Pillow talk: let’s bring conversation to the bedroom

The bears and the bees: Bedtime aversions: my fear of getting down and dirty

I have a confession to make: I’m afraid of giving blowjobs.
I feel like a failure of a sex columnist; how can I properly talk about sex things on campus when there’s stuff I just don’t do? And yet…
My only real experience with giving oral occurred while I was a bit too inebriated. It was incredibly sloppy and ended almost immediately, as my partner quickly realized that I was too drunk to properly make decisions and put me to bed.

The bears and the bees: Assumption of hidden motives hinder hookups

Hook ups are delicate things. The physical act, maybe not so much—but emotional transactions that occur during can be awkward, to say the least. Last spring I was with a dude in his room having fun when, out of the blue, he told me he “loved my eyes.” Said eyes became very wide. Love? We’d met maybe two hours earlier in a dark basement.
Granted, “I love your eyes” is a far cry from “I love you,” but it was still strange to hear from someone who, in all honesty, probably didn’t even know what color my eyes were. Then again, maybe it had just slipped out in the heat of the moment. I ignored it, assuming that either nothing more would happen between us after that night or we’d get to know each other well enough that I’d be cool with hearing that kind of compliment regularly. As it happens, we took the former path and never really spoke again.
But I did think about the compliment. More precisely, about how that sort of thing—the whispering of overly affectionate sweet nothings—is gendered. A girl, in my experience, could never get away with saying something like that. If, in the middle of an alcohol-fueled dalliance, she said anything beginning with “I love…,” alarm bells would start going off. CODE RED. STAGE FIVE CLINGER ALERT.

The bears and the bees

Pillow talk: let’s bring conversation to the bedroom

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Anonymous '16

Columnist

November 22, 2013

Americans are obsessed with sex. It’s everywhere—movies, magazines, billboards, even our classrooms—and we are constantly talking about it. We want to know how to have good sex, how to get a person to have sex with you, how to get someone to call you after a one-night stand, how to avoid making or receiving that call—the list goes on.

Sex is constantly in the conversation.

But for all the talking we do, there is very little discussion where it matters most: in the bedroom.

Bowdoin students are, for the most part, extremely articulate; a huge part of our liberal arts education is focused on learning how to communicate our thoughts to others in clear, concise ways. And yet…we struggle when it comes to sex and relationships.

We are very good at speaking to these topics in general. In fact, the discussion about sex and sexuality on campus never seems to end. But I don’t think we’re very good at taking these things back to our personal relationships.

We are, in a word, awkward.

Last weekend my friend hooked up with a guy who was great in the lead-up, but when it came to actually having sex, lasted for a total of 10 seconds—give or take a few; she hadn’t planned on counting.

I’m sure he was incredibly embarrassed, and my friend had absolutely no idea what to do or say to him.

So neither of them said anything, and they promptly went to sleep without touching—or touching as little as possible in a twin extra-long bed.

This probably epitomizes the awkwardness of Bowdoin’s hookup scene. I asked her why she hadn’t left, why she wanted to prolong the discomfort, and she responded that she hadn’t wanted to seem rude or mean. Fair enough. But it almost seems worse to make him suffer through the night without speaking. Granted, there aren’t really any great responses to the situation. Laughing it off definitely isn’t an option, nor, in my opinion, is ignoring it.

I think the best course of action would actually be addressing the situation head-on. Because you can’t deny it’s happening, and you’ll have to move past it some way or another.

It seems to me, however, that Bowdoin students aren’t good at confrontation, at least not in this setting. We want sex to be this awesome, magical thing, and sometimes it is.

But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes sex is weird and confusing and the sooner we acknowledge that the better able we will be to address tricky situations.

I once had a guy tell me he’d never felt so comfortable in bed with a girl as he did with me, and I think part of that comfort was about talking. Not that I am particularly good at talking. But I do try to be empathetic and address things directly, both of which I think go a long way in establishing lines of communication.

I think we all have a general idea of what “real sex” looks like and we know it doesn’t look like the movies.

But I think we have yet to come to terms with real sex in our personal lives, and we need to.
Sex is weird! Things happen! And we’ll have to talk about them at some point, so let’s start now.

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