Sex Essay
"Between Friends: Let's Talk About Sex" by Callie Byrne
Dedicated to my fabulous intern and friend-in-the-making, N.
You know how there are certain women out there who you just click with? You meet all kinds - friends of friends, business associates, wives of friends, wives of your husband's (or boyfriend's) friends. You pass the pleasantries, smile and laugh at the right times, wondering if you'll end up truly connecting with this woman or if you're destined to remain "close acquaintances" for the duration of your "friendship."
And then it happens. She says something real, something that you can connect with and relate to on an honest level. It makes you laugh.
Something like, "I hate our new claw-footed bathtub, we can't get proper leverage."
Or,
"Morning sex is the worst! It's like he just rolls over and grabs the closest thing to him."
You know you can truly be friends when you can talk sex.
I had just such as experience this afternoon. In my other life, I have a respectable office job. I had a meeting with a coworker, and after a glass of wine, the conversation turned unexpectedly and pleasantly towards "unrespectable" things not having to do with work at all.
Yes. Sex.
Suddenly, I found myself telling her things I hadn't even told my closest friends. How can a feminist, pro-woman, author of erotica, "sexually healthy" woman ever admit that she's been faking orgasms for over a year? And worse - as a result, hasn't had a vaginal orgasm in equally as long?
When I heard the words spilling out of my mouth, I realized how truly important it is to connect with other women about these things.
Is that why Sex and the City was so popular? It was as if a country of women could sit down every week and watch four women say the most personal things about their sex lives, and somehow these women were transformed into everyone's close, favorite friends. We could laugh at Samantha commenting on her boyfriend's funky tasting "spunk" without fear of embarrassment or judgment.
And just as important, as my new friend N pointed out, the show gave us all a way to talk about our own sex lives. We could bring up what happened in the latest episode, and it was an acceptable segue into the real topic at hand: our own stories, problems or questions.
For some women, this kind of conversation comes easy. For others, it's hard to let those words even form in the mind, let alone come across the threshold of tongue and teeth. But for every woman, whether she admits it or not, sharing, especially about sex, is important.
Why is it important for women to talk about sex? I have a theory... as of yet unresearched...but it goes something like this. Men's sexuality is not uncharted territory. Men enjoy strip clubs with women disrobed and dancing for their pleasure, pornography up the hoo hoo, dates for hire and prostitutes in every city. From Ancient Rome, where men enjoyed orgies tailored to their every desire, to the Japanese with wives at home and geishas at the teahouses, waiting to stimulate them both mentally and physically, men have enjoyed many venues in which to explore sex.
Women have not had such ample opportunity to explore their own sexuality - to dabble in the many different sexual experiences - until recently. Many of us predominantly learn about sex (and thus about ourselves) from conversations with our friends.
We live our lives with an idea of how sex should be... what a healthy sex life looks like. We have an ideology, beliefs about equality between men and women and what that looks like in the bedroom. But when we turn to our own beds and our own lovers, those ideas and ideologies are often bent, challenged, twisted (even by ourselves) and changed. How can we work this out except by talking about it? And if not with our friends, than with who?
And so, it is in this spirit that I write: this column is dedicated to women. Women who have sex. Women who think about sex. Women who talk about it and women who don't. Women who have friends, need friends and who are friends. This is all between friends.
Originally published June 2007 - "Body Art"