Good At Sex: An Explicit Case Study (pt 9)
had to take a cold shower after writing this one
We’ve covered women’s sexuality in general so far in this series - what does it mean for a woman to be an outlier? How does general female sexual psychology work? You’re near-experts now.
But for this post, let’s do a case study: I’m going to explain in excruciating depth how my own sexual psychology works, with careful breakdowns of the strategies men have used to arouse me, and times men have done apparently similar strategies but failed, and what subtle things cause the difference.
An Explicit Case Study
I’m obviously an unusual woman in a lot of ways, but my sexuality is still relatively femme-typical; the smutty romance tropes that light up most women’s vaginas also light up mine. I also have a much wider and more varied sample size of sex with men, and - if I dare say - a decent level of introspection on my own reactions and motivations.
I’m going to bring up a lot of example scenarios. In almost all of them I will obscure the details, or merge repeated patterns across men into one archetypical man. I don’t want to put any particular person on blast; often ‘bad at sex’ is just incompatibility, and this is all personal to me!
Please don’t overindex too much; whereas the series so far has been about what women like in statistical generalities, consider this a useful deep-dive singular data point into one woman’s psychology. What specific things work for me will often not work for other women, but I’m hoping the careful breakdown of reasoning in one instance might help you figure out general principles that might apply to others, even if the manifestation is different.
I’m at an orgy. Three men are holding me down as I struggle (I find this hot, this is a fetish I voluntarily opted into, don’t freak out). One of them is sitting on my elbow. People are doing other things to me; maybe fucking me, or biting or something, but the elbow hurts enough that all my attention has gone to it. I don’t even notice the dick in me, I have become a being radiating an attempt to get them off my elbow.
I could call the safe word, or the ‘yellow’ slow-down-and-check-a-limb word. I’m considering it, I feel fully capable of it. But the scene is pretty hot otherwise and I’d rather not interrupt it; I’m hoping that instead my facial expressions, the change of tone in my voice, would be obvious to them.
My moaning and grimacing is consistent. It is reactive to the consistent dull pain in my elbow. It does not increase or decrease when people start or stop fucking me, or when they mess with me or say things. In my mind, I am clearly not reactive to the fucking, but to something else. I am gasping in a brand new way that is not the way I gasp during sex, and my body’s tension is now trying to curl around my elbow, not around my pelvis.
And it is shocking to me that nobody seems to notice. The scene continues on and on, and I think maybe someone just isn’t looking, or they’re distracted with something else, and they’ll notice once they check in, or they stop fucking and notice that despite the break I continue to moan - but time keeps going, and nobody notices. I finally give in and call “yellow - my elbow!” and they are immediately courteous and caring, and check in, and get the weight off the elbow. My entire body relaxes down and the moans stop. I cradle my arm and think it must be obvious to them now that the previous reactions were entirely from the elbow, that they were mistaken in thinking my facial expressions were due to their magnificent dicks or whatever. My entire demeanor is shifted. My breathing patterns are different, the sounds I make now are looser and more varied. I imagine that they go “oh wow, I was misinterpreting her reactions before, but now I see.” I hope that this has been useful.
But it happens again, and again!
I’m not sure what’s going on. Maybe it’s too chaotic in a gangbang scene? Maybe what I think is obvious signaling is actually not obvious? But some men do read me well, notice immediately, and fix the elbow before I have to call yellow. There’s a handful of men who are so attentive that it never even gets to that point in the first place. I’ll squish them all into one ideal figure, Mr. Right.
When Mr. Right fucks me, he is paying such careful attention to my body that he notices immediately when I tense in a way he did not intend to happen. Really, my tensing in a way he did not intend is very rare in the first place.
I’m not sure how he does it. I think probably he must be imagining quite hard what it’s like to be me, like he pours all his attention into me, does a mind-meld, such that leaning on a body part flashes to his mind what it must feel like, and he adjusts his weight instantly.
It reminds me a lot of social dancing.
When I teach dance, I put my hand on their shoulder, and grab their other hand, and say things like “okay now step forward, into me.” They step forward, and their arms sort of trail weakly beside them. They are polite; they are stepping into my space, and do it almost apologetically.
I have to train this out of them. I give exercises where they have to be firm, way too firm for normal dancing. I say, keep your arms tense, connected hard to your body, like you are a statue made of stone, such that if I push your arm, your entire body moves with it as one unit. Now - when you step into me, you must drive that power into your arms too, so that your arms can drive the power into me, and I in turn use this to fuel my own step back. You must be a rock, a beast, you must force me.
It’s hard to make this intuitive. They’ll focus on one arm and then drop the other. Or I remind them to pay attention to the core muscles in their stomach and they will immediately lose the strength in their step. It’s hard to overcome the social training that you must let your energy flow gently around someone, you must not actually contact them, or unleash your power through them. I have to make them push me around a little bit, to show them it’s all right.
But there will be little moments when they manage to get it all together, when it clicks, and they step forward and into me and I am deeply connected to them and we move as one unit. It feels like growing a limb, like there’s a flash of your nerve endings shooting into the other person, and their weight suddenly becomes your weight. It’s not conscious, you don’t have to think about it, you simply know where the other person is now, you can feel them breathing. It’s ecstatic.
I think a lot of the time, when Mr. Almost fucks me, he means very well. If I pointed out that he stepped on my toe he would be apologetic and lovely. But it feels that he’s been socially trained away from some type of intense attention. He is giving my mind a wide, polite bearth.
Much of the time, I suspect Mr. Almost doesn’t know even what direct intense attention feels like, and thus isn’t sure what to even orient towards. When I train new dancers, they have never before tried to step hard and directly into someone else’s space, unless it’s in a fight. It’s very uncomfortable to do that. It requires a lot of trust. I have nothing to point to and say “do it like that” - I have to just walk them through each movement until finally It Happens.
I suspect Mr. Almost views sex the way you might a sport; you can learn to get good at kicking the ball around, and you should get in good physical shape, and mental acuity helps - but there’s no concept of stepping outside your body into another’s. The woman is a video game; learn the cheat codes, press the buttons in the right order until a squeal pops out.
Embodiment - both embodying your own body and hers - is not something you do to another person, it’s done with and within. It’s hard to consciously make note of each aspect of someone else’s experience if you’re doing it manually with your head, but if you manage to step inside their body, it becomes intuitive and automatic, and then you might notice if you’re leaning on her elbow even before she notices.
Mr. Right notices me. He’s crawled inside my head and is fucking me like a puppet.
This takes a lot of vulnerability. When I ask a new dancer to put strength in his arms, to connect his arms to the rest of his body, I do this not just so that he can tell me where to go, but so that I can feel where he is.
It lays bare to me where his weight is, the ways he’s off balance, the miniscule choices he makes with his muscles. When he guides me around the room, sometimes I will move a little too slowly or too quickly to test him. If his arms soften and follow me as I disconnect from him, then I tell him - stop forgiving me. When he forgives my independent movement, merges his dance move with my disconnection, he is telling me that I am the one leading the dance. I have made a decision, and he instantly molded around my choice, usually out of a sense of politeness and fear. And immediately in this, I can’t feel where his center of gravity is. I’ve lost him. My body loses sight of him.
To lead is to be vulnerable. You have to be loudly open about who and where you are, so that your follow may better understand exactly what they are following. Looking to the other person to set the moves is playing it safe; you are asking them for approval.
But you have to do this in conjunction with the intense connection and embodiment! I’ve danced with many guys who are strong leads, where I know exactly where they are at all times, but I don’t feel safe with them. They throw me around like I’m a character in a videogame or a ball in a sport, and I feel interchangeable, like they could perform this exact set of moves on literally any dancer and wouldn’t notice much of a difference.
When Mr. Right fucks me, he knows exactly what he wants, he is unashamed of what he wants, and he is deeply in tune with my own body. His desires cannot exist independently of mine; he isn’t flinging me around according to steps he learned on a blog series online, but rather playing me like an instrument clutched tightly to his chest. He figures out the language I speak before he knows how to command me in it. How can he want me if he doesn’t know who it is he wants?
So far I’ve been a bit vague; getting explicit about exactly the kinds of things that yeet my brain is a bit vulnerable for me. I also struggle with the worry that if people read about what I’m into, this might cause me to doubt the authenticity of future guys who I sleep with. Feeding people a direct manual to my vagina is often self defeating.
But the more I’ve introspected on my own sexuality, the more I actually think it would be hard for guys to fake specific stuff with me. Or it might serve as a challenge - like, would a guy be able to have good sex by recognizing the principle behind the my dirty examples, instead of getting distracted by the form of the dirtiness?
We’ll see. So I’m gonna give some pretty graphic, specific examples of intensely mind-blowing times I’ve had in sex, and what exactly happened to get me into that state, and breakdowns of the kind of mistakes men make that cause them to narrowly miss getting me into that state. It’s also pretty kinky and may be confusing/disturbing if you’re not into that. If you prefer not to read that sort of thing, this is your warning to stop now. All the stories below are CONSENSUAL, I don’t regret any of it, don’t come at me on twitter with angry screenshots arguing I’m traumatized, etc.
