She did try. Once. For “about one minute.” But “that repulsed me so much that it’s not something I’ve been able to do since.” She doesn’t understand how oral has come to precede intercourse in the 21st-century base-running game. “Someone has got to explain to me how [fellatio] became less intimate than sex.” Although her resistance is largely the gross-out factor, she’s also honest enough to admit that in this day and age, refusing to go down on a male partner is both a means of wielding power and “a test of a nice guy.” (As are her blond-fuzzed legs, which she doesn’t shave.) Plus, she’s discovered that “guys are not unwilling to give even if they don’t receive.”
But Ella isn’t exactly a prude. She describes herself as being “notoriously blunt and to the point about sex”; she was the first among her close friends to shed her virginity, at 19, to a New Hampshire boy she was dating in her freshman year of college. Since then, she’s slept with six different people, but they were nearly all either close friends or boyfriends. (She tends to hook up with her male pals. “I have exactly one male friend I’m close to whom I have not made out with.”) Ella’s mom is gay, but she’s never experimented with girls. “Sorry to be dull, but I was harassed way too much about how I must be gay ’cause my mom is. So I’ve been quite the nice straight girl.”
Ella once had to get tested for an STD because of a scare (all tests came back negative), so she vigilantly encourages protected sex. She’s always offering condoms to friends, and she leaves them on her desk in case her housemates need them. But she admits that she’s stopped using them since she’s been in a yearlong relationship with a Boston-area boyfriend. She doesn’t really like how they feel. “The two people I think of as sucking in bed ... I had sex with them using condoms.”
The (reformed) collector
SM, 30, 60+ previous partners
Mike doesn’t mean to sound like a porn star, but the Allston-based musician swears he can’t remember how many women he’s slept with since he lost his virginity 12 years ago. “It’s in the low 60s, but — and I don’t mean this to sound like a Ron Jeremy thing — I just don’t remember everybody’s name, so it’s hard to have an accurate count.”
When Mike reflects on his formerly promiscuous tendencies, his explanation calls to mind a Revenge of the Nerds subplot. “I used to get ‘Faggot this, faggot that’ called to me a lot in high school.” So he flung himself crotch first in exactly the opposite direction. “As Neanderthal as it is, [being promiscuous is] kind of showing them. The dudes that were supposed to be all macho have no idea — just no idea — the life I’ve led.”
The life he led never included more than three different partners in a day; there was usually one but frequently two. “I would often not end up going to sleep wherever I woke up. I had many toothbrushes in Boston.” He also didn’t distinguish between oral or genital partners. “Honestly, the recent phenomenon of kids not considering oral sex real sex just boggles my mind,” he offers. For the record, he estimates that he’s had between 12 and 15 anal-sex partners.
