Disclaimer
All Contents © Copyright Peter C. Hayward 2008-2009 unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.2009
All Contents © Copyright Peter C. Hayward 2008-2009 unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.2009
Hi! I’m Sarah Morgan, and for the month of March I’m not going to have sex.
I’ve already had a number of questions asked about this:
“You’re a girl; won’t a month without sex be easy?”
I have no idea where the stereotype of girls being less interested in sex than guys came from. All of my female friends (including myself) have insatiable sexual appetites, and many of them struggle with the fact that their boyfriends don’t match their needs. To me, the sterotype that females don’t like sex seems like a cruel joke.
I love sex. I love the feeling of naked skin against mine. I love laying in a sweaty, exhausted heap afterwards. I love the freedom you get while you’re naked, while you’re trying to both please someone and yourself at the same time. I love the different types of sex: everything from silly sex with giggiling and many stupid things going on all at one time to hardcore serious fucking with heavy breathing and hard wet kissing. Sex can be fun, sex can be totally animalistic.
It really is the most fun you can have with two (or more) people*.
*Personally, I have only tried it with one partner at a time. I don’t really have any desire to try it with more than that. The personal nature of sex, the intimacy, the fact that what goes on is a secret between two people is another of my favourite aspects.
I could write descriptively about a sexual encounter I’ve had, include all the details, but you still won’t know everything; it’s an experience that you really have to be there for.
“Won’t this pointlessly doom your relationship?”
Honestly, I am a little scared that it will. But if it does, that’s something I need to know.
I think my boyfriend will find this project a lot easier then me. I tend to be the one trying to get us into all sorts of trouble, he has a lot of self-restraint. So if this is going to doom the relationship for anyone, it’s going to be me. As I’m the one who came up with the idea, I think I’m pretty safe.
The Rules:
Originally for this project, the plan was to just not have intercourse.
This in itself would have been quite hard for me. (No one seems to believe quite how hard!) Hard, but definitely possible, so I decided to up the stakes. What’s the point of doing something to test yourself if you already know the results, right?
My boyfriend and I have sex upwards of three times every time we hang out. (occasionally it’s less than that, usually due to being overworked that day) The original plan of “no intercourse” would have been bad enough, but the new revised rules are going to be much more of a challenge, and really test my willpower.
The rules of the project:
Originally I was considering a “no orgasm” rule, but they do sneak up on you. In the past, I’ve been making out with my boyfrend, then out of nowhere an orgasm. Which is a lovely thing, but I don’t want to lose the project over something uncontrollable like that.
I refuse to completely cut making out, because I don’t think I would last a week. I would end up bluring a hello kiss into a pash into a bit of a make-out session, and then I’d feel the need to lie about my secret make-out shame.
These rules are going to test every fiber of self control I have.
My main concern is that I won’t be able to spend large amounts of time with my boyfriend in order to avoid breaking these rules. This could quite negatively affect our relationship. If I find myself avoiding my boyfriend in order to not lose this project, I may have to reconsider.
“Celibate Sarah” will update twice a week. Each post will include details of how the experiment is affecting my relationship. Peter tells me that an experiment needs numbers and charts to be proper science, so I will be keeping track of three factors:
About me:
I am a university student, doing a bachelor of Visual Art. I’ve been studying art outside of highschool on and off for 5 years now. I plan on using this project to push myself artistically: I have always been interested in comics but never actually made one. So over the month, I will try to produce a few comics. I plan on updating the blog twice a
week, and making a comic once a week for the month.
You can see examples of my art on my Deviantart Account.
I’ve done a bit of stand-up comedy around Brisbane in my time, and have just started learning improvisation (this is how I met Peter.) In the coming weeks, I will probably delve into performing to vent my sexual frustrations.
My sexual history:
I was awoken sexually around two years ago now. That wasn’t when I first had sex, but up until that point, I wasn’t interested in sex at all. (sex with another person, that is – I found masturbation quite fun, and even a great sleeping aid. I still do!)
I guess I went through the same process that most females do – I didn’t have the confidence to believe I would ever be found sexually apealling enough for a guy to be able to go through with it. So at some point, I made a decision to close that part of my brain down. I was attracted to men who had brains, men with stories, ideas, jokes. I loved them intently and could happily have lived out a completely non-sexual life with them.
Two years ago, a boy I was attracted to invited me to his place. Previous to this boy, my fantasies mainly consisted of having long conversations with them for the rest of my life; in my fantasies, there was no sex at all. Just witty one-liners, and deep conversations about our souls.
This boy changed all that. He completely took me by surprise; I think I took him by surprise as well. I’ve always had a flirty nature and a smutty mouth, so he probably assumed I was sexually active. I wasn’t and didn’t even understand the protocol for men getting women into bed.
One night this man asked me if I wanted to hang out after work. The conversation went a little like this:
Him: Hey, do you want to hang out after work?
Me: Awesome! We can watch Scrubs!
I now know that the conversation we were actually having was
Him: Hey, do you want to come to my house tonight so I can feel you up? If I feel you up well enough, we can have sex.
Me: That sounds great! I look forward to having many orgasms by your hand
We got to his house, and I sat down the lounge room (because that’s where the TV is, right?) He disappeared for a while, then came back and told me it’s easier to watch TV in his room. In his room I jumped on his bed and made myself as comportable as I could, not realising that I’m giving off every signal of a relaxed female ready for sex. (I was
really looking forward to watching Scrubs.)
I wont go into details – pretty much nothing happened, except to say a man felt up a petrified yet fascinated girl. He asked me several times if I was okay, and somehow I managed to casually say yes. I couldn’t exercise the same control over my body: I lay there stiff as a board, freaking out.
After that night, the boy ignored me, and I had to continue to work with him. It was awkward and confusing: I tried to bring it up a few times, but I did it in round-about argumentative ways which caused fights. Five or six months later, I moved into a share house with him.
Looking back on it though I shouldn’t have. That night was one of the weirdest experiences either of us had ever had. I’m definitely glad it happened though; it woke me up sexually, showed me that guys were interested in me, and it showed me I liked that interest. It also showed me I had a long way to go before I learned how to act in a situation like that.
Continuing to work with the guy that opened my eyes to sexuality was a bad idea. Living with him was an even worse one. These days, we don’t talk. We aren’t friends, and I think after that night we never could have been.
Entering the dating game:
About 6 months later, I was at work, whinging to my boss that I didn’t know how to meet men. My boss had found his most recent girlfriend off a dating website, and told me to give it a shot. I was convinced that I was going to murdered through this; some axe-weirlding maniac was going to be looking for an overweight, brown-haired girl with hazel eyes to seduce, and trap in the basement with the rest of his collection.
I decided to try my luck.
My first date (ever!) started with me meeting the guy at my work. The plan was to meet there, then follow my car to a local cafe. He was waiting for me on a couch outside my work: I was nervous, so my intitial response to him was saying “Hi” as briskly walked past him.
He jumped up and followed close at my heels, making small talk, asking how my night at work had been. All I could think to reply was “I’m really nervous. I’m going to get in my car.”
In my car on the way to the cafe, I contemplated pulling some 007 moves and losing him in traffic. I decided to push through the panic instead, see what the guy was like. We got to the cafe and I immediately blurted out that I was a virgin, and that all my friends had advised me not to tell him that. It didn’t destroy the evening; we walked around the city, talking about everything under the sun (I am a nervous walker and talker) and at the end of the evening, went to our separate cars and said good night.
There was no good-bye kiss (I would have had a heart attack) but I thought that this guy deserved a second date. In an attempt to appear ladylike, I decided to get into my car in the way that a lady gets on a horse: without losing eye contact with the boy I backed into the seat, slammed my head on the roof then tripped and slammed my head on the
door.
To his credit not a single tear of laughter was shed.
After our second date, he dropped me home and started to take off his seat belt. All I could think was “Shit, is he inviting himself in? I haven’t cleaned my room! Shit! How rude of him! I can’t believe this guy!”
He kissed me, said good night, and as I went to get out of his car, I somehow tried to remove only my top half from the car, leaving my legs in the seat.
I fell out, and landed on the ground with a thump.
I was still a bit light-headed from our romantic first kiss, so I sprung straight to my feet, and said “Okay, awesome, see you tomorrow night or some time! I don’t know when are we seeing each other next, it’s cool if you don’t want to. Um, I’m going to go.”
Smooth.
Our next few dates were pretty routine: we saw 10 000 BC (it was horrendous), we did lots of making out in the car, and making out in the bed, and over-the-clothes heavy petting, but it wasn’t until two months later that we had sex.
Losing my virginity:
The day that I lost my virginity was the day of the V-festival, a big music festival on the Gold Coast.
I was, as you’d expect, pretty excited about it. I knew that I definitely wanted to have sex with him at this point – I’d been ready for a week or two at this point, but I knew that the V-festival was coming up. I wanted to lose it on a day I could legitimately call V-Day.
He was doing some kind of convention for work in the area, so he was going to pick me up from my friends house and we were going to drive back to Brisbane together. We got to my house and started to make out and get funky, but we had both forgotten one thing: we were both exhausted from our huge days. I had spent mine knee depth in mud with thousands of strangers and lots of noise, where dehydration and the sun were huge problems. He had spent his day trying to sell products and make connections. We fell asleep mid make-out.
Disappointed? Don’t be.
Later that night I awoke to go to the toilet. I had drunk many litres of water when I had got home in order to tackle the killer dehydration headache I had, so it was my midnight wake up call. I got back into bed, thinking he was asleep, but within seconds Mr Handsy Hands was doing his thing.
Before I knew it, I was having sex.
I actually thought to myself, mid-coitus, “I am having sex, wow, I can’t believe I am having sex.”
It was pretty good. It didn’t hurt like I was expecting, I didn’t feel over-exposed or dirty, plus he didn’t run away screaming “Gross!” which was another unexpected bonus. Over-all I was fairly comfortable with the whole act, right from the get go.
I took charge at points and had a very satisfying first experience, which a lot of my friends envied when I told them about it at uni the next day. We went to sleep straight away, and did it again in the morning. My addiction was taking hold.
Unluckily for my new sexual addiction we broke up a few weeks later. Rather harshly too, he just stopped contacting me. I sent about three text messages without getting any replies, then gave up. I didn’t hear anything from him for months.
He contacted me the day after I had sex with my current boyfriend for the first time (about 7 months ago now) telling me he was sorry and that he got scared because he had feelings for me. The boy I was living with at the time (the one who had sexually awoken me) explained to me that this type of text was a booty call for girls with low self esteem. I texted him back, and told him that he shouldn’t contact me again.
Unfortunately for both of us, about a week later, I ran into him at a comedy club. Oh awkward world, why do you hate me so?
My current relationship has been going for around 7 months – tomorrow, I’m going to be talking more about my boyfriend and why I’m doing this project!
-Sarah Morgan
Tomorrow: My current relationship, and why I’m doing this experiment.
Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for the month of February, I spent exactly twenty-seven dollars and ninety-three cents on food. I did not die.
A graph showing exactly how I spent every dollar.
Here’s today’s Daily Cheesecake – I’ve included the first photos taken (way back on Day 2) for contrast. You can see quite a marked difference:
Notice also hair and beard growth...if you can stop looking at my stomach in that bottom photo for long enough.
Today I woke up at half-past noon. On the plus side, I got a lovely long sleep, but it also meant that I only had half an hour to get to impro classes. I quickly weighed myself and took the daily cheesecake, put my chocolate biscuits in my bag of bread, and ran out the door.
I got to class, and joined in with the activities, still yet to have anything to eat. The man running the class knew about my experiment, and was alternately lovely and very cruel about it: we were doing an activity where we had to pretend we were walking on the beach. I happen to hate the feel of sand under my feet, and so I was grimacing and holding my head, imagining the noise that sand makes when it rubs together. He came over and checked to make sure that I was okay, which I thought was rather nice.
The next few activities we did were all about pretending to eat food.
“Imagine,” he said, grinning at me, “the texture, the taste, the smell. Picture the food as it slides down your throat…”
About an hour later, we were miming a game of tug-of-war. I get extremely involved in mimes, so I started panting and sweating and going a bit red – I “lost” the tug-of-war, fell over, and tried to get up again straight away.
I got as close to passing out as I have all month. The room started throbbing, I couldn’t see anything, and I’m not sure how long I actually sat there, clutching my head. The next thing I remembered was the instructor coming over, and asking if I was okay.
I sat out of the next few games.
During the break, I went to eat my bread, and discovered it was full of ants. I picked the ants off of two slices, used up the rest of my butter, and had a stale chocolate biscuit for dessert. I still have two pieces of bread left, but I’m not gonig to eat them. They’re a bit stale, and I don’t really want to fight the ants for them. I have also finished off my chocolate biscuits.
On the way home, we went to the shops. I was determined to spend my last 57 cents, or as close to as I could – to my surprise (and dismay) none of the chocolate there was less than 70 cents. The only thing affordable from the confectionary aisle was lollipops, and I don’t much care for lollipops.
In the fruit section, they had limes for 50 cents (limes must be much more in demand than they were 3 weeks ago) but a lime isn’t exactly my idea of a tasty treat. I asked one of the service guys what he would recommend, and he showed me that they had kiwi fruit on sale for 50 cents as well.
I had forgotten how much eating kiwi fruit stings the tongue.
I came home, and remembered that I had one piece of devon left. When I was young, another of my favourite treats was fried devon, so I turned on the electric frypan, and cooked a piece up:
I got impatient while the frypan was heating up, and nibbled around the edges.
It was quite nice. Slightly better than un-fried devon, but not as good on a sandwich.
It’s almost 8pm, and (except for rice and a tiny bit of soy sauce) I’m completely out of food that I can eat. In four hours time, I’ll be chowing down on (in this order) a Snickers bar, Bavarian Apple Crepes, a cup of tea, and a steak.
It will be a good time. You should come too.
From the comments:
Several people wrote in to explain the (really simple and obvious now that I’m a bit more clear-headed) explanation of the rice’s calorie listing:
“goddess_amy”, over at the livejournal feed:
Rice swells when it’s cooked so 1/2C of dry rice magically becomes over 1C of cooked rice. I don’t know about rice cookers, but with cooking rice on the stove, you put rice + water in and get out just cooked rice. The water has to go somewhere!
Water doesn’t have any calories, so the amount of calories in 1/2C has decreased. Or to put it another way, the 1/2C cooked rice is measured after it’s cooked.
Also your sis is totally wrong on bread. It’s disgusting to eat plain, but plain toast is actually quite pleasent. I almost prefer dry toast to toast with butter.
“Dan Beeston”:
You mutton-head. It’s saying if you take half a cup of raw rice and cook it. The resulting meal has 355 calories (or galleries as you’ve written somewhere above). But it also expands. It’ll be, like, two cups worth of cooked rice. If you then take half a cup of that cooked rice. It’ll be mostly water and thus only 105 calories.
Friend-of-the-blog Em:
It’s your fuzzy brain, you twit…
More dry rice fits in a half-cup than cooked rice!
You have a LOT MORE big, squishy, moist rice grains when it’s cooked!
In my defense…no, I’ve got nothing. It’s really pretty obvious. Who eats raw rice, anyway?
“Michael Griffin” hasn’t read the rules.
$28 covers every solid and liquid that enters your mouth for a month. Have you made allowance for the cost of water? Don’t know if you pay for it or your landlord (though that wouldn’t matter I don’t think), and how much a person drinks in a month, though.
I decided before I started this that water would be free. I kept track of exactly how much water I had each day for the first week or so, but got a bit sick of it. My housemate Cannibal Kate thinks that alcoholic beverages shouldn’t have counted either. There is no logic behind that suggestion.
If I was out and about without water, I would go and buy a bottle without counting that as part of the money. I didn’t want to risk dehydration – we get a lot of our liquids from the foods we eat. Eating much less food, I needed to drink a lot more water.
“Em” likes my beard:
By the way, I reckon you need to check how much the beard has added to your weight… do a penultimate weigh-in, then shave it, and weigh again!
Another reason your skin may have cleared up = less shaving/soap
I love the idea of weighing the beard, except that I’m planning on doing a final weigh-in about a minute or two before midnight, outside the pancake manor. After that, I am not going to be shaving. I am going to be eating. (which will obviously affect my weight.)
Still Em:
You are looking very naturally-Amish…
Until I saw heaps of them one after another, I never consciously noticed that Amish men shave the face part of their face, but still have huge beards. That’s why it’s such a distinctive look.
The Amish page for Wikipedia tells me that ”Moustaches are forbidden, because they are associated with European military officers and militarism in general.” It doesn’t explain why they shave below the mouth though. Anyone have insider Amish knowledge?
How I feel:
At the moment, my tongue is still reeling from that kiwi fruit. My brain is distinctly un-wooly – fuzziness of the brain is a feeling I’ll be happy to see go.
I’m not particularly hungry at the moment, but I’m still looking forward to some delicious foods in a few hours. Especially tea. I have really missed tea this month.
More than anything, I’m feeling glad that is going to be finished very soon, and a little bit proud that I accomplished it. It’s not something that I’ll ever, ever do again…but it’s something that I’ll always be glad that I did. I discovered a lot of interesting facts throughout the month, discovered how vital food really is to the brain, and really tested my will-power.
I spent $27.93 on food this month. It’s a strange sort of accomplishment, but it’s an accomplishment nonetheless.
I spent $27.93 on food this month. Tonight, I will be spending more than that on food in less than an hour.
Misc:
And now, the picture that you’ve all been waiting for…
Daily weight:
66.8kg. That's 0.9kg less than yesterday.
Perhaps because I haven’t eaten rice for two days now, perhaps because my body has an acute sense of drama…for whatever reason, I lost almost an entire kilo since yesterday, meaning that I’ve lost a total of 6.5kg this month.
Remembering that the camera weighs between 0.4 and 0.5kg, this puts my weight at around 66.3, maybe 66.4kg. (146 pounds)
I stand 188cm tall, so my BMI is now 18.8 – still (barely) in the “Normal weight” range.
As I mentioned, I’m going to weigh myself tonight outside the pancake manor. I’ll also do a follow-up post in a month or two, which will include how much I weigh after a month of eating properly.
Here’s the final “Daily weight” graph:
I lost, on average, 0.24kg/day. The red line shows what my weights would have been had I lost that much each and every day.
Tonight is the “End of 28 Days, 28 Dollars Celebration”. A lot of big names (on this blog, anyway) will be there – Cannibal Kate, my cousin Gavin, friend-of-the-blog Em, RIUM+, and the star of next month’s project, Sarah Morgan.
You should come too! Pancake Manor, 11:30pm tonight, I’ll be the one carrying a penguin, dressed in a far-too-loud Hawaiian shirt. There’s a Facebook event and everything!
Hope to see you there!
-Peter C. Hayward
Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for the last 27 days, I have only spent $27.43 on food. I have lost 5.4kg, and eaten way too much rice. In 24 hours, it’s all over.
I hope I do not die!
The same weight as yesterday!
67.9kg! I haven’t lost or gained any weight since yesterday, as you can see on this convenient graph:
I suspect that by the end of next month, I will have put all of this weight back on, and considerably more.
Daily Cheesecake:
I love these boxers. They are new!
Today I ate more than my quota – tomorrow at midnight, I’m going to be chowing down on all of my favourite foods (well, two foods I quite like, anyway) and so I spoiled myself a bit today. I had 7 slices of bread, and 6 chocolate biscuits! (but only one slice of devon.) It was like all my Christmases had come at once.
I didn’t even bother cooking up rice today. With one day to go, it doesn’t seem worth it. I could quite happily never eat rice again, to be honest.
I was reading through a Calorie-counting book that friend-of-the-blog Em lent me, and for the first time, I noticed this on the rice page:
White Rice:
Raw: 1/2 cup, 100g: 355 calories
Cooked: 1/2 cup, 80g: 105 calories
I’ve been eating the rice cooked (obviously). I put in about half a cup, and then cook it…does this mean that it then turns into only 80g worth of rice, and loses two-thirds of its galleries? Do you have to re-measure the rice when it’s cooked? Or does “raw” just mean “half a cup when it’s raw, with the same calories when it’s cooked”?
Perhaps it’s my fuzzy, fuzzy brain, but I don’t understand this at all. Is anyone able to decipher this?
From the comments:
“Katydid”:
For the record, there’s a precedent of throwing up in the Pancake Manor bathrooms – my sister did it two New Year’s Eves running.
I have nothing to add to this, just thought that it was amusing enough to re-post. I really don’t think I’ll be throwing up, but if it does happen, I’ll have people with cameras on-hand to record the experience.
My sister Elizabeth (you may know her better as MeatGirl, from StinkyPete 1.0) disagrees with the way I have been distributing my butter (I only use it on bread, because toast doesn’t require it)
You have it all wrong! White bread can be eaten plain (though is delicious with butter!), toast, irrespective of type, is far too dry to be eaten plain!
She is so wrong that I had to make a video, showing the correct way of eating toast. (I actually made this last night, but I didn’t want to wait up while it uploaded.) Watch and learn:
How I feel:
I’ve been okay today. A bit hungry from time to time, and my brain’s really fuzzy at the moment…I have rewritten almost every sentence in this post three or four times. That could be because it’s 3:30am: I went to my friend’s 21st birthday party tonight:
It was quite a lovely party, with a lot of delicious food...that I couldn't eat.
It was a cocktail party, so there was a generous array of alcohol laid out:
You can see my cousin Gavin there, behind the drinks.
I’m not really much of a drinker, but I do enjoy the occasional cocktail. Throughout the night, my friends invented all manner of delicious-sounding drinks…and of course the more they drank, the more that they forgot that I wasn’t allowed to have any. I turned down more food and drink tonight than I have for the rest of the project put together, mostly from people who already knew about the experiment.
I got a few compliments about the beard, and also several people noted that my skin had cleared up. I suspect that this is because my diet lately has been “rice” and “bread”, and very few greasy or sugary products. Weight-loss and clearer skin – maybe I should sell this experiment as a diet. It has everything you want, except…well, except food.
One more day to go! One more god-damned day.
Watching every bite of every meal I eat has become second nature to me now. I predict that it will take a few days to switch back. I’m going to be mentally keeping track of every cent that I spend on food for a while now (this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.) I can still quote exactly how much every piece of food I have eaten this month has cost.
Tomorrow there will be three posts:
If you want to come along and celebrate the end of this project with me tomorrow night, it’s at the Pancake Manor, Brisbane City, at 11:30pm. We’ve booked a table under the name “Peter”, and you are invited to come and join us! I will be carrying a giant penguin, and wearing an extremely loud blue and green shirt. (Facebook event.)
I still have 57 cents left over, so if I see anything food-related for less than 60 cents tomorrow, I’m definitely going to buy it.
Tomorrow: The end of the project!
(total money spent so far – $27.43. Remainder – $0.57 – enough for at least a dozen grapes!)
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