When we were in high school we presumed that pretty much any sex was good sex.  If you were getting any that was infinitely better than getting none.  Rumors that you were getting some were currency and most of us didn't want our peers thinking we couldn't get laid.  So, most of us took what we could get, called it good, and assumed that "I'm getting laid" attitude that made us think we looked cool.

 When we got to college, things improved marginally, or should have.  Teenage boys started to get more experience under their belts, so to speak.  In high school they had to be forgiven their fumbling, bumbling ways.  Most of them learned everything they knew about female anatomy from a puritanical health teacher and an antiquated text book with a handful of furtive peeks at the diagrams included with their mother's tampons.  By college it was hoped that they had lucked into a summer fling with a kindly and instructive older girl who had showed them what a clitoris was, or that they had been given "The Talk" by an experienced older brother.

That was the hope, and hope springs eternal.

I took the year off after high school and went to work at Walt Disney World, and had some of the worst sex of my life in the shadow of the Happiest Place on Earth.  I had been working retail in the Magic Kingdom sporting a stunning 19th century style polyester outfit, when I was approached by a charming Frenchman.  He was an employee at the French Pavilion in Epcot Center, which is probably why my less than stylish outfit didn't force him to turn and run in distaste.  We started dating.  Why wouldn't we? He was French and rode a motorcycle and was therefore cool. (This was years before I actually lived in Europe and had my perceptions of cool recalibrated.)

We were blissfully happy in our international relations, with the exception of the sex.  I knew it wouldn't work out in the long run from the first night.  I should have known when he insisted that the lights be turned off that something was funky.  We were on my bed, naked, and making out and he seemed to be making clumsy maneuvers with his thumb in the vicinity of my genitals, when he breathily whispered "Am I hurting you?"  Hurting me? Huh? I wondered briefly what he was on about when I realized that he wasn't trying to finger me but rather he was energetically trying to fuck my brains out with his full 3" hard on.  Oh quelle tragédie.

After escaping Orlando, I set off for college in the Swiss Alps.  Within the first weekend I fell for the smarmy charms of a Portuguese boy.  He was wealthy, well dressed, and suave.  Did I sleep with him?  You betcha! Why wouldn't I?  Mind you, I quickly realized that I shouldn't have.  About half-way through some raw rubbing dead bang tedious sex I got so bored and worried I might begin to bleed that I had to ask him to stop.  He took it well enough, and suggested that I might like to have a go with a friend of his who would be arriving in a few days.  They liked to trade girls.  Clearly chivalry wasn't dead in 1986.

Shortly after the term started I met a nice English boy who worked in the village.  He had a fabulous accent, or at least what I thought was a fabulous accent until I moved to England and learned to distinguish between regional common accents and snippy posh ones. Despite his traditional Englishman's penchant for excessive amounts of ale on a Friday night he became a regular partner. It was with him that I learned the fine art of faking it.  I learned that if I talked trashy, moaned loudly, and pretended to be enjoying myself I could put a quick end to the monotony and get enough sleep to make my way home across the frozen streets of the village in time for coffee and class in the morning.

That winter my roommate Natalie and I took up lodgings in funky apartment in the village complete with a flaking leather couch and 1960's art made out of pebbles on the walls.  A real swinging pad for a couple of college girls on the prowl.  It was here that one exceptionally drunken night, after we had introduced our European friends to the magic of margaritas, that I brought home a pretty little Dutch boy for a romp or two.  The next morning, I was bleary eyed and hung-over when he kissed me, grinned, and said "Thank you!"  Suddenly feeling queasy I asked "For what?" To which he answered "That was my first time and it was great!"  When I asked him how old he was, he informed me that he was 16 and was in the village on holiday with his school mates.  Natalie, whose own behavior had been borderline questionable that night, snickered as I looked at him and said "You're welcome and have a nice bus ride back to Holland." 

The following fall I took a semester in France to study French.  I found myself in the lovely seaside village of Cannes.  The school encouraged us to meet with the locals to improve our language skills.  My girlfriend and I made friends with some beautiful local boys who played water polo professionally.  Lucky us, non?  One evening while out and about in town on my own I ran into Monsieur H₂O and his friend.  He asked me  if I wanted to go for a drive with him to take his friend home. Or at least that is what I understood him to have asked me. We drove along the coast to the edge of town where he pulled into a parking lot.  His friend got out of the car and he turned to me and said "Okay, let's do it now."  Baffled, and uncomfortable in the front seat of his Sirocco, I asked "Do what?"  After a halted conversation in Franglais I soon figured out what he was on about, got out of the car, slammed the door and proceeded to walk to the Ritz Carlton to get a taxi back to school.  Distressed and perplexed I called a friend in Switzerland and relayed the conversation to him asking him what had I so colossally misunderstood.  To wit he informed me that in the colloquial dialect I had been asked if I wanted to "turn a trick" before he took his friend home.  I moved home to the States to try my hand at American men for a change.

The following summer I was living by the beach in San Diego, enjoying the sun, surf, and surfer boys.  One day after a few hours in the gym I was at a local watering hole with two men from the gym both of whom were oohing and ahhing over my calves. (I have the kind of calves that men get implants to mimic).  One of these men was a comedian in town performing at a local club.  Of course he was reasonable looking, but the sense of humor his job implied made him attractive.  So, when, a couple of weeks later he called and invited me to come up to see his show and have dinner, I made the trek to LA.  After his performance, which actually wasn't all that funny, we went back to his place for dinner.  It was a hot LA summer night and he had the air conditioning cranked full blast in his apartment, so I was actually freezing to the point of chattering my teeth while we were sitting on his couch talking, and I was trying to think of a clever way to extricate myself from the date. When, without much preamble, he suggested we head to the bedroom for a little fun and games.  I looked at him blankly and said "Um, no I don't think so."  He pointed at my chest and said, and I quote "Your lips say no, but your nipples say yes!"  Um, yeah, quite the comedian. About a decade later I saw him on TV starring in "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire", where he got his 15 minutes, and I got the heebie jeebies all over again.

A couple of years later, while at university in England, my luck still hadn't improved.  No matter how many borders I crossed or languages I did it in, the sex didn't seem to get any better.  One night, after a dinner in London, I went home with a very pretty Greek boy whose name I think translated to "Pretty Boy" or something equally apropos.  Looking at him I understood why all the good gods were Greek. He had striking good looks, charmingly broken English, and charisma oozing out every pore. Back at his flat he had a great old time gyrating away while I fell asleep.  Yet, another mythic night of love.

Having made my way through a smorgasbord of European men, I decided to try my hand at the exotic Middle East.  It was here that I learned from one nice boy that razor stubble on a man's back can be very distracting during sex.  There was one Libyan who tried to seduce me by painfully tweaking my nipples while we sat in a movie theatre watching a vintage Bruce Lee film.  For a while I dated one boy whose aversion to oral sex or to actually touching my genitals with his hands bordered on pathological and with whom I determined that 90% of the time sex was going to have to be do-it-yourself or don't do it at all.

Besides the bachelors and the masters I earned, I got quite the education during my seven years of higher education. What did you learn in college?