At some point in my adolescence I must’ve developed the belief that if there’s a penis in the picture, the sex is meant to last only as long as the erection does. Then it’s game over. I can’t be sure where I picked up that idea, nor the idea that it deeply, physically pains men to be aroused for too long without orgasming. That if they’re cruelly forced to be too hard for too much time continuously, their balls — their most pain-sensitive body parts — become oxygen-deficient and literally turn blue. And then maybe their bright blue balls explode like some gooey gender reveal (it’s a boy!) as they writhe around on the ground, injured and emasculated. And so if a guy is notably aroused, he ought not to be left that way for too long, lest his goods be put through intolerable pain and perhaps quite permanently damaged. Again, I’m not sure why I thought I might reduce a man to ruin if I didn’t bring him to come, but I do remember having these thoughts long before I even started having sex.
For as long as I’ve been doing it, sex with penises has more often than not been a sort of ordered procedure on its way to a finish line, always amping up towards an ultimate goal of penile ejaculation. At this point the whole event comes to a close, and my unsatisfied private parts get a needed break. Except it isn’t a break at all — rather a sweeping end to the entire evening as he then starts snoring next to me.
Especially when I first started having sex, I think I let sexual interactions with men often unfold in this unidirectional and hurried way because, even if I figured he wouldn’t explode, a similar idea stayed in the back of mind for years. This idea that, once his dick has started hardening, we’ve essentially taken off in a plane that absolutely must land at its destination to avoid crashing into the deep blue sea. That it would be too much to ask for more than minimal foreplay. That when he decides it’s time to stick his penis in my insufficiently stimulated vagina, it’s because his balls are about to change color. And that I ought to tolerate the first several searingly painful thrusts of his penis into my rigid and moistureless canal, riding it out without complaint until it starts feeling a little better, because it would have been inhuman of me to make him wait any longer. It would have been selfish of me to try to avoid pain, let alone to try to attain pleasure, in exchange for his patience.
But I don’t really tolerate this sort of thing anymore. Or at least I try not to. It’s a difficult mindset for me to get out of, but I try my best to make it clear these days that no cock shall enter my coochie unless she (my coochie) is wet enough and wide enough. That means I often verbally and even physically stop partners from sticking it in before I’ve had enough foreplay — which of course angers me on behalf of my less experienced and less confident self, who wouldn’t have dared intervene in that same scenario, and shouldn’t have had to in the first place. It means I tell men to get their stick (no matter how stiff) all the way out of my private parts whenever I want a breather, or whenever I need to be made wetter by some other mechanism before I can permit re-entry. And more recently, I’ve been practicing telling partners beforehand not to put their penis inside any hole of mine unless I put it there.
I’ve made a point of acting this way ever since I (all too recently) came by the knowledge that epididymal hypertension, commonly known as “blue balls,” is also called “blue vulva” in reference to an almost identical phenomenon that just as commonly affects people with vaginas. A phenomenon which I, through experience and deliberate experimentation, have endured over and over again. And I’ve never exploded.
Brat Baby is a student at Cornell University. Comments can be sent to [email protected]. Pillow Princess Diaries runs alternate Sex on Thursdays this semester.