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Something I’ve noticed, in the genre of women’s fiction, is that it is sorely lacking in amusing oral sex stories.  Real women tell amusing oral sex stories to each other, and yet I haven’t found women in any chicklit book recounting a particularly story-worthy oral sex experience.  I’ve found actual accounts of oral sex in 50 Shades of Grey (actually, I’m just assuming they were there.  Those books went through me like water; I’ve retained nothing from my long sojourn with them… isn’t that sad?).  I’ve found realistic penal-vaginal sex in the missionary position being performed by many a heroine in straightforward chicklit.

But I’ve yet to find a scene where a group of women are sitting around a table, talking about the first blow job they gave back at summer camp.

And I guess I am polling all of you to ask if there is a reason for this.

Is there no oral sex talk because finding it in a chicklit book, recounted as part of an amusing conversation, would be a major turnoff that would take you mentally out of the book?

Or is there no oral sex talk because by weird coincidence, no author has thought about adding in a scene where people are talking about oral sex?

I’m asking because I have a scene in my book, Apart at the Seams, which is due in June and coming out in 2014 (the sideways sequel to Measure of Love, which will be out in April!), where the character recounts an amusing tale about oral sex.  I asked Josh if it was too much.  I didn’t want to slap a penis onto my book and turn it into something along the lines of There’s Something About Mary, but women DO talk about oral sex so it seemed natural to have this story fall in the book where it falls in the book.

So, since I seem to have no internal appropriateness barometer, how would you react to a tale of oral sex in the middle of a (non-erotica) chicklit book?  Please be honest. 

You can leave your comment as anonymous if you don’t wish to have your name attached for everyone else to see in the comment section.

I posted this years ago, and I’ve decided to trot the post out again since I am once again receiving these emails.

It must be near Valentine’s Day because everyone and their mother (by which I mean every infertility organization and clinic … since it would be odd if everyone’s mother started writing me emails) are sending me tips on how to not allow infertility to decimate my sex life.

But I’m not really sure how you don’t have infertility decimate your sex life — at least for a short time.  I mean, it’s sort of like an anorexic’s relationship to food — you need food to live, but your relationship with food is killing you.  And you need intimacy in a relationship, but, come on, the sex-not-equaling-baby thing is soul killing.

It is really hard to want to have sex for fun after you’ve been having sex for days in a timed-manner or want to have sex when you’re bloated to hell from drugs.  Or when your heart hurts.  It is really hard to have sex when your heart feels like a shriveled raisin-of-a-thing barely beating under your ribs.  How are you supposed to become stimulated when you are just so fucking sad?

So if you are having mind-blowing sex this week, rock on.  But if you are not; if your body is so traumatized from transvaginal ultrasounds or you feel like sex is just a reminder of what is not working in your body or you are so sad that you can’t get intimate, then stop beating yourself up and stop reading those articles and stop putting MORE pressure on yourself.

You will get back to a happy sex life if you two are both going to work to get back to that place of intimacy.  But all problems don’t have to be solved at the same time.  Sometimes, solving one solves some of the other ones too.  So if not-letting-infertility-destroy-your-sex-life feels like too big a task right now, take the night to eat through a box of chocolates in bed.  And cuddle.  And tell each other what you love about each other.  And promise each other that this is a moment in time and the future won’t look like now.

I feel like instead of “Spice Up Your Sex Life During Infertility!” articles, there should be a simple Michael Pollan-like mantra:

Have sex. If you can. And if not, don’t stress and have it later.

14 words.  That’s the advice I wish I had read back then rather than the articles I did read that just made me feel guilty.  And I was reminded of that this week when I read my 3000th email on sex and infertility.

The same advice applies to anyone not having sex who is parenting after infertility and feels guilty about it.  Or anyone who reads a stupid Cafemom article* that tells them that if they’re not submitting to their sex-craving partner they’re dooooooooooooooooooomed and is now worried.  And frankly, anyone who is not having sex for any reason and they’re feeling stressed not about the not having sex part but how the not having sex is being perceived.  I can’t think of anything less sexy than sex because you feel pressured to have sex. 

You don’t need to solve every problem all at the same time. So have sex.  If you can.  And if not, don’t stress and have it later.

* And seriously, that New York Times article is from 2009.  Surely someone has done sexual research since 2009.

Nicole Smith, a researcher out of Indiana University, conducted a study that found — wait for it… — that infertility can affect your sex life.  It’s being reported as something along the lines of IVF can kill your libido and ruin your relationship, but the actual study seems to focus on the reason you’d be doing IVF (eg. infertility) vs. the procedure itself.

Now I know your jaw probably dropped open because this.did.not.occur.to.you.  Life crises often make us horny, and stressful situations such as cancer, unemployment, or the death of a loved one drive us to want CONSTANT sex.

Wait.

I may have messed that up.

Forgive me if I feel a bit sarcastic reading about this study and the subsequent headlines.  It seems like common sense to me; something that doesn’t need studying per se unless the result will be that people will stop saying things such as “well, at least you get to have a lot of sex!” when you tell them that you’re experiencing infertility.

The university reports,

Compared to a sample of healthy women, women undergoing IVF reported significantly less sexual desire, interest in sexual activity and satisfaction with their sexual relationship. They had more difficulty with orgasm and were more likely to report sexual problems such as vaginal pain and dryness. Similar to emotional and relationship challenges associated with assisted reproductive technologies, the sexual problems intensified as a couple’s use of ART proceeded.

I agree with the researchers that people should discuss their sexuality with their doctor since there are sometimes solutions to symptoms.  But the reality is that infertility is a life crisis, one that happens to be tied to sex.  If someone told you that their sex life was decimated due to cancer or unemployment or the death of a loved one, we would tell them that their libido will hopefully return when they are not in crisis.  We would not expect their relationship to look exactly as it looks when there isn’t a crisis on hand.  So I wonder if the good intentions of this study (and I believe there are good intentions here) creates even more pressure to treat a symptom (lack of libido) even as you’re not in control of the underlying cause (infertility).  And that, in turn, creates more stress and more frustration in regards to a person’s sexuality.  In other words, is this helpful or would it be better if we all just admitted that sex may not be an enjoyable experience during this particular life crisis for many people and we shouldn’t stress about fixing it while we in the middle of the storm.

I’d also want to see a study that looks at a sample of women who learned about their infertility after trying to conceive for a year vs. people who go into IVF knowing full well that they will need to use some form of assistance in order to conceive.  I have heard that the emotional outlook is different for the two groups with one looking at IVF with a disbelief of “how did I get here?” and the other looking at IVF with the relief of “thank G-d there are options.”  Not saying that the stress doesn’t become the same in the end, but how you reach the knowledge of your infertility may play into how you process your infertility.

One thing the study gets right though is their belief (and mine) that in talking about sex and infertility that we let people know that they’re not alone.

You are not alone.

If you have no desire to have sex because the act itself reminds you of what isn’t working, if you have no desire to have sex because hormones have made you feel decidedly uninterested in orgasms, if you have no desire to have sex because it feels like a requirement instead of an enjoyment — you have experienced what so many women experiencing infertility whisper from blog to blog.  It’s the rare person who is unaffected emotionally and physically from infertility, and the effects of infertility are far-reaching, even into your libido.

I don’t know if you can really treat these feelings, especially when you are in the moment.  I think they are something to focus on at a later point when you are not in crisis as part of the idea of resolving your infertility, which is the idea of mentally coming to terms with reality (and not, as people seem to think, reaching parenthood.  Children resolve childlessness.  We all need to do the hard work individually to resolve our infertility).  But I do think talking about sex is important, if only, as Smith states, to let people know that they’re not alone.

Back to 50 Shades of Grey, Ana, Christian, and your sex life.  (What?  You didn’t know your sex life was in this book?  Well… it inadvertently is.)  I was talking with my friend, let’s call her Kay*, and she mention that she was depressed after reading 50 Shades of Grey.  “Oh,” I said.  “Like you miss the characters and being ensconced in the story?  You can visit them again, you know.  I mean, I’m on my 103rd read-through of Harry Potter.”

No, Kay explained.  She was depressed because her relationship wasn’t smokin’ hot like Ana and Christian’s.  She loves her husband, he loves her, they still have sex.  They also have kids and jobs and family obligations and volunteer work, and all of that adds up to a relationship which looks a little like a reusable grocery bag life vs. Ana’s Prada purse life.  You know reusable grocery bags: dependable, does its job, nothing flashy, you can ball it up on the floor of your car for a bit and it’s barely worse for wear.  Whereas Ana’s relationship is a Prada bag; albeit one in the shape of a pair of nipple clamps, but a Prada bag nonetheless.

My end of the conversation came from how I feel about the cross-over of fiction into real life to the admiration of abusive relationships, and we had a half hour conversation while I ate through a box of Special K (the cereal… not ketamine).  I come at this not as a therapist who knows anything about relationships but as a writer who has examined countless fictional relationships and knows how writers construct them so the reader is not only attracted to what the fictional couple has but covets it for themselves.  There’s no greater interest-inducing drug than jealousy.  And no, this isn’t just about 50 Shades of Grey.  Substitute in whatever book you’ve read that has made you feel like shit about your relationship.

I also preface this with the fact that Kay is done with the three books, and I am still reading 50 Shades Darker**, but I don’t think I’m overshooting here by writing this now because everything I needed to know about how I feel about their relationship came from their first few interactions in the first book.  And because we’ve seen this story play out with different characters numerous times before.  It’s a little bit of weak storytelling that is still totally enjoyable as long as you consume it rather than having it consume you.  Books like this are like candy; the problem comes when you start trying to restructure your totally healthy, nutritious life to have the caloric-emptiness of a fictional, candy relationship.  The book isn’t the problem; inviting the book into your life is.

In fact, let’s go back to the original text — Twilight — since 50 Shades of Grey is just Twilight fanfiction.  Edward approaches Bella, whom he picks out because he likes her smell (it makes him hungry, and he wants to drain her), and pretty much tells her that he fantasizes about killing her.  And Bella gives him a chance.  Because that’s what teenagers do.  I found this more excusable in the characters of Bella and Edward since they’re teenagers (I mean, a 111-year-old teenager) vs. Ana and Christian who are both adults.  Real life is somewhat like Twilight in that teenagers see danger signs in a relationship and they ignore them because they either don’t believe that the danger will come to fruition or because they’ve read too many books like this and mistake Edward and Bella’s relationship as epically romantic.

Did it end in a good place; I mean, good insofar as being part of the walking dead?  Sure.  But real relationships aren’t about the end point.

They’re about the beginning and middle too.  And Edward and Bella, as well as Ana and Christian, have a pretty fucked up beginning and middle.  Both girls were chosen because they fulfilled the need of the male character.  Twilight’s sometimes I think about killing you becomes Grey’s sometimes I think about beating you for my pleasure.  In both cases, we’re celebrating someone sticking in there (you know, staying in an unhealthy relationship) to get to the happy ending where they’re cherished.

And please don’t mistake me for saying dom-sub relationships aren’t healthy.  They can be, and certainly, if that’s how you get your rocks off, go get your rocks off.  But a healthy dom-sub relationship doesn’t include berating, cajoling, or overpowering; especially prior to the relationship starting.

In both stories, the action, the objective, is all provided by the male.  It’s about the man seeking his personal gain, and the woman providing it by being inactive and non-goal-oriented.  See, not so admirable, right?  Sure, he ends up getting all entangled in real feelings for the woman, sort of in a romantic, two-way Stockholm Syndrome sort of way, but that’s not where the roots of their relationship stem.  This isn’t about two people coming together because they’re seeking companionship or have a mutual attraction.  In both cases, if Bella hadn’t seemed so mouth-watering and Ana hadn’t seemed so klutzy and weak, they wouldn’t have been attractive to Edward and Christian.  Doesn’t look that romantic when you discover that’s the reason someone wanted to be with you in the first place.

It’s about as romantic as learning that someone only likes you for your fame or money or whatever else you can do for them, and then having them learn along the way that they actually aren’t the star-fucker/gold-digger they thought they were but they honestly have feelings for you.  Is it an enjoyable story to read?  Sure.  But is it a healthy relationship to live through?  Uh… no.

But this is so common; looking at a fictional relationship that is inherently unhealthy and using it as the measuring stick for a healthy, real relationship and believing ours is the relationship that comes up short.  For our generation, I pin all of this back on Pretty Woman***.  Other generations have their own bad lesson fiction; but this one is ours.

Vivian (Julia Robert’s) is clueless, especially when it comes to anything other than sex.  Which isn’t really fair because she’s a sex worker, so she should feel confident about sex, in the same way as I’m a writer, and I should feel confident with words.  So taking sex out of the picture, Vivian is our empty vessel who will be used to advance the objectives of the male character (Edward Lewis).  She’s got a touch of “who me?”  She’s uncomfortable in that rich world and moreover doesn’t really believe she deserves to be there (which is mirrored in Bella and Ana’s “I can’t believe he chose me and what if I’m not enough for him” mentality).  Vivian admits at the beginning of the film: she dreamed she was a princess trapped in a tower and she’s waiting for the knight to come to rescue her.  In other words, this isn’t a woman who is going to write her own ending to her story.  She’s waiting for the knight to do that.  She even tells Edward Lewis as such: she “wants the fairy tale.”

The problem with the traditional fairy tale is that it isn’t predicated on the notion that the man and the woman are equally writing the story.  And while we may draw certain ideas from that fairy tale that we look for in our love life — for instance, that concept that we want someone who will take care of us, will ease the burden that comes with living — we don’t really want the whole thing: the woman who just sits around and waits for the man to come and save her.  Because while it does workout for Vivian, Bella, and Ana, the vast majority of women who actually try this will end up waiting indefinitely.  Healthy relationships have a give and take; have a see-saw motion where sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down and sometimes you’re balanced evenly in between.  But hopefully you’re both agreeing to the same objectives and working together toward them; or you both have objectives and you’re supporting each other on your individual objectives.  And hopefully you don’t live a Bella/Ana/Vivian sort of life where you are an empty vessel, waiting to help your man fulfill his goals without any of your own.

This works in fiction.  You can have a strong character with an objective, and all other characters help that character fulfill his objective.  But it doesn’t work well in real life.  You can’t live your life for someone else.

As for the hot sex that Ana and Christian have; that combustible passion?  It’s part of that whole, and even if some people have it in real life, in this case, it’s wholly fictional.  All the reader sees is that the sex is hot, the passion is hot, that level of commitment is hot, that I’d die without you now is hot.  And they’re forgetting that if the main character had a shred of self-esteem and confidence, she wouldn’t have been chosen by the man as their target.  That real world waiting can go either way for real world humans, whereas fictional characters can feel pretty comfortable knowing that if they’re waiting, their love will come around by the final page.

If you’re sad because you think you might have missed out on a technicolour relationship somewhere along the way, you need to take that step back and remember that you don’t live inside a book.  You live in the real world where you need to make very real choices, and you can’t sit around fulfilling someone else’s objectives even if they bring you hot sex.  And if hot sex is what you’re really coveting, well, there might be ways of getting you hot sex (and I’m sorry, but not having hot sex is also a fact of life sometimes.  Not everyone is going to run a five-minute mile or memorize Pi or achieve any of those things that we’d like to achieve that are sort of innate abilities but are also things you can work on).  But hopefully you see that your relationship is better than these fictional ones.

And if you need to look at a fictional relationship and feel like crap, look at something more like Pride and Prejudice, which has multiple characters with multiple objectives.  Sure, the women need to operate within the confines of their time period, but at least Elizabeth Bennett knows what she wants and strives to get it.  A more interesting relationship to consider as a yardstick.

I hope that if you are experiencing 50 Shades of Grey depression that this has reframed the story somewhat.  And helped you untangle yourself from fiction.  Now go have hot, passionate sex.  Or go have no sex and do the laundry because those t-shirts aren’t going to fold themselves.

* She gave me permission to write about our conversation as long as she got to wear a figurative paper bag over her head.

** I know.  I’m aware of how slowly I’m getting through these books.  The friend who asked me read them said she would have never asked me to start them if she knew I was going to read like a fucking snail.  In my defense, I’ve been trying to finish up my own manuscript, work on an edit of another, practice guitar, attend yoga class, and coo at Cozy Jackson for enormous intervals of time every single evening.  The cooing and blueberry feeding of the hamster cuts into my ability to devour porn.

*** It was such a popular movie for our generation, and I heard the same thing said after that movie came out (people thinking their relationship didn’t measure up).  Everything is pretty interchangeable: Vivian is Ana.  Instead of asking for directions, they conduct an interview.  In both cases, he’s rich and she’s poor.  She is asked to come into his world and doesn’t fit in, and he never really comes to her world where he has to discover how it feels to not fit in.  In both stories, he dresses her up like a doll and makes her feel like a princess.  And there’s lots of sex.  Hey… is 50 Shades of Grey Twilight fan fiction or is it Pretty Woman in disguise?

People magazine has named Bradley Cooper their sexiest man alive.  But, no, it doesn’t just come down to looks.

Ladies, take note: this Georgetown grad can whip up dinner, take you for a spin on his motorcycle and whisper sweet nothings in French (he’s fluent!). Just don’t try convincing him what a catch he is.

Wait, why are only ladies taking note?  What?  Men can’t enjoy gazing at Bradley Cooper’s dreamy… what colour are his eyes?… blue eyes? (I couldn’t actually tell what colour his eyes are in the photo, but it says in the first paragraph that he has “dazzling baby blues,” and I’m assuming that refers to his eyes and not that he has a less severe case of postpartum depression).

I don’t know if I find someone cooking, driving a motorcycle, or speaking French sexy per se.  I mean, I loved it when Josh first cooked me dinner, mostly because it was so endearing how much he had to concentrate on the recipe and what an enormous mess he made to impress me.  And being capable of operating a motorized vehicle is something many adults are capable of doing so I don’t jizz my pants every time I’m in traffic and observe all the people around me driving.  And with over 64 million people in France alone not to mention all other French-speaking countries and countless students who were forced to take a foreign language in order to graduate, I don’t find the ability to conduct a conversation in a second language all that enticing.  I mean, listen, if the man spoke fluent Ubbi Dubbi I’d be a little more impressed.  After all, how many people speak Ubbi Dubbi these days since Zoom went off the air?

The problem, of course, is that beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.  I don’t find Bradley Cooper particularly sexy. (I’m so sorry, Mr. Cooper, but maybe I’m not your cup of tea either.)   I didn’t get excited for Ryan Reynolds in 2010.  While I had an enormous crush on Johnny Depp back in his 21 Jump Street days, my eyes sort of skipped over him during his feature in 2009.  Or Hugh Jackman in 2008.  Which is to say that I have a deep respect for Hugh Jackman — think he’s a talented actor and I love the way he discusses his family — but I just don’t find him sexy.  Perusing back through all the old Sexiest Man Alive winners, I can’t say that People magazine and I have ever agreed.

If I ran People magazine, I’d slap Joshua Ford on the cover.  The man is sexy.  He runs out for emergency tampons when I don’t buy them because of superstitious, hopeful reasons.  He told me I was hot when we were in the throes of treatments and I felt anything but.  He takes all the twins’ night wakings, allowing me to sleep.  He cleans the snow off my windshield in the winter.  He still has all his hair and it’s not even greying.  He scrunches up his nose in excitement when he talks about the Pixies.

That’s who I’d put on the cover.

The Wolvog and Josh back when the Wolvog liked to pull the bottom of his shirt over his face and hang out.

And a close runner up is my celebrity-crush-since-last-February, Billie Joe Armstrong — even with his new blond hair.  (Josh claims he would never clear the snow from my windshield, and he’s probably right… though it could be because he’s from California and they don’t get a lot of snow there.  But he also just might not be a gentleman like that.  That’s sort of the problem with celebrity crushes — you just don’t know the actual person.)

Who would you put on the cover as People’s Sexiest Person Alive — both celebrity and non-celebrity?  Why person?  Because not every woman likes dudes.  Just sayin’, People.