There’s a theory my friend and I have, that the world is divided into “sex people” and “people who like sex.” The latter enjoy sex, but it’s not a part of their personality. It’s something they do, not who they are. I would be classified as a person who likes sex. For the former, though, sex is their whole world. It’s where a lot of their friends come from. It’s a hobby, almost. For instance, we went to a party recently and everyone took their clothes off and started doing this interpretive dance, and my friend and I just looked at each other and shrugged: “Sex people.”
Lately I’ve started to wonder how many people actually fall into the “sex people” category, though—and if they do, whether they’re really as experimental as I think they are. Over the last few months, I’ve heard a lot of people say that missionary is underrated, and listened as a friend told me, between bites of yogurt and flatbread in a Turkish restaurant, that she’s “such a prude in bed.” I wasn’t quite sure what was happening at first, or how all these things were connected, until I heard that Jack Harlow song “Lovin on Me,” and I realized it’s become acceptable—cool, even—to admit to being beige in bed; to say that a lot of the time you’re content with foreplay and a bit of neck kissing, someone nibbling your earlobe.
In a strange way, I find it reassuring. When I was younger, I felt like you had to be into really crazy stuff to be “good in bed.” I’d grown up scrolling through Tumblr where, amongst emo poems and pictures of girls with long bangs in long socks, there was porn. In school, my friend bought Fifty Shades of Grey, and we’d do dramatic readings of it at lunchtime. At university, the emphasis was on sex-positive feminism, which was obviously good, but between my lack of confidence and my developing frontal lobe, it led me to conclude that liberation basically meant enjoying getting choked and being loud and proud about it.
Friends would talk about anal play, or having sex in a train car, and I’d worry that I’d been left behind. It seemed unfair. I’d panicked all through my teenage years about losing my virginity, and now that I had, I was panicking that the sex I was having wasn’t exciting enough. I was young and insecure and didn’t properly know myself, so I wasn’t thinking about what I wanted or enjoyed, but rather what I perceived as something I should want and enjoy. There was no sense of nuance in our discussions of sex; we didn’t consider that people might like some kinky things but not others. It was just this blanket thing of: Are you into this sort of sex or not? It wasn’t traumatic for me, it was just mildly uncomfortable at points—like, someone would pull my hair, and I’d think, Ow, he’s pulling my hair, all while moaning as if I liked it.
Of course, if you’re into kink, if chains and whips do excite you, that’s something to be celebrated too. It’s just nice that, as a culture, we’re now willing to admit it’s not for everyone. We can let the people who get it, get it.
It took a culture shift for me to become more comfortable with who I am sexually, but more than that, it took growing up and realizing I could talk to my friends. Actually, so many things in life got better when I realized I could talk to my friends—really talk, about our families, our relationships with our bodies, our careers. And that the more honest and open I am with them, the more honest and open they will be with me in return. The weirdest and most embarrassing thing about you is probably something they can relate to. The good ones, which is most of them, won’t judge you for anything; they might not have acne on their chin like you, but they will have a weird insecurity about the faces on their knees, or never getting any work done on Fridays or whatever.
So much of the time when we’re younger, we show off around our friends. We’re trying to prove ourselves, make ourselves seem worthy of people like them. We don’t connect, we challenge, and then we end up feeling more alone than ever. Nowadays, the way I talk my way out of feeling anxious is to laugh about things with my friends—like the other day, when I was telling my mate about how this guy put me in reverse cowgirl when I haven’t done that position in years and was so confused about what to do. You can come at friends with your mess, and they’ll come back with something of their own. It’s saying Me too, and if not, I see you.
In the Turkish restaurant when my friend said she was a prude, my other mate forced her to take it back, and then she repeated something she’s said to me before that made me feel a lot better. That there’s no point worrying if sex with someone is going to be “exciting” enough, because if you have chemistry in that way it will always be exciting, just because it’s the two of you. When you have that sort of connection with someone, you become completely unselfconscious. You’re just there, with them. And with them, you could have 10 minutes of very connected missionary, and it would be good—vanilla, actually—and it won’t matter because vanilla is, and has always been, a very good flavor.