 So I'm going to be reading from Girl Sex 101. It's a kind of challenging book to read from because it's really kind of graphic novel-ish, heavily illustrated. So the flow may be questionable, I apologize. So Girl Sex 101 is basically an honor of my belief that you should make the art you wanna see in the world. So I wrote the Sex Ed book I wanted when I was a baby dyke 15 years ago. So this is very much 101. I'm sure many of you are far beyond that at this point. So just, you know, put yourself in your shoes, maybe a couple decades ago, maybe when you were all very curious and this was all very new. So this is from the chapter, A Field for the Wheel, Driving and Navigating. The whole book is structured as a road trip. There's a rottica fiction that starts each chapter and then we go into the how-to. And so this is kind of about how to listen to a lover's body. Imagine yourself in the driver's seat of a beautiful and expensive car. You're about to turn the key and put it on the road. You're a bit nervous. After all, this isn't your car. It's worth a lot and it's being trusted in your hands. What's the first thing you do? Adjust your seat, check your mirrors, fasten your seat belt, take a minute to figure out where all the gauges and switches are. Every car is different and this one will take a few minutes to adjust to but soon you'll get the hang of its nuances and you'll just drive. You won't have to run the checklists as you go. You'll know that the steering will require roughly 1.5 spins in either direction to make a turn. You know that you'll use the second segment of your left middle finger to hit the turn signal. You'll gently brake when you go into a curve. You'll accelerate when you come out of it. You don't have to think of it explicitly each time. You just get a feel for it and you drive. When you're in the flow, driving down an open road is elegant, easy and serene. It's a collaborative experience between the driver and the vehicle and just as driving is a responsibility to be taken with awareness and respect, so is sex. When you're topping, you're the driver. The bottom is the navigator. It's worth noting here that topping and bottoming don't imply a hierarchy. They can be dominant. You can be a dominant bottom or a submissive top. I'm just using driver and navigator but we could just as easily use the words giver and receiver, doer and dewee, et cetera. It's her job to tell you what turns to take. It's your job to listen and drive responsibly. Presence. Most people have a hard time enjoying themselves if they're nervous. This is especially true with sex. Even if you're super experienced, there's always a small jolt of energy when you're intimate with a new person for the first time. This can certainly add to the excitement but it can also make things like pleasure harder to wrangle. To combat this, you don't have to put on some swaggering airs and act like you're all in control. In fact, any kind of pose can make you look like, well, a poser. The best persona to adopt when in bed with a new person is authenticity and transparency. Speak your mind with your sweetie and you will almost always endear yourself to her. One of the biggest impediments to great sex is people pretending that they've got all the answers. The truth is no one has all the answers, experts, workshops, podcasts and guide books like this one. They can't tell you how to get that specific girl off in the way she likes. The individuality and multiplicity of the human experience is out of all of our scope. The best we can do is offer you ways to approach, ask, listen and offer. The rest is a co-creation. This is where the magic of sex happens. So drop the facade and be real. If you're nervous, say so. If you're not sure she likes something, ask. If you need to make an adjustment to prevent a Charlie horse, do it. Otherwise it will just get in the way later. Our brains just don't turn off when it's not a good time to fix something. Fix it right away and then get back to business. Presence also means paying attention to whether something is working for your partner or not. Don't slip into cruise control while doing a move that worked on your ex if you're not going to pay attention to whether it's working on your current. Listening. Hearing is something you do with your ears. Listening you do with your whole body. What does it feel like to listen with your whole body? You've probably done it already. Are you an athlete, a dancer, a musician, an artist, a martial artist, a yogini, a crafts person? What you're looking for is the flow. You may know it as a runner's high or beginner's mind or groove. It's where your mind goes when you're trying to find the right pitch on a musical instrument or when you're sparring with an opponent or dancing with a partner. You're standing in a river of sensation, giving equal weight to all of the input that washes over you. You're looking for the soft space in your mind where you are accepting all the stimuli without latching on to any single one of them. Sex educator Reed Mahalco says it's like trying to make a wine glass sing. When you try to make a wine glass sing, you're tracking a lot of different things, friction, rate, pressure, et cetera. You track all of these at once and adjust your motions accordingly. If you're not sure what he's talking about here, put down this book and go get a wine glass. Fill it with a little bit of water and run your moistened finger around the edge. Try to make it sing. And take note of where your mind goes while you do this. Musicians will often get this right away. It's a quality of listening not only with your ears, but with your body. If you've ever played a musical instrument, you know the feeling of the vibration in your body as you seek the right pitch. You're certainly adding the stimulus, but the instrument is amplifying and altering your input and turning it into a new co-created sound. Your partner will do the same. You can touch her in a certain way, but her body will receive that input and then relate to it in a specific way and give you something back. Your job is to listen to the new sound she's giving you and respond in turn. You can get lost when you stay too focused on what you give rather than what you get back. Listen for what her body is actually saying, not what you expect it to say. Raise your hands. How many of you have been with a lover who obviously is using moves on you that one, worked on one of their former partners and two, did absolutely nothing for you? Yeah, thanks. How many of you noticed that when those moves didn't work, your partner doubled down instead of switching it up? This is what happens when a person gets too attached to expectations. To mix my metaphors a bit, when an artist first learns how to draw, they have to learn how to draw what is really there, not what they see through the various filters of their brain. Your job as a lover is to respond to the person who's actually in front of you, not the person you think she should be. You're allowed to use good information you've garnered from your sexual history to inform your approach. Just be malleable and receptive to the body you're touching in the moment. It's going to be unique. And even if you're with the same woman again, her body will be slightly different the next time, our internal sensations change with our mood, our connection, our cycles, and our hormones. That's part of what makes sex so exciting. You're never stepping into the same river twice when you're with a woman. There are a number of ways you want to learn to listen. Naturally, you'll be better at listening in some ways, and others will feel weird or challenging. The point is to practice listening in all modes. All right, so that I'm gonna skip forward. We're talking about ears and skin and stuff. All right, so this is just a little section from the integrity and identity section. This felt like it was a huge thing. It was absent from pretty much every sex guide I've ever read. And when you talk about queer sex, you can't, I think that sex is inextricably linked to our identities. So this is just a little bit about, you know, again, for the youngins to figure out who they are. So identity, integrity, smooth sailing. I'm talking about a little truth in packaging here. To be perfectly frank, you don't quite look like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up with the wrong job, the wrong friends, and who knows what all. You could end up with somebody else's life. This is one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books, Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World. I read the book right after college when I was living in Los Angeles and miserable about so many things, among which were my sex life and my gender presentation. I put the book down, picked up some scissors, tied my long peroxide-blonde hair into a braid, and cut it off. I stood in front of the mirror, braid in hand and side in relief. Then I marched to my closet, grabbed a sports bra, a baggy plaid shirt, and an ace bandage. I bound my breast, don't do with an ace bandage, tucked a sock into my underwear, put on my baggy clothes, and went for a walk down Sunset Boulevard. I don't remember if anyone stared. I didn't care. I walked with a wide, long stride and felt invincible. Since that night, I've refused to listen to anyone who tries to tell me how I should look. I've worn my hair anyway I felt, got the tattoos I wanted, wore the clothes that made me feel sexy and strong, whether femme or butch or both or neither. Making these choices changed my life. Some people think these things are shallow. I think they're essential. We present ourselves the world every day, both in real life and online, and people respond to us based on these presentations. So if you have the wrong haircut, clothes, friends, job, and so on, you may indeed end up living a life you didn't choose for yourself. Why not make small changes to be as you as possible? Like masturbation, the best way to figure out what you like is by trying a bunch of different things. So step one, self exploration. This often starts as a solitary intellectual exercise. What would it feel like to wear this leather corset? Or an emotional one? Oh my God, I want to wear that leather corset. This phase can last a long time, sometimes even a lifetime. Popularly, we tend to think of people who have a solo exploratory practice as fetishists, of some type, but often it's that folks are in nascent stages of full-fledged identity. Step two, public experimentation. When you've tried on your identity and solitude, it's common to want to present it to the world. Sometimes this is in controlled environments, queer clubs among friends, costume parties only, et cetera. Sometimes it's in tiny increments like fingernail polish, a certain kind of underwear, et cetera. Or sometimes you'll come crashing out of the closet like so many drag kings and queens I knew in college. How you do it is up to you. When we present something to the world that we feel is really true for us, the stakes feel much higher. Positive feedback can feel extremely good here and negative feedback can be devastating. What can keep negative feedback from destroying your ego is tying your presentation to an indefactable truth. It's the part of you that is unfuck withable. It's the part of you that says, fuck all y'all, I'm fabulous. No matter how meek we are in real life, we all have that part of us somewhere. It's your job to find out where that piece is and nurture it. Step three, identification and integration. Sometimes this kind of experimentation is just a dress up or play, but sometimes we strike identity gold. When that happens, do what gold miners do and follow the vein. Explore the cultural signifiers and identities immediately around that thing you love and see what else fits. For instance, if you find yourself fascinated by sharp suits, suspenders and tie tacks, you may want to check out Dabberdandy Culture, steampunk or other things related to high end menswear and the culture around it. If you put on a feather boa and feel luscious, maybe you'll want to check out burlesque, fem culture, drag, stripping or more things where a boa is a very common accessory. Read books by people who have similar identities you're curious about. Hang out with other folks who are into what you're into. Find or build chat rooms for people who like what you like. Find events that cater to your kind of thing. Drag culture has this in spades, so does trans culture. Femmes are finding their collective voices and butchers are having some intense conversations about masculinity, identity, family and fashion. Find your people and make friends. Step four, know that all of this can and will change. When people discover something that really speaks to them, most tend to cling to it hard. We can feel threatened if people question it or offended if people don't understand it. We can insist that this is the real me and it's always been and always will be forever and ever and ever. And maybe it will be, but maybe it won't. There are people who vacillate from straight to gay and back their whole life without ever considering that they might be by our pan. Some people, when they realize their transness will go full tilt to the other end of the gender scale without stopping to think what kind of man or woman or person do I want to be? The sad fact is, many people treat themselves worse than the world ever will. You have to give yourself permission to keep exploring even if something new enters your life that feels contradictory to everything else you've been before. That's life and it's great if you give yourself permission to believe it so. And now I'll leave you with another quote from a home at the end of the world. I was not ladylike nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful. Thank you.