Jane Epstein
Nurse Practitioner
Menopause Society Certified Provider
AASECT-Certified Sexuality Counselor
Why We Need To Talk To Girls About Sex, TedxABQ
In this TEDx Talk, I advocate that teaching girls and young women about sexual pleasure will lead them to make more empowered decisions in their sex lives. This includes teaching them about masturbation. Knowledge about sex including sexual pleasure makes them less likely to passively allow their partners control sex and birth control or to submit to painful, boring or scary sexual experiences. Too many of the adolescent girls that I saw as a nurse practitioner (especially cis, heterosexual girls) were having sex that they neither liked nor even understood.
In 2019, I began interviewing older women about their sexual life journeys to find out how they had learned about and explored sexual pleasure at various stages throughout their lives. Many of their stories appear in my blog.
Interview excerpt from Getting to Pleasure:
I was 25 and we could spend the entire day in bed, listening to music, talking and being sexual. I got intimacy, companionship, joy and I felt very comfortable with my body. Was it ok that I wasn’t necessarily being satisfied sexually? It seems so obvious to me now that orgasm and sexual satisfaction would be a really important part of that intimacy. But I wasn’t there emotionally or developmentally. I couldn’t talk about my needs. Nobody talked to me about masturbation. Maybe that would have been something good for me to understand. You can’t rely on a partner to teach you about your body.
— Teresa, age 57, bisexual