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Spring is here (so they tell us, although the chill wind whistling up my skirt rather belies this fact!) and in Spring a young man's fancy turns to love. Well that's what the old cliche says. Utter cobblers, of course... it is LUST that comes to the forefront of people's minds at this time of year, not love at all. Love is for the cold dark winter months, when cuddling up with your Significant Other in front of a blazing log fire seems an infinitely more attractive prospect than cruising the bars; but at the first hint of sunshine we shed our winter woollies with sybaritic abandon and prepare for fornication. There's something about the sight of the crocuses emerging from the newly-green ground, the daffodils unfurling their little yellow trumpets, the bunny rabbits poking their shy little noses out of their burrows to sniff the Spring air, that makes the blood pound in your veins and rush straight to your genitals! |
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I remember the first time I ever had sex. My mother walked into the bedroom while my boyfriend was wrestling with the used condom. I don't know which of us was more shocked. I suppose everybody always remembers their first time... mainly because it is usually such a fiasco! I don't know about boys, but girls are brought up to expect so much from sex. It is supposed to be a beautiful, meaningful experience that transports us to new levels of transcendental joy. Well that's what it says in all the magazines and books. So the reality, as you can imagine, is a bit of a come-down. (Literally - you don't come so you feel down.) Instead of the orgasmic bliss I had been promised by Cosmopolitan magazine, it was a lot of sweating and groaning, and a wet patch on the sheets! An anti-climax rather than a climax. I blame education. I mean, no-one would dream of letting a 17-year old loose on the roads without taking a driving test. Lessons teach you the way to cook gourmet meals. For most things it is accepted that you need to learn the necessary skills. But with sex - well, sex education lessons teach all you ever wanted to know about how chickens reproduce, a little of the mechanics of childbirth, a few dire warnings about nasty diseases, and that's it! Nothing about the techniques you should use. No hints on which bits to fondle to produce the desired effect! The first time I used my hands to get a rise out of a man, so to speak, I was quite shocked. It went all hard, he started moaning, and I thought I'd done him a serious injury. Presumably you are supposed to pick it up as you go along. Well I didn't exactly find that approach satisfactory and my friends and I would have benefited from the A-Z of Sex being added to the required reading lists. As it was our only source of information was reading books like "Confessions of a Window Cleaner" which doesn't really give one a detailed insight into the location and function of erogenous zones. Also, we were taught nothing about how to go about finding sexual partners. When I was an adolescent that was the over-riding concern of everyone my age (and judging by the conversations on various Internet chat services, the youth of today has exactly the same problems!). Perhaps sex education lessons should include a course on decent chat-up lines; or how to stop yourself blushing and hiding under the table when someone you fancy walks into the room. Of course, having worked out a few of the more basic techniques (How Do I Do It?) and found a willing sexual partner (Who Do I Do It With?), the problems are not over. There is the big question - Where Do I Do It? Home is not usually the best choice (parents being their usual restrictive selves) so all sorts of novel and inventive locations have to be resorted to. Heavy petting in the back row of the cinema is one solution, although you are liable to spill the popcorn and it can restrict your enjoyment of the film. Saturday night watching the weekly X-Rated film was considered the height of daring in my day. Particularly for us under-18s who had to sneak in hoping the usherettes wouldn't ask to see our birth certificates. I always thought it was odd that we were considered old enough to make love, but not to watch films of other people doing it. The most obvious location, when I was an adolescent, was the back seat of a car. No problem if Daddy owns a Range Rover which you have borrowed for the evening... even less if you are lucky enough to own a double-decker bus... but can you imagine attempting to screw in a Morris Minor? Believe me, it is not easy. Bits of the car tend to get lodged in bits of the body, usually at a crucial moment in the proceedings. Of course, once you have decided it is feasible (if not exactly comfortable) to use the back seat of the mini, provided one partner sticks his or her feet out of the window and the other props her or his legs up on the steering wheel... where do you park the car whilst all this is going on? Somehow the carpark outside the local cinema doesn't seem quite suitable. A deserted country lane would be ideal, but there aren't that many in London. Otherwise you just have to hope the windows mist up pretty damn quick! And if you don't have the use of a car, what can you do? Dive into the bushes in your local park for a snog and a grope, risking discovery by the local police, or thistles in sensitive spots. Eventually one grows up enough to enjoy the luxury of actually having sex in a real bed. And then to actually spending a whole night together, rather than fumbling round the room in the dark looking for discarded clothing, and tiptoeing off into the night. It's also when you discover the horrors of spending a whole night in the same bed with someone who steals the duvet, takes up three-quarters of the bed, snores, and has cold feet. It's only when you have the freedom to take sex at a more leisurely pace - and to actually take off all your clothes and lie down flat - that you have time to refine your technique and discover all the things you were never taught at school. Unfortunately, by this time the bad habits have probably set in for life, and no amount of thumbing through sex-manuals will change things. For example - a little statistic here - did you know that the average length of time heterosexual couples spend making love is 4.2 minutes? That's including foreplay! And don't forget, if that is the AVERAGE, some couples must be faster than the speed of light. It takes me longer than that just to decide whether it is warm enough to take my socks off. Perhaps they use sex to time their eggs in the morning. But how on earth did the researchers (whoever they were) come up with this statistic? Did they hide under peoples beds, with stopwatches poised? Or did they just ask people? You can imagine it can't you - market researchers stopping people in the street... "Excuse me Madam, I wonder if you can tell me how long you spend making love?" "Well, usually it is around the 5 minute mark, but last week I was feeling a bit under the weather so my husband was very considerate and made sure he finished up in about 2.8 minutes, so that brings the average down a bit..." And why did they bother? I mean, it's not a good idea to approach a sexual encounter looking to break a few world records. Although it might jazz up the next Olympic games... |
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