Formative Sexperiments
Sexually speaking, everyone’s got their Thing. Some people have a few Things. These days, after years of research, trial-and-error, and an ill-advised “what if the Furries are onto something” experiment, I know more or less exactly what my Things are. But as a hormonal young nerd, my interest in sex — intense though it was — was general, unfocused. I knew I was into the idea, but not sure what about it attracted me. I approached the task of uncovering the particularities of my sexuality with the same methods I applied to everything else: a lot of weird reading alone and furtive research.
It feels impossible now, but the kind of scrounging a preteen in the age of dialup had to do to find adequately sexy stimulation was intense. You sort of took what you could get. As a result, some of my earlier attempts at having a fetish were…well, these.
Dirty Scotsmen
I don’t know where I first saw the movie Trainspotting, but I do know where I saw it the next 35,673 times: in the lower floor of my parents’ house, alone in the dark with the sound turned down, just losing my mind over the seduction of Mark Renton by worldly high school student Diane. The entire cast of this movie blew my mind. The men of Trainspotting weren’t looking for love like the Disney princes and men of PG romcoms, they were filthy, flawed, and H-O-R-N-Y. By the end of my teens I could have listed “ability to stop the movie Trainspotting at EXACTLY the spot Ewan McGregor pulls the condom off his flaccid dick” in the Special Skills area of my resume.
From 2001 to 2004, Spike and Buffy were my everything. He with his bleached hair, bad attitude and worse accent, she with a false haughtiness, as though she’d NEVER let him throw her on the ground and have his way with her. In Season 6, Episode 9, the sexual tension bristling between the two finally comes to a head, with slayer and vampire fight-fucking each other so hard that they bust up an entire abandoned house. It was…formative. I spent thirty minutes downloading a clip of this episode on Kazaa, only to discover that the dialogue had been muted in favour of Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me,” which, as dorky as I was, I still recognized as unbelievably uncool. Lame recognize lame, you know? I watched this clip on a silent loop for hours, and to be honest Dave Matthews still makes me a bit horny.
A Desperate Hand Trailing Down The Steamy Window Of An Old Timey Car
You know what I’m talking about. I think we aaaallll know what I’m talking about.
Synthetic Skin, I Guess
I had not wanted to see Star Trek: First Contact, until it became my first contact (get it) with this scene in which Chief Operations Officer and creamy-complexioned robo-babe Data is given human skin, complete with nerve endings by the QUEEN OF THE BORGS. All the Queen — who is, by the way, just a head and a robo-spine in a hot babe suit — has to do to make Data cream his cyber-jeans is blow on his skin for a bit. It’s very intense. To be honest I’m not clear on the plot of the film, because I spent most of the film thinking about how to speak in measured-yet-sexual tones while never breaking eye contact, and avoiding the fact that I’d come to the theatre with my Dad.
Tulips?
An important part of being a horned up preteen is flipping through all of your mom’s Adult Woman Novels to find the bit where someone uses their “turgid sex” to “enter” someone else. For me, this took the form of a book whose title I never even bothered to learn, about the tulip trade in Amsterdam during the period where everyone was wearing big hats. There was a lot of flower metaphors and the whole thing was pretty cheesy, but people were just constantly “groping beneath her clothes for the wetness underneath” or “working his hard member til he shuddered and sighed,” so what did I care? Anyway, at one point the book compares the throbbing head of a servant’s dick to a red tulip and it is truly all I can think about when confronted with red tulips to this day.
Men Who Are Actually Just A Canvas Bag Full Of Bugs
My most disgusting secret is that I had a weird childhood crush on “Oogie Boogie,” (?) the largely canvas (??) villain from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Although not explicitly a sex scene, Oogie Boogie does a lot of like, power play and restraint stuff to Santa (???), which I would later come to recognize as something I was into. (The power play and restraints stuff, not Santa, give me a break.) I cannot tell you how disappointed I was to learn that old OB was, literally, just a sentient bag of bugs, as though getting off to a hollow bag would have been normal and fine. Still, more than one friend has told me that she was damp for Hexxus — the sentient oil spill and villain in the Fern Gully film — as a teen, so I guess the lesson here is that human sexuality is a beautiful rainbow and teens are wild.
Monica Heisey is a writer and comedian from Toronto. Her work has appeared in The Toast, The Cut, Rookie, Gawker, VICE, Playboy, and many other web and print publications. Her first book, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better, comes out Spring 2015. Writing about herself in the third person is a nightmare.
