Action: A Book About Sex Read Online Free
Author: Amy Rose Spiegel
unless you have anything more you’d like to say, just leave.
Consent includes accounting for and protecting your physical health. You should always use some kind of barrier method that prevents STIs, like a condom, if you’re having sex without also looking to conceive a kiddo. To be extra-safe throughout your encounter, you should also periodically check to make sure that barrier method stays in place. People can be surprisingly and infuriatingly boneheaded about this! Once upon a night that started out promisingly, I caught someone I was with trying to remove a condom without telling me. What a nightmare, right? When he explained that he assumed I’d be “chill about it,” I freaked. How dare anyone treat anyone else with complete disregard for their health or personhood—and then be an idiot bro who tries to project his grossness onto me BY USING THE WORD “CHILL” AS AN ADJECTIVE. Yo, I became a banshee. I fucking hate that guy, and I wish I could tell the world his name so that he could see exactly how chill I am.
On the other end of the consensual spectrum, a recent hookup asked me if I’d gotten the Gardasil shot (an HPV vaccine). This sounds a lot less charming than it was, but trust me! I was kissing this person for the first time, and, even though it was unclear whether things would go further, he wanted to let me know before they did that he carried the virus, so any decisions I made that evening would be informed ones. “That’s admirable of you to tell me,” I said, feeling a little too impressed. His response was even better: “It’s not! I just think you have the right to know whether I could potentially be giving you something like that.” That is exactly how to be! In case anyone tries to tell you that pausing an experience to ask questions, provide information, and/or makesure all of the proceedings are cool with your partner “kills the mood,” let me tell you, his honesty made me like him even more, which is usually the case with any kind of sexual encounter—or every brand of life encounter. It doesn’t make me want to have sex with a person less if they let me know they want me to like it, including after we split ways. That’s just bad logic.
Sex, like any way of relating to another person, is at its very greatest when you and the cohort you’ve chosen to hang around with listen to each other and generally make a point of keeping kindness and respect at the forefronts of your minds. I know that part won’t be hard for you. Even though hooking up with other people can be unpredictable, I hope you go into every situation knowing and trusting that whatever your sexual parameters are, they’re exactly the right ones to work inside of. You know what you want—and so should anyone on the other end of whatever that means for you. Go get it.
Gender, Neutrally
Treating sex as an unsavory, improper, or inappropriate topic is one of the most oppressive forces grinding down our individual and collective happiness. You know how anything more revelatory than stony opacity about money—talking about one’s salary, expenditures, et cetera—is considered gauche? Clock how the richest people continue to remain the only segment of the population with access to the wildly complex specifics of how becoming wealthy functionally happens while the poor are stuck with “secrets” that nobody wants to know and that everyone already knows anyway, aka that being broke sucks, life is too expensive, debt is meant to fuck you not help you, and money is everything.
Sex is similar, except in this case, the stigmatized are people who cop to being interested in it who aren’t straight men. (And then straight men are left working inside a system where they are supposed to believe that they’re the only people who enjoy, or are being served by, sex, which, in addition to being morally and ethically backward—plus interpersonally alienating—makes them garbage lays, and advises them to police some of
Consent includes accounting for and protecting your physical health. You should always use some kind of barrier method that prevents STIs, like a condom, if you’re having sex without also looking to conceive a kiddo. To be extra-safe throughout your encounter, you should also periodically check to make sure that barrier method stays in place. People can be surprisingly and infuriatingly boneheaded about this! Once upon a night that started out promisingly, I caught someone I was with trying to remove a condom without telling me. What a nightmare, right? When he explained that he assumed I’d be “chill about it,” I freaked. How dare anyone treat anyone else with complete disregard for their health or personhood—and then be an idiot bro who tries to project his grossness onto me BY USING THE WORD “CHILL” AS AN ADJECTIVE. Yo, I became a banshee. I fucking hate that guy, and I wish I could tell the world his name so that he could see exactly how chill I am.
On the other end of the consensual spectrum, a recent hookup asked me if I’d gotten the Gardasil shot (an HPV vaccine). This sounds a lot less charming than it was, but trust me! I was kissing this person for the first time, and, even though it was unclear whether things would go further, he wanted to let me know before they did that he carried the virus, so any decisions I made that evening would be informed ones. “That’s admirable of you to tell me,” I said, feeling a little too impressed. His response was even better: “It’s not! I just think you have the right to know whether I could potentially be giving you something like that.” That is exactly how to be! In case anyone tries to tell you that pausing an experience to ask questions, provide information, and/or makesure all of the proceedings are cool with your partner “kills the mood,” let me tell you, his honesty made me like him even more, which is usually the case with any kind of sexual encounter—or every brand of life encounter. It doesn’t make me want to have sex with a person less if they let me know they want me to like it, including after we split ways. That’s just bad logic.
Sex, like any way of relating to another person, is at its very greatest when you and the cohort you’ve chosen to hang around with listen to each other and generally make a point of keeping kindness and respect at the forefronts of your minds. I know that part won’t be hard for you. Even though hooking up with other people can be unpredictable, I hope you go into every situation knowing and trusting that whatever your sexual parameters are, they’re exactly the right ones to work inside of. You know what you want—and so should anyone on the other end of whatever that means for you. Go get it.
Gender, Neutrally
Treating sex as an unsavory, improper, or inappropriate topic is one of the most oppressive forces grinding down our individual and collective happiness. You know how anything more revelatory than stony opacity about money—talking about one’s salary, expenditures, et cetera—is considered gauche? Clock how the richest people continue to remain the only segment of the population with access to the wildly complex specifics of how becoming wealthy functionally happens while the poor are stuck with “secrets” that nobody wants to know and that everyone already knows anyway, aka that being broke sucks, life is too expensive, debt is meant to fuck you not help you, and money is everything.
Sex is similar, except in this case, the stigmatized are people who cop to being interested in it who aren’t straight men. (And then straight men are left working inside a system where they are supposed to believe that they’re the only people who enjoy, or are being served by, sex, which, in addition to being morally and ethically backward—plus interpersonally alienating—makes them garbage lays, and advises them to police some of
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