Getty
While some of us got the birds and the bees talk when we were young, Jada Pinkett Smith says she learned about sex in an entirely different way as a kid. Her maternal grandmother taught her to have control over her own pleasure when it comes to sex when she was just 9 years old.
That part of the Red Table Talk conversation came about after her mom, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, who grew up in a conservative household, admitted that her first sexual encounter was a “painful one.”
“Mine wasn’t. It actually was like, ‘Okaaaaaaay.’ But I also came into it differently,” Jada responded. “My grandmother taught me about self-pleasuring because she wanted me to know that pleasure was from me. She didn’t want me to fall into the hands of a man, and if he gave me pleasure, to think that that was him. And she taught me at 9! At 9!”
It seems that by the time Jada was coming of age, her grandmother loosened up considerably, because Adrienne said that when she was growing up, her mother was very strict when it came to dealing with boys. (But that didn’t stop her from getting pregnant and giving birth to Jada when she was in high school.)
“I had none of that. I had none of what Jada had,” she said. “Her teaching to me was ‘Boys are dirty. Don’t let them put their tongues in your mouth.’ So everything very negative.”
This week’s conversation also featured one of Willow’s best friends, a 21-year-old woman named Telana Lynum who admitted that despite her experiences with sex, she hadn’t used toys. Jada would go on to say that it was sex toys that actually helped her have the most fun by herself during an exploitative time in her own sex life. By Lynum’s age, considering she learned about self-pleasure pretty young, Jada ended up being a pro of sorts.
“I think by your age I gave myself multiples. Multiple orgasms,” she said. “I was really into it at one point. Just because I was in an exploration state and I was abstaining from men. And I actually think I went through kind of an addiction, too, with it. And then one day, I was just like, ‘Enough. You’re having five orgasms a day.’ Because you can create so much pleasure, you just constantly want it.”
