Launching a new advice column on Valentine's Day means it's only right for us to focus on questions about navigating sex and relationships. This week, ‘Can I Vent for a Sec’ columnist Malavika Kannan is helping readers through questions about the pressure to post sexy photos online, the mysteries of orgasms, and why it seems everyone is so passionate about sex.
Why are people so crazy about sex? I get that it brings pleasure and satisfaction hormonally, but surely it can't be that good that people do all sorts of weird stuff to get any?
Hi, OP! This question made me giggle, because it’s true, at least for me: Sex does make me act a fool sometimes! I’ve seen people joke online about being “dickmatized,” or act irrationally over someone because sex with them feels so good. (Humiliating things I’ve done in the past year because I was not thinking with my head: cleaned someone’s house, flown cross-country, cooked multicourse meals, posted targeted thirst traps, and sat through terrible comedy shows and DJ sets.) It’s not a coincidence that there are so many song lyrics comparing good sex to a high: It has an actual neurological impact on your brain, making it one of the most intense, transformative experiences you can have.
To answer your question, though, I love sex partially for the silly, horny reasons you mentioned. But there’s also the psychological pleasure of sex that comes from the closeness you can have with another person. I learn so much through partnered sex about power and gentleness, care and trust, what it takes to surrender to the personhood of someone else, and the push-and-pull of coexisting alongside someone who is different from you but whom you allow to see and hold you.
Being seen in this way can also be risky business. I’ve sometimes held back from having sex when I felt too emotionally fragile for it. On the other hand, when I’ve had sex with someone I loved and who loved me back, I’ve unironically felt like I had everything I needed on earth and could live for a million years.
While it might seem like everyone feels one way about sex, every person truly is different. Some people like sex in certain situations, but it’s not a need. Some people are adventurous, forming safe spaces to explore kink (more unconventional preferences) and push boundaries. Some people are ace and don’t often feel sexually attracted to others, while some just don’t care for sex that much. In any case, most people have multiple practices other than sex for cultivating pleasure and intimacy in their lives.
Even for me, the release I get from sex I can also experience during a good night out dancing with my friends, or a particularly orgasmic session at the gym. I once dated (and got dickmatized by) a surfer who compared surfing to sex, and this metaphor (wetness, ocean waves) really stuck with me, reminding me that there is eroticism everywhere for those with eyes to see.
I love the meme, “Sex is good, but have you ever ___?” There are a million ways I can fill that blank. There’s also the high I can achieve when I write, when I sit in the spa alone, when I run across the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset, when I surrender to corpse pose after yoga, when the beat drops in a song and it makes my nose scrunch and booty bounce—to me, counts as a body! My body! And I can’t wait for you to discover what your body can do for you.
Sweet OP, if being a young person on the internet vexes you, you are not alone. All of us who grew up online are navigating a first-of-its-kind social experiment in which our sense of self and sexuality have become inseparable from algorithms, where tech bros benefit from our insecurities, and numbers—likes and comments and engagement—ascribe worth to our bodies. It’s a lot!
Before we get into being sexy online, I want to hold younger readers close and say emphatically that your job, as a teenager, is to be yourself, be happy, and be kept safe—by using your own instincts and the adults around you. The internet is a freaky place, and while other people’s bad behavior is never your fault, online safety always comes first. (When I was a teenager, I wasn’t allowed to have any public accounts or to post myself in a swimsuit—thanks, Mom, in retrospect!—and I only felt comfortable to start thirst-trapping after I was well into my 20s.)
As to whether you’re “supposed” to be sexy online: No, baby! You just have to be you. You have to want what you want and pursue it safely. I’m also going to hold your hand here when I tell you, there’s no perfect way to exist as a woman online. As you pointed out, if you’re not performing sexiness online, you could feel like a prude (although I pinky-promise nobody is actually judging you; as you also said, most people are obsessed with themselves, or just trying things out online!), but if you do perform sexiness, you might get “slut-shamed” or form a relationship to being externally validated that doesn’t feel good. You’re not wrong to clock that self-objectification can be a trap for women, and it can be hard to be honest with ourselves about what actually feels good, and why.
I love what you said about wanting to “think about yourself less.” The Black feminist writer and professor Tressie McMillan-Cottom writes about the importance of not making beauty a condition for respect and self-worth for Black women—an idea that’s similar to body neutrality. When I discovered the wisdom of neutrality, it wasn’t by choice; it was because I was a brown girl down South who never felt seen as desirable, so I lowkey stopped caring, and what a relief! I’d be lying if I said I didn’t chafe against my sexual non-personhood then, but when I look back at my photos from high school, I see a young girl having fun with her friends, becoming a writer, and finding her voice. I feel grateful I got to become strong, smart, and confident first—and sexy only when I was ready.
As a grown woman who does thirst trap occasionally on the timeline as a treat, I am very mindful of why I’m doing it and who is in my audience (mostly gay people, and we have a really fun online subculture of thirst trapping). When I post, it feels fun to celebrate my full range of queer expression—brains, booty, the whole package. I sent my birthday thirst trap to my gay best friend to vet, and then turned off the comments! It’s camp! I didn’t really express my body online (or offline) when I was younger, and I do now, but who knows? When I get older, I might look back and cringe.
Do most women fake orgasms?
OP, as a woman who wants to give other women/gays orgasms, I have lost sleep over this question! When I was younger, I’d internalized a lot of mean jokes about men who couldn’t make women “come,” and I didn’t want to be like them—even though I already knew that it wasn’t easy to make me, a woman, come in a straightforward sense. This wasn’t because I was having bad sex, but because it all felt confusingly good. Pleasure felt one way when I was alone, another when being touched by a partner, and even that totally depended on how they were doing it. It could all be overwhelming and hard to articulate, especially in moments of vulnerability. If someone asked me what I needed to climax, I used to panic and fake resolution. Sorry to those shes and theys!
The female orgasm has long been treated as a mythical, mystery object. Sex experts point out that pleasure patterns can look different for different people, but I’ve realized that I’m personally uninterested in solving the mystery. Instead, I’ve started surrendering to it, letting myself get lost in the sauce when I’m having sex. As long as I feel safe, respected, and attracted to the person I’m sleeping with, I tell myself not to be preoccupied with what happens next. To me, the deepest pleasure of sex is getting literally lifted out of your body, like an alien abduction, which can’t happen if you’re in your head. My advice is not to worry about whether you’re having orgasms, but if you’re having fun.
Sex, at its best, isn’t a race to a predetermined endpoint; it’s a whole scenic route! My favorite sexual experiences have been multi-hour, multi-act sagas where we get to try a lot of different ways of making each other feel good. Instead of asking someone about orgasms, I ask what feels good to them at that moment. I melt when partners ask me what I want them to do to me. Whether I am giving or receiving, I make sure my partner knows I am having a good time (if I am) so that there’s no pressure to do anything, get anywhere, other than to experience our bodies together.
