She smiled against my smiling mouth.
Years later, Maureen and I would break up and reconcile more than once. I would watch her date boys and feel a terrible, jealous sorrow. Years after that, our friendship would resume, and she would invite me to her wedding to a kind and funny man, our mutual friend. She would be open about her first relationship having been with a woman. I would always be grateful to her for helping to banish my shame and for helping me to learn my capacity for intimacy.
Over the years I would learn and relearn a different kind of revelation. I would learn to whom I really belonged. I was not owned by a church’s cruel teachings. I was not owned by condemnation, isolation, or fear. It did not matter what the state, my school, a religion, or a teacher claimed. I belonged to me. My body was my own, with all of its capacity for pleasure, healing, and wholeness. I could share my body with someone who shared my anatomy. I could share my heart with a woman who would protect it.
I belonged to me.
The first time is going to be amazing—right? Sure, it might hurt a little at first but then . . . ah! We’ve watched romantic comedies. It’s going to be all glitter and roses. We’ve seen porn. Sexy-hot-lusty-busty fun is there for the taking.
Besides, everyone is doing it—aren’t they?
Actually, they aren’t.
At age seventeen, less than 50 percent of young women have had sex. By age twenty, that increases to about 75 percent. Most of those are having sex with a steady partner.1
But there is lot of pressure to get down to business, and it can be tough territory to navigate—especially if you’re convinced that ecstasy is only a thrust away!
4
The First Rule of College
Kiersi Burkhart
My virginity was like an uncomfortable but fashionable little black dress.
It blistered and chafed me, and more than anything I wanted to throw it in a tin garbage bin and reduce it to smoldering ashes—but not until after everyone had gotten a good eyeful of me wearing it.
I still don’t understand why I wanted it gone so badly. Why was I so ready to slough it off on the nearest passerby, like some conspicuous dandruff? Isn’t virginity supposed to be treasured? Shouldn’t I have grasped it tightly and carefully until only the worthiest partner came along?
But the idea of sex had been pumped up to colossal size in my head. I fantasized about how incredible my first good fuck would be, how my whole life had been leading up to that one magical (oh, and it would be magical) moment. All I wanted was to get that teensy little uncomfortable bit of virginity over and done with as quickly as possible and get on to the fun part.
And can anyone blame me for not having a clue? In my favorite fantasy novels, after that first awful moment, the heroine’s first time is soul-crushingly fulfilling. In sex ed, it was boiled down to a diagram of a hymen that uncomfortably resembled a hagfish’s mouth. My folks believed in no sex before marriage, so they weren’t much help. And talking to older girls? One I knew said she hadn’t felt anything, but her sister piped up, “Of course not. It’s always easier for fat girls. Like throwing a hot dog down a wet hallway.” (Later, in tears, the first sister confessed that she’d started early with sex toys and that more likely than not she could thank a blue silicon cock for her painless first time.)
I knew, simply knew, based on my extensive research, the pleasure would improve after that first time. Sex would become mind-blowing. Weren’t the internet porn actresses always moaning with pure glee? They’d pant and scream and eventually, after some thorough pillaging, come so hard that their bodies shook like twigs in a rainstorm. Wasn’t that also waiting for me?
This obsession with sex sunk its claws into me at eleven years old. Soon it completely took over, and it would keep digging in for another five years. After all that time dreaming and fantasizing and clicking through internet ads of huge black cocks, I wanted my first time over and done. I was ready to move on with my life—my real, grown-up, adult life, where sex was as normal as weekend brunch.
But that godforsaken dress. I was still wearing it, and as long as I lived under my parents’ roof, their hawk-eyes watching me, no one was likely to get in and peel it off me anytime soon. So I vowed to myself: get to college, rip the dress off as quickly as possible, and get on with the good stuff.
Now, as I learned it, the first rule of college is this: no hall-cest. (Followed closely by cover your smoke alarm with plastic wrap if you want to smoke a joint in your room and never eat the cubed ham at the salad bar after 6 PM.) Do not—whatever you do—do not sleep with your hall mates. You can sleep with the guy on first floor if you’re on third floor, or better yet, the shaggy fellow you sometimes spot in the dorm across the picnic area, but woe betide you if you sleep with the hunky, blond football player who lives in 303.
But it was an unofficial rule.
So when I met said hunky, blond football player living down the hall, I might as well have placed a bull’s-eye on his crotch and taken out my sniper rifle. He was easy prey: horny, college-aged, and not the brightest crayon in the box. Manipulating Vince into fucking me was like covering a toddler’s eyes and convincing him you were no longer there.
“Don’t do it,” my roommate told me. “Hall-cest. Ten foot pole. Also, free condoms on the RA’s door, but seriously—don’t do it.”
At that point, it didn’t matter. The dress was cinched so tight I couldn’t breathe. I was out of high school, on my own, and there was no point wearing it where my parents couldn’t see me.
So I made remarks to Vince in the coed bathroom about how much I needed to get laid. How relationships were boring, how I hated clingy girls—all that porno stuff I thought boys wanted to hear. We kissed late one night walking through the rose garden and fooled around under the flag pole. Coming home early from class one afternoon, we were the only two people in the hall. I asked him to come over and help me move my desk. In a meager minute, we were naked on my beanbag chair.
I never told him I was a virgin. He seemed happy to assume I wasn’t. I was happy to let him assume.
He scrambled for the purple condom shoved in his wallet and remarked on my bush. He’d never fucked a girl with a full one before, he said, not hiding his distaste all that well.
Not once would I forget to shave after that remark. For six years I carefully manicured the topiary of my pubic hair—airstrips, arrows, boxes, triangles, all neatly trimmed, the smoothness of my lips maintained daily—until a far better man told me I should do whatever the hell I wanted with my own naturally occurring hair.
When the condom wrapper finally tore, that sudden panic one must feel right before skydiving or bungee jumping set in, and I began to wonder if maybe I should back out. Maybe I wasn’t actually ready to take off the dress yet. Didn’t it look good on me? Didn’t it make my parents happy? Didn’t I want somebody better?
But Vince was already shrink-wrapping himself in neon purple latex. Before the panic could worm its way into action, he pushed in. I wouldn’t realize until later that even the most novice penis around will at least give you a little foreplay to lube you up and jazz your jets.
But I guess you get what you pay for.
The pain wasn’t horrible, which surprised me. I’d imagined it sharp and twisting, like a knife, when it was far more like a doctor pinching the flesh of your arm and shooting you full of some nameless vaccine. Everything hurt for a moment, then faded to a dull ache as Vince pumped away. He didn’t seem to notice the just-swallowed-a-warhead look on my face or seem perturbed at all that I was a prone, unenthusiastic participant—which wasn’t particularly my fault, considering I couldn’t feel anything besides pump, pump, pump and ache, ache, ache.
Maybe he did notice and he just didn’t care.
After what felt like a minute, maybe two if I am being generous, a ghost of a tingle somewhere down inside me started creeping upward. A tangle of ivy wove its way from my uterus to my hips to my collar bones.
Oh! Was that it? Was t
hat a shadow of the thing that made porn stars scream? It was, though, only a sad fraction of what I could do for myself on my own time.
Before it could grow into anything more than an ephemeral hint of pleasure, Vince’s slippery purple cock popped free like a slug escaping a Chinese finger trap.
The condom had slipped perilously close to his tip, the cream-filled latex dangling down. I made a sad little sound and reached for him again, as if more pump, pump, ache could actually bring that wary tingle to the surface. But he pushed me away, peeling off the condom that smelled faintly of spoiled grapes, and said, “I’m done anyway.”
I lay sprawled on the beanbag, too shocked to move, or object, or even scowl at him. Vince climbed to his feet, pulled on his boxers and jeans, slipped his shirt over his head and said, “See you.”
Then he was gone. The moron didn’t even close the door behind him.
I got up, slammed the door shut, and slumped against it. I’d burned the dress, all right. I could almost taste the acrid tang of seared polyester.
Maybe it wasn’t the smell of my thrown-away virginity. Maybe it was the smell of shame. Or disappointment.
Or reality.
The little black dress had been replaced by something else but I couldn’t pinpoint what. I wasn’t naked and free, a peaceful hippie in a sweat lodge, like I’d expected. Like I’d hoped.
Looking around my room, nothing appeared to have changed except some new rumples in the beanbag cover. I felt like that beanbag—used, left with a few crinkles, but otherwise completely the same.
I’d been nothing but a toy for some douche bag down the hall. That was the part that struck me most, the part that made me stand there, staring at the beanbag, unwilling to move. Was I getting as good as I got for wanting to make a toy out of him too? I didn’t feel any better now that the dress was gone—all I’d acquired was a throbbing ache between my legs.
I hadn’t magically become a grown, adult woman. I especially had not become a moaning Barbie in a porno.
I’d been a cheap thrill. And that was it.
For weeks I hid from people on my hall, people who might guess. I told none of my friends about it, like a victim after a con, when all the money she’d put in a sure scheme vanishes in a puff of engine exhaust.
I’d been tricked by porn into thinking some sort of instant magic was hidden inside a hunky dude’s dick. But everyone had been lying to me. Sex wasn’t pleasurable for women—Vince had taught me that much, at least.
And the discovery that movie sex and real sex lay galaxies apart set me into full, Kill Bill–style retribution mode.
I had ten partners in one year.
But it was far more about the game and less about the enjoyment. I accepted sex as it really was for me: a fun sport, a game of pick-up soccer, that distant hint of pleasure always lingering right outside my grasp.
I assumed it would always be that way.
They say in sex ed that virginity only happens one time. That once you break your hagfish-shaped hymen, that’s it.
You’re deflowered.
You’re officially in the club.
But it’s just not fucking true.
Life is an endless roller coaster of first times, of lost virginities. My first time having great sex was like taking that dress off all over again—slower, sweeter, better. It captured me completely by surprise. He was older, wiser, a little handsomer; he knew his way around me like he’d drawn the map himself.
After that, sex wasn’t just a sport anymore, where the satisfaction comes from finishing tired and muddy and as roughed-up as possible to show off your battle scars to your friends. This new sex was full and thick and wonderful. It was noisy and honest. Sometimes wild and sometimes slow. This sex was filled with every kind of feeling my body and soul were capable of having.
There will always be more first times.
Even if it feels like everyone you know is having sex there can be lots of good reasons to wait. According to a survey of inexperienced young people reported by the Guttmacher Institute in 2014, the three most common reasons they gave for abstaining were religious and moral convictions, fear of pregnancy, and waiting for the right person.
There’s no shame in waiting. You can wait until you feel ready. You can wait until you really know what having sex will mean to you. You can wait for a partner you love and trust.
In the next story, Karen tells us about her wedding night and why she waited.
5
It’s a Nice Day for a White Wedding
Karen Jensen
The music started.
Everyone stood.
I was twenty-two and getting married.
As I walked down the aisle, my head swiveled from left to right. All I could think was everyone knows. At the end of the aisle stood this man that I was going to marry. He was dressed up in a tuxedo, grinning at me, slightly nervous. And all I could think was everyone knows we’re going to have sex tonight.
Earlier that day a not-so-tactful member of my family got a glimpse of me in my wedding gown and tried to crack a joke. “Yeah, like you deserve to wear white.” It came off as mean because I knew he was trying to make a dig about my faith, but the thing is, if you consider what the white gown used to signify, I really did deserve to wear it. My soon-to-be husband and I had been together for three and a half years, engaged for two and a half of them, and I was still, in every technical sense of the word, a virgin.
As a teenager, I feared sex. Not sex in itself, but the consequences of sex. I had big plans: going to college, becoming self-sufficient, rubbing my success in the face of every asshat in my family who thought I would never amount to anything.
I had seen my mom divorce my dad and try to put the pieces of her life back together. I wanted to make sure that I had a strong foundation to take care of myself and be an independent woman. A baby would have derailed all of that. Besides, getting pregnant as a teenager would have proved the asshats right, and I just didn’t have the stomach for that.
I had places to go, things to say, and a world to change.
Plus, somewhere along the way I had become a Christian. I had always been a romantic, a believer in soul mates and true love, so the Christian idea of the sacrament of marriage and fidelity fit right along with my belief system. My grandparents and the way they had grown old together were the perfect ideal, an example of true love to rival even the greatest of love stories. Forget Romeo and Juliet—they died. My inspiration came from these two old souls who had become my bedrock of stability in a world that held constant chaos and change. I wanted what they had for myself.
For all these reasons, I was a virgin on the day I walked down that aisle to my future husband. Vows were exchanged. Songs sung. Cake eaten. And then I threw the bouquet and we ran.
It was late when we arrived at the little lakeside cottage for our honeymoon. We had almost missed the last boat across the lake. We were tired. We were overwhelmed. We turned on the TV.
What can I say? Three and a half years with no sex and you kind of develop a pattern.
The weather turned bad. The sky grew dark and ominous. Rain pelted the roof. Before long, a storm raged outside. The wind whipped violently through the air, making the house shake and shudder and groan. The lights flickered. They flashed. And then they went out, plunging us into darkness. We sat in silent darkness for a few moments, uncertain. Hesitant.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
A lightbulb went on in my head. I knew. I knew that we could finally do what we had waited for all this time.
So I pounced.
In the unsexiest way possible, I pounced on my new husband.
I flung myself at him with a mixture of glee—Yes, finally I’m having sex!—and trepidation—Oh crap, I’m having sex. How do I do this? Kissing! You start with kissing, right? Like a jungle cat, I was suddenly there in the dark trying to kiss his lips. Except I don’t have jungle cat vision, so my first kiss landed on his nose. We banged heads. We fumbled in
the dark, trying to make our way—still kissing, of course—into the bedroom.
That’s where the magic would happen. I knew this because I’d seen it time and time again in every romantic movie I’d ever seen. And then there was all this weird, awkward dancing. Trying to remove clothes. Trying to find each other in the dark. Trying to figure out exactly how you could insert Tab A into Slot B. I knew the mechanics of sex in the same way I technically knew how to change a flat tire. But I had never done either and knowing, it turns out, is not the same as actually doing.
It was the exact opposite of romantic.
There was, in fact, laughing. Limbs got tangled. Neither of us walked away from that first experience feeling like a red-hot sex machine. It was nothing like what I had grown up seeing in the movies. The movies, it turned out, had lied. But it was fun. It was fulfilling. It was, in fact, quite amazing. It felt like more than love, this trust and surrender that I had just given to the man with whom I had sworn to share my life.
When we were done, I stood up, dizzy with excitement and really needing to pee, but as soon as I did, all of this stuff came gushing out of me. I was appalled and a little grossed out. When I mentioned it, this newly crowned husband of mine asked, “Well, what did you think happened with it all?”
The truth is, I had never thought about it, but then no one had explained this moment to me. There is so much no one tells you about sex, including the fact that it can be slimy.
The Mr. and I have been married for a while now, and we have gotten better at the whole sex thing. Sometimes it is sexy, though more often it’s still funny. Sometimes we still bang heads. Sometimes I go in for the dramatic kiss in the dark and find that I am nowhere near my target and am, in fact, kissing his nose.
We have two kids so I’m pretty sure people realize that we have sex, but it turns out no one really thinks about it. And they weren’t that day I walked down the aisle either. Looking back, I’m pretty sure they were just thinking about how I was the most beautiful bride ever—right?
The V-Word Page 3