Heirloom Tomatoes in July
Heirloom Tomatoes in July
On women and lovers
A few years ago, I wrote a poem about a friend calling to tell me about the most incredible sex of her life as she approached forty. It’s a trend I’ve seen increasingly in the last few years—women in their late thirties and forties experiencing mind-blowing sex after decades of lackluster lovemaking. I shared the piece on social media where a man commented Yeah, but sex is like pizza. Even when it isn’t great, it’s still pretty good.
When I first read it, I laughed. I don’t know a single woman who would claim all sex is pretty good. Not even close. While bad pizza can taste alright, bad sex is awful. In my experience, sex is like tomatoes. We’ve all ingested palatable, unremarkable, at times revolting tomatoes—January greenhouse-grown tomatoes, unripe, shipped thousands of miles tomatoes, on the verge of rotting tomatoes. All bearing hints of a familiar, mealy sweetness. For most of the year, they’re the only tomatoes we have access to, but they are incomparable to their distant relative: the July farmers’ market tomato. Plump, purple heirloom flesh bursting at the seams, tended by the hands of a seasoned gardener who plucks her from the vine once she is satiated by the sun. Ripe and juicy, loved until she is on the verge of explosion. See the difference?
Paradoxically, we live in an era where we more openly discuss women’s pleasure, but closed-minded attitudes and double standards continue to plague our society. Additionally, thorough sex education is sorely lacking in many states. I grew up in Kansas, where science education and sexual education were rarely on the cutting edge. As a high school sophomore, my biology teacher recommended we read Chapter 9 in our textbooks because he was not allowed to teach it. The subject? Evolution.