Action: A Book About Sex Read Online Free Page A

the people they’d benefit from allowing sexual autonomy. All of that is far less pressing than what precedes this parenthetical, though.) The ettiquette in play here works the same way as shushing salary talk: things stay the same for those reaping the paver, and vice versa.
    I suspect that many of our internal panic-hurricanes that keep us from talking about sex come from whether we’re convincingly puppeteering the gendered costumes we’re wearing—whether we know that that’s the cause of our anxieties or not. As with so many of life’s dumbest facets, shyness surrounding sex can stemin part from how masculine and feminine norms are expressed on a cultural level, which is to say immaculately . THEY’RE THE BEST, JUST LOVE ’EM, LUV BEING A “GIRL” WITH MY “PURSE” OF “HAIRSTYLES.”
    No, of course gender roles necessitate feelings of inadequacy in their very being. That is their point. It’s absurd, but who among us hasn’t felt like shit based on observing the twinkling heteronormatoné casts of toothpaste commercials, or by uneasily taking in comedy routines about the uproarious and irreconcilable differences between the sexes as conveyed by our attitudes about Valentine’s Day/parents-in-law/the color or yeastiness of the alcoholic beverages we like (followed by the equally boring commentary about just how downright condemnable those aforementioned yuk-yuk jokes are for assuming broad tropes of nuanced people—aka this sentence)? We are made to feel rude for our difference.
    Unfortunately, we have to keep talking about the particulars of how we’re socialized to absorb and display the expectations for our genders. One of many cogent reasons: They’re wrecking our sex lives. And if you think that seems trivial? (a) This may not be the book for you; and (b) consider every vicious politician who’s ever sublimated his terror that liking a finger in an orifice means he’s GAY into a law that kills or maligns or otherwise tries to place a harness on the population writ large, then maybe get back to me. I’ll be right here, combing my beautiful female handbag as I wince back my anger, just like I’m supposed to!
    Far more preferable, far more loving, far more honest, far fucking hotter: Asking for and paying attention to the User’s Guide for how each of your specific partners wants to feel good and checking that information against whether their proclivities dovetail with what it is that does it for you—and not making your bedfellows feel ashamed about the things they like and want that you’re not down to try out with them. Having as many (or as few!) orgasms as you want, with whomever you want, as long as everyone involved is okay with that. Seeing all of what the world can give you and the other way around: Filling your dance card withother living, thinking, boning beings before you go check out the afterlife. (Freud describes sex, or eros , as the “life instinct” that human beings use to combat Thanatos, or the underlying knowledge, in all things, of the reality that we’re all going to kick one day.) Doing all the weird shit you search for on the internet—and doing it consensually. Most crucial: talking about sex . Not just in the beginning of whatever affair you might be having at the moment, but throughout and beyond the actual doing-of-it. You don’t need to narrate every last gesture that takes place between you and a sexual attaché—once consent is in place, a lot of what’s great about fucking, in the moment, is ineffable—but to treat it, more generally, as taboo is to stiffen and truncate its unknowns. You don’t have to worry about whether that makes you “gay,” or whatever, because that’s up to you and only you to decide. Please stop voting otherwise, if you are.
    In The History of Sexuality , the social theorist Michel Foucault lays out the concept of something called “repressive hypothesis.” This is, paraphrased simply, the idea that in saying, “Our