EPISODE 67: SEX: NAVIGATING AWKWARD CONVERSATIONS

Sep 24

Takeaways

Today, we’re talking about a topic 10-year-old me is cringing at: S-E-X. Namely, catching your parents in the act, yet having them shame the sh*t out of you when it’s time for you to grow up and own your own sense of bodily awareness and pleasure.

If you grew up in a household like mine, raised by traditional parents, there’s a good chance you never talked about sex. In fact, I never saw them sign anything so fast as the sex education waiver school sent home, just so they wouldn’t have to address it with me.

That meant there was a whole area of sensuality and personal exploration I felt I couldn’t talk to them about because it was unmanageably uncomfortable. While it seemed like the easy solution at the time, it left me struggling to find the words to communicate with future partners. And worse, I felt a lot of shame, guilt, and embarrassment when it came to self-exploration and pleasure.

Can you relate?

Listen to the podcast to find out how I experienced shame around pleasure at a very young age, and how to reframe your own experience around sexuality, sensuality, and pleasure.

We also explore:

Transcript:

Judy Tsuei 00:06

Welcome to the f*ck saving face podcast. I'm your host, Judy Tsuei. And together we'll explore mental and emotional health for Asian Americans and beyond all by breaking through taboo topics, like may not always be pretty, but it is indeed beautiful. Let's make your story beautiful today. So for this week, and for the next two weeks following this, we will be talking about S E x. Now, if you grew up in a household like mine, where you were raised by two very, very traditional Asian parents who had a lot of Tiger parenting, then you never ever, ever talked about sex.

Judy Tsuei 00:46

And my parents could not sign the waiver fast enough for me to have sex education at school, so they'd never have to address it with me, which was always fun. Because it meant that there's this whole area of sensuality and personal exploration, and even when I got my period that I couldn't talk to them about because it was so unmanageably uncomfortable. And you know, I didn't have the words to be able to communicate with them anything. So if you're thinking that your kids are not going to be having sex, and if you can be stern and strict, and that's how it's going to happen, then no, I mean, how many of your friends Do you know who had very strict parents and by the time they went off to college, they totally went balls out, you know, partied so hardcore, dated, all the people just explored and all the ways that they weren't allowed to explore.

Judy Tsuei 01:32

And for me, as a writer, as a storyteller, I'm always endeavoring to give people the words that they need to express the things that they're feeling, but didn't have the vocabulary to express in the ways that are most meaningful to them. And that's what I'm hoping to do with the next three weeks of episodes, that today, you'll hear a bit of sharing from my own manuscript. So this is part of the book proposal. As I've mentioned, if you're following me in season two, my book, The Little Book of Tibetan rites with Simon and Schuster, with Ulysses press is coming out in early 2022.

Judy Tsuei 02:05

So that's the first foray. And then the next thing that I'm doing is I spent the last six months developing a book proposal for a memoir. And that's what I'm shopping around to agents right now. So in the book proposal, you have to have a sample chapter or two. And I spent a lot of time working on this one specific sample chapter that I'll read a snippet of for you here. So you can get a sneak preview. For everyone that I know who's gone and written a book, it turns out to be very different. In the end, you know, your final product versus the draft that you send out.

Judy Tsuei 02:36

So I'm curious as to see what all is going to happen in this journey of me really working through different elements. Because if it's a memoir, then it's me sharing my personal stories. And I realized as of late, that I like being able to shine the light on other people. I like attention enough shone on me just to have, you know, respect and honor and encouragement. But when it is fully me in the spotlight, I'm not fully sure how I feel about it. So I think that that's played in energetically to how big my platform has grown. One of the pieces of feedback is if you are going to pitch memoir, you have to have a pretty big platform, you have to be you know, a huge influencer notable figure, you must have done something that's gained some notoriety.

Judy Tsuei 03:23

So these are all things that I'm working through. And as I mentioned to you, at the start of season two, I'm going to be sharing with you parts of this journey. So if there is an endeavor that you're looking to pursue, whether that's you're also writing a book, or you know, you have another personal passion dream that you want to go after, then I hope that you know that you're not alone, that it can be very vulnerable. It can require so much tenacity and resilience and bravery and courage to just even show up for yourself much less to show up for the world with your purpose to serve.

Judy Tsuei 03:56

If one person or 1 million people, however many people who are meant to become connected to your purpose in your light. I always encourage everybody to shine because the brighter that you shine, the more you illuminate the path for others, the more that you give other people the permission to do the same. And what would it feel like if we all gave ourselves permission to shine in the ways that really resonate with our hearts, or that make us come most alive? That shed whatever expectations were placed on us that we didn't necessarily sign up for or don't agree with aren't aligned with what would that feel like? And I highly encourage you to stay tuned for next week

Judy Tsuei 04:33

when I feature an interview with Francis Tang, the founder of awkward essentials, I highly encourage you to go to their website right now and watch the Twinkie video Francis's humor. She really use that to come through in all of the branding and marketing, which is phenomenal. And she's in this niche called crotch care, which you'll learn more about next week. And then after that, we'll do a mindfulness practice because for me, I'm raising a young girl And in this chapter that I'm going to be reading to you, you'll see how I experienced shame from a very early age.

Judy Tsuei 05:07

And if you listen back in season one two Rahi Chen's interview about sexual somatic work, he really takes you through your journey into adulthood about all the trauma that you may have experienced all the messaging that you may have received to inwardly integrate that shame and how to extrapolate it, how to heal that for yourself. So, as I'm raising a young girl, there's an amazing Instagram account called Sex positive families.

Judy Tsuei 05:34

They're based in Austin, Texas, which also has a space near and dear to my heart. Because we live there, you'll be able to see these conscious ways in which you can have the languaging and have the guidance to teach your own children or you know, anybody who you have influence and who you might be a mentor to, to reframe this experience about sexuality, sensuality, pleasure, I think that that's so important as a person that pleasure is a natural state.

Judy Tsuei 06:05

And if we could start to learn to honor that for ourselves, what would that look like? And how would that feel? So I hope that I'm encouraging my young daughter to have a healthy relationship that these awkward conversations that we may have in the future, perhaps won't be so awkward if we can start having them now. And so I named her body parts exactly what they are a vulva, vagina, anus, all of these things, which were so weird to come out of my mouth in the very beginning when I first became a mother, because those were not words that I was taught or normal.

Judy Tsuei 06:41

I mean, how many times have you heard the joke around your anus or anything like that, it's still a little bit weird to me. But I'm hoping that in being able to name and identify different body parts that you can then own that. And that, you know, there doesn't need to be shame around pleasure. And that if you're leading, forward thinking, confident, human being an individual, that you can do it in a way that respects your body that respects relationships that respects physical intimacy. And I'm just curious as to how that will all unfold, because it will be very different than the experience that I had growing up.

Judy Tsuei 07:19

So as I mentioned, this is a section of the sample chapter that I submitted, and it's not going to be the whole thing, but you will get a glimpse into what my experience was around sex or pleasure and why we can all start having more honest conversations with one another, the reason that I love the women who are my friends, now, all of us moms, surfers, you know, entrepreneurs, whatever it is that we, we always drop in immediately into the real conversations and it's so refreshing and so wonderful to be so connected and to not feel that those tender areas or the things that we may feel embarrassed by they're all just part of the human condition and we all share them and man Oh, man, do we laugh a lot.

Judy Tsuei 08:06

So it's one of the things I'm so grateful for for my life here now in San Diego. So without further add, here is the chapter he takes was a ma my mother demands. I'm rubbing my pelvis against the purple carpet of the big room in our house, which also happens to be my parents bedroom. The quote unquote big room is the largest room in our West Los Angeles home, complete with trend new wooden beams on the ceiling that we later discover were all sorts of wrong when it came to Fung Shui.

Judy Tsuei 08:37

Things always go sideways in the big room. He said to us a ma my mother yells at me. What are you doing? I stopped moving my body. What was I doing? I hold my breath. Need side so a summer. What are you doing? I don't know. I'm lying on my belly, rubbing my pelvis forward and backward in front of the TV. I like the way it feels. It feels really really good. She mad that I'm watching TV. We aren't supposed to be watching TV on the weekdays but our Mexican housekeeper Tanya is there so I thought I could sneak in a little TV since it wasn't really me who was watching?

Judy Tsuei 09:11

I wait for instructions. censured I stand up. I quickly pushed myself up. Tanya, the wife of one of my father's undocumented immigrant construction company employees lives with us Monday through Friday, and goes back to her husband and children on Sundays. She has high arch bangs held in place by Aqua net and darkly penciled eyebrows. She keeps her eyes focused on the soap opera playing on the television screen before us. It's an equation sounds How could you think to do this the machine? Disgusting. I keep my eyes down.

Judy Tsuei 09:44

When my parents yell at me, I'm not allowed to look them in the eyes because if I do they think that I'm challenging them. Unless of course they tell me to look at them. In which case if I don't I get an even more trouble. My mother has never seen me do this thing before. But based on her reaction, whatever I'm doing is Bad. Tanya hadn't said anything before, even though I'd done this once or twice around her. Why haven't you told me that this was something I wasn't supposed to do? I didn't hear my mother come home.

Judy Tsuei 10:10

I usually keep my ears on alert because we're not allowed to close the doors in our house. So if I do anything that's a little questionable. I make sure to know how to run and hide. Tanya can't speak Mandarin. Even though she's picked up a few words from my grandmother. They laugh together when she tries to pronounce NY for milk to feed my youngest brother. This time though she seems to know exactly what my mother is saying because she starts gathering up the clothes she was folding very quickly. I tried to look at Tonya Well, my mother is yelling at me but Tanya won't turn her body towards me.

Judy Tsuei 10:39

She puts the last few items of laundry into the plastic hamper. I want Tanya to put me in the basket and carry me away with her the way she sometimes puts my youngest brother in it and whisks him up and around but I know that silly I keep my eyes looking down and catch the sight of Tanya's ankles shuffling quickly out of the room. Her blue jeans cuff tight. I imagine her walking as far away as she can to the other side of the house straight into her own room. I bet she closes the door. She leaves me to my mother, normal, ushering my mother repeats shaking her head. I won't ever learn the Mandarin word for masturbate.

Judy Tsuei 11:18

I don't know why I gave birth to you. She doesn't say this to my younger sister who is just like her. She doesn't say this to my younger brother, the first son of the family. And she definitely won't say this to the baby nine years my junior with his adorable dimpled cheeks and good nature, who I like everyone else loves so much. She only says this to me. When she busted me for rubbing myself against the carpet. My mother made me feel like feeling good in my own body was inherently wrong to just as much as my simply being in the world.

Judy Tsuei 14:23

When I catch my parents having sex, I see that pleasure isn't part of her vocabulary. She knows what obligation is. That's clear to me even in fourth grade, just as much as it's obvious how opposite we are. Maybe her version of staying safe of teaching me as a mother, especially in the company of men is to remind me that life is hard and don't expect to feel good about it. That night. I wonder if she realizes that closing doors is just as much about keeping out what you don't want as keeping in what you do. So that's that. That's a portion of the sample chapter there so much more.

Judy Tsuei 15:01

If this was interesting to you. And if you've been following me, you know that I tend to be very authentic and transparent. But even this was a big deal for me to share. And the reason that I'm sharing it is because I know that I'm not alone in remarkable or ridiculous or trying circumstances, and that there are opportunities to change it around to shift it around, that when I mentioned, you know, that I wanted to write a book. And this was years and years ago before I moved to Hawaii, where I met my eventual husband, now ex husband and had my daughter, that I said that, you know, I will be talking about things about our family.

Judy Tsuei 15:38

And I was actually mentioning this to my mother, and she said, If it helps even one person, you should do it. I don't know if she had any idea of how in depth I would get and how much I would share. So I hope to goodness gracious that she doesn't regret saying that to me. And that, you know, we still subscribe to this understanding that all of us have powerful stories, all of us have shame and guilt that we have healed through or need to heal through. And that we can come through the other side better, wiser, healthier, stronger.

Judy Tsuei 16:14

If this story resonated with you, I'd love for you to join our community on Facebook, there's a private Facebook group called F*ck saving face. And I would be honored to hear your sharing and how this story, this experience of mine potentially, you know, illuminated something for you. And as a means of support. If you enjoy this episode or learn something new, please screenshot it and share it on Instagram Stories tag me, tag F*ck saving face that's fuck without you.

Judy Tsuei 16:44

And it helps us me and my team, my incredible growing team of writers know that you like our content. I look forward to connecting with you next week when we speak with Francis Tang, who incidentally, based on the research that they've done might be the only solo founder who has been backed by a VC who is Asian American, especially in the industry that she's in. So I encourage you to tune in and I will see you next week. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode.

Judy Tsuei 17:19

You can follow me on Instagram at F*ck saving face or have an honest conversation with me in my private Facebook group f*ck saving face. That's without the if you enjoy this work, please help support into seen it. The best ways to do that are to share it with your friends and networks. Subscribe rate and review on your listening platforms and of course through your thoughtful financial donations. You can buy me a coffee or treatment or lunch or share even bigger lab at Fox saving face.com Again, that's back without the you.