How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Stoya and Rich here. It’s anonymous!
Dear How to Do It,
I am one of those very lucky older women who still really enjoys sex and has multiple orgasms almost every time. But I’ve started to notice some changes in my preferences as I’ve aged. The main one is that I’m pretty turned off by the way my husband kisses me about a third of the time. It’s all tongue and no lips and it’s pretty terrible. However I’m mostly turned on enough that I don’t need for things to stop entirely, so I just work around it.
But the other night, he did it right when I was about to come, and I bit his tongue really hard. He thought it was passion, but it was just uncontrolled revulsion. It’s getting to the point where I should probably say something. It feels like I could blame it on my “changing hormones” or something similar, but the problem is that we don’t really talk about sex much at all. When we first started dating I tried to give him some pointers about my body and he got all huffy with me. And later when the honeymoon phase was over, he started signaling he wanted to have sex by streaking. Sigh.
I told him that the better way to initiate would be to bite my neck. I said, “I guarantee I won’t say no if you bite my neck or just tell me you want to fuck me.” It never happened.
Sooo, that’s all just to say I’m expecting even a conversation about my changing body to go poorly. I’m guessing he’ll feel micromanaged and self-conscious the next time we have sex. But I’m not even anti-tongue, I just need more lip. And if you’re thinking I bet this isn’t the only part of their lives where she’s conflict-avoidant and he’s closed off, you’d be right. We work through those non-sex things eventually, but this one feels especially touchy (no pun intended) and could put a massive damper on something that’s mostly good.
—Once Biting, Twice Shy
Dear Once Biting, Twice Shy,
I agree with you: This is already at the point where you should say something. Instead of framing it as negative feedback/a necessary corrective, why don’t you introduce your preferred way of kissing as a way of trying something new or spicing things up? If the sex is mostly good, lead with that. Tell him that it’s so good, it makes you want to experiment. I understand your temptation to paint this in a way that puts the onus on you (by chalking it up to your hormones) and not him, and while that might be good strategy to mitigate his hurt feelings and get what you actually want, the truth is that you don’t have to qualify or have a reason for being into some things and not others. Of course, a bit of sensitivity from him would go a long way here. It might be a pipe dream—how do you instill sensitivity in someone other than by asking for it directly, which then may in turn trigger his sensitivity and prevent you from attaining your original ask? That’s a tough one. Tread lightly. But in some cases, it’s better to ask for something directly than to never ask for it at all. Otherwise, you’re just suffering silently.
Alternately, you can attempt to set the tone silently by kissing in a way that you want to be kissed. Pay a lot of attention to his lips, sucking on them, for example. Not every partner will fall in line and kiss you back in the vibe that you’re giving out, but many will conform or at least reach a certain kind of tonsil-hockey compromise. Worth a try!
Dear How to Do It,
I’m looking for help figuring out who I’m attracted to and what I like sexually. I’m a trans man who realized my trans-ness about a week after my 29th birthday last October. I thought I was a straight woman until 2013, when I was a junior in college. Then asexual and homo-romantic felt more accurate. And then I started dating women, and it was the best it’s ever been, but with a weird edge that I thought was my ADHD. Now I know I’m a trans man, and I’ve been describing myself as “like if a dyke was a faggot or maybe the other way around.”
From a gender perspective that feels accurate, and it’s very fun to say. But from an “I’ve never been physically comfortable in my own body” perspective, I have only a vague idea of what I’m attracted to. Given my porn proclivities, I suspect I’m bisexual with a preference for men, but who knows! How on earth can I start figuring this out? Is there anything I should read for help? How about physically exploring my body? Is there a way I can experiment with other people? Do you have advice for FWB-type things? Please help!
—Back to the Drawing Board
Dear Back to the Drawing Board,
I think you’re putting the cart before the horse in a sense. Identity is important, not just as a way to orient yourself in the world but for other people to be able to understand key things about you (and, in the case of potential partners, compatibility. But you don’t have to have it all figured out before diving into sex. Through exploration, you can learn a lot about yourself.
However, Kelvin Sparks, the writer of Trans Sex: A Guide for Adults and a trans man himself, warns against willy-nilly hookups at this particular juncture. In an email response to your letter, Sparks said, “You’ve mentioned FWB rather than hookups, which is in line with what my advice would be for a trans person just starting to explore their sexuality. While hookups can be fun, they can be complicated to navigate as a trans person, especially when you’re hooking up with cis people who often come to it with their own preconceived ideas of how trans people have sex. While I can have hookups now, when I was still exploring things and wasn’t sure how I liked my body interacted with and how to communicate that (as well as wasn’t practiced enforcing boundaries) it was a bit of a minefield. If down the line you do decide to explore hookup apps, erotica author Johannes T. Evans wrote a guide to Grindr for trans men, which is worth checking out.”
First, though, Sparks advises to “explore your body and how you want it to be touched in a solo context before involving another person. Trans people can often have a lot of weight to how our bodies are touched and interacted with, so figuring out where your lines are by yourself is useful for figuring out what you want a partner to do and being able to communicate that to them.”
Sparks also recommends a mindful approach to self-discovery. “Something I’ve found useful when I’m going through a period of being out of touch with my body is scheduling solo date nights,” he wrote. “This can look a whole bunch of ways depending on your preferences and taste, but the general idea is to give your subconscious a bunch of the signifiers that say ‘yes, this is time for intimate/sensual interaction.’ For me, this involved massage and solo rope tying, but your preferences are yours.”
In terms of finding a partner, people generally start with those that they find attractive (of course, that means different things to different people). If you find yourself unable to discern whom you find sexually attractive, it could be just a matter of inexperience (and may need a trial-by-error approach) or it could mean you are indeed on the ace spectrum (generally speaking, asexuality is defined by a lack of sexual attraction). (Make no mistake: These are but two possibilities, and there are many more that may ultimately describe your identity.) Reading Angela Chen’s Ace could prove illuminating even if you aren’t asexual (I’m not and I learned a lot from that book, including things about myself). Another you may want to check out is Harry Nicholas’ A Trans Man Walks Into a Gay Bar (a memoir that could help provide you with a model for navigating life and sex with gay men) and Ezra Woodger’s To Be a Trans Man, which features a number of interviews with trans men/transmasculine people and should provide you with a breadth of experiences and, I hope, some inspiration.
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Dear How to Do It,
My partner Mary and I recently got our first, and hopefully last, STI together. It’s not great, but it’s fine. Treatable, treated, and no cheating involved. The thing is, I’m fairly sure I wasn’t the one who gave it to her. I was tested just before I started going out with Mary, and haven’t been with anyone else since. So currently, she thinks that either of us could have been patient zero, but I know it wasn’t me.
On the surface I see no reason to tell Mary that. I think she finds it comforting that we don’t know and she’s quite a bit less sexually experienced than I am. Yet, at the same time, I feel sorta queasy about keeping a significant medical secret from her. I can’t see any harm in the lie, and we’re being treated, but am I wrong to want to tell her?
—Tell or Not
Dear Tell or Not,
I’ve never seen Flatliners, but I often think about one of Julia Roberts’ lines in the trailer (which I have seen a million times): “You withheld information, that’s the same as lying!”
I disagree! It really isn’t, a lot of the time. Letting someone believe something insignificant that is useful to them can be a pretty passive way of keeping the peace. There’s so much baggage and anxiety around STIs to begin with that making coping easier should be your priority here. It’s a much a kinder thing to do than to correct them for correcting’s sake.
Besides, you’re fairly sure but not absolutely certain. You could have had a (rare) false negative on your pre-relationship test. If you weren’t swabbed in your throat (and in a less likely scenario, rectum), you could have passed on something from that site to her vagina and then, wham, you both have it. You don’t really know. “Who gave who what,” amounts to nitpicking and it can devolve into passive-aggressive (and sometimes aggressive-aggressive) blaming. You both made the decisions that led you both to contract the STI. What matters is that you’ve taken care of it. If Mary has found a way to bond in what is often a fraught situation, let her.
—Rich
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