Action: A Book About Sex (19 page)

Articulating yourself with respect to filth is a gratifying undertaking. You’ll find you achieve better returns, sex-wise, if you hone the terms you use to speak about fucking, both in anticipation of it and during. That dialogue is at its very best when a person has mastered their personal smut-vocabulary, which is to say, exclamations more specific than, “I love it when you do that… thing… that’s happening!” If you’re not yet confident in your own dirty mouth, I have plenty to say.

When I say
personal vocabularies
: Learning how to talk dirty from porn is like learning to speak French without any immersive instruction. Porn will give you a basic idea to work from, just like
with blow jobs, but if you don’t expand on that yourself through interactions with actual people, your directives end up sounding like prerecorded customer service lines, and not even sex-centric ones. Since we’re not
quite
at the point in the future where we solely fuck robots, let’s enjoy human interfacin’ as best we know how, which is sometimes… flawed or unwieldy, pride-wise. That does not have to be the case each and every time, though—press “2” for more options, or let your fingers continue to do the walking via continuing to turn these pages.

Talking about fucking is equally as hot when you’re not simultaneously living out the events you’re narrating. Some of my favorite filthy conversations have taken place over text, chat services, the phone, and long letters. The beauty of letting others overhear your dirty mouth before you’re together physically is framing yourself as v. buckwild without yet having to prove it, which is great if you’re titchy with new partners, which I can be sometimes.

No matter how you conduct yourself in bed, sex-based correspondence allows you the freedom to dictate how that is perceived. The suggestion of you, and all the things you want to do, has the benefit of padding a memory/expectation of the way you have sex with the other person’s fantasy, as ghostwritten by you. You can make provocative revisions to your entry in another person’s sexual biography by annotating it before or after the fact of your introduction into the record.

The sexiest conversations I’ve ever had were thanks to people with the knack for getting me off on statements that could sound weird coming from someone else, but are perfectly natural as uttered by the person saying them. Compare two different occasions on which I deliquesced in my chair upon receiving these incontestably dissimilar raunch-missives:

• “I don’t really have the time or focus to write you a proper letter, but I feel like I should send you a note because it would be
almost dishonest not to, since you’ve been in my mind so often today, and have generally improved my disposition, apart from whatever I might have been specifically thinking about you. It would be enough to me to keep my affections for you alive, since after all they are more or less unlimited. Still, I think of studying your pussy with the respect and mineral hard-on it’s due.” (—An email, or “filthy mash note,” as he called it, by an august writer I dated for a few months)

• “ugh. i wannnnna lick your ass before the super bowwllll” (—A gchat from a sports-obsessed bro with a great dick with whom I was sleeping for a moment and a half, around the same time as I was seeing Mineral Hard-On)

Both of the wishes expressed above were honored. They straightforwardly got me thinking about each of these partners’ merits, respectively, and I couldn’t wait to continue the discourse in person. I recognize the places in which these notes are corny, and that makes me even
more
into them! Everyone is corny, and I am most willing to be undressed by people who don’t let that stop them from perving out on/with/in me.

How you phrase your own FILTHY MASH NOTES is up to you, but here’s a helpful script: While “What are you wearing?” serves as a time-honored workhorse of an introduction, I typically lead by talking about what part of a person’s body my brain is obsessively posing in compromising positions, or by dissecting my most longed-for ideas about what I want to do together.

The other day, a somewhat mild person with whom I’m sleeping offered his philosophy on compelling coital conversation. “It’s always good to just say what’s happening, or what you want to happen.” He’s right! When all else fails, imitate a horny David Attenborough and state exactly what’s happening. (Draw the line, however, at imitating his accent.) In your fantasies, are you getting phenomenal head? Talk about what, exactly, they would be doing that’d make it feel so good. Are you bent over,
or bending someone over, a couch with your clothes still on? Describe, in close detail, the extent to which you find that urgency sexy. Name specific body parts as smuttily as you can while still being earnest—“vagina” and “penis,” though more than welcome physically, are words best saved for your doctor. Even if someone in the room is wearing a slutty nurse uniform, be less anatomically correct. (Unless you have been specifically asked to do otherwise, in which case, go ahead and speak clinically, ya amateur Dr. Love.)

Here is a pre-assembled sentence that even the most skittish amateur Attenboroughs can employ with ease, whether you’re saying it in person or in writing: “I love it when you
.” Fill in the blank with the act in as much detail as you can: “I love it when you try to fit my cock all the way into the back of your throat.” “I love it when you pull my hair while you’re pinning me to the bed.”
Et alia!
Add adjectives at will.

In EVERY guide to being a socialized person interacting with others within the labyrinthine confines of “speaking articulately and like a cool-type normal,” there’s one core tenet: When you’re unsure what to say, pay a genuine compliment to your fellow conversationalist. You’re having sex with this person for a reason, right? You decided you found their voice sonorous, or their wrists are so perfectly formed that you’re ITCHING to kiss them in their fine entirety, or they have a truly flawless butt-shape. You can and should expound on those observations.

Whenever my co-bed-denizens have made me feel like I am the one person they’re most excited to be fucking in that moment, and
exactly me only, that’s it,
I put roughly 600 times more vigor into putting them into a blackout orgasm fog for the next few hours. How they’ve communicated this to me is by picking up on—and venerating—the peculiarities of the one body I’ll ever own.

I see a lump of unleavened pizza dough in fake eyelashes staring at me from inside the mirror, so it was cool when one girl brought up my “beautiful cheekbones” (not a thing) when we were involved in a heated makeout. It also led me to notice what
it was, exactly, that I found pointedly gorgeous about her, which were the freckles on her chest. In the easiest segue of all time, we both took our shirts off.

Your own encomiums don’t have to hinge on a person’s appearance (cf. that sexy vocal register), or any other of their empirical features, for that matter. I don’t usually select potential sex partners based on how they look because I am a morally flawless person. (It’s because I have face blindness, meaning that it’s hard for me to discern the whole picture of someone’s appearance even if I know them—rather than poor self-image, that’s the deal with the pizza-dough dysphoria I mentioned above, also.) When I let someone know that I think they’re the mad note, I focus on how to translate that opinion into something that might turn them on to hear about, which is interesting to do with non-aesthetic qualities.

All told, the crasser you can be, the better, but if you’re taciturn or easily embarrassed by nature, it can feel simpler to say, “Touch me like that,” or, “Put your mouth there,” or “Hold my wrists down.” That dialogue wouldn’t even be censored on television. You’re basically not even talking about sex, you chasteoid! Except you are, and it’s soooooo hot, and your partner is thinking about/looking at you like TWO cartoon roast chickens on a desert island instead of just one.

Romantic Attachments

Sending links to porn, if a person has indicated that they like to watch it and would be down to do so with you, establishes you as a great listener
and
a hot fuck. Since many full-length porn videos are drawn-out productions in which we are treated to long, staredown-laden striptease intros during which viewers are asked to make note of an underwear company the actors are shilling for called something akin to “www.skinclothezzz.xxx.com,”
I find it preferable, and more direct, to link to .GIFs
in medias res
. Think any activity that could be described by the word “guzzling,” or whatever filthy analogue you’re indicating that you’d like to imitate with the recipient. Five seconds is all you need to get your point across.

BLUE MOVIES

I have a running page in every journal I keep where I take note of a specific phenomenon whenever I notice it crop up. The “Equal Parts Love and Hate List” comprises all the elements of this life that can provoke an equilibrium of repulsion and enthusiasm in me, depending on my mood and the context in which it’s getting under my skin (for better or for worse). The top entries on these lists:

• Frozen yogurt (love: delicious, creamy, low-cal, toppings; hate: the clear demarcation of a neighborhood being swallowed and prevailed over by a ruling upper class)

• Male attention (love: noticing subtle glances and thinking,
Why, hello and thank you, sir
; hate: being noticed by a stranger who is then compelled to scream at me about the right and wrong ways in which my body is shaped)

• Hanging out with small children for extended periods of time (love:
You are so canny, all discovering the world and comparing it to the scant other parts of the world you know about so far and making me laugh a lot
; hate:
You are so loud, plus definitely a barometer for whether I’m a good person or not based on whether you like me, and I don’t want to know the answer to that
)

• The word “cleave” (love: it starts with a voiceless velar stop, which is the term for a hard “k” sound, my favorite; hate: anytime “cleave” is used biblically or sexually, ew)

• Reading about feminism on the internet (love: attention is being paid to inequality, and that like-minded people are globally
able to rally around and converse about that; hate: when women dog or exclude one another for not allowing for female viewpoints that disagree with or come from a different experience than theirs)

• Country music (love: heart pangs and alcohol; hate: racism disguised as “down-home culture”)

• Pornography, which I have quite obviously been waffling on addressing for this whole chapter thus far. Pornography is unusual because it’s a silent partner in so many aspects of our lives: It’s all around us, influencing so much of our intake and output of how we behave in ways both overt and covert. I’d rather do just about anything, including getting catcalled by randos, than talk unflinchingly and straightforwardly about the kinds of porn I watch. The prospect alone falls exclusively on the “hate” list. Parsing why this is not the case for the pornographic medium itself is tougher.

I am going to do my best to peer at the tension between liking and getting off to pornography and abhorring it with my whole self, because I think plenty of people share a similar discomfort with it. The main consideration as to when the last item hews “love” rather than “great pulsating hatred” in me: Am I watching a kind of porn I like and not confusing its plot devices with real-deal in-person cleaving (ugh), or am I in the wilds of the internet that can make me feel inadequate, grossed out, or that I am
not tan, thin, young, ’n’ pube-shorn enough to ever be a candidate for sex again???

Whether you love or hate porno (or both, or neither), it’s up to you to dictate how you consume it. I’m not talking about
abstaining from jacking off more than once a fortnight, unless a southerly tide spells your name in seashells, the moon is a waning crescent, and no one else is home
, or whatever arbitrary time constraint has been culturally, internally, or interpersonally assigned to you as “right.” What makes for healthy porn consumption is the answer to this question (which is contingent upon each individual
person’s comfort): Is taking in pornography fucking up your life in any tangible way you’re actively aware of? Pornography addiction is a real condition, but unless you find yourself helpless against prioritizing porn to the detriment of unrelated areas of your life, like being unable to have sex with a partner without it if that hurts their feelings, it’s unlikely that you have it. If you’re unsure, ask a psychologist.