(Prince with Sheila E on left and Cat on right)

Dirty Mind. Erotic City. Darling Nikki. Ask anyone who considers themselves a Prince fan what their favorite Prince songs are and you’ll most likely get a list of super nasty ones. I am a 53-year-old feminist who’s been selling sex toys at Babeland for twelve years, and I can tell you one thing for sure: Prince’s lyrics taught me a lot about sex and made me the proud sex-loving, sex-positive mom I am today. Here’s a bit of sex ed 101 from his royal badness:

1.     Oral sex should be equal opportunity. In the song “Head” Prince stops a woman on her way to be married, they flirt, she gives him head. He falls for her, they get married and then he gives HER head “morning, noon, and night.” At Babeland our blow job workshops outsell the cunnilingus workshops 10 to 1. I wish more straight boys and men took a page from this song and returned the favor, and as Prince would say “lick it like you like it” (from “Love Machine”).

2.     Women enjoy masturbation, porn, and sex toys. The enormous popularity of the song “Darling Nikki” from the movie Purple Rain meant millions of people walked around singing about a woman Prince meets “in a hotel lobby masturbating to a magazine.” Then he follows her home to find, “she had so many devices everything that money can buy.”

3.     Sluts drive great cars AND have safer sex. For Prince, there was no slut-shaming--only idolatry--for his sex-loving vixen in “Little Red Corvette,” who had ""a pocket full of horses/Trojan and some of them used.”

4.     Women deserve orgasms, and p.s. hand jobs are not cheating. Just let someone “Jack You Off,” “If your man ain't no good/Come on over to my neighborhood/We can jump in the sack and I'll jack you off.”

5.     Exhibitionism and voyeurism are hot, and so is pubic hair. From 319 “I got a good shot, put ur leg on the chair/U know ur too hot when u play with ur hair/I just wanna holler, scream and shout /when u let ur fingers do the walkin', in and out and al about.”

6.     Seduction really is this simple. From “Kiss,” “I just want your extra time and your kiss.”

7.     Consent is sexy. In “Get Off”(watch the video, orgy alert!) Prince sings “23 positions and a one night stand/I’ll only call you after if you say I can” to a young woman who hasn’t been getting served.

8.     Beauty comes from the inside. Perhaps his best message of all, in “Beautiful Girl” Prince pays homage to the beauty inside all women, “And if the stars ever fell one by one from the sky/I know Mars could not be too far behind/'Cuz baby, this kind of beauty has got no reason to ever be shy/'Cuz honey, this kind of beauty is the kind that comes from inside.”

Take all these great lyrics, add the funky beat, the sexy falsetto, and an amazing cast of powerful female musicians (Lisa, Wendy, Sheila E, Cat, and Rosie Gaines to name a few) and you’ve got a life-long, full-bodied, female-first, sex ed experience. I know he was a strange, eccentric person, but my everlasting gratitude goes to Prince for infusing my coming of age years, my adulthood, and my parenting journey with so much positivity.

If you’ve got a favorite Prince lyric or anecdote I would love to hear it.

(Anne celebrating her 50th birthday as Prince, posing with Caroline, her fellow Prince fangirl)