Read Action: A Book About Sex Online
Authors: Amy Rose Spiegel
Action: A Book About Sex
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For you/yes/you
Dilige et quod vis fac.
Love, and do what you will.
—
Confessions
, St. Augustine of Hippo
Love and do what you will
is the only inflexible truth I can tether myself to, belief-wise. Restated, it means:
Be kind, and you can’t be wrong
. Another of Augustine’s life-defining ideas to which I fervidly subscribe: the pursuit of sex, which he famously prioritized in his life—and felt mad conflicted about. Augustine’s tail-chasing career was truncated when he buckled to contrary opinions held by his religion about what sort of behavior qualified as “holy” (turns out boning is pretty much the opposite of Christian divinity, in their literal book), but I think he was right the first time around. One can absolutely treat sex as a conduit for connectivity with the world.
Biologically, we are configured to want and be with one another. Sex accounts for such a sprawling part of what I consider sacramental because it’s also the hardware of my genetics. Sex is high and low: the nexus of culture-shaping religious rites, elemental science, and the visual motif of a lot of the best music videos as yet committed to the canon. I notice how it structures the highs and lows of my life, too, and how that framework overlaps—or not—with other people’s blueprints—and whether I should totally bone them, if our schematics work together interestingly.
Every person I sleep with is a new machine, albeit one with the same set of instructions:
Be loving in a new way. Love like you did not know how to love before
. My sexual partners each show
me new forms of communicating Augustine’s kindness, the most airtight definition of love that I know.
This is
not
to say that I’m conflating sex and love. HA, can you imagine? You’d close the book here, like, “No thanks—I think we’re
alllll
set for today,” and you’d be right. But I
do
clock private information about a person from the way they have sex. Seeing and becoming involved with someone in a fuck-based capacity evinces new things about them—and about me—even if those truths are only true right then and there, and neither of us ever have a similar experience again. Personal details pertaining to sex are not necessarily
secret
, but they’re usually more clandestine than most other biographical compositions, and I feel lucky whenever anybody lets me in on theirs. Even in the most easygoing arrangements, a person who is undressed in a bedroom (or wherever) is vulnerable, physically and psychically. They are also redolent with a specific kind of power,
and
, I hope, about to have a hell of a lot of fun.
A lot of the time, I have sex in order to see what’s possible—to become an updated version of the person I thought I was. I want to traverse as much as I can of the unending range of what I and other people are capable of enjoying (together). I love having sex with someone if I can feel that we’re changing together—beyond the basic “marching ever closer to hanging out with the Grim Reaper” parade. (Isn’t that the point of the processional?) These alterations can be small—as in,
I have never slotted a hand down the pants of this particular personage, at this particular date and time, before RIGHT THIS INSTANT! Man, I am ALL-NEW!
In other cases, they’ve felt more revelatory, like,
Whoa, I guess I love sleeping with women, when I did not suspect that to be the case previously!
Becoming ALL-NEW does not mean that anything you do is reflective on any part of your overarching
identity in life
—unless you want it to be. In the moment, you are still
you
, regardless of what you do. Imposing broad, uncritical rules on sex rankles me—
this is right; this is wrong
. I prefer to think,
Yo! This is possible? Fascinating!
(And then maybe fantasize about it later, if the memory of it rustles up that impulse.)
I love talking and thinking about sex as much as I do having it. Speaking about sex comes, in part, from the attendant preference for wanting to listen to how others feel about it, too. In this book I have tried not to mistranslate and express ownership over experiences that are not mine, which is exactly the behavior that leaves people feeling overlooked, erased from the record, and socially shut down. All I can do is recount how sex has featured in my life and how that has felt. I’m not a doctor—I am equipped to write about sex only in that I am a person who has a pretty normal life that (mostly) does not include anxiety meltdowns about sex i/r/t identity. If I am “qualified” to be honest about my whole sexual deal, of course you are, too. No academic degree—or degree of skankitude—can imbue someone with the grand and lofty ability to know what feels good for them/fuck like a maniac; you’ve already got that (if you want it).
I am trying not only to talk about sex, but also putting forth mad ideas about how to get your partners to talk back (remember that whole fun “listening” gambit? It pays off!). I am a single person, albeit one who happens to have been with many others, so this book cannot even come close to encompassing the boundless interactions people have with their partners. (I’m wild grateful for that—homogeneity is boring, and premature death.) I do not expect you to agree with me throughout all of this. I’d rather you observe the aspects in which you are unlike me—and make up your own mind about how
you’d
have met the decisions I came to.
This is ostensibly a contemporary, youthful, we-do-it-so-different-here’s-how-we’re-special-and-new guide to the rutting that our ancestors have enjoyed and started wars over since humankind took its place among the cosmic junk of our vast and terrible universe, so I’ll quickly hearken back to my original point.
Here is what you learn about a person when you’re taking off their clothes: Are they good to the people they fuck—those people in those vulnerable, powerful states of anticipatory pleasure, trust, and fear? Yo—are
you
?
You are, and you can show them how to be good to you. (And have great orgasms about it.) I think we’re about ready to figure out how that goes down.
Dilige et quod vis fac
. Let’s go get some action.
By Definition: A Glossary of Terms
asexual:
Used to describe a person who does not experience, or feel compelled to act on, sexual desire.
cis and cisgender:
Used to describe a person whose male or female gender identity is the one widely expected of the body they were born with.
non-binary:
Someone whose male or female gender identity, or attraction to partners, does not adhere tightly to the one expected of them or the people to whom they are attracted.
person with a penis/vagina; “they” vs. “she”/“he” pronouns:
For the sake of simplicity, and with as much of an eye toward gender neutrality as I could manage without
muddling the text, I am using the pronouns “he” and “she” to correspond to diction in which I would have preferred to use “the person with the penis,” “the person with the vagina,” or “they.” I had to make a decision about clarity, and I apologize to readers whose bodies don’t correspond precisely with the pronoun that I’ve used at any point. I thought about this throughout every step of writing this book and have tried to be inclusive while bearing this in mind, but I have only one set of experiences, and it would be really gross if I tried to subvert or circumvent that fact by pretending otherwise. I hope you can find something of value here, despite any discrepancies of language.
rape culture:
A society that blames and tries to shame a victim of rape and does not properly prosecute or socially condemn the criminals who commit it, regardless of whether the law states that rape is a crime. Also, a society that normalizes the sexual degradation of women.
rape/sexual assault:
Not just forced penetration. Any sexual act that is committed without the clear permission of all parties involved.
sex:
“Sex” is not necessarily a synonym for “intercourse”—or any other act that involves skin-on-skin contact. A working definition:
Sex
can be whatever act fills in the gaps between any number of bodies, which of course includes—and can even extend exclusively to—the brains operating them. Some people prefer to cultivate their sex
lives in solitude. Although the majority of non-asexual people partner up at some point or another, plenty of your fellow humans don’t engage in double-sided physical sexuality. Others are down to mess around with another person only if a phone or computer is mediating the distance between them.
Nontraditional sexual methods are as much about negotiating the space around a body as any in-the-flesh arrangement. Sex takes the shape of its container, meaning it can adapt to whatever vessel your body and brain decide for it. So: Yes, it means vaginal or anal penetration. But it also means basically whatever you want it to.
sex-positive:
A term that I really loathe and try to avoid, as it makes me feel like somebody’s beatific aunt who uses an “alternative” form of deodorant. Still I can appreciate the impetus behind “sex positive.” It connotes that something or someone is frank, open, friendly, and communicative about sex, that they see and recognize all genders as equal, and that it doesn’t have to be a seedy, morally repugnant secret if you are titillated by bodies (or most of the other things a person can be turned on by).