Years ago, I argued with a friend online about memoirs. Why did every single memoir/autobiography have to talk about their awkward coming of age sex? It was pretty much all the same, forgettable, awkward, unfortunate, or embarrassing, and so this meant that it probably wasn't true, in which case, why include it? OR, it was true, and the person that they're describing KNOWS who they are, in which case, why include it? (Exceptions, when it was exploitative, and therefore a major plot point.)
She didn't really have an answer, because she hadn't looked at the point of view of the writer. She'd always been the reader, who was reading a lot more queer coming-of-age and YA stories than I was, and felt that those stories were important as reflections of queer experiences and voices. I would agree that's important, but I still can't forgive David Sedaris any story he has ever told about anyone he has ever had a sexual encounter with, and hope that all of them are lies.
As always, I have a wealth of knowledge, but dearth of experience- 11 years with one person will do that to you. Well. If that person is basically selfish.
It didn't start out that way. Exactly.
I don't intend to tell a bunch of awkward sex stories, not involving anybody else, anyway. I've read enough to know that mine are mostly unremarkable. The most unusual one only serves as a warning had I known enough to recognise it. It's hard to recognise unusual when everything around you is the weirdest thing you've seen outside the Internet.
This is the flip side of the previous entry. In spite of being absolutely terrified, I'm not any less curious than I've ever been. And still more knowledgeable. Having a casual conversation with a friend, and you have to stop in the middle of a series of "OK, this conversation is going here," jokes and explain one of them.
Back before birth control was covered by my insurance, I ran a cost analysis on the pill vs. condoms and worked out that to break even instead of buying condoms, it would require more than once a day. This was at a point in which I was making much, much fewer tick marks on the calendar than thirty. Oddly, this was the reason I was doing the analysis- keeping track of two irregular cycles synced on an off-set lunar phase on a calendar was the only way to rule out the possibility of error (which is a complicated and euphemistic way of saying, "when you only have sex twice a month AT BEST and your period's irregular, it's really, really fucking hard to be relatively certain that you're not pregnant"). The complaints about the calendar led me to say, "OK, fine, the pill is more effective than condoms. If you feel like I'm judging you, let me determine whether it's worth the money to find something more effective, or I can keep using the calendar."
This is an area of my life where I don't want to have the kind of control I have over every other area. I don't want it to rely around spreadsheets and calendars. That's how I work. I'd rather have sex the way I read, but that's a metaphor I don't think I want to continue to explain.
It's frustrating.
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