I am not particularly good at sex

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I don’t have to tell you that I am an introvert. I don’t have to tell you that I am reserved, that I am awkward, for, you either already know it, or you will discover it or simply will never get it.

So when I mention it here, I mention it not to inform you but to explain to you   why and how much I love social media,

Because I truly do love social media;

It is one of the best things to have happened to my self-expression and social skills. It has indisputably been a vital instrument in my understanding of people, in fact it is the only instrument really, since my social skills are slightly….uneasy.

I love it 

I love it like the second glass of cheap but goodish red wine, the one that is not quite out of the Checkers bin but really should be; or the last bit of white cheddar which waited faithfully in the fridge, waited for me to come home, so that it could soothe me, after a tough shit day; I love social media  like Ben Okri’s fantastical mind, torn between what is, what could be and what is unlikely and impossible but can, with sufficient imagination, be evoked; I love social media like my dreams about that trip to Spain, which seems forever to elude; like the Malaga which is palpable between 2 and 4 am of dreaming 

I love it

I love it for its ability to provide me with a platform for socialising, for intimacy, without the stomach-churning pressure of actual and physical interaction and contact with people. People with skin and eyes and hands and expectations;

I love the remote intimacy.

On social media I can be an extrovert; I can have strong opinions, and make bold declarations, duly guarded by  multiple exclamation marks; I can use emoticons, to abrogate the responsibility of real expression and to place the ball in your interpretation court. I can vacate, I can checkout but still remain checked in. I can vacate myself, my introversion, my awkwardness. I can vacate my life

I love it

But I also hate it; I hate bits about it, of it; many small bits which culminate to large, annoying bits. These are the tedious bits; the bits where you are exposed to ill-considered and sometimes unintelligible opinion; the bits where motivation is shoved down your throat; and the bits where people are not just sharing their lives with you but are telling you to live like them, or to at least aspire to live like them.

I hate it for those bits

But mostly, I hate that every day I am being told how I should be having sex, by people that I am actually not having sex with. 

(I have never been good at sex)

I am told how often I should have sex; I am told how much sex I should have, I am even told what mint flavour to have in my mouth when giving a blowjob…“for best results”

I am instructed, I am shamed and I am left ashamed.

I am ashamed because I never feel like I am meeting the prescribed standards.  And that perhaps I just do not understand the mechanics of sex; that  I just do not understand the rules of it all.

I am shamed because I have never understood why I cannot finger a man in his butthole or why anal sex is great but rimming is “freaky” or “kinky”. I am ashamed because of my inability to understand  why riding a man is great but reversed missionary will have a man telling me that I have made him feel like he is being… had, being had as a woman.

Or perhaps I am ashamed  because when I try to hold a man from behind, he quickly turns around, to rectify the positions, to be where he should be and place me where I should be placed: only a woman can be had from behind; or maybe because I have never understood why I cannot kiss a man on the neck, tell him he is pretty and put my fingers in his mouth for him to suck.

So, I am not good at it, at any of it.  I am not equipped for the sort of sex which I am supposed to have or even want to have.

I am not equipped to touch tenderly but not too lightly. I have not learned to moan but only throatily; I have not quite learned to resist the urge to move my tongue to the asshole when giving a blowjob; neither have  I learned to curb my ball-sucking enthusiasm so that I do not appear too “freaky”; or to be above the allowable eagerness quota or indeed not appear too ‘’experienced”.

I have not learned the right sex;  the social media sex.  I have not learned the acceptable levels of prescribed deviant/kinky/freaky sex. 

I am not good at sex and I am starting to wonder if social media is any better.

Writer: Nomfundo Shezi