Exploring Sex and Living in a Body: Dr. Carol Queen

“Exploring Sex and Living in a Body: Dr. Carol Queen”

a Girl Boner podcast transcript

Carol: I just want everyone to live in their beautiful body, in their beautiful sensation and emotional space, and in their integrity… There is no one way to explore all this stuff.

[acoustic guitar strumming]

August/narration:

“Living in [her] body” did not come easily for Carol Queen. Today, with her PhD in Sexology and decades of activism under her belt, she’s well known in the sex ed world. She’s a speaker, author and staff sexologist at Good Vibrations, a store that launched in 1977 — becoming the second sex-positive, women-friendly shop in the entire U.S.

Back in the 60s, Carol was “coming of age” in a town much smaller than her imagination. [pastoral music]

Carol: So I grew up in the sticks in Oregon, in a mountain town. It wasn’t even really a town. There were more churches than most other things. There were maybe more bars than churches.

I was interested in the outside world and what I wanted to do was learn as much about it as possible, fill my head with ideas and virtually nobody around me, my classmates, et cetera, probably their parents do to be fair, seemed to feel that way. So I was a weirdo.

At my vantage point today, I can look back and say, I was probably also a neurodivergent weirdo, which may have upped the ante on all of this and given me some strange superpowers, but also queerdo qualities.

August/narration:

And so, she got a nickname.

Carol: Some of my little friends, I want to say it was in sixth grade, started calling me Queen the Queer.

August/narration:

One day Carol learned that “queer” meant more than “weird.” To some people, at least.

Carol: My best friend, Kristen, said, “Dummy, that means you’re a homosexual!” Nobody else knew that word as far as I know. I was like,” It does not. It means I’m unique and rare!” She’s like, “Look it up.” And I didn’t know that I might be homosexual or anything else like that for another minute. But this did start me off on some research, which proved to be very fruitful in the long run.

August/narration:

In one of Carol’s books, “Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture,” published in 1997, she wrote about being very sexual from early on.

August: You talked about spankings when you were a kid having a little excitement. There were some hints at things that you were perhaps very connected to your sexuality, but it sounds like maybe you didn’t have language around it. Did you know what sexuality was? Did you have any feelings about that?

Carol: In my house, sexuality was a presence that was not articulated. And I could feel it, but I couldn’t figure out how to even really think about it for a while. I could, I could notice it, feel it and note that it felt troublesome in some way. It was linked in with what was going on with my parents.

August/narration:

Carol wrote that her parents’ silence about sex lived in her body. She knew they had a sexless marriage. She wouldn’t understand the roots of their challenges until years later. But sexuality is “in the air of the culture,” she told me – so how could it not get into a house?

Carol:

But in my home, it was particularly present and problematic and confusing to me initially.

August/narration:

At the same time, she was drawn to sexy things.

Carol: I can remember clearly that my dad had a paperback book. Like a Western, sexy romance butch book. It had a man holding a naked woman, probably a passed out naked woman. God only knows what was going on there. I do remember looking around in this book quite a lot. See if it had any answers for me.

August/narration:

Around the time of her Queen the Queer curiosities, Carol started looking up sex words in the dictionary.

Carol:

Anything that I could grab from the ether that seemed like it was a sex word. From rape to intercourse, and of course, in the 1960s, you couldn’t find real definitions of most sex words, but I did my best and then I started trying to hunt down library books that would give me more information.

August/narration:

Finally, something fruitful.

Carol: It helped me name, or at least recognize, some of the interests and feelings that I was having personally. I remember trying to learn how to masturbate once I heard that word and figured out what it was and it was a, it was a terrible learning curve initially. I didn’t know enough.

August: Do you remember what you tried? I imagine there weren’t many instructions?

Carol: No, there were no instructions. And did they mention the clitoris? Well, I know I didn’t know about that yet, so that made it harder. I knew about the vagina. I just didn’t know about all the rest of, you know, sort of the empowering and enlivening nerve endings and how they, how they fit. So, put something in the vagina was what I got first.

I couldn’t figure out what to insert and I tried rolling up toilet paper. I’d heard about tampons and that was intriguing and I was trying to manufacture my own. I wasn’t menstruating yet. That linked up with sexuality to me somehow, only insofar as doing it, trying it. It was a disaster. It wasn’t sexy. There was no lube. The toilet paper fell all apart.

August/narration:

Young Carol knew that masturbation was supposed to bring sexual pleasure, and she tried to experience that. But she had no idea how she would even recognize that if it happened.

Carol: I mean, that was the animating problem of my early sexuality, just enough information not to fully understand what it was that I was trying to go for, but enough to know that I wanted to try to go for it. Like this is important stuff. My 10, 11, 12 year old self was convinced, convinced it was important.

August/narration:

By this time, ideas from the “summer of love,” the hippy-fueled sexual freedom phenomenon, were trickling into her community. Carol caught glimpses in her parents’ magazines. [retro 60s/70s’ music]

Carol: So that just animates me to try to learn enough that when my opportunity for sex, sexuality, whatever it’s going to be, appears that I’ll be ready to take the next step. I was really stumbling around in the dark, but with the instinct that I really wanted to learn, it was important to me.

August/narration:

It did not, however, seem important to her parents.

Carol:

I remember my mother at one point sent me out in the backyard where my dad and brother were out having a talk. Like this is mysterious and ridiculous, right? And I get there just in time for my dad to describe wet dreams to my brother, which was horrifying to my poor sensitive brother. He didn’t want to know this at all! Two years younger than me.

I was like, Wet dream, fascinating! It was somewhat horrifying to me too, because my brother was so horrified. And my dad was being kind of geeky about it and whatever. It was just uncomfortable for everyone. But I was like, other people talk about this. Huh. How about that? Do girls have anything like that? Not that I was going to ask my damn dad.

August/narration:

Carol’s mom kind of attempted a sex talk with her once.

Carol: She asked me one day, “Carol, do you know what masturbation means?” I was 11, so I had looked it up. I had started to fuck around and try to find out, but what if I wasn’t correct? So I said, “no.” And I thought she would tell me what masturbation meant then. Seemed like that was where the conversation was going.

August/narration:

It…wasn’t.

Carol: She said, “Good.”

August: Oh my goodness.

Carol: Nevertheless, I knew that that was a bogus parenting that there was a thing that I was trying to learn about that other people knew about that they were keeping information from me and that was not okay. So I continued my my quest.

August/narration:

In fact, that same year? Carol wrote porn stories.

Carol: Two of them. So proto kinky.

I would sit out in the VW van, the seafoam green VW van, after school. This was my clubhouse, basically in my alone time place. Sometimes a cat would jump up in there with me. I would turn on the radio and I would listen for sex references in songs. For some reason I wrote a couple of stories out there. And now first one had to do with a boy and a girl who went into this place and the purpose of the place was for them to have sex in. I invented sex clubs! And, I knew about penises and I knew about vaginas and I knew they fit together. I had no idea about thrusting. I had no idea how the bodies stayed together. couldn’t find any information about this. So, the reason that they had to go into this place to have sex was because they needed someone to assist them and tie them together with rope while the penis and the vagina.

Yeah, I don’t know if it seemed plausible, but it seemed like it would work and solve the problem that I had identified.

August/narration:

The other porn story she wrote back then involved thirst.

Carol: A boy and a girl go out into the desert for a walk and they don’t have any water with them and it gets really hot and it’s dry and they’re very, very thirsty, and the only thing that can happen is that they have, they have an empty bottle with them, but maybe they had water in it, but they drank it.

He has to pee in a bottle so that they have something to drink. Very kinky, honestly. If I’d been an adult, I would have written these stories with adult protagonists, but I was a young person. So it was sort of age appropriate.

And then of course, by the next year, it was almost time to be a babysitter. So I could look for porn at other people’s houses. Also fruitful. But I had to start out somewhere and that’s how I started.

August: You’re like a sex detective. I just see you as this little almost like Nancy Drew, X-rated.

Carol: I loved Nancy Drew! And her girlfriend’s name was George. So, there was a little gender fuckiness…where I was like, why is her name George? Well, later on, I met plenty of girls named George? So…

August: Yeah! It’s almost like you psychically saw so much of what was already happening and going to happen.

Carol: I might’ve been a little bit of a futurist then. I think smart kids are like this in general, honestly: I know what I know, I have some inkling of what I don’t know, but oh my goodness, what’s going to happen? How is it going to be when I go out in the world, when the future comes? What’s it going to be like? What’s it going to change? I remember thinking a lot about that kind of stuff.

August/narration:

Finally, she got some of those answers in terms of sex. Along with more questions.

August: Do you recall what you would consider your first sexual experience with another person and when you did start to figure out how the bodies fit together and all that?

Carol: Oh, certainly. I want to say two things about this because my first true sexual experience with another person was a kiss after a date, making out after a date, and it was not exactly consensual making out. And I didn’t know enough about the tongue. I didn’t know enough about what making out actually comprised to have a good time.

It was shocking. It wasn’t a turn on. I wasn’t interested in the guy. I could think back and go, it’s very assaultive . I don’t think that was how it was intended. I think he thought that was what you were supposed to do. He was pretty geeky himself. So that was a little bit of a setback in my mind. I was like, if that’s like the precursor to sex, Oh, I didn’t like that! I don’t even know if I want to do that again.

August/narration:

Meanwhile, Carol had a big crush on a boy named Paul. He was a couple years older than her and drove a green Mustang – which totally suited him.

Carol: Mustangs were good looking in that decade. I got to say they were sexy cars. And Paul was very sexy. He was tall and blonde and rangy. I was in choir with him and we used to joke around.

August/narration:

That summer, on her 15th birthday, he surprised her.

Carol: He calls me up and says, “I’ve got a birthday present for you, can I come and visit?”

August/narration:

Carol and her brother were home alone as usual, being latchkey kids.

August: The amusement was Paul came over with incense. We went up into my room and closed the door and my brother was being a pest and I was like, “Get out of here!” Because who knew what was going to happen in there? Well, we fucked! That was what happened. I think that was the true birthday present. Thank you, Paul!

August/narration:

Like the nonconsensual make out session earlier that year, though, Carol didn’t find it exciting. And yet, it was informative.

Carol:

This is my most clear memory about it. At a certain point, he was like, “Get on top.” And I didn’t know what that meant. And I laid on top of him, like. face up, like a log, oh a log. [laughs]

August: Oh, bless you.

Carol: Carol: It was just just so embarrassing! And he said, “Not like that! Face to face.”

So I scrambled around and I got it. It was very ridiculous.

August/narration:

A few things struck Carol about the experience, besides the embarrassment.

Carol: At the end he said, “Did you come?” And I said, ” Would I have noticed?” Because I was already reading Feminist Theory and I knew that that meant that he hadn’t paid attention to me intimately and he didn’t care. And he was just trying to score. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was just like, I was so intense. I was like, ooh, ooh.

He didn’t know what to say. I mean, he hadn’t read any feminist theory. He just thought he was supposed to ask. And it was so, so many decades later when I realized that it was his first time, too, that he had picked me out as the girl at school who was most likely to fuck him, which was true. And that he was trying all the positions that he’d seen in pornos!

It never crossed my mind that that was the case because he was older and he was handsome and he drove a Mustang, and it never crossed my mind that boys had to lose their virginities, too.

August/narration:

They discussed what happened decades later, at a high school reunion.

Carol: We were in our late fifties. He started talking to me about that day. He remembered what I was wearing, he remembered what day of the week it was. And I was like, ” Paul, was that your first time, too?” And he was like, “Yeah.” I was like, oh, man.

If I’d known this, if we had been dating, if we had been hanging out, if we had even acknowledged to each other beforehand that we were probably gonna fuck eventually and it would be our first time, if any of that information had been part of my understanding of the situation or our actual communication, there would have been more give and take, I think, in terms of what we explored, how we talked about it, all that stuff, it would have changed that experience.

August/narration:

One thing that was a game changer in a good way? Finding her parents’ vibrator. She stole it out of the hall closet, not long after having sex with Paul. With it, she learned she could bring herself to orgasm.

Carol: I’d read about vibrators by this time. I was getting these magazines in the mail now, “Mom, would you subscribe for me to this magazine?” And so I could see more sex content, among other things.

This vibrator was never used by my parents. I know that because they never looked for it. And they never asked for it back.

And I had to only use it when everybody was out of the house because it made the television roll and it was extremely loud.

August/narration:

Before that, Carol said she would get stuck in orgasmic plateau, and never fully climax.

Carol: What would happen when I was just up underneath orgasm and I had been using my hands. was my hand would freeze. It wouldn’t continue to move on my clit.

When I tried to masturbate, I was in girl blue ball land because I couldn’t get to the orgasm and the release and the climax of it. Just the high arousal, just the need for it. This experience with Paul didn’t change that. The experience with the vibrator did change it.

August/narration:

Through solo sex, Carol was learning to occupy her body – something she says we all need to do.

Carol: You’ve got to live in your body to be able to discover those things about it.

August/narration:

And back then, Carol was determined to keep learning about her own. Vibrator in hand for a lot of it..

Carol: Continuing to masturbate with a vibrator was important because it helped my body learn orgasm. And orgasm is a reflex, but the elements that move you to the reflex experience can be learned and understood. They’re not outside our ability to think about and recognize patterns and all of that, right?

So know thyself. It’s a great idea. I encourage it and you can know yourself sexually and it doesn’t just mean masturbating, but masturbating is an important part of it. Right?

I learned about the water running over your clit orgasm. That worked! That was great! And that feels more like clitoral stimulation that you would get from say oral sex or stroking.

So ultimately I became able to have my arm not freeze up and to actually continue until I had an orgasm with my hand and that meant that my clit and the other bodily arousal system recognized touch, not just vibration.

August/narration:

Exploring solo helped Carol reach spicy goals she had with partners, too.

Carol: The day came when somebody was going down on me and I came. And I was like, Hallelujah! I can live in the human world! I love this! This is great!

August/narration:

Carol also became increasingly communicative about sex and her desires.

Carol:

My first year in college, I was like, “Uh, roommate? So, My vibrator is really super loud. So I don’t know. Are you staying with your partner tonight? Great.”

But a year later, I was an exchange student in the middle of all of this. I went to Germany and my research told me that I could not take my vibrator and plug it in to those foreign sockets… It was a great experience to go to Germany and be an exchange student, but that was the worst part. I’ll tell you what. I was very glad to get home and see my vibrator.

August/narration:

Carol continued to learn about her body, on her own and with others. Then, she met her first girlfriend, and learned a ton through “queer sex.”

Carol: The one thing that is the norm in a situation like mine or most other young people’s is that heterosexuality is the norm. That’s why I wrote those embarrassing porns that they were straight, you know, I just it took a minute for me to understand that I could be queer, that there were other ways to do it, that there are other ways to be in the world in your sexuality, other ways to love.

Queers don’t get good sex ed. And if they get any hint about sex ed, it’s that it’s supposed to be like that.

August/narration:

In other words, sex equals a man’s penis in a woman’s vagina. The end.

Carol: Not that we’re going to give you very much detail about that, but it’s that that you’re supposed to be going for, not this.

And so, what do queers do? They fool around and figure it out. People discover it. People teach it to the next lover. And that’s kind of how sex ought to be.

Would anybody have told me about the clitoris and that it had wonders to reveal? No, nobody would ever let me in on that secret. So it really was a decade or so of trial and error.

[DB’s trailer]

Sponsor fun:

Happy Pride, all. As we commemorate the whole LGBTQIA+ rainbow of wonderfulness, why not celebrate with a spicy new accessory for the bedroom? The Pleasure Chest is making Pride Abundantly Queer — their term, and I love it — with a free gift.

Spend $89 within their Pride Sex Toy collection and get a FREE tote bag, while supplies last. The collection features so many cool items: silicone strap-ons, harnesses, a rainbow  unicorn dildo, lubricants and more for leather daddies, lesbians, gays, bears, bisexuals and more, plus the most popular gender-affirming and couple’s toys anywhere. It’s so, so cool.

Head to thepleasurechest.com to check it out and start shopping. Again that’s The Pleasure Chest at thepleasurechest.com.

August/narration:

Carol did finally learn about a family secret, one that explained a lot about her parents’ take on sex – her mom’s especially.

Carol: I talked to my mother finally about the fact that she had been sexually abused when she was a girl. Well, that fucking explained everything, didn’t it?

Explained why she wouldn’t tell me what masturbation was and explained why there was something in the house. It had to do with sex. What was it? It was the effects of my parents not being able to communicate about this and my dad being like, what, what, how can I, how can I help her? How can I wake her up?

The puzzle pieces finally connected when she told me that after my dad died. She hadn’t talked to her husband of 30 some years about this extraordinarily important thing that happened to her until the perpetrator who was a family member himself had died just a couple of years before and that finally allowed her to feel safe enough.

August/narration:

Carol spends a lot of her time these days helping others feel safe enough – to talk about deeply difficult experiences and wonderful things, like sex and their bodies.

Carol: I go to airports, I go to talk on college campuses. I go down the street, I go to the store. I walk around the world and everywhere I go, there are people around me who have had experiences like this or experiences like the one that I had, which was quasi consensual, but not appropriate and problematic in so many ways.

Or the ways that nobody figures out on their own, unless they’re fortunate, like I have been and dogged like I have been, to be able to learn the skills where they can say to the person that they’re having sex with, let’s talk about this for real. Let’s really talk about it. Let’s figure out what else we might want to do. Let’s figure out what we could do differently.

“Hey, guess what? I learned that if I put my hand on my clit while we have intercourse, I could maybe have an orgasm easier. I’m going to do that, okay?”

Before I die, I would like to issue the porn star challenge to all of my friends in the porn world who have clitorises. When the camera’s on you, my friends, put your hand on there. Show everybody how it’s done. Just normalize that movement. Let’s see if it changes things for people because God knows we’re not getting good sex ed.

So people turn on the porn and they’re like, Oh, it’s like a documentary. No, it isn’t! It’s like a car chase movie, but still, I mean, you do learn a little bit of configuration. You learn some positions. It’s just not what I would set up as a step by step course.

August/narration:

Speaking of porn stars and spicy exploration, Carol was part of something extraordinary that involved both.

In 1994, she masturbated on stage with Annie Sprinkle – in front of 4,000 people. She wrote about it in “Real, Live, Nude Girl,” in a chapter called On Stage with Annie, describing it as not only an erotic experience, but a spiritual one.

Carol: So Annie Sprinkle when I met her, had been a porn star who had morphed into a performance artist in the 1980s.

And she was very famous because she had done some sexually explicit performance art. One of the things that she did in her wonderful show Postporn Modernist, she measured how far to the moon she could travel on the length of the cock that she had sucked adding it all up. Most people don’t do math problems like that.

Annie’s climactic finale of her show was talking about the ancient sacred prostitutes, the erotic priestesses of old, and how they could bring erotic and spiritual energy into their bodies by masturbating. And she would do a ritual, a masturbation ritual.

She invited a handful of her friends on stage with her when she did one of these shows in San Francisco.

August/narration:

By then, Carol knew she enjoyed exhibitionism. She’d even started writing the how-to book, “Exhibitionism for the Shy: Show Off, Dress up, Talk Hot!”

Carol: This was my zone. I’d already worked in a peep show. I’d already experienced my first multiple orgasm at a sex party where people were watching me masturbate. So I knew that I had some energy with this.

I was going to do this thing. And so I got together a tray. She was like, “I recommend you bring your sacred objects on a tray.” So I got my tray out and I put my dildo that I wanted to use, some lube that I wanted to use…some things that were important and meaningful to me.

August/narration:

Including a unique family heirloom.

Carol: When my dad died, I had discovered in his effects an empty condom box, Trojans, from the 1940s, much cooler design of the condom box back then. It was awesome. And I put that on my tray to link me to my parents and the things that they had experienced, the things that they had hoped for and yearned for, the things that they could never get right either. The things they hadn’t told me, all the ways that I was disconnected from them.

This sexual silence was a marker for that. And I wanted to erase it a little bit.

August/narration:

Plus, they’d both died by then. Who was gonna get upset?

Carol: And everybody on the stage had their own tray with their own things that were important to them. There’s power in numbers, too, right? So there were maybe a half a dozen of us on this stage, each of us occupying a separate space.

Annie gave rattles. They were made out of two drink cups put together with some kind of little gravel or rattly stuff in there, passed them out to the audience, and said, “Okay, you all are part of this ritual, too. Make sound with the rattles as you are so moved.”

[etherial music, soft shaker sounds, then “moan chorus”]

So there was this, this beautiful, interesting din from the rattles. There was this sense of rhythm that these strangers created together eventually. And some people chanted as well. And some of us on stage, I think chanted also.

If one person starts to orgasm, it’s not all that uncommon for the energy and the sound and if you can see them out of the corner of your eye to kick yours up. And so orgasm, orgasm, orgasm, orgasm, orgasm, orgasm, all over the stage.

It truly was a spiritual experience. And I realize there may be people listening who have a different definition of spiritual than that. But just, just know that in the world of spirituality, there are many things that can be spiritual. Pleasure and orgasm are certainly among them.

I didn’t know I had that on my bucket list. But it turns out that I did. And I got to experience it. It was extraordinary.

August/narration:

As you can imagine, all of Carol’s exploration and study have impacted her life profoundly. And, by extension, lots of other people.

Carol: Well, as my, as my story clearly indicates, before I was any kind of professional, I was a searcher for information. And I had a deep drive to try to understand all kinds of things, not just this, but this was pretty central. Whether I knew some molecule of my being that this would be my path for my whole life, I don’t know. I don’t know if I knew that. But everything about living in a body has to be learned except the autonomic parts.

I mean, there was always something about living in a body and connecting my own thoughts and experiences and the things that were important to me with the people who had come before and had theorized about them or made political action around them or any of the things.

I had to be on a path of self discovery and trying to figure out if I was doing it all right, from a space of undiagnosed neurodivergence. So it was very unclear if I was doing it all right. Sometimes it was pretty sure I wasn’t doing it all right. And I only had so much assistance from outside with all of that stuff. So, one of the reasons that “know thyself” is so important is that if you don’t become an arbiter and a, a seeker of your own self, others will parachute in and attempt to do that for you.

And many people who are hearing me say those words, may think of their parents. So maybe they’ll think about their religious figures in their life. Maybe they’ll think of their first boyfriend. Maybe they’ll, other people will tell you how to be for their own comfort, for their own purposes, because they think they’re doing right by you sometimes. Sometimes not.

And I was allergic to that, people are going to tell me how to be. It doesn’t mean that I’ve never been swayed or affected in those ways I have, but I don’t trust it. I don’t appreciate it particularly. And I want to know that the life that I’m living in the body that I’m living in is occupied by me primarily and understood by me primarily. And if I have to go get specialist help with any of that kind of stuff, I hope I’ve been that for other people, especially around sexuality related questions.

When I started to wonder if I was neurodivergent, I needed to read a whole lot of new stuff that started to make more puzzle pieces fall into place. And I, I just need people To know that it’s possible to take any part of your experience and understand it better. It’s always possible to tune into yourself and say, what is it about living in this body with these desires, with these loves and crushes? What is it about any of this? With the posture, with the way you breathe, all of it. What is it? How do I live as best I can in this, in this body?

Letting sexuality be the avatar of all of that body curiosity, concern, awareness, experimentation, allowed me to find community. It helped me know that there would be other ways to find other kinds of community if I needed it. And it allowed me to take myself seriously.

And when I took myself seriously, the things that I was afraid of, I wasn’t afraid of anymore, not in the same way. I used to be so shy. I used to be so fearful of talking about my truth. Cause I wasn’t sure my truth was understood enough by me for me to express. Wasn’t that I thought it was wrong. It was that I didn’t know if I had enough gathered awareness and trust in myself to say this is my space. This is what I think. This is what I know.

And I’ll tell you what, when I got to that space, what a relief. You know, I can look back at my mom. She never got that. I know she never got that.

And I can look around and I can see people around me sometimes who don’t have it. So I just want anybody listening to this to know that your sexuality is not separate from the rest of you.

It’s part of you! It’s one of the animating energies of all of us, including asexuals, including people who’ve never had any sex, including people who never get to the place of sexual pleasure.

I can understand why people would feel that sex needs to be boxed up. But it’s so dangerous. As Wilhelm Reich said, “if we can control the people’s sexuality, we can control them utterly.”

August/narration:

And whether you’re more vanilla or kinky, monogamous or poly, super into sex or asexual, Carol holds a deep desire for you.

Carol: I just want everyone to live in their beautiful body, in their beautiful sensation and emotional space, and in their integrity, in a diverse lot of us.

Because there is no one way to explore all this stuff. I’ve explored it all the different ways I could think of. There’s no one way.

August/narration:

To get started toward all of that, seemingly small steps can go far.

Carol: One baby step is to try to acknowledge the things that, that they have experienced as meaningful, either kinds of people that they’re drawn to, kinds of touch or sexual experience that they know they respond to, what lights us up, wakes us up, draws us, those things are going to be different for many people, for probably all of us on some level, but they’re important things as part of that know thyself piece. And know thyself is this big notion, but understanding pieces of it, just break it up into puzzle pieces.

You don’t even have to put them together right now, but understand what your pieces are. Because if what you believe is that there’s one normal way to be and you’re either it or not, no, no, no, you have specifics. They make you you. Nobody except people who don’t want you and your integrity are going to tell you that you’re doing it wrong unless you’re doing it non consensually. Then a bunch of people will stand up and say, “you’re doing it wrong.” Other than that, you’re yourself or yourself is becoming, and that’s honorable. That’s beautiful.

August/narration:

And if you’re worried about what to label yourself meanwhile – your identity or your sexual interests – Carol said, don’t. At least not yet.

Carol: You don’t have to reach out into the world of all the labels there are now to just get all the spectra and all of those things. I really honor that people are thinking about these things in deep ways and making spectra for all of us to think about and then, try to learn more from and understand where we might fit and all of those things.

But it’s not where you have to go first. I was once talking to a group of people who came out or realized that they weren’t heterosexual or realize that they didn’t care what their sexual orientation was and they weren’t going to live their life according to that label.

And somebody snaked their hand up in the air and went, ” Do you mean I don’t have “to choose a label?” I’m like, That’s exactly what I mean. You don’t have to choose a label. You might want to at some point. It might really help you make space for a community that you will find meaningful if you do it. No, no, if you don’t feel like a label fits you, put it back. Try to understand who you are.

August/narration:

Meanwhile, recognize that it’s a fluid process. Knowing your sexual self doesn’t happen all at once.

Carol:

You don’t have to predict what it’s going to be when you’re 75. It’s not your job today. Your job is to live it. Be in your body. Be in your emotions. Try to learn things. Try to understand things. Try to live a good life. Try to be nice to people. Communicate. Do those things one step at a time.

August/narration:

Find Dr. Carol Queen’s book mentioned today, Real Live Nude Girl, on Amazon or Audible. Her most recent book, “The Sex & Pleasure Book: Good Vibrations Guide to Great Sex for Everyone,” is available at goodvibes.com and most booksellers. It aims to demystify sex by offering “fun, detailed knowledge to make solo or sociable sex fabulous for just about everyone.” Find a link to the Antique Vibrator Museum, which Carol curates, in the show notes.

If you enjoyed this episode, I’d so appreciate a rating or review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Ratings, and letting your friends know about Girl Boner Radio, help me reach more people – which means the world to me. Thanks so much for listening.