Everything is about sex. Think about it.
Everything is about sex.Think about it.Try not to think about it.Didn’t work, did it?Our coming-of-age sex education stories always lurk right under the surface.
(Do you have a coming of age story? Please write to me here: https://elizabethworley.org/contact-elizabeth-worley/)
When was the first time you became aware there were different sexes?
I must’ve been three. My brother was twenty-seven months younger, and one afternoon my mother was changing his diaper. I was suddenly struck by the fact that he had something I didn’t. A little squiggly something…with two round ball-things attached. How very odd.
Maybe I had had one and it went away? Maybe it would come back?
I asked my mother. I don’t remember exactly what she said — I was three, after all — but the gist was: He’s a boy. You’re a girl. Don’t think about that.
End of story.
Odd.
By five, we lived in a sandy little neighborhood on Key Biscayne. Two boys down the street would come over to play. One day they encouraged me to pull down my panties: show us and we’ll show you. My mother caught us.
Awkward.
At eight, in Connecticut, the boy from across the woods coaxed me into the closet (yes… the closet) to reenact the same “show me” ritual. My father caught us. Skipper was banished forever. I was sent to my room in disgrace.
Beyond awkward. Shameful.
And so it went.
I received no sex education until sixth grade, when we had to bring in a signed permission slip to watch a girls-only film about menstruation. My mother’s only follow-up was, “There. Now you know all about it.”
Everything else I learned came from older girls whispering half-truths and wild misinformation at slumber parties.
Then came my own first “experience,” in the back of my grandmother’s metallic silver Pontiac Bonneville with the maroon leather seats. My parents found out — another story for another day — and my mother said, “Well, I guess you found out it wasn’t much fun!”
This from a woman who bore and raised five children and endured several miscarriages.
Oof.
Then came the 60s. The 70s.
Sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll.
And absolutely no roadmap for any of it. But, at least, we had birth control! Eventually, we even had the right to abortion, for awhile.
An Excerpt From the “Hold” File — worthy but superfluous prose
From the sequel to Chasing Tropical Ice — working title: Chasing Arctic Fire (TBD 2026).Sex and coming of age — what Gus has to say about it.
One day, when I was sixteen and feeling the first hormonal flushes I didn’t understand and didn’t yet have words for, I was sitting in a booth at the Rexall drugstore lunch counter with three of my girlfriends. I was drinking a Coke float — chocolate ice cream — while we gossiped about the good-looking biology teacher who hinted at evolution in our almost pre-Darwinian Southern town, and the history teacher who lost his job after marching against the war in D.C., and the home ec teacher who burned her own muffins.
Shirley, tall and athletic, had breasts that poked out her T-shirt in a way I could not stop staring at. I was so distracted by her pointy nipples that I missed half the conversation until someone said:
“Did you hear Mary and Tom went all the way?”
That got my attention. Somehow, no matter where we started, our conversations always found their way back to sex: who had it, what it was, whether it hurt, whether it was heaven, whether it was messy. In 1972, most of us didn’t know anyone with firsthand experience.
“I heard it hurts.”
“My aunt says it’s like an explosion in heaven.”
“My mom says it’s messy.”
They were terrified. They couldn’t wait. And if pregnancy weren’t a threat, they wouldn’t wait. Birth control pills were only for married women, and only with their husbands’ consent. Seriously.
I, on the other hand, had no idea what they were talking about. I’d had vague feelings — a restless dream here or there — but without context or vocabulary. Sex was never mentioned in my house. Never.
When I got my first period the year before, my mother handed me a pink box of Miss Debs sanitary pads and said, “Read the directions. I have to go to garden club.”
End of lesson.
So, on this day, I excused myself to the restroom, wandered back past the paperback rack, and stopped cold. A garish cover in reds and oranges showed two women kissing. Forbidden Love! Sin and Shame! Outcast Forever! the headline screamed.
Whoa.
I picked it up.
Doc Warner, the tall and terrifying pharmacist, swooped in and snatched it away.
“Get your hands off this filth! It shouldn’t even be out here!”
“Where should it be?” I asked — a mistake.
“You smart-aleck little miss! You and your friends leave. Now. I should tell your parents what you’re up to!”
Up to? I had gone to the bathroom and picked up a book. What?
1972. How naïve we all were.
Chasing Tropical Ice, 2024https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DVZC5CKP
More Behind the Scenes:
If you want to know what really fuels my characters — the sex, shame, rebellion, truth-telling, and reinvention — grab my memoir, Risking Everything: Coming Out in Coffee Land.
Honest, revelatory, true.
Risking Everything: Coming Out in Coffee Landhttps://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DY5ZN2PK