The Obligatory Sex Column
by Clay Risen

The self-effacing sex article. It's become a rite of passage in the online opinion world. All the hot young Web columnists have one; it's how we get to know the pundits of tomorrow. It used to be the childhood memories; now it's the foot-fetish confession.

Admittedly, I want to be one of these people. I want to be called an Internet "Wunderkind," the next Ruth Shalit (or, maybe not, but something like that). Which means, in no short order, that I am required to tell something embarrassing yet oddly hip about my sexual coming-of-age. Here goes.

I don't like porn.

Never have, probably never will. Playboy, Penthouse, Shaved Snizz — boring. Sort of sick, actually. I'll visit friends, and they'll have a copy of Juggs lying around, and I won't even take a peek (well, there was this one time I checked out a buddy's copy of Flat-top Fuckers, but that was really a curiosity thing).

Usually I get away with telling myself that, as an enlightened male, I am turned off by the way these magazines degrade women. Maybe; this isn't a lie, but it's not the whole truth, either.

The fact is, unlike most men my age, I grew up porn-deprived. It's not that my father didn't have porn — in fact, I remember a rather hefty stack of Playboys sitting up in our attic. But before I knew their true power, he sold them — he even took me with him to the second-hand store. He said he was selling them because they were worth a lot, but I know the real reason: He was intent on denying me my legacy.

So what is a 12-year old boy to do when he has all the usual urges but none of the usual instruction guides? Improvise.

I was a pretty nerdy kid growing up, and while my classmates were out playing football, basketball or just beating the shit out of each other, I was inside reading. When I didn't have anything of my own to read, I'd venture into the attic to scour my parents' collection. And that's when I found my El Dorado.

I get my proclivity for reading from my parents. They have a lot of books. And they don't get rid of them, ever. So going through our attic's book collection was sort of like an archeological excavation. And my research soon revealed a startling fact — my parents had a lot of erotic literature. I'd be flipping through histories, epics, biographies, when suddenly I'd come across something like "Couples", John Updike's paean to sexual liberation. As soon as I read the back cover, with its promise to be "abundant in its sexual activities," I was hooked.

And there were others. "Fanny Hill". Henry Miller by the arm-full, with the requisite Anaïs Nin chaser. I became an expert at skimming a book for its sexual content; given the genre — suspense, romance, family drama — I could approximate where the juiciest parts were going to be.

Then there were the sex manuals. Good lord. "The Joy of Sex", of course, but also "The Sensuous Woman", "The Sensuous Man", "The Sensuous Couple", "Sophisticated Sex Techniques in Marriage" (my personal favorite) — they had them all. And I read them all.

This was my porn.

After several months feasting on books like these, I couldn't understand the attraction of straight-up porn — what's the excitement of a naked woman in the face of a detailed description of the "slippery pond" position, or several explicit pages of Piet Hanema bedding every single woman in Tarbox?

What little visual stimulus I did have only fed my increasingly baroque sexuality. While no Penthouse ever arrived in the mail, Victoria's Secret catalogues came in droves. My friends may have been budding experts on the relative merits of nipple size, but I was probably the only kid my age who could tell the difference between a regular garter-belt ensemble and a merrywidow.

What's more, Victoria's Secret used to run these multi-page ads in Esquire, Vanity Fair and the like — to which my parents had subscriptions. These ads would always tell a story — a ravishing English lady walking around her estate in her skivvies trying to plan the perfect evening for her and her beau. She settles on a night of candles, massage oils, and oh yeah lots of slinky lingerie. And none of this was written — it was all told in the photographs. It was high art, plain and simple.

Though woefully short on actual sexual contact, my teenage years were relatively happy ones because I was able to retreat to my own parallel universe of erotica. And to this day, it's always soft-porn over hard-core, the Palmer's web page over teenmaster.com (no, there will not be a link to that site).

The only problem is, this isn't life. As I have grown into adulthood I have learned a shocking truth — sex is nothing like what I thought it would be. Women don't, as a general rule, lounge around the house in body stockings. And wife-swapping is not, so I have found, as common in reality as it is in the pages of a Rabbit Angstrom novel. Sex, surprisingly, does not revolve around the world according to Lady Chatterley.

So there you have it. A telling glimpse into the sex life of Clay Risen. Not exactly flattering, but these days very little on the Web is. It doesn't matter, I've paid my dues — now, where's that call from Salon?

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.