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There was a time before time, in the yawning abyss of darkness and starfire that is the infinite and ever-expanding universe — a time before any of us had had lesbian sex. Most of us thought about it, though, or tried to imagine how it would work! We were not always correct. What misconceptions, inaccurate ideas, or ultimately unfounded and in retrospect bizarre insecurities did you have? Where did they come from? How did you overcome them? Let it all out!

KaeLyn, Staff Writer

I thought I should be focusing on putting my tongue, like, inside the vagina. I mean, that’s totally fine if you like that particular sensation, but it’s not the preferable tongue action for most people with vaginas. This baffles me because I have a vagina that was engaged in sex at this time and I feel like I should have known that wasn’t the best way? But also a lot of cis men were the ones engaging with my vagina and they (1) rarely went down on me and (2) probably didn’t know what they were doing when they did. I thought this at least until I was 19. Thanks, lesbian-porn-produced-by-and-made-for-men and also men who didn’t make the effort to figure out what I liked.

Riese, Editor-in-Chief

I truly thought that you balled your hand into a real fist and shoved that clenched fist right inside the vagina. Just a pure fist, a start-to-finish fist.

Tiara, Staff Writer

This isn’t really lesbian sex-specific, but I was pretty thoroughly convinced in my teens that I was going to be one of the Unlucky 0.00001% that would have ALL the birth control and ALL the STI protections and STILL somehow be carrying Jesus 2.0 while dealing with some terrible disease. And compared to most of my peers I actually had pretty decent sex ed! (Mostly thanks to some progressive books; Malaysia’s sex ed is non-existent.) I was just very very paranoid.

Mey, Trans Editor

This one is very specific to trans women with penises. For a while I was totally afraid to have lesbian sex because I thought that since I had a penis, I would have to do PIV sex, which usually gives me a lot of dysphoria. Oh wow was I happy when I realized we could just use hands and mouths and toys. Also it helped a ton figuring out that I’m a bottom and love being penetrated.

Erin, Staff Writer

This is going to sound maybe a little hard to believe, but I did not think about having sex with a woman until I was in the middle of having sex with a woman at age 18. In fact, I hadn’t really thought about sex at all until I was having sex with a woman at age 18. (Look, catholic school’s weird and also so is my family about intimacy.) Basically my first sexual experience was my first gay sexual experience after a lifetime of sexless thoughts. GET INTO IT.

On the one hand, that’s a little terrifying. On the other hand, being pushed out into the deep end before you know how to swim and before you’ve even thought about why you’re wearing a bathing suit means that you don’t really have fears or assumptions. You’re experiencing everything in realtime, and either your instincts kick in and you figure out how to tread water, or someone comes to help you, or both.

Of course, that didn’t mean I accepted everything I’d experienced my first time and went, “Well, that’s sex then,” and then never investigated it again. However, I think I have a backwards answer to this question. Something I thought was a misconception turned out to actually be… a conception.

Once I was introduced to queer sex and then the queer scene, I started to hear about the top/bottom thing a lot. At 18, that seemed wild to me that you had to be one or the other, and that there was no way people subscribed to this paradigm as much as people were leading me to believe. Readers, and maybe this is generational, I was wrong. People were not exaggerating about this shit! It is truly a way of life, light, and truth for so, so many. This isn’t a bad thing, just a personal observation! Shine bright like a diamond, everybody.

Heather Hogan, Senior Editor

I love baths and showers. Loooooove baths and showers. Love them, okay? I would take a huge big bubble bath and two showers every single day if that was a thing that was good for my body and the environment. I read a lot of fan fiction before I ever had sex for the first time and I especially loved shower and bath sex because it was: my favorite thing + the thing I was most excited to get going on + a person I presumably wanted to be spending time with. What a perfect equation! It also seemed so romantic and easy and fun. However, it turns out that neither shower sex nor bathtub sex (and honestly especially bathtub sex) are really comfortable. In the bathtub, it’s already kind of a tight squeeze with two people in there and surprise! water isn’t actually a lubricant and you’re sloshing around and shampoo bottles are clanking and then there’s water all over the floor you have to clean up and that’s just extra laundry. With shower sex someone’s always outside of the stream of water so it’s too cold or too hot for one or the other person and it’s not like hot water lasts forever. Alas. (Bath and shower sex isn’t the thing fan fiction steered me most wrong on but it was the thing I was most excited about that turned out to be a bust.)

Nora, Fashion & Beauty Editor

In the same vein as Heather’s shower sex revelation, I thought until only a few years ago that “normal” bodies were able to bend and accommodate each other in certain ways (porn-like scissoring, for example, or penetrative sex standing up), and that my body was either permanently wrong or, ideally, something I could fix to get to work like the bodies I’d seen participating in various sex acts in movies/on TV/via the internet. But a cool thing not enough people tell you is how creative queer people are in the sheets, and that there’s a ton of other stuff you can do with your body now, as it is, to get the pleasure you deserve. I’m so glad I finally figured that out!

Carmen, Staff Writer

I was actually talking about this with a friend recently! Even back when I still considered myself straight, I felt pretty clear about the basics of lesbian sex. Fingering and oral sex, scissoring/ tribadism, even strap-ons all made sense to me on some level because I could first imagine how they worked on my own body. The major exception was fisting. A lot like Riese, I assumed fisting was done by an actual fist essentially “punching” into a vaginal canal over and over again. The idea of it terrified me. I was no clearer about it after I came out. For a few years thought I couldn’t be a lesbian, or at the very least was a “fake” lesbian, if I was unwilling to give it a try. One of the first articles that finally helped me dispel my misconceptions was written by Carolyn right here on Autostraddle! It’s still something that I haven’t personally tried, but I return back from time to time with increased curiosity. Anyway, Fisting! It’s absolutely not getting punched in the vagina! (Unless you want it to be. No judgment. You do you.)

Alaina, Staff Writer

I definitely thought lesbian sex was more gentle than any lesbian sex I’ve ever had has historically been. I also imagined a lot more fingernails. These misconceptions were because I was a latchkey kid who watched way too much porn on dial-up AOL internet, and I mean, if you search “girl sex” on a free porn site, you get ladies with long nails having gentle sex with one another.

Carrie, Staff Writer

Through my early twenties, I thought that for lesbians especially, sex couldn’t be good or fun without an orgasm. I’m not surprised given that this assumption continues to pop up pretty much everywhere — but news flash, it’s not true.

Molly Priddy, Staff Writer

Until I finally got with another woman, I didn’t have a clue what the lesbians were talking about when they were talking about sex, but I knew I wanted it. With dudes, I didn’t love the attention they gave my body, so I was like, “I guess it’s strap-ons?” Anyway, the first time I really made out with a woman I was like, “Hahaha, oh. OK THIS MAKES MORE SENSE.”

Natalie, Staff Writer

Let me co-sign Heather’s point about showers: my ex and I once stayed in a lavish hotel with a huge walk-in shower and I thought it’d be great to include shower sex as part of our romantic weekend. It was not great… it was, in fact, the opposite of great. Even with the extra space, we weren’t able to coordinate our positions, in sync with each other, the water and my fear of getting my hair wet (it’s a black girl thing and shower caps are not sexy). That weekend, I learned to save showers for getting clean and masturbation, like God intended.

Carolyn, NSFW Editor and Literary Editor

I thought that I could either be myself or have the type of sex I wanted to have but not both. I thought that maybe it wasn’t actually possible to have the type of sex I want, or to have it more than once, or to have it with more than one person, or to have it consistently. I thought I couldn’t ever really let go, or maybe I was just always scared to really let go, because what would that look like and what would that mean. I also thought I couldn’t squirt except for that one time.

I was wrong.

Reneice Charles, Staff Writer

Until the first time I had penetrative sex with a woman in my early twenties I thought lesbian sex had to be boring. I’d only ever seen really bad lesbian porn and the occasional lesbian sex scene in movies which generally involve a lot of kissing, sighing, and one hand moving slowly under the covers so… I figured it just had to be boring. Not that soft and gentle always has to be boring, but the idea that that was all I had to look forward to was very underwhelming to me. Needless to say when the day finally came and after a few minutes of softly anxiously fingering the woman I was hooking up with she sat up and said “if you’re gonna fck me then FUCK me, go for it, let me feel that sh*t” and grabbed my wrist to lead me in the right direction, I was VERY excited to learn I’d been wrong.

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Staff Writer

I was an extremely sexually repressed — and extremely horny — teen who knew little to nothing about any sex of any kind. I learned to masturbate from a Meg Cabot book, and that’s about as far as I got for a while. I can’t say that I necessarily had many misconceptions about lesbian sex before sleeping with a woman, because I just really didn’t think much about the specific mechanics of sex at all! I knew I wanted to have it, and I was pretty sure I would like it. But most of my sexual fantasies were pretty vague as far as the actual logistics of sex go. I was surprised by how not-nervous I was when I was finally in the situation of having sex with a woman for the first time. I think all the masturbating helped.

Raquel, Staff Writer

I had no idea how to go down on someone but I knew that was a thing women liked, so I tried to Google it without having any idea about how or what to Google, and I ended up finding some kind of article about treating the vagina like a peach, and so well I did some very strange things from there including kinda assuming that’s what it would taste like? I probably should’ve thought that one through further. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Laura M, Staff Writer

When I had my first kiss — age 18 — I remember feeling taken aback that the other person’s tongue was wet. It was so surprising! I’d just never really thought about it.

When I had my first lesbian sexual experience several years later, nothing caught me off guard. After extensive reading, I pretty much knew what was up. This, friends, is why everyone should read Harry Potter fanfiction at least once in their lives.

Rachel, Managing Editor

This will sound dumb but maybe you know what I mean: I think my biggest misconception was that gay sex was like straight sex, just not with men. Up until I did have gay sex, the sex I had had with boys followed a fairly consistent formula: five to ten minutes of making out, roughly two minutes of letting them squeeze my tits like stress balls, some light mutual masturbation, maybe oral sex depending on whether we were in the backseat of a particularly compact model of car, and then penetration. My assumption was that even if the gender of the person I was with changed, it still worked more or less exactly like that without variation — maybe not so much with the penetration? Maybe you just skipped that step? That part was shrouded in mystery. (Please refer to Alaina’s excellent description of women in porn having extremely gentle sex with long nails.) You will understand my delight when I had gay sex for the first time and discovered that it’s TOTALLY different, from the ground up, in ways that I couldn’t have imagined. It’s like adding a Y axis after only moving in two dimensions for your whole life. I hate being wrong but this was a great thing to be wrong about!

Sarah, Business and Design Director

That pussy tasted like vanilla and cinnamon, or candy, or like a donut? I wrote a lot of fan fiction before I had lesbian sex and the girls in my stories tasted like candy! SORRY WORLD SORRY SORRY but also definitely not sorry about what pussy really tastes like!

Yvonne, Senior Editor

Much like Erin, I didn’t really have any misconceptions about lesbian sex because I didn’t really think about sex until I was having lesbian sex at age 17. In retrospect, I don’t even know how we knew what to do having zero references, not even porn or movies, because it all felt right and wasn’t awkward?

I will say though that a few years later when I had just come out, I heard that “lesbians don’t really scissor” and so I thought scissoring was a shameful sex act, like it was a really silly thing to do and not fun at all. Scissoring is real and can be super fun too!

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