Lies we’ve been taught about sex
by Tara Margulies

Thinking back to my own sex ed days at school, one memory stands out in particular. I was in a room with my female classmates (because even though I was at a mixed school, the boys and girls took separate sex ed classes) and a religious woman was telling us to save ourselves for marriage. My best friend put her hand up and asked the lady:

"But Miss, you wouldn’t buy a car without test driving it first, would you?"

I think about that period of time a lot, the time in my life where not a single guy I hooked up with even thought to touch my clit, when the only thing that counted as sex was P in V and the race to ‘lose our virginity' was basically the only thing anyone seemed to talk about.

Sure, sex was exciting, but did it actually feel good? Not for me and my girlfriends it didn’t.

There are so many things that I’ve had to unlearn, and in doing so I’ve realised just how much of what we grew up thinking is either scientifically untrue, outdated or downright sexist and needs to be stamped out before it gets passed down to future generations.

I’ll start with a scientifically inaccurate one: vaginas loosen when women have sex with lots of different men.

So, the boys claim that their penises have the same effect as pushing a baby out? The audacity. Honestly.

The vagina is surrounded by the pelvic floor muscles, which relax to enable penetrative sex and snaps back to its previous shape.

Google is free and the science is all there, so why does this factually incorrect phrase get thrown around so much? One could argue that the men who say this want women to believe it as a way of stopping them from enjoying sex with other men. They’re most likely the same men who want their future girlfriends or wives to have only slept with them, whilst they go around sleeping with whoever they want. I’ve had several interactions with men like this on the internet and they’re also the type to shame women for enjoying sex. If you ever meet someone like this: run.

Also, they don’t seem to ever say that about a woman having a lot of sex with the same man… the lack of logic is astounding.

The next thing to discuss is the word vagina. I was 26 years old when I realised that most of the world uses the term vagina to mean the female genitals, when in reality the vagina is the canal that links the uterus to the outside world.

The word we *should* be using, is vulva. The vulva is the outer part of the female genitals which includes the opening of the vagina, the labia majora (outer lips), the labia minora (inner lips), and the clitoris. So essentially the majority of the world refers to the vulva as *only* the part that penises go in and babies come out. What century are we in again?!

Imagine if we referred to the male genitals as the testicles.

That brings us nicely to the female orgasm (figuratively…)

The more I speak to women about sex and their sexuality, the more lies I realise we’ve all been told. You’ll most likely be able to add to this list, but here are the most common ones I’ve come across:

• If you’re don’t orgasm from penetration there’s something wrong with you
• If you need a sex toy in order to orgasm there’s something wrong with you too
• All women need emotional connection to orgasm
• It’s harder for women to orgasm than men

I think it’s important to elaborate on why the last one isn’t necessarily true. If you take into account everything we’ve just spoken about here, the fact that female pleasure is almost completely left out of everything we learn about sex when we’re growing up, it makes sense why studies have found that heterosexual men orgasm when sexually intimate 95% of the time and heterosexual women do 65% of the time. The women studied who said they orgasm frequently during sex mentioned that they had lots of foreplay, received oral sex, ask for what they want in bed, explore kinks, incorporate dirty talk and more.