The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/category/opinion/sex-on-thursday/)
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.
When I entered college, I scoured the internet for rules on hooking up. From looking up how to properly give a blowjob to how to not be so awkward, I tried to compensate for the fact that I had negligible experience (the boys in my specialized high school were unattractive, okay). Nothing could really prepare me for reality: First times are learning experiences, and sometimes you can’t know how to do first times until after you’ve done them. First Hook Up
My first real hookup, not including kissing a friend in preparation for a date, was a boy I went to prom with fresh out of a recently failed relationship. We went from zero to almost 100 (unreciprocated oral sex but not in the direction you’d think) with his mom dropping by the basement room about every 20 minutes. It wasn’t a great time, neither of us knew what we were doing.
I don’t necessarily endorse ghosting people. It can be incredibly cruel and lead to far more hurt feelings than talking to someone and formally breaking something off would. It’s an unfair way to communicate. The ghoster gets away with pretty much no consequences while the ghostee is left with questions and the nagging feeling of something unresolved. But what about when ghosting someone really does feel like the only way to convey your lack of interest?
A couple weeks ago, I had the birth control implant inserted. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a four-centimeter rod that is inserted under the skin. A local anesthetic is applied and a small incision is made — so small that you don’t even need stitches. Through the miracle of Cornell Health, I was able to get the thousand-dollar procedure done for just under $21. The nurse’s comments about the size of my biceps and her questions about my workout routine were only marginally more uncomfortable than the procedure itself.
Five thoughts on orgasms and whether they matter as much as we think they do:
1. At 14, I confess to a couple friends that I’ve never actually, you know, had an orgasm. They stare back at me with matching expressions of shock. “But you jerk off, right?”
I do. Maybe not in the most typical way, since I hate the slipperiness and contours of my vagina, which reminds me of a raw chicken, and prefer to keep my fingers strictly on the outside of my underwear.
I’ll admit it: I was a prude in high school. Sophomore year, my friends and I created a convoluted set of rules for what we would do with a guy. First hookup: second base. Third hookup: hand stuff. Fifth hookup: oral on him.
Taylor Swift thinks she’s so cool because she’s crazy, a hookup said to me after we watched the Blank Space video together. (Maybe the problem in this situation lies more in the fact that I was watching this specific video specifically with a hookup, but bear with me here.) And it certainly looks like it at first glance — I mean, how crazy do you have to be to destroy your boyfriend’s sports car, his expensive suits, stab a cake and a portrait of him, solely because he was texting during a picnic? Isn’t this whole video just her delighting in the beauty of her destructive, chaotic power? He missed the point of the song and the video — it’s not that Taylor Swift is the crazy ex-girlfriend, it’s that she’s playing the archetype of it to show how utterly ridiculous it is. It’s absurd and campy: cuz darling I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream, the Elie Saab dress standing over the horses, the damaged car …
I was fifteen when I first had sex. It was with my first real boyfriend, and it hurt so much I cried. It was a splitting sensation — it hurt so badly that any sane person would never want to experience it again. However, it was me who didn’t want to wait, it was me who bought the condoms and it was me who re-initiated every time, only to assume a fetal position in pain after it was over. My preoccupation with sex continues to baffle me — especially because I wasn’t a very sexual person.
My boyfriend of five months, Desert Not-So Solitaire, was snoring softly next to me, his arm curled around my back. It was winter, so instead of sleeping in his car, he had struck up a deal and was living in an unfinished guest house in someone’s backyard. The house didn’t have a heater, so breath rose from my lips in little puffs, but I was warm underneath our blanket. I wanted to be moved by his soft smile and how peacefully he was sleeping. I felt my stomach clench; a rising nausea overtook me.
There are coping mechanisms you invariably adopt during a dry spell. You rationalize it: Has it really been that long? Have there really been any eligible candidates? You download Tinder, delete Tinder, redownload Tinder, change your settings, swipe through and realize that your hometown Tinder is not what you had remembered it to be when you were swiping through the slim pickings of Ithaca Tinder. When an interaction with a member of the preferred sex doesn’t end in the wondrous, distant land of Hookup, you wonder, like Cher from Clueless when she was rejected by, as it turns out, a gay man did my hair get flat?
Everyone who knows me knows that I like to talk, and that I especially like to talk loudly about inappropriate things at inappropriate times and places. As one of my good friends once drunkenly slurred to me, I say “a whole lot of outta pocket shit.” Normally, this just gives me a reputation as someone that you probably shouldn’t introduce to your parents when they come visit, as well as the best person to tell any tea to if you want it spread as quickly and widely as possible. However, being known for being down to talk about anything, anytime, anywhere, has also lead to some more unforeseen consequences. When my best friend texted me one otherwise uninteresting Sunday in April last year asking for advice, I assumed it would be along the lines of how to do the homework for one of our shared classes or that he and his girlfriend were fighting and he needed me to decode a text. What I wasn’t expecting was for him to ask me how to pick a third for a threesome.