everything I learned about sex came from Redbook

I like to say, half-jokingly, that nine years of Catholic school and they still didn't manage to convince me sex was wrong. But the half-joking part isn't that it isn't true, it's that--contrary to cultural stereotype and perhaps other people's experience--they didn't even try. Nine years of Catholic school and we didn't talk about sex or sexuality at all. When we learned the ten commandments, they just sorta glossed right over the one on adultery. Certainly no one explained what the word meant to a bunch of perplexed eight year olds. No one told us in elementary school that we shouldn't masturbate or have sex before marriage or whatever else it was that we weren't supposed to do. All that time that I imagine people think the nuns spent telling us sex was bad was really, in fact, spent teaching us to diagram sentences and write proper paragraphs. Win-win, y'know?

So in the absence of any kind of sexual education or morality indoctrination, everything I learned about sex came (in time-honored tradition) from the street or from...Redbook. See, my mom loved magazines. My mom bought or subscribed to, and read, pretty much every "married women's" magazine available in the 70s, from Family Circle to Ladies' Home Journal, from Good Housekeeping to Redbook. And in the mid-seventies, some of those magazines were surprisingly (in retrospect) feminist. There were the usual health-related articles on the various types of birth control and self breast examination. But there were also a fair number of articles about a wife's right to sexual satisfaction and such. So in the pages of Redbook, I read about the existence of the clitoris long before my future ex-husband pointed mine out to me (his sexual education having come from what we today would call a "cougar"--or statutory rapist, whatever--and god bless her, wherever she is). In the pages of Redbook, I learned what an orgasm was after I'd already managed to have one, with a kind of "ohhhhh, so that's what that was" dawning fascination. I learned that sex was supposed to be fun and that I was supposed to like it if I were a modern kind of chick. Whew, thank goodness.

I have absolutely no idea why my mom allowed me to read her magazines without censorship, especially since I wasn't allowed to check books out of the "adult" side of the library till I was in 8th grade, and since she kept certain of her books in a drawer in her headboard that I was forbidden to open under the pain of, like, death. Maybe she thought discussions of the clitoris would go right over my head?

I don't know. But, thank you, Redbook, thank you and your liberated 70s editors so very much.

xoxo