GGTAS Episode 59

GOOD GIRLS TALK ABOUT SEX Transcript – Mel, Episode 59 [MUSIC] LEAH: Welcome to Good Girls Talk About Sex. I’m sex educator and sexual communication coach Leah Carey and this is a place to share conversations with all sorts of women about their experience of sexuality. These are unfiltered conversations between adult women talking about sex. If anything about the previous sentence offends you turn back now! And if you’re looking for a trigger warning, you’re not going to get it from me. I believe that you are stronger than the trauma you have experienced. I have faith in your ability to deal with things that upset you. Sound good? Let’s start the show! [MUSIC] LEAH: Today, we’ll meet Mel, a 55 year old cisgender female who describes herself as white, bisexual, polyamorous, and post-menopausal. She grew up in United States and France, currently lives with her triad and has one teenage son. Mel and I became good friends while she was developing her one woman musical, Sexology: The Musical. It chronicles her journey from monogamy to polyamory through stories and songs and she’s been touring at different festivals around the country for the last year. To find out if she’s bringing the show to your city, visit melaniemoseley.com and that link will be on the Show Notes. One of the things I love about Mel is how honest she is with herself and about herself. She’s not afraid to own up to the fact that she cheated on every monogamous partner she’s ever had, which ultimately led her to the discovery that polyamory is a better life choice for her. So, come for the polyamory but stay for her story of declaring her everlasting love to a man in song on their first date. I’m so pleased to introduce Mel! I’m super excited to have you here. We know each other through Sex Positive Portland, which is the local group that has done so much for me in terms of owning my sexuality and learning about sexuality in general. And you are one of the dear friends that I have gained through this group, so I’m thrilled to be talking with you today. MEL: I’m thrilled to be talking with you too. SPP has done a lot of that for me as well. LEAH: So let’s start at the beginning where we start with every interview. What is your first memory of sexual pleasure? MEL: Oh Lord. I was probably 7 and I realized that if I rubbed up against my pillow that I would get this really warm, nice feeling. And my mom used to put me and my brother down for naps even at 7. She just needed a break, right? [LAUGHTER] MEL: So she would put us in our bedrooms for an hour or something and that’s what I would spend my hour doing is just rubbing this pillow on me and just going, “Wow that’s a really good feeling.” I don’t know that I knew what it was I was doing until much later. LEAH: Did you come to something you would now recognize as an orgasm? MEL: Absolutely, oh yeah. Yes, definitely. LEAH: I hear a lot of people say that they learned to rub up against something but the way that you just described it reminds me of the show Big Mouth. [LAUGHTER] LEAH: With the glow worm. [LAUGHTER] LEAH: And her name is Missy I think. MEL: I didn’t even think of that. LEAH: I love that show so much. [LAUGHTER] LEAH: So you discovered masturbation relatively early. At what point did you connect that up to the idea of doing something with another person? MEL: Right around the same time, there was this neighborhood boy. I don’t remember his name anymore but he was in my class and he was my age obviously and he had an older sister. And she at one point took us out to her backyard and had a wedding for us. We were going to get married. And then we got married and then we were supposed to lie down against each other and rub up against each other. And I mean we did that clothes on and all. This is innocent kid fun I guess, so we’re just rubbing up against each other and I had that same sensation again and I was like, “Huh, that’s hot.” [LAUGHTER] LEAH: So did you pursue that sensation with other people? MEL: Not really, not when I was young like that. I mean I assume that everybody has this but probably they don’t, I don’t know. Sometimes girlfriends and I would sometimes play with each other like that. I mean it was just that one time with that one boy and then later as I got into my tweens, which we did not call it at the time, but now we do. I would play with girlfriends like that like we would rub up against poles together or rub up against each other or that kind of thing. LEAH: What was sort of the self talk that went along with that? Was it just fun? How did you explain to yourself what you were doing when you were doing that with your girlfriends? MEL: It was fun but there was also a little guilt. There was some shame around it and I don’t know why. Well, actually that’s not true, I have a memory of my mom walking in on me at one point when I was masturbating in my bedroom during a nap and her telling me, “That is not okay. You should not be doing that.” So it was clearly something that needed to be hidden but something that was really enjoyable. And so with my girlfriends, it was enjoyable and also there were some shame around it and we never talked about it. It wasn’t like we had a conversation about, “What is this that we are doing or why are we doing this?” It just felt good so we just did it. And we just walked away from it and went and created a play or whatever we would do. Go climb a tree. [LAUGHTER] LEAH: So when your mom walked in on you and said, “This is something we don’t do.” Did it give you pause at all? Did you slow down or stop in response to that? MEL: I didn’t slow down or stop. I just felt bad about it. I was fine about it before and then after that, “Oh well, I guess it’s a bad thing but I sure do enjoy it.” [LAUGHTER] LEAH: And did that put an idea into your head that you were a bad girl for enjoying it? MEL: Definitely, yeah. LEAH: You mentioned that before you started taping that you spent time in the Baptist church as a child. What kind of messages were you hearing within the church about sex and female sexuality if anything? MEL: I don’t know that I really got a whole lot of messages about sexuality from the Baptist church other than that you get married and you have kids and that kind of monogamous message but sex wasn’t really a thing that came into it. And not to say that my parents were not open about sex, they were. I mean we knew where babies came from. Nobody told us that a stork delivers them in a cabbage patch but still it was like this kind of distinct thing so I don’t have any religious doctoring that I remember around sexuality specifically. LEAH: So you mentioned that as you got into your tween years, you started playing around with other little girls. But that sounds like primarily a friendship thing, at what point did it progress to a more romantic/sexual thing for you? MEL: Well, the first time that I had literal penis and vagina sex was at 14 so that was really when it escalated into something like that. That’s when I had a boyfriend. We had a relationship. We had sex. I loved it. It was awesome. I did not have that first time horrible bleeding whatever traumatic, that just didn’t happen to me. It was just instantly, “This is awesome. I want to keep doing this!” [LAUGHTER] LEAH: So as someone who had a good experience and I know it’s hard to put yourself in the shoes of an experience you didn’t have but so many of us did have really difficult painful experiences, do you have any idea what it was that allowed you to have a good experience? MEL: I would think that probably some of it was the guy that I was with was just a sweetheart. We were really good friends. He was super careful and gentle and worried about me and I didn’t even know that I needed to be worried about me. I didn’t even have the predisposition that this might be a hard bad thing, which I think sometimes you hear that story and you’re like, “Shit, I’m going to have a hard bad thing when I have sex for the first time.” But I never heard that story so it was just like, “All right.” And I had no expectations of things being bad. I was with someone I loved and trusted. It was really easy.

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