C. Communication Is for Everybody
Humans are not telepaths. We’re capable of having many types of sex with all different kinds of people with varying body types, but we’re not capable of reading minds. Not everybody has sex the same way, and that’s fine. The point of sex is fun and intimacy, and there shouldn’t be any “should” about what kind to have. But sex—whatever kind we want to have—requires communication. Daetan, twenty-two, told me, “My job had never traditionally been to talk about things, but when I finally did, sex was the easiest thing to talk about.”
There are at least four things that everyone needs to be able to talk about before they’re in a good place to have any kind of sex with anyone:
Enthusiastic Consent
Good sex can happen only between people who both want it to happen. Consent means more than just not saying “no.” Consent is affirmative. Enthusiastic participation is consent. Wanting it to happen, being into it, liking it, is consent. Silence is just the absence of “no.” Not pushing someone away is just the absence of “no.” That’s not good enough. That’s not “yes.” Consent is the presence of “Yes!” In the presence of a mutual “Yes!” nobody needs to worry about whether a partner consents. Sex with a partner who is merely willing to acquiesce is wrong.
Enthusiastic consent is a standard that helps everybody. You want your partners to be into it, right? And you’d want to know if they were not, right? So it’s good for you to look for affirmative indications that they like what you’re doing. And they need it—because people can’t or don’t always say “no” when they don’t like what’s going on. They may be scared or unsure or freaked out, and not know how to say so.
How do people know if their partners are having fun? Sometimes it’s a no-brainer. “Yes! Yes! Oh my god! Keep doing that! I’m gonna come!” is hard to misinterpret. But if you can’t tell, you need to ask. Asking gives your partner comfort that you respect boundaries, and you comfort that your partner is having fun. Ben, twenty-three, said, “Comfort is a really effective way of maintaining a sexy environment.” That doesn’t mean asking your partner to fill out a customer satisfaction survey, and it doesn’t break the mood. It means checking in. “Do you like that?” is a check-in. “Is that hot for you?” is a check-in. “Do you want more?” is a check-in. Take a deep breath, say it slow and low and with confidence, and your check-in does double-duty as erotic talk.
Enthusiastic consent isn’t just about our partners, though. It’s about ourselves. This notion that men, as Ben, twenty-three, says, “are not supposed to ask directions on the road, or off the road as well” is no good for us, either. As Daniel, thirty, put it, “If we can’t talk about what we want, there’s no way to negotiate on any of the things that I want done to me. It’s all things I’m doing to someone else.” Sometimes, we’re so conditioned to initiate sex and be in charge that we don’t even question it, but as Daniel adds, “This requirement to initiate on the part of the culture is something that I didn’t sign up for. I didn’t sign up to be aggressive in that way all the time.”
Limits
Limits are not really separate from consent. I’ve broken it out as a separate item because people talk about consent as if it’s a light switch or a check-box—as if it’s a little “I have read the terms and conditions” box they can check off and get out of the way. The thing is, even if I do read the terms and conditions, I usually don’t like what they say. I check the box because I don’t have any bargaining power, and I’m annoyed that I have to agree to whatever crappy terms they write. I check the box because I’m stuck with it. I don’t ever want to feel that way with someone I’m about to have sex with, and I damned sure don’t want my partners to feel that way about me.
So, the term “limits” is just a more flexible way to talk about consent. Everybody needs to be able to assert what their limits are. And everybody also has to hear a partner’s limits (see number 1 above). If you’re outside someone’s limits, you’re outside their consent. Never let that happen. No decent person ever wants to be in that situation.
When we think of limits, many of us think immediately of teens who may not be ready to do things, sexually, that many people do later in life, but that’s only part of what I’m talking about. Everyone has limits.* But the truth is, each of us has things we don’t like and don’t want to do. Some people like anal sex, some try it and don’t like it, and some never will try it because they don’t want to. That has to be okay, they have to be able to say where they stand, and every person they’re intimate with has an obligation to respect it.
The reason people need to state limits is because our limits are not all the same. Some people get scared and freak out if a partner holds their wrists during intercourse, but for some of us it’s a huge turn-on. Folks may not know how they’ll feel about something in advance, but if they do know, the best way to make sure a boundary is understood is to say what it is, up front and direct. “I don’t like when people come up behind me and touch me” is a limit. It’s pretty clear.
Intentions
We need to know that we and our partner have the same view of what the sex we’re having means. Are we both in love? Is this a relationship or not? What are the rules of the relationship? If it’s just play, are we both prepared to say that it means neither of us has any expectations of the other?
This sounds so simple, but the culture makes it hard. There are countless commentators and magazine articles, books, jokes, and TV shows that spew generalizations and reinforce stereotypes about how people should behave, whether they’re men, women, black, Asian, gay, lesbian, etc. Ignore them. Acting like the people in our lives are stock characters from romantic comedies isn’t going to work out well. They’re people.
It’s impossible to respect a partner as an individual if you assume what that person wants, rather than ask. Do Jewish women love giving blowjobs? Who cares? Nobody is dating, hooking up with, or raising “Jewish women.” I’m not married to women; I’m married to my wife. What “women” want is an abstraction. What my wife wants is what I need to know. I can’t find out what she wants from Maxim. I know what she wants from treating her like a person, and being with her, and talking to her. We can’t guess about each other’s intentions. Often, folks don’t know what they want—that itself is important information, and getting that out in the open can give you the opportunity to figure it out together. It can even be the start of getting closer.
Safety
This is the reality: The only perfectly safe sex happens when each of us is alone. Partnered sex has risks. Being responsible, being ethical, means talking about risks.
The risks depend on the people involved. You only need to talk about condoms if you plan to put your penis, or an object shaped like one, inside your partner. The one universal is that no one can deal with risks if you can’t talk about them. Say for example that you really don’t like condoms. It’s a preference, and having a preference isn’t a problem. But your preference comes with real risks, and your partner may have a different preference. If you can’t talk about it, you can’t get on the same page. Without communication, the only options are bullying or taking your balls and going home (pardon the pun). Going home alone is no fun, and bullying is wrong.
Folks who are going to have sex together have to be able to tell each other their disease status, including when they were last tested and what risks they’ve run into since, and they have to be able to talk about safety measures appropriate to anything they’re going to do, whether it’s contraception, condoms, barriers for oral sex, no changing holes with the same condom . . . all the way up to sterilizing toys for folks who have the type of sex where that’s an issue.
How to talk about safer sex is one of the areas where the culture moved miles during my lifetime. The AIDS epidemic forced the conversation out into the open when I was a teen, and there are some good resources out there:
Planned Parenthood does more than many people realize, like providing excellent and user-friendly safer sex advice.
The Centers for Disease Control maintains a National Prevention Information Network with FAQs on most common STDs.
And whether you’re seventeen or seventy, Heather Corinna’s advice on Scarleteen about how to start a conversation about safer sex is excellent.
DO THIS: This is a short writing exercise in sexual communication. Don’t write this for anyone else; this should just be for you. It doesn’t matter if you do it longhand or at a keyboard, but do it when you can get some peace and quiet and concentrate. Now, find a sexual Yes/No/Maybe list—Jaclyn recommends this one. Go through and pick five things that make you hot. Now, pick a partner—your regular partner or a celebrity or a neighbor, whoever you want. Imagine a conversation with that partner about doing those five things you picked. Now, write it down. Write the dialogue out. Write about them (for many of us the partner will be a woman, some of us would rather imagine a male partner or someone outside the gender binary, and for this exercise that won’t matter) going through the list with you, telling you that they want to do those things you picked, and why they want to do them, and how they want to do them. . . .
You may need to masturbate or take a cold shower, but this exercise should dispel the myth that sexual communication is a turnoff.
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* Talking about adults and limits may make some folks think of BDSM, the acronym that covers bondage & discipline, dominance and submission and sadomashochism. In that community there is a lot of focus on how to discuss limits, as well as safety – which are really important things for folks who do any kind of kinky or rough sex, but which can also be a learning tool for people who don’t. A resource list can be found in Chapter 8. [back to text]
