When I went to grad school to get my Masters in Counseling, the very first class I was required to take was a week-long intensive called “Sexuality and Sex Therapy”. (The first class! What a way to begin getting to know my classmates!)

Before the class started, I assumed I had a pretty healthy view of sex. But my inner discomfort with sex and sexuality was exposed very quickly. The professor, Sharon Hersh, was not crass or obscene; she was honoring, vibrant, and tactful in her use of the full vocabulary of sexuality and sexual brokenness. She talked freely and beautifully about orgasm, genital sex, oral sex, and arousal, not to mention impotence, inorgasmia, sexual pain, and other forms of sexual dysfunction.

As she did so, I could feel myself involuntarily smiling like a teenager in a sex ed class. (I was twenty-six.) I tried to suppress my smile, because I knew it reflected something unhealthy in me. I didn’t want my classmates to see my immaturity. But even if nobody else saw it, I was exposed to myself.
Thankfully, Sharon was a gracious and wise teacher. She named the beautiful truth that sexuality is about our longing to be seen and known, as well as our fear of it. In other words, she said, it is about our sensitivity to encounters with otherness. Arousal—of both the body and the soul—requires sensitivity. Becoming aware of our sexuality includes an invitation to become aware of and curious about the particularities of our sensitivity.

As for me, my smile didn’t just reveal my immaturity; it also revealed my sensitivity! And the goal of maturity isn’t to become “desensitized,” as if I should be able to sit in a room and hear explicit descriptions of sexual behavior like it’s no different than the morning weather report. In fact, it is desensitization that kills the ability to be aroused—to orgasm or to any other form of delight, awe, or gratitude. Desensitization strips sex of all ceremony and lowers it to something commonplace.
So, on that day in Sharon’s class, I was both exposed and blessed by Sharon. I was exposed by the way she unashamedly named glorious and mysterious realities about sex, arousing in me an undifferentiated mass of feelings that I had not yet explored—resulting in my uncomfortable smile. And I was blessed by the way she normalized my arousal: I was meant to be sensitive to reality. More specifically, just as the whole body is sensitive to being touched but the genitals are particularly and uniquely sensitive to touch, I am meant to be particularly and uniquely sensitive to truth about sexuality.

Sharon’s blessing to me came in the form of these words: “If you’re uncomfortable, be curious about your discomfort. What does it tell you about yourself? If you’re not uncomfortable, be curious about that, too. What does that say about you? About what you believe about sex?”