Happy endings are arguably what this column has been about all semester, but this particular ending of my time with The Maneater is rather sad. You’ve let me jabber about vibrators, grill my roommate on IUDs, confess about chlamydia (before Vox made it cool … OK, sorry, I couldn’t resist), ponder about abortion, rhapsodize about small penises and more. And while I hope I’ve hacked a decent job illuminating as much as I can about this wonderful, weird world of sex, there’s one thing left I want to explain: why this column has been anonymous.
Writing a sex column for The Maneater, a student publication famous for throwing flaming typewriters out of windows and being generally provocative, has felt like a rite of passage. In much of the way you’d want to party your brains out with your lush of a roommate before she graduates, writing as Sex Edna has been an opportunity I’ll probably never have again. I wanted to be anonymous at first because I wanted to stretch my opinionated muscles and write about doing it, without imagining the grimaces of future employers who know how to use Google.
I just thought it would be fun to talk about sex in a candid, measured way. But as the weeks went by, I started telling you things I’d never told anyone on earth before: that I once had an STI. That I botched my first blowjob. That I’ve shared my body with seven different individuals.
And I became so thankful that The Maneater allowed me to write anonymously under the pseudonym of Sex Edna. Not because I didn’t want my friends to think I was a slut. Not because I didn’t want my peers to know I’ve thought about abortion. Not because I didn’t want current/future sex partners to know how I feel about their penis size. But because it shouldn’t matter who I am: My experiences, fears, views and doubts are not unique.
Who is Sex Edna? I’m your roommate who didn’t lose her virginity until she was 19. I’m your geology partner who took Plan B the other day and is so, so scared. I’m your sexual partner who gets really anxious, even when we use a condom. I’m every girl. I’m every guy. I’m every person who has thought about sex and had sex and hated sex and loved sex and wanted to talk about sex.
See, I’m not, like, _proud_ of a lot of things I’ve done or that have happened to me, specifically. But if sharing my insights on the serious and the silly made you, darling reader, infinitesimally more comfortable with _your_ experiences, or even if it all just made you feel a tiny bit less alone and less freaky for loving sex, then that’s all a girl can ask for. If for some wild reason, this column has helped you have more sex or better sex, I have an address you can forward my Pulitzer to.
May the sex you have be awkward and messy and fun and beautiful and amazing. May it terrify you a little less. And may you have lots of it. As for me, I’ll keep bumbling my way through one experience after the other, alongside you: making mistakes, blushing when I buy Trojans, wondering who invented orgasms.
Thank you for reading all this time. For your future sex talk fix, I really recommend two podcasts: Savage Love and Sex Nerd Sandra. Both of those have inspired me this semester, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did. And hey. Stop crying. This isn’t goodbye, forever. I’m like, on Twitter.
_Love,_
_Edna (@Sex_Edna)_
