The Cut on Tuesdays
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On today’s show, we return to the dawn of sexual knowledge. What is sex? For all of us, there was a time when we did not know … and we wanted very much to find out. So in this episode we put the question to our friends, our colleagues, our listeners: How did you start to make sense of sex? There are a multitude of possible answers. For example:
ANON: So, when I was 11 or 12, my family had this girl from Northern Ireland come stay with us as part of this program that they used to do — it was to show Northern Irish kids that Catholics and Protestants could get along. You’d have a Protestant come stay with you if you were a Catholic family, and vice versa. We were Catholic, so she was Protestant, and I thought she was very sophisticated because she had a boyfriend and just seemed to know things about sex that I didn’t. I don’t remember how this came up — it’s mortifying to even think about it; like, we must have been using extremely veiled language — but at some point we started talking about masturbation techniques. She told me that what she did was put a nail-polish bottle in her vagina. Like, just the cap. And we’re sort of explaining each other’s techniques. I would go into a room and try her technique; I’d come back out; she’d go and try my technique. And when I was in the room trying her technique I was sort of like … This doesn’t work like my way. This is just something sitting there. I was like, “What do you do?” She would read a magazine with a nail-polish bottle just there. And I was like, God, if this is what sex is going to be like, I do not have a lot to look forward to.
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