There's this moment when I'm in bed with a new person and we are kissing and touching each other and it seems like we are about to move into sex territory. I'll stop or they'll stop and we'll look at each other. This is when the check in happens. Usually, it’s pretty brief. Some things I’ll usually ask are: Are there ways you don’t like to be touched? Are there particular things you like? How will I know if you don’t like something or want to stop? Is there anything else I should know?
This check in is where safer sex agreements are made, sti disclosures are made, information about communication styles and preferred consent practices are shared, and basic likes and dislikes are laid out. Often there’s not a huge amount to cover. It’s just the basics. But it goes a long way.
If people don’t know what to say I’ll often get the conversation going by saying For example, I really don’t like it when people squeeze my nipples really hard. Do you have anything like that? It can be light hearted and chill, and we usually laugh and feel a bit shy, but we get the basics down for how to enter into this new territory responsibly.
Once I was talking to a straight friend about a guy she was seeing and she was feeling anxious and confused about their sex life. And I asked her, Well, when you guys first checked in about it, what did he say? And she didn’t know what I meant. I described the kind of check in I’m used to with new sexual partners, and she told me she’d never done anything like that. Not with him. And not with any of her sexual partners in all the years she’d been sexually active.
On one level I find this absolutely shocking. On another, I know I shouldn’t be surprised. Because, while I’ve been in sapphic world for many years, where our problem is, if anything, over-processing, I also spent many years of my life as a straight girl. And I remember it.
I remember hooking up with men I met while out drinking or who I met on tinder. I remember a very passive relationship to my sexuality where what happened was a roll of the dice. It could be hot. It could be meh. It could be traumatizing. And the outcomes felt totally unpredictable and random. There was no check in. There was no question and answer period about things we really didn’t like or did like. There was no discussion of the fact that I hate having my nipples squeezed or the fact that my clit is way too sensitive to be touched head on. There was certainly no discussion of how he might be able to tell if I’m not into it anymore, or what I would do to communicate that I wanted to change up what we were doing. And on top of this, both of us were often drunk.
I often joke that compulsory heteronormativity assigns men tops and women bottoms with no understanding of what topping or bottoming means, and no intentionality around whether or not either partner actually wants that role. The situation is actually rather bleak. Men feel they have to be very assertive and initiatory or nothing will happen. Women feel they can’t or shouldn’t express the specifics of what they want, or they aren’t even sure what they want because arousal for them is more complicated than stating a set of actions. It’s more of a vibe. And it’s hard to create that vibe, and it’s hard to be clear about what feels good and what doesn’t, and it’s hard to say no.
So many women go along with sex they don’t really like. Either because they are scared or because they are ashamed or because they are more focused on being desirable than on their own desire or because they don’t know what to say or because they don’t want to scare him off or because they feel they should want what he wants or because they have past sexual trauma or because there really isn’t much education on or representation of straight sex freed from the shackles of heteronormativity, sex-as-penetration, and restrictive gender roles.
This sucks for women and it can be traumatizing. And, at the same time, I think this situation of poor communication and being stuck in unsatisfying scripts is different from sexual assault. The key difference is that most of the men in these situations don’t actually know when this kind of sex becomes unwanted, something she is putting up with rather than enjoying. Sometimes women like what they are doing and sometimes they seem less into it, and men don’t know why. But the answer is that women are individual and don’t like the same things, and without any kind of communication, the initiatory partner is just taking shots in the dark.
For a long time I was in the camp of not cutting these guys any slack. Being so angry that they didn’t know better. Assuming they must know and since they kept doing it, they must just not care. I thought about all the men who got off while I was enduring it. All the men who got off while never once attempting to touch my clit. All the men who did things they seemed to really enjoy while not seeming to read my body language or arousal signs at all. Cumulatively this stuff adds up and made me feel fucking awful. But none of the guys I was having sex with seemed to have any idea. And sometimes, randomly, I’d have super hot sex with no communication. Was this guy just a better lover? No. I just happened to like the things he was doing.
My feelings about these guys changed when I started having sex with women, and more specifically, when I started topping. I’m going to be honest and say that I have a thing for bisexual women and so a large number of the women I’ve dated have been bi. That means, me and the girl I’m on a date with are both used to heteronormative dating scripts. Which means both of us were trained to be relatively passive and receptive. Which means no one wants to make the first move and no one wants to be the top. I realized quite quickly in my dating life with women that if I ever wanted to have any kind of success, I would have to learn how to take initiative.
This was immediately terrifying. Not only did I have to face the risk of rejection, but even scarier, I had to face the possibility that my date might not communicate honestly with me. I had been silent when I wasn’t into what was going on so many times in my life. What if she does that? How will I know for sure she’s feeling it and not being traumatized by the situation? Having been the receptive, non-communicative partner I was hyper-aware of the risks.
This is where I learned that topping, or being the one who initiates, when done responsibly, is an act of trust. It requires a whole skill set around communication, and being perceptive, none of which are taught to or modelled for straight guys, and it also requires a certain degree of trust that the receptive partner will meet us half way. That the receptive partner will find a way to communicate if something isn’t working. That the receptive partner won’t expect us to read minds.
And yet how many times did I silently scream at men in my head while they did things I didn’t like? They weren’t being responsible tops, but I also wasn’t being a responsible bottom. And that’s to be expected because we didn’t know we were topping or bottoming. We thought we were just having normal straight sex lol.
People are rightly sounding the alarm that sex and dating is a nightmare for many straight women. Many straight guys are pushy, do not communicate at all, and do stuff their dates aren’t actually into. A lot of sex for a lot of straight women ranges from meh to literally traumatizing.
In response, we are stirring up a sex panic. We are insisting that consent must always be verbal, enthusiastic, and sober even when this doesn’t match the reality of how most people navigate sex. We are imagining that dudes who fail at good consent practices are rapists and monsters, that there is something really fucking wrong with them that they did something unwanted. They should have known. I wish they had known. And I now know that lots of times, they literally have no idea. They believe that being assertive and taking the lead is what’s expected of them. They have no idea how to talk about sex. They don’t know how to read their date’s body language. They may not even have a basic understanding of the way her arousal works.
The answer to all this is not sex panic, insisting on rigid unsexy consent practices (Can I touch your arm?), or scapegoating individual men who are doing what the vast majority of straight men have been doing for quite some time. The answer is to teach and model the basic skills of sexual communication, to men and to women, and to show why it is hot and nice to find out the information necessary to have hot, consensual sex.
If you haven’t had the best consent practices up until this point, either as the initiatory partner or the receptive partner, no need to spiral into shame. This is a cultural phenomenon not a personal failing. You weren’t given the basic tools for how to communicate about sex. But it’s not too late to start doing things differently. A basic check in as described above is a great place to start.
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