I blame Barry White. Ever since the Great Walrus announced to all living, listening women that he was 'going to love you all night long', women are under this weird illusion that great sex has to take hours and involve lots of scented candles and soft music. No it doesn't! No, Barry, you are not going to love me all night long, you are going to give me an orgasm in under 10 minutes, go to sleep, and maybe in the morning I’ll make you a cup of tea.
Or perhaps, like a true Freudian, I blame my mother. It was she who gave me the all-clear when, at 13 years of age, I started self-pleasuring. Although I didn’t call it that. I knew what it was really called – I wrote her a brusque note clearly stating the fact: I had started to masterbate and was that bad?
(The written missive was due to some shame; it wasn’t that my mother didn’t live within talking distance. I could have asked her when helping prepare supper but it just didn’t seem appropriate in the middle of mashing potatoes.)
Mum wrote back promptly: Dear Glenda, first off, masturbation is spelled with a ‘u’. If you are going to do it, please spell it properly. No, it is not bad but you will probably stop when you get married.
Well, dear mum was spot-on on the spelling, slightly off on the stopping point. Still, she allowed me to soldier on in my solitary pursuit of pleasure. And it was pleasurable… and also rather easy. I mean, I had read ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’. It seemed most women took at least half an hour with a mirror while sitting in the most unglamorous position in order to obtain something I could achieve in under 2 minutes with a finger while lying on my back. Ok, occasionally, I had to resort to raiding my Dad’s dirty book collection (just the one, a rather odd anthology of Victorian short stories called The Pearl with lots of ‘bubbies’ and ‘frigging’… I picked it up thinking it was the John Steinbeck novel) which meant a bit of subterfuge and timing, but mostly it was wherever, whenever, whatever…. I really didn’t have to put a great deal of effort into the exercise.
I found that I could even eliminate the finger tool. Just by crossing my legs very, very tightly and concentrating very, very hard, I could very, very come. This gave me much amusement as this little trick could be done in public… in buses, in the classroom, in cars (great for long boring trips to relatives). Only an occasional flush of the cheeks might have given me away but you know, no-one ever turned to me and said, ‘Excuse me, miss, are you having an orgasm?’ Sometimes I wish they would have, just so I could have said, ‘No, I’ve just had one.’
I tried experimenting with shower jet-streams and found this upped the ante considerably. I realised that I needn’t stop at one orgasm. I realised I couldn’t! I began conducting experiments to see how many I could have in a row. My record was seven. Sadly, there was no-one with whom I felt I could share this particular triumph.
Then on a chardonnay-lashed hen night, some of the girls started giggling about vibrators. I was genuinely perplexed why a girl would need one. Imagine my humiliation when I expressed this thought out loud. Short of a demonstration, I couldn’t really explain my fast-finger technique. I began to get worried. Perhaps I was a weird onanist (I looked it up in the dictionary this time). Maybe the act of self-love shouldn’t be such a short one.
It was time to find a man.
Men turned out to be great. And grateful. Finally, someone who didn’t mind if they skipped foreplay! Who didn’t need to be caressed and coaxed into climax. Or called afterwards. Yes, I may have missed out on the modern courtship ritual of first date – film, second date – dinner, third date – drunk sex, like my other single friends. But we all ended up in the same position….. they just had to wait longer to be not called.
And with regard to that old joke about men not knowing where ‘it’ was, I found they learned pretty damn quick when I showed them how quickly I could achieve results with it…. they became rather eager students. Especially fast learners then moved to the second level: spelling cunninglingus. No, that’s not right. Cuninlingus. No, umm, cuningling…. You see, I can’t spell it either. But then, I don’t have to. It’s only fellatio I have to worry about.
So I ignore pop songs where boys brag about their ‘all night long’ prowess… they’re manufactured tosh. And tantric sex sounds tedious… waiting nine hours to come? You should only wait that long for a delayed flight to Fiji. I don’t need to spend entire Sundays in bed, unless I have exceptional hangovers. For me, the most effective sex is short, sharp and spelled correctly.
