admin We lay next to each other in silence afterwards, his arms folded in a pretzel shape behind his head. “That was really good,” he said, half-sighing. Then he offered me a make-up wipe from his bedside table, which made me think about how many women must pass through there. In the morning he gave me one of his T-shirts and some joggers and dropped me home in his car, the sort that has a computer screen at the front that shows how close you’re getting to things when you’re reversing. That evening, he sent me a meme with the caption: “Send her this with no context.” It showed a golf course, and when the white ball hit the grass and rolled into the hole, the words “You have nice tits” took over the screen.
The sex was good for me too, not necessarily because of how it felt, though it did feel good. It was good because it made me feel like a certain kind of person. I knew what he wanted, and I did it well—or it seemed like I did, judging from his response. I took a more active role where sometimes I can end up following the other person around. Everything was spit-covered and seamless. We moved about the living room, then onto his bed, as though it was something we’d rehearsed. A yoga flow or a dance.
It reminded me of this section I read in a book my friend Moya recommended me, called The End of Love. It’s by an academic called Eva Illouz, and it’s an exploration of how “unloving” has come to define contemporary relationships. In it, she describes how the end goal of sex has changed since the sexual revolution: “Traditional heteronormative sex was sex with a purpose (whether this purpose was marriage, love, shared life, or a child),” Illouz writes. “Casual sex subverts the narrative telos of heteronormativity. Instead, it aims at the accumulation of pleasurable experiences, which in turn becomes a status signal, a sign of having a body marked by others as attractive.”
I’ve known this—that sexiness and sexual performance communicates something about our worth in society—since I was much, much younger. When I was 16, I was desperate to lose my virginity because, back then, it seemed like if you were a virgin at 17, your life was essentially over. My friend told me that the guy I was “getting with” back then wasn’t sure what to do because he knew he’d have to ask me out in order to have sex with me, and he didn’t know if he wanted a girlfriend. I told her to tell him that he wouldn’t have to ask me out, and I’d have sex with him anyway. The next time he had a free house, it happened. It seems so stupid now. When I look at 17-year-olds, they look so young, unable to hold eye contact.
