Glitter. Real Stories About Sexual Desire From Real Women (10 page)

The Sensualist

Luisa Colt

The sensualist knows nothing without feeling. I have sought answers: a label, a framework to understand my sexuality, with the insecurity of an abandoned child. Without a cohesive identity to present to you I fear I have failed. Reliant on the most simplistic of structures – a chronological narrative – I will try to explain how it is I became this collection of paradoxes: a wife, a slave, a feminist, a white-collar professional, a stripper, a bisexual, and even sometimes, a prude.

The story starts as a young girl. Third year of elementary school, masturbating to orgasm under my school desk. Back row, squeezing my thighs together systematically to release. Flushed cheeks, ragged breathing, but finally, release. Looking around, nobody seemed to notice. Lunchtime, I knew different.

My mother brought ‘educational’ books home from the library and handed them to me silently. By then I was a competent reader and consumed them enthusiastically, alone
.
Where Did I Come From
?
depicted the practical act of lovemaking between a decidedly rounded husband and wife, but it raised more questions than it answered. If that rubenesque pair could kiss and cuddle and make all those love hearts appear – and a baby – and that’s what sex was, what was it that I was doing? Sex education: anatomically correct cross-sections, abstractions of something that was consuming me whole. My tension wasn’t just lying there, matter of fact on a page. I knew I wasn’t making a baby. I was alone. None of it made sense.

Alone in my bedroom, under the cover of night and my Strawberry Shortcake doona, I loved to touch myself. As masturbation tends to go, it was a solitary pleasure that conjured a longing for company. I craved someone to acknowledge it. The closest I came was a sleepover. My best friend from pre-school and her other friends lay out mattresses on her living room floor. She mounted her pillow and playfully kissed and rode on it in front of all of us. We all had a turn. We created orgiastic dioramas with our (all female) Barbie dolls. When I think about it now I see those plastic limbs bent back, perfectly smooth junctures of legs and torsos bumped against each other to all of our delight.

Even now I feel the need to be very clear about something. I was never sexually abused. But like other young girls, I had intense feelings I navigated alone. I knew from the fact that nobody talked about it that it was something I should keep private. Silence corrupted the natural, stirred it into shame. I assumed, as children do, that there was something wrong with me. I felt that somehow I had instigated those childhood experiments with my dirty mind, that I had poisoned others by simply being there. It wasn’t until the internet that I was relieved of this solitary burden.

Dial-up internet coincided beautifully with adolescence. Just turned twelve, a new girlfriend who wanted to share babysitting duties. The awkward grey Apple Macintosh woken while her younger siblings slept. We logged onto an adult chat room that she had found somehow. Outrageous statements of lust interspersed with smooth, angry looking hard-ons and pneumatic breasts. As soon as I got home I begged my mother to buy a modem. Homework of another kind: from the intellectual to the profane. Trawling the emerging web of raw erotic fiction, the delicious pain of downloading images bit by byte, a voyeur of volatile IRC chat rooms. All in the name of alchemy, creating and deciphering the intricate chemistry of sex.

Thirteen. My desire blossomed under blue light. The laughable pretext of police and adult supervision at the local scout hall: an alibi. The darkness: our collaborator. Pressed into a corner, ah, finally! Lips in tentative negotiation, tasting a home cooked dinner, ill-gotten booze on shallow breath, insistent fingers searching over, under clothes. Their hard cocks through their pants. Hard, slick with pre-cum. God, I was hungry. Hungrier than I felt those awkward boys were. Predatory. I craved a man in this proliferation of boys.

Blossoming confidence led me to a connection. The closest I had to a boyfriend for several years. Him: twenty-six, across the Atlantic, my sexual collaborator and confidante. Me: fourteen. Endless nights on IRC bookended with volumes of emails. Together, alone, touching ourselves to incremental conversations, frantic redials, urging each other to orgasm. Digital photography didn’t exist, but a visual reference wasn’t necessary. It was desire dealt in words. Finally: reality. His (surprise!) girlfriend found and seduced me artfully. She’d logged in as him, made me hungry and wet before unleashing a tirade of abuse. He found me on Facebook fifteen years later, but that’s another story.

The same year I met a forty-nine-year-old online who lived in the same city. Emails for months before he asked me if I’d like to meet up. Even then, instinct served me well. I never saw that salt and pepper hair. Hysterics can point fingers at predators but to me the most important conversation about power is still not happening. Talk to girls about sex and pleasure. Fuck virginity, masturbation is the holy grail. The prize within your self: your pleasure, yours. It renders virginity irrelevant until loving commitment brings up the question. Empowerment. Total control. Self-worship. Had I been told masturbation was a precious gift I could – and should – give myself, I doubt I would have shared it and made myself vulnerable in this situation and others. I was incredibly lucky.

Overlay a blur of the usual high-school hysteria over boys, men in posters, guys in bands. Outwardly the all-girls’ schoolgirl. Boys my age still mostly uninterested in anything outside of sports or academia. Imaginary courtships started in stunted one-word exchanges on the back seat of the bus. IRL sex with these boys was out of the question. Still, more anonymous exchanges at underaged parties, or house parties held by friends presented opportunities.

Careful to disguise myself, I never dressed provocatively. Dressed in loose jeans, oversized polo shirts and sneakers. Hair always tied back neatly in a pony-tail or bun. On recollection it was unfair to those poor boys. I would find a way to get them alone. Kiss them passionately. Slide my hand into their jeans. I always loved cocks, all shapes and sizes. Loved making them hard and wet with pre cum. Surreptitious grinding and exploratory manual adventures. Once I was done I craved none of the things my friends obsessed over. No desire for a boyfriend. I considered myself a sexual adventurer.

Fifteen: sex with my best friend. Her mother had now moved to an outrageously designed seventies mansion on the outer suburbs of our city. Again recruited to babysit her younger siblings. After sharing a bottle of awful, sweet Sangria on the heated carpet floor, we found her mother’s bed, a stash of video-taped porn. The tangle of hormones and visual inspiration and sheer opportunity. The nervous electricity of first touches. Slowly undressing. Kissing impossibly soft lips. Smooth, bare skin and suckling breasts. Writhing in a sixty-nine, a hot, probing mess of tongues and fingers. I still remember her manicured long nails sliding inside me, hands I had always been envious of. I was in heaven…and woke in hell. Conspicuously alone. She was back in her bunk bed and wouldn’t wake up to talk to me. With a raging hangover I walked to the train station and vomited in a trash can. I was crushed. I sat on the train in tears. Turning the house upside down in my mind for clues: am I gay? What have I done? Is she going to tell everyone? She apparently never did. We are still friends, but to this day she has never wanted to talk about it. The lasting impression fit perfectly into my suspicion that I had somehow engineered yet another situation to be ashamed of.

I waited eagerly again for weekends. Exploited the darkness. Waiting for an opportunity to arise with somebody who would go further. Not just anybody. A character that would inflame my imagination, stimulate my desire, who was strong enough to take me.

Finally: Sixteen. I decided my virginity had to go. It all started on a school ski-trip. The math teacher – who was also a tennis coach – had brought several fellow tennis coaches to chaperone. One of them was a college student a decade older than me who was reasonably cute, bookish, strong, interested but reluctant. After some very heavy making out sessions behind the jacuzzi room (snow, steam) I couldn’t persuade him to take my virginity at camp. He promised to fuck me when we got back, if I was still interested. His place wasn’t the college hangout you’d have expected: it was his parents’ place. He had a waterbed. And I got exactly what I went there for.

Losing my virginity was pleasurable and, for me, a relief. I didn’t lose it so much as strategically dispense of it. Moments of physical obsession, connection, and devastation don’t need to be about love for me, though the many times I have had sex whilst in love are different again, another facet of the same brilliant phenomenon.

The idea that somehow I still was a virgin, despite everything I had thought, felt, and done seemed like a joke. So, the setting was unsentimental. The soundtrack was laughable. The waterbed, whilst a challenge, proved impossible. I wasn’t fooling around. We moved to the floor, and finally, it was happening. Me on top. Stacks of books and whispered moans. He was shocked at how much I enjoyed myself. His words: “It can’t feel that good.” It did. It wasn’t his skill. I smiled the whole way home. Again, I found myself on the train, the world speeding past me, transformed as if in a giant centrifuge, thinking how differently the world looked now. I couldn’t believe there was a world out there comprised of people that did this all the time. Why did they spend so much time and effort covering it up? Pretending this wasn’t the greatest thing ever?

Why do we?

We fucked in his shitty car, the cliffs on the beach near my house, the suburban park near his, then it was over. I wasn’t interested in him as a boyfriend, no more than he was interested in having an underaged girlfriend. The next time I saw him was eight years later, when he’d started dating my then boyfriend’s sister.

Her: “This is X.”

Him: “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?”

Me: “Yeah, you helped me lose my virginity!”

My boyfriend: “…”

Far from opening the door to promiscuity I merely settled back into regular school life. You can skim read this part, as there’s no sex for two years. I still made out with those I found interesting at parties but there were no boyfriends and no sex. I silently judged my peers inadequate for anything but classroom or bus-stop cohabitation. In my final year of school I met a guy my own age online. He was creative, sensitive, sexually demanding. He lived on the other side of the world. His plan was to move to my country on a one-year working visa so we arranged to meet.

What began as a passionate, obstinate love affair became tempered with habitual negligence as the years passed. A year in my country, a year in his. I went to college, we got jobs. The sensitivity that had fascinated me in the early days of our relationship now seemed like weakness. I cooled towards him intellectually, became repulsed by the thought of sex with him.

Once he had received his permanent residency I left him and began to take on lovers. Without wanting a relationship I always saw something in them, or perhaps in me, that demanded the relentless exploration of connected mind and body for hours at a time.

On completing my degree I found an internship at a prestigious agency. They offered me a job almost immediately. Outwardly I was an accomplished graduate with a steady income and a bright future, but the image I presented was incompatible with my fundamental nature: fickle, curious, tempestuous. I was bored, suffocated, and half-living. In desperation I decided to move.

Moving to a new city was a shift of tectonic proportions. It birthed a continent within, one of dramatic mountain ranges and vast tracts of unexplored land. I had a new boyfriend, a place of my own, but I was finding it hard to find another job.

Then, the most vivid dream: a stage, bright lights, throbbing music, the deliberate uncoiling of a bra, oozing confidence, a wry smile.

Striptease.

On waking, I tentatively shared my dream with my then-new boyfriend. He’d known girls who were strippers before, in fact it was a big business in this city, and he thought I could do it. I had nowhere near the self-confidence I thought I’d need. I was still hiding myself under – slightly tighter – jeans and t-shirts. Yet there was something about the potential to become that goddess in my dream, and better yet to make the money I needed to survive.

Nerve-wracking doesn’t even start to cover standing, almost knock-kneed on a red-lit stage, wearing six-inch heels for the first time, praying for twenty agonizing minutes to be over before you fall off. But taking your new, tiny clothes off isn’t the scary part. Navigating the men and keeping your cool while dealing with constant (sometimes cruel) rejection was the harder skill to acquire.

The elaborate and necessary cultivation of a sexual alter-ego: first, you ‘pick’ a name (“No, not that one, it’s taken. Not that one either. How about we just give you one, love?”) Then hone a personality: mine was a peculiarly attractive combination of seductress/confidante/tease/bitch that mirrored my own. The club I worked at had a strict no-touching rule and drugs weren’t tolerated. I was sexually potent, peppered with an intellectual curiosity, but ultimately safe. I interacted with all types of men, discovering one by one the different triggers and tastes they wore so close to their wallets.

After several months I’d had an education money couldn’t buy. I could read a room in sixty seconds, find a target, and take what I wanted. The money was more than I could ever – or can still – make in my tertiary educated desk job. A litmus test for societal hypocrisy. Grueling hours buoyed by a huge roll of tax-free cash. Independent financially, and professionally considered a contractor, nobody told me how hard to work, when to work, who to dance for. Feline, predatory, untouchable. Not taking shit from anyone, even if they’d paid me. Even, no
,
especiall
y
if they’d emptied their bank account. At the slightest offence, I walked.