tfw you’re stuck inside most of the year because of COVID but you still wanna stay up-to-date on the latest sex news
Each December I write about 5 people whose teachings on sexuality were significant to me throughout the year. Since in-person workshops and conferences weren’t available to us for most of the year, sex education looked different for me in 2020 – most of it happened while reading books or blogs. However, I still feel like I learned a lot more about sexuality this year, including deepening my understanding of my own sexuality. Here are the 5 people whose expertise most impressed and uplifted me in 2020…
Angela Chen
I already wrote about Angela Chen’s brilliant book Ace in a previous 12DoGJ instalment, but it bears repeating: this is one of the best books in existence about asexuality. I know it will change many lives. In fact, I’m sure it already has.
In addition to being an outstanding author, Angela is a reporter who covers asexuality, technology, and health. Her essays on subjects like “curing” desire, discovering one’s own asexuality, and the overrepresentation of alloromanticism in fiction are full of ideas that challenge the status quo, both out in the world and within your own mind. She is consistently brave enough to question societal norms and eloquent enough to make me shout, “How can anyone write this well?!” I love everything I’ve seen from her body of work and can’t wait to see what she does next.
Velvet Veronica
2020 was the year that I discovered possibly the best handjob-giver on the planet, Velvet Veronica. Granted, I don’t have a penis so it’s hard to assess that for certain, but my partner does, and attests that Veronica’s skills are unmatched (or at least, they appear to be!).
Though she bills herself as a “soft femdom” porn creator, her style of dominance can actually be wonderfully strict and mean. Her videos show her “torturing” her submissive (whom she calls “pet”) with vibrators, chastity, edging, denial, post-orgasmic overstimulation, and much more. Though I enjoy her work very much on a purely entertainment-based level (what can I say, I appreciate a great HJ!), I also think her videos are remarkably educational for anyone looking to explore dominance. She never shows her face – or the mysterious thigh tattoo she covers up with a garter in every scene for anonymity reasons – but she doesn’t need to, because her power is all about her voice, her presence, and those magic hands.
The more that internet discourse becomes a tug of war between the right and the left, between “cancel culture” and “free speech,” between “fake news” and true facts, the more I respect and admire journalists of marginalized identities who manage to do brilliant work despite all the pressures they face. Ana’s reporting is always incisive, with a side of humor and whimsy. Her writing makes me feel optimistic about sex journalism again in a way I don’t often feel anymore. She’s a must-read, in 2020 and beyond. (Oh, and she also makes porn.)
Denying Thumper
One thing my spouse Matt and I have in common: when we become interested in a new kink, we research the hell out of it. That’s how they stumbled upon Denying Thumper, who’s been blogging about his adventures in long-term chastity for several years.
As a sex educator, I often tell people who want to introduce their partner to a new kink of theirs that it’s important to be specific. Just because you’ve seen 800 videos about your fetish doesn’t mean that your partner has the slightest clue how to put it into action in a way you’ll enjoy. This is why I’ve found chastity blogs like Denying Thumper so useful as Matt and I have been exploring chastity together: they give me a model of what to do, what not to do, and even how to think about the kink in question. It helps enormously that Thumper is a cogent, witty writer with a clearly bottomless passion for chastity. Sex bloggers fucking rule, man.
My therapist
As I told you earlier in the year, I was lucky enough in mid-2020 to find a therapist who was not only accepting new clients (only over the phone – this is a pandemic year, after all!) but who also happened to be clued-in about kink, non-monogamy, LGBTQ+ issues, and trauma – all important puzzle pieces of my psyche. My therapist herself (who uses both she/her and they/them pronouns) has experience in these areas both personally and professionally, and they have been a total godsend for me this year.
Good therapists, who don’t stigmatize their clients’ natural and healthy inclinations but instead push them to explore their desires free from self-judgment or self-hatred, are so necessary in this world. I end every call with my therapist breathing a sigh of relief, feeling less frazzled, less broken, and less alone. I doubt they’ll ever read this (that would probably be ethically weird), but they helped me get through 2020, and I’m so grateful.
We have arrived at one of my favorite 12 Days of Girly Juice instalments: the one where I tell you about some of the sexiest songs I grooved on this year! I will admit that while this list was originally meant to be literal sex songs, i.e. songs you would want to listen to while having sex, it has transformed over the years and become moreso a list of songs that feel sexual or sensual in some way, but aren’t necessarily sexy, if that makes sense. You’ll see what I mean…
As ever, here’s a Spotify playlist that contains all of this year’s picks + those from every previous year I’ve done this. Enjoy!
Her’s – Low Beam
I know what you’re thinking / You can take me for a ride / Baby, hit me harder / ‘Cause I’m never gonna hide / You can keep on running, but you’re running out of track / I’m-a keep it coming, as a matter of fact
I wrote a bit about this band last year; they’re a duo who were tragically killed in a car crash in 2019, so listening to them is very bittersweet. I’m absolutely enamored with their sound – the peppy guitar parts, the sensuous harmonies, the singer’s deep and morose voice.
I don’t really know what “Low Beam” is about – this band’s lyrics can be charmingly opaque at times – but I do know that it was a central component of my first shrooms trip in February. For some reason, the line “You can keep on running, but you’re running out of track” got lodged in my head and became a mantra, an affirmation, a tether, an anchor. I begged my trip-sitter Brent to put this song on the stereo several times throughout that day, and danced my ass off every time. This song just… feels good in my body and brain, like laughing at a party with friends, or strutting down the street on a sunny day, or – yes – excellent sex.
Brotherkenzie – Poems on My Phone
I’ve got the thought of you inside my bed / That thought’s the only thought inside my head / Mezcal left over from my birthday week / Still here, but without you it’s hard to drink
Brotherkenzie’s Big What was hands-down one of my favorite new albums this year. It’s contemplative, groovy, worried, and weird. “Poems on My Phone” stands out as a particularly poppy, hooky tune, and is also probably the sexiest track on the record.
It’s a “relatable mood,” as the kids are saying, because it’s about that feeling when someone you’re crushing on goes away for a while and you just can’t get them out of your head. The beat of this tune has the same plodding inevitability as intrusive infatuated thoughts: they just keep coming, uncontrollably, while you’re trying to focus on other things, and all you can really do about it is write poems on your phone.
Marika Hackman – Send My Love
Are you coming home to feel alone? / Did you love me tonight, or any night of our lives? / It’s never gonna be like it was before / The writing’s on the floor
I discovered this song while trying to scope out some lesbian drama online. The ever-fantastic Amber Bain, of the Japanese House (a band that’s appeared on this list more than once), dated fellow singer/songwriter Marika Hackman for years (so I gather), and indeed, several songs on her quintessential breakup album Good at Falling are about Marika. One day I was creeping through Amber’s social media posts and saw she had given her now-ex’s new album a resounding recommendation – and her favorite track, she said, was “Send My Love.” Obviously I had to give it a listen.
Marika’s sweet, lilting voice was so interesting to hear for the first time after listening to her ex warbling about her in a comparatively sad, gravelly voice for years. This song feels to me like Imogen Heap and Phoebe Bridgers’ lovechild – a driving rhythm, a pretty melody, a thoughtful vibe, and gay undertones out the wazoo.
Sarah Harmer – Late Bloomer
Never thought I’d be the marrying kind / It was nothing to be always left behind / From the ship that would sail with everyone on it / I said, “Give me the land – I know what I want and where I’m wanted” / But you came in whistling, “I’ll go if you’ll go” / And I was waiting around to play like an old piano
Okay, I know not everyone will think this song is sexy, but something about Sarah Harmer’s voice makes me into a crushy queer mess – and this song overflows with romantic tension moreso than sexual tension, the former being, paradoxically, sometimes the sexiest kind of tension. (To me, anyway.)
Sarah sings in this song about (so far as I can tell) falling hard for someone at a time when you felt sure you’d never fall that hard again. She sings about two people who thought they’d never get married, realizing that maybe they want to marry each other. It’s a last-ditch romance, a late-arriving passion, lost opportunities fading away to make room for new love. Sarah’s voice is clear and high one moment, and sexy and throaty the next. To me, this song feels like having a crush – but maybe I just have a crush on Sarah Harmer.
Alina Baraz – Take it Home
You say that you want someone to hold / I just wanna get you all alone / You just gotta say it / Don’t you keep me waiting
Alina’s been on this list every year it’s existed and the reason is clear: everything she makes is sexy. She’s in fine form here – breathy and sweet, full of yearning, singing over deep beats and smooth guitars that feel like being laid out on a big bed in a dim room by someone you’re excited to fuck.
I still find it amazing that you can hit “shuffle” on Alina Baraz’s whole discography and it’ll make the ideal sonic backdrop for sex, no matter what ends up playing. I mean. Could Alina be any more perfect?!
John Mayer – Do You Know Me?
It’s just the strangest thing / I’ve seen your face somewhere / An early evening dream / A past-life love affair / Do you know me at all?
This song came out in 2009 so I’m not sure how it’s never made its way onto this list before… It’s one of the most beautiful things John Mayer has ever written – which probably doesn’t sound like a high honor unless you’ve been a JM superfan at some point in your life like I have, because his hit songs are never the prettiest/smartest/best ones. But he’s masterful with pretty jazz chords and delicate guitar riffs, and this song is a prime example.
The lyrics are simple and spare, so it’s not totally clear what the song’s about, but I think it’s about that feeling when you see someone across the room at a party or a bar and you get the immediate sense that they’re going to be meaningful to you. Sometimes this instant resonance feels like love at first sight; sometimes it feels more like déja vu. Either way, it can be so impactful that it knocks you off your feet.
Missy Bauman – Why Do We Fight?
Is loving me too much for you? / You say that that’s unfair to you / The way that I just stared at you / I love you, I love you
I’m a little biased because my brother played drums on this track, but it really is stunning. “Dreamy drug folk” singer Missy‘s voice is clear as a bell here, sad, sensuous, sparkly. This song kinda sounds like what would result if My Brightest Diamond covered a Weeknd song: haunting, tragic, yet oddly sexy.
You know that period of time near the end of a relationship when you’re still having sex, but you know with near-certainty that you’re going to break up sometime soon? This song feels like that. Like the last gasps of something that used to feel good, and still does, a little.
Broken Social Scene – All to All
Call of forgiveness / I’m like the beat of the hurt / I’m not the only one you tried to save / When you fell out
I stumbled across this song because I was fervently Googling the beautiful Lisa Lobsinger, big-haired and soft-voiced lead singer of the long-defunct band Reverie Sound Revue (who I’ve mentioned on this list previously). She occasionally sings for Broken Social Scene, a “super-band” known for its huge rotating cast of players from the Canadian music world, like Feist and Emily Haines.
One of the magical things about Lisa Lobsinger is that she can make you feel things even if you can’t understand what she’s actually saying (and you often can’t). She can also take lyrics that don’t really make sense, and make them feel like a coherent emotional statement. All this to say: I have no clue what this song is about, but I know that it feels like it’s about regret, remorse, missed opportunities, “right place, wrong time,” and the way we ruminate when a relationship ends but we desperately wish it had not.
Chet Atkins – Take Five
This guitar arrangement of the Dave Brubeck Quartet classic is searching and chaotic and weird. “Take Five” is known among jazz nerds for its unusual quintuple time signature; most songs count to 3 or 4 in every bar, but this one counts to 5. To me, this makes “Take Five” feel more like the way bodies actually move in the dark. Fucking isn’t always steady or predictable; sometimes there’s sudden pauses to readjust, or brief interludes of still whispers, or hard thrusts thrown in like a wrench in the works. Our bodies and their rhythms are deeply erratic and that’s part of why they’re also erotic.
I heard this guitar version of the song while I was out somewhere, and Shazam’ed it immediately, because I was stunned by the skill involved. The original is a sax playing an iconic melody over top of some supportive piano chords, but Chet Atkins has somehow managed to cram all that complexity into a guitar arrangement he apparently played all at once, all by himself. If the Brubeck version feels like off-kilter sex, this version feels like off-kilter masturbation – equally charming, but in its own way.
Andy Shauf – Changer
I heard you’re back in town / Working at the drugstore / Did you get the city blues? / That, I can relate to / Change on, changer
Andy Shauf’s The Neon Skyline is probably my favorite new album of 2020. What can I say – I just love the guy. A quiet Canadian indie legend who pens thoughtful songs about made-up characters in made-up situations, he’s the type of brilliant songwriter who can make me cry through a computer screen. (And indeed he did, this year, when he played the sad gay unrequited love song “To You” on a fundraiser concert stream. I literally could not stop the tears from flowing and flowing. I think I got a bit dehydrated. Dammit, Andy.)
“Changer” is the closing track of Skyline; the protagonist has just spent the entire album yearning for his recent ex, Judy, and awkwardly trying to get her back, and “Changer” is a moment of sad reflection at the end of a drunken night. Judy has changed, while her mopey ex has not. He still wants her; she just wants to move on. I can picture this song playing on the jukebox at the Skyline bar where the album takes place, as our hero slow-dances with someone whose name he doesn’t know, trying to forget the love he doesn’t get to have anymore.
What sexy (or sexy-adjacent) songs did you love this year?
It’s been quite a week, to say the least. And quite a month. And quite a year.
While there has been an occasional piece of good news amongst the bad (Joe! Kamala! All the wonderful trans and BIPOC candidates who won senate seats! Steve Kornacki finally getting to pack up his map and go get some sleep!), obviously overall it has been a rough time to be a human. That’s part of why, in my sex educator communities, there has been so much discussion this year of how (or whether!) to try to reignite your libido in such tumultuous times.
This is a fairly new problem for me, and I know I’m lucky in that way. Traditionally my libido hasn’t ebbed, but has instead flowed, during times of high stress. If that’s your experience too, please know that there’s nothing wrong with it – it can be more difficult to navigate when you’re in a relationship with someone whose stress affects them in the opposite way, but it’s still fine!
It’s also 100% fine if you don’t want to revive your libido right now – either because there’s too much other stuff to do (our work is not over and there’s still a lot that can be done to support, for example, Democrats in the Georgia runoff elections), or because you just don’t have the energy at the moment (FAIR!), or because you just plain don’t feel sexy while fascism is flaring.
This post, however, is for people whose sexual desire has waned, and who want to do something about that. Sex and masturbation can be almost medicinal for me in stressful times, giving me much-needed bursts of happy neurotransmitters, affirmation of my desirability and desirousness, or even just helping me sleep. So here are some tips you can try if you’re missing sex – or just missing the sensation of wanting sex – and want to give your libido a gentle boost.
Try something new sexually. It doesn’t even really matter what it is. A magnificent new vibrator or clitoral sucker. A kink scene involving hot wax or E-stim. Even just a new position. Many sex and relationships experts point to the hit of happy chemicals your brain produces when you try a new and exciting thing, regardless of whether the thing itself ends up becoming a new fave of yours or not. This is a really easy way to put the spring back in your step sexually.
Not sure where to start? Take a BDSM quiz online (with a partner or alone), fill out a Yes/No/Maybe list, peruse sex toy reviews written by people you trust (hiii), or just ask your perviest friend what their latest sexual fascination is!
Seek out new sexual stimuli. I know it’s not always the most fun thing to scroll through porn sites or flip through erotica books when sex feels unappealing, but it’s gotta be better than sitting around feeling sad about your magically disappearing libido, right?
Set aside some time on a regular basis to explore new things in your sexual medium of choice, whether that be hardcore kinky porn, soft tender fanfiction, group sex erotica, or literally whatever. Maybe it’ll be unbelievably hot and get you all riled up; maybe it’ll just make you laugh or teach you more about human sexuality. Either way, it’ll give your brain and genitals something new to ponder. (Don’t forget to pay for your porn, please! Supporting sex workers is hot.)
Drugs ‘n’ supplements. (Big congrats to all the states that recently legalized weed, medicinal shrooms, etc.!) These are not an option for everyone, of course, whether it be due to their own personal views on drugs, or something more logistical like an incompatibility with crucial medications they’re already on. There’s also the question of how drugs may affect one’s ability to consent – which is why I suggest negotiating the components of an upcoming sexual encounter while still sober, deciding on safewords that are easy to say, and checking in regularly.
I’ve always found that smoking or vaping marijuana enhances my arousal and pleasure, in part because it reduces the volume of my depressed and anxious thoughts. Some of my friends have had similar experiences with shrooms, hashish, and various other trippy goodies. You could also look into natural libido supplements, such as HerSolution, which contains bloodflow-boosting niacin, orgasm-intensifying cayenne, and various other herbals, nutrients, and alleged aphrodisiacs. (Be sure to check with your doctor before adding anything new to your medication regimen, especially if you have preexisting conditions!)
Cultivate a new crush. I often return to this strategy when I’m depressed because I know how motivating and uplifting a juicy crush can be for me. Maybe you’re still fantasizing about the map guys from election week and want to go read some John King fanfiction. Maybe that person you follow on Twitter for their hilarious political jokes would be open to a flirty DM (tread carefully and respectfully!). Maybe you just want to re-watch a beloved old TV show and obsess over the will-they-won’t-they dynamic between your favorite characters.
However you choose to manifest it, I believe that (for those of us who are alloromantic, i.e. capable of experiencing romantic attraction) crushy energy can be heart-healing and world-widening. This is true even if (and perhaps especially if) nothing ever comes of the crush. Just like meditation is more about the bliss of the journey than it is about the one-time attainment of enlightenment, having a crush can be more about the invigorating almostness of it than it is about actually pursuing the person/people you have your eye on. And yeah, sometimes that can lead to an uptick in sexy feelings, too.
Make time and space for yourself to feel sexy. This one is so important, and unfortunately our overstuffed days under capitalism don’t often allow for it. But study after study has shown that stress inhibits sexual desire, and so in many cases your best bet in fighting libido troubles is to eliminate the stressors in your life that can be eliminated, whenever possible, and create little stress-free zones within your day/week/life.
This might mean rearranging your work week so that you have 3 hours open on a Tuesday night to read erotica in a hot bath by candlelight. It might mean asking your spouse to watch the kids for an evening so you can try out your new sex toy. It might mean addressing that lingering health issue that’s been making you feel super gross/ugly but that you haven’t had the time or energy to deal with. It might mean doing your hair and makeup, slipping into some lingerie, and taking some sensuous selfies so you can get some sweet sweet dopamine hits from your thirsty followers’ likes and retweets. It might mean clearing your schedule to watch a sexy ’90s thriller while munching popcorn with your sweetheart and then seeing where the night takes you.
The point is, you can’t expect yourself to just randomly feel sexy if all the circumstances of your life are conspiring to keep you focused on more pressing but less fun things. Sex may be “play” but it doesn’t have to be an afterthought if it’s important to you; you can choose to make it a priority, to treat it as an ironclad commitment on your calendar, to leave the proverbial door open so your desire can pay you a visit.
What has helped you most when you’ve had a prolonged dip in your sexual desire?
Thanks to HerSolution for sponsoring this post! As always, all writing and opinions are my own.
Blindfolds are so versatile. I never regret bringing one with me while I travel, even if by “travel” I just mean “take the subway across the city for a sex-date.” Of all the products you can buy at a sex shop, I think blindfolds are right up there with lube in the category of “low price, high impact.”
The three uses of blindfolds that I enjoy most often are sleep, sensory deprivation, and anxiety reduction – let’s talk about ’em.
Sleep
For the past couple of months, I’ve been waking up refreshed when my alarm goes off at 9 a.m., and rarely wanting to go back to sleep. This may not sound like a huge deal, but for me it is. I’ve been a chronically sleepy person my entire life, as a side effect of depression, especially seasonal depression. Hell, even when I was in elementary school and had no diagnosed mental illnesses, sometimes teachers would tell my mom and dad in parent-teacher meetings that they worried I wasn’t getting enough sleep at home because I kept dozing off in class. Oops. (Look, I can’t help it that hearing someone read aloud from a novel in French is incredibly soothing… or that fractions are incredibly boring.)
So what’s changed? Why are my mornings suddenly energetic even sans coffee? I attribute this shift to my sleep mask. I’ve worn eye masks to bed sporadically over the years, but usually they didn’t fit right, or didn’t block out light very effectively, or were so uncomfortable that I would take them off in the middle of the night while half-asleep. It wasn’t until I bought this one – which is made of dark-colored, silky satin, padded for comfort, with a nose cut-out that works for my big schnoz – that I would go to sleep wearing a mask and wake up with it still positioned correctly on my face. So I started experiencing the benefits of sleeping with an eye mask on: deeper and more restful sleep, less insomnia, and fewer instances of waking up through the night. Truly astonishing.
If you have sleep troubles and haven’t yet tried an eye mask – or haven’t yet tried one that fits you properly and blocks out all the light within your field of vision – then I would highly recommend it. It’s maybe the best $12 I ever spent.
Sensory deprivation
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that wearing a blindfold during sex can be hot; Cosmopolitan and Fifty Shades have done a good enough job of that already, their various flaws notwithstanding. But it’s often depicted as a novelty, a way to “spice things up,” while for me it’s a regular enough part of my sex life that I’d consider it a staple. Want to have sex like Kate Sloan does?! Get yourself an Eroscillator, an Eleven, and a blindfold. (Oh, and turn on a playlist filled with cheesy R&B and slow-roiling jazz.)
It’s true what they say about how reducing or eliminating one sense can turn up the sensitivity of the others. (Just listen to this recent Off the Cuffs interview with a blind dominatrix if you don’t believe me. God, she’s amazing.) When I’m wearing a blindfold, my nerve endings feel primed for all sensations, my ears perk up, and smells and tastes are more vivid and more erotic.
Blindfolds can also help reinforce a power dynamic, if you’re into that. Sight is, of course, one of the primary tools I use to guide myself through the world, assess situations, and make decisions – and when it’s removed, I’m stripped of most of my usual ways of processing information and figuring out what to do next. In a sexual context, this means that a blindfold can make me feel instantly powerless, even in the absence of other classic submissive props like cuffs or a ballgag. This is also one of the reasons they’re a must-have in the toolkit of any burgeoning or nervous dom – depending on how your sub reacts to them, they can bolster the power dynamic you’re trying to create, and may thereby bolster your confidence as a dominant.
Anxiety reduction
I’m no psychology researcher, so I can’t tell you how far-reaching this effect is – but blindfolds are massively helpful for me for treating mid-sex anxiety. Am I feeling shy and embarrassed? Put a blindfold on me. Hating my body that day? Put a blindfold on me. Distracted by the “New Message From Mom” notifications that keep popping up on my phone screen? Put a blindfold on me. (And also put that phone on Do Not Disturb!)
Blindfolds take a lot of pressure off, because you can’t reasonably be expected to do much of anything when you have one on. A blowjob is probably the most dexterous thing I ever do while blindfolded; anything more challenging would be nearly impossible. In this way, wearing a blindfold helps me relax into pleasure, or submission, or just being in the moment.
Blindfolds are also, as I’ve mentioned, potentially helpful for dominants who put ’em on their submissives. Part of my nervousness around taking the reins in bed is related to how I look while I’m doing it; I’ve never felt like a picture-perfect femdom, not least of which because I’m more likely wearing sweaty pajamas than leather and lace. But as soon as I blindfold my partner, I can take control without needing to worry about how I look – including how I look when I accidentally drop the flogger between the bed and the wall, or squirt myself in the face with lube. Whoops.
How have blindfolds improved your life, sexually or otherwise?
Recently, I asked my partner to write mini reviews of some lewd self-portraits I shot in Agent Provocateur lingerie (yep, I’m needy as fuck) and, in one of the shots, it became evident that I had teamed this very expensive, sexy ensemble with a pair of blue calf-high socks. Rather than do what most people would do and either wish they weren’t there or not even notice them, my partner noted that the socks “show me that you want to come, and they’re the only thing that will be left on you once I get my hands on you.” I giggled, blushed, and nodded. Exactly.
If you’d be mystified receiving a sext like that, let me explain. A study done in 2003 in the Netherlands, on the neural processes that contribute to orgasm, found (among numerous other things) that wearing socks increased female participants’ rate of orgasm from 50% to 80%. Innnteresting.
This makes sense to me, given what I’ve learned from sex researcher Emily Nagoski about how women can be more sensitive than men to the presence of “sexual brakes,” i.e. factors that inhibit sexual arousal both physically and psychologically. (For the record, I’m not really sure how this information relates to trans women or nonbinary people, or whether gender-non-conforming people were included in any of the relevant studies, although my past experiences reading sex research lead me to believe they probably weren’t sampled significantly or at all.) Having cold feet in the literal sense could give women cold feet in the metaphorical sense about having sex, because in some cases it’s a distraction significant enough that it prevents or slows down the arousal process – at least, for me, and seemingly for other women as well. This is likely compounded by the fact that women’s extremities, on average, run colder than men’s. (Again, I assume the research here refers only to cis people, but would be pleasantly surprised if that was not the case.)
In the many years since I first read about the socks study, I’ve cited it to multiple sexual partners when asked why I tend to keep my socks on during sex, or (in the cases of a few foot fetishists) when lustily asked to remove my socks. It’s interesting how just explaining “My feet get cold,” like I used to do before I knew about the science, was typically met with more resistance than the more recent and more airtight “Studies show wearing socks during sex helps with having orgasms.” It’s almost as if… people trust male scientists more than they trust women about women’s own bodies?! Gee, who’da thunk.
I should note here that many people have a legitimate aesthetic issue with the whole idea of socks during sex. Either they think it looks silly and weird (which is their prerogative – I know even ultra-busty pouty-lipped sex dolls would look kinda odd wearing woollen hiking socks and nothing else) or they’re turned on by feet and/or full nudity. When I fuck someone who feels this way, my partners’ orgasms may be inhibited almost as much by me wearing socks as mine would be by me not wearing socks – so I’m sometimes willing to bend my policy and work a little harder for my orgasms, knowing I can wriggle back into my nice warm socks when we’re done. I do, after all, want my partners to enjoy having sex with me!
But luckily for me, I’ve had about as many paramours who loved socks as ones who wanted to ban them from our bedroom. This, I think, can be attributed mostly to my interest in DD/lg – there are a lot of visual tropes within that fetish, and knee-high and thigh-high socks are high on the list for many kinksters. I still remember the time I settled into bed for a nice long phone-sex sesh with a daddy dom years ago: he asked me what I was wearing, I told him “a T-shirt, underwear, and some knee-high socks,” and he moaned/growled/grunted with such ferocity that I knew I had made the right choice even though he couldn’t even see my outfit.
Sometimes when I talk to other women about wearing socks during sex – and, yeah, my life is sufficiently weird that this topic does come up in conversation with friends sometimes – they seem slightly mystified by my decision to put my comfort first in a sexual scenario. I think this is sadly emblematic of our sexual culture. Mainstream porn, for example – while I adore much of it and think it is necessary and important – is full of messaging which suggests that hot sex and comfortable sex are basically mutually exclusive, especially for women (can you IMAGINE doing reverse cowgirl, while standing, for 20+ minutes straight?! I simply cannot). And indeed, there are some sex acts I enjoy greatly which could not be considered “comfortable” by any stretch of the imagination (getting paddled and getting throat-fucked come to mind), so it’s not like discomfort is incompatible with arousal for me. But for some reason, socks are one place where I draw a line. I’m rarely up for being uncomfortable in this particular way even though I’ll happily be uncomfortable in various other ways during sex from time to time.
I will say, too, that this has sometimes been a litmus test of sorts for how a new partner reacts to boundary-setting or mid-bang communication. Are they really so committed to their porn-borne sexual scripts that they’re going to insist on full nudity at the expense of my comfort? Are they really going to argue with me about this perfectly reasonable boundary I have set for my own body? Or are they going to say “Huh,” shrug it off, and move on like nothing is wrong (because nothing is)?
Despite being a foot fetishist, my current partner is so devoted to and interested in my pleasure and my orgasm that they’ll often encourage me to keep my socks on during sex. And this makes it all the more delicious for both of us when – after giving me a partly socks-enabled orgasm or two – they crawl down my body, rest their hand gently on my ankle, and ask so so sweetly, “May I take these off and look at your feet?”
Respecting sexual partners’ boundaries is so, so important, even if those boundaries don’t totally make sense to you. Every time a partner respects one of my boundaries without question, it becomes easier and more fun for me later on to bend my more flexible boundaries in the name of pleasure. Heeding my “no” now is likely to get you a “yes” later, for something else. I’m glad science exists to back me up when I set this particular boundary, but the truth is, I shouldn’t need a scientific citation to state what I want and have that be respected.
So when my partner compliments the socks I’m wearing in nudes ‘n’ lewds, I know it’s more than just a compliment. It’s an affirmation that my choices are valid, my boundaries are important, and I am beautiful regardless of which clothes I do, or don’t, remove.
