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.
