Sex Tips for Straight Women From a Gay Man (19 page)

You probably heard about sex long before your folks ever got around to explaining the facts of life. If you were a boy, you quickly learned that you possessed some anatomical equipment that could make you feel pretty good in addition to its use for making babies. As a girl, the pleasures of your anatomy were probably a little less obvious. But whether you shared a room with your brother or went to nudist colonies on family vaca-tions, you knew that what boys had was really different and, somehow, sublimely intriguing. Lest you think that this is a lead-in to a classic Freudian scenario, we want to set the record straight. In the eloquent words of one wise father whose young daughter burst into the bathroom while he was showering and said, “Daddy, I want one of
those
”: “Emily, if you have one of
those
,” he said, pointing back, “you can always get one of
these
.”

So with the myth of penis envy dispelled, the problem, if you were a girl, was that you learned how all those parts functioned from your parents or from the oh-so-carefully-worded books they gave you, or maybe from watching sequences on
Wild Kingdom
. Still, the mating hippopotami on television conveyed little information beyond the mechanics of the “doggie style” position. The female hippopotamus appeared, shall we say, as though she couldn’t care less. And why not? She seemed to be functioning as a willing, passive receptacle

Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man
without a care in the world, much less wondering if he was thinking, “Gee, this is really one hot hippo mama.”

Without disparaging the joys of the animal kingdom, we human beings are blessed with the additional consciousness of the physiological and emotional pleasures associated with sex. Moreover, we are taught from an early age to excel at whatever we do. But again, girls are faced with a classic di-lemma. Sure, they can “use what they’ve got to get what they want,” but without full-time possession of all the tools, girls face an obvious disadvantage in having to hone their skills on temporary loan equipment. And remember, practice makes perfect.

So where does a woman go to learn more about sex? When you are younger, the only really down-and-dirty talks you could have about sex were with your girlfriends, and best girlfriends at that! Remember those pajama parties where everyone made a fist and practiced kissing their hands? How about putting on lipstick and kissing the mirror to determine what was just the right amount your lips should be parted for a kiss? How about a
kiss
kiss? And what about the once-dreaded but later sought-after French kiss? Okay, you say, that’s kid stuff, what about when girls get older? We offer as Exhibit A any Thursday night in the cramped cubicle of a sor-ority house or women’s dorm. The conversation revolves around who did or didn’t “go all the way,”* what some jerky guy tried to do or maybe, just maybe, the virtues of vibrators

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