The gap in what women were taught isn’t an accident. It’s a pattern — and it has a measurable cost

Think about what you were taught about your body growing up. Not the clinical diagrams — the actual useful information. How arousal works. What a healthy cycle looks like. What pleasure is, and that you’re allowed to want it. The names for all the parts of your anatomy, not just the ones involved in reproduction.

For most women, that list is short. For many, it’s empty.

That’s not a personal failure. It’s a systemic one — and research has been documenting its consequences for decades. The gap between what women were taught about their bodies and what they needed to know doesn’t stay in the classroom. It follows them into their relationships, their healthcare decisions, their self-image, and their sense of what they’re allowed to want.

This post is about that gap: where it comes from, what it actually costs, and what it looks like when women start filling it in on their own terms.

The Education Women Actually Received

Most formal sex education in the United States has been built around a narrow framework: reproduction, disease prevention, and risk avoidance. Not pleasure. Not anatomy beyond the basics. Not the psychological dimensions of a woman’s relationship with her own body.

A 2023 study published in the Georgia Journal of Science examined the relationship between sex education, body image, and sexual identity in women. Its finding was direct: women’s experiences have long been neglected in conversations about sexual identity. The study found that both formal and informal sex education shape how women see their bodies, their sexuality, and their relationships — and that education received earlier in life, if broadened to include consent, communication, and body positivity, could meaningfully change those outcomes.

Source: “Sex Education and Influence on Body Image and Identity.” Georgia Journal of Science, Georgia Academy of Sciences (2023). View Study

What most women received instead was a curriculum designed around what not to do — a framework that centered risk and shame rather than knowledge and agency. The parts of female anatomy associated with pleasure were routinely omitted. The emotional and psychological dimensions of sexual development were left entirely unaddressed.

That omission isn’t neutral. It communicates something — that those parts of a woman’s experience aren’t worth addressing, or worse, that they’re something to be managed and suppressed rather than understood.

The Research Confirms What Many Women Already Know

The consequences of this education gap aren’t just anecdotal. They show up clearly in the data.

A 2024 scoping review published in PubMed Central examined the psychosocial and behavioral dimensions of women’s sexual pleasure across decades of research. One of its central findings: there has been a systematic erasure of sexual pleasure in sexual science research itself — meaning the gap isn’t just in classrooms. It exists in the scientific literature that’s supposed to inform healthcare, education, and public policy.

The same review found that gendered social scripts consistently lead women to prioritize their partner’s sexual needs over their own — a pattern that begins in adolescence and compounds over time. The Pan American Health Organization formally recognized this problem as far back as 2000, establishing that the value of sexual pleasure should be recognized throughout a woman’s life. More than two decades later, that recognition has yet to filter into most educational settings.

Source: “Psychosocial and Behavioral Aspects of Women’s Sexual Pleasure: A Scoping Review.” PubMed Central (2024). View Study

A 2021 paper published in the International Journal of Sexual Health put it plainly: viewing sexual health purely through the lens of disease prevention is counterproductive. The researchers found that a pleasure-affirmative approach to sexual health education — one that takes pleasure seriously rather than treating it as a footnote — actually brings more women into healthcare settings and leads to better reproductive health outcomes overall.

Source: “Sexual Health and Wellbeing through the Life Course.” International Journal of Sexual Health, PMC (2021). View Study

This matters. When women don’t have language for their own experience, they’re less likely to seek care, less likely to advocate for themselves in medical settings, and less likely to recognize when something is wrong.

What It Costs: The Mind-Body Connection

The cost of the education gap isn’t just informational. It’s psychological — and the research on that connection is substantial.

A 2023 systematic review published in PubMed Central analyzed the relationship between sexual health and psychological wellbeing across 14 studies. Its finding was striking: sexual functioning doesn’t just correlate with mental health — it actively predicts it. Women with healthier sexual lives showed measurably lower rates of anxiety and depression. The review noted that most research had framed wellbeing as the absence of psychological distress, with very little exploration of positive dimensions like self-esteem, resilience, and self-efficacy — the exact qualities that a fuller education might have helped build.

Source: “Sexual Health and Psychological Well-Being of Women: A Systematic Review.” PubMed Central (2023). View Study

Body image is another documented casualty. A study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine found that body dissatisfaction directly predicted lower sexual desire and arousal in women. Not because their bodies were inadequate — but because they had been taught, implicitly or explicitly, to evaluate themselves through a critical external lens rather than an internal one. The study noted that interventions to improve body image could have meaningful, measurable benefits for sexual experience.

Source: “The Relationship Between Body Image and Domains of Sexual Functioning Among Heterosexual, Emerging Adult Women.” Journal of Sexual Medicine, PMC (2016). View Study

A 2025 study in the International Journal of Sexual Health found that self-esteem alone accounts for nearly one-fifth of a woman’s sexual pleasure — a proportion that dwarfs most external factors. Genital self-image, anxiety, and distraction all play measurable roles. None of these are things most women were ever given tools to address.

Source: “Sexual Pleasure’s Associations with Self-Esteem and Body Appreciation.” International Journal of Sexual Health, MDPI (2025). View Study

The throughline across all of this research is the same: what women weren’t taught didn’t stay safely in the past. It became part of how they experience their bodies, their relationships, and their own worth.

The Informal Education That Filled the Gap — and Its Limitations

When formal education fails, women fill in the blanks however they can. For most, that has meant a combination of peer conversations, media, partners, and trial-and-error. None of these are reliable sources. Most are actively distorting.

Media — including pornography — has historically centered a male gaze and male pleasure as the default, leaving women’s bodies and experiences as peripheral or performed. Peer conversations often replicate the same gaps and misconceptions that formal education created. Partners, however well-intentioned, are working from their own incomplete education.

The 2023 Georgia Journal of Science study noted specifically that further education throughout a woman’s lifetime can change previously held views about sexuality and body — implying that the damage isn’t permanent, but that correction requires intentional effort, not passive exposure to the same inadequate information in different packaging.

This is what makes access to accurate, shame-free, science-backed information so valuable in adulthood. It’s not remedial. It’s corrective — and for many women, it’s genuinely transformative.

What Filling the Gap Actually Looks Like

Reteaching yourself what you weren’t taught doesn’t require a curriculum or a therapist (though both can help). It starts with a few concrete shifts:

Learning the actual anatomy

The clitoris — the primary organ of female sexual pleasure — was largely absent from medical textbooks until the late 1990s. Its full internal structure wasn’t comprehensively mapped until 2005. Many women were never taught that it exists beyond its external tip, let alone how it functions. Starting with accurate anatomy is not a small thing.

Separating pleasure from performance

Much of what women learn about sexual response is shaped by what they’ve seen performed — on screen, in media, in the responses they’ve been told are expected of them. Understanding your own actual responses, separate from what you’ve been conditioned to demonstrate, is a process that requires both information and permission.

Recognizing the body image connection

The research is clear that how you feel about your body directly affects what you experience in it. Building a more neutral or positive relationship with your physical self isn’t vanity — it’s foundational to everything else.

Giving yourself permission to be curious

The World Association for Sexual Health formally declared sexual pleasure a component of holistic health in 2019. Not a luxury. Not a bonus. A recognized dimension of human wellbeing. Curiosity about your own body isn’t indulgent — it’s health-adjacent, and the research backs that up.

Why This Matters Beyond the Personal

This isn’t only an individual issue. When women aren’t given accurate information about their bodies, the effects scale outward.

Women who lack language for their own experience are less likely to communicate clearly with healthcare providers — and more likely to have their concerns dismissed when they do. The same shame and silence that shapes a woman’s personal relationship with her body shapes how she navigates the medical system, how she talks to her daughters, and what she passes on.

The 2021 paper in the International Journal of Sexual Health found that a sex-affirmative approach to education — one that takes pleasure and wellbeing seriously rather than focusing exclusively on risk — actually increases the likelihood that women seek out the reproductive healthcare they need. The information isn’t just personally valuable. It has public health implications.

And perhaps most practically: women who understand their own bodies are better equipped to recognize when something has changed, when something is wrong, and when they deserve better care than they’re receiving.

The Bottom Line

Most women weren’t failed by their own lack of curiosity. They were failed by systems that decided their curiosity didn’t matter — and by a cultural framework that treated their bodies as something to be managed rather than understood.

That failure has a documented cost: in psychological wellbeing, in body image, in sexual function, in healthcare outcomes, in self-esteem. None of it is inevitable. None of it is permanent.

What women weren’t taught, they can learn. What was omitted can be filled in. The research is clear that education — at any age — changes outcomes. The question is whether women are given access to information that’s accurate, shame-free, and actually centered on them.

That’s the standard The Dark Olive holds itself to. Not because it’s a nice idea, but because the alternative has a cost — and too many women have already paid it.

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References & Further Reading

The following peer-reviewed sources informed this post:

1.  “Sex Education and Influence on Body Image and Identity.” Georgia Journal of Science, Georgia Academy of Sciences (2023). https://digitalcommons.gaacademy.org/gjs/vol77/iss1/59/

2.  “Psychosocial and Behavioral Aspects of Women’s Sexual Pleasure: A Scoping Review.” PubMed Central (2024). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10903595/

3.  “Sexual Health and Wellbeing through the Life Course.” International Journal of Sexual Health, PMC (2021). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10903615/

4.  “Sexual Health and Psychological Well-Being of Women: A Systematic Review.” PubMed Central (2023). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10706599/

5.  “The Relationship Between Body Image and Domains of Sexual Functioning Among Heterosexual, Emerging Adult Women.” Journal of Sexual Medicine, PMC (2016). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5005305/

6.  “Sexual Pleasure’s Associations with Self-Esteem and Body Appreciation.” International Journal of Sexual Health, MDPI (2025). https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5118/7/1/1

7.  “Sexual Wellness: A Movement Happening Worldwide.” PubMed Central / Revista Brasileira de Ginecologia e Obstetrícia (2023). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10748507/