We sat across from each other on the twin bed of her dorm room, our legs intertwined. Her inhale synchronized to my exhale, and each exhale synchronized to the back and forth of our hips. In every breath the space between my heart and lungs grew taller, creating room for her to settle within my rib cage. I could feel all thoughts float out of my mind, replaced by the present moment. A moment that told me to lower myself onto the floor, as I slowly pushed my index and middle fingers inside of her. A position you take to make an offering. Also, a position that more easily allows you to access the spongy ridge at the frontal wall of the vulva.
She breathlessly nodded as my fingers found exactly the right spot and motions. Alternating between circles, stroking back and forth like a windshield wiper, and a beckoning “come to (and for) me.” I persisted in that spot like I had taken an oath, only pausing to kiss her body and her mouth. Time, which had suspended for us but continued for the rest of the world, ticked onward imperceptibly as she became more and more swollen around my fingers. Until suddenly, with a shrill-in-a-good-way gasp, her orgasm shot out of her body and landed on my chest.
I was slightly shocked but entirely elated. I had never made anyone squirt before. I climbed up next to her and pulled her also shocked but entirely elated body towards me. We laid there as her heartbeat returned to a normal rhythm, and I started putting my clothes back on.
“What are you doing?” she inquired. “I was going to get us some food?” I said, confused. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re just getting started, lay back down.”
I happily did as I was told and laid the fuck back down.
At this point, I had been having sex with her and other vulvas for years. I knew one person’s orgasm didn’t necessarily mean the encounter was over. I knew about taking turns. I knew about regrouping and starting from the top (or the bottom depending on your preference). So why did cum in its projectile form feel like some sort of grand finale?
Many of us piecemeal together our understanding of the trajectory of sex. I was lucky to receive the basics of the mechanics from various reluctant adults in my life, albeit in a clinical and exclusively heteronormative way. I filled in the gaps with questionable and often terrifying videos I’d download onto the family computer with dial-up internet, secondhand reports from my neighbor’s older sister, and movies. I remember rewinding that scene from Mr. & Mrs. Smith where Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt decide to fuck instead of kill each other over and over and over again. That scene, along with the vast majority of scenes depicting heterosexual sex in Hollywood movies, followed this sequence of events:
Step 1: Two people experience simultaneous, ravenous desire for each other
Step 2: Brief intensely passionate kissing while ripping clothes off to gain access to the genitals
Step 3: Immediate penetration
Step 4: Simultaneous orgasm
Step 5: The end.
There’s nothing wrong with sex that plays out like this, but why limit our understanding of the erotic?
Before I realized my queerness, I didn’t even qualify an encounter as sex unless a penis entered me: afternoons dry humping while the sun creeped through the living room window, the multitude of ways I experienced pleasure with mouths, hands, or breath on the back of my neck, the hand written letters we’d send back and forth describing in meticulous detail what we wanted to do to each other. All those things were considered precursors to sex. The appetizers intended to accompany a meal.
In fact, society places so much emphasis on the singular act of specifically a penis penetrating specifically a vagina, we consider ourselves changed beings after we experience it for the first time. The before and after of virgin to no-longer-a-virgin pipeline. The experience of moving from untouched and in our original state to something different.
At its worst, this understanding of sex can make us feel something is wrong with us when our sex doesn’t follow the trajectory. A person with a penis who, for one reason or another, can’t penetrate a vagina will think they are incapable of providing a satiating erotic experience. A person with a vulva whose body needed significantly more time to feel sensitized before being penetrated will mimic sounds they’ve heard in porn while staring at the ceiling. We go through the motions. We don’t connect. We dissociate.
But we also turn sex into something monotonous. Something with a linear order of events. Something with a beginning, middle, and end that stays between the lines. And again, there’s nothing wrong with it, but I need you to know it isn’t the only option.
Queer sex redefined sex as the mutual exploration of the erotic, and that is a lesson for everyone regardless of their preferred gender of sexual partner. Maybe it’s because the rule book and guidelines that society culturally deemed as default don’t apply to a non heterosexual context. There’s so much freedom in that. For me, it was the opportunity to simply follow what felt good. The moments of tracing fingers along a constellation of freckles became just as significant as the moment of orgasm. The feeling of hips gently gyrating against my pelvis as I slowly woke up in the morning could simply be a sweet way to start the day. I could finally find the erotic in the subtle motions. In the back and forth. In that look when you just know. Mutual exploration of the erotic doesn’t require a beginning and end or climax it must build to. It can simply be a co-collaboration in transcending cerebral thought so our bodies can really feel, and we can have that feeling without removing a single article of clothing.
We feel it when we’re so deep in a great conversation, we realize hours have passed. We feel it when we lock eyes with someone playing music and can feel them flowing. We feel it when we slow down and synchronize our inhales to their exhales. We feel it when we stop worrying if we look silly while we’re dancing. We feel it when we are seen, really seen.
Maybe we have an opportunity as a society to expand our understanding of sex as more than just a physical act. Maybe we can instead begin to see it as an experience of sharing our aliveness with another person, and in that understanding there isn’t a way to do it right or wrong or order of events to follow.
Maybe in that understanding, we just get to be free.
