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As you know, January’s theme this year for confessions is FIRSTS. It felt wonderful to be able to have Amber Keyser, author of The V-Word, join in the fun this week as her book is an anthology of 17 stories all about first time sexual experiences.
But what does first time sex mean? The V-Word explores that with beautiful depth and diversity, including trans voices and queer voices among the many stories.
We dive into virginity and what a dated, patriarchal concept it is. Amber even has a phrase I’ve become obsessed with: the cult of virginity. We talk about teenagers and sex, resources for young people that offer possibilities rather than prescriptions about what sex should be, and dive into her new novel.
Be sure to sign up for the newsletter to get details on next month’s confession theme, too.
Follow Dawn on Instagram.
In this episode, Amber and I talk about:
- Amber’s book, “The V-Word,” which is an anthology about women’s first time sexual experiences. It has 17 essays that are incredibly personal and beautiful, including queer and trans stories. It’s aimed at teen girls, but it really is for everyone.
- Resources for teenagers and books that they can get at libraries to learn about sex that won’t announce to the world it’s for the sex. What books should you check out to read about female masturbation? It’s so smart.
- Why romance novels are so criticized and mocked since they’re one of the only places that consistently show women having good sex, sex that they enjoy and want.
- Getting to choose the kinds of sex you want and who you engage in sex with – whether it’s with yourself or someone else. That theme of autonomy and choice around sexual experiences really comes through in Amber’s book. It’s beautiful.
- How you have to unpack the definition of virginity in order to define the word sex, especially as it applies to first times and teens.
- The concept of virginity leading to negative and dangerous behavior around sex. Amber calls it the ‘cult of virginity’ which I ADORE.
- Creating space at home for teens and kids to talk about sex and first times. Amber meets with parent groups a lot, and there is so much stigma around talking about sex. Parents often need permission to just start the talk.
- The importance of sharing our stories, our first times, with the young people in our lives so that they can see the art of the possible.
- Amber’s new book on the feminist history of marriage, which includes a chapter on the cult of virginity and patriarchy around child brides and the desperation to prove paternity.
- The burlesque show that Amber had at her book launch party for The V-Word.
- The importance of having a trans voice in The V-Word and just how powerful that story is in the book. We need to be showing the spectrum of sexuality and gender in books for young adults.
- Young girls and the intimate relationships they form with each other. Amber is explore this sensual and sexual experience for young women in her new novel, “Pointe, Claw.”
- Amber shares one of her firsts with us to help out with the theme for this month’s listener confessions.
Resources discussed in this episode
“Beast” by Brie Spangler, which is a YA novel centering a trans character
About Amber Keyser
Amber J. Keyser is an evolutionary biologist-turned-author, who writes both fiction and nonfiction for tweens and teens. In addition to The V-Word (Beyond Words/Simon Pulse, 2016), she is the author of The Way Back from Broken, a heart-wrenching novel of loss and survival (Carolrhoda Lab, 2015), Sneaker Century: A History of Athletic Shoes (Twenty-First Century Books, 2015), and the forthcoming Pointe, Claw, a novel about claiming the territory of the body (Carolrhoda Lab, 2017). She is the co-author with Kiersi Burkhart of the middle grade series Quartz Creek Ranch (Darby Creek, 2017).Listen and subscribe to Sex Gets Real
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Episode Transcript
Dawn Serra: You’re listening to (You’re listening) (You’re listening) You’re listening to Sex Gets Real (Sex Get Real) (Sex Gets Real) Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra (with Dawn Serra). Thanks, bye!
Hey, everyone. It’s Dawn. This week, we have a wonderful interview with Amber Keyser, who is an author. She wrote a book called “The V-Word,” which is a book all about sexual firsts. I was really amazed when I picked this book, just how sex positive and inclusive and beautiful and deep all of the stories where. They include trans voices and queer stories. It’s a book that I hope that every teenage person in the world has an opportunity to read. But also, it was really moving for me as an adult. Amber is really thoughtful and intelligent and has some really amazing things to say about virginity as a concept and how all of these stories in this book got birth.
Dawn Serra: But before we get to that, I want to share a listener confession for this week. Of course, January’s theme is all about firsts, which is perfect for my chat with Amber. This one actually just came in. The story says, “I’m a trans woman, so I have a lot of firsts. But there is one that really stands out – the first time I came out. I was 12. I had a huge crush on my best friend at the time. I was trying to keep my sexuality a secret, but it was slowly eating away at me.
One day, I thought I just needed to get it out. I was in the park with my friend. I don’t know how I mustered the courage. I told him, ‘I think I may be bisexual.’ He said, ‘Do you want to give me a bj?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I went down on him in the park. For the next year or so, he and I would walk his girlfriend home, and on the way back to our neighborhood, we would go to the park and have sex. No one knew. This has caused problems for me in my life.
Dawn Serra: Even now, ten years later, I get very anxious about relationships. If my partner isn’t being affectionate enough in public, I start to feel like I’m right back there in the park – hidden, ashamed of – and I hate that feeling. I hope one day I get past all of this. So that was my first time I came out, and the first time I had sex, all wrapped in one. Thank you for your time. Emery.”
Thank you so much for sharing that with me, Emery. I really appreciate that you had the courage to share that. Your voice and your story is so important as part of this theme of firsts. To everybody else out there, I’ve been getting your confessions. You can head to dawnserra.com for this episode, and check out the guidelines for submitting your stories. You can type them out. You can record them and send me the sound file. If you have a story that’s under three minutes – we found this out the hard way – you can leave me a voicemail. So please get me those confessions. Of course, if you’re on the newsletter, you already know what February’s theme is. Make sure you get on the Sex Gets Real newsletter as well, so that you can get advance notice of the following month’s theme. I will be announcing that on air a little bit into February. But start sending me confessions for February, if you’re on the newsletter, and you know what the theme is.
Dawn Serra: Let’s get ready for the interview. A little bit about Amber, she is an evolutionary biologist turned author, which is very evident in how articulate she is about so many of these issues, who writes both fiction and nonfiction for tweens and teens. In addition to “The V-Word,” she is the author of “The Way Back From Broken,” a heart-wrenching novel all about loss and survival, “Sneaker Century: A History of Athletic Shoes,” and the forthcoming “Pointe, Claw,” which is a novel that we talked about in this interview, all about claiming the territory of your body. She’s the co-author with Kiersi Burkhart of the middle grade series “Quartz Creek Ranch.” We talked about “Pointe, Claw,” but we spend most of the time talking about “The V-Word,” virginity, and first times. So here we go.
Welcome to the show, Amber. I am endlessly excited to have you here because I completely fell in love with your book, “The V-Word.” I’m really happy we’re going to have this conversation today.
Amber Keyser: Thank you so much for having me on. I’m excited to be here, too.
Dawn Serra: Interestingly, this month, January, the theme for listener confessions is first. It just seems like kismet. Yeah, that not only our listeners writing in with their own confessions of firsts, but that I was going to get a chance to talk to you, and dig into your book, “The V-Word.” So I would love it if you would just tell our listeners a little bit about the book, if they’re not familiar with it.
Amber Keyser: “The V-Word” is an anthology that I put together of personal essays by women about first time sexual experiences. There’s 17 essays. They’re quite explicit. They’re very, very personal. They describe a whole bunch of different kinds of firsts from many diverse perspectives. The book is directed for teen girls. But I certainly think young men should be reading it too, if they plan on having any sexy times with girls in their future. But the book also has a lot of resources for young people trying to figure out information about sexuality or gender identity or safer sex practices.
The other thing that’s in the book that I’m really proud of is a Q&A with a librarian, where we talk about depictions of teen sexual behavior in the media.
Dawn Serra: Which is so important, and something that so few of us talk about.
Amber Keyser: Well, the interesting thing for me is that the state of sex education in our country is pretty abysmal, especially given it varies state to state – some states worse than others. So one of the ways that teens are actually getting good and realistic information is from young adult novels, which is really interesting. Part of the reason we had that in there was to have a reading list, so that if a young woman is curious about female masturbation, she could just go to the library and say, “Hey! I want to pick up this novel,” and nobody would ever have any idea that the reason she wanted it is to learn about female masturbation. We had “Forever…” when I was a young person, but there’s a wealth of literature out there right now that teens can access to get good, realistic depictions of sexual stuff. Which I think is great. So that was part of the reason we wanted that in the book.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I know when I was a teen and even a tween, I was reading Sweet Valley High and Judy Blume. But then I very quickly graduated to my mom’s romance novels.
Amber Keyser: Yeah, yeah.
Dawn Serra: As a 14 year old, 13 year old, probably even younger than that, the point of reading the romance novel was to clearly get to the sex scene. You didn’t really care about the rest of it. You just wanted to read about the sex because it was an opportunity for me to sit in this super sexual explicit space, and no one really knew what I was doing. Of course, romance novels, especially from the 80s and 90s, offer a very different view of what sex looks like than we probably want our young people to be doing, like watching porn, which is a wonderful form of entertainment, but not necessarily the best form of education.
Amber Keyser: Let me give a little shout out for romance novels. It’s one of the few places where you see women enjoying sex, women wanting to have sex and getting to have sex and having fun having sex, and having it be good sex. I have to wonder if that’s part of the reason that the genre is so denigrated. Because we, as a culture, do not like to think about those things, especially not for young women.
Dawn Serra: I think that’s such an important point, especially not for young women. We have a tendency, I think, to vilify teen sexuality. We’re simultaneously terrified of it and upset about it, instead of just allowing it to be something that happens. So we either avoid it or we hyperfocus on it as a culture.
That was one of the things that I actually really, really loved about “The V-Word” was, for everybody listening, one of the themes of this show is inclusion, like radical inclusion. You included trans voices and queer voices and someone who is exploring their bisexuality, and different ways of being in your body, and different ways of having firsts. It felt like there was so much permission in the book because it was all of these different individuals choosing for themselves how to engage with their bodies and with others. That was one of the themes that really, really struck me about the book was whether the story was your classic wedding night first or it was a first around having certain types of feelings for somebody else or kissing somebody else. It was really about each of these individuals having the opportunity to choose for themselves. I think that’s a big piece of what’s missing when we talk to young people about sex is they get to choose instead of us dictating to them what they should do.
Amber Keyser: One of the things that was at the foremost of my mind when I was putting this collection together was that it was not going to be prescriptive. It was not going to tell young women what to do. So when you put together a book like this, of course, I did a ton of background reading. I had every book that I could put my hands on about teens and sexuality and books that were for parents helping their kids through these transitions for teens. I found one, it was like from a series called “Decision Points.” Then the title was “Everything You Need to Know to Choose Abstinence.”
Dawn Serra: Oh, wow.
Amber Keyser: But you’re right. I mean, there are lots and lots of people telling young women what to do. This book was designed to tell young women what sex can be like. It was envisioned as what if a bunch of smart older sisters or aunties sat down with you, and just told you their real stories? They told you what it was like. So you had a sense of what the possibilities were out there. Because certainly if you’re just looking at romcoms or if you’re just looking at pornography, you’re just reading romance novels, you’re getting a pretty small slice of the pie when it comes to what’s possible for sexual experiences.
Dawn Serra: And I’m curious, too. Because the very first story in the anthology is yours. It’s just so wonderfully sweet. But after each of the stories, you take a quick moment in the book to just offer some thoughts or some perspectives about the story and what’s coming next. It offers this really nice thread that pulls you through each of the stories. What I loved about what you wrote immediately following your story was that you had a little bit of conflict in deciding whether or not the first that you shared really counted as sex.
I would love to know, now that you’ve done all of this reading and this research, and you’ve created this beautiful book with all of these firsts that really have such a rich range, how do you now define sex?
Amber Keyser: Well, there’s a lot to unpack in there because part of what’s behind that question, I think, is a definition of virginity.
Dawn Serra: Yes.
Amber Keyser: Maybe we should talk about that first because the book really tries to unpack that and take the power away from that idea of virginity as a thing that you give away, that someone takes, that is lost, that doesn’t come back. Because that’s not very useful in terms of the decision-making we do around sex, and that idea leads to a lot of what I think is actually really negative and dangerous behavior around sex.
In my essay, what I talked about is this very intimate experience when I was 13 with another 13 year old boy. We were naked, and there was oral sex in both directions. We tried to have penetrative sex, but it really just didn’t work. I was pre-pubescent at the time, and the parts didn’t fit together. Then we got interrupted, and that was it. I did spend a lot of time wondering if that was really sex – “Am I a virgin? What happened there?”
Amber Keyser: So really, in exploring all the behaviors, all the first times in this book, I think I’ve broadened my definition a lot. One, I just want to get that idea of virginity thrown in the trash heap, and just think about that there are many first time experiences that we have. That they can take many different forms, and that that broadens this definition of sexual behavior in a way that I think is really useful. Now, if I’m thinking about sex, I am really not drawing any distinctions between oral sex and penetrative penis and vagina sex. To me, that’s all sex so.
When you look at some things like the cult of virginity in this country or the born again virgin movement or the promise, these movements where girls are promising their virginity to their dads and these parties that are really disturbing, a lot of those young women are using this very narrow definition of a virgin as not having had penis and vagina sex to go ahead and have anal sex and oral sex and all sorts of other kinds of sex, but still call themselves virgins.
Amber Keyser: To me, that disconnect between language and behavior causes a lot of cognitive dissonance that I don’t think is ultimately healthy for us when we’re trying to embrace what it means to be in our bodies, and how we experience our bodies sexually, and going back to that idea of choosing what it is we really want to do.
Actually, it’s interesting because one of the other essays in the book, one by Kate Gray, that’s a lesbian experience. There’s a line in that essay that says something like, “I didn’t realize I had lost my virginity for years.” Because she also, what grew up in this idea that a very narrow definition of what sex is and what being a virgin is. So it’s not very useful either if we’re talking about anything that’s not heteronormative.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, yeah. Something that came up for me, I thought this was just some wonderful– This book, “The V-Word” is for everyone. It’s intended for teens, but really, truly, I mean, I think it’s for every human being on the planet.
Amber Keyser: I agree. I think so, too.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. What struck me so much was… I mean, I’m a sex educator. I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve talked about sex for, I don’t know, over a decade at this point, and examined so many of my sexual experiences and sexual firsts even on this podcast. But what had never occurred to me, until I read your book, was that when people would ask me in the past about losing my virginity, I always told the story of the first time I had penis and vagina sex. I was 21 years old, and it was with a boy I’d met off the internet. That was the first time I had traditional intercourse. But when I was 14, 15, 16, I was having all kinds of other types of sex that just didn’t happen to involve a penis going inside my vagina. I mean, oral sex was happening and humping and fingering – all of these really delicious experiences. But it had never occurred to me that those counted as sex, despite the fact that I’ve had dozens of conversations even on this show, about how my lesbian and my trans sexual experiences count as sex.
There was just something really interesting to me about even my personal story and allowing myself to change that story after getting to sit with all of these other people’s stories. And that was such a powerful, wonderful exercise for me.
Amber Keyser: That makes me really happy.
Dawn Serra: Yay!
Amber Keyser: For many of us who wrote our stories for this essay or for this collection, writing the essays actually reclaimed our own narratives as well. For me – and I mentioned it in the book briefly – I really carried a ton of shame around about this experience. For most of my life, I didn’t talk about it. I didn’t tell people about it. We were really young. It seemed I just had a lot of shame around it.
One of the wonderful things about writing this essay for me and about working on this book is that it reclaimed that experience for me in a really positive way. I no longer look at that and think, “I was a bad girl. I shouldn’t have done that.” I look at it and I think, “Wow, that’s amazing that this boy and I shared this really beautiful special time. Nobody got hurt, and it felt good. And it was really pretty magical.” My husband and I like to joke that that boy, I hope that he grew up to make some people very happy because he had pretty mad skills as a 13 year old.
Dawn Serra: That’s delightful.
Amber Keyser: Really. I mean, I think he probably went on to great success in the bedroom.
Dawn Serra: How delicious is that that now you have the opportunity to actually embrace that experience and share that story and feel good about it?
Amber Keyser: Yeah, definitely. I mean, it used to be something that I worry, like, “What was I going to talk to my own kids about when we’re at that place?” Yeah, it’s totally changed the conversations that we have. I mean, my kids are teenagers now. They’ve had to live with this book for two years.Actually, that’s a side note. But one of the best things about writing this book was the conversations it created in my own family.
Dawn Serra: So what was their response to the stories? I mean, did it bring up lots of really good questions or did it simply create an atmosphere of, “We’re allowed to talk about these things,” or both?
Amber Keyser: Actually, they haven’t read the book. I don’t think– I mean, they know where the books are. Maybe they’ve read the book. I don’t really think so. My son was funny, actually. He’s like, “Maybe I won’t read that one. I’ll read your other books.” I’m like, “That’s cool, dude. But it’s also there free, if you want to read it. Just so you know, my essay’s the first one if you wanted to skip that one. I don’t care if you read it, but you might not want to.”
But in any case, we just had all of these conversations all of the time in the house because it was on my mind. We’d be at the dinner table and be like, “Oh, my gosh. I got this great revision on this essay. This is so amazing what this author did.” Or, I would find something in the news about consent or some issue that is really near and dear to my heart, and we would just have all of those conversations. So I think they feel totally comfortable coming to me with anything they want to talk about. It’s also something that they don’t hesitate to engage in conversation on, whether I bring it up or they bring it up.
Dawn Serra: I feel it’s really refreshing and wonderful. Something that I hope for all of us who have young people in our lives in any capacity is normalizing these conversations, so that there’s the opportunity to share mistakes and regrets or to ask questions before choices are made. And just to have the opportunity for this to not be a topic that feels ultra icky. Let’s just get this over with as quickly as possible and not share anything about it. What a beautiful thing to have cultivated in your own home.
Amber Keyser: It feels good. I mean, I definitely feel excited about that. One of the things I do a lot in the context of talking about “The V-Word” is meet with parent groups. Mostly, they just want encouragement for how to start having those conversations with their young people. I realize how there’s so much stigma around talking about sex, honestly, anyway. There’s just the discomfort that parents and young people are trying to get past as parents are starting to see their young people as more and more adult. The changing dynamics of those relationships make it really hard to have these conversations. The bottom line though, is the more you do it, the easier it gets more comfortable. It becomes more productive. One of the things I tell parents to try and encourage them is just the research is so, so clear that the more information you have, the better choices you make.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, yeah. Something that you said earlier about virginity was you used the phrase “this cult of virginity” that we have. I love that so much. I mean, listeners will know that this is one of my soapboxes – the social construct of virginity and how it isn’t the thing. It’s just used to control and patriarchy and “rah!” But I love this phrase “the cult of virginity.” Adults, I think, even have trouble unpacking what virginity really means, and what it means to let go of virginity as a concept. Especially as parents, to start having these conversations, I think some of the discomfort also comes in in, “How do I talk about these things if I don’t even really know the answers for myself?” And how do we, just as human beings on this planet, have conversations when we don’t know the answers. Like it’s OK to still talk about the thing, even if you don’t know all the answers. The important part is let’s just start the conversation and see where it goes.
Amber Keyser: I think, as parents, we do tend to think we need to have the answer or the explanation. So you’re right. I think that’s a hard thing when we’re having these conversations to say, “I don’t know. What about this?” Or, “What about that?” Or, “That’s a new concept for me.” Yeah, that’s hard.
Dawn Serra: It is. Yeah. Just letting that awkwardness be true. One of the things that I love the most is modeling for people that it’s OK to be awkward and vulnerable and still forge ahead anyway.
Amber Keyser: I love that.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I think that’s actually one of the things that “The V-Word” invites too is how can we look at all these different experiences, and then think about our own experiences, and then have these rich conversations where we don’t have to know the answer? We can just say look at all the possibilities.
One other thing I just want to circle back to, I know when people hear “The V-Word,” and especially a book about firsts, everybody’s thinking this is a book about losing your virginity. But what you talk about is that you think this is a book about something way more important than virginity. And that is voice – people finding their voice around these sexual experiences, and actually being able to share that. I’d love to know, have you always felt that way? Or, through the course of creating this book and reading all of these stories, is that where you ended up? What was your idea about virginity to begin with? Then how did you get to this place where this isn’t about virginity, this is about voice?
Amber Keyser: It’s interesting that you asked me that because when I started this book, I believed that I didn’t have an agenda. We talked about how I didn’t want to tell girls what to do. I didn’t want to tell them what to do. I believe in stories, and I believe in the power of sharing our stories. And that’s it. That’s what I’m going to do. I get that I was naive to think I didn’t have an agenda because I think we all do. What I realized through the course and working on the book in a very organic way was that my agenda was all about voice. That I felt really, really strongly that not only should we be sharing our stories, but we should be empowered to say, “I like that.” “I want that.” “I don’t want that.” “More of that please.” “Let’s not do that.” “No, thank you.”
So honestly, my sense was always there, but it took time for me to unpack that for myself. And it’s funny. I mean, because I’ve never liked to talk about sex or my own sexual experiences. My husband always teases me about it. He’s like, “You never told me anything about what your life was like before.” I’m like, “umm”, and he’s like, “You don’t want to know?” For me, “Yeah. No, I don’t really want to know.”
Amber Keyser: I don’t know why I was like that. I had hippie parents that were pretty open. I certainly was well-informed from a book learning perspective about sex. But, yeah. I didn’t want to have those conversations, really. I guess that’s what we do as writers. We go into places that are uncomfortable for us. And it was pretty cool to come out on the other side and recognize that I am totally down with having these conversations. I want to be having them all the time. Anybody who wants to talk to me about– So now nobody can shut me up about it.
Dawn Serra: I love that. Standing in the grocery store, “So have you heard about the cult of virginity?”
Amber Keyser: I know. Good idea. I’m going to do that.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. Actually, when you said “cult of virginity,” I put a little star in my notebook that said, “I need a T-shirt.”
Amber Keyser: Great idea.
Dawn Serra: Yes. OK, so…
Amber Keyser: A little bit of a side note, but I’m working on a book right now that is a feminist history of marriage. I have a whole section in there about this cult, this idea of a cult of virginity because certainly marriage, especially marriage historically, was all about protecting paternity. That’s why you had to be a virgin. That’s why you had to get married when you were 14 because that’s the only way that your way older, disgusting husband that you don’t even want to marry is going to ensure that these small humans that come out of your vagina are his.
Dawn Serra: Yup. I’m so glad you brought that up. I’d love to hear more about the book. I wrote something on Facebook the other day that was an idea that popped into my head, and I need to explore it more. And it feels like it relates to this exactly. But I was starting to unpack this cultural fantasy that we have around older men and very young women, and how we romanticize young women finding these much older men. We feel like it’s pretty normal for older men to be interested in very young women. For me, that’s so much about patriarchy, control, wanting to mold and influence someone, and also have someone who admires you and your power. Of course, comes with that also, the purity aspect that we see as coming automatically with being with a younger woman – “She’s less bitter. She’s more pure.” All that kind of crap.
But in this book that you’re writing about the feminist history of marriage, I love how this fantasy that we have now really relies on the way that we built our society hundreds of years ago, in needing to protect this paternal line, and needing to be guaranteed that this was your seed. I find that really fascinating.
Amber Keyser: There’s a long, long history behind the cultural expectations that we are still deeply invested in today, which is somewhat demoralizing at times. When one is hoping for a new way that we can interact with each other.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, yeah. Sometimes it feels really overwhelming, especially when you’re at that point when you’ve just started to really ask the questions, and you really start to unpack, “Why do we value virginity? What does this virgin horror myth mean?” These models of a younger woman and romanticizing the older man. It does feel a little like, “Oh crap! We haven’t changed at all in 600 years. We were just labeling it differently, and we have internet. But then books like yours exist, and shows like this exist. So at least, we’re shifting slightly in the right direction, I hope.
One of the other things that I read – I just want to pop onto this really quickly – is that you had a burlesque show at the book launch.
Amber Keyser: Yes, it was so great. It was the best thing.
Dawn Serra: Oh, my gosh. I want to hear all about it.
Amber Keyser: A dear member of my writing critique group is also a burlesque performer and producer. She helped me put this– She put the show together for me. What we did was alternate a reading from “The V-Word” with a burlesque performance. Nicole, the producer for this, did such an amazing job of pairing these acts. The burlesque acts, for the most part, were what is called Neo-burlesque. So the acts tell a story. There’s more of a theatrical plot piece to the act as well.
For example, one of the performers came out in this very classic Victorian gown with a bustle and everything. She starts pulling these scarves out of her cleavage, and they have words written on them, like bitch or smile or slut. Pulling out these words that are thrown at women in very barbed and charged ways. Then once she takes off the gown, the outer gown, you see that the bustle is made of barbed wire or something that looks like barbed wire. Then that comes off. Then, it turns, and then she finishes her burlesque performance. She has more empowering things written on her naked body.
Amber Keyser: It was so great. The whole show was so great. The performers were amazing. The readers were incredible. It was such a great night, I have to say.
Dawn Serra: That just sounds so fun. I mean, when I think about awesome things happening, burlesque, and people sharing these amazing, beautiful, vulnerable stories about first times is awesome. That sounds like a magic night.
Amber Keyser: We sold out the whole show. And people loved it. It brought together really different groups of people, like the people who might come to a book reading, and the people who like to go to burlesque shows. She’s done several more. We call them Booklover’s Burlesque. The last one, she had picked readings from a lot of different literature, I did a reading. I read the wedding night sex scene from Outlander, where Jamie and Claire have sex for the first time. The performance was a male-female duo. It was like a campy version of Outlander. It was hilarious. It was so funny and fun to read that scene and really camp it up, and then get this really super saucy performance afterwards. We were laughing really hard. It was great.
Dawn Serra: Burlesque is the best. And to pair it with books, that’s a dream come true.
Well, you’re talking about readings from the book. The last thing I want to do is ask you, “What’s your favorite story from the book?” Because I don’t think that… I mean, there’s a thousand reasons that you love all of them. But of the stories in the book, I would love to know, is there one story that really had an impact on you personally, that either gave you permission or helped you feel less ashamed of your own story or that just really hit you in a very personal way that you’d like to talk about?
Amber Keyser: This is very hard for you to ask me to pick my favorite. I can’t really. Actually, one of the things that is really gratifying to me when people read “The V-Word” is that everybody has a different favorite story. So that, I actually love about this collection.
Honestly, the piece that I think is the most revolutionary in this collection is the one that Alex Meeks wrote. She’s a trans woman. In her essay, she writes about having sex with a girl when she was still presenting as male, having sex with a boy when she was still presenting as male, and then finally, having what she considers her real first time, where she’s presenting as female and she has sex with a trans man.
Amber Keyser: That story, to me, captures some really, really important themes. It beautifully illustrates this idea that gender and sexuality are very fluid and exist on a spectrum, and that we should honor that and stop putting people in little boxes. Also, it is just… I mean, it brings me to tears every time I think about it because it was through this sexual act that she felt most truly herself. Really, I want our sexual experiences to be like, where we bring our full self into the experience, and feel heard and empowered and pleasured, and all of those things from that experience. That’s the essay that I come back to most frequently.
Dawn Serra: I think it’s also one of the– I’m going to sound just a little bit of an asshole, but my assumption when I picked your book – OK. It’s a story about firsts – was that I was going to get a book of a lot of heteronormative virginity, penis and vagina stories. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy those, but it’s just like, “Eh.” The deeper I got to your book–
I mean, first of all, the introduction to your book, I looked at my husband, and I was like, “This might be one of the most sex positive books I’ve ever read.” But then as I read all these stories and the diversity of the experiences, and the permission that you created by allowing these voices to be heard and amplifying them, and to have a book about firsts that includes the voice of a trans woman who gets to fully be seen by a partner and experience herself and her body in a way that feels totally aligned, that was just – I agree with you – one of the most profound parts of this book.
Dawn Serra: Because those stories from trans voices and queer voices and marginalized voices are absent from so many of the books and the materials and the stories that are available to young people. Even young adult books, I think, have come a long way over the last decade or so, because I love young adult books. But even in young adult books, we still don’t see trans voices being centered. So to have that story in your book stand beside so many other stories, I just thought was a really spectacular, beautiful thing. I hope that we see more books about sexuality and experiences and relationships for young people showing the spectrum instead of highlighting the binaries.
Amber Keyser: There’s really an amazing young adult literature coming out right now that I think will make you very happy. One title in particular you should read is called “Beast” by Brie Spangler. It is a spectacular book that centers a trans voice right up front.
But yeah, there’s some pretty exciting stuff being done in young adult literature, which makes me really pleased to be writing in that space. You know, I love teens. I love interacting with teens. I care really deeply about teens and wanting them to dive into “The V-Word” or dive into my other books and feel like their experience is worth sharing, is worth a story. Yeah. I mean, that’s a lot of the– That’s some of the themes around my next novel that comes out in April, where I was really trying to explore what it means to be in a girl’s body today, and what does it look like if you really claim that territory for yourself, instead of having other people tell you what you should do with it?
Dawn Serra: Tell me more about that. I am so excited. When I was reading all about you and I saw that you have this new novel coming out that explores themes around control and consent and physicality and being in a girl’s body at this particular point in history, I got so excited. I would love it if you could tell us a little bit more about that.
Amber Keyser: Yeah, it’s interesting because it really is a direct outgrowth of “The V-Word.” You’ll have to let me know after you read the novel if you see that. I don’t know that the novel would exist in the way it does if I hadn’t written “The V-Word.” Which is, again, one of the cool things about being a writer, the way your different experiences cross pollinate like that.
But the book is called “Pointe, Claw.” It alternates in the perspective of two girls. They’re both 17. Jessie is an elite ballet dancer. She is working really hard to be in perfect control of her body so that she can get a spot in the company where she is a pre-professional student. The other girl, Dawn, is suffering from a medical condition that nobody can really figure out. That lots of doctors are poo-pooing – “It’s in her head. It’s related to your period. Woman problems.” She’s dismissed a lot, but she’s losing time. She wakes up from blackouts, and she doesn’t know where she is. She doesn’t know how she got there. Her body’s bruised and battered.
Amber Keyser: There are these two characters who, one, is in perfect control of her body. The other is losing control of her body. They were childhood friends torn apart for reasons they didn’t really understand. They crash back into one another and are trying to figure out really how to claim the territory they want to occupy, when there are so many ways that adults are trying to push them into particular little boxes.
Dawn Serra: Yes.
Amber Keyser: It really explores deep female friendships, especially the kinds of friendships that I had as a young girl that I think many women had that involved sexual play that we don’t ever talk about because shame.
Dawn Serra: Yes.
Amber Keyser: They certainly had that kind of a friendship when they were young. When they come back together, they are definitely exploring very fluid sexualities. Dawn is pretty solidly a lesbian, but definitely Jessie has much more fluidity in who she’s attracted to. There’s also this sexual connection between them that I think also many women have experienced, but maybe don’t talk about. Especially women who are playing the straight label, where you can be really, really, really close to another woman and as friends, and then discover that there is a sexual undertone to that. That’s part of the book.
I think another important part of the book is really how their mothers are trapped in a much more traditional view of what it means to be a woman. You see these girls in contrast to their mothers. As well as this landscape of male figures who are very busy trying to smash them into little boxes.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. OK. There’s a thousand things I want to say. I love this exploration of girls and the fluidity that some experience around their sexuality. I remember when I must have been around 18. My best friend at the time got some ecstasy, and so we decided to try it. We took the ecstasy, and we were doing what you do on ecstasy, which is just float around.
But I remember it was a super sensual experience for me. We were touching street lamps and trees and bushes and just marveling in the sensation. In that moment, I had this deep urge to feel her naked body against mine. I expressed it to her in a jokey way just to see how it would land. And she was pretty horrified by it. I remember feeling in that moment, “But I like boys. Everybody always called me boy crazy. I had done all these things with boys. This couldn’t possibly be true. It must just be the drugs.”
Dawn Serra: Then three years later, I have a girlfriend and I had discovered drag kings, and how much I love that gender bending thing. But in that moment, nobody had ever given me that permission. I didn’t know that it was possible to like boys, and also have these sensual feelings for this girlfriend of mine that I was really close with. Being able to blame the drugs was convenient because then I was able to tuck it away. But years later, to look back and realize, “Maybe that was just removing this barrier and allowed me to finally experience something that I just thought I wasn’t allowed to.” I love that that’s a theme in the book.
Something else that I love too is, I think that regardless of your gender, both your family and your society put such strict rules around what it means to have this certain set of genitals. Boys are expected to take without asking and wait for the no, and to be strong and not feel their feelings. Girls are expected to conform and to wait to be asked. I think we see some of that changing, but not fast enough for my liking. So I love that you’re using the mothers’ experiences to help contrast the way that these teen girls are experiencing their bodies and their girlhood, to show how even as adults, we can get so trapped in what it means to be a woman and what it means to be in a certain kind of body, a certain gender, a certain sexuality. It can feel like a trap.
Amber Keyser: Yeah. I have a lot of empathy for the moms in this book, actually. They’re doing their very best, but really without understanding these constrictions that are placed upon them. I do have so much optimism about millennials and about teens today. I really have a lot of faith that they are having a broader and more nuanced perspective of a lot of these things than even my generation had.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, yeah. I’m teaching sex ed to some med students right now. I have a group of about five. I think they’re 22 to 24 is the range. They’re all first year, second year med students. I remember, before I met them, my assumption was I’m going to have to spend so much of my time unpacking all of this sex negativity. I’m going to have to talk to them about gender issues and trans issues and all this kind of stuff. What’s been so wonderful is all of the students that I have in my group, they may not feel comfortable with the nuance of talking to a trans person about their sexual experience, but they’re endlessly curious about, “Tell me more about kink. Tell me more about non-binary genders. Tell me more about orgasms.” They just have this beautiful curiosity and openness, even when it’s really clear that what we’re talking about–
On our last call, we were talking about non-monogamy and polyamory as a choice that some other patients might engage in. So how can you use language that’s inclusive of monogamous and non-monogamous folks? One of them made it really clear that she is super against anything other than monogamy for herself. But she still has this really beautiful openness and how can I make it safe for my patients who come to me? That feels hopeful to me. That there’s this group of young people who are just entering the medical field who have all of this curiosity and this burning desire to create safe spaces for spectrums, instead of filling out sheets that force people into boxes.
Dawn Serra: I think you’re right. There are some wonderful things that are brewing. I hope it doesn’t get squashed in the current climate. But I hope that that continues to be nurtured.
Amber Keyser: Yeah. I hope so, too. I mean, I think it’s one of the wonderful things about some of the storytelling that’s happening in movies and in books and on TV. I remember when the Supreme Court ruled on marriage equality, my daughter, I don’t know, she was maybe 10 or so at the time, she said, “Mitch and Cameron are going to be so happy,” from Modern Family.
Dawn Serra: Yes.
Amber Keyser: They’re not even real. But yes, they can get married now. It’s awesome.
Dawn Serra: Oh, that’s so sweet.
Amber Keyser: I think, just in terms of the range of experiences that young people are exposed to – through media, through books, “The V-Word” or through some of the best fiction that’s out there – I think they know that there’s a little bit more to the landscape than people did in previous generations.
Dawn Serra: Yeah.
Amber Keyser: Knowledge is power.
Dawn Serra: I agree. Knowledge is power. Not just this prescriptivist knowledge of lecturing at young people about what they should or shouldn’t be doing. But instead, this knowledge of investigating other people’s experiences so that you have an opportunity to decide what yours might look like.
Amber Keyser: Yeah. Because wouldn’t it be nice if we all moved into our earliest sexual experiences with intention? Instead of, “Oh. This is something that happened to me. Wow, I don’t know what happened.” You know it’s like, “Oh. Well, that’s interesting. It could be like this or it could be like this.” I could make choices that would cultivate a certain kind of experience for myself.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. Or. instead of feeling like you lost something or that someone took something that you can’t ever get back. Instead, being able to look at it as a first among many firsts. I think that’s something else that’s missing from our conversation is, I think so often, we think of firsts as being something that’s unique to youth. But we can have firsts our entire life. And hopefully we do. We can have firsts with each partner we have, and firsts with our bodies as they change. I think that’s something else that I really hope all of us include in the dialogue that we have with young people is the firsts never stop, so how can we invite that in?
Amber Keyser: I absolutely agree with you.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. Well, I would love to end by putting you on the spot a little bit. Feel free to say, “I am so not ready for this.” But since the theme this month is first, I know you shared a little bit about the story that you included in the book, but I was wondering, is there any other first that you might want to share with us that you’ve either been thinking about since she wrote the book or that just amuses you a little bit that you might share?
Amber Keyser: My first thought is there’s so many different things to choose from, because you’re right, that we have many first time experiences. But I think the first that’s been on my mind a lot, especially because of writing “Pointe Claw” was really the first intimate experience I had with a woman. I’d always had girl crushes and stuff, and that was cool. But mostly I had had male partners.
But there was this little window of time where I had this very, very intense friendship that developed over email when I was living abroad, with a woman. It was most definitely an experience where this really deep intimate friendship led to an inevitability of an intimate physical relationship when we were back in the same country at the same time again.
Amber Keyser: That incredible synthesis between when you really feel like you know someone’s heart and mind and soul in that really profound way, and then it leads to a physicality is what I had really hoped to capture in a really critical part of “Pointe Claw.” Even though the circumstances are very different. It is that idea that when we come together sexually, we can be saying, “I see you and you really see me.” And that is incredibly profound.
Dawn Serra: That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Now, I’m so excited for “Pointe Claw” to come out. Amber, I will love it if you could share with everybody who’s listening how they can stay in touch with you, find you online, and just generally see all of the amazing books that you’ve put out because you have a wide variety of books you’ve put out over the years.
Amber Keyser: Sure. I’m online pretty frequently. I’m really active on Twitter, @amberjkeyser, and my last name is KEYSER. My website is amberjkeyser.com. It’s pretty easy to find me. I hope you’ll connect and reach out. That would be great.
Dawn Serra: Yes. Well, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show and digging into these really wonderful topics with me. I hope everyone who’s listening will check out “The V-Word,” either for yourself or to share with someone in your life, a young person. It’s a beautiful book. Of course, if you have any comments or questions you’d like to share with me or if you have your own first that you’d like featured on the show, please go to dawnserra.com for this episode. You can find all of Amber’s links to the book. Of course, an opportunity to communicate with me. Until next week. This is Dawn Serra. I will talk to you soon.