Sexuality to me is defined as being a heterosexual woman having interests and preferences in the opposite sex and having an emotional and physical connection with that person that I’m comfortable with. Growing up, the only thing I learned about sex was the famous Birds and the Bees talk. Don’t have sex until you’re married or if you masturbate you’ll go to hell. It wasn’t until I got older that I learned that I could have an orgasm and I learned what I liked and didn’t like. I was raised to believe that sexual relationships are to be between a man and a woman and not the same sex. I was taught to believe that sex between a man and woman was for the sole purpose of reproducing. After getting married and having sex, I later learned that sex can be and is a lot more. I was also taught that marriage is between a man and a woman. They meet, fall in love, get married and start a family. Sex is only to be with your spouse and sex before marriage was kept a secret especially if a child was born out of wedlock. Having premarital sex was considered a sin. It was okay for boys to sleep around, like earning some kind of badge of honor, but girls who were promiscuous were called whores or sluts and talked about in the community. Expressing yourself sexually was meant to be in private.
Sexual orientation was not discussed when I was growing up. If you were a boy who liked other boys, you were considered weird and an outcast. I remember in high school having a male classmate who was very feminine and always hung out with us girls. I never thought about it at the time nor did it bother me. When we became older he did come out as they call it. I rarely heard of girls liking other girls, but if you saw them dressing like boys, they were called Tomboys.
When I was growing up, some of the things that had an influence on my sexuality were; Sugar and Spice and everything nice, that’s what girls are made of. Every little girl growing up in my era (the 60’s and 70’s) knew this...