The V-Word (5 page)

I'd been tricked by porn into thinking some sort of instant magic was hidden inside a hunky dude's dick. But everyone had been lying to me. Sex wasn't pleasurable for women—Vince had taught me that much, at least.

And the discovery that movie sex and real sex lay galaxies apart set me into full, Kill Bill–style retribution mode.

I had ten partners in one year.

But it was far more about the game and less about the enjoyment. I accepted sex as it really was for me: a fun sport, a game of pick-up soccer, that distant hint of pleasure always lingering right outside my grasp.

I assumed it would always be that way.

They say in sex ed that virginity only happens one time. That once you break your hagfish-shaped hymen, that's it.

You're deflowered.

You're officially in the club.

But it's just not fucking true.

Life is an endless roller coaster of first times, of lost virginities. My first time having
great
sex was like taking that dress off all over again—slower, sweeter, better. It captured me completely by surprise. He was older, wiser, a little handsomer; he knew his way around me like he'd drawn the map himself.

After that, sex wasn't just a sport anymore, where the satisfaction comes from finishing tired and muddy and as roughed-up as possible to show off your battle scars to your friends. This new sex was full and thick and wonderful. It was noisy and honest. Sometimes wild and sometimes slow. This sex was filled with every kind of feeling my body and soul were capable of having.

There will always be more first times.

Even if it feels like everyone you know is having sex there can be lots of good reasons to wait. According to a survey of inexperienced young people reported by the Guttmacher Institute in 2014, the three most common reasons they gave for abstaining were religious and moral convictions, fear of pregnancy, and waiting for the right person.

There's no shame in waiting. You can wait until you feel ready. You can wait until you really know what having sex will mean to you. You can wait for a partner you love and trust.

In the next story, Karen tells us about her wedding night and why she waited.

T
he music started.

Everyone stood.

I was twenty-two and getting married.

As I walked down the aisle, my head swiveled from left to right. All I could think was
everyone knows
. At the end of the aisle stood this man that I was going to marry. He was dressed up in a tuxedo, grinning at me, slightly nervous. And all I could think was
everyone knows we're going to have sex tonight
.

Earlier that day a not-so-tactful member of my family got a glimpse of me in my wedding gown and tried to crack a joke. “Yeah, like you deserve to wear white.” It came off as mean because I knew he was trying to make a dig about my faith, but the thing is, if you consider what the white gown used to signify, I really did deserve to wear it. My soon-to-be husband and I had been together for three and a half years, engaged for two and a half of them, and I was still, in every technical sense of the word, a virgin.

As a teenager, I feared sex. Not sex in itself, but the consequences of sex. I had big plans: going to college, becoming self-sufficient, rubbing my success in the face of every asshat in my family who thought I would never amount to anything.

I had seen my mom divorce my dad and try to put the pieces of her life back together. I wanted to make sure that I had a strong foundation to take care of myself and be an independent woman. A baby would have derailed all of that. Besides, getting pregnant as a teenager would have proved the asshats right, and I just didn't have the stomach for that.

I had places to go, things to say, and a world to change.

Plus, somewhere along the way I had become a Christian. I had always been a romantic, a believer in soul mates and true love, so the Christian idea of the sacrament of marriage and fidelity fit right along with my belief system. My grandparents and the way they had grown old together were the perfect ideal, an example of true love to rival even the greatest of love stories. Forget Romeo and Juliet—they died. My inspiration came from these two old souls who had become my bedrock of stability in a world that held constant chaos and change. I wanted what they had for myself.

For all these reasons, I was a virgin on the day I walked down that aisle to my future husband. Vows were exchanged. Songs sung. Cake eaten. And then I threw the bouquet and we ran.

It was late when we arrived at the little lakeside cottage for our honeymoon. We had almost missed the last boat across the lake. We were tired. We were overwhelmed. We turned on the TV.

What can I say? Three and a half years with no sex and you kind of develop a pattern.

The weather turned bad. The sky grew dark and ominous. Rain pelted the roof. Before long, a storm raged outside. The wind whipped violently through the air, making the house shake and shudder and groan. The lights flickered. They flashed. And then they went out, plunging us into darkness. We sat in silent darkness for a few moments, uncertain. Hesitant.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

A lightbulb went on in my head. I knew. I knew that we could finally do what we had waited for all this time.

So I pounced.

In the unsexiest way possible, I pounced on my new husband.

I flung myself at him with a mixture of glee—
Yes, finally I'm having sex!
—and trepidation—
Oh crap, I'm having sex. How do I do this? Kissing! You start with kissing, right?
Like a jungle cat, I was suddenly there in the dark trying to kiss his lips. Except I don't have jungle cat vision, so my first kiss landed on his nose. We banged heads. We fumbled in the dark, trying to make our way—still kissing, of course—into the bedroom.

That's where the magic would happen. I knew this because I'd seen it time and time again in every romantic movie I'd ever seen. And then there was all this weird, awkward dancing. Trying to remove clothes. Trying to find each other in the dark. Trying to figure out exactly how you could insert
Tab A
into
Slot B
. I knew the mechanics of sex in the same way I technically knew how to change a flat tire. But I had never done either and knowing, it turns out, is not the same as actually doing.

It was the exact opposite of romantic.

There was, in fact, laughing. Limbs got tangled. Neither of us walked away from that first experience feeling like a red-hot sex machine. It was nothing like what I had grown up seeing in the movies. The movies, it turned out, had lied. But it
was
fun. It was fulfilling. It was, in fact, quite amazing. It felt like more than love, this trust and surrender that I had just given to the man with whom I had sworn to share my life.

When we were done, I stood up, dizzy with excitement and really needing to pee, but as soon as I did, all of this stuff came gushing out of me. I was appalled and a little grossed out. When I mentioned it, this newly crowned husband of mine asked, “Well, what did you think happened with it all?”

The truth is, I had never thought about it, but then no one had explained this moment to me. There is so much no one tells you about sex, including the fact that it can be slimy.

The Mr. and I have been married for a while now, and we have gotten better at the whole sex thing. Sometimes it is sexy, though more often it's still funny. Sometimes we still bang heads. Sometimes I go in for the dramatic kiss in the dark and find that I am nowhere near my target and am, in fact, kissing his nose.

We have two kids so I'm pretty sure people realize that we have sex, but it turns out no one really thinks about it. And they weren't that day I walked down the aisle either. Looking back, I'm pretty sure they were just thinking about how I was the most beautiful bride ever—right?

Sexual autonomy.

It's not a sexy phrase but it's a good one. It means that you get to choose what you do. You're in charge—every kiss, every stroke, every time you rip your panties off, or don't.

It's all you.

This is a book about first times. Consensual first times. Chosen first times.

When you don't choose and sexual things happen anyway, that's not sex. It's violence. An unwelcome kiss. A hand grabbing your ass. Coerced oral sex. Rape. If you don't want it to happen, it's assault. (And if this has happened to you, I urge you to report the crime and visit
RAINN.org
, a support organization for survivors.)

Just as sex can make us powerful, it can also make us vulnerable, naked in every sense of the word. This is especially true for survivors of sexual abuse. Some respond by choosing abstinence because it is so difficult to contemplate letting anyone touch their bodies again. Others respond to violated boundaries by giving up on boundaries altogether. Sometimes flashbacks of abuse accompany their consensual sexual experiences for years.

For survivors, reclaiming their sexual selves can be a long road. In the next story, Christa lets us walk beside her for a while.

I
was six years old the first time a man put his hands on me sexually. It wasn't the first time I'd been exposed to the idea of sex, but it was the first time I was a participant. Exposure to trauma at such a young age left little room for the milestones of “firsts.” As a teenager I did not care about rounding bases or giving up my V card, I cared about trying to fill the part of me that had been taken away, the part of me that was unprotected. I cared about being wanted, as if that could provide protection. And sex became a means to an end, a way to feel wanted.

I became the girl who would give a guy a blow job in a living room with people walking in and out to get their coats. The girl who gave a guy a hand job underneath a thin blanket on the lawn of a completely packed outdoor concert. I became the thing people wanted more than anything else, if only for a few minutes.

I wanted to be wanted with the voraciousness that addicts approach a fix. But after years of multiple hookups, male and female, I still had no balm for my many broken parts. At nineteen years old, I had no notion of what love looked like.

I decided to get away from everything and everyone. I would spend the summer after my sophomore year of college on Block Island, a small island off the coast of Rhode Island. I had a plane ticket with a return date at the end of the summer, eighty dollars in my pocket, and a tent to sleep in. I was alone because the friend who was supposed to spend the summer with me backed out at the last minute. I had no job and no real plan. But I was stubborn and determined to prove that I was fucking fine and could take care of myself no matter what.

The first thing I saw when I stepped off the ferry was a giant sign that said, “Absolutely no camping on the island.” Twenty thousand tourists descend on Block Island every summer, and the few year-round residents wanted to discourage drifters like me. So I found the police station and pitched my tent in the woods about fifty feet behind it. I had something to prove, after all.

Within two hours of setting up camp I landed a job as a cashier at Bella Pizza. I talked the owner into hiring me like I did everything else. I made him think I was invaluable to the sale of his pizza. It was a strange sort of bravado I carried inside. And one I had with men much more than women. Men were easy. In my mind, all I had to do was make them feel like they were the most important person in the room and that I was lucky to be around them.

My first night on the island I was sitting at the pizza parlor chatting up my new manager about housing options when he introduced me to some employees from the nearby hotel, including a gorgeous waiter named Brian. He was one of those tall, lean boys who wore close-shaved blond hair and a smirk. He was nineteen, had a deep golden tan, and smoked Marlboro Lights between his thumb and forefinger—the guy way. Sexy as hell when you put the whole package together.

In spite of my girlfriend back at college who had sent me to the island with a book of Sappho's poetry and long, wet, good-bye kisses, the sight of that smirk awoke the voracious and desperate she-demon inside me. I wanted to make him crave me.

So I did what I always did, I played to my strengths, or at least what I assumed my strengths were to guys. Mostly, I knew how to give good blow jobs. I had a really big mouth, and I swallowed. Surely these made me worthy of being craved. Because what guy doesn't want sexual services from a girl who swallows?

I dangled fat, sexual innuendos in Brian's face. He didn't blink. I did the cherry stem trick with my tongue. He didn't fall for it. I hung on his every word and made him feel important. He lit another cigarette and waited. Brian waited all that first night. He waited for days. He was waiting for me to become me.