S*X for the Extremely Shy

PART ONE

Women’s magazines, Sunday papers and the Reader’s Digest have been writing more and more about sex in recent years. They carry candid letters from girls who can’t achieve orgasm or men who fear impotence. They solicit replies from sexologists, whose advice, for some reason, is always written in bold face, and who provide long and explicit answers which never fail to badly shock those of us who were brought up in mid-20th century when the most explicit things in newspapers and magazines was advertisements for Maidenform bras. Today, magazines publish a zillion words a year just on how to find your partner’s G-spot.
I don’t even know what a G-spot is – and I daren’t ask.
What these journals fail to realise is that out there, there are people who have difficulty finding even a decent parking spot and who also wouldn’t know what a G-spot was even if it leapt out and bit them on their backsides.
The following advice is for them.
If only editors knew it, there are millions of people who can be classed as Extremely Shy and who need just very basic advice so that they can take it s l o w l y.
In the 1950s everybody was shy. Or nearly everybody. For a start your parents never told you anything, but they would issue many an enigmatic warning about, well . . . you know . . . about, well, s*x, the very mention of which would induce a violent fit of coughing. Or they might have slid you some sort of book written by an elderly clergyman, who’d obviously never had it, which would warn you about not playing with yourself.
As a consequence of all this one would – in fact two would – feel guilty about being sexually attracted and the sex act itself was one stage short of robbing a bank or snatching an old lady’s walking frame as she was hobbling to the shops. One would writhe in agony before summoning up the courage to make a date. Men especially.
In those days few of us had telephones so, if you wanted to ask a girl for a date, you had to do it face to face… if you’ll pardon the expression.
And my generation did not do a much better job in sexually educating our kids. In the 1950s and 1960s you’d no more think of discussing sex at the table than you would flick food at the ceiling to see if it would stick.
Today sex can come up in normal conversation at dinner. “Aesthetically speaking,” one sister might say to another, “whadya think of this new female condom?” The other, idly chasing a pea around her dinner plate…

Extract from “Sex for the Terribly Shy