No means no …. I think
By the time I was between 14 and 15 I found myself to be relatively tall and slender. My facial features now came together so that they looked like they actually belonged together on the same visage.
By this time I had had fantasies about girls and women for a very long time. But I didn’t really know anything about them other than what I read in books or heard from my friends. It was all very theoretical.
You were supposed to rub them here and kiss them there and then somehow everything would work out. It was like learning how to bake from a recipe without any experience; or like working on a car engine by following the manual. You lubricate. You oil. Get those pistons moving. Turn the drive shaft. Insert tool here. Pump that gas. Fill the tank.
This was not really very handy when you are alone with a girl and sweating like a pig out of nervousness and anxiety and she was looking off into some other direction.
Whenever I did manage to venture into any kind of amorous exploration, I would have to be directed like an actor with no brain. Kiss me like this, stroke me like that, lift this arm, move that leg and my eventual favourite, “Ouch! Get off! You’re on my hair!”
I was a very good student in school, but this love business seemed infinitely more complicated. And that was just the physical stuff. Never mind the complexities of trying to hold a conversation.
To be sexy, you couldn’t just talk about things. You had to flirt. You had to joke. Otherwise, you could, as I sometimes found out, spend an evening having a dry and fruitless philosophical discussion only to find out later your female counterpart was expecting you to compliment her, perhaps even try to kiss her or more and reported her disappointment to her friends.
And although I was an A student, I didn’t get the hang of this love business very quickly. I was kissing a girl, running my hands up and down her back and buttocks, when she said, “Oh god, stop. If you keep on doing that I don’t know what I’ll do. You’ve got to stop.” So having learned how to follow instructions in a class, I stopped. Later, the girl seemed angry at me. “Why did you stop?” she asked.
“Because you told me to stop,” I answered.
“Idiot!” she said and turned away. Did I miss something?
With another girl, I found myself in exactly the same position and she was saying in almost the same words, “Oh god, you’ve got to stop. If you keep going I’ll lose control and I don’t want to do this. No.”
Being now infinitely more experienced and wiser, I did not stop. At which point she pulled her arm back and slapped me across the face. “No means no!” she yelled.
So apparently no means no, but I am still not convinced that stop means stop. The trick is, how do you tell the difference? I call on all those infinitely more versed in sex than me. Help!
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