My vagina was much more interesting than the library, so I stuck my hand down my skirt while my sister checked out the second Harry Potter book. 

Cue: the librarian’s embarrassed glance, my sister’s groan, my mother turning around to hiss at me. She forced me to use Purell on the way out. Their urgent reactions bewildered and shamed me. 

Later in life, I adorned this as one of the many moments when I learned that sex was dirty; that sex was private. My educators on the subject itself were confined solely to Google and online porn. 

Image: Lovense Toys

I can pinpoint the birth of my sexual curiosity to when I searched ‘Lebanese kissing’ on YouTube. I’d only heard ‘lesbian’ in passing, so must have mixed the two words up in my head. I can also recall sneaking onto my mother’s work computer to look up ‘penis’ on Google, and feeling quite fascinated with the results. 

In my early pubescence, I experienced a lovely mixture of pillow humping, shame and curiosity. I furiously researched ‘how to orgasm’, courtesy of a Wikihow that wasn’t as helpful as I had hoped.

Though a sexually frustrated brown girl in the 2000s isn’t exactly uncommon, at the time I considered myself quite the perverted little shit. 

My very strict Indian parents made it clear that “all forms of sex were to be reserved for marriage!”

School was even less helpful. My sex education consisted of poorly delivered speeches on ‘female’ and ‘male’ anatomy, which did nothing but provoke a loud chorus of “ewwww!” every time.

There was also an intense wave of shame associated with female masturbation in high school, which made it an unspeakable discussion among friends. 

Why does it look like I wet the bed when I finger myself? Am I a lesbian if I watch lesbian porn? Why the fuck do I want to hump my pillow?

I turned to Google to answer all the questions I would never ask out loud. This took a turn when I finally surfed deep enough to find internet porn. 

Naked people. Fucking. On camera! Bondage. Old woman, young girl. Five ways. Orgies in public. The opportunities were endless. Where was their shame? I was turned on immediately.

Pornhub poured out the most addictive content I had ever encountered. I felt a peculiar sensation of being both horny and frightened – too young for the brutality of the website, but too excited to leave it.

Occasionally, when I would come across a video that was too degrading for my 14-year-old self, I’d shut my phone off and curl up into bed.

I always came back to porn. I started to repress any frightened part of my brain in order to keep up with Pornhub. I was completely desensitised.

It was only a matter of time until that desensitisation turned into attraction; sex no longer seemed to exist without a woman passively yet enthusiastically receiving pleasure. 

Porn plunged me into a deep kind of dark desire. I couldn’t pass someone on the street without thinking of pushing them against a desk; how they would moan; what they would say. All my sexual fantasies contained shades of aggression. The type of porn I was watching was moulding what turned me on.

More than that, I was frustrated at the fact that I no longer wanted to actually have sex. I felt that mainstream porn took away the awkward vulnerability of real sex. ‘Girl with Perfect Tits’ bounces on ‘Man’s Perfectly Huge Penis’ for five minutes, reaches completion ‘Super Loudly’, and begs to suck him off afterwards because ‘She Likes It More Than Him’.

Lesbian Pornhub was even worse – clearly tailored towards a male audience, leaving me with a skewed version of lesbian sex. 

At this point, I was able to believe that sex could be aggressive, passionate, intimate, impersonal or kinky, but never awkward. My friends had assured me that the embarrassing side of sex was what made it real and honest and nuanced. Jesus. Gag me. 

I didn’t know what I was waiting for. Certainly not love, and definitely not marriage, but I wished I could skip to the part where a guy makes me orgasm after five minutes of riding his ‘Perfectly Huge Penis’. But why experience honesty or awkwardness when I could watch perfection unfold online? 

Any attempt to replicate real life connection felt lonely. I felt severe anxiety seeing myself naked, thinking about having sex with someone, or even masturbating in anything but pitch black. 

When my statistics professor pulled me aside one day to ridicule my incompetence in his class, I couldn’t stop the famed teacher-student fantasy from taking hold of my mind. I realised then that I should probably cut back watching certain types of porn. Aggressive sexual fantasies about people I wasn’t attracted to became my breaking point.

I’m not quite ready to indulge in the intimate reality of a real physical touch, but hearing honest truths about sex helps. From my sister, my friends, even my mother  – the gory details are fascinating. The sweating, the vagina farts, the laughter, the intensity of power play, the ability to speak another language through touch. Taking time and talking.

Apparently, sex is about more than mere completion. It is about feeling good, listening, trying new things and developing trust. It’s about letting go of your nerves; letting go of being in your head.

Grasping the concept that my body is multifaceted – it’s meant to sweat, shit and be sexy – is something that I still struggle with today. I often feel disheartened with my miseducation of it all. Yet if I had to go back to little old sexually frustrated me with some advice, I wouldn’t really know where to start, except to try and guide her out of the constant shame she was feeling about everything. 

Oh. And that the clit is too sacred to be played with in the public library. 

Al Goveas spends five percent of the day looking for a job, and ninety five percent of the day thrifting for clothes, drawing, drinking espresso martinis, and writing freelance articles like this one.