Urge

Foreplay
My first real kiss was an exhilarating invitation into the world of sex.

I was not prepared for it, nor was I prepared for what it awakened in me. I was a pathetically naýve thirteen year old, with a massive crush on a fourteen-year-old boy, a "rebel without a cause" type who I was sure was the cutest human being created in the year 1970.

One afternoon, we were -- gasp! -- Alone In His Bedroom, so already I was dizzy with a sense of taboo. He leaned over and with what I thought at the time was absolutely no warning (remember, it was my first real kiss), he puckered up and planted his lips on mine. I went gooey and warm. Then he slipped his tongue in my mouth and I snapped my head backwards in a violent whiplash-style reaction. What the hell was that? His tongue?! Oh sure, I'd been told in graphic misinformed detail in girls' school toilets about French kissing, but let me tell you, at that point, with his tongue somewhere between sly and slick, halfway past my teeth, knowing something French and doing something French were two distinctly separate things. He smiled at me, realising it was my first kiss and leaned in again. I silently vowed I would not be caught off-guard by this second attempt! As he began again his ooh-la-la moves on my lips, I became completely overwhelmed with the urge to explore his mouth with my tongue. I remember this first feeling, this urge. My body took over my mind. Or rather my body just took over, bringing to an immediate halt all logical thoughts and analytical observations. I was consumed with my sexual urge. I wanted to reciprocate pleasure, explore someone else's mouth and body, feel more, open more, experience more.

That first thrill of tongue awakened my sense of the sexual urge and I have been chasing it and catering to it ever since.

My approach to this book has been one much like that first kiss. I wanted to probe every corner of the sexual world, push the everyday ordinary buttons and boundaries of our understanding of sexual desire, and peel back our conceptions of sexual behaviour to see what naughty secrets and neon passions lie under our masks and fancy dress. Peel, push and probe, peel, push, probe . . . a kind of collective striptease sexposý of our carnal lives.

In writing this book, I decided to stick out my tongue for another kiss, to take a titillating, twisted, flickering, salivating, piercing taste of our physical culture. I've kissed the girls, kissed the boys, and kissed the frogs. I've peeked through the keyhole into our collective bedrooms, and indulged my urge to then let that door just swing on open. I've peeped, I've kissed, and I've told.