3. Apparently there are things you can do with a boyfriend that don’t involve sex

      Inevitably, number one and I set about having as much sex as was humanly possible in the often very short times we’d be together. I’d head straight to his house after school, and had a curfew of nine p.m. This meant we had roughly five hours in which to consume as much as we could from the all-you-can-fuck buffet.

      Naïvely, I’d assumed—based purely on a passing reference in that classic educational film Grease—that sex took around fifteen minutes. My assumptions around that were shattered in the five seconds it took number one to jizz away our virginities, so I modified my expectations and assumed that fifteen minutes was the average recovery time between quivering ejaculation and the next enthusiastic hard-on.

      I was swiftly proven wrong.

      ‘What are you doing?’

      ‘I’m sucking you off.’

      ‘But … we’ve only just had sex.’

      ‘Yeah, about fifteen minutes ago. Now can we have sex again?’

      ‘Umm … how about we watch telly for a bit?’

      To paraphrase everyone’s parents: I wasn’t angry, just disappointed. Everything I’d ever read, seen and heard about sex, including the rather memorable chat from my dad, had promised me that men were constantly on the boil. Sure, they’d occasionally neglect their erections to leave the house and hunt for food or Xbox games, but realistically there was very little chance that a man would turn down sex with a woman he fancied. Some publications—notably FHM, which I devoured as if it were The Idiot’s Guide to Men—even went as far as to suggest that your chosen man didn’t need to fancy you that much. Consequently, I believed guys just needed a spare half-hour and a structurally sound erection and Bob’s your undiscerning horny neighbour, a shag would be all mine.

      Poor number one.

      Not only did he have to cope with a girlfriend who was far more confident—and for ‘confident’ read ‘loud, horny, and unafraid to mention it’—than him, he was also solely responsible for battling years of ingrained stereotypes about his gender.

      Sometimes he had a headache. Sometimes he was tired. Sometimes it would get to eight p.m. and he was simply empty of spunk, having managed to successfully live up to my expectations for a good four hours already. He’d shyly ask me if I wanted to watch TV or listen to some music. He’d offer me food, cigarettes, a refreshing walk in the sunshine, or if things were getting desperate he’d play his guitar, staring earnestly at me to try and tap into a romance that neither of us was old enough to be comfortable with. Occasionally, when all else had failed, and his attempts at distracting me simply led to comments about how I loved watching his hands as he strummed his guitar and could we have sex now pleasepleaseplease, he’d lead me into the kitchen and encourage me into protracted conversation with his parents just so that he had a chance to rest.

      It’s not that I’m insatiable, I’ve never been insatiable. Thanks to my superlative wanking skills, I’ll happily go without sex for a while. And as an adult I’d see this situation for what it was—a slight mismatch in sex drives that could easily be solved by a bit of conversation and compromise from both parties. But I wasn’t an adult, I was sixteen, and as such I was devastated. I was a sixteen-year-old girl who had been told that all men would want to fuck her, that they were only after that one thing, and it was I who’d have to feign headaches and manage expectations just to get a decent night’s sleep.

      Having been conditioned to believe this, it was humiliating to find that this man—my man, my teenaged boy—who should by all rights be an insatiable sex pest, was immune to the sexual temptation I threw at him.

      I’d whisper filthy things, dress in cheap Ann Summers lingerie, strip naked for him and beg him to touch me. My attempts at seduction were as ham-fisted and incompetent as his undiplomatic rejections, but that just made things worse.

      Late at night, after another failed attempt to tease an erection out of his exhausted cock, I’d lie next to him in his single bed, beneath a poster of Shirley Manson looking like teen-punk sex made flesh, and cry myself to sleep.

      As an adult I know these lies for what they are—not all men want sex all the time, and not all women will punch the air in celebration if they receive a ‘get out of sex free’ card. People are just different, with different drives and needs and desires. I didn’t understand that back then, but I wish I had. It would have saved me the misery and heartache of trying to work out why I wasn’t sexy enough for my boyfriend, and it would have saved him the humiliation of having to explain to his sixteen-year-old lover why he couldn’t maintain a fifth erection in one night.

      It’s important to challenge the assumption that ‘men are only after one thing’, because publicly recognising that it is definitely not true helps all of us feel a bit more normal. If young women grow up thinking that all men want to sleep with them, we’re not giving them the gift of insight, we’re telling them an outright lie. A lie that will lead to humiliating disappointment for our daughters, and—most importantly for my poor first boyfriend—give our sons a reputation that they could never possibly live up to.

      But I shouldn’t complain about number one. As I say, it was mostly the fault of the weird expectations I had about male libido that led to my sexual frustration. I don’t mean to cast aspersions on his manhood—he was actually incredibly good. I am gobsmacked that we managed to have quite as much excellent sex as we did given that neither of us knew much beyond what we’d been told by teachers, parents and the aforementioned well-thumbed copies of FHM.

      So although the sex wasn’t quite as copious as I’d have liked, it was certainly decent, and I won’t complain just because the poor guy hadn’t yet managed to overcome the limitations of biology and started producing six gallons of jizz per day from a permanently erect penis. We’d still shag a lot—at his house, at my house, at parties. In sheds, behind bushes, in tents. We learnt enough about each other’s body that we could frig each other to simple, gleeful orgasms during snatched moments—on buses, in his parent’s kitchen and, of course, in the darkest corners of the local park. On one memorable occasion we shagged in a treehouse, learning two lessons at once, namely that a) sex is much better when your friends aren’t standing nearby shouting ‘Timbeeeeer’ and b) it’s impossible to remain aroused when you’re within three feet of a garden spider.

      Our parents soon learned what we were up to, and were given ample opportunity to lecture us about condoms, carelessness and conception. The Talk came earlier for me than for him, and certainly far earlier than my mum would ever have expected:

      ‘Can