I’ve recently started picturing other people having sex, usually while they’re talking to me. I imagine them naked, I imagine them grabbing someone else’s body with their sweaty hands, I quickly try to figure out what they sound like when they moan. Contrary to what this might imply to most people, I am not sexually frustrated or looking for some “adventure” outside my fantastic (and quite sexually fulfilling) relationship. To me, thinking of who someone is when they’re in sex makes them more human, more real.
Try it. Picture the person sitting next to you on the train having sex with someone who is really attracted to and in love with them. Picture what his face would look like when he thinks his partner is staring at his dick, what her hands would be doing while her lover is biting the shit out her nipples, what shapes her tongue would be forming on the roof of her mouth right before she came. It’s very hard for me to not have more patience with people when I remember that sex is a great equalizer.
Not everybody is fucking another person, no, but everybody has sex inside of them. Every person is insecure in some way about some thing related to sex. Everyone (every single living adult) has at least an ounce of raw emotion tied to sex, and the memories, scents, tears, and lessons connected to how their body worked with (or wanted to touch) another body.
This is where I base my definition of sex positivity. To me, sex positivity acknowledges the power and vulnerability and human-ness tied to sex, and it allows room for all the differences and weaknesses and mistakes and joys that come with such a complicated, raw, and intimate act.
People want pleasure. They (we) do. That is the simple part. On the path to pleasure, however, we’re each told different things by different people; so many lessons as to what’s okay and what’s not, what will make you burn in hell and what will make your family not love you anymore. Sex positivity says “Do what feels right to you without hurting anyone else.” There is no grand moral compass other than the one that always demands consent. Besides that, I really don’t care what you put in your mouth or up your ass, I don’t care what you hook your nipples to or piss on for giggles. Just don’t hurt anybody who didn’t ask to be hurt.
Sex positivity allows people to be people. You will never be less of a person for what you do in bed, and yet you will also, always, be more than the sex you have.
Yes, it gets more complicated than that. But for now, that’s where we start; that’s where I am, as I picture the people in my life coming and thrashing and being nervous about having their wrists tied together. The more we get fed little processed lives, the more we ache for raw and real. Sex, and being honest about sex, is a goddamn superhighway to real (often with a eye-rolling explosion of pleasure at the end).
Yes, I’ve pictured you fucking,
jameson.
hmmm