I took the easy way out for the final project, hastily making a board game tangentially related to sex. Another woman — who’d recently given birth but didn’t look like it because she practiced capoeira and was very strong and lithe — did a striptease in the classroom, which was incredibly brave. (She wore a short, silky kimono and did not bring her baby to class that day like she usually did.)

At the end of the semester, all the female-sexuality classes came together for a talent show, which I attended for extra credit. The university mandated that a professor oversee the student instructors, and she sat in the first row while a “boy band” made up of ladies wearing dildos sticking out of their skirts lip-synched and someone else did very acrobatic yoga, holding each pose until we clapped.

Now, 14 years later, I realize that maybe the class wasn’t supposed to make me more informed or better at sex. After all, I could Google “can erect penises break?” all by myself. I think, rather, the class was supposed to make me feel safe enough to discuss my hang-ups — and by exposing them, sap them of their power and get that much closer to sexual liberation.

It was Berkeley, after all. The Bay Area can often seem like a Gomorrah where the fire just makes everyone sexy-sweaty instead of charring them. Once I pulled off the freeway and saw a man walking another man on a leash in broad daylight. And a few months ago I went to a bachelorette party in San Francisco where the other attendees did not a) seem fazed by male strippers’ penises inches from their face, or b) think anything of asking whether we watch our own porn. (Which presupposed that we make our own porn, which was giving me entirely too much credit).

My roommate took the class, too, and her final project was to puff-paint her original poetry onto a T-shirt that she hung from the fluorescent light in the middle of our room to air-dry. One of the lines was, “hazy, hazy, it’s so crazy,” except she couldn’t spell, so it said “hazzy.” I zeroed in on that, “hazzy.” She felt free enough not only to write poetry, but to spell it wrong and wear it around — and also to casually turn off the lights with some guy in her bed and me in my own.

In that class, I didn’t learn how to "lick it like a lollipop" or use the "rhythm method." But, in retrospect, I think the class tried to teach us the right things. I just wasn’t mature enough to appreciate the lessons that seem so clear now: that women’s sexuality exists separate from men and from other women. That it’s hard to feel sexual when you’re consumed by the size of your body and how much you put into it. That when you free your mind, the classroom can become a strip club, the lecture hall a stage for gender-bending performance, and the world your scat-fetish oyster. I'm still pretty prude, but the difference now is that I try not to judge myself for my inhibitions — or other women for their lack of them. I think we can all raise a cup (poop-filled or not) to that.