The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/category/opinion/sex-on-thursday/)
Not unlike a miserably small man maintaining a Napoleon complex to counter his stunted stature, I, a small Asian girl, have always harbored a tendency to offset the likely impression of myself as quietly obedient and accommodating with behavior indicating the total opposite.
In a world where we claim to strive toward egalitarian parenthood, we should see mommy as equally powerful and dominant as daddy.
My birthday is two and a half months away. I’m going to pass the final stage of adulthood, and involuntarily enter my twenty-first year. I’ve accomplished so much, and yet I still haven’t had sex. Everybody around me tells me “HLG, honey, your time will come,” or “They’re out there … waiting for you too.” And that’s the best thing you can tell someone like me, because literally nobody can verify it. It’s vague-ass comments like these that you hate receiving, but exhale with relief when those same comments save you from the panic that mounts as you desperately search for advice for someone else.
“You’re so fun at parties because you always have the best stories,” Austin joked. “Tell them what you told me.”
Austin and I had been friends since high school, and I was standing among a group of his friends at a party back home over Thanksgiving break. He was asking me to share the story of what happened during sex with my summer fling. I tend to be pretty open about sex, so I didn’t mind talking about my experiences, though this one elicited a bit of shame. “Well,” I started, blushing, “you have to understand he was a teenager and loved the fact that I was a few years older than him. I’d never been with a younger guy.” Austin was already giggling.
“She came first, ‘cause I got it like that,” he whispered in my ear as we shuffled through the aisles in Jansen’s. I looked back at him with a faint smile. How does this work? Am I supposed to pretend to be interested in his little sex story? Because I don’t want to hear it.
“Hope you like bad boys because I’m bad at everything!”
Ugh … I don’t know why I go on Tinder. The pickup lines are so corny that rolling my eyes becomes an involuntary response. Plus, I’m not really interested in hookups, and it seems like everyone on Tinder has a strong “hit it and quit it” mentality. And yet, I keep scrolling … maybe because I wishfully think that one day I may blindly swipe and stumble across someone who shares my intimate vision of a life-long commitment.
“You’re not pregnant, are you?” was the first question my parents asked when I sat them down and told them we had something we needed to talk about. The question seemed laughable to me, considering my long-term boyfriend had just broken up with me and what I was about to tell them. “I’m … not straight,” I told them haltingly, and braced myself for their response. While I love my parents, acceptance of the LGTBQ+ community has never been their strong suit.
Her:
The girl who was shown how to love herself—
I walked into my first frat party during O-week, clutching my Keystone tightly to my chest and covering it, worried that someone would spike it, and I would be found unconscious in a ditch. Sex to me was a dirty thing, something that a guy wanted to take from me — and take and take and take until I had nothing left to give. I carried the clouds of a variety of my sexual assault experiences and traumatic stories of others with me. I had sex willingly for the first time three weeks into college. In my new room, under my string lights, I tried to remind myself that it was okay to have sex and that it was okay to have sex casually, for fun.
Not all jerk-off sessions are equal.
I rock back and forth in my childhood room rewatching every episode of Seinfeld. I furiously latch hook a rug to keep my hands busy. I’ve already knitted seventeen hats, rolled five beeswax candles, made a papier-mache dragon and assembled a tiny ship in a bottle. I’m starting to run out of things to occupy my sexual energy — before my hands will resort to frenzied masturbation instead of frenzied arts and crafts. This is one of the few times Anya Neeze is going to strongly advise you not to seek out physical sexual contact with anyone outside your home unless you own a full hazmat suit or medieval plague doctor costume.
I figure moments of intense awkwardness will only make our joyous reunion with our significant others in sunny Ithaca that much better.