I guess I’ll write about sex
When I was a little girl, I quite fancied the idea of becoming a nun. I thought the nuns looked like pretty little penguins in their habits, and liked the idea of pottering about in an abbey garden, minding the lambs and tending the vegetable patch.
I suppose I gave up on the idea when puberty hit. Suddenly boys seemed more important than piety, and life became complicated by the pursuit of that sweet little thing we call the orgasm.
I’ll never forget my first one. I awoke from what I can only assume was a sexy dream to find that a strange and rather wonderful sensation was flooding through my body. It was as if my vagina was giving me a gentle reprimand, saying “Jules, look what I can do. Look what you’ve been missing.”
By this time, the boys in my class had been dicussing masturbation explicitly for months. If everything they said was true, I was sharing a classroom with fifteen fully-fledged porn addicts. Masturbation seemed to dominate their thoughts, and as they couldn’t exactly do it right there in Social Studies, they settled for regaling us with detailed accounts of their solo sexual adventures. Strangely, us girls kept quiet. I like to think that this was because we had a bit of an edge on the maturity front, rather than because we were restricted by old-school notions of female propriety.
Our discretion didn’t last long. Flash forward a few years, and the talk of the common room was this cool new thing called sex. I ended up giving it a go just to see what all the fuss was about. I was bitterly dissapointed at my findings—he had evidently never heard of foreplay, and in his years of studying the vagina online, he seemd to have failed to notice the prescence of a clitoris. Still, I don’t pretend that I was particularly good myself—I imagine that my bemusement at the whole situation rather took away from the passion of the moment.
I’ve since enjoyed a rather healthy sex life, until now that is. I am currently in a period of imposed celibacy, enforced by my fractured spine, which tells me off for far less althletic movements than those required during sex. In a moment of sheer desperation, I called my boyfriend for a round of good old fashioned phone sex. Unfortunately, it went a little like this:
Him: What are you doing?
Me: I’m sitting on the couch, reading. What are you doing?
Him: I’m sitting on the bed with my laptop.
Me: Are you looking at porn?
Him: Nah, I’m studying up on Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. What are you wearing?
Me: Oh, it’s super cold so I’ve popped my dad’s old jumper over my pyjamas. You?
Him: Just jeans and a tee-shirt. Are you wearing underwear?
Me: Yup. You?
Him: Yeah. Umm. Are you touching yourself?
Me: No! My dad is in the next room and could come in any minute! You?
Him: No, but I am finding Baudrillard very stimulating.
Me: Do you have an erection?
Him: Intellectually stimulating, Juliet.
Me: Oh.
Okay, so we’re not phone sex people. If I’m honest, I knew that it would never work. I call a spade a spade and a vagina a vagina, and euphemism are an essential part of phone sex. I could never bring myself to say, in the words of Kate Winslet, “I’m aching for your big purple-headed womb ferret”. Text sex is even less appealing to me. I hate text language, making it a rather labourious process, and one with far too much room for misunderstanding.
Me: Ur sexy. Im lyng n bd thnkng bout u x
Him: I don’t know what you just said. ‘I’m lying in bed with a bout of flu’?
Me: You have the flu? I’m sorry to hear that!
Sigh, I seem to have exhausted my options. Maybe I’ll enter a convent over summer. Who needs sex anyway? If The Sound of Music is anything to go by, there’s plenty of fun to be had without it.
- Article tagged in: Where the wild things are
One Comment
12 Oct, 2009 at 1:35 pm
No sex in The Sound of Music? Where do you think all the little von Trapps came from?
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