Lesbian Sex With Men
This is about the first time I had sex with a guy, after I’d finally started having sex with women.
And it’s about how having sex with women radically changed the way I have sex. With everybody. Men, women, everybody.
Here’s what happened. I was making out with this friend of mine. Male. And this was clearly not the “just fooling around” variety of making out. This was the “lead-up to having sex” variety. We’d actually decamped from another friend’s living room, where things had gotten started, and gone back to his place to keep things going. This was “making out, otherwise known as foreplay.”
So we were making out on his sofa, getting increasingly hot and heavy . . . when for no apparent reason, his momentum slowed down. Like, a lot. Trying to figure out what the heck was happening, I asked if he wanted to get a condom and go into the bedroom . . . and he said, with obvious embarrassment, that he’d already come, while we were making out.
(I think it had been a while since he’d had sex.)
And here’s where the “having had sex with women” part comes in.
Before I’d started having sex with women, my reaction to a guy’s premature ejaculation had been pretty traditional: disappointment, frustration, embarrassment on his behalf, attempts to soothe his ego, feeling like I’d done something wrong.
But this time, my reaction was to say, casually and matter-of-factly, “Oh. Well, is that any reason to stop?”
I wasn’t trying to make a statement or anything. I honestly didn’t even think about it. I certainly wasn’t thinking of it in terms of, “this is the great lesson I have learned from having sex with women.” It was just an automatic, instinctive reaction.
But it was an automatic, instinctive reaction that was the complete opposite of the one I would have had a year or two before. It was an automatic, instinctive reaction that had been shaped by the sex I’d been having with women — sex in which one person’s orgasm didn’t stop the whole train, but was simply one of many sights on a long and eventful excursion.
And here’s the thing I found especially interesting:
When I said it, he was relieved.
He wasn’t angry, or annoyed, or anything even remotely approaching angry or annoyed. He was relieved. He was happy.
He didn’t want our encounter to be just about his orgasm, either. Especially since it had fired off before either of us was ready. “Is that any reason to stop?” was a way we could do that. It was a way he could feel good about our encounter, like a sexy, sensitive, open-minded lover instead of a gawky klutz who couldn’t control himself. And it was a way we could keep on having sex. It was a way we could actually have sex that night, instead of an aborted make-out session.
And we did.
I don’t even remember if we wound up fucking per se. But we had sex. Wonderful, sweet, delicious sex. For a good long while. An hour or two, if I recall correctly. With many sights on a long and eventful excursion.
Now, of course, you don’t need to be bisexual to learn this lesson. Lots of straight people figure out that sex doesn’t necessarily equal fucking, or even fucking and sucking. Lots of straight people figure out that the presence of an erect penis is not necessary for sex to count as sex.
But lots of other straight people never figure that out. Even today, even in our post- Monica- Lewinksy, “it depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is” era, the default definition of sex is still, “a hard dick going inside a hole.”
And I think it’s important to remember that this state of affairs doesn’t just suck for women. It sucks for men, too. My friend was so disappointed and embarrassed that his premature ejaculation had screeched our evening to a halt . . . and he was so relieved and happy to be offered the idea that it didn’t have to. The obsessive spotlight on the hard dick as the sole focal point and defining feature of sex . . . it makes for some seriously unsatisfied women, of course, but I think it’s a raw deal for men as well. It’s too much pressure on one little organ.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I think my point is just this: An awful lot of people, of all genders and orientations, would benefit from the kind of sex that lesbians take as a given. The kind of sex where success isn’t overwhelmingly defined by one partner’s “performance.” The kind of sex that doesn’t make a sharp distinction between “foreplay” and “sex,” and that doesn’t have a strong opinion about which has to happen first. The kind of sex where the journey is the destination.
I don’t know where my friend is now. But I hope he remembers. I hope he remembers as fondly as I do. And I hope that from that night on, whenever he couldn’t get hard, or came before he wanted to, he was able to smile and say to his lover, “Well, is that any reason to stop?”
This entry was posted on Friday, 25 January 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Friday, 25 January 2008 at 3:54 am RT wrote:
Hm, really not sure bout the feelings I’ve had after reading your experiences. At first I was pretty impressed by the way you’ve handled what might have become a bad ending for a make out for both of you, but I’m not with you on the general meaning you point out in your last part.
I think a lot of disappointment results of men who cant handle themself, and most of them barely recognize that their game was more or less so-so, as women unfo tend to pretend everythings allright when in fact it is not even somewhat near that. I’ve met a lot of girls in the past that broke up with their relationships after several month, because of having unfullfilling sex all the time but hoping that things somehow may improve over time. Its a myth, barely nothing improves over time.
What I try to point out is, that pressure can be very important to keep a man get to work on himself. Of cause it wont help when the mess is there and in fact worsen the situation, but if “evaluation” of ones own performance is left to a mans mind, he wont win any award for a realistic crit. Wouldn’t even been nominated.
Guess you have to even both reactions out, some well-placed pressure to get a man focussed and some laisser-faire in the right situations…
on Friday, 25 January 2008 at 9:13 am John Murdock wrote:
I am a guy who sometimes has issues with PE.
One thing I noticed though was that while my first ejaculation often came rather quickly, I could still maintain my erection and continue to engage in sexual activity.
What I learned to do was to work around it. Knowing that my first ejaculation would happen very early on, I would perform oral sex on my wife while having her masturbate me. With my erection still going strong, we would then engage in intercourse, and I would last much longer than if I tried to engage in intercourse before the first ejaculation. Not only that, but when I came the second time, the sensation was so much stronger and better.
You are absolutely right. Both men and women seemed conditioned to think that as soon as a man shoots his load that it has to mean a disappointing and abrupt end to a sexual encounter. It absolutely does not have to be that way at all.
on Friday, 25 January 2008 at 9:17 pm Myk wrote:
And one of the main things that conditions us to think that male ejaculation is the end of the sex show is crappy, formulaic porn.
It’s something I really need to fight. Sometimes I end up not having an orgasm at all, because I avoid coming early, and then later on I get tired, lose my erection and can’t get it back.
on Saturday, 26 January 2008 at 2:54 am Jon Petersen wrote:
Yea! I love it when a person is honest enough with themselves that they can distinguish between sex and fucking! If it takes a hard cock to have sex, why were we given fingers? Where did the concept of ‘male ejaculation = no more fucking tonight’ come from anyway? How do we know for sure that his orgasm was premature? It could have been right on time and the rest of us were just late getting there to join in. There’s so many unanswered questions about sex that simply don’t need to be asked in the first place. If things aren’t going like you’ve always heard they should, just keep on practicing. If we are fooling around together and you cum too soon 5 or 6 times in a couple of hours, what was wrong about it anyway?
on Saturday, 26 January 2008 at 11:14 am Joreth wrote:
I think there is a world of difference between “evaluation” and the all-encompassing pressure that a hard dick is the *only* source of pleasure and sex. Gently guiding your partner and explaining the specific kinds of things you like should also be part of a healthy sexual relationship. But the idea that the sex is *only* fullfilling / good / enjoyable / real when his dick is hard and remains hard, that the goal of sex is the almost-mythical mutual orgasm (and is not complete without it), or that the orgasm has to come from PIV penetration exactly 1.3 hours into the act, is harmful to the sexual relationship and to the individual psyche and emotional well-being of the individuals involved.
Thank you again, Greta, for writing something that so eloquently explains my own ideas on a difficult topic. I would like to use some of your words in my own journal and refer back to this article.
on Monday, 28 January 2008 at 6:18 am charlotte wrote:
“The kind of sex where the journey is the destination.”
i found this sentence very interesting.
i heard somewhere once that when going somewhere, no matter where, males are more inclined to concentrate solely on the destination, while females tend to focus on the journey.
therefore, it doesn’t surprise me at all that lesbian sex could be called “the kind of sex where the journey is the destination.”
funnily enough, while reading this blog post, my gf was flicking through some porn on a few sites online, and the majority of the gay male porn videos were less than a minute long, whilst the lesbian porn was mostly at least ten minutes…
if men (regardless of orientation) were able to realise that sex does not (have to) have a “destination” it could be a lot more enjoyable. for them and their partners. and i’m sure there are a lot of women out there who could benefit from this realisation too!!
on Wednesday, 4 November 2009 at 3:11 pm [Greta Christina] 101 Positions That Won’t Spice Up Your Sex Life | Blowfish Blog wrote:
[…] But sexual variety can mean so much more than rotating your bodies in different configurations before inserting Prong A into Slot B. And these books seem blind to these possibilities. They hardly ever talk about erogenous zones outside the obvious ones. They hardly ever talk about dirty talk, dirty outfits, foreplay (or, as we dykes like to call it, “sex”), sex toys, slowing things down, speeding things up, role-playing . . . all that good stuff. […]
on Thursday, 5 November 2009 at 8:52 pm Michael wrote:
Greta, I read this post when it first came out and loved it. Now, rereading it almost 2 years later it still has the same profound meaning for society at large and the ways people harm themselves with non-useful ideas about sex.
I reckon it’s a classic — and you should extend the “if you only read three things” section on your other blog to 4!
on Tuesday, 2 March 2010 at 3:21 am mssexyblack wrote:
I think a woman first orgasm should be by masturbation maybe oral copulation but never strictly penetration