Action: A Book About Sex (10 page)

When you’re the one responding to an introductory message like the ones conceptualized above, you’re in a far easier position. A nice, optional guideline: Even if, like me, you’re not naturally funny, come at your reply with levity and/or wryness. Thank them for writing you. Ask a question, and make it specific to them in the style laid out above. Then let them chase you! The fun of being wanted is similar to the fun of wanting. With luck, a person will come to experience both. The whole point of these endeavors is good sex, and the whole point of good sex is realizing that you can position and reposition yourself as you go.

How to Graciously Turn Someone Down

Save for the cases in which you’re flagged down by catcallers and “suitors” with defunct understandings of what qualifies as a compliment, turning people down with kindness is an admirable practice.
You
might not have the kind of tender nerves that make hitting on someone feel like a potentially humiliating risk, but don’t make the assumption that everyone else shares your unflappability! Even if the person wooing you is grounded and easy about any potential negative reaction, it’s still less than preferable to have someone sneer into their drink at your advances. Say, “Thanks, but I’m not interested,” like a self-actualized adult.

If someone invades your space, interrupts or touches you without asking, or comes at you clumsily, you do not owe them your politeness, as they haven’t paid any mind to yours. In those cases, I like to crisply pronounce every letter in the phrase “You need to back up,” while looking at the offending party like I want to garnish them with parsley and masticate ’em. That’s usually enough to get the shitheel to slur, “SOH-RRY!” and maybe call me a bitch, then leave. Perfect!

Whom Should You Bone?

Anyone who’s lucky enough that you should want to. I was going to add, “… as long as they seem like a good person,” but who needs goodness when sometimes you want an encounter to carbonate what you think sexual quality is all about? Often, if you allow the opposite of what you would have engineered to happen without trying to apply the grid of “What You Like” onto it, you find that that framework has more elasticity than you thought. Like, did you know, heretofore until you pinioned your limbs around the person you’re boning, that you were into being bitten like one of those shockingly oversized turkey legs at a county fair, as aggressed by a guy named Ron with something to prove? You did not. Now, you’re sure of it.

Allow for the chance for every word in “What You Like” to change meanings whenever you have sex. The act of “what” you’re doing, the “you” who knows only how they’ve gone about sex with people who aren’t the person they’re salivating about in the current moment, and whether “liking” something includes finding room to make it worthy of attention besides, “THIS IS WHAT HAD HAPPENED TO ME SO FAR THAT IS COMPARABLE TO NO-CLOTHES-TIMES I HAD SEEN AT THE MOVIES WHERE THE PEOPLE WERE VERY ‘MTV BEACH BODY CALIFORNIA’ HOT, WHICH I LIKED.” Keep things mutable, and you’ll maximize your happiness.

That mindset also applies to having a “type” when it comes to sexual partners. Usually, if someone I’m involved with seems to be pantomiming the choreography of porn
without
including me in their mimicry, I’m not hooking up with them again. I also don’t
sleep with people who perpetuate, or in any way behave like they generally agree with, bigoted slurs/acts of any category. Barring larger discussions about consent, physical aggression, and so on, these are my only mineral rules.

Other more flexible demographics to consider:

•
People who you can mostly bet are accomplished experts in bed:
under-thirty drivers of station wagons, not DJs, dudes whose nail polish matches another element of their outfits,
any
person with short, clean fingernails (varnished or not), lockpickers, piano players, anyone of
any
hand-based vocation, ballerinas, gymnasts, wearers of loafers with no socks in the summer (even if their feet smell), thoughtful upholders of spinal posture (my endless wolf-whistles, once again, to eye contact–maintainers, as well), adults with spotless orthodontia, people who prefer going to the movies instead of watching them at home, girls with Morrissey pompadours, guys with Morrissey pompadours, anyone with a Morrissey pompadour, youngs in overalls (if they’re not wearing anything underneath, bring them home
as soon as you can
), people with nicknames that would also be at home on the hull of a speedboat, fixers of small household appliances, sewers of their own clothing, the guy at the supermarket who smiles with every part of his face except his mouth and you can tell it’s because he’s shy about his beautifully haywire teeth, listeners of the radio.

•
People around whom you should padlock your thighs closed:
most career music critics, bigots, anyone who thinks being “politically correct” is a drag, any utterers of the words “politically correct” full end stop, jerks who don’t listen when you talk—they are going to be even less attentive going-at-it-wise, your friends’ partners unless you’re all aware of and into that scenario, dudes who NEED you to know that they are feminists, white people who NEED you to know they advocate for people of color and/or “don’t see race,” anyone who makes fun of other people in a way reliant on the “teasing” part over the loving part (those
elements are at their best when they’re given equal, or close to equal, weight), male improv students, self-identified “philosophers,” those who condescend, hashtag enthusiasts (unless that’s for a cause or event), “truthers” of all stripes, hosts of the radio.

This is all highly subjective. You can obviously fuck, or not, any of these people at will, and you don’t even have to like them to do that. I often hear arguments that hate-sex is some of the best sex out there, but I prefer to put on a one-act with someone of whom I am actually fond, in which we get vicious and violent while we’re being physical, then are able to good-naturedly kid and kiss about it instead of parting ways in silent fury and derision. (Let me reiterate: Fucking DJs is a doomed way to spend your time.)

Some Notes on Grooming

You are under no obligation to present your body in any standardized model for sexiness. However: This is not a call to action against Big Soap. As a demonstration of respect toward your partners/insurance you’ll have them to begin with, you DO have to make sure your zones are clean and smell
at least
neutral. What will improve your and a partner’s time together is making sure you look hot in as close to the way you do inside your own head—on your best days—as you can muster. When my mettle is up, my lipstick is shadowy velvet, and my hair doesn’t look like a post-pillow-friction tumbleweed
before
I get in bed, I’m liable to relax and mentally dedicate myself to what I’m doing with my body and how that feels, not how it looks. Conversely, if you could grease a baking sheet on my forehead and my teeth smell, you can bet that I’m fretting, which detracts from my ability to keep my mind on how my and my co-person’s bodies feel. (Morning sex = not my favorite.)

My self-styled grossness is never as bad as I think it is, even when I’m SURE it is. If a person is having sex with you, it’s probable that they do not share in your perception of yourself as half-beast-at-least. The trick to avoiding that head-trap: Making sure you’re aesthetically comfortable, whatever that means for you… but not stressing out over every! Last! Detail! Follow this rule: You are allowed to look in the mirror exactly twice, maximum, even in private, on a date.

The best ways to jazz up your sexual fitness, which is incontestable and inborn, is to be, in some way of your personal
choosing, distinctive in your sartorial/outwardly formations. Go ahead and rise to
Tha Krazy Ol’ Media
’s expectations about what you should slather and drape on yourself if you genuinely get a kick out of that, as I often do. There’s no joy in conforming to gendered stereotypes of appearance because you’re suffering under the misconception that following those tiresome codes to the letter is the only way you’ll ever turn a partner on. Decorate yourself in modes super-feminine or -masculine if you like to do that, or you’re probably better off not doing it at all. Your date is, let’s hope, not judging you via a rubric that looks suspiciously like the “Fitness” section of a magazine display rack, but asserting that they are right to be doing that. Be complicit in someone essentializing you only if you’re aware of and okay with/have your own reasons for that. Stay conscious of it either way.

When you personify ownership over and happiness with your body, even if you aren’t 100 percent convinced of it in all moments, it grants your partner an improved likelihood of doing the same. You’re less likely to set off another person’s anxious review of their own zones for unworthiness. Confidence can be unnerving to some people, but I’m not really trying to get it in with anyone who needs me to feel unsure of my sexual aptitude as a result of worrying that my face might suck (and not in the crude way that syntax suggests, either). I used to become disruptively nervous if a comely person I was taking the clothes off of projected the opposite, and instead seemed ill at ease. This was before I figured out that even the most modelesque among the human race occasionally feel like lukewarm roadkill about their outfits, hairstyles, and bodies, so I could not yet identify the motivations behind when, say, they suddenly got quiet or started stammering.
Did some aspect of me disarm or dismay them?
I thought.
Is it because my face is a gigantic problem with inadequately-velveteen lipstick on it???
No! They were
also
petrified! The minute insecurities I fretted over seem so cyclical and useless when I could have crawled outside my head, quit trying to look sexy, and focused on
the fact that the other person did. Appreciation is
also
usually a reciprocal act. Have you ever heard of “mirroring”? It’s when, if a person likes someone with whom they’re interacting, they unwittingly mimic their stances and poses. Making a nonverbal show of “good self-esteem” by not perceptibly loathing your appearance is no exception: Though it might feel like the flimsiest of shams at first, that grace is palpable, and so, communicable. “We are what we pretend to be,” quoth Ernest Hemingway. The rest of that particular excerpt, if I recall, has gone missing somehow, but I believe it continued, “… and imitation is a form of self-flattery that will totally find you up to your eyeballs in vacant condom wrappers if you do it convincingly.”

Another reason to shower today: If you’re not bugging out over your appearance, you are tacitly confirming your agreement with your partner re: your being a sex-worthy person—and that they’re a superb decision-maker for putting their skin in close proximity to yours, which feels good for all parties involved.

SHAVE, OR DON’T

There’s something sexy, in a highly sweet and even goofy way, about premeditated pubic-hair grooming. You kind of can’t beat making it with somebody for the first time and discovering that they were so eager and anticipatory that they trimmed their subequatorial zones into a discernible shape, or putting your hand down some gorgeous individual’s pants and feeling the one true manifestation of the word “intent”: a landing strip or other topiary that is a hair-oglyph translating to, “I am here to fuck you and I wanted you to know it.” I don’t care about how anybody’s pubic hair looks except my own (a frustrating/hot conundrum: I prefer not to intervene with my bush, but getting head feels better sans pubes). Some people prefer pubic hair styled one way or another—and pornography suggests that people don’t want to have sex with others of their kind whose genitals aren’t those
poreless, hairless blanknesses you see on mannequins, except with deeper tans—but you don’t much have to worry about that unless you’d like to, which I sometimes do if I’m into somebody a lot in the aforementioned anticipatory way. The thing here is that
nobody
is going to jerk their head/hands/other appendages away from you if they notice that you do or don’t have hair on some recently unclothed part of you—and if they did, you’d be spared some similarly unimaginative sex, so you’d win anyway.