The sex talk
Talking about sex terrified me. Now it’s liberating.
January 8, 2025 | story by Ginger Koehler | illustrations by Delia Rose Sauer
This story is from Atrium’s Winter 2024 magazine, which released December 2024.
I sit at a McAlister’s Deli crying my eyes out. Tears make my PB&J soggy. My mom has just explained to me that when I start becoming a woman I will bleed and cramp each month.
“Don’t ever tell me anything like that ever again,” I say. I’m 9, and I am furious about the life of pain that surely awaits me.
For once, my mom does what I ask. She never tells me anything like that again. She opted me out of sex ed classes — though even if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t have learned much. The Florida Department of Education only requires schools to teach health lessons that, aside from being medically inaccurate, promote abstinence until marriage and fearmonger about deadly sexually transmitted infections.
Without a proper resource to rely on for sex ed, I joined the countless kids in Florida who have been left in the dark.
It’s ironic that my adult life has been spent trying to reverse the impacts of this system.
In seventh grade, in my hot pink and neon green bedroom, I muster the courage to first confront my mom about S-E-X. After I’d asked what it was at my BFF’s sleepover, and everyone went quiet, I needed to know for sure. My mom starts: “When a man and woman love each other…” She confirms my worst fears.
Only at 17 do I dare to speak on the subject again, though now it feels less nasty and more exciting. My ragtag group of girl friends is having another Just Dance night at my childhood home. Rasputin has worn us out, and we eat a DiGiorno pizza and sit around my twin bed when someone brings it up.
This time, I’m not afraid.
This time, I have a lifetime of questions bursting at the seams. And for the first time, I say the word: sex. Not as a whisper, not while fighting back giggles, but plainly, firmly say it out loud.
Half of us have done the deed and the other half haven’t had their first kiss, but none of us have ever had a candid conversation about it until then.
Suddenly, it’s the summer of sex. We talk about it constantly, go to Spencer’s to buy little pink vibrators and have our first experiences with sexuality. Talking about sex is a high, the kind that my friends enjoy recreationally. But I quickly become hooked.
Unlike my peers, I fall in love with the subject, not just the act. I’m obsessed with learning more about why people do what they do and why it impacts us so deeply.
When my senior year of high school starts, I decide to spend the year researching my hometown’s need for sex ed. When I found that over 90% of parents and students in my county — across parties, genders and religions — wanted comprehensive sex education it hit me: This could be my career.
My research landed me a spot at the University of Florida, where I study theories and politics of sexuality and journalism. Between delivering educational presentations, publishing over 30 articles and never failing to find myself in an unabashed sex talk, I’ve immersed myself in all things S-E-X.
When it comes to sex ed, I haven’t just seen the light — I’ve gotten others out of the dark, too.
“You’re the sex girl, right?” people ask me regularly. It brings a smile to my face, even though it definitely makes me sound like a prostitute to bystanders.
When I mention my “sexpertise,” I become a bit of a confessional booth. People take it as an invitation to open up, often with stories they’ve never shared before. Sometimes, I feel like I’m standing in the splash zone of a flood of pent-up questions.
“Hey Ging, can I ask a weird question?” texts my old friend, who had pledged a fraternity the previous month.
“I love weird questions,” I reply.
He recounts his sexual escapades through sorority row, his voice hinting at a sense of pride. But then his volume quiets: “Will you come with me to get an STI test?” He knows it’s the responsible thing to do, and he’s embarrassed he hasn’t yet, but he’s scared. He has no idea how they work, where to get them, or how much they cost. He’s desperate to be safe but too uninformed to take action.
A few months ago, during my shift at an adult store (my career’s version of gaining hands-on experience), a great-grandma struts in. We instantly click.
“I just want to talk to my grandbabies about pleasure,” she tells me as we sit across from one another on the store’s leopard-print couch. “They’re grown. I’m grown. But nobody wants to talk with grandma about getting it on.”
We spend the next hour sharing stories and laughing, enough for me to figure her smile lines had been etched from decades of joy. As closing time nears, she hands me a $5 bill. I try to refuse.
“Nope,” she says. “I have never had such an open conversation in my life. I’m going to come back to see you again.”
The confessions keep coming:
- “We have to buy all new sex toys because the silicone on ours is ripping,” a woman says to me in between smacks of her gum at the adult store’s register. “We can’t figure out why.” I solve their mystery pretty quickly after she reveals they were boiling their toys to clean them. A wet washcloth will do.
- “Is it normal for a guy to choke you out when you hook up?” my sorority sister asks me over lunch one day, as if the question were about the ethics of putting pineapple on pizza. “I don’t know if I’m being dramatic, but I never expected him to grab my throat.”
The question crushes me because of how normalized the violence in the dating scene has become.
“No,” I explain to her. “No, that is not normal.”
- Two friends talk to me in the same week about sexually exploitative relationships with their bosses. Both women reveal how their employers drove them far away from home and made advances. Each woman treated the situation differently. One called HR on him. The other fell into a tumultuous relationship with him.
- “I’m a sex addict,” one man swiftly proclaims to me after introducing himself at a house party. “I broke up with my boyfriend two weeks ago, and I haven’t been with anyone yet, but it’s been hard.” He walks away before I can respond.
- “I just got divorced, and my kids have moved out now,” an older woman whispers to me in the back of the adult store, even though nobody else is around. “And I’ve never had an orgasm,” she adds. I find her a pretty pink vibrator to take home. The next day, she backs me into a corner and tells me she doesn’t know how to turn it on.
Both recounted their circumstances to me with neutral expressions, but it wasn’t hard to see their pain. Neither knew how to make it better.
I see myself in everyone I talk to: people who are ready to open up but haven’t been given the chance; people whose lives would have been less confusing, less painful, if they were taught to understand their bodies and desires.
Maybe, if we just said the word — “sex!” — a little louder, and a little more often, it wouldn’t be so intimidating.
We are desperate, as a society, to talk about this enormous and intimate part of our lives. Yet we barely do. If we talked about the weather and what we had for lunch and how satisfying that orgasm was, perhaps people wouldn’t feel so frustrated and alone.
Maybe if we taught sex ed like we do math and reading, we would have a basic understanding of topics like consent.
Maybe it’s time we proudly share experiences in the pursuit of knowledge, safety and pleasure.
Maybe, it’s time we talk about sex.
