Christine Emba - Rethinking Sex : A Provocation

In my freshman year of college, I started dating a junior. My friends had watched our artless flirtations across sticky beer pong tables and charted with interest our extended study sessions at the dimmest libraries around campus. One weekend night, after Id been conspicuously absent from my undersized dorm room the evening before (for once, my long-suffering roommate was allowed to fall asleep without first enduring the two a.m. recitation of my interactions with the various interesting guys in our dining hall), my lewdest, drunkest friend smirked at me over a Solo cup sloshing with watery Milwaukees Best.

So, Jacob demanded, loudly enough to catch the interest of our underage bartender, who immediately began to listen in. Did you... handle... the peen? The question was accompanied by a bizarre two-handed gesture akin to testing the casing of a giant sausage or fingering the keys of a clarinet. It stopped me in my tracks.

My friends and I burst into horrified laughter, which saved me the embarrassment of having to reply. No, I definitely had not been handling my new boyfriends penis, and definitely not in the alarmingly visceral manner that was being implied. And I wouldnt, not for years.

The average American millennial has their sexual debut around the age of seventeen. I came onstage more than a decade later than that: I was saving myself for marriage. I grew up an evangelical Christian, and converting to Catholicism in collegeat a time when many of my similarly brought-up peers were leaning out of the traditionalist religions of their youthcemented that decision, at least for several more years.

Its not that I didnt want to have sex in all that timeI did, sometimes desperately. I didnt escape my colleges hookup scene untouched, and several boyfriends worth of on-the-edge encounters left me (and them, Im sure) furious at myself for my stance. I ran up against my commitments in narrow dorm bunk beds and on first-apartment mattresses laid on the floor, wrapped in the hot, rumpled sheets of those New York City summer nights that seemed made for the crush of bodies. My whispered nos left me feeling more and more outside the current as the years passed.

Despite my perpetual virginity, my non-sex-having twenties were full of sex, even if I wasnt the one having it. Countless brunch conversations revolved around my friends experiences with the men and women in their lives and their processing of what every moment and movement meant. I was goggled at whenever I revealed my uneventful celibacy to a new friend and was frequently (and often reproachfully) lectured on how I was missing out.

What I heard again and again was contradiction: Having sex was a marker of adulthood and a way to define yourselfbut also, the act itself didnt really matter. Good sex was the consummate experiencebut a relationship with your partner was not to be expected. It was nearly impossible not to indulge your desires, and extended celibacy was a state near unto deathyet I could and did say no and was clearly still alive.

I didnt end up waiting until marriage to have sex. I held on to my abstinence for a while and then let it go, after emerging from a failed relationship and wrestling with my own faith. I stayed Catholic, but sex went from something longed for and maybe slightly feared to something far more down-to-earth. Still, from my unusual vantage pointoutside the postvirginal circle, then insidethe narratives around sex seemed deeply confused.

Maybe these stories sound familiar to you:

• Thinking that we should be having sex, even when we dont really desire it, because thats the impression society gives usand thus seeing ourselves as incomplete, abnormal, or fallen behind if we arent doing it, even when were nothing of the sort.

• Having sex that we dont really want for reasons that we dont fully agree with far more often than we would likebut also thinking that thats just how it goes, and that it would be unreasonable to ask for more.

• Feeling jaded and discouraged by the romantic landscape, its lack of trust, emotion, and commitmentbut also feeling as though other options arent reachable or even realistic.

• Experiencing too much of the kind of sex that saps the spirit and makes us feel less human, not moresex that leaves us detached, disillusioned, or just dissatisfied.

• Knowing that something in our sex and dating culture is somehow off, and wishing that things were differenteven if we dont know exactly why we feel this way or how to make the shift to something better.

Hopes are high, outcomes trend low. Social expectations seem at odds with our true desires. And for something meant to bring pleasure, sex is causing a lot of pain.

It feels as though we have accepted many of these disappointments as normalunfortunate but not criminal, the cost of doing business even after #MeToo. Yet things dont have to be criminal to be profoundly bad. And the fact that so many of the women around me relate so deeply to stories of harrowing dates and lackluster encounters shows that a lot of us are having a lot of bad sex. Unwanted, depressing, even traumatic: if this is ordinary, something is deeply wrong.

The goal of this book is to reassure you that youre not crazy. That the thing you sense is wrong is wrong. That there is something unmistakably off in the way weve been going about sex and dating.