Learning Curves

Like most children of the '80s, I had received a reasonable sex education via pop culture by the age of 11. In fourth grade, I asked my mother what Darryl Hall was referring to when he sang "I Want to Play that Game Tonight," and laughed knowingly when she answered "Monopoly." I suffered eye strain from repeated late-night viewings of the Spice Channel and was a longtime aficionado of The Joy of Sex. Still, nothing quite prepared me for the copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS) I found in my parents' basement.

It wasn't the detailed diagrams of the female reproductive system, or the drawings of six different types of hymens that captivated me. Nor was it the righteous, womyn-power assertions such as, "We are learning to live our sexuality on our own terms." No, it was the book's explicit, unflinching description of fantasies: real women revealing their most private erotic imaginings about horses (ew) other women (less ew) and men (totally awesome, as I may actually have said in 1986). I read the scenarios over and over in the privacy of my locked bedroom, until I finally left for college, where the logistics of living with a roommate promptly put an end to that.

The eighth edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves arrives in bookstores this month. Touted as one of the most lasting contributions of the second-wave women's movement, it has been called the definitive women's-health reference of the last 35 years. But ask the daughters of its original intended audience — the women who now call themselves the third wave — why they love it, and they'll confirm it wasn't the advice on healthy eating or bicep-building that mesmerized them in their youth.

"I definitely remember reading the sex parts, especially the lesbian parts, and being like, this is amazing, they're real people talking about sex," says Liza Featherstone, the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart. "It must be like a teenage guy discovering Penthouse Forum. Except better, because these aren't stories about people having sex in airplanes that are probably made up. It must be the way that people experience amateur porn now."

It's true: reading OBOS isn't entirely unlike watching a jiggly, implant-free woman and her paunchy, real-life boyfriend wrestling naked in front of their home cam. The fantasies in OBOS weren't airbrushed, and neither were the people. And though one friend of mine claims that a childhood viewing of "the crazy picture of two fat lesbians, one of them in a wheelchair" led her to temporarily resolve that sex was absolutely, unequivocally grody to the max, most of us felt deeply, intuitively comforted by the knowledge that we could think our dirty thoughts and look like our less-than-centerfold-worthy selves and still get some action (eventually).    

Hell, you wouldn't even need a lover. (That's the book's very "Saturday Night Live"-sounding term, not mine.) In fact, OBOS picks up where Gloria Steinem's "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" maxim leaves off. Every edition devoted an entire section to sisters doing it for themselves, sexually speaking. From the story about the gym teacher who feels up her female students to the girl who imagines sleeping with her brother because he's "19 and groovy and looks just like me," OBOS provided plenty of things to think about while doing the deed. "I don't remember a lot about the rest of the book," says Marisa Meltzer, a freelance writer who was given OBOS by her mother one Christmas. "I was like, let's get back to the masturbation scenes."    

I'm pretty sure that when the book was first published in 1970, its feminist authors weren't attempting to recruit young ladies to their cause with a bait-and-switch -- get 'em with the sex stuff, then pump 'em full of women's lib. But it worked anyway.