Sorority Girl’s Sex History in Power Point: Who’s the Man Now?

Having to apologize after sex is one of the more emasculating experiences I’ve had. It happened several years ago, after a drunken one night-stand that I’d known in advance would be a bad idea, though it seemed like less of a big deal as the booze and warm-lighting gradually made the case for fleshy togetherness. Things were fine enough until suddenly we were naked with no teasing pretexts left to unwrap,  and then all the reasons why I’d thought this might be a bad idea came back. At that point there were no good choices. I could either get over my nattering subconscious and meet the call of lust, or tumble through the awkward explanation of why I wasn’t interested while pulling my underpants back on.

I chose the less talkative route, lying on my back and doing as little as possible to prolong the experience. I felt like a mannequin tied to a trampoline. Neither of us came and after ten minutes we both gave up the pretense and passed out. The next morning over breakfast I felt awful, like I’d bounced a rent check or farted at a funeral. I looked down at my oatmeal with pressed lips and pushed the reluctant words out of my mouth. “Hey, I’m sorry about last night, if that was weird or whatever.”

I was reminded of that experience when reading a Duke sorority woman’s sexual rankings, an extensive Power Point document cataloging her experiences with the different men she’d had sex with in school. I felt an irrational horror at first, a whitening wave of shock like watching a football player’s bone break during a slow motion replay. I was implicated, certain that I would find a document of my own sexual incompetence and physical inadequacy among the recounting of student-athlete-on-sorority-girl intercourse. It’s been easy to forget about all the bad sex I’ve had in my life, bringing out the stories in safe company for comic effect. This one time it was so bad I barely even moved, and I felt like I had to apologize in the morning.

That’s a safe story because I didn’t have a deeper investment in the person I was with. But there are also moments when I’d really cared about the person and tried my best to excite them. I bring those up less often: the tap on the shoulder during oral sex, the obviously faked orgasm, the seemingly real orgasm that turned out to be fake, and the bandolier of ejaculations that came too soon. Those secret informers say more about me than does getting drunk and winding up in bed with someone I hadn’t wanted to beforehand. That’s the fear anyway, and it makes the fact that someone has an opinion of  their sexual partners seem like a radical news story.

While few people make Power Point presentations about the loosely concealed workings of other people’s genitalia, it would be surprising to meet someone who didn’t think backwards, trying to assemble a categorical structure capable of explaining everything. It’s even less surprising that someone of relatively limited experience (it doesn’t seem like our dilettante reporter has pushed her boundaries too far beyond the safety of athletic men with a taste for canned beer) would have the energy and focus to wrestle a sexual non-sequitur from the heart of Microsoft Office.

It’s a mundane story that touches an overly sensitive spot, the simultaneous fear of being judged inadequate and the irresistible urge to prejudge everyone else. Even writing the above I catch myself drifting into suggestive ad hominem argument, describing the author as a “dilettante reporter.” In this way I’d get to throw out her entire project as insignificant because of my assumptions about her person, mercifully sparing me from having to publicly describe my own instincts of what good sex is.

When I finished reading the account of men, the welcomely aggressive, the early spouters, the thick, the long, and an apparently Napoleonic manifestation of micro-penis—I wanted to send a survey of my own backwards to all the women I’ve slept with. There are some mortifying experiences sleeping in the memories of many of those women, I’m sure. Being mortified by the documents of your past is a wonderful thing, an anchor that keeps a person from drifting right out of the atmosphere on an updraft of ego and self-affirmation.

It’s safest to imagine the worst—at least for me—but I have always been surprised by excavations into the past. Event the most embarrassing moments have their little surprises when looked at in reverse by both people. There are many ways of being incompetent or ridiculous, it’s a condition that afflicts us all though we’re capable of insulating ourselves from frequent confrontation. But it’s there, in everything from explaining to a child what the sun is to navigating public transportation in a foreign country . We’re idiots. There are some fleeting moments of relief from this condition, bright little blooms of indifference to your ego, but they are rare and never seem to happen when you need them most, in the clutch of catastrophe or imminent defenestration.

A few years ago I wrote a description of a first date I’d been on. My date read the story and was understandably unhappy to see herself reduced into the ego-gratifying observations of my story. After some tense text and email exchanges I offered to publish her version of our night together as a way of making things equal. My slanted commemoration of the five hours we’d spent together wouldn’t be the uncontested the truth of the event, but one side presenting an argument. I wanted her to present her argument. Since I’d already tracked the guttural sloughings of my side into our budding romance, I thought her recounting would be merciless and emasculating.

She sent me her version a fewdays later and, to the contrary, it was disarmingly sweet. Rather than a document of reciprocal snark, she wrote a wistful ramble about someone who seemed genuine, funny, non-judgmental, and impulsively romantic. She also wrote rather more flatteringly of my appearance than I’m, even now, not willing to sound out in my own words. I was in the numb hollow of a recent breakup and had sailed right past her.

We always seem to get sex wrong when we write about it. The phrases and idioms are all wrong, or at least they’ve never matched up with my experience of sex. Everyone’s bad in bed in the same way that everyone’s lousy in the Tokyo subway or prone to getting lost in the Dar es Salaam bus system. You can know all there is to know about trains, buses, and internal combustion and still get on the train going the wrong way and without the right fare card in your pocket.

When reading the sexual mythology of the young men representing the various arms of the Duke Athletic Department, the idea that some are 9’s and some are 1’s is funny enough, but this factless belief in objective skill connects to an octopus of social degradation. I cannot believe Tyler Clementi’s suicide at Rutgers University last week was catalyzed by his unwanted outing alone. The fact that the video documented not only his preferred gender of sex partners, but the specific and, likely, not very assured moments of their exchange must have made the betrayal of his roommate especially toxic. All the bundled awkwardness, social confusion, expectation of religious persecution, and the general derision of a jury of sneering peers were too much.

We reserve our cruelest derision for people based on their participation in something essentially mutable and subjective. Yet in even the most prolonged sexual ranking there is only the outline of another person sailing past, on their way towards constructing a story that suits their needs without quite expressing them. Which is the fountainhead of all the lousy sex I’ve ever had.

Image via Dawniaa