I'm bad at sex

Welcome to Sex and the State, a newsletter about power. I’m a writer working on decriminalizing and destigmatizing all things sex. I synthesize empirical evidence, stories, and personal experience to interrogate existing power structures to propose new, hopefully better, ways of relating. To support my work, buy a subscription, follow me on OnlyFans, or just share this post!

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Before I decided to write a whole newsletter about it, I texted that article about that study about great sex to a boo. The conversation turned and he said he’s sure I know what I like and dislike in bed. Now and then people will tell me things that indicate they think I’m good at sex.

I always think, do you really think that if I were good at sex I’d have a whole blog about it? And maintain it more or less faithfully for I don’t know seven or eight years? (I started on Wordpress if you’re looking for the archives.) If I were naturally good at sex I would have simply had a lot of it.

Now I’m not going to claim to be so dumb as to have had as much sex, with as many people, in as many configurations, as I have and have learned absolutely nothing about how it’s done. But I’ve seen masters at work. And I am not among their ranks.

I came to sex late, and while I was and am a very motivated pupil, very little about it has come naturally to me. Sex is a struggle, which I think is why it’s so interesting to me. The human mind loves a puzzle. We love to turn things that are unresolved over in our minds. I read that when you get a song stuck in your head you should listen to it all the way through. Your brain is playing a piece of it over and over because it wants it to resolve.

I think it’s why I so often prefer people who sometimes pull away to people who are constant. I end up more interested in them. I think about them more. They fascinate me. There’s less mystery to someone who’s consistent. There’s less to figure out. This is false, of course. There’s mystery and puzzles to solve about everyone. But when you’re trying to get your needs met, the puzzle is hard to ignore. And the puzzle is often compelling in a way that straightforwardness is not.

I don’t spend long hours contemplating, researching, and talking about things that are cut-and-dried. When my mind’s made up about something, I move on. That’s why I think I’m stuck on researching for a book about decriminalizing sex work. My mind is made up. I’m not saying I can’t be swayed by more information, hopefully. Just that I don’t need more information to feel very confident in my opinion. But I don’t feel like I have the information I’d want to see in a book on the topic. On the other hand, maybe just sharing what I know in an accessible way would be a decent contribution to the conversation. But merely synthesizing what I already know appeals to me less than learning new things about things my mind isn’t made up about. I’m turning questions over in my head right now, about kink and power and sex advice. About ethics.

But honestly, I think sex not coming naturally to me is a boon in some ways. I read once that people who are naturally good at things tend to be worse at teaching them. If you are good at something immediately and with very little effort then you never really had to learn it. You certainly don’t know what it’s like to need every little step in the process explained to you in painstaking detail. You don’t need to hear it explained multiple times in different ways to really get it. And that’s what a lot of people need to learn something. You can learn how to break something down that you’re naturally good at. But I think it’s something you have to learn. And you’re at a disadvantage relative to someone who has had the direct experience of really not knowing how to do it.

I think to the extent I have good advice on sex it’s because I had to learn how to do it.

Another thing that I love about sex is that it’s constantly surprising me. The more I learn, the more I realize I will never know 1% of what some people like. Some of y’all are freaks and I am absolutely here for it. The creativity! I’m often reading about stuff that people like to do to each other that it never, in a million, zillion years, would have occured to me to do. Like, how are you going along in life and suddenly think, what if I called a phone sex line and had someone describe drinking blood to me, in detail?

There is so much suffering in the world. Sex can be such a joyful, fun, interesting thing to do with each other. When you think about it, it’s one of the lowest cost, highest reward ways to connect with each other. Everything that sucks about it (besides STIs and pregnancy) is either something that sucks about human connection generally or results from stigma and shame. It really motivates me to think about the fact that many phone sex operators wouldn’t talk about blood because their bosses feared the Bush-era Obscenity Task Force. Having a vampire fetish should not be a crime.

I’m also most interested in problems for which there is no one right answer. And that’s the thing about sex. There’s no right way to do it. I mean obviously for sex to be sex it needs to be consensual. And some things are near-universal. But there is still so much variation. However good I might get at the sex things that please the vast majority of people, I’ll still never know 1% of what a whole lot of people really like.

Equally importantly, I may never know 1% of what I really like. There’s so much to explore. There are so many things to try. And I do try things. But there’s a bunch of shit I’m curious about but don’t pursue. I don’t because I’m afraid. I don’t want to be embarrassed. I don’t want to fall in love with people who don’t reciprocate. I’m doing other shit. I can’t find a partner who wants to try it that I want to try it with. If I did, I wouldn’t write about it. I’d just be doing it.

Stigma and shame are certainly barriers to great sex. Censorship makes it harder to explore sex. But there are internal barriers as well. Feelings to confront. That’s why I write about sex. I want to learn how to do it. And I learn in public because I want it to be easier for other people than it’s been for me. That, and I love attention and have no shame.

That’s the thing. I want to have no shame. I want to not be embarrassed about shit that’s not hurting anyone. I want to show up vulnerably and authentically, to sex and to life. I want that for everyone.