28

Red

We have all had that first time sex experience. What was your first time like? We’re you ready? Were you nervous? Do you regret it? Was it exciting and sensual and everything you hoped it would be? After the very first time you continue to experience more firsts. Your first blowjob. Your first threesome. The first time you realized the way you enjoyed sex was different than the way others enjoyed it. And somewhere in there you even experienced your first orgasm. Tell us about one of your firsts.

– Prompt by Stella Kiink

 

I was sixteen when I lost my virginity. It was at a party, in a muddy stockyard, in the middle of winter, with a boy, G, from school. We’d been eyeing each other up for weeks, flirting during class, hooking up at various social events, things going further and further until the urge to have sex was itching at us both like a hair shirt, maddening in its intensity.

We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend but that didn’t matter to me – or him. I was never a hearts and flowers sort of girl and, unlike a lot of my peers, who generally had far more romantic notions when it came to giving away their virginity, I had a somewhat more pragmatic approach to sex. (Much to their consternation, my world-view didn’t really require that the boy I lost it to take me to the movies for six months and then profess his undying love over a candlelit supper.) Bluntly, having had a satisfying relationship with my own hand for quite some time, I was intrigued by the possibilities presented by a penis and didn’t place much value on waiting to ‘do it’ with someone special. My first time was very much something to get out of the way so that I could move on with experimenting and enjoying my sexuality.

I should say at this point that, although G and I weren’t officially an item, we were attracted to one another. With every look we shared – in the lunch queue, during seemingly endless maths lessons – the promise of sex was there and by the time the night in question rocked around, we both knew what was going to happen. He’d never done it before, either, and with the party raging in a woolshed roughly fifty metres away, the cold night air attacking every exposed bit of skin as we partially undressed and fumbled about in the dark with a condom it was, frankly, pretty awkward and uncomfortable. But neither of us was dissatisfied. Even more surprisingly, rather than it being a case of lost interest after the fact (as I suspected it would be) our desire to connect, against all odds, increased.

And that’s when things got interesting. Continue reading

27

Edges, Limits and Boundaries

Soft limits, hard limits, personal boundaries, personal fears. It doesn’t matter if we’re kinky or vanilla, every single one of us has things that we’re comfortable and not comfortable doing sexually; lines that we don’t want crossed, things that we adore doing. And it’s most certainly the case that one person’s ‘hell no!’ is another person’s ‘hell yes!’ That’s a good thing. If we were all the same, life and sex would be terribly boring. What intrigues me, however, is how our comfort levels and perceptions of what we do and don’t like, can and can’t tolerate, can – and often do – change over time.

Now, before I go any further with this train of thought, I’d just like to make it really, really clear that hard limits should always, ALWAYS be respected. No exceptions. They are not there to be pushed. They are not there to be ‘broken though’. A hard limit is a prohibition, a definite no-no. End of story. And a hard limit remains so until such time as the person whose limit it is chooses of their own volition and without coercion for it not to be.

Public service announcement out of the way, let’s continue.

One of things that I am coming to realise the longer I explore my sexuality is that the devil is very much in the detail. And the gulf between the aforementioned ‘hell yes!’ and my safeword is actually much wider than I originally thought. Not because I’ve been sloppy in articulating what I’m okay with and what I’m not or because I’m getting kinkier (I don’t think I am) but because identifying the things that arouse is a bit like going off to explore the jungle. You take your map with you and it defines the terrain you’re going to cover, but the route you follow to your destination often ends up revealing a multitude of alternate trails and tracks that you just have to go back and explore. And on occasion, those offshoots lead you to places you originally sought to avoid. Continue reading