The sex that you’re not having

by: Kate Carraway

September 09, 2009 9:05 PM

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Other people’s sex lives are mostly a mystery. I have some good guesses, though

In the silvery evening-time in the middle of too-full-of-sushi, too-drunk, too-early and whatever else we’re going to do that night, a friend and I spent three or four cigarettes sitting on a curb in the Annex considering the sex lives of the various couples — or assumed couples — that wandered by. Since we were in the Annex, the majority of our assessments consisted of “Missionary. Lights off, always,” or “Never, probably,” and occasionally “Advanced Kama Sutra stuff,” and were based mostly, as these things will be, on clothes (a woman in a pastel top and three-quarter length quick-dry khakis doesn’t communicate “sex freak” to me), dogs (the owners of the hilarious-looking mutt are having more varied sex than the bichon frisé family, right?), and how the couples walked, how they touched, how they looked at each other. Although we were just trying to out-bullshit and out-dirt each other, as you do when you’re so full of rice and Asahi that thinking beyond a fifth grade level is unlikely, it got me thinking about my perceptions of what everybody else gets up to.

Other people’s sex lives are bound to a powerful cognitive dissonance. We’re treated to certain, grody ideas of sex-having on reality shows, in purple confessional journalism, and in the din of provocative-on-purpose Twittering and Facebook mentions. Clues about other people’s sex lives are everywhere, implied and explicit, but really, we don’t know much about them. You like to do it, sure. But how do you feel about the taste and texture of come? What do you do with your hands? It’s all and nothing, at once. Non-erotic dialogues about sex are culturally under-represented, considering how much we each think about it. It’s why every generation of teenagers obsesses over the details of what people do and why post–L Word heterosexual adults obsess over the details of how lesbians do it and why a formerly slutty sometimes-sex-writer obsesses over the details of what everybody (well, nobody I share genetic material with) does when their public personae are abandoned.

How we feel about our own sex lives, good or bad, tame or kinkified, is largely experienced through comparison to other people and, of course, subsequent jealousies and judgments. We’re informed by the unbalanced canon of rude pop culture noise about sex and our own, mostly ignorant, assumptions about what regular people do.

My own assumptions are based on a few specific indicators. Actually, I mostly have indicators for men. Like, how they drive. Steady, 10-and-two, methodical mirror-checking? That’s the kind of dude who has a carefully researched, five-point approach to make a clitoris remember him. He might get boring. If a dude sits waaaay back, moves the wheel with one finger while he does the radio with the other hand, and looks at you more than the road? That’s the kind of guy who will forget to buy condoms, whose underwear is ripped, and who will happily fuck you up against some garbage cans if that’s what you’re into. (That’s not what I’m into.)

Of course, the most obvious suggestion is their body, and how it moves. A thick high-school-linebacker type who walks like it hurts him seems likely (and is likely, really) to fuck with more force and less finesse than perhaps the smaller, wiry one who wields a knife and fork with strange precision. (Both are cool.) Something I do know for sure, according to my own experience and the wise council of Cosmopolitan (I swear to god, I’ll be fine for months and then one day there’s a sanity blackout and I wake up with a crumpled Cosmo and some Ferrero Rocher wrappers on the floor beside me), the size of a man’s penis is generally not consistent with the size of his feet or hands. None of that, though, says much about what kind of intimacy they’re after.

One of my first-strings, a guy who paroxysms equally about Canadian politics and his feelings about oral sex, said to me once that because the sex he has and wants is just another part of him and his life, he finds it offensive if his friends don’t want to hear about it. I think that’s great. The private ways I think about other people’s sex isn’t born from some immediately carnal impulse, nor is my interest in talking candidly about it. We owe it to each other to get a little looser with the details so that collectively we know more, and can make fewer dumb guesses about what somebody’s denim style communicates about how they fuck.

» Tell me about your sex life. For real. (Nothing creepy.) Email kcarraway@eyeweekly.com or Tweet @katecarraway.

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My Life, My Fault

The sex that you’re not having

Kate Carraway