I’ve been a sex nerd for a long, long time, y’all. One of the ways this manifested early in my life was subscribing to the Bad_Sex community on LiveJournal.
At the time, I didn’t give much critical thought to why these stories fascinated me so much. But in retrospect, I think they gave me a sense of perspective about sex that I was missing at that time, as a naive virgin whose main understanding of sex came from flowery erotica stories and slick MMORPG cybersex. When the sex media you consume is all smooth ‘n’ hot, it’s easy to overlook how often real-life sex is boring, confusing, unsatisfying, or straight-up bad.
Let me be clear here: I am not talking about sex that’s bad from a consent perspective, i.e. rape, coerced sex, and so on. That is a whole other kettle of fish, obviously hugely problematic in different ways and for different reasons. I am talking about sex where consent is freely and mutually given, that turns out to be bad due to other factors. It happens, and I think we don’t talk about it enough, leaving the young or inexperienced among us with unrealistic expectations of sex as effortlessly perfect and magical.
So I was excited when Lily Wilson reached out to me to tell me about her new book, In the Glow of the Lavalamp: Stories of Bad Sex and Other Misfortunes. It’s a series of short, funny bad-sex tales. Flipping through Lily’s book inspired me to reflect on some of my own memories of bad sex…
The first time I ever had penetrative sex was a mess. Me and a cute lesbian FWB decided our foreplay should be scissoring, since that’s, I guess, the quintessential girl-on-girl act. (Or at least, it was, in the minds of two 16-year-old baby queers who watched too much The L Word.) She’d just purchased some blueberry cheesecake-flavored lube and, having never used lube before, decided one full handful each was the proper amount. We anointed our vulvas with this sticky elixir and then rubbed them together until our muscles ached and the slippery squelching sounds made us giggle so profusely we had to stop.
Next we attempted the centerpiece of our evening: strap-on sex. She suited up in her new harness and slipped a smallish grey silicone dildo through the O-ring. We tried one position, and then another, and another, but no matter what we tried, we couldn’t figure out how to get the dildo into me without hurting me. I’d already used a bigger dildo on myself plenty of times so the hymen hypothesis didn’t check out; it was seemingly an issue of angle and awkwardness.
Finally, we settled on the “cowgirl” position: me on top, astride my pal. I ground down against her for many minutes, looking for an angle that would give me any pleasure whatsoever, but I couldn’t find one. She seemed to be enjoying it, though, so I kept at it… for half an hour. We bucked and writhed in near-silence, just breathing and grunting and sweating. So much sweating. I literally dripped sweat onto her. I felt disgusting. But I couldn’t stop, because she was… into it? Maybe? I couldn’t tell.
When I finally collapsed in exhaustion beside her, I asked, “Did you come?” and she replied, totally mystified, “No. Did you?” Of course, I hadn’t. And the window for any further pleasure had closed, both of us being too overexerted to move, let alone get each other off. We fell into a deep, unsatisfied slumber, in a puddle of sweat, saccharine lube, and bemused disappointment.
The last truly bad sex I had happened last summer, 5 days after a breakup, which should’ve been my first clue it was ill-advised. A beardy Tinder bro talked my ear off at a bar for an hour about his career ambitions, his creative vocations, places he’d been, girls he’d fucked. He mocked the food I ordered, expressed zero sympathy when I mentioned I’d just been through a difficult split, and asked me literally nothing about myself.
And yet, somehow, I decided to go back to his apartment with him. I am not proud.
We smoked weed in his humid attic apartment and launched into messy makeouts, no romance or pretense whatsoever. He awkwardly tried to pin me down because I’d mentioned being submissive, but it felt hollow, perhaps because I’d dated an ardently dominant kinkster so recently and was still sad about it. He went down on me and unleashed a pointy, flicky tongue on my hypersensitive clit, causing me to squirm away and offer breathy suggestions like, “Can you do that slower and softer?” or “Can you focus on the side of my clit instead of right on it?” but he seemed confused by these directives and just kept at it.
After a few more minutes of this, I gave up and tried to transition things into good ol’-fashioned fucking, but neither of us seemed that enthused about his dick being inside me. Finally, he finished himself off on my chest and belly while we kissed. As we laid there in the smoky darkness afterward, he asked, “Did you come?” and I narrowly resisted the urge to exclaim, “LOL, nah, bro.”
Unsurprisingly, what both these bad-sex stories have in common is a lack of assertiveness and communication. There are good reasons for that: the culture we live in encourages us to keep quiet about sex, and also encourages female and feminine folks, in particular, to downplay our needs and focus on making other people happy. I don’t regret these experiences, and my other forays into bad sex, because I’ve learned a lot from every one of those encounters – but I like to think I’d be better at avoiding situations like these nowadays.
Alana Massey once wrote, in an essay about bad first dates, “This life is short and wild and precious, and people are spending way too much time on first dates that they need to skedaddle on out of as soon as they know things are heading south.” I think this sentiment applies to bad sex, too – though leaving any romantic or sexual interaction midway through is, obviously, easier said than done.
Bonus: here’s an interview I did with Lily Wilson, the author of In the Glow of the Lavalamp: Stories of Bad Sex and Other Misfortunes!
Kate Sloan: What made you want to write a book about bad sex?
Lily Wilson: I’d written a story about an incident that was hilariously bad. When I shared it, people began coming out of the woodwork saying, “OH! You won’t believe what happened to me!” They’d tell me their own stories. Many of these were funny. Bad sex happens more frequently than most people imagine; in fact, there’s a universal aspect to it. But we don’t often talk about it. An activity that involves so many complex interactions, so many things that can’t be controlled, is bound to go wrong some of the time. I began to collect the stories and get permission to write them down. They aren’t always funny, but I do love the humor – that’s what makes the disasters bearable.
KS: Assuming we’re talking about sex that is consensual and not coerced, what makes sex “bad”?
LW: Two categories of things can make it bad: 1) stuff that is out of the control of either participant, and 2) choices the participants make. Category One includes things like disasters: the roof falling in on top of you, a giant rat pouncing on the bed… Also in this category would be like illness, accidents, interruptions, that sort of thing. These stories are usually funny, at least in retrospect.
Category Two is more complicated; it covers choices the participants make. Mismatched desires and expectations are behind a lot of bad sex. If both people are not honest about what they want, there’s a strong possibility the sex will be lousy. If person A wants roleplaying, costumes, and trapezes, and person B wants something more basic, and either person fails to communicate, this is not going to go well, probably for either of them. Sometimes people want connection so badly they stifle their needs and desires and attempt to settle for whatever is on offer. Like, OK, I will do y and z, and hope that I can at least have a minute or two of j and k. This approach generally does not produce a happy ending.
Category Two also includes the degree to which each partner cares about the experience of the other. Most of us have been with someone who was completely oblivious to or unconcerned with how the sex was for us… It is very difficult to have a good experience with such a person.
KS: What’s your #1 piece of advice for avoiding bad sex?
LW: Communicate! Make sure your expectations are compatible. Two people don’t have to want exactly the same thing, but it’s important that your expectations don’t nullify theirs, and their expectations don’t make yours impossible to fulfill. Make sure your partner cares about how the experience is for you. That sounds almost too basic to bother stating it, but there are an astounding number of people in the world who seem to be unaware of/uninterested in what their partner experiences. You get to say “No, thank you” to such people.
Thanks so much to Lily for doing this interview and for writing such an interesting book! You can buy it on Kobo or check it out on Amazon here.
Heads up: this post was sponsored, and as always, all opinions and writing (save for Lily’s answers to my questions) are my own.