Action: A Book About Sex (6 page)

This swoonfest ensures that if you’re sexually interested in a person you’re appreciating, you’ll feel so much more natural when remarking upon what it is you like about them, since you are quite used to drawing on that practice with regularity. It also ensures that you will be far happier, far more frequently—or at least whenever you stroll past the bank.

Accept invitations.
This is applicable to events you have a hunch will be captivating, AND the ones that seem limp, dull, and/or grating.
Oh, you don’t really like that band, so there’s no probable way a person who might not agree with you about the specifics of how sound arrangements appeal to the two of you, but who is a kind and fastidious lay, might be in attendance as well?
The two have nothing to do with each other!

Going everywhere means meeting everyone, which is homiletic and useful even if you don’t bone any of your fellow cult-costume party/professional conference/sociopolitical lecture/after-hours rave attendees. (All of those are places at which I’ve unwittingly scored.)

Become Small Deluxe

This sounds like glossolalia, or else a fast-food menu combo option, but please allow me to explain. You know how Beyoncé summoned Sasha Fierce, her more confident alternate self, in order to propel her stageward for a while? If not: For a few years, Bey created and named a personality whom she embodied during shows, then dropped off at the proscenium when she was done performing. (This is just one of many brain-ordering modi operandi that we, as a people, have appropriated from Beyoncé, who, in turn, has often copped many of them from drag queens. In terms of performing any sort of charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent that I might possess, I owe RuPaul just about everything I know—hell, instead of buying this book, just go send a RuQuet of roses his way on my behalf.)

This flashy self-reinvention is also a useful internal stratagem, if one that I would draw the stage curtain at actually, in our cases, discussing with other people. My perfected self-projection is called SMALL DELUXE, and I have never so much as whispered her existence into someone else’s brain before today!!! AHHH! Talking about your Small Deluxe kind of undermines her purpose in that it’s an admission that you have enough of a dearth of confidence to need her, but I’m willing to bring her to this party if it means we-the-world get to meet your alter ego, too. Besides, I am sustained by the knowledge that feeling perpetual and mineral certainty in oneself is a myth. If there was ever a world in which Beyoncé lacked them, you know I’m correct about this one.

I came up with Small D. one grim afternoon when I realized with horror that I had
chosen to give a psychic money
to fling some platitudes at my insecure face. I know many people find value and support in astrology, but I am not one of them—I have always hoped to be the autonomous celestial director of my own happiness, but, that day, had instead chosen to be preyed upon by a charlatan who professionally flips others’ pain into cash. I examined what I had endeavored to find in the psychic’s office,
and the sought-after result was my best and most capable self. So I thought about what she would be like, if I could choose her (which, of course, I could and can). I envisioned how she’d respond to the circumstances I found vexing with confidence and verve, and vowed to follow her lead whenever I was feeling dented-up or otherwise low.

Small Deluxe drives a station wagon. She knows the joke doesn’t have to be on anyone. She’s lean and mean, but only in terms of affect, because she isn’t thin. I think she has red adult braces? Not because she dislikes her teeth, but because she thinks orthodontia is beautiful, especially when it announces itself, and why not reinvent her mouth?

Who is your fake/truest person? NO, DUDE, DON’T ACTUALLY TELL ME. Remember, your Small Deluxe is probably most effective when kept secret.

Throw parties, even if they’re not “parties.”
Parties exist so that the attending free agents can intermingle and leave with one another’s fingerprints on their phones. Being responsible for your own bash means you have a prefab introduction to any suave-looking newcomers your guests might have rolled up with: “Hi, I’m Amy Rose! Nice to meet you—I’m glad you could make it. Where are you coming from?” WHOA NELLY with this stunningly original bon mot, I know, but its recipient is then obliged to tell you that they’re happy to be there, too, and probably chat you up for a minute or two about whence they bopped, since you’re the host-o-max with the inquisitive most-o-max.

You don’t need to have a keg-style rager, by any means, to draw your friends and their beloved as-yet-unbeknownst-to-you cabal to the festive outpost of your choosing. Nor must you square your shoulders, put on a button-up, and cackle composedly above a glass matching all the other stemware on offer—along with your insistently self-disciplined cheerfulness—at a home brunch where no one consumes more than 1.5 cocktails per head.

What makes sense to you? What enterprises do you find unsurpassable in terms of how to invest your time? Organize a function that avails those spectacular pursuits to like-minded dreamboats: Sharing your appreciation inflates it, and has the same effect on your reputation. Have a good party or four or nine, and you will have cultivated the widespread understanding that you are a person who likes enabling others to have excellent days and/or nights. Choose what and whom you’re into, and honor those selections in tandem! No themed place mats/keg taps required, unless that’s the way you prefer to set your table.

Under this maxim, I started a reading series in my living room a few years back. My “Welcome Home” parties feature five rotating guests presenting excerpts of their criticism, poetry, fiction, and essays in a corner of the room as the rest of the congregation watches from my couches and floor. Then all of these like-minded superstars stay for the antecedent house parties and make out with one another, and me, in my bedroom!!! It rules. Figure out your own version of Welcome Home, get to writing out your invitations, and then, if you’re hosting at your house or apartment (and that’s totally optional!), clear off the stuff all over your bed in preparation—coats can find another surface to carpet.

Involve yourself in your direct community.
Sex is about contact, camaraderie, and mutual esteem as much as it is getting WET ’N’ WILD in the style of a smuttily named lipstick. (Confidential to makeup companies who might want to hire me someday: I sincerely adore that there are people out there whose professions are looking at a shade of unctuous pink grease and deciding, “Let’s definitely call this one ‘REVERSE… WOW, GIRL!’”) Part of feeling communion with the world is exercised in its social microcosms. Some ways to enact this for yourself: Vote in local elections. Make friends with your deli person, corner bartender, colleagues, and neighbors.

I loathed my first office job and most of my fellow employees when I worked for a corp-o listicle website, but I took pains to identify the moments and people within it to which I could affix
my limitless affections, and I left that Hades-corporation with a solid body of accomplishments in my name AND lifelong friends. In all pursuits, no matter how staid, humdrum, or even corp-o: Expand yourself by looking directly around you, and then making yourself a beautiful part of that drab-ass landscape.

Unglue your hands and eyes from your phone.
When you arrive at whatever enticing place has beckoned you from out of the house, your cell phone is not your date. Put it away and pay attention for the entirety of the time you’re out, save for commutes, necessary communiqués, and entering previously uncollected contact information into it. If you have to wait in a line, bring a book. If you’re taking in a lecture, performance, or other event where you’d like to record notes, bring a small journal or notepad instead of pecking into your phone screen, unless a work-related reason demands otherwise. You will be more aware of, and look and feel more composed, wherever you are; being a hunched-over social-media-scroller detracts from your experience and the ability of others to differentiate you from three-quarters of the room you’re in. It’s less compelling, anyway. Pick up your lovely face and look the heck around!!!

Be excellent at a job—preferably one that you adore, but any position will do.
Even if you’re assembling drivel about being a nineteen hundred and nineties kid-lennial for a third-rate website (see: my listicle-based plight just above), do it with gusto. Self-sufficiency is the sexiest thing. If there are certain pragmatic/situational demands or restraints that keep a person from this, don’t castigate yourself—given the current economic state we’re collectively floundering in, I would be an utter knob-job if I didn’t recognize that, in many cases, obtaining any kind of paid work, let alone in a field you love that ALSO keeps you in Diet Cokes, is pretty lucky.

Knuckle on what rent-making labor you’ve got, and dedicate yourself as best you can to excelling at it rather than stewing over how much you despise it. Those energies are better utilized by trying to transcend the level you’re at. And don’t balk at taking work
that “isn’t what you want to do”—I know plenty of unemployed associates whom I’m always hearing say that they’re broke, but they don’t want to take a part-time or entry-level position because it doesn’t precisely fit the model of what career they’d like in the long run… except, when pressed as to what that is, they usually say something amorphous like, “Something creative?”

NO TO THIS. Find something—anything—that earns you the scrilla you need to scrape by, even if it’s just a life-sustaining amount and no more, while you work out the specifics of that nebulous creativity or whatever it is. You’ll be padding your skills, both professional and social, in the meanwhile, without depleting the mental faculties you need to do your real CREATIVE (or whatever enterprising area of inquiry you favor) work.

My greatest jobs, before I landed a dreamy one as a writer/editor for a publication I love, have been the ones that had nil to do with my intended area of employment: Being a telemarketing-center stooge, EDM rave hostess, pizza-pushing cashier, coat salesgirl, hookah bar waitress, library page, garden-supply-store plant-hoser, events planner, et cetera, edified me as comprehensively as CREATIVE meandering-around ever has. Each position expedited my already-gnawing motivation to do something
else
, necessitated that I interact with people I wouldn’t have chosen to hang with independently, and kept me (mostly) out of hock while I was at it. And they gave me things to write about, when it came time to write! Take work. Whatever you can wrangle. Not to sound TOO grandfatherly, but: It builds character.
[wheezes and asks you whatever happened to “good” music like the ol’ Beatle Boys]

Masturbate.
Onanism (the sophist’s preferred term for whackin’ it) ensures that when you do get laid, you’ll know how you like to be touched and so can more readily communicate those tastes. Masturbation is not just a means to that end, but a sheer pleasure in and of itself! (As if you didn’t know this already, ya perv-ass!) It diminishes stress by releasing endorphins, aka relaxation-inducing brain chemicals, in your mind-piece (this can also help
with insomnia), alleviates sexual frustration and physical tension, and is otherwise good for your health: Recent scientific studies by the University of Sydney have suggested that regular masturbation can reduce the risks of conditions like cystitis, some forms of cancer, diabetes, and certain sexual infections.
^*
But you don’t have to justify self-conducted handjobs by rationalizing that it’s all for the sake of your precious medical wellness! (Although, as we have discussed: Your health is mad important.) Masturbating helps sex with people other than yourself feel like less of a looming physical obligation that isn’t being met, since you’re self-sufficient, pleasure-wise. Also, it feels mad good. (Again: As you know, pervadocious!!!)

Get all altruistic.
You know how people sometimes sniff that volunteering and other forms of do-gooderism are
ultimately, like, so selfish in the end—they’re all about making the person doing it feel good about themselves
. To this, I say:
Correct, probably! And that is so rad.
People who apply their time and energy, if they are fortunate enough to find themselves with extra supplies of these resources, to making the world the slightest bit less harrowing for others, have the right to feel good about themselves (so long as they don’t post TOO many pictures of it on the internet—I don’t care if people talk about the causes they love, but I rankle when that’s to the end of broadcasting their own saintly virtue and generosity). Also: Who cares! Good is being done here. If, in chasing momentarily rewarding-feeling self-aggrandizement rights, a person is chipping at the net grossness of the planet’s collective miseries, at least they’re trying to both preen
and
big-up themselves (even if that’s just internally) through fellowship. I vastly prefer this kind of grandstanding to the types of which the by-products do not serve anyone but their enactors. Like, attempting to have
THE HOTTEST SEX-HAIRSTYLE TO PROVE YOU’RE THE TOP DOG doesn’t end up affecting anybody besides the updo-er in question, but fixing to have THE BIGGEST SEX-HEART BY DOING GOOD TURNS at least helps others out.

A secret: I used to be one of the eye-rollers who mentally (and sometimes vocally) accused people who donated time, cash, and/or public support of being self-deifying phonies. But you know how people who are obsessed with whether the motives of others are “fake” or not are so often anxious in that way because they’re fearful that expressing their own interest in similar activities is valid? When I waffled about the worth of my own motives, which were
fine
—and would have been even if they
were
narcissistic—I was stating an argument to counter what I actually believed because I was worried that if I got involved in causes I cared about, people would roll their eyes at ME. That is major dunce behavior, and it shouldn’t have stopped me from just saying FUCK IT and heading down to the food pantry to see what I could do.