Here's a short list of some things I think are totally awesome

Here's a short list of some things I think are totally awesome: + Squirming and moaning during sex in a genuine way, out of genuine pleasure! + Acting Super Excited when your partner wants to do something you're actually Super Excited about! + Being up for sexual experimentation and trying new things, while keeping track of your boundaries and saying no (or calling your safeword) to sexual things you really don't like! Those things are great. They're great when they happen in all kinds of sex, and I have no problem with how people experience or deal with with those things -- whether people get them from vanilla or S&M sex, or porn, or sex with multiple people, or queer sex, or whatever. All consensual sex is fine with me. (In particular, in pieces like the one you're about to read, I often have to make it really clear that I'm not anti-porn. OK? I'm not anti- porn. Got that? Say it with me now: Clarisse Thorn is not anti-porn. Yay, it rhymes!) What scares me, however--what continuously gets my goat, what still occasionally makes me feel weird about sex -- is how easy it is to perform those three things I listed above. Because I have always, since before I even started having sex, known exactly what I was supposed to look like while I had sex. I don't even know how I internalized those images: some of them through porn, I suppose, or art or erotica or what have you; some of them by reading sex tips on the Internet or hearing the ones whispered to me by friends. But I can definitely assure you that before I had any actual sexual partners, I knew how to give a good blowjob. I also knew how to tilt my head back and moan, and I knew how to twist my body, and I knew what my reactions and expressions were supposed to look and sound like -- I knew all those things much better than I knew what would make me react. There was a while there, where my sexuality was mostly performance: an image, an act, a shell that I created because I knew it was hot for my partners. I'm not saying I was performing 100% of the time -- but certainly, when I was just starting to have sex, that's mostly what it was. And, scarily, I can put the shell back on at any time. Sometimes it's hard to resist, because I know men will reward me for it, emotionally, with affection and praise. It's much, much more difficult to get what I actually want out of a sexual interaction than it is for me to create that sexy dreamgirl shell: hard for me to communicate my desires, hard for me to know what I'm thinking, hard for me to set boundaries. And hard to believe that a guy will like me as much, if I try to be honest about what I want. Honesty means that sometimes I'm confused, and sometimes we have to Talk About It; honesty means that sometimes I say no, it means that sometimes I'm not Up For It. Something in me is always asking: Surely he'd prefer the sexy, fake, plastic dreamgirl Shell? It's not true, I know it's not true, I swear it's not true -- I don't have such a low opinion of men as that. I know this is just a stereotype, the idea that men are emotionally stunted horndogs with no interest in how their partners feel. So sometimes, I have to fight myself not to perform. But it's worth it -- because the hardest thing of all is feeling locked into an inauthentic sexuality. I tell myself, I try to HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018512