The Good of Bad Sex

Drew Barrymore once said at the end of Never Been Kissed: “To write well, you must write what you know.” Sex is central to relationships, and disastrous relationships seem to be a trend in my life, so it seems only fitting to write about less-than-ideal sex.

There is so much pressure to have a fulfilling sex life these days; it is the never ending subject of my fashion magazines, rubbed in my face during Gossip Girl (when I realise that I may never have passionate sex with Chuck Bass) and even in my 18th century French literature class, when it becomes clear to me that even lesbians in convents were having better sex than me.
Is it me? Am I just one of those women who will never achieve the “never ending orgasm” that my weird-sex-obsessed friend has promised is possible?

Upset, Confused, Lost, I stumbled across an article in GLAMOUR magazine that would give me answers to the questions I hadn’t dare asked. Then it all became clear - It wasn’t me. It was HIM. It was all the men I had ever slept with. Out of the 8 key problems identified, ranging from “what if he tastes weird?” to “he’s HUGE”, I could identify with most of them. I had experience a range of mishaps from the sexual spectrum of bad-sex inducing problems. Yup, I had had the too big, the quite small, the silent type, the hurling monkey.

I feel like the article failed to tackle some important issues – for example, how should you prevent yourself from laughing if an elbow is being used to massage what he thinks is your clitoris but is actually your pee-hole? Is it okay to shout at your boyfriend if he throws your back out during sex in the shower?

Even when it came to the more general questions, I felt GLAMOUR didn’t offer the right answers – what if I didn’t feel like making a sex video to show my partner that his sex face turned me off? What if I didn’t feel like waking up at 6am to make avocado smoothies to alter the taste of my boyfriend’s semen?

If you think about it, it is undoubtely the man’s fault. Of course, the woman could, if she wished to do so, improve the quality of the sex but can’t fundamentally do anything bad. That’s why I think “Virgin Schools” should be compulsory for all young men; a nice, healthy environment where they could look an accurate geography of the vagina and learn to be selfless lovers.

Until that happens, I guess we’re all screwed. But what’s so bad about bad sex? At least its entertaining and let’s face it, it can never be that bad. Maybe the magazines were wrong – why should I go on a special diet to help tone my pelvic floor when I’d rather eat my own weight in Reese’s Cups? I’m not sure any sex could justify the torture that would be a month of steamed fish and red cabbage.

When I think of myself, alone in a world full of good-sex-Nazis pressuring me to try adventurous sexual positions and use scary looking sex toys, I comfort myself by recounting a saying said to me by one of my best friends - “The most overrated thing in the world is sex, and the most underrate thing is a good bowel movement”.