Action: A Book About Sex (13 page)

Have a signature seduction snack! I find that even the most lax hookups appreciate being offered a Fruit Roll-Up, vodka soda, prosecco, handful of blueberries, or ice-cream sandwich varietal upon arrival at my home. These cover all the bases of people you might be sleeping with: hot, overgrown moron with a heart of gold; super-fun dilettante alcoholic; person who owns a mountain bike or feasibly could (check for a lanyard on their belt loop; this has the double utility of telling you all you need to know about the state of their pubic hair in advance); and spouse material.

Your shopping cart: something packed with sugar and artificial everything, something mind-altering to take the edge off, something where the recipient will be like, “My, my—now here’s a person who snacks on a known source of antioxidants for PLEASURE, because they LIKE IT? Goodness, I didn’t know I could
become
so sprung,” and more more more sucrose sugar sugar!!! You can customize this at will—my only gentle warning is to shy away from any processed corn snack that leaves a dusting of easily communicable orange moss on your fingers and tongue, unless that’s a deliberate fetish you have.

One of the most impressed faces I have ever seen on a partner was pulled when, on my way to the shower, I offered him one of
the abundance of Take 5 bars I keep in my freezer at all times. He looked at me in wonderment and said, “You know this is like a parody of a perfect sexual encounter, right? You are
really
offering me a candy bar after we came at the same time?”

The best part: Even if you don’t get laid, all of these comestibles taste just as good if you’re eating them while post-up with your newspaper by yourself, morning after or nah—especially the ice-cream sandwiches, Take 5s, and vodka. Aren’t you glad you’ve created such a mature and welcoming home?

PART II

Protect Me from What I Want

The above chapter title, from artist Jenny Holzer, extends to the body as usefully as it does to the heart. I mostly regard sex as a means, not an end: I am discussing all this belt-loop notching with regards to sex as recreation, not procreation. The foundation of ensuring agency within this for yourself and others is accounting for, and doing your best to dramatically reduce, the risk of facing down any long-term life alterations as a result of getting laid. However airtight your consent and methods of protection, there’s no impermeable way to make sure that you or your partner won’t surface from bed with a new medical diagnosis, including “pregnant as hell.”

Preventing those conditions is easier than it has ever been. We are lucky enough to live in a time when prophylactics are not only readily available, but so profuse as to come in varieties that sound like the cocktail menu at a chain restaurant in the mall (although I will neither make love with nor drink anything branded as “Twizted Cherry Passion… Flavored For Her,” thank you very much).

Condoms, the main barrier method of birth control, are crucial if you want to twizt your passions with respect to penetration. There are also plenty of other preventative measures when it comes to the interlacing of your sexual health with a person’s that includes STIs while still enjoying your time together. (If you have one of these under your belt already, you already know that it doesn’t preclude all sexual caprice, forever.)

Let me reiterate, since informing yourself thoroughly about sexual health is capital: I’m not a doctor, as far as I know. I’m a woman who delights in maintaining my confidence that I can engage in
frottage with the whole sequence of the cosmos and remain relatively unscathed, and I do my research. Here’s a distilled version of what I know—I encourage you to augment it with further reading.

EVERYTHING’S UNDER CONTROL

My condom policy is thus: It’s not one person’s “responsibility” to provide foils. With a reasonable margin for forgetfulness, the occasional lean times between paychex, and extenuating circumstances like “the store’s closed and I’m rolling up to your spot at 3 a.m. after agreeing to meet a whim that you just texted me you’d had,” every person anticipating imminent coitus is obligated to furnish protection, unless you’re a couple with a shared econo-dom-box in your co-owned nightstand.

Discovering you’re out of stock, condom-wise, just as you’re reaching to use one can lead to a ruthless urgency to throw on pants and procure some at the store across the street that I find very hot. More often, it’s tedious and mood-slackening to have to wait on a person’s bed all like,
It’s been five minutes and I’m getting restless—can I reach for my phone without sacrificing the mood entirely?
Plus, not everyone makes their home opposite a bodega… which, how do you even survive without one? I can’t fathom having to prepare for life before it happens, you upstanding models of organization.

My solution, when my bedroom became a naked waiting room one too many times, was to treat condoms like other parts of my grocery list:
paper towels, dish soap, condoms, toothpaste
. Like everything else accounted for here, condoms are necessary maintainers of your upkeep that you will never overstock, since you’ll need them in perpetuity. If this kills a certain spirit for you, if you are besotted with the sheer intentionality of going to the store and buying prophylactics before meeting someone you think is super-sexy, go forth with your ritual. That errand feels mad nice. (Just please remember to make it.)

Now that you have a bounty of condoms and aren’t afraid to use them, let’s talk about a situation that reverses the latter idea. Did your condom just break?! Don’t panic. Yes, a teeny fissure in a thin disc of rubber instantly set off a chain of headaches with which you’ll have to contend, and that’s unfortunate. If you need to freak all the way out about it, I exhort you to wait, because you have more immediate priorities, and zeroing in on the pragmatic ways to make this situation suck less, instead of lamenting its misfortune, works formidably in your favor—as it would in any luckless scenario, latex-based or nah.

Did the person with the penis ejaculate before this wrenching discovery was made? If yes: Do not try to flush the offending substance out with water. There’s no way to “wash” come out once it’s made genital contact, and you need to focus on more productive steps away from accidental parenthood.

Emergency contraception is low-cost and simple to buy (at least if you live in America). You can cop it at most pharmacies and drugstores that stock other kinds of over-the-counter medicines, and some brands cost as little as ten bucks per. If you can’t make it to the store by the next day, it’s okay—you have up to three days to take pills with the active ingredient of progestin. Ones that utilize other kinds of hormones can be effective for up to five days, too, if you’re willing to pay more. But, honestly, if you’re able to go take care of this right away and
choose
not to: What are you actually doing? What schedule obligations are more important than making sure you don’t have to be responsible for at least a surgery and at most a human life?

It’s not a brilliant idea to make a regular practice of taking hormonal modifiers, which is what most morning-after pills are, since they can make you sick. Despite certain media chatter, there’s not a large faction of sexually active people using the morning-after pill as a primary form of birth control for this reason. That is fabulist political nonsense that ignores the realities that condoms are far thriftier and don’t make their customers want to ralph.

The availability and destigmatization of emergency contraceptives is a societal boon, since accidents frequently warrant their name, and it’s not just okay, but smart and necessary, to use the morning-after pill in the times for which it was invented to help you and your partner.

STANDARDIZED TESTING

Get tested for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) once or twice a year, even if you’ve been thoughtful about protection. There’s not much need to check in with a doctor or clinic if you’ve maintained the same sexual partner or partners from the last time you peed in a cup (as long as you are POSITIVE that you two are monogamous), those who run around more might like to go at least once a year, barring any unforeseen prophylactic mishaps. I don’t subscribe to going after
each and every partner no matter if you kept things tightly wrapped
. It colors sex with a high degree of unnecessary panic—the fear of
being punished by a plague for the dreadful sin of having an orgasm
feels melodramatic, and also like it comes from a few centuries before birth control rose to the massive popularity it enjoys today. However, I understand that for many people, the impetus to check up on everything, every time, is meant to ameliorate anxiety that they’ve jeopardized their well-being by exposing themselves to below-the-belt frogs and locusts. If that’s what you need to do in order to feel responsible and healthy, I not only encourage, but demand, that you do it. Your health is yours to dictate.

When you DO go get tested, at whatever volume you do that, you can go to either your regular physician’s office or a sexual health–focused clinic like Planned Parenthood. There’s no one all-encompassing screening for each and every STI running rampant through the sheets, so you have a short conversation with a medical professional about what-all you’ve been up to, and they determine what diagnoses to test for. They ask you things about
birth control, doye, but also inquire about more pointed parts of your sexuality—what body parts are involved when you bone, the genders of the people whom you bone, and so forth. If you don’t identify along the straight-and-narrow hetero spectrum of sexuality or gender identity, it can be assuring to have your tests conducted by a medical practitioner whom you know will treat you with respect and knowledge of non-hetero
eros
. You likely know that, like any other person, some doctors have inflexible, gross biases and prejudices about non-binary
livin’ and lustin’
. Here are a few good resources to help you locate practitioners minus these flaws:

Planned Parenthood

Mayo Clinic

The Door

As I mentioned: Even if you’re taking another form of birth control and are having monogamous sex with someone you trust, you honestly cannot know if they’re “safe” unless they furnish the proper paperwork. I’m not big on quizzing people, but it can be fun to
get tested together.
It isn’t as awkward or accusatory as it sounds! A dude of yore and I wanted to go latex-free, but we each wanted to show the other that that was a solid idea, STI-wise. We decided to make some sort of romantic display of it, I guess, by demonstrating that we’d accept whatever new results we learned of, or didn’t, as long as we found out and accounted for them together. Filled with loving resolve and determined to bareback it, we embarked on our modern, free-lovin’ errand, feeling mad adult and responsible and sexually in control. Nothing makes you feel like a person who acts with intelligent, capable intent like taking care of your body, so it’s pretty attractive to observe someone else as they do that.