Confessions, sexual awakenings, weird dreams, DFMOs, and practical advice.
Content warning: allusions to sexual assault
Article & Art by Mira and Tasha
I like to dig myself into the horniest hole.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if all of us just started fucking. Taking turns maybe, or getting in one big pile of undulating bodies until no one knows whose limbs are whose. Would the freedom of letting loose make up for the loss of precision? Would we be able to look at each other the same the next day? Maybe it would be great fun and then we’d laugh about it and everything would be fine.
Sexual awakening #108: Dream about my friend who is mean to everyone else but nice to me. We’re lying on the turf of the pier where we’d play soccer and she’s sitting on top of me, hitting me in the face but it doesn’t feel violent. All of the sudden she’s kissing me and I’m kissing her, we’re kissing.
A text at 2 a.m., sent hot and wet under the covers, I am quite shaky to begin with but I think your fingers had special effects on me. Oh I used to wake up so early with the birds, watching his fingers rise and fall on mine.
Sexual Awakening #7: I play an imaginary game with my friend where she is this magical elf woman who has long pink hair, so long that she can wrap it all the way around her whole body. Underneath, she’s naked. I don’t remember who my character was supposed to be. We put on Blistex fruit smoothie chapstick and kiss. The pink hair, the nakedness, the imagining stays with me much longer than the kiss itself, which I think was chaste and awkward.
I can’t tell if I like reading Sally Rooney outside of the sex scenes.
Tasha saw a man with a gray ponytail watching porn on the plane. I keep sitting next to middle-aged women who are reading large-print smut on their Kindles.
Dance floor as a playground. Most of the time you have fun. But every now and then you get hurt, and the next morning you see the hickeys on your neck and you want to erase being choked on the dancefloor and fingered in the bathroom, but the evidence is written all over you, and it’ll take a few weeks for it to go away and you’re surprised because you thought girls played fair and gentle; you thought there were different rules to this kind of thing.
I bruise easily and then I need everyone to know. The way it changes color.
Dance floor makeout (DFMO) as confirmation of your dancing kissing skills.
Sexual awakening #22: Dream about lying in bed kissing my tutor. Can’t look him in the eye the next time he tries to teach me pre-algebra.
I read something once about how almost a third of people experience some form of “sexual dysfunction.” The article said that, if it’s so many people, maybe it isn’t sexual dysfunction at all, but a dysfunction with the way we think about sex. I feel certain that people mis-imagine the way I have sex. Maybe if I stopped talking about it, joking about it, or writing about it – if I ever shut up for once in my life – they wouldn’t imagine it at all.
When I miss how he felt, I become the worst version of myself and look up something gross on the internet. I am trying to find the points of pleasure here.
Instead of writing about the ways I can’t have sex, can I write about the ways I do?
Sexual Awakening #54: Everything we did instead of sex, in my childhood bed. Starting on accident, on top of each other in our sweatpants, moving until he said he had to stop. Dressing up and kissing in character. Bandanas in mouths, bandanas tying hands to the headboard. The red bandana I kept until I lost it on Halloween freshman year of college and then cried even though it had been four years. He just followed me on Instagram with his new account, although I know we won’t speak. He looks like a man now. Do I look like a woman?
The night I lost my virginity, he asked if we could try it and then took off my fuzzy PJ shorts. Light pink with monkeys all over, eating bananas. They’re in my drawer somewhere still, except now the fabric is starting to pill so I can barely make out the monkeys’ faces.
Sexual Awakening #199: Realizing my gag reflex is stronger than I thought it was. Almost throwing up on his penis, that pale little creature, but making it to the toilet just in time. Finishing him off with a handjob because he had a bottle of lotion and it seemed like the right thing to do.
Hot and a little wrong until it’s no longer hot.
I think there’s something fucked up about my interpretation of type two fun. It’s like I want to prove to myself there’s nothing to be scared of, that I’m strong and tough. I’ll smoke a cigarette, drink a beer, recite the “Cool Girl” monologue from Gone Girl, my version of armor. But by the time I finally remember there’s always something to be scared of, it’s way too late. Too dark to walk home alone, I’ll have to listen to his breathing till morning. By the time I remember there’s always something to be scared of, I’ve already forgotten what that thing was. I’ll have to memorize the whole damn monologue again.
If you push too hard at the beginning, my nerve endings get worn out and want to go home. There’s nothing for them to look forward to anymore.
Two times I have woken up in a bed that wasn’t mine not knowing how I got there. The first time I woke up with all my clothes off and just my underwear on. The second time all my clothes were on and just my underwear was off. I know the not-remembering part of these moments is a Big Deal, and the amount of clothing that was on me is less important, but I can’t stop thinking about how weird that part is, the complete inverse operation. I know that these moments should be a Big Deal to me all on their own, but really I have no idea how to separate what I consider a Big Deal from what other people tell me is a Big Deal. And the bigger deal other people make of my not-remembering, the smaller I feel my body become. I wonder how small I’d have to become before the not-remembering becomes forgetting, before all my clothes slip off for good. I guess I just wonder how big other people’s deals are.
I hate Sally Roooney’s sex scenes but I can’t stop. Why does she act like wanting someone is synonymous with wanting them inside of you? Still, I feel myself getting wet in the Apple store. At the table next to me, someone wearing a headset microphone is giving a workshop to old ladies about how to use their Apple Watches.
Sexual Awakening #988: It’s literary, religious, almost biblical. I don’t bruise my knees because his carpet is soft (although when I lay down on the floor under him, I realize the room is cold). In the morning, he puts a trash bag over the window so that the light won’t wake me up. In the morning, we do something slower, softer, sleepier.
Sexual awakening #1072: The joy of taking nudes that no one else will ever see. Hidden Folder. I don’t know if mine are “tasteful” or closer to the classic porn variety. It’s nice to not know, to have the only voyeur be myself.
My favorite part of sex: talking about it. Before, after, during.
Why don’t you start by asking me what I do when I touch myself? I’ve done it a million more times than you have or, let’s face it, ever will. Why don’t you ask me what I think about? Watch? Read? Where on my body I start, as a litmus test for how badly I want it? I’ll show you, walking backwards like a college tour guide. Someone will shout happy birthday at me, but it isn’t my birthday. I’ll make a witty quip about how one labia is longer than the other, in a sort of square-shaped way, and nobody knows why. Ask me about pressure, speed, surface area. Specificity is not the enemy of pleasure.
Dance floor as a way into the Afters. If I time my moves correctly to the music, I’ll get the address of the next location without the kiss. I don’t have to feel bad about it then.
Sexual Awakening #840: Leather top, leather skirt, platform leather boots making them taller than me. Sparkly eyeshadow. DFMO and then saying “do you want to get out of here?” and the next morning, telling my friends I was definitely not gaslighting myself about being bisexual.
“Was that something you were concerned about?”
Dance floor as a 30-year-old accountant at a gay club who reminded you of your middle school English teacher. Women who looked older than they were, with deep-set eyes and smile lines around their mouths. The one you kissed, the accountant, she had a tongue piercing.
Sexual Awakening #417: Drunkenly tripping over each other in the snow. I kiss her as a joke on a dorm mattress in the middle of the quad in our coats and boots. We pick up the mattress and keep moving.
My legs were limp and I didn’t say anything except make little noises to confirm I was still alive if not to him maybe just to me just to me a little whisper of something anything even if that anything is you’re so sexy you’re so sexy I whisper to myself a hint of something left behind I used to know before I threw it all up woke up lazy eyed and foul breathed wondering if my legs were still mine.
Sexual Awakening #1: Winnie the Pooh goes to the doctor.
A room I don’t recognize. I wonder if the answer “we slept together” means the same thing in Spanish. I wonder if the addition of the word “here” after “slept” makes his answer any different.
The Panama canal. Valuable because it’s the absence of land, an open, cavernous space— a slot for a boat to move through. From the observation deck, we stare at the people on the cruise ship, which is barely moving. The people on the cruise ship stare back. What if, in my body, you have to go all the way around the bottom of South America? Would you do that?
I want to be good but I have been fucked in some number of ways and now there is something inside of me I don’t know what but at least my test results are clean even if my earrings are crooked and wouldn’t it be cool to be exorcised or at least receive a lobotomy.
I feel like Lucy from Dracula sometimes. I feel like Dracula from Dracula other times.
My mom had small boobs until college. I am terrified that mine are growing, directly disobeying my wishes to spite me.
Sexual awakening #329: The British camp counselor 10 years my senior who bought me Cadbury chocolate when I was voted color war captain. Once, when we were assigned the same table in the dining hall, he took my hand and compared our hand sizes.
Sexual Awakening #1,114: One week, I start to wonder if somehow I’ve never ovulated before and now it’s happening for the first time. Did you know you can get ovulation cramps? It’s hard to imagine that I could become hornier than I already was. I keep expecting the hormone monster from Big Mouth to show up– though I’m not sure whether it will be the Nick Kroll one or the Maya Rudolph one. On the highway, I change the way I’m sitting so I can feel the vibration of the road and I drive myself crazy until my friend calls and I have to stop. Can you get a ticket for that?
Before we kiss, she kisses all her friends first.
Dance floor as a portal, through time and space, from a sticky rooftop to an old town?
I’m into it in the sense that I’m in a new country, and a road trip could be fun — cinematic even in the old French film type of way. I’m into it until I remember my friend said not to go on a bike ride with this man, let alone get into his car. I will write off something nice as creepy and then end up thinking something creepy is nice (it’s a constant guessing game). My other friend says creepiness only comes with exhaustion. As if someone under the age of 30 can’t be too creepy. I really just wanted a free trip to the ruins. I didn’t want it to be about sex at all. But then I think about how we met. And then, well, then I think a makeout on a dancefloor doesn’t have to be a makeout anywhere else. A dance floor should just get to be a portal. That’s it.
Games without frontiers or pity. A public park. A man with a trumpet, backlit by the setting sun and someone playing tug of war with their dog. You can say anything you want, all of the time.
I’m talking about a dance floor literally. The part of the orchid that looks like a little mushroom, where all the flies meet to pollinate or to dance. Neither Mira nor I can remember the scientific details of this mechanism. But it’s nice to think flies have nightclubs too.
Maybe, instead of where it ends, I should finish the story where it begins again.
We go to sleep instead. Let kissing win. I didn’t know that was an option.
To kiss a million lips and have it be expansive. To seduce your way into the world, to be seduced right back.
Unfold me like a book. Lick your finger to turn the page. Eat a scone and spill the crumbs in my centerfold.