Bad Sex: The 20-Year-Old Virgin
by Porochista Khakpour
August 29, 2005
You Are Different. So Are We. This was the informal motto of Sarah Lawrence College, where I got a BA in nothing (we didn't have majors) after getting no grades (written evals only) based on no tests (just essays). They pied-pipered the spectrum of fringe high schoolers with that motto. You were hazed into their differentness before you ever got there.
My freshman dorm was an English Tudor cottage known as "The Virgin Dorms." You're supposed to be able to hear the high-pitched guffaw of generations of spoiled rich girls here. At SLC, virginity was charming, silly, aesthetically irresistible. It was '50s-cat's-eye-glasses, white gloves and mink stoles. It was totally adorable — as long as it was totally not real.
This was a school renowned for its impromptu orgies and sex soirees, where the 70/30 ratio of women to men would mean lesbianism was just another "whatever" decision. In all my years there, I encountered not a single virgin female. Everybody was pansexual and/or nymphomaniacal and/or "queer."
I, however, was quite heterosexual. This was a problem, since homosexuality and its various incarnations were the law of the land at SLC. If you had the audacity — or backward taste — to be a Straight gal, you were supposed to avoid Straight Guys, since they were obvious agents of the Conservative White Wonderbread Patriarchy. They got plenty of action anyway. They were in demand in a black-market sort of way.
Errol seemed as standard as SLC Straight Guys came: Mayflower ancestry, read only obscure French novels, glass half-to-completely empty, vegan except for sushi, fluent in French and Italian, abstract experimental/early punk/Euro lounge only, turtlenecks, no athletics. I first spotted him as the only other wallflower at the school's annual Coming-Out Dance. We made intense eye contact before he was dragged away by a mohawked blonde. After bumping into each other on the train back to Manhattan, I invited him to tea in my Virgin Dorm the next day.
A few hours into our spiked Earl Greys, our clothes came off, as expected, and I was offering Errol a dish of condoms as if they were candy. Not as expected, he froze. He just stared at the condoms with a mixture of no comprende and yikes, like they were exotic currency.
"Surely, dude, you don't think we're, like, not going to use protection?" I finally said, in my best Sarah-Lawrence-ese. We all had cultivated voices to channel early Audrey Hepburn with a touch of West-Coast-Riot-Grrrl-alumna.
"No need," he finally said with rehearsed confidence.
I put the condoms away, and we continued with a long session of all acts that end in the word "job." Afterward, I asked him what the hell had happened.
"Oh, it's just that," he paused as if thinking just how to put it, "you know, I don't do," pausing again, this time with a devilish grin as if about to utter something sexy, "It."
He was not celibate, not asexual, not gay. He was just not into It. Why? I asked. Errol gave me a long lecture on how that was what separated us from mammals, that biological sex was anti-progress, that it was embarrassing to imagine all simpleton earthlings doing It for the sake of It, that it was commercial,
pedestrian, perfunctory. "I'll leave it to the one day I really find it imperative to," he said, pausing to wrinkle his nose in deep disgust, "baby-make."
I found myself nodding, mesmerized. Of course! Sexual intercourse was for fucking babymakers! It was 1996 in the avant-garde-lite academy of Sarah Lawrence—of course this was the type of reasoning that would appeal to any artsy, free-spirited, grunge-era-matriculated feminist. This was what "experimenting" in college was all about. No sex was the new sex!
Errol and I formed a cult of sexual pioneers — he the leader, I the lone disciple. Errol became an evangelist of outercourse, constantly scheming for new ways and new places to come: hands, mouth, sheets, toys, the odd piece of fruit, basically anything other than vaginal walls. Every session was a triumphant fist-in-the-air moment for the movement.
News of our anti-activities spread. Straight Girls and Lesbians worshipped Errol for having the ingenuity to keep penetration out of the equation. Straight Guys and lesbians adored me for being so open-minded and acquiescent, like a magician's lovely assistant who volunteers to get cut up in a coffin over and over.
We kept the campus rumor mill fed with our loud orgasms in the library video rooms, our artillery of sex toys poking out of our bags, our German porn videos tucked into our armpits in place of theory textbooks. Errol and I would sometimes do demos in preferred foreplay — for instance, eyeball-licking — before a breathless crowd, and I would actually feel something like turned on. Well, charged, at least, like static-ridden-laundry.
For a semester, we were the future.
And when the immediate future snuck up on us — Summer Break — we accepted our separation calmly. Marathon phone-sextravaganza! Errol offered optimistically. No contact, no problem!
No problem, except when you leave college and go back to the world of normal people — people with jobs and bills and debt who live in suburban wastelands and drive bad American cars, and are related to you — you are forced to come to terms with who you are. You Are Not Different. It's ugly. You remind yourself no rich Daddy paid your way there — you're the sole Virgin Dormee on scholarship. Your parents actually eat meat and potatoes — no macrobiotic options at this cafeteria. All the differences come crashing down, and there you are: pony-tailed, in jean shorts and Adidas, eating fries with your primary-school best friend in the local McDonald's parking lot, realizing that no, sexual intercourse is just what your people do.
But summer was not forever. Sophomore year began, and I was back in old form — deconstructed dress shirts, metallic lipstick, gartered fishnets — and picking at cafeteria sashimi with golden chopsticks while chain-smoking Nat Sherman Fantasias. Errol greeted me with a cluster of artistically arranged hickeys on my neck. He had made some exciting purchases, he wanted me to know: a shiny anal vibrator, not to mention hermaphrodite porn from Prague. It was all back to abnormal!
But the thing was, I felt suddenly rusty about our old ways. The rationale was foggier than before. Our audience was gone. There was a whole new flock of Virgin Dormees for the campus to corrupt. What use were we now?
Still, it never occurred to me to doubt Errol until a mutual friend approached me and asked me last year's question: why I thought Errol would do everything but It anyway.
I was still a cult member. I beamed dumbly like a TomKat-era Katie Holmes, far too indoctrinated in my partner's ways for self-consciousness or shame. "That vaginal-intercourse shit is so our parents' generation, so old school, so mainstream, you know?!"
Mutual Friend groaned, having heard our shtick too much by now. "I think you should know that your man is not some genius sex artist. He's a virgin."
I laughed. Oh, how I laughed! Too loud, too long, for what felt like hours, days even, weeks, that laughter of delirious deluded women everywhere. The idea drove me nuts. It was so painfully obvious, and yet I had never examined the fine print beneath Errol's preferences. Virginity was one thing when tagged stylishly to a girl's dorm room, but to a guy — the horror! Adult males were just not virgins!
So, then what? The answer was standing in front of me: cheat on him. With Mutual Friend, who was incredibly average by real-world standards and therefore exotic at SLC: wears Levi's! Irish-Midwest stock! Classic rock! Guinness! Soccer! Carries a backpack!
Once in MF's room, I took the reins and arranged him on top of me. We proceeded to engage in very biologically programmed, traditional sexual intercourse. Like any first sex, it was off — too fast, too soft, too dry, too quiet, then too loud — but the awkwardness was a beautiful thing to me. In all my time with Errol, I had forgotten that I loved Intercourse the Ritual. With MF, I felt the blood rush to my face and body. I was human again.
Suddenly, I became that secretly coveted thing, The Girlfriend. We did it once a day. I got infections. I considered oral contraceptives. Upon the first condom rupture, I skipped to the nurse's office and expressed pregnancy panic like I was collecting a Girl Scout badge. When I downed the morning-after pill with a swig of beer, it was like being home again. I was with a man who did It and had done It before, an It never exceeding anything more than pure, simple, the-way-your-grandparents-did-it, mediocre Intercoursing!
Meanwhile, Errol disappeared. Onward to some new disciple, I'm sure. I always thought of him as my virgin, but I suppose I could never prove it. In an anthropology class that year, I learn that only in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands of South Africa can tribal leaders determine male virginity through a simple physical exam. Not only can they detect a "male hymen," they can tell by how you pee (projectile-stream = virgin; messy spray = done It) and by the shade of your knees versus your legs.
In Errol's case, it's a shame eyeballs don't tell tales.
Copyright 2005, by Porochista Khakpour