- Share This Post
- submit
- 3
-
Sparkle (0)
Recently, Femfresh, a company that manufactures feminine hygiene products, conducted a survey of 3,000 women in the United Kingdom between the ages of 18 and 50 and found that 75 percent of those who responded prefer to have sex after drinking. According to the results, the average respondent had had eight sexual partners, been drunk with five of them, and couldn't remember the names of two. A total of 150 women admitted they couldn't have sex sober.
The survey cannot be labeled conclusive due to its limited sample (3,000 women, and these are all users of the Femfresh product line) and the ambiguity of the words used to report the findings (when women responded they that preferred to have sex “after drinking,” do they mean after having a nice glass of wine with dinner or after finishing an entire bottle? What is their tolerance? Is this consumption a natural thing?). Despite these limitations these results suggest that a lot of women may need to get a little tipsy to get it going on and I find that disheartening.
I'm not here to moralize about other people's choices. If you've read me for any amount of time, you know that I don't believe in that method of interaction. I believe in stories, so I'm going to tell you mine, to give you a little background into why I feel the way I do.
REMEMBER, REMEMBER
An ex of mine e-mailed me a couple of days ago. He and I shared an incredible relationship—we were made of adventure and pleasure. We had no boundaries, we rode the wave right over the edge and into the abyss. His e-mail said that he had been thinking about our nights naked on a deserted beach. He asked, regarding the first night we danced on the sand under the stars, what we'd eaten that night. Was it shrimp?
I couldn't remember. I had been drunk. I had been drunk the first night I met him at a party at the house of a friend, too. I had been drunk afterward when we went dancing until sunrise. I had been drunk when he suggested to take me to his house afterward instead of dropping me off at my apartment. I had been drunk when I opened the car door, looked at the highway moving quickly under the car, and threatened to jump out unless he took me home.
I remember these things because I drunkenly wrote about them before I passed out. I think part of my obsession with chronicling everything stems from the fact that I believe that all of life's moments serve a purpose—they all have a lesson. And if we forget them, we lose that lesson.
For all the talk of how drugs fry your brain, there is very little talk about what alcohol can do to it. I started drinking with regularity when I was 16. Back then, it was high school fun, and usually involved throwing up. I was young; I thought my occasional hangovers were like battle scars, a key to Valhalla. By 22, I couldn't remember the last time I'd thrown up from drinking. I weighed a little over 100 pounds, but I could polish a bottle of Stoli by myself—and often did.
Blackouts became so common that I began writing to myself while I was drunk (thank God for computers, I have a hard enough time reading what I write without a drink). I wish my memory of the previous night had been the only thing I was in danger of forgetting. What I didn't realize until later is that alcohol doesn't just smudge short-term memory. I was born blessed with an incredible mind, a memory that was so close to photographic, I thought studying was cheating—if I didn't retain all the information I needed on the first go-around, I let myself take the grade I deserved.
My retention never failed me. Until 23. I've been sober for a handful of years and it's never come back. A woman in Alcoholics Anonymous once told me it would, with time. I believe her because I want it to be true. I believe her even if I can no longer remember a large percentage of the trivia that once made me so good at Trivial Pursuit. I believe her even if I can no longer remember where I read something that touched me. Or what channel I was on two seconds ago that had that cool show about black holes.
That's part of the reason I have continued chronicling my life
