The Joy of Stopping During Sex

Mama and Aunt Marianna and other sensitive folks, the title gives it away — this one is explicit and not for you. More posts that are family-friendly coming soon!

In 2019, North Carolina became the last state in the union to grant a woman the right to change her mind once sex had begun. This dreadfully belated reform came after predictable (and justifiable) outrage. It also served as the reminder that a great many people continue to believe the lie that for a man, “stopping” once intercourse has begun is damn near impossible.

It is right to remind men that it really isn’t all that hard (sorry) to stop having sex before an orgasm. It is important, however, to tell them something else: sometimes, stopping isn’t just ethical. Stopping can also lead to some very nice surprises.

Three stories follow.

One:

I was 17, having sex for money in a motel room, when this happened for the first time. No, I didn’t ask the john to stop. Rather, we started to have sex and he lost his erection. The more I played with him and tried to blow him, the limper he got. Finally he told me to stop trying, and he sat up, forlorn, hairy and sweating.

The john was maybe 40, a near perfect Danny De Vito look alike. He asked me sheepishly if I’d like to watch TV, promised money if I’d stay another hour. I gladly agreed. For the next 60 minutes, we sat on his motel bed, watching reruns of Hogan’s Heroes and Gomer Pyle. He had three Almond Joy bars in his room, and we ate them while we watched the shows. It was the john who first told me that Jim Nabors was gay, a fact which I found implausible.

At one point, the client put his head on my naked thigh, and I awkwardly stroked his head and neck. When I left, he paid me twice what I’d been hoping for. It was the first and only time in my brief career as a male prostitute that I made money without having sex.

Two:

My freshman year at Berkeley, my best friend was Gretchen. Gretchen and I performed in a pickup cast of Rocky Horror together, studied together, napped in the same bed together. We had no sexual chemistry, but that didn’t stop us one drunk lazy autumn Saturday from proving to ourselves that we didn’t.

We were buzzed and giddy as we undressed each other in her dorm room, safe in the assurance that her roommate was out of town. Gretchen’s body was lovely, my body was ready. I started to kiss my way down her torso and she smacked my shoulder. “No, come on, let’s just do it!”

I was inside Gretchen for less than a minute when she started to laugh. I stopped. “What?” I demanded, slightly hurt and worried she was laughing at my 19-year-old performance.

“This is insane,” Gretchen pronounced, even as she kept moving her hips; “this isn’t Hugo and Gretchen.” (We often talked about ourselves in the third person.)

I started giggling, too. I pulled out, sat up. Our laughing grew louder. Gretchen put a record on (Aha’s “Hunting High and Low”) and we danced naked around the room, giggling and tickling each other. We smoked a joint, ate her roommate’s previously unopened extra-large box of Lucky Charms, sat on the bed, and studied each other’s bodies. Gretchen asked questions about my then-uncircumcised penis (mine was the first she’d seen); I told her I thought she was awesome for not shaving anywhere.

We slept — still naked — in each other’s arms.

Gretchen and I remained friends for years. More than once, she remarked that the fact that we had stopped so quickly had solidified our friendship forever.

“I don’t think we’d ever have been as close if we’d finished,” she said.

Three:

In early 1990, when I was in my first year of grad school at UCLA and living in the co-ops, I had a brief affair with a woman named Rachel. Rachel also had a lover named Charli. Rachel was bi, but Charli was only interested in women. Not terribly surprisingly, Charli and I did not get along well. Rachel, meanwhile, kept trying to set up a threesome. I was interested; Charli was not.

One Monday, out of the blue, Rachel whispered in my ear during dinner. “Charli wants to fuck you tonight. In my room.” I must have looked very doubtful, because Rachel repeated herself. “No joke. Come by at 7:30.”

When I came by, both women were there. They were drinking; I joined them, and then Rachel stood up, kissed Charli on the mouth, me on the cheek and walked out of the room. Charli and I looked at each other, and after a deep breath, I kissed her. She offered a reasonable approximation of passion in return, and we pulled off our clothes.

Charli held up a condom. “Rachel gave me this for you.”

“She’s so thoughtful.”

Ten minutes later, we each had our eyes shut tight as Charli sat astride me. I felt distant, distracted and awkward. I could feel the obvious — each of us wanted to be in bed with Rachel, and we were only fucking each other at Rachel’s insistence. Charli forced herself further down onto me, then drew her breath in as if in pain.

“Can you come soon?” she asked.

Not bloody likely, I thought.

“Can we go get Baskin-Robbins instead?” I replied.

I wish I could claim I’d planned to say that, but I blurted it out, without thinking. For an instant, Charli looked puzzled — then grinned, and hopped off me so fast she hit her head on the bottom of the bunk bed above us.

We put on our clothes, walked into Westwood, ate ice cream (finding we shared a love, you guessed it, for vanilla), told each other our life stories, and, of course, debated what we should each do about Rachel. Charli and I laughed, nearly as much as Gretchen and I had. When we got back to the co-op, we shook hands.

“I think we can be friends now,” Charli said. I told her there was no doubt of that.

Rachel and I were never quite the same after that. There was an awkwardness between us, perhaps because she felt guilt over what she had set up, or perhaps because it had in some sense backfired on her. Charli met another woman, and moved out of state. Charli died of cancer a couple of years ago, but not before she was able to marry the woman who had become the love of her life.

Even North Carolina now understands: if someone asks you to stop having sex with them, even if you have already started to have sex with them, you stop. You stop because it’s the right thing to do, and you stop because you respect the autonomy of the person or persons you’re having sex with. (And if you need this reminder, you stop because you deserve to go to jail if you don’t.)

And yet we don’t always need to wait to be asked to stop to sense that stopping might be a good idea. Sometimes, stopping in the middle of sex to go get sundaes, or dance to ’80s pop, or simply to have a serious talk about the relationship can be the wisest and kindest decision. The three different instances of “stopping” that I’ve shared here are some of my fondest recollections from my teens and early 20s. There’s no mystery as to why I’m so fond of these memories: each time, I saw something that I saw too little of when I was young: sex, wrapped in kindness, respect, and deep tenderness.

Hurrah for the wisdom to know when to quit.

An earlier, shorter version of this post appeared on Medium in 2017.