By Molly Freedenberg
What’s the worst thing about waiting two hours in the airport for a delayed flight after a long weekend of drinking and subsequent hanging over? Almost everything.
The one redeeming thing? My extra two hours at O’Hare, without a convenient outlet for plugging in my computer, gave me the chance to finish Bad Sex: We Did It, So You Won’t Have To” (Chronicle, 2008), a collection of essays by Nerve.com contributors about funny, embarrassing, ill-advised, and just plain silly sex encounters.
The book, like Nerve itself, is charming, hip (but not trying too hard), entertaining, and extremely readable. It’s also refreshingly multi-generational, containing stories from recent college grads and middle-aged divorcees alike.
Highlights: Monica Drake’s “The Splatter Artist,” about a lover who can’t keep his fluids to himself; David Amsden’s “The Incomplete Triangle,” in which a man discovers the pitfalls of dating a bisexual woman (read: it does not guarantee you a threesome); and Porochista Khakpour’s “The 20-Year-Old Virgin,” which is about small liberal art school culture as much as it is about the boyfriend who believed intercourse was “commercial, pedestrian, and perfunctory.” Though there are some stories too crazy to believe (see the one on vampirism by Kevin Keck), and some about sex so bad it hurts (see “On the Rebound,”), most of these tales are about sex that’s less obviously bad but rather awkward, strange or disappointing in the way most of us have experience less-than-stellar sex. What these it-could-happen-to-me confessions lose in titillation they certainly gain back in relatability and humor.