Action: A Book About Sex (29 page)

Not Enough Lube/Not Fitting

I once had sex with a person whose genitalia fit so poorly into mine that getting him in me was like trying to hammer a bent-up screw into a sugar doughnut. I had no idea why this could be, or that it could even happen!

We were frustrated because we had been involved in a dire mutual crush for two years or so, and having gotten out of a
relationship about five minutes (fine, five days) beforehand, I summoned him to hang (fine, nail/screw/otherwise misapply hardware euphemisms to me).

Even those you foster titanic infatuations with can be subject to compatibility-based bodily oddities. We tried all kinds of different positions and spit-based lubrications to try to make it work, which, eventually, it KIND of did? Instead of the natural pulse of intercourse it felt like… scraping?

Neither of us came, I don’t think, and after getting home, I discovered that one of my labia was swollen. I did what I always do in times of medical crisis: avoided googling my symptoms at all costs—the pictures are life-threateningly gross and misleading; I have found 100 percent of the time I don’t follow this rule. Instead, I dialed up my sage older sister, Laura, who is a lot smarter than I am, and less of a sensitive little nightmare who thinks she’s dying or else STI’ed up because of benign swelling.

“I used a condom!” I wailed, sans salutation of any kind when Laura picked up, because I have excellent phone etiquette. She didn’t balk, but calmly asked what happened, because
she
is the best and instantaneously gets it most, if not all, of the time. “I finally got it in with Alan and one side of my vagina looks like someone took a bike pump to it.”

“Oh, dude, calm down. That’s totally normal! Did you use enough lube?” I recalled that our only kind was salivary, and she told me to go sit on some ice for an hour. Post-deflation, I called her back to say thank you, having sufficiently calmed down enough to even say “hello” first. Since then, I make sure that if I’m carrying a condom, I’ve also got one of those single-use packets of lube close at hand, lest I run into another issue with my and a partner’s construction.

Passing Gas During Oral

One of my best friends recently told me that her most bloodcurdling fear is “letting out a fart with someone’s face in my minge.”
Thank her home country of Britain for that delightful locution, and thank me for telling you that however homicidal this potential humiliation might feel, you are going to be fine—and your stomach, at least, will feel better?

Let’s not minge words: This can happen, and while you should do your best to prevent it at all costs via the motivation of “basic human decency and respect,” bodies are villainous machines that process their exports at uncontrollable clips sometimes. While I have never been either the deliverer or recipient of this wildly unpleasant-seeming olfactory tour de farts, I have been the unlucky, unwitting recipient of other gruesome anatomical products. And I am alive, and pretty much fine, if tinged crimson about committing this particular prose to the corridors of the Library of Congress.

You might not know how to slow things down gracefully, but you HAVE to, no matter if it looks peculiar, and then get the heck out of that room for a second. If you can’t bring yourself to say, “Sorry, this feels amazing, but I need a moment,” and repair to the john because you think it’ll look SO OBVIOUS that you have a body that occasionally does normal bodily things, come up with an excuse. Say, “This feels amazing, but I got an eyelash in my eye and I need to get it out,” then hit the bathroom, run some water, and come back saying, “Sorry about that—I feel way better now,” and meaning it.

Period Blood All over the Bed

Did you bleed on someone’s bed, or have a bloodletting on your own sheets? No big deal (unless maybe it’s coming from someplace other than a vagina, out of a wound). Like most natural fluids, period blood doesn’t have to stain your bedclothes permanently. If you know you’ll be engaging in period sex, you can avoid any trouble here by laying out a burner sheet—this can be any old bedding or towel that you’re okay with Jackson Pollock–ing with menses. If you discover that you or your partner is beginning their
cycle immediately after you’ve finished in bed: Rush some seltzer onto the hemogravy in question.

You know how I can’t seem to stop stanning for seltzer throughout this book, to the point that it almost reads as though I’m an infamously raunchy heiress to the Schweppes fortune? (GOD, I wish that were my life.) That’s because you can harness the powers of carbonated water not only to keep your mouth pleasantly wet during oral and seeming like the kind of “together” adult for whom even WATER can be improved upon, but also to get blood out of fabric.

You don’t want your partner to think you’re grossed out, in large part because
you’re not
, so don’t act like you’re trying to douse a wildfire. Calmly be all, “They’re just sheets!” omitting any portion of that sentence in which you are tempted to enumerate the thread count of said bedclothes, and pour half a glass of the cold seltzer sitting on your nightstand. If this seems like an excessive amount of water: You want to keep enjoying that jacked-up number of threads, am I correct? Gently blot out the stain with paper towels.
They’re just sheets
—stain-free sheets on which you also got to enjoy the miracles of period sex.

Condiment Attack

The most painful thing that ever happened to my vagina was when a boyfriend added “ZEST” and “SPICE” to our sex life in a tragically straightforward sense. We had been revising a new recipe for wing sauce to exactitude every few days for one whole summer, so it was a shame that I utterly lost my appetite for it when, after dinner, Chris touched me without washing his hands. We had forgotten that pepper hurts body parts other than just your tongue, and wing-based pleasure morphed instantly into intense pain. Even as I was wincing and screaming “THIS IS NOT WHAT ‘HOT SEX’ IS SUPPOSED TO MEAN, YOU JAG” at Chris, I was laughing and grateful to have a new story to tell my friends for the month, but since then, I have taken care to avoid buffalo-style sex.

Handling spicy foods like peppers—or wing sauce—before handling another person’s D or V is the living worst. Wash your hands eleven times if you think you’re going to bone after dinner, and maybe decide against cooking/eating scorch-inducing foods on a date. (And not only because they often incorporate beans, putting you at risk of “letting out” my British friend’s gaseous terror.) If you still
heat things up
in the most regrettable possible way, get in a cold shower immediately, wing sauce be damned to burn on the stove in retribution for how it burned me. Flush out the point of contact, then take a break from sex until the next day. If you don’t feel better in two hours, call a doctor.

Getting Come in Your Eye

I wear lots of makeup. As such, I’m far from intimidated by the prospect of effluvia around my general eye area. As with mascara, though, the key is making sure your optic nerves aren’t suddenly clouded with alien liquids by applying them to your face with precision.

Did you know that when you see the world through a filter of semen, your eyes inflate and redden until they resemble rubber grade-school kickballs? If you’re masturbating and have a curved dick, or if you’re in the mood for a 100 percent natural facial treatment, consider your or your partner’s aim.

I was given this unfortunate education recently, when I found myself looking down the barrel of a partner’s loaded dick. “Wait—!” I yelp-cooed, trying to preserve both my fake eyelashes and the sensuous tone of klymaxxx, to no avail on both counts. My vision blurred with come. I brushed my tear ducts gently with the back of my hand as the dude susurrated apologies: He had never done this before! He lost control! He was so so so so sorry! I played it cool: It had come from his body, so it couldn’t hurt me too badly, right? There was no need to jet off to the bathroom and flush my eyes immediately, as far as I was concerned.

That turned out to be wrong—semen does not make for a good saline solution
at all
. The swelling was swift and stung
badly… and I had a meeting to go to in an hour. How do you even lie about such a highly visible vision-based irritation? I had no idea, as I’m an unskilled liar with an overactive imagination, but not a useful one. I came up with a bee sting to the eye, an allergic reaction to eyedrops on just the one half of my face, and, “Oh, this remedial sports equipment I’m calling part of my head? I was crying! I was crying very hard about… having… sadness,” which doesn’t work if you’re trying to maintain a professional profile, but which I thought might still be better than the obvious conclusion of semen-eye. In the end, I canceled the meeting.

If this happens to you: Don’t make my mistake of trying to be
all casual
about things. There’s come in your eye! Get thee to a faucet and wash it out with water immediately! If, like me, you do not actually have an allergy to eyedrops, employ those afterward. Make sure your eye is totally cleansed of all semen—leaving any behind will be sure to irritate it.

Excrement

Obviously, I have little timidity about working blue when it comes to sex—which makes it all the more ludicrous and prissy that, when it comes to talking about scatological, urine-based, or otherwise execrable topics, I blanch—a lot. (See how, there, I had to use the most distancing possible language because I’m too prim to say the word “shit” in the context of bodily functions? Do you know how irrationally peevish I am that I just did? THIS IS A TOTALLY SCATOLOGICAL TURN OF EVENTS, for me.)

I am very selective about bodily fluids, sexually—except that one time that a boyfriend and I got uncharacteristically stoned, my home-for-once roommate was in the bathroom, and I really had to go. The solution we came up with, geniuses that we were, was that he could try drinking my pee. I remember laughing a lot and him saying, “It tastes like warm tea” and thinking,
Why wouldn’t you just say “tea”?
before deciding the phrase “warm tea” was a very tender way to describe the taste of your loved one’s piss in
your mouth. That was a nice time. I never, ever want to repeat the experience, ever. (Unless, of course, I’m stoned again and the urge to urinate is outlasted by the duration of someone else’s shower. Thank God I smoke pot roughly once every bi-never.)

Another thing I never want to do again: It took one new-at-the-time boyfriend, Graham, a while to feel comfortable in what he felt were esoteric new positions, like anything approaching the non-horizontal and firmly face-forward. One night, a lapse in his demureness involving a new rearrangement of positioning (prostrate; prostate) surprised me. At the time, I thought the most abhorrent interior design of our Holiday Inn room was a painting of a pond in which the lilies were literally gilded. I stared at it, lying on my stomach, as I linked its subject to the idea of having anal sex versus vaginal. I scoffed at myself and got back to enjoying the grip of the very specific pleasure-pain that comes only with taking it up the ass. I looked at the sheets after. Behold:
Nightmare
.

I bugged out and covered the bed, dashing to the bathroom, scarlet all over. Graham was immaculately gracious; he knocked on the door of the bathroom as I showered in scalding water and my own woe: “Take all the time you need—but, look, it makes sense that this happened, given what we were doing, and I’m not grossed out at all.” I had to concede his point. I walked outside in a towel, evading his face for entirely different reasons than I had moments before.

The lily had been not only un-gilded, for sure, but left to rot in a compost heap. He tried to salvage what he could of my pride. “I don’t think you’re gross,” he continued, and the precision of his kindness there is as follows: He knew there was no persuading me the situation wasn’t objectively putrid, but he wanted to convey that he still liked me and didn’t want me to seethe inwardly over an inadvertent by-product of having great sex, which is to say, the occasional
Nightmare
. Sweetly, he got to assuage MY anxieties about something that was, in essence, a microscopic (if colonoscopic) deal.

See how even the most self-aggrandizingly “open-minded” sex-havers can find, to their grim surprise, that maybe they’re not as cool and carefree about the smashing together of anatomies as they envisioned themselves? This is why, when you shack up (or Holiday Inn up) with a slow-mover like Graham, it’s crucial to be kind, patient, and uncondescending. Your partner might, after all, end up as gallant as you had always prided yourself on being when you find, instead, that you’ve shit the bed.

The Case for Celibacy

Sometimes, I don’t have any room for sex in my life, and my body and brain decide to give me some space back. This has happened to me on a few occasions when I was focused on special professional projects (usually, I do both with relish, but on exceedingly rare occasions, I do one or neither for a while), went on a kind of antidepressant that lessened my libido, and, at other times, I just didn’t care to fuck anybody for a minute. When I’ve lost the signal for sexual frequency, in terms of both my erotic brain-buzzings and the rapidity with which I broadcast them outward, I have learned that it’s best to not freak out and think,
I hate sex now forever, I guess???!!!
which would be fine but has never, historically, been the case. (Although wouldn’t it be kind of hilarious if this book came out and then I got me to a nunnery?) When I do that, I’m berating myself for something I have found is ultimately instead kind of a sexual boon, and always a mental one. I am talking about a labial lie-low, the denial of all things penile, an extended hormonal holiday—whatever your anatomy, you’ll be able to recognize it: the classic boning breather known (by me) as the Celibration.