I am not the Messiah: I’m a very naughty girl. But a complicated one: I enjoy kinky sex, but only within the confines of a loving and monogamous romantic relationship. Sometimes, as happened recently, I’ve had sex with an ex with whom I’ve previously had a loving relationship, but the danger is falling back in love with them, which is always messy.
So basically I’ve had rude sex with boyfriends (well, one at a time) whom I cared for deeply. And I sometimes tweet smutty jokes, write erotica and record sexy songs. But that’s it: I don’t even have casual sex, let alone an OnlyFans account. One night stands make me cry, so I don’t have them. I kind of wish I could, because it should be fun, but… for me, it isn’t. I like my sex with a large dollop of love.
Anyhow, I thought I’d talk you through some of the seminal (no pun intended) events which led to this point.
How it all started
The first boy I ever kissed was Benji [name changed to protect his blushes], a boy at my school, when I was ten.
Benji was my mum’s friend’s son, and I would go over to his house to play after school on a Thursday. Though only three months younger, he was in the year below me, so thankfully didn’t realise how unpopular I was at school.
Benji’s mum had a whopping five children, three of them under six – so, fortuitously for us, she couldn’t keep tabs on us easily. One warm evening in 1990 when I was ten, Benji and I were lying facing each other in a hammock in the garden, our bare legs touching – and I started to feel all tingly and weird. Benji must have felt it too, as he asked, ‘Do you want to go up to my room?’
We went up to his room, and he asked me, ‘Do you want to kiss?’
I hesitated, and nodded.
Then he warned, ‘No tongues, though.’
I was confused. How could I take my tongue out of my mouth? Surely I couldn’t. I compromised by pushing it as far back in my mouth as I could before we kissed. I still remember how soapy and clean Benji smelt.
The next week, we kissed again, and he said, ‘Do you want to sex?’
My mum had told me about sex a couple of months previously, looking extremely embarrassed. She’d mumbled, ‘The man puts his penis in the woman’s vagina, and that makes a baby.’ She’d said something about them being in love too, or maybe being married - I can’t remember that clearly.
The next day, I’d gone into school and excitedly told a girl in my class called Charmaine: ‘Guess what “sex” is? The man puts his willy in the woman’s fanny!’
‘You’re lying!’ she accused me. ‘That’s disgusting!’
‘I’m not lying!’ I insisted. ‘My mum told me.’
‘You’re lying!’ Charmaine said again.
These days, she’s a doctor and is married, so hopefully she now knows I was telling the truth.
I didn’t know how to have sex in practice though.
‘I don’t really know how,’ I confessed to Benji.
‘It’s okay, I know,’ Benji reassured me. ‘I’ve seen it in films. First, you take all your clothes off except your pants.’
We both stripped down to our pants.
‘Then I lie on top of you,’ Benji instructed.
I obediently lay on the floor, and he lay on top of me.
‘And now I do this,’ he finished.
He began thrusting on top of me, and grunting: ‘Uh! Uh! Uh!’
I could feel something hard pressing into my knickers, between my legs, which wasn’t very comfortable.
After about a minute, Benji stood up and announced, ‘There. I’ve sexed you.’
I was distinctly underwhelmed by the sexing. If that was sex, I decided, I was happy to do without it forever.
The next day, I woke up with a sick, horrendous feeling in my stomach. I remembered what my mum had told me: The man puts his penis in the woman’s vagina, and that makes a baby.
This must mean I was pregnant, which was terrible news. My dad was literally going to kill me!
I didn’t tell anyone, though. I just cried every morning for months, and stared at my belly in the mirror. Was it swelling, or was I imagining it? Was a baby growing inside me?
I hadn’t started my periods yet, but I’d heard that you could get pregnant before starting them if there was an egg there. It was the end of my life, and I was only ten.
I kept crying. My mum asked me several times what was wrong, but I couldn’t tell her I’d had sex with Benji. She was embarrassed enough about sex as it was, and would definitely disown me.
Eventually, I was exonerated by my Usborne book How Your Body Works. It said that boys started producing semen aged eleven. Benji was only ten! The wash of relief that coursed through my body was immense.
Of course, Benji hadn’t actually come either, and you can’t get pregnant through your knickers anyway – but How Your Body Works didn’t tell me that.
Not a nice girl
Fast-forward a few years, to age 13. There were four Asian girls in my class at secondary school, but I was far and away the loudest and most exhibitionist. So when our class put on a play about the Mughal Empire (an ancient empire in South Asia), I was chosen to play the Emperor Akbar.
I remember sitting on a throne (aka a chair), and six other girls sitting cross-legged at my feet, pretending to be my wives. Our adviser on all things Mughal was a Muslim teacher called Mrs Chopra, who studied the scene and announced, ‘Akbar needs a hookah!’
Never one to miss an opportunity for a joke, I quipped ‘But Mrs Chopra, I already have six wives!’
Our stern English teacher Miss Buckley (who was the worst teacher I ever had) rounded upon me with a fearsome glare, and replied ‘Ariane, I thought you were a nice girl. You are not a nice girl!’
I literally have no idea how I knew what a hooker was - I must have read it somewhere. Ironically, I actually didn’t know what a hookah was, but I assumed correctly that Mrs Chopra wasn’t referring to a prostitute. My grammar school was definitely not that progressive.
Losing my virginity
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Thoughts From a Small Brown Girl to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.