fter giving a talk about pleasure anatomy to a group of Ivy League students, complete with 3-D models of a clitoris, a tall, soft-spoken sophomore student came up to me with tears in her eyes. “This is the first time I’ve ever learned about the clitoris or anything about female pleasure,” she whispered, “I’ve had sex many times, and I have a boyfriend, but I’ve never enjoyed sex or had an orgasm. What’s wrong with me?”

As a sex educator, I’ve heard this story hundreds of times. It used to be my story, too.

The thing about bad, one-sided sex is that you can be sexually active for years and not realize how bad or one-sided it is — that you’re missing out on a wide array of joy and pleasure. I grew up in a conservative, religious family, and not once did anyone ever tell me that sex… should feel good. I was taught that men would try to get sex from me, and that my job was to say “no” and protect my virginity.

Not only did I never learn about pleasure, no one ever mentioned consent. All sexual acts were equally sinful, so it didn’t matter if a boy went too far on a date with me — why was I letting him touch me at all? This internal shame about sex made it easier for people to coerce me to do sexual things and made me complacent about unfulfilling, ho-hum, or just plain terrible sex… until I learned about pleasure through exploration, actively working through my shame, and extraordinary lovers who supported me. Finally, I learned what a true “yes” felt like.

And while recent accounts about Aziz Ansari and the greater #MeToo movement have started a long overdue and deeply necessary conversationabout harassment, coercion, abuse, and our culture around sex, it lacks a critical element: any meaningful discussion of pleasure.

But without discussing pleasure, how can we talk about consent?

Overwhelmingly, our media’s reflection of female pleasure is, at-best, one-dimensional. When women’s pleasure is shown, whether in porn or a Hollywood movie, it’s often reduced to a quick, performative expression, an overwrought moan, perhaps, that serves as applause for the man. This not only alienates and guilts women who don’t climax, but such stereotypical representations flatten the complexities of pleasure, and prevents us from discussing its absence. As a result of our media and educational system failings, real conversations about sexual pleasure rarely happen at home or in school either, and discussions of how to achieve it is still, sadly, taboo in many relationships.

Straight women who date straight men tell me about the script: making out, oral sex on the penis, then penetrative fucking. When the penis ejaculates, sex is over. When I slept with straight men, this was my experience too, and my partners never seemed that concerned about my pleasure, or lack thereof.

Statistics show that I wasn’t alone.

Women don’t just face a wage gap at work; they also face what’s being called an “orgasm gap” in the bedroom. According to a recent Kinsey study, straight women have fewer orgasms than any other group*. While 95% of heterosexual men have an orgasm every time they have sex, and 86% of lesbians, only 65% of women sleeping with men do.

So, for women, sleeping with a straight man lowers the chance of having an orgasm by 20%.

Due to my struggle with sexual shame and lack of education, I have spent the better part of my twenties disturbed by and grappling with the lack of sex education in the United States, especially as sex ed in schools has plummeted over the last 20 years.

As a result of conservative efforts, fewer than 50% of schools in the United States now teach any sex ed at all — and of those, more than 75% focused on abstinence-until-marriage. Back in 1995, over 80% of students learned about birth control in schools. The Trump administration has slashed $200 million from the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program started in 2010 that has been thought to be the key driver of a plummet in teen pregnancy in the past few years.

I was so disturbed, in fact, that I founded a live-streaming company for sex and pleasure education called O.school. Over the past year, we have given sex and pleasure education workshops in 15 universities from progressive places like Los Angeles to rural colleges in Kansas to huge schools like Arizona State University. We’ve spoken to thousands of students about the issues they have around sexuality and pleasure.