Action: A Book About Sex (5 page)

Here’s how to be a hot person, regardless of your externalities:
Stuff your life
. When you do: You’ll find that you’re not even doing it to attract somebody, once you get going, because the best thing to do with your life is everything (and also everyone). Look around for the kind of ideal company you’re already keeping all by yourself. If you decorate your world, people will come to gawp admiringly at all of its many ornaments. In looking at the great fortune of your self-possession, others will be tempted to follow your example. (And also have sex with it.) You are
yourself
, and you are brimming.

Become Yourself

Make borderline-severe eye contact with everyone.
(And, while we’re keeping it stodgily parental in this bit of advice, please: Sit up straight): Look right into the face of the person with whom you’re yammering. Allow it to feel deliberate, but not invasive. In the most fledgling sexual/social capacity, like when you’re encountering a babe for the very first time and are tempted instead to openly gawp at them, it’s extra-important to be able to identify the difference between “flirtatious” and “intrusive/lecherous/looking for a pepper-spraydown”: Is the other person willfully involved in conversation with you? You’re golden. If they aren’t, but they
are
looking back with pleasant interest/their tongue running across their teeth like YEAH YOU WANT THIS? you’re
also
probably golden. If they look away and appear in any way bummed, HALT. You are initiating a staring contest with someone who’d rather not compete.

Some might be unsettled by prolonged eye-to-eye (does everyone else
also
have social anxiety?), but I promise almost all will thrill at being its recipient. Holding the gaze of someone with whom you’re conversing (or would like to be) isn’t awkward, as I once thought despite the urgings of every last cliché about making solid impressions. It’s just good etiquette. But, like most overtures based in diligent manners, many people aren’t used to it. Use this sense of novelty to highlight your own social rectitude: Letting a person speak with your eyes trained on theirs gives them the rare chance to feel heard when they’re talking. Sensuous stare-downs are efficacious because, to many people, nothing is sexier than the feeling of being paid clear attention to. This is how Bill Clinton
not only became president, but convinced the national masses of his charm, too—he is often said to make those he interacts with feel like the only person in a room, regardless of their politics. The first step in copying that magnetism is letting the person you’re interested in know you can SEE them in said room, and that you find what you’re looking at compelling enough to linger on it. There is enormous value in conveying that a person deserves—and downright commands—respectful, attentive interest, even if you end up getting nothing out of it.

Listen closely:
Charisma isn’t anything but the skillful delivery of focused attention. I have a rampant case of ADHD and still know better than to interrupt. Or maybe, because my brain is inclined to tug me in every direction at once, I have carefully practiced the great art of clamming up for a change. Pretend you have ADHD, I guess? Just don’t extend that to neural drifting while someone speaks to you. Endeavor to hear them as though you’ll be tested on the information later.

Unlike
coursework: If you know squat about the material at hand, listening closely becomes even easier. The interests belonging to my past sexual partners that I thought were most captivatingly hot never coincided with my own. Oral histories of
anything
I’ve never previously been inclined to be curious about absolutely do it for me: I don’t care much about clothes, but I was totally fascinated and charmed when one dude rhapsodized about the structures and colorways of classic sneakers. I maintain no grandiose passion for primatology, but the dude I saw who knew everything there was to know about chimpanzees was going to get smashed from the second he said the words “animal behaviorism.” Encouraging people to talk about the things they care for most in the world is equitably rad for both parties—watch your orator’s enthusiasm compound and compound as they motormouth their greatest loves at you. They seem equal parts blissed out, relaxed, engaged, and excited, right?
Hmm
… in which other kinds of interactions is that a totally advantageous state of mind? (Which is to say…
of bodyyy?
)

You are going to hella learn from the tiny colloquia people spout your way when you ask them what they think the best thing in the world is. Making people feel heard, as with making them feel seen, is valuable even if you don’t score. You collect its primary benefit—personal edification—and then the added bonus of being able to offer it up to other dreamboats in future conversations about the topic at hand. Either way, once you train your ears to pick up each and every frequency coming outta the mouths of others: Buy some condoms, because people not only LURVE talking about themselves, but also boning the people who allow for and adore that.

Figure out not only what you like and believe, but the specifics of why you like/believe it—and allow that others might not agree.
Take stock of yourself and your tastes, but don’t consider your viewpoints immovably “correct.” This makes you a person who allows for imperfection, aka a good conversationalist and also not a pigheaded, essentialist nimrod. The minute you decide that you’re impermeably right about everything is the minute you shut yourself off to other kinds of interpersonal osmosis, which limits the social world around you and closes you off to all kinds of possibility and understanding. Plus, you stop learning, so you commit double homicide by also deciding it’s a wrap for the development of your brain. You don’t have to and probably won’t buck your opinion the second you’re presented with a variant one. Rather, you might become more certain of your prior conviction, and see how you communicate it in a new context, which exemplifies respect for what you believe. If you think something worthwhile and true, you are probably inclined to spread that idea, right?

Some years back, it became clearer than ever that I didn’t need to mutually agree about every last one—or even most—of my beliefs, opinions, or tastes with a person in order to connect our two brains and bodies. This was thanks to a great extended sexual friendship with a Republican audio engineer named Rex. He
took my boots off for me each time we got undressed, and when I was like, “Huh, dude?” he scoffed and said, “What, guys don’t take your shoes offa you? You’re too good for those idiots.” (?!??!!! This is not a thing… as far as I know?) Rex sent my mom flowers after casually spending time with her once and taught me about Ray Charles. If I had written him off because I thought he wasn’t “on the same page as me” in terms of politics, et cetera, I would have missed out on a lot, including the time we were fucking and he craned his gorgeous, craggy nose down right into my face, observing it like he was seeing me for the first time. (
Told
you it’s really appreciated when you make eye contact!) After, he said that that was the distance, or lack thereof, at which I was most beautiful to him. REX! Rex ruled. Keep your mind flung wide open.

Treat people like they’re smart enough to understand you by being smart enough to take in, and allow for, their difference.

You don’t have to be so healthy that you ooze green-Gaia-vegetable-smoothie juice if you get a paper cut, but you have to care about your bodily well-being at least somewhat.
Everyone has their own metric for what makes them feel physically and mentally sound, whether or not it includes the regular ingestion of pulverized salad-liquid. Those considerations are even less universally prescriptive if a person has a long-standing or chronic medical condition—these can include physical diagnoses like fibromyalgia, or mental ones like depression. Whatever you need to do to make yourself feel stable, and maybe even strong: Your first and most pressing responsibility in life, and sex, is to make sure you’re doing those things.

I have to pester myself to drink enough water; try not to smoke; take supplements, even though the jury’s out as to whether they do anything besides make me feel falsely virtuous about my commitment to
glowing, palpable immortality
; chomp my ADHD and anxiety medications because, otherwise, my brain coughs bacterially all over my happiness; get enough protein and maybe lay off the SUGARSUGARSUGAR I mainline if left to my own breakfast devices (today’s morning aliments were a chocolate-chip cookie and
a buttercream cupcake—I need a fucking warden). Outside of your regular routine, undertake to get yourself access to mental and/or medical help if and when you need it—in both instances, there are more options than ever out there for low-income and uninsured people now, even if they take a little research.

Illness is an insistent and recurring piece of life, no matter how fastidiously we wash the grime from our paws, take our brain-leveling psych-vitamins, or all the other millions of practices by which we try to stave off sickness. That is okay, and none of it discounts us from putting it to a healthy body when we ourselves have one again! But you have to administer to yourself, as you would any other ailing person you love, in order for that to be true. When I choose to neglect my health, others are likely to pick up on that, too. A mess, itself, is not unattractive. But a willful lack of self-regard—the nonverbal demonstration that pantomimes the thought
I don’t deserve health
—is palpable and troubling. How can a person confidently expect me to provide them physical kindness if I’m unwilling to do that for myself?

Don’t beat yourself up if you slip, because that does nothing but make you feel even worse than the condition that cookie-cupcake breakfast combo is tormenting me with at current. If you compound sickness or discomfort with self-loathing,
that’s
when you’re sunk, and shame doesn’t even come with the consolation of tasting amazing, rendering it entirely useless. Plus, it’s understandable: Cigarettes and candy and being so drunk that you’re pretending to give a presidential address in character as Ronald McDonald are all the absolute best; you were up against Goliath here! Make a different choice next time, and keep shredding along your merry path.

Go places you love, or suspect you could love, by yourself whenever possible.
This practice guarantees, if not all new avenues of romantic or sexual possibility right then and there, that you possess the three lodestars of being an attractive personage: You are intrigued by the world, motivated to pause and examine the parts of it on which your surprise and fascination snag, and you don’t need
anyone else to cosign your tastes in order for you to adore them. Overfeeding your day planner with the interests you find most fulfilling means you are also courting a ratcheted-up likelihood of encountering people with whom conversations will “warm up” (I know, I sound like a horny women’s magazine—just go with it) quicker than the microwaved repast you’d be preparing at home if you chose ease and familiarity over discovering new shit. Not that there’s anything wrong with eating out of a plastic tray. It’s one of my own dearest pastimes! Albeit one that doesn’t quite work for this purpose (nor, for that matter, the health tip just preceding it).

Make friends of all stripes.
I used to have this problem where I held people to the loftiest of heaven-high standards for friendship. I wanted my friends to be kind, sexy party angels with spooky genius craniums, all the time, in every area of life. For the most part, I still do, and they are! But that’s because I figured out the major caveat that allows the successful execution of that wish in reality: Mentally allow people to embody one or more of the above qualifiers, but not necessarily all of them, and observe the characteristics by which they emit light into the world before you do the omissions of the other ones you like in a cohort.

Expecting perfection of EVERY LAST PAL, ALL OF THE TIME, TO THE END OF MEETING EACH OF YOUR SOCIAL NEEDS AND HOPES will find you alone as heck, plus sourer than you have to be. I got tired of being unfairly let down that people were people. Trust me: Do you know how many more barbecues I got to go to once I stopped treating friendship like a military drill where, if a compatriot made one misstep, they had flunked the non-exam of “having a relationship with me”? Also, do you know how much better I feel as a person, and not just because I get to eat far more grilled meats? To demand perfection is to play yourself.

Flirt with everyone (and everything).
I don’t mean “flirt” as in “sleazily try to bed”—that would be extremely troublesome in this context. Flirting, to me, can mean noticing and communicating the shimmering qualities of each of life’s entities. I believe
the ways in which they add to the net luminosity of your day are worth big-upping.

Halfway fall in love with all the people you meet. Pick up on their most special aspects, and, when you’re swooning over a person, this goes double for the parts of them that rule—of which they might not be aware others have picked up on, and would love to hear a few bromides about! Tell your colleague you love their complex acrylic nails. Say, “You look so nice today,” to a mailperson who has obviously made extra time in their morning routine to embellish their uniform. Grin with just one side of your mouth at a DMV clerk who takes pains to be efficient and polite. Take a second to appreciate and mentally offer up,
God bless you, miss
, to the sun hitting the side of the bank as you walk down the street.