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Lama Hajj

Let’s Talk About Sex, Beirut (Part I)

Let’s talk about you and me. Let’s talk about all the good things, and the bad things that may be.

If you don’t get the Salt-N-Pepa reference, click off – you’re far too young for the obscenely graphic info I’m about to drop on you head.

To satisfy my endless curiosities about sex and people’s sexual behavior, I asked a pharmacist in Hamra about her experiences with sexuality in Beirut. The first thing to come out of her mouth was a description of the strange way people buy condoms: they will typically skulk around the pharmacy for minutes, pick up a tube of toothpaste, ask for some Panadol, then grab a box of condoms at the last second – all the while avoiding her gaze.

The second most intriguing thing? The way people buy pregnancy tests. “I often have women talk about their husbands for a good twenty minutes before they pay for a pregnancy test, like they want me to know they are definitely not having premarital sex.”

There’s a staggering lack of sexual health awareness in our city. Many people think pee comes out of a vagina (it doesn’t, look up the word “urethra”) and that pulling out is a great method of contraception (it’s not).

And what’s worse is that negative attitudes towards premarital sex mainly prevent people from getting tested for Sexually Transmitted Infections, but very rarely prevent people from having premarital sex. The bottom line is, if you want to fuck in Beirut, you will find a way.

But how good is the sex we’re having?

Sometimes I fantasize (for lack of a better word) about someone setting up a pop-up shop to teach young Lebanese men everything that is sex. The art of oral, fingering, G-spots, clits, and many more sexy buzzwords. Maybe we need one for women too; “how to not give a shit about whether your hymen is intact or not” would be the first lesson I offer – my grand entrance would be me running through a big vagina-shaped screen and busting the hymen – too much?

Anyway, are we creating generations of people who are simply bad at sex? We don’t talk about it, we do it in secret, we hump in cramped cars – this is not good. Or maybe sex in Beirut is amazing and the hundreds of men who have had VIP passes to my pussy have been the only terrible one hundred in the city. Who knows? I’m clearly joking – but:

Will sex ever be normalized in Beirut? To the point where we all move in with our respective boyfriends and girlfriends and show up to work with sex-hair and post-orgasm glow? That may put every D-rate hotel out of business, but it would be pretty great – right?