For as long as I can remember, I desired male touch. Blame puberty, hormones, the rise of sexual culture on television, whatever. I wondered what the weight of a man on top of me would feel like, the swapping of tongues, hands under my blouse or in my jeans. Like many other shameless yonis, I was raised in a sexually repressed household—learning the proverbial “birds and bees” from the Life Cycle books my well-meaning, but embarrassed, mother gave me. When I came up on the word, I asked her what an orgasm was. She responded “It’s a feeling.”
What a sad understatement for such a gorgeous thing!
Up until high school, my sexual nature aired itself in clumsy ways—in freshman biology I said “orgasm” instead of “organism”; I talked about vivid sex scenes in movies (like “Nine and A Half Weeks” and “Damage”) at lunch while my friends inched their chairs away; I danced to “Like a Virgin” in my room until my parents caught me and told me to stop.
Throughout, I remember my parents’ shame as they looked at school and family photos of me, and my large breasts looking even more magnified in every single image. And my own shame over those recurrent slutty thoughts.
Of course, my sexual curiosity only intensified while I attended an all-girls Catholic high school. The setting itself is nothing short of porn. Nubile young women rolling their plaid skirts up as high as they could, or low enough on the waist to expose the top of a g-string. Were they teasing each other? Themselves? The dirty old men who served as teachers? Despite my later obsession with “The L Word” and female folk singers, I was all about the male teachers. I imagined lurid sexual acts on student desks with the teachers I now look back on, and cringe. Hundreds of hormonal girls, and a handful of men—what were those nuns thinking?
Knowing I didn’t want to waste my energies on pathetically awkward high school boys, I waited and relented to my first boyfriend while I was in college. I didn’t care that he didn’t want to be serious, that he was a drop out, or that he was in his late 20’s. That he drank too much and wasn’t much into socializing otherwise. Yeah, mom would’ve been proud.
The way he touched me felt electric (cliché but nonetheless true), and as long as he would have me, I would do whatever he wanted (which wasn’t much). I’d lie there and just let him make me feel ecstatic. I hadn’t yet learned about bikini waxes, thongs, or the nuances of making erotic sounds, and he couldn’t have cared less (which tells you a lot about his enthusiasm level over the sheets).
In retrospect, yes, that first boyfriend was a loser. But as with most first experiences, I learned an inordinate amount about myself. If the man I’m with doesn’t arouse me—make my nipples harden; urge me to get out of those pesky clothes; say the dirtiest things that would make me cover my face the next morning; raise my arms above my head in carnal joy—there is no hope for decent conversation or anything else for that matter. What happens between the sheets directly impacts what happens when we’re across the dinner table from one another.
Monogamous or not, routine is the death of eroticism. More on that next time…
Shameless Yonis 