Last Word: My First Time
My first time hurt, and it hurt a lot. After that experience, I should have shut down my downtown and become a born again virgin. The sex was ugly. My boyfriend and I fumbled around the bedsheets and the foreplay lasted for probably an hour. My heart pounded the entire time. Horrified of the pain and nervous about it feeling good, my head overtook my body and I kept psyching myself out. Just one more kiss. Just keep doing that. Let’s cuddle for a bit. By the time we got to the penetrative sex, we were overwhelmed with nervous energy atop a twin XL bed. The sex lasted for only a couple of minutes, and then we didn’t have anal sex for a couple of weeks. It proved to be just too difficult.
Besides gaining a killer two truths and a lie statement, “The first time I had sex I received a high-five instead of a load,” I learned that the picture-perfect sex shown in movies or porn is unrealistic. Sex is messy and oftentimes, mediocre. It’s rarely this mind-blowing experience that we’re all shown and taught over and over again (if you constantly have mind-blowing sexual experiences, let me know how you get it done). Sometimes it is astonishing, but more often than not, it’s just sex. Even when we talk about sex, we talk about the best we’ve had or the worst, we never talk about the mediocre, every day or real.
When we don’t talk about the regular sex, we set up unrealistic expectations. We spike up nerves for the guy bottoming for the first time. We create an uncomfortable situation for the woman who has never gone down on another woman. We give the first-time jitters to people. We create a stigma around mistakes, discomfort and messiness, and it can create significant anxiety around sex.
Ever since my now ex-boyfriend and I broke up, I have only slept with a few men. There’s this anxiety around “being good” at sex and around bottoming again. Have I lost my touch? What if it sucks? What if something goes horribly wrong? Instead of confronting these fears head on, I have let them take over, and I have mostly avoided sexual contact. I’m not saying this is due to how we talk about sex, however, how we talk about sex plays a key role.
Sex either has to be monumentally good or catastrophically bad when discussed. But maybe if we talked about how we fumbled on the bedsheets, how the condom affected our experiences or how the sex was messy, it could perhaps alleviate anxiety for the gay boy from Iowa or the straight couple trying to have their first experience together. And maybe, just maybe, we’d become a more sex-positive society in the process.