1. I’m nineteen and a virgin, which status I would love to change.

2. I’ve had two sexual experiences in my life involving more than kissing. One was non-consensual when I was very drunk, and the other came with an awful lot of emotional baggage in other ways. For more details, see below.

3. I’ve had one boyfriend and one girlfriend. I only dated the guy because I was desperate to get kissed before I was fifteen. He wasn’t a very good kisser and I wasn’t attracted to him, though it felt good walking round with him knowing that people could see we were together. My girlfriend was a more complex relationship from around when I was 15 to around 17; it’s kind of hazy because it was very off-again, on-again. We were best friends first and neither of us had been with a girl before, the whole relationship was very stressful and awkward. We only had one sexual experience together and that was in the first half of the first year of our “relationship”

4. Said sexual experience involved a lot of alcohol and much writhing around and groping. We did not undress and touched each other’s privates maybe once each for maximum a minute, not even long enough to feel properly aroused. At one point I think she wanted to go down on me but I stopped her. After that we slept in my single bed and I felt hellishly awkward, trying to make sure she got enough space and that I didn’t snore/dribble etc.

5. The next two years of our “relationship” mainly consisted of me sitting next to her yearning but unable to talk about it or kiss her. We kissed maybe half a dozen times, only once without being drunk. During that time I felt very conflicted about my sexuality and whether I was attracted to her or not. In hindsight I think that it would have gone much better had at least one of us been more mature, and that it could have been a good relationship if we’d had more courage.

6. Saying that, eventually she ended it by messaging me on Facebook to say that she figured out that she was straight. It was very painful, both the message and the fact she told me over bloody Facebook. After that we didn’t talk or see each other for a year, in which time I got over her and we are now very close friends again.

7. The non-consensual experience happened shortly after the above anecdote occurred. My friends and I at that time used to socialize by getting wasted in parks. On this particular occasion I got very emotional and just wanted to hug this guy, he took me over to a secluded bench and started making out with me. I was too out of it to really know what was going on, but I know he put his hands down my pants but I made him stop, and that he pushed my hand into his own trousers and I touched him for a little while before I got away. That’s the first and only time I’ve had first-hand (ha, excuse pun) experience of a penis. It was unpleasant and confused me, because at that point I kinda subconsciously thought any sexual experience was meant to be good sexual experience. I remember for a week afterwards I was terrified that somehow he might have had semen on his hand and gotten me pregnant, which is totally ridiculous but I’ve always been a hypochondriac. Remembering this has made me see that it was actually quite a traumatic experience for me, but that I’ve never really thought of it in that light.

8. Relatedly, I know that when I do have sex I’m going to be terrified of being impregnated.

9. Throughout my teens I’ve struggled with my sexuality. In my early teens the “bisexual fad” was at its zenith, and when I came out to my friends as bisexual they all said they were too! It was kind of nice having that support and being able to talk about girls in front of them, but pretty soon I realized they didn’t like girls the way I did. When, later on, I thought of myself as a lesbian I knew they would never support that, and they are all heterosexual-identified now.

10. For three or four years I thought of myself as a lesbian. I even came out to my parents when I was 17. Since I moved away from home and met more people, I no longer identify as gay, because I quite clearly check out and have crushes on men, too. I now identify as queer. I am attracted more on an individual basis, so I think it’s silly to be more specific.

11. I find all genders and gender expressions appealing, but I find expressions of female masculinity really, really hot.

12. I view my gender identity as femme, but that’s only been a recent thing. As with my sexuality I’ve struggled with my gender, and many times actively deluded myself into thinking I enjoyed being butch, or that I was an FTM transsexual or genderqueer. It makes me cringe now, and I cannot comprehend what thought processes led me down those paths that were so wrong for me. I think, shamefully, that I thought these identities were cool or more desirable. Ick.

13. I’ve masturbated since I was thirteen. This was 100% due to being exposed to erotic fan fiction and hentai from the forums I used to spend a lot of time on.

14. I masturbate the same way now as I did back then, on my back, slightly propped up, knees bent, one finger on clit, very reliant on fantasy to get me off. I masturbate anywhere from once a week to multiple times a day, and my sex drive has tapered off slightly over the years. I come every single time I masturbate, except for when I run out of time and have to break off early, or very very occasionally when I let the build up take too long and become either de-sensitized or over sensitive and can’t continue. I would like to mix up my masturbation routine a little but nothing else seems to work. I want to get a vibrator when I have the money and see what that does for me.

15. It takes me a long time to climax, probably average around 30 minutes but often 40 minutes+, and my orgasms are very intense because of this. I can rush it if I try but it’s not as satisfying. I’m worried that any potential sexual partners will find this annoying and a turn off.

16. My hottest fantasies are usually male/male or a male/female/male scenario. I really like watching gay porn, but lesbian porn doesn’t do much for me. I also prefer to think about people masturbating each other/jerking themselves off/oral sex than actual sex. Something about that voyeurism and intensity of watching someone come from another’s hand or mouth is really erotic.

17. I have this extremely weird thing that I feel reluctant sharing, where I get convinced that I’m a pedophile. It crops up when I’m fantasizing and stops me from thinking sexual thoughts, like: “What if this fantasy about watching a guy jerk off is really a subconscious pseudo-Freudian expression of being a pedophile? Stop wanking right now you awful, disgusting pedophile!” I mean, I KNOW I am not a pedophile and would never, ever do anything to hurt a child, so why does this happen? When I tell myself to stop being ridiculous, this part of me says “ah, you’re just being defensive because you’re scared it’s true!” It’s got to the stage where I am actually scared it’s true, even though my stance on child porn etc. is with the rest of the world: that it’s appalling and horrific and while I don’t really believe in good and evil that it’s the closest thing to pure evil a person can do. I reckon what it really is is my latent sexual guilt manifesting itself in a really cruel way. I do this a lot in other areas of my life, suppress negative feelings so that they bubble up somewhere else. I don’t want to believe I have sexual guilt, but that’s the only explanation.

18. Relatedly, I often stop myself mid-fantasy to panic about whether the fantasy is like totally Oedipal and that I secretly want to bang my dad or something. Freud has got a lot to answer for for making people unduly paranoid about their sexuality!

19. My greatest desire at this moment is to meet a beautiful, sophisticated person a few years older than me and to be swept up in a life-changing love affair with them, with lots of tender, passionate, deeply intimate sex. I am starved of intimacy and I want it more than sex itself. I never want to be with someone who is lukewarm in their affection for me and/or is inconsiderate and boorish in bed.

20. I have great trouble thinking of myself as a sexual being, despite all of the wanking I do and porn I watch/read. In fact I find it absolutely impossible to believe that anyone could find me attractive and/or want to fuck me. In my mind I feel like people view me as sort of an asexual child-woman who is not even relevant on the sexual radar. I try and comfort myself by looking at couples where both people seem completely repulsive to me but who obviously still found someone to love them. It doesn’t work often. I think deep down I expect to be alone for ever. I reckon the way my ex-girlfriend dumped me has a lot to do with the way I see myself; how can I not interpret it as that I was so unattractive that I turned her straight?

21. Despite this I am not willing to lower my standards in order to assuage my loneliness or to feel a sense of self-worth. When I have sex it will be because I deeply desire to make love with that particular person, not because I am lonely and horny and feel like I should have got laid already by this point.

22. I think it will be kind of amusing when (if?) I do have sex, as I can climax completely silently and can do so without changing my breathing pattern or moving my body at all, except for my hand obviously. This is due to years of living in a small house with a nosy family and sleeping in a room with extremely thin walls right next to my parents’ room. Ninja orgasm! Since I moved out, I’ve got better at relaxing and really feeling my arousal more, and I think that’s helping with the sexual guilt thing.

23. I’ve just remembered one reason for the said sexual guilt: when I was a young teen I was über-horny and used to look up hardcore yaoi and erotic fan fic all the time, and being young and naive I didn’t know to delete the browsing history on the family computer that I was using. Foolish me! My dad used to drop hints that he knew I looked at ‘funny’ (as in weird not humorous funny) stuff online and it was deeply deeply mortifying. So that might have quite a lot to do with it. I still don’t know if my parents know I masturbate and neither do I want to. I’ve never talked about it with anyone else either. My rather earthier twin sister has bought it up a few times but I find it so humiliating I’d rather not discuss it; I think of myself as quite open minded but obviously I still have some issues with being sexually open. I guess that might be part of the reason why I haven’t yet had a meaningful relationship.

24. I’m very envious of my sister who has had three serious boyfriends, lives with her current one and is totally open about the fact that they have a great sex life. I feel like I should have that too, seeing as we’re the same age.

25. The hottest/guiltiest/most empowering moment of my life so far was getting drunk at a lesbian club night and making out with a random 29-year-old woman while the FtM guy I was in mutual crush with at the time looked on (I hope) jealously. And then said woman texting me half the night to see if I wanted to go home with her. I didn’t, but I could have, and that felt great.