Bad Sex: The 20-Year-Old Virgin

At my liberal arts college, no sex was the new sex.

By Porochista Khakpour

You Are Different. So Are We.

This was the informal motto of Sarah Lawrence College, where I got a B.A. in nothing (we didn't have majors) after getting no grades (written evaluations 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 meant that 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. 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 Wonder Bread Patriarchy. But they got plenty of action anyway. They were in demand in a black-market sort of way.

Errol seemed pretty standard for a SLC Straight Guy: 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 to Manhattan, I invited him to tea in my Virgin Dorm the next day.

As expected, a few hours into our spiked Earl Greys, our clothes came off 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 comprendo 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 Riot Grrrl.

"No need," he 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 he were about to utter something sexy, "It."

Errol was not celibate, not asexual, not gay. He was just not into It. Why? I had to know. He gave me a long lecture about how 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. Sexual intercourse was for fucking babymakers! It was 1996 in the avant-garde-lite academy of Sarah Lawrence — of course this reasoning would appeal to any 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 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. The 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, the artillery of sex toys poking out of our bags, our German porn videos tucked under our armpits in place of theory textbooks. Errol and I would sometimes perform demonstrations of preferred foreplay — for instance, eyeball-licking. Highly erogenous! Errol would proclaim, breaking it down:

Step One: Tilt receiver's head and hold.

Two: Breathe on their face. This is sexy.

Three: Have them open eyes wide — no blinking.

Four: Since that's often not possible, force their eyelids open. 

Five: Collect saliva around own tongue, not to soak but to lube.

Six: Withdraw tongue in firm form. No Gene Simmons knife-tongue, but not the soggy-nugget dip, either — a solid, resolute tongue ready for some eyeball. Very sexy.

Seven: Descend lightly upon middle of eyeball. Go forward lightly, then go back in two strokes.

I’d groan ecstatically, mmmmm incredible, hon, before a breathless crowd, and I’d 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!