The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/category/opinion/sex-on-thursday/)
They have always tormented me on the margins of my screen: these flashing banners with the promise of voluptuous, bouncing anime titties. I have restrained myself from clicking on them, knowing full well the forbidden games might strike my laptop with an assortment of viruses and pop-ups. It’s not like I needed a flash game to fulfill my needs when the usual gang bang sufficed. I curbed my curiosity for long enough. The orgasming animations beckoned to me, not out of lust, but out of spite.
In May, the person I’ve most loved (so far) broke up with me.
The more you fantasize about the weird and potentially uncomfortable things too, the less awkward it will feel when it actually happens in those heated moments of passion.
Getting hard can sometimes be a struggle — that’s normal.
Ever since the start of the pandemic, I feel like I have no libido. I have very little interest in sex. My partner is starting to take my lack of sex drive personally, but I don’t know how to tell them that it’s not their fault! Is there something wrong with me?
-LackLuster
Hi LackLuster,
If there’s a “No Sex Drive During a Pandemic Club,” then you and I are both members. And so are millions of people across the world.
I couldn’t tell what caused it initially, but everyone was sexier when I came back to campus after an endless summer of quarantine. Certainly some of this was attributed to my pent-up isolation lust, but there was an added x-factor that really churned my butter. Never before have I thought such a vast number of people were attractive as I twiddled my thumbs, six-feet-apart, in the arrival test line. That is, until I recollected my childhood crushes: Zorro, the Phantom of the Opera, Mrs. Incredible, and Hannibal Lecter. All of them wore masks.
I’m glad we did our one-time fuck, but it doesn’t have to be any more than that.
Perhaps love is a universal umbrella, but that doesn’t mean we can’t name the planets that float within.
The best way to protect your access to birth control is to vote.
It helps to see things through a non-sexual lens.
Whether you’re quarantining with a new partner, just went through an awful breakup — but are still stuck living together — or are stuck in the isolation blues, it’s likely that whatever your sex life was pre-pandemic, it’s pretty different now. Maybe, like me, your months in quarantine have been replete with fluctuation – beginning with a time of passionate, consuming sex with a beloved, followed by periods of agonizing sexual and emotional separation, and then frosty post-breakup months spent wondering if you’d forgotten how to masturbate. Maybe, if you really are like me, your body is just waking up as if from a long sleep, the pain subsiding enough that you can finally ask: How can I get off without risking giving COVID to my housemates?!
After hours of scrolling through tinder with zero intention of meeting anyone and of scouring the internet for porn I actually enjoy, I found myself turning to a long familiar form of pleasure: language. So whether you’re looking to spice up your quarantine sex life or you’re just trying to keep your twin bed a little warmer as we head into autumn, look no further than these cliterary classics:
from “When the Beloved Asks, ‘What Would You Do If You Woke Up and I Was a Shark?’” by Natalie Diaz
“Be-loved, is loved, what you cannot know is I am overboard for this
metamorphosis, ready to be raptured to that mouth, reduced to a swell
of wet clothes, as you roll back your eyes and drag me into the fathoms.”
Here is a poem for if love comes to you as an act of submission, of offering yourself completely to a dream or to a lover. Here is a poem for if you ache for acts or for imagery that you fear to speak aloud.