The ‘base’ sex system is really screwed up

A hole’s a hole

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Remember the days? We’re at Cambridge, so it probably wasn’t that long ago. When that special someone said to your teenage self: “That’s okay if you’re not ready to have sex. I am willing to wait for you, you’re really special to me.” Awww.

“I don’t mind just having blowjobs in the meantime.” Oh.

A blowjob is really fucking intimate. When it looks up at you expectantly. Maybe kind of cute at first, until you get up and close and see it staring you in the eye. Staring into your soul. Ready. And eager.

Definitely more intimate than keeping it below the waist line – where it can keep its eye(s?) to itself.

When you weren’t trying to get in to clubs you were giving hand shandies till your arm fell off

So why is sex considered a homerun and a blowjob base 3? If you think about it, it’s going in a hole either way.

During your teenage years ticking all four ‘bases’ off your list all too often becomes a competitive race to the panty line – which at that age generally has a few false starts – without anyone stopping to question what they mean and how they are ranked.

Assigning these numerical categories to physical acts makes it both easy to lie and easier to be pressured into the next step to strike that elusive balance between ‘cool’ and ‘slutty’.

This ranking system artificially creates a social stigma as to when it’s ‘normal’ within stages of puberty to take ‘that next step’.

Boys ew

Kissing with tongues – ‘pulling’ ewwww- in Year 8 progresses to cheeky over-the-jeans fondling at house parties (if you’re lucky) in Years 9-10 , then maybe a reach into the ‘popcorn box’ in the cinema followed soon after by a blowee behind the bike sheds.

And then of course there’s the long slog of dull and exhausting hand jobs while ‘waiting until you are ready’ (the customary 4-8 months) for sex.

Or at least, that was what it felt like everyone else was doing.

Just a few years after starting secondary school and maybe even before you graduated to underwired bras, hand jobs became the going currency for anyone wanting to sit at the ‘cool’ table in the lunch hall.

You can’t sit with us

In hindsight discussions by your sexual superiors were probably highly laced with lies and exaggeration, but at that age you never thought to question it.

Teenagers don’t often admit to feeling this pressure. It is much easier to be a sexual sheep than a Beyonce, who don’t need no man (or woman).

Before you’re ready for sex, you’re expected to be ‘cool’ about doing pretty much everything else.

We need to end the base system. It’s fucked up. ‘Going to third’ is often way more intimate than sex, and some kids do that long before they consider themselves ready for sex. Due to some weird adolescent norm they think they are ready for blozzers.

Stay safe kids

It’s insane. It fucks up our notion of sex, it makes us think of it in numerical, mechanical terms. ‘How far did you go?’ shouldn’t be a question a 14-year-old feels pressured to live up to.

So we have all learnt a valuable lesson today on social norms. Maybe if we’d learned it earlier we would either be much better at sex or much worse at blowjobs. But we might also be less messed up about sex, consent, and pressure.

Retrospect is a bitch.