As I’d fallen into more frequent smoking schedules, I noticed how male friends would comment on my habits. Sometimes more derogatorily, others in sheer awe–they seemed to find it odd, even unnatural, that I enjoyed smoking as much as I did. I observed men who smoked regularly seek out women who didn’t when it came to girlfriends. Family members inquired if I was “over weed” yet. As stoned selfies hit my Facebook feed, some childhood friends fell out of touch. While there was an entire canon of stoner films starring male leads for college viewers, female enthusiasts were merely comic relief with a couple of lines. As a daily cannabis user, my grades were great. I had a job on campus. I was the healthiest and happiest I’d felt in my entire life. It redirected my frantic, perfectionist, people-pleasing energy towards what genuinely interested and inspired me, guiding me towards what I truly cared about—not what I thought I should. But the cannabis element somehow negated or overshadowed that, making me a pothead above all. That judgment made me feel less-than, not good enough, or just bad. That judgment also felt familiar.

Just like smoking cannabis, everyone has sex. But women have traditionally had to walk a narrower tightrope of respectability. We ought to enjoy sex—but not too much. There is a societal threshold of sexual pleasure for women, and once someone perceives that you’ve passed it, that red A, that label of “slut” can overshadow the more fundamental parts of your identity. That kind of environment extinguishes any sense of it being ok for women to talk about sexual pleasure, and it’s those kinds of effects that keep so many women from experiencing real pleasure. Because I was self-conscious of my own sexual curiosity (and ignorance), I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t seek advice. And I didn’t experience satisfying pleasure for the first few years of sexual awareness. I was too busy feeling guilty about perceived impurity and the concept of virginity lost to worry about whether I’d experienced a real orgasm.

The lack of adequate, accessible sex education that doesn’t make one feel guilty or ashamed puts many of us in the dark. It took many cringe-worthy Wikipedia spirals, candid conversations with gynecologists, and frank heart-to-hearts with women I trusted for me to realize I had been experiencing the bare minimum of pleasure.