Everybody is having more sex than you by Mason Wood
Everybody is having more sex than you
It’s early evening and the sun is down because Perth hates daylight savings. I’m driving my old Hyundai Elantra to a hookup a good 40ish ks away. It feels too far away to get laid—I would never travel this far in Melbourne. But this summer trip home isn’t a holiday. I’m staying for three weeks, which is enough time to see old friends and sit with my family and wear skimpy bathers to the beach. And be a bit of a slut, hopefully. I tell people that I’m here to rest, and see loved ones, and to get warm. But all I can think about is having sex with boys in my hometown. To kiss them and take them on dates. To breeze through the city that I grew up in, laying claim to some kind of geographical sluttiness. I’m trying to show off to the buildings and the old highways and the parks that I once played in, that I’m no longer totally afraid, sexless and bratty! No—now I can kiss boys, and suck them. And fuck them sometimes too. Or have them fuck me. And I enjoy it, mostly.
I’m here now, 50 minutes later. Somehow, afraid, sexless and bratty. When I arrive, I stop my car in the middle of a quiet street and decide to make an excuse about needing to rush home. Something about a family emergency—I left the gate open or some relative had a fall maybe. This isn’t painfully out of character—choking at the last hurdle. I’m driving home and I’m disappointed that my excuse isn’t an original one. I’m driving and I’m mad that:
I couldn’t find a good park
I decided that my underwear was ugly
I spent the drive counting trees, and power poles, and all of the people I have been intimate with. I am counting, and all the anxiety comes to settle in my knees and tell me that I need to go home. Because there is nothing horny about critical thinking. Because my body is telling me I’m doing this for the wrong reasons and my body is made of sad, complicated knots
I think about how a week earlier I’m painfully mad that nobody would quit their family Christmas to come fuck me.
☞☜
I’m eating pizza with some friends and one tells me that they had thought I was a slut when we first met. They say it was my earrings and the leather jacket and my moustache. They make no mention of my fuck-off sexy aura—weird. But I’m flattered. It feels like currency. I think about it for too long and I feel guilty. Ashamed that I’m not that. Like I’ve let them down.
☞☜
I break up with a boy, or he breaks up with me, because it isn’t working. We fight a lot. The boy is tall and kind, like a giraffe. He is my soulmate (insofar as I believe everyone could be). I can’t admit that I was a virgin before I met him. I am ashamed that my first boyfriend was also the first person I had sex with. Something is telling me that I can’t enjoy our bodies together because I haven’t experienced enough to compare. I’m not sure where this idea came from. Straight people? Other gays? ‘Skins’? It was probably ‘Skins’. I feel deprived of a slut phase. It niggles at me. Makes me feel incomplete.
I’m single now and I still can’t pinpoint if having a shit ton of sex with strangers feels authentic to me. If I actually want to be a powerful slut or if I just want to feel worthy of attention? And be calm. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. Where this all came from, I don’t know. Maybe it was the corrosive influence of too much pornography in my teens. Or feeling like I should want to be a Samantha.
I’m at brunch with the same friends who told me that they once thought I was a slut, and they tell me I’m probably a Charlotte. This cuts deep. I want my friends to think I’m a Samantha.
☞☜
I’m trying to unlearn my obsession with body counts and finding ways to play sexual catch-up. I don’t want to feel like I need to overcompensate sexually for the time missed in high school or when I was in monogamous relationships. I’m some lusted-up fairy who has spent most of their time benched by their own volition.
I’m trying to live in my body. Sex is confronting. I feel unable to harness the confidence and the bravado that other cis gay men seem to be able to. It can feel as though I don’t deserve sex. And that by doing it, I am staking claim to something that I should have a right to. I’m worried that sometimes I don’t actually care about the people and the affection and the sex that we share. I’m just trying to add their name to my list so I can name them when we go around at some hypothetical party and talk about all the boys we’ve kissed or fucked, and I won’t feel like so much of a loser. Because everything I do is just to avoid feeling like a loser.
☞☜
I lived with this wonderful girl who said she had this alphabetical list of all the people she’s hooked up with. Trying to get a name for every letter. I try starting a similar list. I delete it. I think about how I have hooked up with so many people starting with the letter R. I think about how I’m so focused on other people’s sex lives. And about how I’ve recently watched ‘It’s a Sin’ and its slick gay sex montages left me feeling tired. Tired of feeling like I should want that. Tired of the cliché gay narrative that all we do is fuck. We do. But also, we don’t.
It feels like a competition. Who is having the most fun? Who is the freest? Who is the most in touch with their kink?
It can feel as though my social value is determined by some sort of numerical cumshot tally. I’m measuring my sexual and aesthetic self against the people in my life and the figures on TV and the internet strangers I see that just look like they have sex every day, sometimes twice maybe. I want to shrink myself down and sit on their shoulders and see what it is I’m missing out on. I want to be happy for them. And I want to proud of myself and the pleasure I do have. And I don’t want to turn my jealousy into a poison.
Sometimes I say, stop overthinking it and just get fucked. You would be so much calmer if you just got fucked.
