h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Inteligently written, with a refreshing style. It was good to see a female perspective, on 'growing up'.

i enjoyed this a lot.....

Thank you very much EvilTwin.

I wonder why women don't admit to being as confused as men during their teenage years. Or maybe I was right at the time, and most of my peers weren't confused at all.

All the best.

Rising Tide.

I think its a confusing thing for everyone, male or female.

I think the truth is that its a bit like a 'secret society,' in that there are a lot of myths and half truths that sound plausible. You dont know what to believe, and you wont know whats true untill you sign up.

It dosent help that the clichéd double standards still exist (men are supposed to put it about, while women are supposed to remain pure, untill marriage at least) my feeling is if you are both up for it, then whats the problem.

I was a late starter at 19, by the time it happened i was glad to 'just get it over and done with'

Great inspiration to come "forward" with my poem written long ago.
Title: " Sex after death"

A friend said: "Shut up and get out", never had a chance to spread the good word around.

May be some day I collect my courage to post it among these pages.

BlueBird.

I wrote a poem recently about transsexuality.

It has been shown to a group of transsexuals who had varied responses, the most extreme of which said that before I did anything else I should learn how to write poetry. (It didn't rhyme and scan, you see). I will listen to real technical crit, but that response was too laughable to take seriously.

Most of the transsexuals were appreciative, but said that it only scratched the surface, which was fair enough. How could it do more?

I have learned through painful experience that hootoo is probably the safest place to post things with a difficult subject matter. Other sites flame. This one is remarkably flame-resistant.

B

What an extraordinary place hootoo can be, and, as my friend B has just said, a comparatively safe place to air the expressions of personal transformation.

What an amazing piece of writing your "Sex in the Head" is, Rising Tide. Both courageous and inspiring, though the robustness with which you conclude (...I got laid...) raises a whole new load of questions. The main one being, having gone through such an extended period of "research", tinged, it would seem, with a fair dose of romantic idealism, how did the event live up to the expectation?

In my own case, (an appallingly long number of years ago now), the great crossing of the final threshold (in the compassionate arms of my medical father's prize graduate student) was rather less than dramatic. Perhaps because my technical "virginity" had been done away with years earlier in the context of sexual abuse.

But rest assured, that even several decades later, the possibility of true love and blissful sex does not diminish, and in many respects improves. The important thing is to enjoy the journey, and not get fixated on the goal. But you clearly know that already.

Cheers,

and thanks for sharing your story.

C \|/

Thank you Chaiwallah.

The event itself? Is there such a thing as 'the event'?

As with most people, those early couplings showed a certain lack of practice and finesse, which is probably why one is stoked up with hormones in one's youth - that way you keep you coming back for more so you have some kind of chance to improve with practice.

I guess this piece is a celebration of my slow path to learning to understand, celebrate and enjoy my own sexuality and sexual power. The goddess is rightly shown in three forms - maiden, mother and crone. The journey is what it is all about, isn't it?

In the meantime, I am glad that you enjoyed what I wrote, Chaiwallah, and thank you again for saying so.

RT

Dear RT (!)

<>


By the "event", (and I hope the 'italics' won't yikes this discussion if it really takes off), I mean the first experience of fully penetrative interpersonal (as opposed to solo) sex. From the male perspective, this was THE event, the event sans pareil, the great threshold, the ultimate dream.

Well, that was nearly forty years ago for me, and boy, how times have changed. My guess is that the internet and the availability of such a bizarre range of "alternative" sexual practices depicted therein must have done something to reduce both the fear and the mystery surrounding sex.

Looking back, I could have happily done without the uncertainty and fear, the anxiety that surrounded the whole business. And presumably that's one aspect of internet sex which can't be too comfortable, namely performance anxiety. This is the prime male fear of sex, it would seem, and what porn portrays, in terms of performance, bears little relation to the actualities of sex as shared between lovers. (Though judging by the predominant forms of spam, performance and personal "endowment" are prime territory for exploitation by the snake-oil advertisers.)

But the porn videos don't come with a health warning, saying: Don't be deceived by the editing, don't be depressed by the script, there are other things in sex than the meeting of the small percentage of donkey-dicks and accomodating recta.

I saw a documentary earlier in the year which questioned British teenagers about the effect of porn on their sexual expectations, and it was depressing to hear of relationships between teenagers foundering because of the totally reasonable refusal of the girl to agree to anal intercourse.

Of course, my own anxieties were largely dictated by the after-effects of childhood sexual abuse, and what a long time it took for those echoes to fade.

Mind you, even in those dim and distant days, other cultures had a much easier attitude to sex than we had in the British isles. My time in Denmark, (where porn was both legal and easily accessible), introduced me to a way of socialising where sex between comparative strangers was the norm, but real emotional closeness, a sense of intimacy , was much harder to find.

But love does conquer all, including these primal fears. So if any young lurkers should read our conversation, I hope they will have the sense always to follow their hearts, trust their intuition, and remember the power of the word "No," which is almost as powerful as the word "Yes!"

I guess the real mystery, and the essential core of "romance", is the venturing into the personal unknown, of which sex is only a part, albeit a wonderful part.

Cheers,

C \|/