When Debby Herbenick reached puberty, her mother's sex talk consisted of asking her daughter if she understood health class. "She knew the day we had to watch the video on reproduction, so she picked me up and asked, 'So, do you have any questions?' I said no, and that was it," she says.

Today, at 38, Herbenick is a sexual health educator for the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, the author of seven books about sex and sexuality, and a professor and scholar at Indiana University. She also hosts the popular "Kinsey Confidential" podcast.

Herbenick shares her story about the intellectual excitement of discovering human sexuality, her decision to ditch two Ph.D. programs, and her open-ended career philosophy.

Growing up in Miami, we didn't talk about sexuality issues or puberty or those kinds of body changes at all in my household. I really had the sense that these things weren't on the table as far as conversation went. As a result, I was very embarrassed whenever anyone talked about sexuality or periods or bras — not even breasts, but bras.

I didn't mean to become a sex researcher and educator. As a kid, I wanted to be a pediatrician. At different points growing up, I wanted to be a writer. As a teenager, I thought I would be a child psychologist.

So I went to the University of Maryland to study psychology. When I was finishing up that degree, I found out about a research study at the Kinsey Institute that intrigued me. It involved asking college students about early experiences of childhood sexual play — such as playing doctor, "I'll show you mine," etc. — as well as adolescent feelings related to first crushes, first kisses, and so on.

I knew I wanted to work with children as a psychologist, and the aspect of studying their sexual behavior was fascinating to me. I emailed Kinsey to see if they were hiring anyone to be a part of it. As it turned out, they were just about to post an opening. I sent in a résumé and then shortly thereafter scheduled an interview for a few days post-graduation.

Once I started researching in preparation for the interview, I was suddenly struck with this world I knew nothing about and I wanted to learn everything about it.

It became a hard time for me because I was already set on this path to get my Ph.D. in child counseling at the University of Maryland. But if I went through with it, I would have to give up this sex research study that I really wanted to be a part of. I turned the Ph.D. program down and packed up my car the day after graduation to move to Bloomington, Indiana.

The plan was to work at Kinsey for a while and then attend a different Ph.D. program. I set my sights on a pediatric psychology program at the University of Miami.

At Kinsey, I started as a research assistant. It was initially a part-time job, but it's a pretty small group of researchers at Kinsey and I was able to cobble together different assistantships to make it a workable salary. I certainly wasn't making a lot of money, but I was learning so much. I was working on other people's studies, doing a lot of data entry and very basic statistical analysis. I spent most of my time reading a lot of the scientific literature to better understand what I was doing.

It was 1999 and a very interesting time to get into sex research. I was a research assistant on a study about Viagra, which had just come to the market. After about a year, my job transitioned into a research associate role with a salaried position at Kinsey. It was still very entry-level. I helped with literature reviews, drafted papers, and executed all types of data entry. I helped on studies about genital self-image, pain during intercourse, and Americans' belief about vibrator use.

About a year or two into this job, I decided not to do the pediatric psychology Ph.D. in Miami. I found that in my spare time I was still looking up scientific literature in sexuality. It occurred to me this is what I should do for a living.

I enrolled at Indiana University to get my master's in public health, which then transitioned into a Ph.D. in public health. I stayed on the same campus and continued working for Kinsey. The program worked very well with my job, but it was a balancing act. My role at Kinsey was changing at that time. I began leading my own studies. The very first study I led was about how women and men feel about women's genitals. This got me into a whole area of studying genital perceptions and genital self-image, which ultimately led to my first appearance on Tyra, in 2007, when I got to bring my vulva puppet on the show and educate women about their vulvas and vaginas.

I finished my Ph.D. in 2007 and began teaching in the School of Public Health at Indiana University, where I am now on the faculty. I love teaching human sexuality because it's a topic that college-age people are all grappling with in their lives. It's an elective for most students, so they want to be there and figure this stuff out.

One frequent challenge I have is deciding what to tell people I do for a living when they ask. Sometimes I simply say that I'm a professor or researcher, and if they ask what I study, I say public health. Other days I more immediately tell them that I study sexual health and teach human sexuality classes. Why don't I go with the part about sex right off the bat? It's often such an unusual response that people get curious and want to ask all their questions. Sometimes that's fine. But other times I just want to relax and read a book on the plane like everyone else.

Around 2001, the folks at Kinsey asked if I would start answering sex questions from the public in written form. We developed a student newspaper column and started the "Kinsey Confidential" blog and, eventually, podcast. Every episode is a real question sent in from a real person. We have always had a lot of questions about whether it's normal for women to not have orgasms during intercourse (it is), whether women can learn to have orgasms (most can), how to enhance sexual desire (it's complicated but doable), and whether a man's penis size is sufficient to pleasure his partner (men of all sizes can have great sex). We also very often get questions from people worried about whether something they have done could have led to pregnancy. We get far more questions than we can answer in the podcasts so I try to choose a diverse range so that we can address as many different topics as possible. Listeners can subscribe on iTunes.

Somewhere around that same time, I got an email from a small newspaper that was starting one of those free weeklies in Louisville, Kentucky. They were looking for a sex columnist. They asked me to write some sample columns, and I did that for all of the seven years, answering readers' questions [about] oral sex, first-time sex, loss of desire, sex after having a baby, which vibrator to buy, how to deal with painful sex, STIs, and so on. I did that until the paper folded during the recession. Shortly after that, Time Out Chicago approached me to write a sex column and then so did Men's Health, and then many other publications both small and large.

Since then I have written seven books. The idea for the first one, , was to do something very accessible for women that addressed issues of sexuality from desire, arousal, sex toys, and more. There's no shortage of people who want to write about sex, but a lot of people don't have a lot of training in it. It means that a lot of the information out there isn't trustworthy. This frustrated me so I asked a friend of mine, who is an author, if he'd introduce me to his agent, and it worked out.

Certainly writing books in addition to everything else that I do takes a lot of energy. To me, it's been something I enjoy. It makes my overall career much more interesting and pleasurable.

My research in the School of Public Health, which is separate from Kinsey, which is where I do much of my education and outreach work, is ongoing. I'm currently researching exercise-induced orgasm (what the media sometimes call "coregasm,"which is what is about), as well as teenagers and love, very long-term relationships (people who have been together for 25 years or longer), pain during intercourse, and certain aspects of female masturbation. I'm also working on developing and testing a new female condom. Funding is up to individual researchers and their teams. My research is funded by private foundations, Fortune 500 companies, startup technology companies, moderate-size companies, as well as government grants. It just depends on the project.

There are so many difficulties with sexuality. It's apparent to most of us that not talking about sex as a culture can make two people who are partnered in a relationship not talk about sex. What maybe isn't obvious to everyone is that in societies where they don't talk about sex and sexuality, it can give power to those who commit assault and rape. Reporting assault and rape involves a lot of discussion about the genitals and sex and very specific things. Victims who are not comfortable talking about those things are less likely to report. Those who commit these crimes benefit from this silence.

I had a student last semester who was assaulted, which I found out about in her final paper. She ended up going to the health center, reported it, got tested, and so on. She said if it hadn't been for taking my human sexuality class, she didn't know if she would have reported the assault or even told a health care provider about it. Reading her paper made me really emotional, but I was also grateful to have given her those tools of communication.

As for the rest of my career, I'll just keep doing the things that interest me. I don't do a lot of long-range planning. I hope that the research and education work I'm a part of helps people to learn more about their sexuality, to be more thoughtful about their relationships, and that it helps people become more compassionate about what it means to be a human being. Sexuality is a part of our humanity, and it's a big part of how we connect in our most intimate relationships. I hope my work helps people figure out how to create (and keep) the sexual lives and relationships that they want.

Get That Life is a weekly series that reveals how successful, talented, creative women got to where they are now. Check back each Monday for the latest interview.

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