Amber Madison

I guess I'd call my parents responsible hippies. They don't do drugs, and they both pay taxes--but on the other hand, my mom puts a stuffed goddess at the top of our "winter solstice" tree. My parents never believed in censorship, or acting any differently around children. There was one of me and two of them, which meant that their way of life won. I was at dance parties by the time I could walk, watching Dallas when I was four, and I knew about sex before I even thought to ask. I would have thought that my parents were eccentric, but the other adults on my road had the same mentality. I grew up in a “community.” Twenty families, twelve meetings a year, multiple bonfires, and one jointly owned tractor. There are artists, doctors, carpenters, computer geeks, and even a squatter. The common thread: die hard liberalism, a love of potlucks, and denial that the 60’s have ended.

I attended Orange High, an overcrowded, rural high school that could barely afford to buy textbooks. Many of my classmates lived on farms, drove cars more expensive than the trailers they lived in, and a good number didn’t graduate…or if they did, they didn’t go to college. Going from that environment to a private university was quite a culture shock.

It only took me one semester at Tufts to figure out that I wanted to study sex—and I did, through a double major in American Studies and Community Health. They say that your professional pursuits are really an attempt to resolve your own internal conflicts, and that’s what attracted me to studying sexuality. I started writing a sex column because I wanted to fix things for other girls that I knew needed to be fixed for myself. I developed early, looked old for my age, and before I had even thought about having sex, everything I did was sexualized. I needed to understand how I wanted sex to fit into my life, and I needed reassurance that it was under my control.

My column tackled many issues: female sexuality, relationships, and of course STDs and contraception (since I’m a total hypochondriac).The more columns I wrote, the more questions I got. And the more questions I got, the more I understood how desperate girls are for explanations about their bodies, information about sex, and reassurance that their experiences are normal. Even in college, many sexually active girls don’t have a good grasp on how to protect their reproductive health, or have enough confidence to negotiate sexual relationships on their own terms. And I didn’t have to extrapolate what it was like for girls in high school; I remember. Girls grow up bombarded with images of sexuality, but at the same time, few are willing to actually talk with them about sex. I believe that sex can be a normal and healthy part of a young woman’s development. But at the same time, sex is full of complex issues, and without an open discussion, girls end up confused.

The summer after my junior year, I backed out of an internship in LA to stay in Boston and start a book. I wanted to write something that would answer all of girls’ sexual questions, help them feel more confident, and let them know that they’re not alone. Beginning when I was twenty, I wrote HOOKING UP in short bursts over the next year and a half. I wrote it hoping to help other girls, and thinking that maybe, after struggling over 200 and some pages, I would finally come to terms with sexuality for myself.