Someone said that they’d arranged a threesome—half the circle clapped. Another said they’d consensually hit a partner—all but one of us clapped. We talked about everything, from using sex toys in public to hooking up with roommates present, from sleeping with strangers to being electrically shocked. No one turned a hair at any of these—people proudly clapped when they, too, had done something, and every time no one clapped there was a chorus of “I’m so jealous!”

The fourth time it was my turn, I said, “Step Up if you’ve had sex with a Republican!” Everyone in the circle stared at me, silently, not clapping. The silence (as silences do) became rapidly very awkward. Finally, a friend looked at me and said, “Um…why?”

From Inktastic

I didn’t have a good answer for her. I don’t have a good answer with myself. The interaction with The Republican was a brief encounter with an old acquaintance, the furthest possible thing from a long-term romantic and sexual relationship. The twenty-minute tryst ended badly, but not for any reasons related to his politics.

I tend to think that, after a certain threshold of being a decent person (not a murderer, likes cats, etc.) it’s all right to have sex with people who might have other views that I find deeply questionable. The shocked faces of my friends, though, made me doubt my standards. I doubted myself, too, when I felt horrified when I saw The Republican unironically “like” Mitt Romney on Facebook.

It’s not that I should have to justify who I sleep with to my leftist friends. It’s that I slept with someone who isn’t a feminist, someone who doesn’t see a problem with so many systems that anger me every single day. I don’t think that The Republican disrespects me—but can he at once respect me and vote to regulate my uterus?

I suppose that my question to my shocked friends is, “why is sex so special?” I do think that sexual interactions are different from more quotidian ones, but this interaction lasted twenty minutes. Perhaps it’s more important that the people that I actually spend my time with—that is, the friends that I don’t sleep with.

I wonder, in moving forward, if I will ever sleep with someone with such profoundly different convictions than me again. To be honest, I might. I think that the most important thing about my partner choice is that I have a good time with them. And who knows—maybe there are some right-wingers who are good in bed.

From Some Ecards

From Jorjia Peach

It’s the part of the night where I become my most open, where I’m likely to say things without realizing that I removed words from thought bubble and projected them vocally. The last time I was inebriated enough to be in this state, two of my (straight) female friends admitted laughingly that, at some point during our college careers, they were probably going to make out with each other. I don’t quite remember if I asked them out loud why they planned on doing this, or if I only thought it very loudly. But I do remember thinking, “Hey, if they’re straight and they’ve admitted they’ll probably kiss each other, not to mention that they’ve both already kissed several different girls (even though their motivations were usually to impress their male partners), then where does that leave me?”

I’m in college. I’ve been out of the closet as queerfor a while now. And I’ve never kissed a girl. This is something that, when I tell most people, they generally adopt a stance of incredulity. “But…but you’re queer. How have you never kissed a girl?”

I went along with this for a while. I started laughing and calling myself a “bad queer” (even though there’s obviously no right or wrong way to be queer – you do you). But really, I was infuriated. I had people doubting my sexuality, saying I should just go kiss someone already. “How will you know whether or not you’re actually queer unless you’ve kissed a girl?”

From Flickr Hive Mind

I’ve been curious as to what it would be like to kiss a girl as long as I can remember. But I’m curious about kissing people in general. There are plenty of people in the world that I’ve never kissed, and that’s never been used as a means to question my sexuality. When I was a child and I had my first crush, nobody ever questioned whether or not I really liked boys just because I’d never kissed one.  So why is it any different with my queer identity? Personally, I realize that I have the potential to be attracted to people of all gender identities, so I’m still at a loss as to why it seems to be so many other peoples’ business as to whether or not I’ve “proved” that attraction in some way.

But you know what? Frankly, I don’t have to prove shit. I know what I like. I know whom I’m attracted to. I hope that, one day, I’ll get to kiss a girl. Just because I haven’t yet doesn’t mean that my status is demoted to that of a “bad queer.” I’m just doing me, at my comfort level, and I’ll kiss whomever I please without feeling like I need to prove anything to other people.

I’ve had the same experience in regards to coming out as genderqueer. I started off by telling my mother and my closest friends, but I couldn’t work up the nerve to tell others that sometimes, I prefer male pronouns. That I identify as bigender. That I’m not cis. A mixture of dysphoria and fear of the great “What If” has kept my stomach churning with anxiety and my eyes on the brink of tears for far too long.

So I decided to destroy the “What If.”

From Fscked

I’ve been writing and performing slam poetry for going on two years now. I love it, but I’ve had problems in the past with confronting the issues that really anger me/sadden me/make me want to throw things. Despite my chosen art form, I’m a really private person. So I really surprised myself last week when I sat down and wrote a poem about my gender identity, with the intention to perform it.

I sent it to a friend that performs with me, and he assured me there was no rush. He complemented the piece, but it wasn’t until the night of one particular poetry slam last week that I decided to perform my poem.

“You don’t have to perform it if you don’t want to.” “I know. I’m working up the nerve.” “It’s okay if you do another piece. This piece is great, but you don’t have to perform it before you’re ready.” “I know.”

I’m not quite sure what convinced me to decide to perform the piece, but I finally realized that I’m lucky enough to be in a safe space with regard to non-cis gender identities. With this knowledge, I made my way (hands still shaking) to center stage and poured out every thought and feeling I’d had recently about being genderqueer.

From Xanga

At the end of the show, I was congratulated by more strangers than I ever have been in my life. I was hugged, complemented, and generally embraced by the audience. It was the most amazing thing I’ve felt in a long time. I left the performance venue feeling elated: I had come out. I had done it. And, in the end, everybody had accepted me as I was.

For many reasons, mostly academic and schedule-related, I’ve been too busy, tired, or stressed to have sex. When you have multiple papers, meetings, events, and assignments all due during the same week, it’s hard to squeeze in any kind of quality time with friends and family, let alone sexy times with your partner. But upon noticing the seemingly energetic sex lives of my peers, I can’t help but feel some sort of pressure to do the same. I sometimes question myself: Am I not having enough sex? Should I be having more sex? Is there something wrong here?

It seems that the obvious solution here is to just do it: have sex already! I have a willing, consensual, lovely partner, a bed, privacy… and yet I still haven’t done so, even with some recent free time I’ve acquired after the end of midterms. Why? Why not just bring sexy back?

From Survival Fittest

Well, one thing I’ve realized is that having tons of sex is not my prerogative anymore. Now that I’m in a loving, committed, long-term relationship but also leading my own hectic life, what’s important to me is the quality of time we spend together, not necessarily how we spend it. Sometimes that means lying in bed, cuddling and venting about our crazy days, eating breakfast at our favorite diner, or de-stressing by watching “The Voice.” Other times it means having sex.

From Kitty Stampede

My sex life fluctuates, and I am OK with that. What I’ve learned is, regardless of the pressures of my peers or of society, which says the only kind of sex a couple should have is constant sex, it’s totally fine if I don’t have sex. Because when we do find the time to have sex, it’s amazing and beautiful and exciting — since it’s the right time for both of us.

From Zastavki

And then we actually did it.

About ten of us were gathered in Rex’s* suite around seven in the evening.  Josie suggested it for a laugh, but lacking anything else to do, we decided that this was the time to finally watch it.  After poking around on the internet for a free streaming version for maybe fifteen minutes, amid various cries of doubt and objection, we finally found it: all two-plus hours of sexy pirate-y fun.  We hooked up Rex’s laptop to the flat-screen television and hit play.

It began with a dramatic, nautical credit sequence, followed shortly thereafter by a rather frank sex scene between a young sailor and his blonde, buxom bride, featuring plenty of gratuitously close-up penis-in-vagina shots.  Callie yelped.  She comes from a conservative Catholic background, and had never seen pornography or any sort of depiction of sexual intercourse before.  “Ugh! The sound!” she yelled, referring to the smacking of flesh on flesh that tends to accompany aggressive penetration.  She swore aloud she’d never have sex, and we shared a laugh over her prudishness.

From The Angie Martinez Show

I don’t consider myself a connoisseur of pornography by any means, and I’m certainly not dependent on it.  But if I’m bored and decide it might be fun to masturbate even though I’m not aroused, or I’m feeling particularly voyeuristic, or for whatever other reason, I do watch porn on occasion, and it always does the trick.  I’m not too picky about the acts depicted, or people involved, or production quality; watching pretty much anyone do anything sexy turns me on.

But not so with Pirates.  Excuse my crudeness, but even through the most erotic scenes, I stayed dry as a desert down there.  I don’t think Pirates is objectively bad or unsuccessful as a pornographic work—a million dollars is a lot of money to spend on unsexy sex—so I have to imagine it was the context in which I was viewing it: surrounded by close friends, completely sober, right after dinner.  But it wasn’t even funny.  After Callie’s initial outburst, I don’t think anyone laughed.

I could only think about how ridiculous it all was.  How could a charade like this possibly turn me on?  I felt repulsed by myself and society at large.  I think everyone else was feeling a similar disgust, too, because we all wanted to stop watching after just fifteen minutes despite swearing we’d make it all the way through.  I don’t think Pirates made me anti-porn, but for what it’s worth, I haven’t watched any since.

*All of the names in this post have been changed from the originals.

Sure, we kiss. We often sleep in the same bed. We fuck. We have cute little names for each other. We talk every day, even when we’re thousands of miles away. I know his parents. We go on dates. We hold hands in public. I care about him. But he’s certainly not my boyfriend.

From Facebook

I’ve never understood the strange nuances that everyone but me seems to know about in the language we use to talk about relationships: I don’t know if my boo and I are “dating,” “going out,” “in a relationship,” “together,” “seeing each other,” or even “boyfriend and girlfriend.” These words all mean effectively the same thing—but not quite. Maybe it’s because I didn’t date in high school, maybe I’m just an oblivious person to subtle social meanings, but I find the terms indistinguishable. “Boyfriend,” though, is the one I least want to use.

To me, the word “boyfriend” has always been a middle school word—I can’t imagine saying it to a professor or a parent. It seems childish, somehow. I have plenty of friends who use it very seriously, though. The connotation of ownership (my boyfriend, his girlfriend) also stresses me out—as a friend of mine once said, “I don’t think I want to be his anything.” I equally don’t want to be infantilized by the “girl” in girlfriend…but what’s he supposed to call me, then, his womanfriend?!

We were good friends before we started going out, and we’d had conversations about my irrational loathing of the B-word, so he’s thankfully never pushed for it.  If he’s referred to himself as my boyfriend, I haven’t heard about it.

When forced to refer to him by more than just his name, I’ve sometimes used “partner.” On the one hand, I like the queerness of it: it’s gender neutral, it implies equality and collaboration, and it doesn’t give away too much. Partner, in some ways, means mind your own business. On the other hand, it seems a very sterile word. It makes me think of my doctor saying, “How many partners have you had” and John Grisham novels—not quite the connotations we’re going for.

From Author Tony Peters

This summer, I found a funny postcard that I sent to him that said that saying “boyfriend” is silly and school-girlish and that “partner” was too PC and so we should all say, and I quote “This is the person I regularly like to **** the living daylights out of!” It’s an attitude I admire. In the end, though, I think that I’m happiest to just call him my friend. It’s what he is, after all, and I don’t want us having sex to overshadow the fact that we are, at the end of the day, just two people who really, really like each other.

From Woman Savers

Admittedly, the only relationships I have ever been in were monogamous, but I am beginning to become more and more uncomfortable with the idea of traditional monogamy. I suppose most people would explain away this discomfort by labeling it as “commitment issues”: even though I have been in my current relationship for a long time and it seems like my entire high school graduating class is getting married and having babies, I’m not so thrilled about the idea. I’m terrified, in fact. Not terrified of love or being with someone. But the idea of being someone’s “Mrs.,” of having children and having a house and taking on someone else’s last name is enough to keep me awake at night, and also to give me nightmares when I finally fall asleep.

I am incredibly uneasy with the trappings of traditional models of monogamy, but I would hardly call these “commitment issues.” In general, I am a rather committed person. I have a tight circle of friends that I would do anything for. I am a good child to my parents that listens to them and never rebelled too often. I always did well in school and I do my best to fulfill my obligations to other people. All in all, I think I’m a rather committed person.

My main issue with traditional monogamy stems from the idea that loyalty to a partner seems to get translated into ownership. When people see that I wear a ring on the fourth finger of my left hand, they assume it means engagement, and that there’s someone out there that owns a little piece of my future. They don’t usually seem to think, “Oh, this person just really loves someone and wants to show it.” They assume that I owe marriage to someone, and they act flabbergasted when I express attraction to other people, as though my attraction is a limited resource of which I owe completely to my significant other.

From Marchese Law Group

I’m coming to find that attraction is not a limited resource. Neither is lust or love. While I am not polyamorous in the context of my own relationship, my partner neither owns me, nor do I automatically owe him my affection. I give it to him because I want to. Our monogamy does not mean that he owes anything to me, and we are together out of a desire to simply be together. I have no proverbial collar around his neck, and the moment that he refers to me as his “ball and chain,” there’s going to be serious conversation to be had.

There is nothing wrong with traditional monogamy if it works for the individual. You do you. But along with that, I need to do me as well. And, although I am romantically and sexually involved with only one individual and will probably remain that way for the foreseeable future, I like to think that we lack the level of ownership that seems to be present in many other monogamous relationships. I’m not his. I will never take his last name. But after all of the things I’ve done to demonstrate my love to him, I’ll be damned if these things get translated again into “commitment issues.”

From Lonely Planet

I recognize that stay-at-home domestic goddess-dom would never work for me. I’d go NUTSO. Coordinating with other people is difficult enough – I don’t want to imagine coordinating my schedule around other people, 24-7, and the loss of complete independence. I want to be able to travel, and have a career, and be on boards, and just generally lead the same sort of driven, high-energy life that I do now. But I also don’t want to be the mom that isn’t there whenever her kids need her, and I don’t want to stick my kids in the shitty American public school system. (For that matter, I don’t want to stick them in some over-priced private school where they’ll never learn about the real world.) Oh, and I have this thing where I’m half-convinced that I’m undateable and thus will never, ever find someone who I could actually fall in love with and settle down with for the rest of my life, so my kids probably wouldn’t have a present father, and we all know that single-motherhood is just not the easiest thing in the world, even if I was somehow fabulously wealthy and financial concerns weren’t an issue.

I’ve wrestled with all of these concerns for the last two years — how would I make it work? How would I pass on my values? And then, I had an epiphany: I don’t want kids. I don’t know what the turning point was, why this suddenly occurred to me, why I am now OK with not having kids when I was before. It’s certainly not because I’m on some weird idealistic “the world doesn’t need more overpopulation” trip; and it’s not because I suddenly realized that kids make a mess and cry and suck all of your money away and are generally a pain-in-the-ass.

From Katie May

But suddenly, I don’t want kids, and I’m OK with that. I’m going to be fabulous. I’m going to have a badass career and I’m going to travel and be on top of my finances and I’ll probably get another degree and I’ll date whoever I want and just generally, be me.

Unless, of course, I get pregnant.

From Living Love Revolution

But it’s never happened. Not hunched under the covers with a vibrator and an erotic story. Not with my partner’s tongue flicking at my clit, his hands inside of me. Not watching porn. Not tying him up. Not being tied up. Not with a showerhead. Not fucking strangers. Not fucking people who know my body more intimately than I do. Not ever.

My sex life is wonderful. My body is not broken: it is whole, beautiful, good. It does amazing things. I know perfectly well that it’s ridiculous to get caught up on one tiny, highly overrated part of sex. It’s ridiculous to suggest that my sex life is lacking.

And yet I can’t escape wanting to just know. I can’t stop feeling incomplete. I can’t just move on.

A few months ago I started Googling, looking for answers. All I got were hundreds of diagrams of vulvas, with big pink arrows pointing at the clits. Buy a vibrator and get busy! Descriptions of orgasms were similarly unhelpful—universally, the texts said that they were indescribable and that you’d just know. The closest I got to a description was the word “release.”

From Sunday Morning Contemplation

Of course, the good websites told me that some people just don’t orgasm—that’s okay and perfectly normal too! You can still have great sex! They’re right; I can’t and don’t argue with them. My lack of orgasms doesn’t ruin sex, and I really love the incredible sex I have. But I still feel I am missing out on something that, in our current cultural narrative, is held as the center of sexual pleasure.

Not being able to orgasm makes me feel so powerless. I can’t do anything about the worried look on my partner’s face when I put my hand on his to tell him to stop fucking me, that I’ve had enough. I hate that I have to tell him when to stop, hate that we can’t be done at the same time. I hate that I don’t know what people are feeling when they press back into pillows, their mouths open and legs jerking.

I talked to my partner about this soon after we started having sex—letting him know that I almost certainly wouldn’t have an orgasm, and that he shouldn’t worry about it, as I’ll be enjoying myself. I’ve tried talking to him about it since—saying, effectively, what I’ve written here. Invariably, this discussion upsets him: of course, what he hears is that he isn’t satisfying me. That isn’t the case at all. I just want, terribly, to share with someone the certain sadness, the tiny feeling of loss.

Logic, feminism, and advice blogs have all told me that this is nothing more than a bodily quirk, a variation, just a thing. That doesn’t make it easier. If anything, the irrationality of my emotions makes them worse. I feel ludicrous thinking about it so much; I feel guilty for being upset.

I am working towards not caring, pushing myself to love all the fantastic things I can do during sex. But I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to cast off this lurking sense of disappointment, of absence.