I spoke to the original Dolly Doctor about the infamous Sealed Section and her latest book, ‘Welcome to Sex’

“Young women will talk about this fine line that they tread where you’ve got to have a little bit of sexual experience, but not too much.”

Dolly Doctor’s sealed section was my first taste of scandalous content; tearing it open and feverishly consuming every word was a private ritual that coincided with my coming of age. Every girl I knew was the same. The local library’s copies of Dolly were thoroughly dogeared and probably checked out more than any other book in the library’s inventory.

Unpacking the tantalising tales we’d read about the night before was the highlight of the school week. For many of us, Dolly Doctor was our only source of information when it came to sex, puberty and relationships. She was the older sister we longed for, offering a safe space for our innocent curiosity (a curiosity that was ignored in our school’s curriculum).

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Perhaps Dolly Doctor’s success was in both her anonymity and the anonymity of the question askers. And for those of us too afraid to submit a question of our own, something of a similar vein was almost always included in the next issue, complete with Dolly Doctor’s detailed and shame-free answer. She always reassured us that despite their sensitive nature, our questions were far from embarrassing.

Sitting down with Dr Melissa Kang – Dolly Doctor’s longest-standing doctor – reminded me that this internal questioning is all part of growing up. Across her 26-year stint as our own personal pen pal, she has seen it all, from questions about hair removal, having a crush on your friend, first-time hand jobs and those tampon questions.

Dolly magazine folded in 2016, but Dr Melissa’s commitment to educating young people with kindness and honesty has never waned. I sat down with her to discuss the lessons she learnt as Dolly Doctor and how she’s used them to inform her latest book in her Welcome To series, Welcome to Sex.

So far as the questions we readers asked, Dr Melissa assures me that, despite their brazen nature, she enjoyed helping us navigate this tumultuous period of our lives. “I was very, very excited to be answering questions as Dolly Doctor,” she tells me. Dr Melissa was a junior GP in a medical clinic specialising in adolescents when she was approached by her Dolly Doctor predecessor about the role.

Across her time at the magazine, “a very great majority of questions didn’t really change in essence, they were predominantly young teens noticing changes in their bodies, noticing changes in their feelings and sensations [and] becoming interested in romance and sex. They weren’t having sex but [were] just kind of curious and interested,” she shares.

What she did notice was that as technology evolved and social media became more commonplace, access to information about sex and the popularity of porn altered the way questions were being framed. They became more specific and focused on aesthetics, something she hadn’t seen previously. “What did change actually, I noticed a lot more questions about pubic hair removal. In fact, there was almost nothing for the first few years and suddenly there was just like a steady little trickle of questions.

“‘I’ve shaved my hair and I’ve got a rash‘, or ‘How do I wax my pubic hair?’, ‘Is it safe to remove pubic hair?’” she tells me. She attributes a lot of the hair removal questions to the increase in easily accessible porn at this time. “I think, as we kind of know, in the last 20 years or so pornography has [featured] hairless vulvas. And so young teens and young adults were noticing that on porn… after that, it just sort of took off.”

As for the issues that trouble us many years later, she believes there’s still work to do when it comes to women embracing their sexuality. “I don’t think ultimately it’s changed yet. I think that you know, women feel more empowered to say ‘I enjoy sex‘ or ‘I want to have sex’ but young women will talk about this fine line that they tread between… where you’ve got to have a little bit of sexual experience, but not too much. So I think it’s still very much… a tightrope that young women have to walk and that’s due to a double standard, that’s due to inequality. It’s due to stigma [around] female sexuality.”

Making sex education as equal and accessible as possible is something she hopes to achieve through her new book. She wants to ensure “sex education is taught from a sex-positive perspective” and that young women are encouraged to enjoy sex if they decide they want to have it.

For Dr Melissa, publishing a book like this was only a matter of time. “I did kind of start to write a book in my head and I started to do an outline of a Welcome to Sex type of book, that was really the book that I wanted to write because I felt that that was the thing that no one would tell young people.”

She’s always had a passion for teaching young people. Providing information that’s factual and unbiased can only be a good thing, even though she acknowledges she may face criticism for thinking like this. “As a doctor, I see plenty of people under 18 who are having sex who would like [information]. I’m going to respect their right to make those decisions and give them the information that they’re seeking,” she tells me.

Welcome to Sex will answer all of the nitty-gritty questions younger generations have about sex, in the same way Dolly Doctor helped many of us all those years ago. But this time, it’s much more in-depth and there are even diagrams – something she thinks would have resolved a lot of reader’s issues during her time as Dolly Doctor.

“It’s very much exactly what I used to write for the magazine, only with illustrations which I would have loved to have had. I’d just say [when creating her book] ‘Can we put a diagram in for how to put in a tampon?’. There’s so much to share with young people. You know, obviously, they go to the internet. But this book hopes to be… very factual, very accurate and inclusive… we’re kind of finally hoping to make it [sex] safe for people of all sorts.”

Welcome to Sex is out now, published by Hardie Grant. Head here to purchase a copy.