I would love for everyone to have the opportunity – at some point in their life, or ideally at multiple points in their life – to really nerd out about sex. Explore all their questions about sensation with someone who has questions of their own. When Jenny S pitched me her story about asexual exploration as a guest blog, I was so excited to read about her doing exactly this – nerding out and zooming in on lots of different sexual curiosities. I hope you enjoy this gorgeous guest blog as much as I did, and maybe see it as a jumping off point for some curious exploration of your own…
Asexual exploration – turning walls into vantage points
For what could have been the fiftieth time over our friendship, Lex’s clit stiffens and begins to pulse intensely under my tongue. For the first time, I actually feel it. The blossoming firmness; the waves of tension and throbbing warm muscle spasms beginning in her inner thighs against my cheeks, rippling through her body to escape as gasps of pleasure and moans of barely-held focus; all with a crystalline clarity that turns these familiar sensations into something new.
Neither of us are going to cum, neither of us want to – that’s the point. We’re not fucking, we’re not even having sex. With one last teasing breath against her I pull back. We lock eyes, just long enough to both be sure that yes, we both just did that, and yes, this is absurd. Yet this absurd, orgasm-less, sex-less oral proved to be an emblem of many similar experiments to come, and many more lessons to be learned from them.
Mutual rediscovery
It all began a week earlier, when my hand unconsciously flicked down to cover my nipples as I changed into a pyjama top. At last, an outer limit of my patience I had long seen approaching was shattered. Neither of us had had sex in a year, each adrift in our own cocktail of stress, medication, and coming to terms with our respective experiences of asexuality, and my confidence in my body and around sex was at a low I despised. After years of transition, self development, and active work to love my body, there was no way in hell I was going back to hiding it from myself or my partners.
We started with the simplest and most primal of human bonding activities: playing Mario Kart naked. The agreement was explicit – we both love sex, we both love each others’ bodies, and we both wanted to take steps to mutually rediscover and regain this part of our lives that was so important to us both. What we didn’t want that night, or in any of our sessions exploring this that followed, was to turn it into sex.
Once we considered this, our goal was immediately clear: to create a space in which we could experiment with anything that would usually only be experienced while having sex, whilst stripping it entirely of its sexual context to allow for an environment of minimal pressure and maximum freedom to simply learn about ourselves and each other.
Upon realising we wanted to dive into this even just once, we were both flooded with things we wanted to try. How had a year of HRT changed the sensitivity of my breasts, and how I like them to be touched? What was the difference in sensation for Lex between her clitoris being licked with a firm and pointed tongue, versus a soft one? What exactly would it feel like for Lex to put a soft dick in her mouth, and have it get hard between her tongue and cheek?
All of these were questions we had asked ourselves idly before, but never foreseen the opportunity to actually explore. As fantastic as sex is, it can have a less than optimal impact on the workings of the scientifically curious mind when deep in the sweaty, frantic throes.
Communication has always been the strongest aspect of the relationship between Lex and me, and here was naturally no different. Our friendship was initially built on sex and like many people we have developed our own informal shorthand of glances and gestures that are more than sufficient for fucking for fun, but here it is important to note we knew we needed to be exactingly careful with consent. To be touched or even carefully observed in a way a lifetime of social conditioning and experience inextricably linked to sex, in a context that is new and intentionally challenging even with a deeply trusted partner, is a fundamentally new experience that must be treated with due respect. Always voicing what we’re going to do, making sure we’re both on the same page about why, and getting explicit verbal consent even if it’s something we’ve done dozens of times before. Simply, establishing and reinforcing comfort and ease can only be done from a place of comfort and ease.
The science bit…
Two weeks later, Lex lavished in running the base to the tip of her tongue against the head of my cock. Pulling back, we each took a second to collect ourselves before diving into what had quickly become our usual debriefing process. In a small notebook she jotted down the results of her experiments, from her own observations and from the questions she’d been asking me throughout in the name of her ongoing quest to master the art of the blowjob. When she gets better results focusing on the head as opposed to the shaft; when the more intense stimulation of the tongue as opposed to the lips or cheeks created a powerful positive response, as opposed to being overstimulating.
The metaphor may be laboured, but to me it’s a lot like making coffee. You can brew a cup every morning, with the best equipment and the most carefully chosen and roasted beans, but that’s not how you learn to make better coffee. The important part of progress is the second cup, and the third and the fourth, each time tweaking your dosage, recipe, and brew method; taking time to unpick the flavours and how myriad factors change them. Tasting these coffees is a fun, engaging experience that very quickly will make an improvement to a near-daily activity, but tasting them is still an entirely different experience to drinking your usual morning cup. The sensations are, by all reasonable measures, identical, but the change in the mental frame of reference allows for the acute studying of the intricacies of these sensations which would usually be swept under the umbrella of ‘it feels great to drink my morning coffee’.
The details of what Lex and I have concocted is incredibly specific to us, but the principles are something I believe most people could build into something special for them.
Have you ever wondered what it actually looks like when someone with different genitals to you gets cold? Can you put into words how the feeling of your inner thigh or breast being lightly touched changes over time with physical arousal? Are you aware that a hand job with ‘sex brain’ turned off can feel similar to the deepest, most soothing back rub?
Sex and our bodies give us infinite fascinating avenues of exploration to dive into. For our own comfort in our skin, for becoming more able to communicate what we like to feel and how to make us feel it, even just to answer the most idle curiosities that there would so rarely, if ever, be an opportunity to ask or investigate. My most sincere hope for writing this post is that someone, somewhere, takes the ideas we’ve been playing with and runs with them, and turns it into something meaningful and powerfully positive for themselves, as we have so delighted in doing.