Please note: This piece discusses my personal sex life, and my personal sexual history, in a certain amount of detail. Family members and others who don't want to read about that stuff, please don't. This piece was originally published on the Blowfish Blog.

This is about the first time I had sex with a guy, after I'd finally started having sex with women.

And it's about how having sex with women radically changed the way I have sex. With everybody. Men, women, everybody.

Here's what happened. I was making out with this friend of mine. Male. And this was clearly not the "just fooling around" variety of making out. This was the "lead-up to having sex" variety. We'd actually decamped from another friend's living room, where things had gotten started, and gone back to his place to keep things going. This was "making out, otherwise known as foreplay."



So we were making out on his sofa, getting increasingly hot and heavy... when for no apparent reason, his momentum slowed down. Like, a lot. Trying to figure out what the heck was happening, I asked if he wanted to get a condom and go into the bedroom... and he said, with obvious embarrassment, that he'd already come, while we were making out.

(I think it had been a while since he'd had sex.)

And here's where the "having had sex with women" part comes in.

Before I'd started having sex with women, my reaction to a guy's premature ejaculation had been pretty traditional: disappointment, frustration, embarrassment on his behalf, attempts to soothe his ego, feeling like I'd done something wrong.

But this time, my reaction was to say, casually and matter-of-factly, "Oh. Well, is that any reason to stop?"

I wasn't trying to make a statement or anything. I honestly didn't even think about it. I certainly wasn't thinking of it in terms of, "this is the great lesson I have learned from having sex with women." It was just an automatic, instinctive reaction.



But it was an automatic, instinctive reaction that was the complete opposite of the one I would have had a year or two before. It was an automatic, instinctive reaction that had been shaped by the sex I'd been having with women -- sex in which one person's orgasm didn't stop the whole train, but was simply one of many sights on a long and eventful excursion.

And here's the thing I found especially interesting:

When I said it, he was relieved.

He wasn't angry, or annoyed, or anything even remotely approaching angry or annoyed. He was relieved. He was happy.



He didn't want our encounter to be just about his orgasm, either. Especially since it had fired off before either of us was ready. "Is that any reason to stop?" was a way we could do that. It was a way he could feel good about our encounter, like a sexy, sensitive, open-minded lover instead of a gawky klutz who couldn't control himself. And it was a way we could keep on having sex. It was a way we could actually have sex that night, instead of an aborted make-out session.

And we did.

I don't even remember if we wound up fucking per se. But we had sex. Wonderful, sweet, delicious sex. For a good long while. An hour or two, if I recall correctly. With many sights on a long and eventful excursion.



Now, of course, you don't need to be bisexual to learn this lesson. Lots of straight people figure out that sex doesn't necessarily equal fucking, or even fucking and sucking. Lots of straight people figure out that the presence of an erect penis is not necessary for sex to count as sex.

But lots of other straight people never figure that out. Even today, even in our post- Monica- Lewinksy, "it depends on what your definition of 'is' is" era, the default definition of sex is still, "a hard dick going inside a hole."

And I think it's important to remember that this state of affairs doesn't just suck for women. It sucks for men, too. My friend was so disappointed and embarrassed that his premature ejaculation had screeched our evening to a halt... and he was so relieved and happy to be offered the idea that it didn't have to. The obsessive spotlight on the hard dick as the sole focal point and defining feature of sex... it makes for some seriously unsatisfied women, of course, but I think it's a raw deal for men as well. It's too much pressure on one little organ.



I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I think my point is just this: An awful lot of people, of all genders and orientations, would benefit from the kind of sex that lesbians take as a given. The kind of sex where success isn't overwhelmingly defined by one partner's "performance." The kind of sex that doesn't make a sharp distinction between "foreplay" and "sex," and that doesn't have a strong opinion about which has to happen first. The kind of sex where the journey is the destination.

I don't know where my friend is now. But I hope he remembers. I hope he remembers as fondly as I do. And I hope that from that night on, whenever he couldn't get hard, or came before he wanted to, he was able to smile and say to his lover, "Well, is that any reason to stop?"