I tried to clarify, but I was half-paying attention during a lecture and couldn't articulate it fully. Later, I had to explain my weird relationship with “dirty talk.”

I'm a flirty woman. I love banter, witty exchanges, attraction, and all the little games that come with it. It's fun. Sometimes flirty talk takes a sexy turn, and I genuinely don't mind when it does—as long as there's mutual attraction.

But the typical sex talk—the kind that happens during sex? It's always been a bit… funny to me.

I had a long-term hetero partner with whom I learned a lot about myself, pleasure, and turn-ons. But I discovered that the dialogue during sex felt performative. Fake. Learned. Rehearsed. Sometimes, I'd have to hold back laughter because of how genuinely funny and scripted it seemed. I let one slip once and had to explain myself—let's not relive that. 😭

He was genuinely great in bed. He prioritized my pleasure. But it made me wonder how much porn influences people's minds around sex. Even when people overcome the initial performance anxiety, the imprint never really leaves your brain. It teaches you what to find hot.

There is absolutely nothing hot about being called “daddy” sexually. Dare I say, it has pedophilic undertones. But because people consume it in a context that frames it as hot, their brains get wired to find it that way.

We need to talk more about the performance of sexual dialogue. We already know how performative porn is and how it affects sexual dynamics, but we also need to pay attention to how the language follows us into the bedroom.

I do like being talked to during sex—just not in a script that sounds lifted from a video or a novel. Tell me about me. Tell me about what we're doing, right now. Communicate what's working and what isn't. Tell me how good it feels, but in a real way—not in some cliché echo of what you think I want to hear.

And that's my unusually specific sex rant.

I didn’t know that this would be my first newsletter, but I had to post this.

I plan to explore more topics outside the bedroom. Do well to subscribe. 🫶🏾

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