Last year my friend S confessed that he had become a virgin again. This is a phenomenon that occurs when somebody goes for a year or longer without having sex.
I was alarmed to find out that there’s actually a name for this kind of thing because it had been almost a year for me too. I’ve gone on long sojourns without sex in the past, but I’d never stopped to add up the days and weeks and months. I didn’t realize there were specific words to categorize people according to lengths of time they’d been without a little wettening in their pants.
For the most part, I am stingy with my sex. One-night stands are fine in theory, but I am not wired to enjoy them soberly. Sex is too intimate and, when my faculties aren’t numbed by some substance, being that close to a stranger’s body sends my brain into a gyroscopic spasm of disembodiment.
I also avoid anything resembling a relationship whenever I can. It’s a combination of selfishness and self-defense. I don’t have brakes in relationships. I freefall for people. Knowing that, in combination with the memories of my parents’ acrimonious relationship, I have developed an instinctual avoidance of intimacy. And to complete the Freudian circle of hypocrisy, I steer subconsciously towards those things I fear most. So I am an emo-gazing fop who avoids having to live up to the hermetically sealed virtues of my own rhetoric.
I give good advice, but I create all these fragile emotional constructs in my own life and each one inevitably comes crashing down in a tinkling cacophony of shattering china.
So I’m comfortable going through extended periods without sex. Sex is not a body function for me. It’s not a glass of water. It’s not a sport. It’s not a stress reliever. It’s language and intimacy, and I know that thinking that way means there’s always less sex on my horizon when I go out for a night.
But for S, the idea that he hadn’t had sex in a year was torture. He huffed and puffed, he groaned and strained and cussed. He let loose a dozen variations on the time honored “I gotta get laid.”
In both China and Madagascar, I heard many graven-faced men tell me that they had to have sex or else they would get sick. Keeping all that sperm trapped inside a man’s guts inevitably led to poor health and a shambolic state of mind. It sounded like voodoo logic at the time, but watching S I started to wonder if his sperm hadn’t pickled in his brain. He seemed depraved and come-drunk.
What I don’t understand about people who need to have sex but don’t are their reasons for not having sex. It’s not difficult to have sex. You might have to lower your physical standards a bit, or endure some embarrassing bouts of rejection at a bar before finding that special someone to spread her legs; but sex is always attainable. If all a person wants is the sport, the relief, the satisfaction of physical contact, then go get it. It’s out there. It’s right around the corner. It’s probably at some bar five or ten minutes from where you’re sitting and reading this. Sex is tricky, but it’s not hard to find someone to have sex with.
I remember when S finally had sex again, thirteen months after his last encounter. He went out on a first date with a woman, got really drunk, brought her back to his apartment, and had sex with her. I was excited for him when he told me. I was sure this would have been the pivot point where would go from defeated to victorious and confident. He could walk into every room with the pride of a man who had the metaphysical scent of sex hovering in his pants.
He wasn’t. He was exactly the same. Sex had solved nothing. He was just as unsettled, dissatisfied and irritable as he had been the week before.
He’d had sex, but he didn’t like the girl. And when the sex was over and the booze had worn off he felt exactly the same as he had before it all began. He had re-lost his virginity and nothing had changed. I suspect he secretly wished he had waited for marriage.
Previous Posts:
Sex Machine: Come On My Face
Sex Machine: Because I Can
Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?
Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars
Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor
Date Machine: Long Distance Lovers
Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores
Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures
Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move
Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents
Love Machine: Willing to Relocate
Sex Machine: Checking my Oil, or the HIV Test
Date Machine: How To Pick Up a Bartender
Date Machine: Are You My Girlfriend Now?
PDA Machine: Making Out in a Bar
Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?
Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof
Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman