I would not call it unusual for a girl to grow up today harboring confusion on the morality or acceptance of female sexuality.

It is a complex problem that has developed and perpetuated for centuries and still creates an unsure sexual-social climate for men and women alike.

When I was a child, my parents did their best to shelter me from popular culture and the media, as well as the reality of sexuality.

When I first heard about pornography at the lunch table in middle school, I went home and asked my mom what it was.

She explained that porn was something men watched to become aroused.

Women did not become aroused visually, and pornography was dirty and shameful. In this, she firmly established that it was something I would never want to see.

This was one of many examples my mother gave that highlighted the archaic attitudes surrounding female sexuality.

At the time of my questioning, I took her word as the truth and adopted her ideas.

A proponent of the lock-and-key theory, I was taught my virginity was a special gift I would save for a special man, and even then, I wouldnt necessarily enjoy giving it up.

Since then, I have met a great number of sexual libertines.

I have read Chaucers The Wife of Bath, discovered MTV and YouTube, read Cosmopolitan and Jezebel.

I have met women who like sex. Ive met women who will admit to watching porn.

Yet Ive also had an overwhelmingly high number of close female friends who, for a time, adamantly deny things that seem to be safe conversation topics for many of the men I know things such as porn, masturbation and sex.

Its assumed that boys will be boys and that sexuality comes naturally to them.

It is encouraged as a part of male identity, while it is stigmatized in women as nonexistent or even abnormal.

I never understood the notion of scoring, as if convincing a woman to sleep with you is a great feat.

The term easy used to describe women who are willing to engage themselves is frustrating and perpetuates the negative female sexual stereotype.

There are plenty of women who love sex, plenty of men who are indifferent, and plenty of people who feel a whole variety of ways about the subject.

I dont believe it can be so narrowly defined as a simple distinction of gender or sex defining sexuality.

It is safe to say that nearly every topic of sexuality is far more complex than we as a society determine it to be.

It is simply the acknowledgement of a lack of comfort, a lack of dialogue, a lack of understanding, of sexuality among the masses from the perspective of a woman.

With that said, have as much or as little sex as your heart desires. Happy Valentines Day.