Q: Right now I’m open to a kind of delirium that only the vacuum of a true romantic existential crisis can create. I both want to tunnel into the feeling of my own heartbreak, and I want to escape it. My loneliness has cultivated strange sexual appetites: connection, yes, duh, but also frustration, euphoria, playfulness. Sex as a contact sport! Sex as emotional hang gliding! I’m down to get a little strange. The only thing is, I find the realm of sexual fantasy kind of… cheesy. I’m prone to embarrassment, and I can feel really yanked out of an erotic moment by a guy trying too hard to make the story happen. You know, using a little voice, or evoking language that makes me feel like we’re both in a school play: me a dirty little slut or a fairy princess. Not to yuck someone else’s yum, and not to be a naysayer. I’m just wondering: What’s a good way to access a higher register of exploration that doesn’t require a kind of high-fantasy voiceover? How do we get weird while remaining ourselves?

A: You write that you find the realm of sexual fantasy cheesy. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that’s true. I suspect that what you find cheesy is performativity, which is the only form in which you’re encountering fantasy.

As I was talking to my friend Louise about your question, she reminded me of a video we watched on YouTube our first semester of college. In the video, the porn actress and writer Stoya reads aloud from a book called Necrophilia Variations while, presumably, masturbating with a vibrator hidden below frame. As she begins to respond to the vibrations, Stoya’s reading voice gets interrupted and the rhythms of her breath become uneven, until she starts to come while sitting on camera at this little table, with a beatific, shaking grin on her face.

At the time this video was an object of great fascination to us, and maybe also of contempt. We were declaratively sex-positive—young feminists at Barnard—and yet we knew that there was a type of female performativity in this purported piece of art about which we felt, or were obligated to feel, some form of discomfort. We knew it would be reductive simply to enjoy it, yet we also couldn’t say that we thought it was bad, since we didn’t believe that what was pornographic was bad. What we felt above all was a kind of shuddering disappointment that broke over us in those years, over and over, each time we went looking for a glimpse of pure, unconcealed sexuality and instead encountered acting.

It was difficult for us to speak about the despair of looking for intimacy and finding performance, in porn, in erotic art or in our own sex lives. We worried that being disappointed by performance was moralizing or antifeminist. I remember hearing a rumor back then about a girl who had kept her heels on during sex; the theme of the rumor was how humiliating it must be for a woman to be so mannered about something we imagined ought to be raw and intimate. At the same time, I had the sense, especially as a young gay person, that “performance”—channeling deliberate sexuality; putting on a show; connecting with a version of yourself which was not banal and daily—was definitively liberating, full of wild and redemptive possibility, and that what I might call “earnestness” was in some way conservative by comparison, because it privileged privacy, and perhaps because it implied revealing some innate, immutable self.

Your question speeds to the crux of how we understand sex now: as a problem of performance. In my last column I told a story about my friend Piper, who is sometimes turned off at sex parties by the people she called “sex nerds”—those for whom sex is a performance of engineering, logic or extremity. We’re confused about whether sex should involve performance, and how much. Part of the problem, I think, is that performance is presented in much of the available porn as the only and fundamental mode of relating sexually—since most of it is written, directed, acted-in and produced—even that which is “amateur” or homemade. Our simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from porn, is, I think, a result of this ubiquity of performance. We relish performance as a chosen addition—and we recoil from it when it seems to signal a type of deprivation or falsehood, a lack of a sexual there-there.

I love the way you invoke the image of a school play in your letter (what could be less erotic?). And you’re right: much of sex does feel like theater. But what kind of theater is it? Should sex involve playacting? Is sex about expressing our earnest and fundamental nature, or ought sex allow us to be, to feel, like someone different?

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Your examples of the way men talk to you during sex—evoking you as a dirty little slut or a fairy princess—smack clearly to me of what I think of as “sex voice”: the shift in tone from a normal speaking voice into a lower register, persuasive, repetitive, and often dirty or provocative. We recognize sex voice in rhetorical questions—Aren’t you a…? Don’t you like…?—and in confident assertions—Oh, you’re so…. I know you like it when…. Sometimes we recognize it in expressions of a desire so intense it overrides hesitation, a quality almost of addiction: I can’t help myself from… You make me… Rarely does a full conversation take place in sex voice, though lovers can trade assertions and questions back and forth in this register. What would otherwise be an earnest expression of desire—I want to touch you in this way—is displaced into shorthand—this is the way a person like you gets touched or you make me touch you this way. The rhetoric of sex voice is presumptuous, promising that everything we say is already known to both of us, secretly. The tone implies: here we finally are, here we can acknowledge what really goes on between us and inside us, which is shameful, private, and enthralling.

People who enjoy sex voice are those who are aware of the innate social shame of sexuality, and yet capable, in an instinctive way, of playing with it, resisting it, looking at it from another angle. The excitement of sex voice is in the open acknowledgment of desire and of sexual type, about which, in any other context, we might feel shy or ashamed. Sex voice signals to us that we are doing something dirty, something primal. It’s the parlance of praise-degradation—in the most evocative, quintessential example, That’s my good little whore—which is the foundation of public American sexuality. This is the basic presumptive form of sexual speech: in porn, in television, in the burgeoning romance and fantasy genres, and in the arena of “casual” sex. In sex voice it’s revealed that our shared primary wish is to be simultaneously acknowledged as nasty sexual animals and showered with love for it. And sex voice allows us simultaneously to fuck and to perform the fact that we’re having sex. Don’t we sometimes, while having an exquisite evening with our friends, all say to each other, what a great night we’re having! Isn’t this fun? Some of us love to verbalize our pleasure as well as experience it, and thereby double it.

But what about you—who seems very much not to like sex voice? You’re certainly not alone. Part of it, I imagine, is that you aren’t interested in the fantasies that are being invoked. Sex voice is based fundamentally on assumption, and therein lies the danger. You don’t want to be a dirty little slut or a fairy princess. It sort of makes you laugh and/or cringe that these guys imagine they see that in you, or—and which is worse?—that this is simply what they want from a woman, and you’re the woman present. I think some people who find sex voice inherently degrading or uninteresting—and perhaps this is true of you—find it so because they can feel the impersonality of it, the refusal to actually claim a desire. What some of us want to hear is nothing less than this: I want you specifically, and I want you in original ways. This is the rhetoric of love. We can receive this sexually in a non-love context, of course, yet even then it’s so penetrating that it reminds us of the presence and possibility of love. This type of sex, which circulates beyond sexual archetypes and simply ignores received ideas—I want you specifically, and I want you in original ways—is often, famously, less erotic for exactly this reason. What is frequently and obviously “sexual” for us is the game we play with shame: how we perform our subjection to it, how we perform the rejection of it which the heights of our desire demand. Sex that takes place outside of these themes has a certain purity. Sometimes—though certainly not always—this purity also entails silence, purity of form uncorrupted by the attempt to articulate it. For some of us, this purity is what sex is, and for others, this is an almost asexual type of attention. (Another important dichotomy!)

It’s not lost on me that you are asking this question in the wake of a profound heartbreak. You might ask yourself whether there is an archetypal fantasy you wish someone would call on for you but are as yet too shy to suggest—not a dirty little slut, not a fairy princess, but something else which arrives when you’re getting yourself off alone—or whether, in fact, though you wish you were open to some stranger sexual appetite, fundamentally you are actually wishing for I want you specifically, and I want you in original ways. If you are, it doesn’t mean you can’t try to draw something different out of these guys. But doesn’t it help to know what shape the hole is?

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A problem most of us have, perhaps especially women, is that when we are in the mood to have sex reinvent our lives—when we feel dirty, restless, eager to be used and witnessed—we lay around wishing for someone intuitive and creative to come along and recognize a kindred spirit in us. We walk into bars and parties as if we’re adolescents hoping to be recognized on the street by a talent scout. We know that if someone would just give us what we want, without us having to describe it, we would amaze them and ourselves. It humiliates and disappoints us when everyone who comes sniffing just feels “kind of… cheesy,” as you put it. The intention of sex voice is to conjure a mutual fantasy, to invoke a shared scene—but the question remains: Whose scene is it? We each have the opportunity (and, really, the imperative) to direct the erotic scene for ourselves—and this includes women who wish on the whole to be submissive. I don’t mean leading in sex; I mean adjusting, with a light touch, the direction in which we hope the scene will tend.

My friend June recently joked to me that she doesn’t like feeling pressured to talk during sex, an activity whose physicality feels like a welcome release to her, by saying, “I don’t want to play yes/and during sex.” Despite June’s chagrin, I can’t think of a better description for most forms of good sex, and especially of talking during sex, than playing yes/and. Consensual sex is premised on yes/and—every gesture, every word, builds on a yes and expands it, and when there’s a no, you usually circle back again until you get a yes.

I’ve heard two key pieces of advice about expanding the realm of shared sexual fantasy. The first, and most difficult, is simply to state what you want and what about it appeals to you. There is nothing about this that involves performance. It’s utterly earnest, and therefore it’s advanced placement work for most of us. Risk of rejection, especially with someone you don’t know too well, feels high—though often much higher than it actually is. People who want to have sex with you generally respond warmly to sexual vulnerability.

The softer suggestion, and a suggestion I love, is to bring up a morsel of erotic intimacy that excited you in some recent and available past that you spent with this person. The previous week, the previous hour. I don’t mean something explicitly sexual. I mean I liked it when you knew what I wanted and ordered my drink for me. I mean When I stood up, I noticed how you looked at me. (If he’s anything like me, he might ask you, How was I looking?). I mean in the car I was feeling so impatient to get home so I could… If these guys like talking to you, they’ll pick up the ball and throw it back—hopefully in a direction you can get into. Recently I had a conversation like this with my girlfriend about our first date; at the time, we’d flirted, but I noticed and puzzled over the fact that she didn’t touch me until the very end of the night. When I mentioned, much later, how curious I’d been about why she was so physically reserved, she asked me: What did I imagine she’d been thinking? As we were talking, I got excited by the play between fantasy and reality: the articulation of what I had imagined and hoped, the revelation of her private, unapprehended reality. This is as replicable, on a date, three hours after you leave the bar as it is weeks or months later. Who doesn’t like to talk, once we realize a mutual desire, about how it came together, what we projected, how we were seen and desired, especially when we hardly knew it? What if you were to ask the guy you’re seeing to talk to you about what he was thinking on some night you were out together recently—about what he hoped for, about how it felt to bring that hope into reality?

Not everyone will agree, but personally, I think a good definition for intimacy is feeling that you know what someone else is thinking. We imagine that intimacy describes those moments, or prolonged states, in which we two are feeling and thinking the same things; but some of the most fascinating and thrilling, sometimes painful, instances of intimacy are those in which we find out, either by being told or by intuiting, that someone else is thinking or feeling something which amazes us in its foreignness, but which we find we can entirely comprehend. When you have sex without speaking, you have a lot of opportunities to imagine that you know what someone else is thinking, though of course you may be wrong. When you speak during sex, you inevitably find out a lot about what someone else is thinking—even if you don’t like it. An amazing power to realize: you can change what someone’s thinking while they’re touching you. The act of fucking might be your sex as contact sport, but I think being willing to say what you’re thinking is the ultimate sex as emotional hang gliding. Don’t do it in sex voice, since you don’t like it, and don’t do it in high-fantasy voiceover. Try saying something you like in the same voice you use to say Do you want to come over? Let him yes/and. I can’t promise this will lead to delirium—but it will lead to better sex.

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