Are You Getting Any? I Had More Sex in Lockdown

As the coronavirus pandemic continues, Are You Getting Any? interviews are conducted via video call.

MOLLY, 23

Quality of sex overall: 8.5/10
Frequency of sex: 4/10
Intimacy levels: 9/10
How do you feel generally about the people you fuck: 10/10
How happy are you with the amount of time you have for sex: 5/10

VICE: Hi, Molly. How are you? 
Molly: I’m pretty good. As you probably know, New Zealand’s not in a lockdown at all anymore.

So you’re entirely back to normal? 
Pretty much. We’re still doing contact tracing, and you’re supposed to socially distance and wear masks on public transport, but other than that it’s completely normal.

That sounds great. How did you find being under lockdown last year? 
I have a partner who I’ve been dating for two-and-a-half years. I was living with them in Wellington, so lockdown was OK because I was in a flat with heaps of friends. During that time my auntie passed away, so that was really hard – so it was good to have my partner and friends around me to support me. I was also dating another person who lived in a different city, and that kind of fell apart. 

Why did that happen? 
I think because we’d just started dating when COVID happened. It was just very casual, though, not really dating-dating. 

Is your relationship open? 
Yeah, we were. At the moment we’re not really in an open relationship, just because I think it’s such a weird time at the moment. We’re kind of realising simultaneously that we don’t really have time to date other people with uni and the other things that we’re interested in.

Did lockdown impact your sex life?
Our sex life was really healthy the entire time, and if anything, it got better because we had more time to explore things. It’s almost like we got better at communicating when we actually want to have sex, when we’re actually feeling it, rather than doing it out of, like, obligation or habit, just because we’re around each other so much. Now that we’re out of lockdown, we live in different cities, so for the most part we’re not together. 

How often do you get to see your partner now?
Once a month. It’s usually only a weekend, so it’s really condensed. It can be quite intense. It’s very passionate, so it’s not ideal, but it works.

Across the US and the UK, research has shown that millennials are having less sex than generations before them. What do you think about that? 
It could be, like, the availability of porn and sex toys and stuff like that. 

So people are using toys rather than having sex?
I guess they can do sexual exploration by themselves. If sex education is bad [there], like it is here, people don’t really know about consent or how to pleasure someone else, or how to communicate what they like. So if they do have sex or sexual encounters, they could be pretty shit. That’s a massive guess, though.

OK. So before we sat down to talk, you mentioned that being non-binary has impacted your sex life. Would you talk about that?
Definitely. I get a lot of dysphoria associated with people perceiving me to be female. And like, obviously that’s going to happen with my clothes off, because you can see specific body parts. So if the person isn’t clued up on stuff around being trans or being non-binary, I think it’s really easy for them to misgender or make assumptions about me. For ages, that really turned me off sex. I thought I was asexual because I just didn’t feel like my partners were perceiving me as who I actually am. 

Would you say that’s improved now? 
Yeah, it’s heteronormative and cis-normative here, but I’ve found a good community of people now.

What’s being a part of your community like? 
It’s such a small place that, if you’re queer, it’s much harder to find communities that are accepting, just because the population is so much smaller. So you also end up knowing everyone. If you date someone, chances are they’ve also dated heaps of your friends. I don’t know a better word other than it can get a bit incestuous. Like a rat cage.

What’s the general culture around sex in New Zealand like? 
I feel like our culture around sex and sex education is really bad. We basically get no sex education at all. But thinking about the sex lives of the people in my university who are a little bit younger than me, like 19 or 20, they don’t really talk about sex and they don’t really seem to be dating people as much as I expected.

That’s really interesting. I guess it’s from watching films or TV – we assume university or high school will be the same. 
Yeah, I actually agree with you. What’s represented in mainstream media doesn’t seem to be as explicit around sex. I remember watching American Pie way too young and being like, ‘Whoa. What the fuck is high school?’ Another thing, just going off the people I interact with at university, but a lot of them talk about hentai and porn. 

Really? Like often?
Yeah, but they don’t really talk about real people. They talk about their favourite hentai.

That’s really interesting. What do you study? 
I study design in history. 

I don’t know why I thought that would explain it. Anyway, how do you usually meet the people you date or sleep with?
Usually at a party or something, but people have to be a little bit drunk or high at least to even say that first thing.

You would only feel comfortable if you were drunk?
I feel like a lot of dating culture is very much grounded in binge drinking here. We just don’t have the vocabulary to express to someone that we think they’re hot, because embarrassment is a big thing. Everyone is constantly afraid of being embarrassed, so you can’t be too sure of yourself. It’s Tall Poppy Syndrome.