Let’s take it as a given that because she will often be taking initiative in sex, she knows already that she may have to deal with sexual rejection in a way that men have previously experienced more than women (even if all have not coped with it well, or if the way they have coped was influenced by the way masculinity is defined). In fact, if she chooses male partners, she knows they may say no as often as they say yes, now that some masculinity roles of the past are done away with, and her ideas about what male sexual desire looks like are radically different from what any of us previously envisioned.
Without the assurance or expectation that she has a script to follow that she didn’t write, she not only knows she will have to be more creative sexually than women before her—she’s looking forward to it. She’s not expecting porn or a romance novel, she’s expecting interpretive dance. That also helps when it comes to feeling comfortable about her body: She knows that the unique way that she looks is part of what makes sex authentic for her and her partners. Reared without feeling that her body or her sexuality are dirty, immoral, or the promised property of someone else, she’s already plenty familiar with her own genitals and sexual response, with the aid of no one beyond her own two hands. She knows plenty of things that will get her off by now.
Additionally, she expects what sexual activities she’ll engage in with a partner on any given day to vary, since who knows what they’ll feel like doing or discover anew. A distinct element of surprise will be afoot. “Get lucky” is a euphemism for sex that has fallen out of vogue. But when we recognize the rarity of Big-Time Desire that is mutual and miraculously simultaneous, our expectations are such that when it occurs, we all will know we have, in fact, gotten quite lucky, and it’s a great fortune to be able to experience even one moment like this, let alone many. Our gal and her other did plenty of planning and risk reduction in advance when it came to being prepared for the time that those desires
did
coincide, but when it all came together may have been the weekend before or after they had planned.
What if, when they both chose to follow shared desires like these, expected or unexpected—not when they “just happened”—she had, we had, this sort of foundation beneath it all? What if we all visualized her yes,
our
yes, not as a happy ending but as the barest beginning?
The sex itself? It’s sweatier and it’s sweeter, all at once. When it’s tender, it’s not a Hallmark card, but a cookie fresh out of the oven: steaming, moist, delectable, and melt-in-your-mouth. When it’s forceful, it’s not so because one partner is being assaulted or objectified, but because the energy and strong unity of shared desire feel so urgent and wanted that both partners leap upon them like someone who’s been on a hunger strike for a week might approach an all-you-can-eat buffet. Her expectations and the experience of her sexual initiation are less a country-western serenade and more an ’80s power ballad.
By the time either of our players gets near the other’s genitals, they are puffed up with arousal like a baboon’s bright red behind. Both partners are equal parts terrified and fearless. Those fears and hopes aren’t about being harmed—or avoiding harm—but about the excitement of exploring spaces unknown and full of glorious mystery. Words are used to verify the obvious and specify the wanted, but are often in the unique sexual language of monosyllables and half sentences punctuated by gasps and sighs, laughter and moans. Whose hands are whose hands, whose limbs are whose limbs, is tough to discern to an outside eye; they’re moving too fervently and are too tangled to identify, especially if both sets belong to partners of the same sex. If one sexual activity lasts only a few minutes, no one cares, because they just slide into another, hungry for all of it; this dance continues, ever morphing from one rhythm into another with feelings only of floating, not of failure. If and when something hurts or is uncomfortable, voicing that is easy because of the expectation that partners explore to find the things that not only don’t hurt, but feel crazy good.
Embarrassment or shame about normal body functions and fluids would seem quaint and passé. After all, sex is about crawling as deeply into the muck of someone else as possible and rolling around in it with the relish of a pig in mud. Someone, at some point, will do something that seems completely instinctive and really sexy, but that is actually quite silly. Someone will laugh out loud, which will be interpreted as an expression of joy, rather than an insult. No one will be stressed out over how long it’ll all go on, because every few seconds are stretched out like taffy and feel like hours. If all the sex is over half an hour later, both are surprised, because it felt like mere moments and days at a time, all at once. Everyone gets off, whether through orgasm, having a hand in someone else’s pleasure, being that close to someone you adore and are attracted to, or whatever other authentic and unique expression of diverse human sexuality someone gets off on. Neither partner has to ask the other, shyly, if they got off or not—it has already been clearly demonstrated, and if either partner does not feel satisfied, they say something plainly, because they know, without question, they want to give and receive pleasure mutually. No one has the expectation that any one activity will get both people off, and they may well already have discussed that there will probably be times when it might be more fun to take turns. For example, sex one night is all about one partner, and the next it’s all about the other. No one moment in sex has been privileged as the apex; the orgasms are amazing, but so are those brief moments of complete clarity just afterward, those feelings of breathy loss of control in the moments before, those first dizzy flushes of arousal, those utterly exhausted moments after it all before you fall into a well-earned snooze.
This sex doesn’t just feel okay, nor is it good only because it is painless. This sex feels freaking magnificent. Sure, sometimes it’s magnificent like riding a roller coaster or having a near-death experience, and at other times it’s magnificent like soaking your feet after a long day—but it’s always so much more than just okay.
The next morning, beyond affirming love and care, both partners are reduced to grins and vague expressions of “So, last night ... well . . . yum . . . mmm. Wow.” Having both been so amped-up the night before, they look the next day like people back from a four-day massage, from a place where physicality, psychology, and biochemistry delivered the potent cocktail they do.
And all of that may have come from any combination of sexual activities whatsoever. It doesn’t matter which, because when you feel like that, no one has to ask if what you did the night before was “real” sex. It couldn’t have been anything else.
What I’m envisioning isn’t the stuff of speculative fiction or utopian fantasy. It’s not out of our reach. While we’ve got a helluva lot of work to do to get everyone here, it is entirely possible for someone—including you—right this very minute.
We can (and, if you ask me, should) be anarchistic about this. We can create small communities, small partnerships, singular existences outside of the presently pervasive sexual oligarchy, where how we want things to be can be either
exactly
how we think they should be, or mighty close within the limitations of the macrocosm we live in. Unlike rape, we get to choose when we have sex, how we have sex, and with whom we have sex; we get to choose if we’ll ever have sex at all, and it is not mandatory, but optional.
What we individually and collectively visualize has power and influence over what we manifest. We cannot somehow erase or alter all of the barriers we have right now when it comes to real sexual agency for all women. But there are no barriers beyond the limits of our own imagination when it comes to rewriting the scripts of our sexual ideals, our individual sexual lives, and what we present to ourselves, our sisters, our daughters. We have the power to dream up and manifest something better than a woman’s merely being able to say no; something that is an entirely different animal from scenarios that are positive only because we have escaped the most negative consequences or results. Good sex, great sex, enriching sexuality is not just about the absence of physical or emotional pain or only about emotional intimacy. It is also about desire and the full expression of that desire.
We often knock reality and defend fantasy, sure that reality could never compete. But when we do that, we discount the possibility of a reality that is literally fantastic. There is not only room for women’s desire in every sexual equation in which we choose to take part; there remains a vacancy sign flickering, with one light on the fritz, in many sexual relationships where
everyone
involved is breathlessly wishing, waiting, and hoping for the appearance of that desire, and will have the whole of their world positively altered when it finally howls its first-found rebel yell.
And then, on some night sometime soon, right down the street from where you sit or perhaps even right where you live, two people may have a first time—even if they have had sex three-hundred times before then—that is
exactly
how we all wish it to be, and that has finally dreamed, written, and birthed itself into being.
If you want to read more about ELECTRIC YOUTH, try:
• Hooking Up with Healthy Sexuality: The Lessons Boys Learn (and Don’t Learn) About Sexuality, and Why a Sex-Positive Rape Prevention Paradigm Can Benefit Everyone Involved BY BRAD PERRY
• Real Sex Education BY CARA KULWICKI
If you want to read more about IS CONSENT COMPLICATED?, try:
• Beyond Yes or No: Consent as Sexual Process BY RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL
• An Old Enemy in a New Outfit: How Date Rape Became Gray Rape and Why It Matters BY LISA JERVIS
If you want to read more about SEXUAL HEALING, try:
• Toward a Performance Model of Sex BY THOMAS MACAULAY MILLAR
• Reclaiming Touch: Rape Culture, Explicit Verbal Consent, and Body Sovereignty BY HAZEL/CEDAR TROOST
16
Hooking Up with Healthy Sexuality: The Lessons Boys Learn (and Don’t Learn) About Sexuality, and Why a Sex-Positive Rape Prevention Paradigm Can Benefit Everyone Involved
BY BRAD PERRY
STEAL THE BEER, meet the girls, get them drunk, and try to get some—that was the plan. I was thirteen years old, and my friend Jon and I were sleeping over at our buddy Zach’s house. What we heard that night made every cell of our newly pubescent bodies crackle with electricity. Zach’s older brother informed us that he had recently experienced the most mysterious and most desired pinnacle of male teenage existence—ejaculation caused not by his own hands, but by a real live girl. He “got some.”
Tellingly, the specifics of exactly how Zach’s brother was able to achieve this milestone were far more interesting to us than hearing what “getting some” was actually like. We’d all learned about the wonders of masturbation by this time, so we thought we had a decent reference point for the physical rewards. The fact that girls could like sex hadn’t even crossed our minds. We knew sex was supposed to involve some type of mutual appreciation for each other’s genitals, but we didn’t understand why—after all, it was us boys who were doing the “getting” of the “some” right? And growing up in white-bread, middle-class, suburban Virginia, we no doubt received plenty of messages in our social environment casting sex with girls (and
only
with girls) as a one-sided affair where the boy makes the moves and calls the shots. We were intent on learning these moves. So most of what Zach’s brother told us about his encounter—and all we really wanted to know—revolved around
how
the pre-ejaculatory events unfolded.
Zach’s brother was a fifteen-year-old punk-rock skateboarder, and was totally badass as far as I was concerned, since I aspired to be a similar brand of aloof cool guy. Through this lens of awe, I listened to him recount key events over the previous few months. It seems that one afternoon Zach’s brother stole a twelve-pack of beer from a neighbor’s garage and invited his neighbor Cheryl over to drink it while his parents were out of town. At some point they started making out. Zach’s brother told us he thought the beer had made her really “into it,” so he started taking off her clothes. He then recounted a litany of sexual acts in which they engaged, culminating in that most cherished of naked heterosexual activities: actual penile/vaginal intercourse. This same scenario played itself out several more times over the weeks following the first encounter, usually with the aid of beer or pot.
We listened to Zach’s brother with rapt stares and took copious mental notes. All three of us came to basically the same set of conclusions: 1) It is possible for girls to actually want to do “sexual stuff” with you; 2) Getting a girl to do sexual stuff with you usually requires some “loosening agents,” such as alcohol or pot; 3) The guy usually has to make the first move.