Orca Publishers

The First Time: Volumes I & II.

Edited by Charles Montpetit.
Victoria, B.C.: Orca Book Publishers, 1995. 147pp / 128pp, paper, $7.95 each.
ISBN 1-55143-937-1 / 1-55143-039-8.

Introduction:

P R E C A U T I O N S

WEAR PROTECTION

There. Now that we've got this out of the way,
let's move on to what this book really is about.

Turn on the news.

At this precise moment, people are fanatically killing each other off somewhere. Not just personal conflicts, but full-scale, honest-to-goodness, all-out massacres. As I write these words, it's happening in Bosnia, Rwanda, East Timor and a host of other "hot spots." The places may have changed by the time you read this book, but you can rest assured that the overall level of bloodshed will still be the same.

What's this got to do with a collection of short stories about first sexual experiences, you ask? Not much; we're only trying to put things in perspective, if you don't mind.

You see, ever since the dawn of time, sex and violence have topped the list of human interests no matter how hard we try to ban them from our lives, they just keep surfacing again and again. In fact, the words are now so often spoken in the same breath, you could believe they're connected, as in I'm telling you, Chris, the entire world has gone ballistic because of that sexandviolence on television.

Why is that?

It's not as if we were talking about two similar notions. Real-life violence is an open-and-shut case: everyone agrees that cannon fire tends to ruin your day. Sex, however, is a very different issue: there are exceptions, but, as a rule, most people will concede that making out is far from an endangerment to the future of our species.

Yet it doesn't seem to matter that both subjects stand at opposite ends of the survival scale: they still have the same shock value, and in the age of two-second sound bytes, that's the only thing anyone notices: as many cases of art censorship have demonstrated in this country, the frontier between crime and sex easily gets blurred. Add a return to conservative values, throw in the AIDS crisis, and we all end up trying to hush our most enjoyable activity!

It just goes to show how mixed up we are. Nowadays, whenever someone snaps out of it and suggests that we could use a bit of straight talk about lovemaking, all we can drum up is yet another lecture on body plumbing.

Is that all there is to a loving relationship?

This is not to say that mastering the mechanics is an unimportant skill. By all means, we should get a grip on the basics, it would be irresponsible to think otherwise. But at the same time, you can't filter out the emotions and stick to hard data. Sex does not work that way.

So why not deal with both angles?

It's not that the sexual vocabulary is too crude; we've all heard the words before, and not one of them has ever been reported to induce brain damage.

It's not an age problem, either: according to reliable studies, 10% of grade 7 students have already had sex. The number grows to 26% in grade 9 and nearly 50% in grade 11, so it might be a good idea if our talking about it occurred before that time.

And it's not that the issue is too controversial for our classrooms. Strong philosophical, ethical and geopolitical standpoints are already covered in many courses. We do discuss violence in school: have we become so twisted that a talk on aggression feels more comfortable than one on intercourse?

As for the tired old argument which states that frank sexual debates would encourage everybody to leap into bed early, let's get a grip, okay? Since when does the act of information-gathering promote more recklessness on the part of anyone?

Still, the unease is there. No matter what reasons are invoked, most people think sex is "too personal" for anyone to discuss openly.

But, hey, wouldn't it be nice if we did?

Imagine that: you walk up to your friends, you ask them how their First Time went, and you get clear answers. No shilly- shallying, no mumbo-jumbo, no sidelong glances or nervous fits of giggles. No omissions, either, and no lies designed to improve the storyteller's reputation. The unvarnished truth, and nothing else.

Of course, you still wouldn't find surefire recipes this way, but that's because there are no such things. What you would end up with is an overview of the joys and obstacles that surface in many cases. And like they say, learning from history will help you avoid the same mistakes.

Now that's the idea on which this anthology is based. Not fiction, not make-believe, nothing that's hard to trust because strings were oh-so-obviously pulled to make the plots go a certain way. What we've done instead is simple (though it certainly wasn't easy): we've found people who were willing to tackle the subject of teen sex, and we've asked them to write about actual First Times.

Repeat: actual First Times. True stories. Real events in which the protagonists stand naked before you, and bare their souls as well as their bodies. No faking.

Let it be clear that these tales are not meant to blow you away; that would defeat the realism we were striving for. Each story merely covers what occurred at a specific time and place, in the flesh-and-blood lives of ordinary human beings. As professional writers, we may have been tempted to "improve" on the events with a few embellishments, but in the end, we chose to do without the excesses, the dramatic twists and the happy endings of B-movies and romance novels.

Stand warned, then: these stories are not rigged and sanitized to fit some squeaky-clean, latest-edition ideal. We're spanning five decades here, and sexual attitudes certainly went through a lot of changes over the years, along with the population's general awareness of safe sex practices. By today's standards, yes, some of the characters herein do make mistakes, but no, these things won't be pointed out in neatly giftwrapped morals at the end of each tale. That's real life for you: sort it out for yourselves and draw your own conclusions. Who knows? You may find that in spite of all the hoopla over the so-called generation gaps, the most important aspects of the tales, the actual feelings and emotions, remain timeless.

But, don't expect the definition of a First Time to stay the same from one story to the next. The concept is fluid, and no two people see it the same way. So we've let the authors make their own subjective rules. Any other arrangement would have been impracticable anyway: even if we had all agreed on what a First Time was (which we didn't), and even if we had been utterly accurate in describing the event (which we weren't), we still would have ended up with a very different book if we had endorsed the point of view of the other person featured in each story.

Don't chide us for failing to cover all the possible variations, either. Ultimately, there are as many types of First Times as there are people in this world. But we only had room for sixteen stories, so we were forced to settle for a very small sample. Efforts were made to cover a wide range of testimonies, but obviously, there's no way we could satisfy everyone. If your favourite flavour is not featured here, please see the invitation at the end of Volume 2.

Any more precautions we should take? Ah yes: while these stories are true, most of the characters' names (and other telltale details) have been changed to protect people's privacy. More to the point, do note that the stories are not necessarily autobiographical, whether they're told in the first person or not. For dramatic purposes, the authors may have talked about a relationship as if it was their own, but this doesn't mean that they were actually involved in it.

On the other hand, the photographs that accompany each text were really taken during the writers' youth. We could rationalize this as a gesture of solidarity with the people featured in our stories, but really, it was just a fun thing to do.

That's it. Doesn't sound so scandalous now, does it? It just goes to show: no matter how preoccupied we may be with our society's problems, love should never be too sensitive a subject for discussion.

Charles Montpetit

Contact Orca Publishers at The First Time: Volume I and II in CM Magazine Volume 2 Number 3.

Published by
The Manitoba Library Association
ISSN 1201-9364

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