Steve_Bamlett_blog

What could you try for the first time?

I have felt defeated by this topic for discussion and I turned to references to the ‘first time’ on the web. In large, and on an inspection of them that probably lacked rigour, the pages thrown up by both Google and Bing search engines seemed to fall into three categories:

1. things older people do to break their routine supposed to characterise older life (not necessarily by people who are themselves older people) and sometimes older people (for that last reason) have presents chosen for them on milestone birthdays, such as FIRST-TIME hot air ballooning, hang-gliding, airplane-wing walking, seeing the Northern Lights. The concept of the ‘bucket-list’ is important here – tings you do at least once before you ‘kick the bucket’ (namely DIE);
2. things teenagers do to try out a skill, estimate their knowledge and, on some occasions, test their values’; and, of course;
3. SEX.

In fact advice on the third topic seems largely geared to how to prepare for the ‘event’. At least this kind of advice seemed to dominate what was said and was aimed at men, women, and people identifying in any number variations of sexuality and sex/gender. Most of this advice is practical, especially for men – such as ensure you attend to your personal hygiene (which may or may not tell us about the nature of men) but sometimes it involves advice like ‘get used to talking about and through the experience with your partner so that this becomes part of the experience’. It was these last examples that made me think that events we plan for, even if at the level of our expectations only, are very difficult to dub ‘first-time’ events, not least because among the expectations of too many people are too many assumptions and theories of what kinds of inter-human activity constitutes ‘real sex’, that already make a ‘first time’ hard to identify even when what actually happened is in the past. This goes beyond those issues of whether the only ‘real sex’ is penetrative sex to notions of the kind of reformulations of itself that sex involves as it is being experienced, through expectations, foreplay, fantasy, play-in-performance and mutual after-reflections.

Sex is the best example of the fuzzy boundaries of something we can experience and talk about as having a ‘first-time’ because it is experienced, or elaborated upon afterwards whatever the reality of it as as a performance scripted by expectations, fantasy and personal and social cognitions and day-dreams. Teenage boys in particular, in my teenage a long time ago, often saw ‘the first time’ they had sex ‘with a girl’ (the phrase usually got added) as a subject of narrative, and more often than not, the content was grossly confabulated to feed a self-image. In many novels the same happens, with the first-time being seen as a test and proof of some identity statement of genuine masculinity or heterosexuality.

This is so much the case, that for a queer male like me, participation in such confabulation became a means of passing as straight, though the myths of what masculinity was like and what women were like and wanted that permeated these narratives – call them fictions or even lies if you want – fed many highly sexist and heterosexist myths. It also ensured that what was actually experienced was not only hidden, sometimes in shame and other times in pretence, that might have characterised the absence of any real event, even those in it which had been successfully role-played. It is par excellence one of our remaining rites of passage but not one celebrated socially. It announces a permanent change in status – here the loss of the status ‘virgin’. Some people still dwell on stories of having lost their virginity – and I am talking about male past-friends here. The modern privacy of this rite of passage is the cause of its status as thing as much experienced in the telling, before and after the event but sometimes in verbal or gestural elaborations during it.

Since I am 69 next week and not greatly attractive, I am not expecting any new sexual experience to be presented to me. In truth I think it is also the case that it would not now be wanted by me, other circumstances in my life being the same. But if I was in that mood and with a fair enough amount of self-confidence about my capacities (which I doubt) I would wonder now what might be ‘new’ enough about it to be ‘the first-time’, for even if I have not practiced a variant act in body, I will most certainly have been told about it by others (in reading, conversation or disclosure – and as a past social worker I received many disclosures). I will have a history too of having fantasised about it too perhaps together with associated sensations or thoughts of lust, disgust, can’t or must. None of that qualifies whatever is proposed then as ‘first time’ because it is too anticipated )and the likelihood of my anticipations being fulfilled already tested by analogy in my past). But the same might be true of the first and second items in the list, where a ‘first time’ implies a sequence of following times, and given we are mortals, a ‘last time’. First-time is a temporal concept but it interprets time in terms of the meaning of first-time experience in the cognition of the person experiencing it and often to in the social cognition of a social group. Think especially of rites of passages in several cultures, which announce say the advent of adulthood, gender status or role status – warrior for instance.

Most episodes of my life that could be said to contain ‘the first time’ I tried something were not things I tried to do in the light of it being my first time and hence had some reality to them. I remember the first time I tasted a Sambuca (a clear sticky aniseed drink in a small sherry glass with a coffee-bean on its surface and set alight) because I was presented with it at the end of a meal I was not paying for, with its surface already lit and the smell of the floating coffee bean on it fully apparent. I was impressed. It seemed really ‘posh’ to me, something a working class lad would not have anticipated. I assumed it was expected that I drink it and so I did. Having done it, not greatly enjoying the effect of stickiness on my lips nor the taste, I did it many times in the ongoing years in anticipation of the thrill again of its presentation or to see that thrill in the face of someone else whom I knew had never tried one. But the ‘last time‘ I drank it was a definite decision on my part, having found, as time passed that these drinks were no longer considered cool and that asking for one now was considered rather vulgar. I am not afraid of accusations of vulgarity now but I was then.

Approaching 69, as I said before, it is possible people will ask me to review my bucket list but I don’t think there will be hang-gliding or even ballooning on it. As I read accounts of people doing this in older age (even in the eighties or nineties) I tend to dread being given the chance myself. For first times are always experiences of losing a kind of virginity and achieving a new identity status. Some older people talk of restored confidence that they can do things and that they still can set and follow life-goals. A first time is a way of predicting even at base a new sequence of repeated events that organise and regulate life, so that it isn’t organised only by those of endings – which young imaginations sometimes equate with aging. Of course aging is not like that BUT there is that in me that does remember a ‘first time’: when I agreed that Geoff could take me to a Peggy Lee concert at the Festival Hall in London, probably in the 1970s but I forget. Yet what sticks in my mind about this ‘first time’ is that I heard a song about first-times, Peggy’s masterpiece in sculpted voicing If That’s All There Is. In that song first-time experiences have their outcome in literally nothing – a sense of deflation and disappointment in what life offers. You can see, for the first time, a fire that ruins your home, the first time your Dad takes you to the circus, take a lover but lose him, even die, for the first time and sing to yourself:

… Is that all there is
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friend
Then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

https://genius.com/Peggy-lee-is-that-all-there-is-lyrics

You have to hear her sing it : IF THAT’S ALL ( LONG PAUSE) THERE IS. And of death she expects (of course a ‘first time) that she ‘is not ready for that FINAL disappointment’. Hear the song on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCRZZC-DH7M.

Now the purpose of this is not to spread misery but rather to say that ‘first times are probably really only ever elements in a story – euphoric ones of becoming someone or something or achieving a status, or sad ones of a disappointment that an event does not live up to the stories of it that preceded it, or a sense that the first time was actually not a first-time at all for the experience began in the probabilities and determinations that you would think to do a thing and ended only when you stopped telling the story (or were forced to do so as older people often are). Once we start planning a ‘first time’, we are already experiencing those shifting contradictory meanings that in fact comprise the event, containing expectations ready for confirmation or otherwise. So I am not expecting a first time next week nor wish anyone to gift me one. If something happens that is new, I might not believe it: as it says in the Old Testament’s Ecclesiastes, ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ (for someone’s experience of it is likely always going to be available to me and mine can only compete with it. I could win the competition (not for the first time – LOL) but this still would not be ‘my first time’, just a thing produced from the shadow of others under the same sun somewhere.

Image available at: https://www.kjvbibles.com/common-english-sayings-from-kjv

I should say sorry to you all for this, and maybe I shall – as they say:

THERE IS A FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING!

Though I find it, as you too might say if you read the above, very unlikely for complicated reasons! LOL.

With love (especially to MISS PEGGY LEE)

(By the way, did you know MISS PIGGY in the Muppets was modelled on her – that must have been disappointing moment in a career.

Steve