Sticky

by Olivia Knight

She stepped shyly through the doorway, the diaphanous stuff of her white negligee barely concealing the pure lines of her body. He stepped towards her... she caught her breath… His hands gripped the gossamer thin fabric. As his mouth descended on hers it seemed all the stars of the sky fell around her. Sweet music of angels thrilled through her body as she succumbed to him… at last. Through the brilliant heavenly lights, she heard the music of the spheres… and they were one.

“What did you think?” My friend breathlessly awaited my reaction to the Barbara Cartland novel*, the first I’d read, the first to go beyond a chaste kiss or marriage vows all the way into the marital boudoir.
“I don’t know,” I said doubtfully. “I always thought sex would be a bit more sticky than that.”

Stickiness: secretions, juices, fluids, mucuses, jets, spurts and drops: what would sex be without it? And what, for that matter, would erotica writing be with it? Try a few excerpts of more imaginary novels:

He withdrew his fingers slowly, a long strand of transculucent silky fluid dangling from them… He pounded into her, the rythmic slap of their bodies counterpointed by the juicy squelch of each thrust… He savoured the sight of his cock pulling out of her, slick with thick white cream… She lay beside him, still gasping as the last aching twinges of bliss subsided and their mingled juices began to drip from her saturated slit, soaking into the sheet.

Real sex is sticky from beginning to end and then some. The aftermath – creamy streaks of juice down your thighs or a little latex bag of gloop that you check for holes – is as much part of sex as the initial slipperiness and ultimate spurt. In both erotica and romance, we’re usually describing sex in considerable detail – so how far should verisimilitude go?

The Cartlandesque approach avoids stickiness assiduously. You’d be forgiven for thinking every attempt at sex is interrupted by divine intervention - hardly useful for a pubescent girl in search of solid information. At the opposite extreme are Fanny Hill’s “copious emissions”. The spectrum from romance to erotica might well turn out to be simply one of stickiness – but even hard-core no-holds-barred fearless erotica writers like us can suddenly start skittering like high-bred fillies around female juices.

Male juices are less problematic. From the ubiquitous gleaming drop on the glans to the squirt of the money-shot, this is familiar territory. Semen, spunk, cream, jizm, and even the occasional sperm (some of these characters have amazing eyesight) present no problem. With women, it’s a little coyer. You can’t start with a few Latin terms – “mucus” is the preferred medical term and sounds like snot. “Vaginal discharges”, meanwhile, sound like pus. Nouns are awkward: her juice, cream, love-juice, female juice, female honey… you soon start to cringe. The heroine’s always wet, obviously (just as the hero's always hard) – creamy, slippery, moist, damp, and juicy are all essential adjectives. The actual nature of her wetness is something we’d usually prefer not to go into.

In fact, the actual nature of a woman’s wetness in general is still bizarrely misunderstood. So, just for the record… in the four or five days before ovulation, a woman gets sticky first. Then, she gets slippery and creamy, and it looks like hand lotion on your fingers. Then, for a couple of days it’s that super-squelchy, gloopy, feels-so-good-to-plunge-into stuff that looks – frankly – like egg white.

Without preamble, he shoved three fingers deep inside her. “You’re so wet,” he gasped. “You want me so much…”
“No, you numbskull,” she retorted, “I’m bloody ovulating. It’s nothing to do with you.”

“I want you so much…” she groaned. As his fingers pressed into her knickers, she realised to her mortification that despite the rising lust that pounded in her ears, her love-petals were bone-dry. Damn, she thought. I shouldn’t have got so pissed last night – I must be dehydrated…

Obviously, all the sticky/creamy/eggwhitey stuff often coincides with horniness, plus of course there’s the independent juiciness that comes with being very aroused (or, sometimes, doesn’t). For the curious, you can tell the difference by dipping your finger in and out: arousal juices dry very quickly in the air. The other ones don’t. Like Garfield on his first visit to the farm, where he discovered the origins of eggs, bacon and milk, you might prefer not to know. In the current state of play, even if you did know, most erotic books would be enough to confuse you for life. In real life, sticky sex is the best. In books, how sticky do you like it?

And as a special sticky treat, we’ve persuaded the lovely people at Good Vibes to give you a present – so drop a comment to be entered in the draw for a hamper of slippery lube.

* Obviously to avoid plagiarism not an excerpt from Cartland’s work, which to avoid libel I must refer to as a fine body of literature providing a telling and incisive insight into normative gender paradigms which are toujours déjà inscribed, et cetera.