There was a time when sex felt … meh. It didn’t feel natural and it definitely didn’t look like humans, specially our ancestors could keep doing it over generations to create us.
It seemed to me that sex was a skill. A transferable skill, like Excel and PowerPoint, I felt it had to be learnt, and I could. And four years back, I felt like I totally sucked when it came to sex, no pun intended.
After all, you had to rely on another person. You have your whims, they have theirs. It’s like trying to time a window where both partners would be interested in doing it at the same time, the same 1 hour window - never.
Since the window was slim, the ordeal felt harder to achieve. It felt like a sacrifice one had to go through in order to make sex happen. Person A isn’t interested? Sex is off the table, no matter how horny Person B is. Person B is now interested, but Person A has dozed off and has work tomorrow? No go.
When sex feels like work, even being there to receive Amazon packages at 9 AM is a big deal. If you hate your job, you’d love to wake up late, go to your work late, dilly dally in getting onto the subway, and most of all, you’d love taking frequent bathroom breaks and longer lunch breaks. Propping your bag up on your shoulder and waiting for the clock to strike 5 PM before making a run is easier, too.
At this stage, even initiating sex will feel like jumping through ten hoops as a circus monkey, except now you’re tired and would be grateful enough if food landed on your plate magically, and you could fall asleep in 10 minutes after hitting the bed. That would be a record.
Such is the feeling with sex, when it’s not something you enjoy, yet. You buy the lube, but you never use it. You buy the time, but you never initiate it. You subscribed to porn, but you never watch it. Trust me, it’s as ridiculous as it sounds. Sex is complicated. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Sex, like any other feeling like hunger and thirst, is a need. Technically, you’ll not die without it, but without it, you can’t live a fulfilling life. If you are a person who has sexual urges but never gets to fulfil it in any way, it might feel almost devastating. You’ll not be able to pin that emptiness to a particular problem. You’ll just feel like that puzzle player who can’t find the 1000th piece. Was it under the couch? Was the 1000th piece never delivered in the package? Oh my, why did I never count all the pieces to make sure before I started the puzzle? Feels like such a sick joke, doesn’t it? So close, yet so far away. And it feels totally unfair.
Like everything, having sex is like having a muscle. You need to exercise it. You need to know how to use it on command when you need to lift heavy groceries, or do a pull up on a mountain ridge to save your life (okay, that’s just pushing it). Simply put, you need pleasure, and you need to derive it at the right moment. The right moment is whenever you want it, sparing the eyes of the public of course.
If you need sex, you’re not an animal. I mean, well, you are. All of us humans are just that, animals. While we don’t hoot, beat our chest or dance to impress our mates in the jungle like birds and the other great apes, we do pose with a duck-like pouty face to get more likes on Instagram, lingering around a bar stool longer than our curfew, take photos with our friend’s dog to get matches on Tinder, go to the gym to get in shape for a boy or girl we’d like to hit on, and frequent coffee shops with book books while secretly hoping to bump into someone special.
And if you notice the void, you will try and do everything in your power to fill it and close the portal forever. You need sex, but you don’t know it yet. So you try things. You throw money at it. But throwing money at problems, which were psychological to begin with - never solved any problems.
As a woman, most of your private parts are kept under wraps. If not by you, your parents, relatives, neighbours and the entirety of society will take it upon themselves to correct your fashion whenever you’re wearing anything that remotely reveals your skin to the sun. All of the criticism and correction is never direct though. It may come in bites and forms of “Why are you not wearing full trousers? Mosquitoes will bite the heck out of you, you know!”, “You chose a bad day to wear a sleeveless shirt. Have a look at the scorching sun!“. When you’re young, it’ll mostly make you feel that all these people are putting a boulder on their chest, and saying these things out of empathy to help you. When you grow up, you may or may not realise that they, in fact, don’t have an ounce of empathy, but want to control what you wear by taking digs at you in polite, unsuspecting language, when it’s actually their envy in disguise.
So big is the envy, they almost forgot to tell you that as a woman, you have a vagina, and the opposite gender has a penis. In trying to teach equality at school, they forgot to tell you that not everything in fact is equal among you two. In trying to preach how men could wear pink and play with Barbie, they never explained why Barbies didn’t have a dick, but Kens did in real life. In trying to encourage women to play football, they didn’t explain that men had balls and it’s different from the inflated ones they practice with before a football match.
We were never taught about our hardware, how we’re wired different when it comes to displaying our emotions. Instead, we were taught that men chase women, men rescue women, men open doors, men make the first move, and that women kick bad men in the groin, women get jealous, women get robbed, women bring problems, and women get pedicures at the salon. Be it old Hollywood or Bollywood, it’s the same ideal wherever you look. At school they’ll tell you you’re all the same, and when you graduate University, the world will make you feel nothing but at war with each other.
Is it even an epidemic until it gets hard to even stand in the same room as each other and breathe the same air, but feel a pang of loneliness hit you hard when you’re alone and wonder what the hell is it that you’re missing even after taking a fat salary home?
It’s hard enough to sustain a relationship. But I’ll go one more step to say that it’s harder to have sex, just for the sake of a relationship. The first day you’re unpacking sex, and before you know it, it’s a chore. It’s a duty. If you don’t take enough interest in it, you’re labelled as an asexual person, queer, trans or lesbian even, and your bed suddenly goes by the name of dead bedroom, whether you like it or not.
In such moments, you’d expect closure, communication, empathy. You’d spend days thinking, “Why me?”, and gaslighting yourself into believing and sticking all those labels on yourself with a glue gun. You’ll start believing, “Oh, maybe I am an asexual, and I didn’t know”. You’ll start believing that you have successfully ruined the life of your partner by marrying them, or being with them all these years. You’ll start believing that sex really is the oxygen to a relationship, and minus that, no chemistry between you two can ever truly exist.
Back in high school, you faintly remember, they did teach you some things about sex. Stuff about how the male and female reproductive organs each looked. The insanely symmetrical uterus with its fallopian tubes. The penis looking limp, with testicles and a detailed vas deferens. Yet somehow, we all were in shock when we saw a real penis for the first time, or when we discover that we don’t urinate via the vagina, but men do urinate and have sex, both using the penis.
Unless you have menstrual cramps or a pregnancy scare, and go for an ultrasound, and then read the report, you never know that your ovaries are, in fact, almost never symmetrical. And your uterus is not just a simple uterus. It could be anteverted (tilted outwards towards the bladder), retroverted (tilted backwards towards the rectum), anteflexed (tilted too far forward), retroflexed (tilted backwards too much), midline (neither) and more variations. Most women are born with an anteverted uterus. Crazy thing about uteruses? No matter which way your uterus was when you were born, it can totally flip and rotate itself when you’re pregnant.
If you are uncommon and get a retroverted uterus on an ultrasound scan report, you’re a statistic - one in every five women in the world. Having a retroverted uterus, aka an uterus that tilts backward to the rectum instead of your bladder can be hell for many. It was for me.
In textbooks, they’ll not even tell you what a uterus really is in depth. But now you have menstrual cramps, painful sex and heavy bleeding. You are an environmentalist, but you can’t use a tampon or a menstrual cup to save the planet. You bought a cup, thinking it will reduce the landfill waste due to the 20 cotton chemical pads you use every month, and also save you money. Alas, the world just played a trick on you. You have watched dozens of YouTube videos on how to insert one into your dry, dry vagina with lube ot spit and you even got a stool to prop one leg up and push the silicone cup in cute little C and S folds. But now, not only can’t you push that thing up your dark alley, sometimes the cup gets up so high and vaccuum-seals itself so hard, you panic.
You can take it out, if, and only if you relax, but you remember you have a meeting in 5 minutes. The cup has great capacity, but you’re still afraid of TSS (Toxic Shock Syndrome) and keep emptying the cup like a maniac. You wet your fingers and reach in to grab the cup, but you can’t find the stem at the bottom of the cup. You panic and sweat. You grab the stem and you pull on it. It hurts. You remember, you have to squeeze the bottom of the cup to release air and break the vacuum seal of an aeroplane that your vagine now is. You do it for a while and the vacuum is out. But you did it too fast and now you have blood on your hands. The only time it’s okay to have blood on your hands is when you have murdered your clitoris by masturbating too much on your period. What did you think I’ll say, become a murderer? You’re funny if you thought that.