The Mormon Girl’s Guide to Sex

A Glossary of Terms.

A.

Abstinence. In theory, this refers to not having sex. It is the only form of birth control/ sex education/ dating guidance I was offered as an adolescent: sex exists and YOU SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.

Y’all. I was a teenager in the 1990s. This is before most people had the internet, even the shitty dial-up internet that made noises like a ghost fucking your television.

I had no idea what anyone meant when they said, “sex” (which they almost never did), or the more off-putting, “sexual intercourse” (also, thankfully, rarely said), or, more commonly, “immorality.” Your third-grader knows more about sex than I did in the tenth grade. I spent a shockingly long period of time convinced that a) sex involved boys peeing on girls, and b) you could get pregnant through kissing with tongue.

Other Mormon youth, it turns out, were more precocious than I. My rural Utah high school had the tenth highest teen pregnancy rate in the country. My understanding is that this had something to do with all of the absolutely wild urban tales going around regarding what “counted” as sex. Some gems: if he pulls out, it doesn’t count; if the penetration is “accidental” (?!?) it doesn’t count; if you do it standing up, it doesn’t count. And if it doesn’t count, then you’re technically abstinent, and, as we all know, abstinent people can’t get pregnant.

My high school had a lot of abstinent pregnant teenagers. It’s what you get when formal sex education amounts to, “No.”

I understand Mormon youth and young adults have evolved in their expansive definition of abstinence. There now appears to be widespread adoption of other abstinent behaviors, like “soaking” and using the “poophole loophole.” Mormon youth were probably doing these things when I was in high school, too, but I had no way of Googling it in 1993.

B.

Birth control. This is the only thing standing between you and being pushed into marrying your high school boyfriend at a Wedding of Shame (all marriages that don’t or can’t take place in the temple are Weddings of Shame).

I got my first gynecological exam at Planned Parenthood, which was like seventeen sins all at the same time. They were kind and informative and gave me a free prescription for birth control pills. The pills made me emotional and nauseous but every time I considered not taking one, I imagined getting married, redneck style, at seventeen, my belly perfectly round under whatever white dress we could find at the thrift store. Then I reached for that fucking pill really fast.

Blow Job. Contrary to what its name implies, there is no actual blowing involved. In fact, if you’re blowing, you’re doing it wrong.

A blow job is very useful for the following reasons:

• It’s a way you can stay “technically” abstinent. (See above, “abstinence.'“)

• It’s how you keep from getting pregnant if you think that Heavenly Father hates birth control and your uterus screams at you every time your husband tells you that he’s pretty sure that Baby #7 is hanging out in the Pre-Existence, hoping that you’ll keep your promise to be its mommy.

• It will end most conversations.

Blue balls. An utterly mythical condition that some boys used to claim they would get if they didn’t climax every time they got aroused. Maybe they still claim this. I don’t know, it’s been a while since I’ve been a virgin, or a teenager, or even on the dating scene. Getting blue balls was, apparently, a fate worse than death, an unspeakable agony that couldn’t be alleviated by hiding in your bedroom closet and masturbating into a sock.

Mormon girls, if Brad is still insisting the family jewels will never recover if you don’t give him a hand job after prom, maybe it’s better that way. It doesn’t sound to me like Brad should ever father progeny. Let those balls turn cobalt and go for ice cream with your girl friends.

C.

Clitoris. Geographers and explorers claim that some regions of the world are so dangerous, so inhospitable to human life, so impossible to access, that we will never fully unpack their mysteries. There is terrain in the arctic that remains elusive to human observation, life forms in the darkest parts of the Amazon that elude scientific exploration.

According to a significant subsection of Mormon men, the mystery, danger, and inaccessibility of all of these geographic areas is dwarfed by the greatest, most elusive locale of them all: the clitoris.

The clitoris, the woman’s pleasure center where most of her most exciting nerve endings are located, is simply impossible to find. Brave and noble men have died in the attempt. Sure, some women and gynecologists might claim that it’s an easily identifiable mound of flesh at the junction of the inner lips of the vulva. They clearly don’t understand how difficult it is to navigate women’s genitalia.

Condom. A wonderful invention that keeps you from getting an STD from that one guy in your Ward who swears he’s “technically” still a virgin.

Cunnilingus. This is performing oral sex on a woman. Never heard this term before? That’s because some men assume that if you don’t know the technical word for something, you don’t have to do that thing. This is both selfish and incorrect.

Most men are pretty bad at this (for more information on why, see “Clitoris” or “Vagina.”) And most women don’t even ask for it because they’ve been raised to believe that their lady bits are naughty and unsightly.

So, here’s my PSA: Gentlemen (or other ladies; whoever’s bringing the tongue to the table). When you turn your tongue into a miniature dick and go for the vajayjay, it does absolutely nothing for us. Find the clit. Do better.

And ladies, if oral sex is part of your sex life at all, you deserve to receive as much as you give.

D.

Dildo. My little sister bought me a vibrator for my thirtieth birthday. It was called “the pocket rocket” and it would have indeed fit neatly into a coat pocket, had I wanted to carry it around with me. She claimed that she was having incredible experiences with her own pocket rocket and just had to share the wealth. If that’s not sisterly affection, I don’t know what is. Little Women had nothing on us.

Dildos can be as small as my pocket rocket or as large as a lumberjack’s forearm. Your dildo is as unique as your fingerprint; you should pick the one that’s right for you.

Just be aware: you will absolutely, positively, spend eternity in the Telestial Kingdom for this. Heavenly Father is basically obsessed with his kids’ sex lives and boy does he hate women to have orgasms without a man involved, and sometimes not even then.

Dry humping. One of the less satisfying ways to stay “abstinent.” See under “abstinence,” above.

E.

Erection. If you are a teenage girl, a male erection may be one of the most uniquely horrifying things you can encounter in the wild. The first time I saw my high school boyfriend naked with an erection, I thought (but sadly did not say), “Oh, absolutely not.” It was a horrifying, purplish alien appendage jutting like a drawbridge from the nest of that boyfriend’s pubic hair. I wasn’t all the way clear on what he planned to do with it, but I had a terrible feeling that it involved me.

Erotic. Anything that gets your motor running. You know, things like: a back massage; a long, luxurious bubble bath; that one scene in The Two Towers where Aragorn throws open the doors at Helm’s Deep; a man running a goddamn vacuum without being asked for fucking once; long walks on the beach. (See “Horny.”)

F.

Fellatio (see “blow job”).

Feminism. The radical idea that people who identify as female should get to have orgasms, too.

Fingering. Another form of abstinence. (See “abstinence” above.) Most of the time it’s a guy bypassing your actual erogenous zones all together and going straight for the vagina, which is about as sensitive as your forearm. Then he inexpertly proceeds to dry rub you in ways that evade your G-spot until you fake an orgasm to get him to stop already or spontaneously grow some self-respect and kick him out of your Ford Focus.

G.

G-spot. Many men believe the G-spot, the gorgeous miracle pleasure spot distinct from the clitoris but also VERY important, is a myth. Many women believe this, too, for that matter. Sisters in christ, I am here to testify that the G-spot exists, and if you and/or your partner haven’t figured out where it is yet, cancel your weekend plans. You’re going to be busy.

Gonnorrhea. One of the many reasons we LOVE condoms! Especially for all sex that occurs outside of a monogamous, committed relationship in which you’ve both had your tests done. (See “condoms”.)

H.

Hand job. This is something Mormon boys try to convince you they should be able to experience while they’re driving and you’re in the passenger’s seat, doing nothing else useful with your hands. It is a form of “abstinence” (see “A,” above).

A guy on the debate team literally crashed his car into a goddamn tree after successfully convincing his girlfriend to play with his stick shift while he drove. Fortunately, both the guy and his girlfriend were fine, at least to the untrained eye. The psychological toll of crashing while climaxing probably took years of therapy to work through.

Horny. That urgent, frantic feeling you get when something gets your motor running. You know, like: a back massage; a long, luxurious bubble bath; that one scene in The Two Towers where Aragorn throws open the doors at Helm’s Deep; a man running a goddamn vacuum without being asked for fucking once; long walks on the beach. (See “Erotic.”)

Hymen. Once upon a time many millennia ago a whole bunch of men got together at the annual How to Oppress and Destroy Women Annual Conference and Cave Expo. The primary topic on the agenda was how to create a measurable economic value for the commodity known as women, so there would finally be an international standard for trade and bartering purposes. For example, is one Bethany worth two Melindas? Are you overpaying if you offer four Lauras in exchange for a Patricia and a half?

The problem, of course, was that there needed to be a lot of dimensions to the absolute value of a woman, much like there would be with a horse.

One guy, who was probably named Chad or Brett, said, “I think it’s important to know if some other guy has sexed up my woman property before me. You ask me, that hugely impacts resale value.”

And some other guy, who was probably named Kyle or Brody, said, “I’ll tell you how we’ll know - there’s that membrane in the vagina. If that’s broken, that means she’s been sexed up and therefore bad property.”

And a reasonable guy who had wandered into the Annual Conference and Cave Expo by mistake, said, “Hang on. First of all, whether a woman has that membrane or not doesn’t impact her value as a person at all, that’s just objectively nonsense. But also secondly, a ton of things can break that membrane. Like, riding a saber-toothed tiger, or doing a lot of sports, or enjoying some ‘me’ time.”

But Chad and Brett and Kyle and Brody threw the reasonable guy out, and the Conference voted to make this membrane a big deal. They called it the “hymen” because they wanted to know if it had said “hi” to any other “men.”

I.

Implant. Something you can get a doctor to put in your arm to avoid pregnancy. They warn you that it increases your appetite, but LADIES LET ME TELL YOU if I hadn’t been starving to death from poverty I would have happily eaten myself into an early grave after getting one of these suckers shoved into my subcutaneous arm fat.

Incest. This happens a ton in Mormon families, as it does in all strongly patriarchal cultures - particularly secretive ones. This happened in my family. And it’s authentically, bone-crushingly too horrifying to joke about.

Inbreeding, on the other hand, I will absolutely joke about. If you want to perform a case study on inbreeding, might I suggest literally any rural area of Utah? Find a fast food restaurant, walk in, and notice that all of the employees either have the exact same chin or no chin to speak of.

Rural Utah is where the polygamist Mormons who split off from mainstream Mormons in 1890 so they could keep raping a wide variety of 13-year-old girls resettled. Polygamist enclaves still exist today; if you’re at the grocery store and see a woman with long braids wearing a dress and tennis shoes, there’s an 83% chance she’s a plural wife.

Not having a chin is one possible impact of inbreeding.

Having too much of one is another, as generations of Hapsburg families could tell you.

The thing about tiny, polygamous enclaves is that they don’t grow through conversion. No woman who has ever been exposed to literally anything else would agree to give up jeans, lip gloss, coffee shops, and book stores to live in the Utah desert with a guy 30 years older who is also fucking her sister, the babysitter, and the Sunday school teacher. No, polygamous communities grow through having so many kids that all of the women over 35 are almost certainly incontinent.

Because there hasn’t been a fresh infusion of DNA into these polygamous enclaves since about 1891, the gene pool is stagnant, covered with algae, and hiding a variety of mosquito nests.

K.

Kink. I swear to Brigham Young that Mormons use this word for anything that isn’t the most awkward, vanilla sex imaginable, in which both people have their eyes squeezed shut out of shame for being naked and the man just sort of flails around on top of the woman until he makes a weird grunting noise, goes slack, and leaves the woman to clean up the mess and deal with the continuous vicious burn of sexual frustration and thwarted semi-arousal.

In the real world, kink comes in all shapes, sizes, flavors, and costumes. There are people who like dressing up like animals to, ahem, fuck like bunnies. There are people who enjoy a good whip, chain, and/or ball gag. There are people who enjoy messing with bodily fluids that, in other circumstances, you would have to pay nurses a good wage to clean up. There are people who like being with several other people, and people who don’t want to touch the other person at all. No kinks are wrong, as long as they involve genuinely consenting adults and don’t harm anyone else.

If Heavenly Father is so obsessed with your sex life that he cares whether or not you and your main squeeze 69 the hell out of each other or neigh like horses while using a sex harness, you just let him know that you’d appreciate it if he took care of childhood cancer instead of watching your home porn.

L.

Libido. Something the LDS Church still seems to firmly believe women lack.

Spoiler alert: they’re wrong.

M.

Masturbation. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong adventure.”

This is a mechanism for giving yourself the love you deserve. You can buy yourself flowers, you can hold your own hand, and you can give yourself a mind-blowing orgasm.

Church leaders do not want you to do this because then your expectations for heterosexual sex will go up. You will no longer be somewhat content with inept attempts at physical affection. You will compare what your partner is doing to your body with what you are capable of doing to your body, yourself.

I’m told that Bishops ask boys about masturbation in worthiness interviews. They do not ask girls about this. This means that God doesn’t care if girls masturbate, only boys.

Multiple Orgasms. One of the many reasons that men are jealous of us and thus have to try to control us through assaholic religious structures. We get multiple orgasms, they don’t. HAHAHAHAHAHA.

This is probably also why Church leaders keep saying dumb shit like sex isn’t supposed to be fun.

N.

Naked. My personal favorite way to have sex, although if it’s winter and I’m really cold, I sometimes wear fuzzy socks.

O.

Oral Sex. Here’s the thing with oral sex. It’s either really, really good, or it’s really, really bad - but very seldom is there an in-between. For more details, see “Blow Job,” “Fellatio,” and “Cunnlingus.”

Orgasm. One of the very best things in the known universe. If you aren’t sure whether or not you have experienced this, YOU HAVEN’T. I know this seems self-explanatory, but I literally had an actual conversation with a woman once where she said, “I don’t know if I’ve ever had an orgasm??? Like one time in college, I thought, what if I masturbate??? So, then, like, I tried, and after a while I felt kind of nice, you know??? And then I started giggling, so then I figured, maybe that was an orgasm.”

No, it was not. It was NOT an orgasm. An orgasm is all the best sunsets of your life packaged in molten gold and starlight, and experienced simultaneously during a ride to Mercury on a private jet with Ryan Gosling. An orgasm is a supernova made of nacho cheese erupting through every fiber of your being and shattering the space-time barrier.

This is the best guidance I can give you about orgasms: NEVER fake one. All that does is reward bad behavior. Don’t encourage a guy to keep fucking you in an inadequate way.

In fact, not only should you demonstrate having an orgasm only when you are actually having an orgasm, I suggest keeping a spray bottle of cold water next to the bed so you can spray him the next time he climaxes spectacularly, leaving you unmoved, and says, “Was that good for you?”

P.

Penis. I’m generally a fan, but also very discriminating. Not all penises are created equal.

You may have heard the saying, “It’s not the size of the boat that counts, it’s the motion of the ocean.” That’s mostly true, but outliers exist. There is definitely such a thing as too small. There is also such a thing as too large. The exact threshold on these varies from person to person.

The one thing that seems universal - at least in my experience - is that all cis-gender men with penises are really delighted with their penises. Like, they tend to think that nothing better was invented, ever, at any point in time. They make most decisions with their penis as the critical determining factor.

This is okay. I mean, it’s way better to be pleased with your body than not.

The problem happens when they assume that you must be just as delighted with it as they are.

I have been equivalently (or perhaps even more) delighted with a penis than its owner exactly one time in my life. And, Reader, I married him.

Q.

Queer. A term brilliantly reclaimed by the LGBTQIA community after it was used as a perjorative for years. Though also maybe don’t use it if you’re not part of the community, unless someone gives you explicit permission to use it to describe them.

R.

Role-play. One of the fun ways to do kink (see “Kink”). You can do role-play as many things. You can dress up as Vikings and battle each other in the backyard until one of you “yields.” You can put on onesies and pretend to be Pokemon characters, but sexy. You can pretend to be an alien abducting a human subject for experimentation. If you want to be boring, you can go conventional and play doctor and nurse or bad teacher and worse student.

The important thing to remember about role-play, apart from consent being essential to the whole operation, is that if you’ve ever faked having a good time when you really weren’t, you’ve already got practice at being someone you’re not. You might as well use it for fun.

S.

Sixty-nine. This is a great way to help both of you get yours at the same time! (See “Cunnilingus,” “Fellatio,” and “Oral Sex.”)

Swimsuit Area. My family’s favorite euphemism for talking about a girls’ naughty parts - they’re everything covered by a swimsuit. It was explained to me very clearly that nobody should touch my Swimsuit Area, not even me.

As an adult, it made me overly enthusiastic about using the actual technical names for sex organs. I will mention vaginas with almost no provocation.

T.

Temple Garments. I have exactly one sibling (out of five) who is an observant Mormon. This means I have one sister whose underwear runs her life. The full-tilt cap sleeves and boxer style of the garments mean that they can’t be worn with most comfortable summer clothing, and I haven’t asked her about this but I’m pretty sure that they ride up your butt and scrunch under your shirt sleeves on the regular.

The reason why this is about sex is because there is NOTHING LESS SEXY than seeing your beloved in temple garments. When that same sister was pregnant with her third baby and her husband saw her in the maternity temple garments, he said (and I’m quoting), “Those are enough to make me never want to have sex for any reason ever again.”

Testicles. The best place to kick a man.

U.

Uncircumcised. I’ve never seen an uncircumcised penis on a real, actual human man. This means that 100% of the men I’ve slept with had their dicks mutilated as infants.

The explanation I was given about this blood-curdling practice is that circumcised penises are more hygienic. It turns out that this, of course, is nonsense. As long as you shower regularly (I’m looking at you, some of my ex-boyfriends), uncircumcised penises are no less “hygienic” than circumcised ones.

Urinary Tract Infection. What you get if you have an absolutely unbelievable amount of sex in a short period of time, unless you’re diligent about peeing and getting the whole situation cleaned up afterward.

V.

Vagina. PSA to the guys out there: I know you think the vagina is the most important sex feature, because that’s where your dick goes, and, let’s face it, you’re a little fixated on your dick (hey, someone had to tell you).

The vagina has about as many erotic nerve-endings as your forearm. If it had more nerve-endings than that, everything to do with pregnancy and childbirth wouldn’t just be agonizing but unbearable. The vagina’s tough because it has to be for new humans to get out of their mom’s body that way.

So forgive me for echoing a South Park character when I say, “Find the clit.” (See “clitoris,” above.)

Vern. My high school boyfriend. He was originally interested in my best (only) friend, but she wasn’t interested back, so he settled for me. Sure, I got Kirsten’s sloppy seconds, but this was great news for me, because

a) I was in contention for the least popular person attending our high school, and having any guy interested in me significantly increased my social capital, and

b) he was REALLY good at kissing.

Really. Really. Good.

This is not me and Vern. But this is definitely a picture that I would like you to use to visualize me and Vern.

We were never this coordinated and frankly I wasn’t either popular enough or rich enough to wear UGGs.

Vern smelled like pine trees and the leather gauntlet gloves he wore continuously, even in 90 degree weather. He was a lanky Nordic geek and I found him irresistible.

After we discovered that kissing each other was really fun, we did very little of anything else. To this day I cannot remember which, if any, high school dances we went to, but I can tell you that I understood for the first time how someone could “accidentally” have sex. Because kissing was so fun that we escalated to groping, and then kissing bits of each other that were not on the face, and I started thinking about the possibilities inherent in removing pieces of clothing.

We had a lot of conversations about this. Vern wanted to go on a mission, and, more importantly, be worthy of going on a mission. I still thought Heavenly Father might care if Vern saw my tits. We tried to brainstorm ways to not hook up, which usually led to hooking up, and then feeling guilty and repeating the cycle.

Vern got me so worked up that I ended up cheating on him with my debate partner, who was not Mormon and so didn’t have any concerns about missions or worthiness. This was a horrible, shitty thing for me to do to Vern, who had done nothing except be a kind, considerate boyfriend, kiss me extremely well, and get me so fired up that I went for the first guy who seemed like he could scratch that itch.

I regret this to this day, not only because cheating was a wretched way to treat a very nice guy, but also because my high school debate partner wasn’t nearly as good a kisser and his performance in bed was nothing short of abysmal. I broke Vern’s heart for a guy whose big ambition in life was seeing how many days in a row he could go without showering before other people started to notice.

Virginity. A completely made-up, bullshit thing that was invented by men as a means of assessing the value of property, which in this case was a woman. (See “hymen.”)

W.

Withdrawal. This is what happens if you quit your antidepressants cold turkey, instead of weaning off of them like your psychiatrist told you. You probably shouldn’t quit antidepressants at all, because, let’s be real, you were taking them for a reason, but if you’re going to, you should definitely do it slowly.

I once got off of Effexor, and even with tapering I was reasonably certain that I was going to end up either on the news for burning something to the ground or in jail because I did some light murder.

I now subscribe to better living through chemistry. My serotonin isn’t produced naturally, it’s store bought, but my brain doesn’t care why it’s happy as long as it is.

There are other kinds of withdrawals, of course.

There are bank withdrawals, and there are relationship withdrawals. You can withdraw your support from a political candidate, and withdraw a loaf of bread from the oven.

And some people practice withdrawal during the sex act. These folks believe that withdrawal of the penis from the vagina just prior to orgasm is a good form of birth control - one that doesn’t break Heavenly Father’s mandate about using formal birth control.

Those people are incorrect. Because of this, there is something that we call people who use the withdrawal method of birth control:

Parents.

X.

Xylophone. Something I recommend against involving in your sex life.

Y.

Yeast infection. Another thing I recommend against involving in your sex life.

Z.

Zone, Friend. THIS IS NOT A THING. Louder, for the people in the back.

THE FRIEND ZONE IS NOT A THING.

Gentlemen, if you asked her to date you, and she said no, but that’s she’s okay being friends, she did NOT “friend zone” you. She could not friend ANYTHING you. Because you were never her friend.

A friend doesn’t hang out with a friend in the hope that someday you’ll get into their pants. That’s absolute bullshit. And if you were just pretending to be her friend because you thought her boobs were amazing and were hoping she’d let you cop a feel, then not only are you not her friend, you are also a liar. You willfully misrepresented yourself and your motives, which means you suck.

If she told you she wanted to be friends, it’s possibly because she’s terrified that if she doesn’t try to placate you, you’ll go apeshit like a bajillion other guys, and scream at her, “I never wanted to date you in the first place, you fat, stuck-up bitch! You should be grateful I was willing to let you lick my dick!” and then get on Instagram or TikTok to whine like a hungry cow about how girls won’t date the nice guys.

Apart from this, when you talk about the Friend Zone, this infers that friendship with a woman is not something worth having. That the only reason for a guy to be around a woman is because he’s hoping she’ll drop her standards enough to take off her clothes in front of him. It’s not just shitty to the particular woman you did this do, but it is shitty to women in general.

If you bitch about the friend zone, you deserve to live in a permanent state of almost-coming, but not actually getting there, much like the women you slept with.