By Paula Derrow
There’s one in every crowd, the person who can always be counted on to slyly, subtly bring the conversation around to sex. I’ll admit, it’s usually me. I could blame the fact that I’ve spent the better part of the past 20 years working as an editor at various women’s magazines, mining friends’ sexual adventures (or lack thereof) for story ideas and splashy coverlines.
Yet despite my journalist training, teasing forth honest conversations about sex isn’t always easy. I still recall a dinner with two close friends a few years ago, when one woman, newly engaged and spurred by a few vodka tonics, wondered aloud if either of us had ever tried “you know, back-door sex.” There was a pause, I felt myself smiling stupidly, and before I could speak, before any of us could, I could tell from the sheepish expression on her face that she was sorry she’d ever mentioned it. We did get around to swapping experiences that night but all of us, as close as we were, felt awkward about our attempts to open up.
Afterward, I found myself wondering why three sophisticated, been-around-the-block, liberal-minded types had gotten so embarrassed by the mere mention of a sexual taboo, and a relatively tame one at that. It’s not that I’d never had frank sex talks with friends: We occasionally dished over a new lover or sniped about a lackluster ex and there had certainly been more than one drinks-fueled discussion over dinner about vibrators and blow-job techniques. But as we got older and many of us occupied ourselves with husbands and households, increasingly demanding jobs and new babies, these exchanges happened less and less. When they did, they mostly served to remind me how much remained unsaid, how little the women I know talked about the awkward couplings and surprising urges; the long dry spells or messy, mind-blowing encounters that make up a person’s sexual history.
Partly, I think, this silence stems from fear—fear of being exposed as inadequate or worse, of being boring. Living in an all-sex, all-the-time culture may be liberating in many ways, but it can also breed shame—shame for not keeping up, for not being invited to the party. When most of what women read, see and hear about sex has little to do with their own everyday, perhaps less-than-HBO-worthy experiences, there’s a disconnect, which breeds anxiety: How can any one of us know that what we feel and do is normal, that we’re good in bed, that our desires are kinky, tame or somewhere in between?
The 26 brave, funny, ballsy, smart, searching writers in Behind the Bedroom Door explore the sexual territory that is not often talked about. Because despite living in a world where it’s possible to peer directly into bedrooms across the country via web cam, getting to the truth about sex hasn’t necessarily gotten easier, partly because what’s portrayed in the media is usually as inauthentic as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo throwing each other good-night kisses from their separate twin beds.
And so, the idea for this anthology: When I began mentioning to friends and acquaintances that I was putting together a collection of essays about the sexual feelings and experiences women are afraid to talk about, the stories started to spill out. At a party one evening, a Texan woman with frosted hair and sparkly eye shadow told me she felt guilty about rejecting her husband’s sexual advances the night before. “I needed to catch a plane early,” she explained. “Besides, all he wanted was a quickie. Why should I bother messing up my hair?” Another night, at dinner with a recently married couple, the wife—a dark, serious, intellectual in her late 30s—leaned toward me as soon as her husband slipped outside to take a call on his cell. “I’m only telling you this because you’re doing a book,” she began. “But I’d be interested in having a threesome, with another woman.” Another day, while hiking with a group of women during a vacation in Utah, our guide, a bright-eyed 73-year-old former Mormon told me she’d been married six times, had seven children—and had never had an orgasm. “But I’m done with men,” she said, with a laugh, stepping nimbly over the rocks in our path. “I wouldn’t want anyone to see me naked now.”
These conversations convinced me that women are hungry for a book that tells the truth about sex in real life. Behind the Bedroom Door is that book, its 26 original essays meant to open a window into the libidos and longings of women of every age and stage of life . In her essay, “In Praise of One-Night Stands,” Susan Cheever up-ends conventional notions about casual sex. I n the harrowing “Sexercise,” Abby Sher comes clean about her view of sex as a means of burning calories, of making herself disappear. Lauren Slater contemplates her virtually sexless marriage in “Overcome” while Valerie Frankel takes a decidedly lighter view of things in “Ouch, You’re Lying on My Hair.” Hope Edelman makes a case for innocence in “The Sweetest Sex I Never Had” and Julie Powell, in Lost in Space, gives an unflinchingly honest account of the tempestuous affair that rocked her marriage and world view.
These essays, all so different, make it clear that for women, sex changes all the time, along with our hormones, our psyches, our partners. It’s always evolving, happily often for the better, as we learn what we can give and allow ourselves to get in return. Let the conversation begin.
