Sexual Basics

This is the page for people who are only going to read one page.  No matter how obvious these ideas may seem, they're among the most important ones:

Core values hold in sexual relationships

Examples are honesty, integrity, generosity, kindness, patience and courtesy.  In other words, tell the truth, don't promise more than you can deliver, keep the commitments you do make, always give as much as you can, be gentle with other people's fears, keep your temper if at all possible, and in this most sensitive of areas, do your best not to hurt feelings while doing all the above. 

Your sex life is fundamentally interior

Sex is about what you feel, not what you do.  Sexual experience is made up of emotion and sensation, not the activities that happen to evoke them.  Understanding this takes a lot of pressure off doing things any particular way, and makes competitive comparisons difficult or impossible.

After all, how could you measure your feelings against anyone else's?  Even if you have hundreds of orgasms a day with thousands of partners in the wildest, kinkiest, most athletic ways, still someone who only has one orgasm a decade by masturbating might, for all you know, be enjoying a richer and more intense sex life than yours. 

Sex is not like algebra or ice-skating — there's no set of knowledge or skills (aside from the core values above)  that make you competent at it.  The only measure of sexual competence is how well your sexual activities are working for you, and that keeps changing for everyone by the hour, by the day, by the month, over years and decades until you die.  There are things you know as a kid and then forget that you wish you'd remembered better.  There are things you know much later that you wish you'd known as a kid.  So what — all that matters is to keep learning, keep going forward in the face of all your fears when you want or need to. 

Courtship is a blast

Few things feel better than a new romance.  It starts with attraction, advances to flirting, flowers into a crush, sometimes becomes wildly obsessive, and often leads to beautiful sex and passionate love.  But the intense courtship feelings themselves do peak quickly and then they fade away.

Physical relationships tend to create deep bonds

"Casual" sex easily turns serious.  Many people really want a pair-bond.  Such a bond usually gets deeper and stronger over time.   Deep bonds can be incredibly painful to break, but having a deep bond in no way diminishes the fun of a new courtship. 

Everyone is scared of sex

We're primitive people: we have taboos.  Remember how you felt just before you did [fill in the blank with something sexy but intimidating] for the first time?  You did it, even though you had to drag yourself across a huge, threatening threshold — but then a little while later, when you looked back, you realized there was nothing to it — absolutely nothing.

I remember, for example, being really curious when I was younger about what was in those dirty-looking sex shops, but being too embarrassed to walk in and find out.  As I finally approached the door of one, determined not to let some stupid irrational cowardice limit my knowledge of the world, I remember finding myself physically shaking with fear.  I knew better, I knew there was nothing to be so ashamed of, I knew that nothing I would find inside would be so terrible or dangerous, but it was sex — and that tapped into all kinds of primal taboo fears that you can't help picking up from the culture you live in.

With the exception of stores like Toys in Babeland and Good Vibrations, I've found sex stores kind of disappointing over the years, but I can't imagine at this point any reason to feel nervous walking into one. 

So you get over all the taboo fears that are behind you — and still you find yourself facing ones in front of you.  It's always the same deep primal fear, now re-attached to something new. I know people who've been having kinky public sex for years, doing things with lots of partners that most people would be embarrassed even to think about — is it any different for them?  No.  They aren't scared any more of most of the common taboos of our culture (nakedness, sex in public, various arcane ways of arousing yourself and other people of any gender), but there's always something just ahead of them, often having to do with intimacy, that's exactly the same kind of barrier every teenager faces right at the very beginning. 

Take pride in your sexual courage!

Sex is scary — it's that important to us.  So be proud every time you face down one of those fears, no matter how silly it seems.  Sure, the reason for the fear may in retrospect turn out to have been ridiculous, but the fear itself is anything but.  Acknowledge your own courage in facing those fears every time you move forward into new territory, because too many people hardly ever move at all — too many people keep themselves trapped in a little box, desperately afraid even to crack the lid and peer out.