‘You can French kiss yourself’
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), United Artists, 1972
From Guernica:
The first time I successfully masturbated I was eleven and my older brother and his girlfriend were watching Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). The process was slow and often seemed hopeless: I think it took an hour or more. I could still hear the movie in the background. I imagined my penis as a straw and a girl from school sucking on the straw. When I orgasmed it was qualitatively different than any orgasm I have had since. They say that, the first time you smoke heroin, it is called “riding the dragon,” and after that you are always only approximating that birth into a new world of pleasure and disappointment.
You can French kiss yourself. Take your tongue, fold it back upon itself, and now roll the tip of your tongue back and forth across the middle of the muscle. I learned this after French kissing Denise at the seventh grade dance. We had those at Rideau Junior High: every five or six dances the teachers would play a slow song, turn the lights down low, and we would have a kiss dance, during which, with luck, you would French kiss the entire time. I passed Denise’s house wearing my canvas bag of rolled and rubber-banded Calgary Heralds and tossed one on her porch, while French kissing myself. It is mildly titillating, but seems filthier, somehow, than masturbation.
