Disappointing Sex

I wrote this a while ago and an abridged version appeared in Fun Magazine, I put it on my writing blog too but no one goes on that, so given this has been kind of a slow news week for me on Noodles, I'm going to stick it up here. After all, everyone loves a tale of abject misery and crushing self-loathing.


If you’re a boy, shit sexual experiences are pretty hard to come by, if sex is shit it’s still ok cos you still blow your load, which is always fun. Girls have a harder time with that stuff but if you’re a boy shit sex has to be really shit, it’s pretty funny when there’s blood or an injury and it often brings you closer to the person you’re doing it with, the shittest is when it’s just kind of grim and miserable, the kind of event that makes you wonder why you bother with sexual experiences at all.



For most people art college is usually a pretty good place to get laid, but for me it was shit for that. Prior to college I’d had a bit of a breakdown, which had shattered my self confidence and also led to me being been put on a hefty dose of antidepressants, which shattered my self confidence a second time by making me balloon in weight and lowering my sex drive considerably. I became a sort of rotund Billy Bunter/Morrissey figure, sitting in the college bar bemoaning my loneliness, not knowing where to start to do anything about it.


My drought lasted a long time, so long that I began to worry that if I ever got to do it again they would have changed it. Everyone around me was fucking like John Holmes and having threesomes and shit while I lived a monk-like, emasculating existence, it was depressing to say the least.


Quite a way into my drought, I resolved that whoever came my way, I would do, no matter who. And so it came to pass that I ended up at a house party talking a girl from my class and actually getting somewhere, the deal was that I didn’t fancy her at all, in fact she was pretty ropey, the usual fine art student fare of angry veganism, brown cords and pockmarks, fuck it, I thought, lets get this over with and get back in the game. So I listened enough about some po-faced lesbian art movement or other for her to be suitably impressed to invite me home with her, so we travelled across town to her grotty, petulia oil stinking room and she fucking leapt on me. She’d probably been as starved of affection as me because it was the kind of scary, intense, ripping and tearing shit that only fat girls and rotters think is hot but is really unpleasant when all you really want from them is to sit quietly while you get on with the shameful act (you may as well be fucking the sleeve of your favourite jacket). She was trying to make a point, I think, that leftist, serious-minded vegans had a wild, untamed sexual energy inside them, too. I was willing her to sit quietly and let me get on with it but still kind of knuckling down and grinding away with my eyes closed, but then she took her fucking clothes off and revealed her misshapen, pallid figure, twisted and hunched by years of bitter anger against imperialism, sexism and her dad or whatever. It was fucking gross and I think I saw some half-hearted self-harm scabs on her upper arms, I looked right, deep into her green eyes and realised she was harrowingly ugly, the blood drained from my dick and probably my face and I know I should have upped sticks and fucked off then, but I needed to reclaim my manhood so I soldiered on. However, the part of me that refused to soldier on was my own little soldier, he disobeyed orders by retreating back into his barracks etc etc this is an ill worded military metaphor about my dick not being hard- you get it.


I figured if I got it up to a semi lob-on and gripped it at the base to trap the blood I could force it into her and think of someone attractive and a few humps in I’d be ok. The pressure was on, it had been a good half an hour of ‘foreplay’ and I started thinking that she thought I was some sort of homo because this was taking so long, thoughts of inadequacy began to plague me and certainly did not help the little chap get into fighting mode. It was over before it began, and I had one last, rather optimistic, stab in the dark (playing snooker with a piece of rope etc etc you get it) and collapsed.



I kind of thought I could feign sleep at this point, citing drunkenness and exhaustion, but I hadn’t really shown signs of either previously and I think she worked out the deal. I rolled over, pulled up my shorts and almost began fake snoring, and then I realised she was quietly sobbing. I’m a scumbag but there’s a limit. I manned up and tried to comfort her, I started talking about how my antidepressants made me ‘weird’ and I guess that was as close I was going to get to discussing the elephant in the room with erectile dysfunction. She kept crying and crying and saying she was never good at this and that no one really ever found her attractive and I kept comforting her badly while freaking out myself and then it was light and I realised she was pretty unhinged and unhappy generally and I’d actually really hurt her by kind of using her but not even being able to. I had this gut feeling of darkness, like something genuinely tragic and hurtful had just occurred. I began to panic like fuck that I was never going to be able to do it again and that my body was fucked or I was secretly gay but had repressed it so much that even I didn’t know. For a few hours that bedroom was the centre of all self-doubt and self-loathing in all of the world.


I considered at this point, I don’t know, maybe turning my life around. I have some serious issues but most things I can hold internally eat me up from the inside, but now this girl knows which means her best friend and her counsellor/therapist, probably daddy knows too, so I kind of felt that I should remedy the issue before I snowballed into some downward spiral of self-loathing at the bottom of which lies real impotence, that’s when you have no self esteem left at all, not a shred, that’s when fat girls and rotters look like babes and I would be praying for this kind of attention from some self harming spotty vegan. But yeah I guess I got through it some way, maybe not the right way but my way, little while down the line I’m able to bone skanks in stairwells of clubs whilst tripping balls on mushrooms and coke, pretty good eh? P –r-etty good.