SEXIS WRONG

Egg Sex
Susie Bright
In 1966, when I was eight years old, my mother gave me a
little pink book, A Baby is Born. In great detail, and with lots
of close-ups and diagrams, it described exactly what a sperm
and egg looked like and how they joined together, with subsequent
portraits of the develop ing fetus.
How did the sperm meet the egg to begin with? The book
said simply, “Mommy and Daddy love each other very much.
They lie close together and, after performing inter course, the
sperm is on its way to fertilize the egg.” There was no accompanying
diagram, so I made what was prob ably my first
earnest attempt to read between the lines of any piece of
literature. I gleaned nothing.
Twenty-five years later, I was pregnant, and this time I went
out and bought my own collection of pink and blue books
bulging with instruction for prospective parents. Of course,
there was a great deal to learn about fetal develop ment and
breast-feeding techniques, but I couldn’t help but check each
index under “Sexuality—during and after pregnancy.” All the
manuals, from Dr. Spock to the latest yuppie know-how, followed
an almost identical script: “Mommy and Daddy love
each other very much....” Fol lowing this vein, the paragraphs
on sexuality gave advice that was inexplicit, vague, and almost
threatening in their avoidance of the nitty-gritty.
Steeped in a romance-novel notion of marriage, sexual advice
to pregnant moms, whether revealed in print or in the strange
silences at the doctor’s office, gives short shrift to the dramatic
changes in women’s sexual physiology and desires.
Great emphasis is placed on how to cope with the ambivalent
husband’s feelings towards his wife’s body and the burden
pregnancy puts on their normal sexual routine.
None of these books were written in the 1960s. All of them
glow with feminist and holistic approaches to mother ing, supporting
working moms, refuting the sexist prejudices against
breast-feeding, and offering all manner of enlightened positive
self-esteem for the mother-to-be. I began to wonder if
anyone knew what went on in women’s sexual lives during
pregnancy. The most definitive state ment the books managed
was: Sometimes she’s hot, some times she’s not. This
wouldn’t be the first time that tradi tional medicine had nothing
to contribute to an under standing of female sexuality.
Meanwhile, my clit started to grow. Everyone knows that a
pregnant woman’s breasts swell in accompaniment to her
belly, but why had no one told me that my genitals would also
grow? My vulva engorged with blood; my labia grew fatter;
my clit pushed slightly out of its hood. I was reading absolutely
everything on the subject of pregnant sex by this point,
and, by picking out the fragments of pertinent information, I
learned I was not peculiar in this regard.
It’s a little embarrassing to be 31 years old and finally get the
message that my primary and secondary sexual characteristics
are not simply for display and pet ting. I was being physically
and psychologically dominated by the life growing inside
me, and of course I wanted both to escape and to submit. I
was unusually sensual and amor ous, and yet, 20 weeks into
pregnancy, I found I could not successfully masturbate the
way I had been doing since I was a kid. I was stunned and
a little panicky. My engorged clitoris was different under my
fingers; too sensitive to touch my usual way, and what other
way was there?
That’s when it hit me. The experts all say that it is a mystery
why some women get more horny when they’re pregnant,
while others lose interest. I’ll tell you some thing—no one loses
interest. What happens is that your normal sexual patterns
don’t work the same way anymore. Unless you and your lover
EGG SEX 39