Sex Toy Tales: Tales

Seventy-seven, seventy-eight, seventy-nine. I counted eighty-five dildo strokes for good measure. 1971, the year I initiated sex with my also-virgin boyfriend, was a whirlwind of how-to advice. From The “Joy of Sex” to our college campus newspaper, information and its attendant power literally heaped around me. I was protected, liberated, adventurous. Minus orgasm.

Mine, I knew, was a simple problem. Biology student capable enough to speed through diagrams, I went directly to a magnifying make-up mirror that my mother, who neither wore make-up nor went to college, insisted a coed should have.

Pancake days at college were the best. I could be sure that my roommate would rise early, wait in a long line at the dining hall, gorge herself on griddle treats, and then study in a sugar streak until noon. Unless she returned to the room for a forgotten meal pass, I had two or three hours alone.

Legs spread on my paisley twin bed's ruffled comforter, I examined my anatomy. Magnified, the distance between clit and cunt could have been the route of a forced wartime march, it was so interminably long and dreary. Sensation prickled and coalesced in my front, I knew from experience, yet my boyfriend's cock craved the snug and drippy tunnel that welcomed him.

Our sex together was snappy, both in vigor and imagination. We'd played positions, fingered one another and ourselves (unblushing as toddlers discovering our holes), confessed fantasies. To this day, I count him as the ideal first partner. While upperclass dorm-mates primped in the parlor before football games, he and I shredded sheets in bed every Saturday (and Friday and Sunday) that I was able to visit him at his school.

Still, there was the span.

My approach was, pardon the expression, two-pronged. First, I dashed off a missile (too phallic by half) to the campus newspaper's sex advice column. How, I wrote, can a young lady achieve orgasm by vaginal thrusting alone? Eager to experience the most mature plateau possible, reinforced by my reading on the subject, I needed to know how animated poking could get me there.

Not to worry, came the boisterous reply, printed for me, God, and everyone at my university to see. Hands shaking, vision blurring, I carried the smudged newsprint to the library, easing into a pocked graduate student carrel, the better to spread my future sex life on the table before me. Math, the anonymous advisor clucked. Orgasm requires eighty penile strokes.

Summing what must have already been a million in-outs total, I sketched a little graph and reminisced. More physics than biology, it came down to staying power. Apparatus was called for.

***

When the vibrating dildo came by mail in its very long box, I had a stock of batteries hidden in the drawer underneath the make-up mirror, three charged blocks at the ready. I tore off the plain brown wrapper. First of all, it was very pink. Perhaps someone designed it to be flesh-colored, but no creature on earth sported this shiny tone. A grooved cap on one end unscrewed to reveal the battery chamber. Trying to be grateful for new technology, as well as for the reliable postal service, I switched it on. Buzzing decibels louder than any snooze alarm in the dorm, it most definitely vibrated true to description.

I had a choice to make.

My boyfriend, after all, sported great flexibility, mystifying ridges, and velvety skin, qualities I appreciated in our less-than-eighty-penile-stroke sessions. Dee, however—I named her a girl's name—could buzz in her box, or in me, for an easy minimum of an hour. And so she did.

First I tried the math. Pancake day after pancake day, I desecrated our institutional room, plunging the prong into me up to a hundred times, an enviable steady stroke. I didn't know if orgasm could be approached, like a place on the map, but I knew I was lost. One day, on about stroke twenty, I abandoned numbers. It was as if a newspaper cartoon bubble appeared over my head, so clear was the insight. Throttled high, the pink tip strayed to my clit, and the rest, as narratives say, is history.

Freed from routine, as well as from counting, I learned everything about my sexual response. Dee and I could drive me wild in forty seconds. Pausing before what I could only imagine would be the critical finis, I took up the advice books again. Always, they preached, ALWAYS, the Big O marks a lucky lady with erect nipples and a sexual flush. On the day I felt, sexually speaking, like I'd fallen—no, jumped!—off the tallest mountain in the world, like drifting earthward would take forever, I stared at my flat nipples and used the mirror to examine freckled skin on my chest.

Nothing.

***

That exact day and hour was the turning point of my sexuality, or, more honestly, the minute in which I began to own a sexuality. I pounded, I thrilled, I swooned, wondering how my body would actually survive the crescendo—never mind repeat the performance.

Death by orgasm seemed possible, likely, as my dexterity increased. I rode the wave of adult pleasure, damning whatever the books called it. Climaxing in minutes, challenging myself to cut response times in half, I was one satisfied partner. In fact, orgasm de-emphasis during weekend boyfriend sex relaxed us, let us meander on the path toward sexual maturity.

Sure, Dee had her limits, but they pushed me past mine and made me forget, and forgive, the experts. On one memorable holiday at home, well past the era in which I gave up, sexually speaking, boys and books, I held a solitary marathon in my parents' marital bed, perversely stopping at thirteen what-I-knew-to-be orgasms.

***

As I near fifty years of age, I applaud my original pink friend. When my mother whispered questions, blushing furiously, about her physical options when my father's health forced their intimacy to memory, I offered her a mail-order address. Now years after his death, she speaks more openly about the physical pleasure their vibrator afforded them as a couple, how it maintains her sanity as a widow. “Always be a lady” she had told me in childhood, “Except in bed.”

So the other day, at the nervous intersection when I and my female lover shared toy boxes for the first time, mine replete with cords and Hitachi wands, hers with dirty books, I chuckled when she said she'd never tried one. “A loaner?” I said, being generous and ambitious at the same time. Declining, she led me to bed, loving me with physical intensity I mirrored back to her. Who could have guessed, in 1971, as I sifted through books, articles, and ads, that I would be an adequate student after all?