Sri Lankan TCK Sex

The first time I had sex was in the safety and comfort of my air-conditioned bedroom, with my first serious boyfriend, when I was 19. It wasn’t in Safa Park at night, where my friend Hana lost her virginity, or at a drunken house party with my peers, which could have gotten raided by the police. 

The thought that Hana got away with this still makes nerves flutter anxiously in my chest. In Dubai, it’s an unspoken agreement between expats and the government that you are absolutely not having sex unless you are married. If a groundskeeper had caught them, I’m sure Hana and her boyfriend would have been thrown in jail and deported at best (though in reality, law and order were so shady in Dubai that I have no idea what would have really happened to them).

First thing’s first

My parents grew up in Sri Lanka and only moved to Dubai after they were married and had my sister and I. Their ideas about sex (or at least I thought) were traditionally Sri Lankan—sex before marriage is definitely a no-no. 

“I respected your mother so much, and still do, because we waited till we got married,” my dad told me. Well, I certainly didn’t want to lose my boyfriend’s respect. We started dating when I was 16 and that’s when then the unsolicited “he won’t buy the cow if you give the milk away for free” advice started from my folks. I was still deciding how I felt about sex and didn’t completely agree with abstinence, but until I figured things out, this concept of ‘respect’ made the most sense to me. My boyfriend was incredibly supportive about this, and other than the usual heavy teenage make-out sessions whenever we found an empty corner, we stuck to that initial plan.

If we hadn’t lived in Tasmania for two years prior, I wonder if I would have blindly obeyed my parents’ advice until I graduated high school. In the privacy of my bedroom, when I was 13, I was reading Dolly magazine. Thank god for that Australian publication! You see, I had switched schools at a point where I missed sex ed both in Tasmania and in Dubai (it wasn’t actually allowed in Dubai at all, but my British curriculum school had given a covert class on reproduction and banana-condoms the year before I moved back). Dolly was my glossy sex ed teacher, helpful gyno and sex confidante in a time where I didn’t have any other resources available.  

“Don’t ask your partner to wear two condoms at once! That does NOT make sex safer.”
“If you’re worried about tightness or soreness, a small smear of lube inside your vagina will help. You don’t have to use a lot.”
“Sex does not and should not hurt.”
“A boy’s balls will not turn blue and fall off if you don’t have sex with him! That’s a total lie.”

I absorbed all of it and stored it away for later, and lucky I did. When we moved back to Dubai there were absolutely no Dolly magazines on local newsstands. 

Dolly Do’s and Cosmo Can’s

It was still a few years until my classmates and I were to become sexually active, but I found ways to be resourceful and keep up with my reading. Dubai only had one internet provider back then, Etisalat, and their proxy blocked everything. Sure, you couldn’t access porn, but you couldn’t even Google a photograph of the statue of David either. Censorship was serious (black ink bands sliced through models in popular magazines) but they had somehow missed Dolly online, and even better, Cosmo.com, which I had given myself permission, as an ‘older woman’ to start reading. And read I did.

When we did get to sweet sixteen and my classmates were experimenting with sex, thankfully, I was educated enough to know that it was perfectly natural and acceptable. I just wasn’t keen on my first time being as awkward and fumbling as the house-party sex stories I was hearing about from my peers:

“You could totally see Nate’s ass bobbing up and down through a gap in the curtains! And Nat’s legs were flying around all over the place! It was so funny!”
“I was wasted! I don’t even know if I was doing it right. At one point I swear I was fucking the lamp on the bedside table instead of her.”

Even the more ‘standard’ sex stories weren’t that inspiring:

“We got into his bunk bed and he played Iris by the Googoo Dolls! It was so romantic for my first time!” That, unfortunately, was Chris’s (the virginity taker) standard routine. Natalie was just too new to our class to know how choreographed that evening was, but the rest of us did.

So my boyfriend and I talked about it, planned things out and had sex when both of us were ready, with no guilt, no shame and barely any serious sneaking around. Was it a beautiful, magical experience because we waited? Of course it wasn’t, because we were both virgins who didn’t really know what we were doing. But it was exactly what it should have been for the first time: safe, consensual and healthy. He ended up being an awesome first sexual partner as we continued to sleep together: he was really supportive and appreciative of my body and genuinely enjoyed our physical connection, which really helped me harness how powerful a woman’s sexuality can be when embraced and celebrated. 

Don’t be a pill

I’m glad that being exposed to sex in Australia helped me shape a natural acceptance of my body and a healthy attitude towards sex. It empowered me to be objective and true to myself, despite my parent’s flood of traditional cautionary tales. 

“I’m sure mum and dad hooked up when they were dating, though,” my sister used to say. 

I’d raise an eyebrow in response, knowing she was probably right but not being able to picture it. They’d have to be robots not to, but my grandmother was intimidating, with the steely gaze of a hawk, and my grandad was constantly and bodily chasing my dad out of the house whenever he visited my mum. I assumed they just couldn’t have had any real opportunities to sleep together until their wedding night.

After we graduated high school, my sister and I moved to Melbourne and eventually shared a two-bedroom apartment. My parents would fly down to visit and we’d often meet there before strolling to dinner on Lygon Street or taking a tram into the city. One day, we were applying finishing touches to make-up and accessories in my sister’s bedroom while my dad chilled on the couch in the living room, chiming in with our conversation from time to time through the open door.

“Your grandmothers were far ahead of their time. They were incredibly progressive ladies.”
“How do you mean?” I asked my mum.
“Well Archie took me to a GP and put me on the pill and Loku Archie did the same with your dad’s youngest sister. It was right before we went away with dad and Uncle Asith on a little holiday.”
“Is this that holiday where dad almost drowned in that river?” I asked.
“You remember that story?”
“Didn’t you go on that holiday...” comprehension was beginning to dawn on my sister’s face. “Didn’t you go on that holiday before you were married?!” 

My mum’s eyes widened in horror as she realised what she had blurted out and my dad’s neck whipped around in our direction. A moment of tense silence gurgled between us before my sister threw back her head and roared with laughter.“YOU HAD SEX BEFORE YOU GOT MARRIED!” She hollered gleefully.

“Noooooooooooooooooooo!” My dad wailed in dismay. “Why did you tell them that?!”
All my mother could do was look sheepish in reply.

As you can imagine, a million thoughts flew through my head. Most of the initial ones were indignant:

“Why the hell did you lie to us this whole time?”
“How could you expect us to abstain if you didn’t?!”
“What was all that cow and milk crap?”
“You could have used all those years educating us about sex instead of trying to scare us out of it!”

In the end, I didn’t say any of that and found myself smiling instead. Yes, my grandmothers were amazing and progressive in a culture where that would not have been easy to do. 

And thank god I never listened to my parents about sex.