The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/category/opinion/sex-on-thursday/)
“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.
Picture this. You’re in bed with your not-quite-a-friend, not-quite-a-hookup, but more than just a stranger. You’re casually talking when he brings up a dream you had about him where he rejected you, a dream that you told a mutual friend about in confidence. He asks you about it, joking (but is he?) that he didn’t know you cared so much. You panic but hide it, doing your best to brush it off as nothing, saying that you have dreams about people all the time and that they never mean anything.
The threesome, though an exercise of compulsory hedonism born from a perhaps unhealthy impulse, made me appreciate life.
The closest relationship that I have on this campus is with another girl. Let’s call her Cosmos. Although I can’t describe her in her entirety, her beauty is unimaginable. When God was designing her, He must have been in an especially giving mood, compelling Him to give His World a taste of perfection. You look at her, and you think … well that must be it.
We all have something that makes us feel like choking the chicken. A wide-shouldered Russian woman slicing a perfectly ripened avocado, JCPenney mannequins or the stretchiness of Mrs. Incredible could all give us the urge to flick our swollen bean. For many of us, it’s feet. From Quentin Tarantino’s obsession with Uma Thurman’s feet in Kill Bill to Ricky Martin admitting he finds feet really beautiful, being titillated by toes happens to be one of the most common fetishes. Yet in spite of its prevalence, it’s the butt of countless jokes.
Today I want to talk about a situation that I recently found myself in, and that I know other women have found themselves in too. I was hooking up with a guy and asked him to use a condom. He complained at first but then acquiesced briefly, before stopping and saying that he really didn’t want to wear one and it wasn’t going to be good for him and he wasn’t going to be able to finish with one on and so on and so forth. Willing to just go along with things, and honestly mostly just wanting to fuck properly already, I said fine. The next morning, after all was said and done, I got to go on an especially magical journey.
In September, your photo came up on my screen while I was scrolling through Tinder. I accidentally swiped left. My stomach dropped. I hurried to the bathroom to avoid waking my roommate, flicked on the light and proceeded to spend the next half hour trying and failing to download Tinder Plus so I could undo my erroneous finger movement. I flooded my best friend’s phone with texts, frantically trying to figure out which way you would’ve swiped on me, and how to show you in a totally-deniable-but-still-flirty-and-cute way that I really, really meant to swipe right.
There’s no time to be an ingenue when you’re an upperclassman. I’ve slowly come to the understanding that by the end of my first two years of college, I should’ve been out on weekends, flirting with cute guys and making my debut into the realm of dating and hookup apps. Now I’ve reached the final stages of undergrad only to realize that I damned myself for the first two years of college that I spent on weekend movie nights with my friends, drinking from the comfort of our home, dancing to our own music in our own rooms.
Because now, after meeting with a guy once or twice, there’s an underlying assumption that I’m supposed to be putting out. The courtship ritual shifts within a week from friendly texts and witty banter into late-night Snapchats that I don’t really want to open. After hanging out with a guy for a few hours one time in public, suddenly I’m at fault for not wanting to come over at 12 a.m. Everyone’s supposed to be on board with casual sex.
Perhaps I should message some of my other freshman year hookups and see what could have been.
My first time having good sex was in the desert. My then-boyfriend, Desert Not-So Solitaire, and I waited until it was dark, then snuck partway down a trail at Capitol Reef and stretched out a blanket over the burnt orange sand. The stars were so bright above us. The sky seemed to stretch all the way down to our feet. We’d had sex a few times before, but the act was still new and fumbling for me, often accompanied by discomfort or pain.
