Action: A Book About Sex (2 page)

My distaste is not only about the intense “key party” atmosphere around
sex-positive
—I also don’t like the term because differentiating a healthy and normal attitude toward sex by bestowing it with a special title reinforces that mindset as marginal while holding up that the “normal” thing is to revile sex, which I earnestly do not think most people do. Despite its faults, “sex-positive” will help you find sex stores, literature, and pornography that make more sense to you than a lot of mainstream
kinds, in many cases. You won’t catch it in this book, though—at least not without audible groaning.

sex versus gender:
Your sex is what a doctor decided based on what they saw between your legs on your zeroth birthday and then wrote a letter on a certificate. Your gender is “male,” “female,” and/or any designation between or outside those roles that you feel most closely matches the person you are in a way that extends to the rest of your body and mind.

PART I

Age of Consent

The number one most essential part of any and all sexual encounters: establishing the often-hazy-seeming-but-actually-pretty-clear parameters of “consensual sex,” which is otherwise known as “sex.” Sexual consent is a direct verbal go-ahead that conveys, “What we’re doing with our bodies is okay with me,” as confirmed before
not only
sex involving penetration, but
so many other
kinds of sensual scenarios, too. Consent is an important part of getting down with anybody, of any gender or sexual persuasion, every single time you’re getting down. In fact, it’s probably
the
most important part: If you’re in a physical situation where the other person disregards that you’ve told them not to touch you in the way they’re touching you, what you’re experiencing isn’t sex (a catchall term I’m using here for “hookups of all stripes”), but sexual assault, and possibly rape. There is a plethora of ways to give and receive consent—and to refuse it. We’ll explore as many of them as we can here today. Is that okay with you? (Look! We’ve already begun. I wish it were always this easy.)

While it may seem obvious that consent extends to far more than “Can I sexually freaq your bod now, or…?” too many of us have been with people who don’t understand that getting prior clearance can be as necessary for relatively low-impact activities, like kissing, as it is for sexual bod-freaqing. In moments spent with those types of people, the inside of my younger brain mostly neurosis’d out thusly:
Wait, what the literal heck, I thought this person LIKED ME, so WHY IS HE TRYING TO HARASS MY LAP OUT OF NOWHERE, do I go along with this weird crotchvasion or risk losing his company forever??? Can we just go back to thinking that biting each other’s lips was the most torrid this was going to get, please? Plus, am I strong enough to overpower him if I have to?
This is not what the internal monologue of a person given over to erotic ecstasy sounds like, Alex-from-the-bar-on-the-corner-whom-I-made-out-with-because-I-was-bored! Thanks for the panic attack!

When someone instigates sexual contact that you haven’t agreed to, it can be tough to negotiate how to feel—let alone what to do. First of all, that’s totally normal, and second of all, it has got to change, because I want you to have fulfilling, electrifyingly hot encounters
of the flesh
(ew, this lasciviously horrible turn of phrase) without feeling pressured, uncomfortable, or, heaven forbid, endangered along the way.
Or
like you’re some kind of frumped-out killjoy for simply saying no, because YOU AREN’T.
Orrrrr
like you can’t have rough sex AND non-negotiable boundaries at the same time. You know better than anyone else what feels good and manageable to you and what doesn’t. (And this would be true
even if
Mark Ruffalo somehow merged with Sappho into a single, sexually masterful entity, and that being sidled up to you all like, “… Hhhhello there, allow me to playfully lick you on the forearm, my dove.”) You have the absolute right to broadcast these non-negotiable preferences to every individual to whom you decide to affix your various and sundry (and sultry,
my dove
) body parts. No lap-harassment or weird crotchvasions necessary. Unless that’s what you’re into.

On the whole, my bod-freaqing, et cetera, has been wild enjoyable. (I
know
, I am a
very
cool sex-haver, CHECK OUT MY COOL-GUY HAIRSTYLE AND STYLISH DENIM JEANS.) I’ve also had some less-than-sterling, and occasionally downright awful, experiences with partners who didn’t seem to consider whether I was all right with what was happening between us—and there have definitely been times when
I
was too pushy, and we’ll talk about all of these occasions in a little. First, though, an abridged list of illustrative quotations from
Remembrances of Bone Zones Past
(
RoBZP
), my mental encyclopedia of belt
notches (this is
not
to be confused with Proust’s classic literary masterpiece, which was definitely at high risk of happening here):

• “I didn’t think you wanted me to use a condom.”

• “Just relax. You’ll like it.”

• “You were okay with it last time.”

• “I forgot you weren’t into that.”

• “This is the only way it feels good for me.”

All of these are real-life garbage sentences, uttered by real-life garbage people in response to my protestations about some dubious piece of the “action” we were getting. Sometimes these people were also actual rapists (because, straight-up, anyone who disregards your not wanting to have sex, or coerces you into it after you say no, fits this description). Though these phrases were deployed in different scenarios/for ostensibly different reasons, each one means, “I don’t care what you want, even though you just directly told me that
it isn’t what is happening
, and I don’t respect you as a person more than I do my own horniness in this one moment.”

To operate under that mindset when someone has trusted you with the privilege of feeling all up on them is
wholly unacceptable
, and not only because you’re trying to make that person feel bad for your own repugnant behavior. (Not, you know, “you,” but some hypothetical Alex-from-next-to-the-jukebox-style garbaggio-fuck, whom I’m now itching to destroy in vengeance of your honor even though he’s technically made up.) Any person who exercises this selfishness has bought into the set of false promises made to them by male-violence-dominated societies, aka that victims of sexual assault are responsible at least in part for the harm done to them, so the aggressors don’t have to feel like it’s their fault. This is untrue putrescence.

I know
you
(real you, this time) wouldn’t be the kind of solipsistic cretin who thinks that way, but if you find yourself in a situation where someone is reciting a passage that sounds plagiarized from one of the above excerpts from the
RoBZP
, please
understand that your decisions are sound and worth respecting, even though said scum is trying to make you feel guilty about the fact that they’ve decided it’s okay for you to feel unhappy/uncomfortable/unsafe as long as they’re feeling sexual pleasure. The idea of even the potential of that happening to you makes me want to mail a congressperson a stink bomb and yell obscene, hideous things at a beautiful phenomenon of nature—ideally a canyon, but definitely a majestic, centuries-old sycamore,
at least
(in addition to my previous crimes against fictional “Alex”-type pred-nesses).

You are entirely within your rights to let anyone trying to pull that know that they are acting execrably and extricate yourself from the scene immediately. In some terrible, wrenching situations, this self-removal is not an option for the person on whom sex is being pushed, as I also know firsthand. (I have no quips about my experience this time. It was just awful and that’s it.) As we know, despite coming up in a social environment that doggedly tries to convince us of the opposite in order to keep traumatic physical harm a normal: Rape and sexual assault are never caused by their victim’s behavior. They are the result of another person’s callousness, and there is nothing you can do in this life to “deserve” or “invite” rape or sexual assault. The people on whom these acts are inflicted are sometimes led to believe that if they had somehow conducted themselves more responsibly and/or advocated for themselves more insistently, everything would have been A-OK. This is the highest caliber of cold bullshit. Even if you were drunk or on drugs. Another forever-true side note: You are entirely within your rights to stop fooling around with somebody if you’re no longer into it, regardless of how considerate the other person is being. You don’t need a reason or an excuse to not want to get with somebody, and you don’t owe anyone a goddamn thing in that respect, ever. No one has a claim on your body but you.

I don’t want to scare you off forever—most people are not angling to trap one another in these kinds of scenarios, but, if we’re going to have this consent-versation, we have to acknowledge the
fact that consent, though essential, is fallible. I think the gigantic, looming threat of potentially messing up when it comes to consent, and then being forever after labeled an abuser, assailant, or rapist, is part of why some members of the genuinely non-monstrous majority population are afraid to discuss it—and are, as a result, more likely to mess it up. (This is a shame, since verbally consensual sex is good, healthy, and the crowd favorite among highly skilled, hot, and respectful hookup candidates. I’ve had myriad physical experiences with well-meaning, resolutely decent types who just didn’t seem to know how to address consent in a proactive and sexy way in the heat of the moment. As I mentioned, I have also been this species of person! I don’t think everyone who stumbles when it comes to discussing consent is a rapist/predatory beast—many of them have never been made to understand that rape and sexual assault are things they even have to think about committing, since they are convinced that “rape” is a terrible act with just one meaning that
of course
would never be demonstrated by them. (I exhort these people to get an inch of a clue.) Others don’t know how to bring up consent without getting skittish, feeling prim, worrying they’re killing some kind of moment/boner/wide-on, or otherwise shutting down. This makes me sad, because avoiding consent because it’s an “uncomfortable” topic actually steers people into the exact awkwardness they’re trying to avoid: It leads to situations where two amenable foxes who set out to have a great time together end up snarled in a morass of anxiety, which is, at least from the maps I’ve drawn up in the front covers of
RoBZP
(as one does with fantasy novels) not usually their intended destination. It sincerely doesn’t have to go down like that—in most cases, it is so easy for it NOT to go down like that! You just have to give each other directions.

At its best, sex, or making out, or touching regions, or whatever affectionate physical contact you’re enjoying with another willing individual, is communicative and instructive in tons of ways. Every person has their own motions, methods, preferences, and modes when it comes to all these exercises. Learning
someone’s personal specificities—and having them learn yours—is edifying and sexy and worthwhile. One important condition on which this is predicated, though, is mutual honesty and consideration, which—guess what—come from mutual consent.

I don’t mean you have to permanently chuck spontaneity into the garbage disposal mid-hookup to instigate a heart-to-pelvis conversation about your entire sexual history and interior life (although if that’s what you need to do to feel comfortable about being physical with another person, do it right up without a second thought). But no matter how free ’n’ breezy (or otherwise reminiscent of a feminine hygiene–centric commercial) your encounter, you still have to pay attention to and interpret signals, respond to cues, and intermittently ask questions. Those are the basics (but, trust your girl, we’ll delve deeper in just a moment). Speaking up is so much easier—and so much more effective—than wordlessly removing someone’s hand from a part of your body where you’d rather it not be fluttering around, although, frankly, your partner should get the message from that alone.