ABSTRACT
Childhood sexual development has always been a difficult subject to talk about. But many people have vivid childhood memories reflecting their curiosity about their own bodies, others’ bodies and gender differences. The author reflects on her own anxieties about sex when she was a child. She looks at observations about childhood sexuality made by Freud and the sexologist Alfred Kinsey. She considers her own sexual confusion as teenage girl. She discusses the time when she confessed her sexual anxieties to a well-meaning but misguided Freudian psychotherapist who told her that women who didn’t experience proper vaginal orgasms were sexually immature as a result of masturbation as a child. She tells how she left his consulting room that day convinced she was deficient as a woman and never went back. She goes on to discuss the origins of Freud’s ideas about female sexuality and the damage caused to generations of women, and also to gay men, by Freudian psychoanalysts.
