Free Future Sex by Emily Witt Page A

Shouldn’t I have the right to be in the world without having to contend with male desire? My whole life I had received strangers attempting to flirt with me withthe graciousness of a fence post. It had always filled me with annoyance. I could never take it lightly, as I saw my friends could, when we were interrupted at a bar in the middle of an interesting conversation to endure a dull performance by a man. My first impulse was always to indicate that I wanted to be left alone as quickly as possible. Of all the things Nicole Daedone said to me, however,the idea of acknowledging and accepting the sexuality in a room, feeling it, naming it, and inhabiting it, was a kernel of a thing that I kept trying to dismiss but found I was unable to stop thinking about. To walk into a room and concentrate on the way my body responded to the people in it was a sexual inquiry I could conduct privately, without any risk. After thinking of what Nicole had said,I discerned a duplicity at work in the archive of my own perceptions, whereby I had carefully excised my sexual awareness of other people from the naming of my experiences and pretended my own physical responses had not happened. I wondered what this façade of asexuality had cost me in confidence and decisiveness. Had I made choices on false pretenses? To shift my perception meant only that I beganletting myself name when I wanted to stare at someone, or that I fought the impulse to look away when someone stared at me. I tried to notice the catalog of subtle urges or repulsions that I would never name or discuss out loud. I experimented with my responses to getting hit on or hollered at on the street, forcing myself to chat or nod, letting myself experience the unsettled feeling that camewith a sexual overture, just sitting in the feeling and trying to know it, instead of immediately trying to close it down. It became apparent how much energy I expended in being affronted, or wondering whether I should be affronted. Other women at OneTaste would talk about conducting similar personal experiments. They might mention that they had spent a week sitting with their legs spread in public,so as to test out the sense of entitlement or ownership over a space.
    The time now came for Nicole to give a demo of the practice of orgasmic meditation. We took a short break and the staff set up a massage table covered in pillows. Justine Dawson took off her jeans, and the look that passed between Nicole and Justine was one of complete trust and mutual assurance. They were friends who kneweach other well. Sitting up while Nicole explained her process, Justine looked unembarrassed and cheerful. She was a fair-haired woman in her mid-thirties, slim and small. Once Nicole had adjusted the pillows, Justine lay back and splayed her legs.
    “The first thing I’m going to do is safeport her,” said Nicole. She told Justine that her hands were cold. Then she described Justine’s vulva to theroom. This was where Daedone could be her most poetic, evoking seashells and flower petals. As house style, OneTaste always used the terms pussy and cock . When I asked someone why, the response was that the problem with female genitalia was that it was difficult to describe the whole thing—the word vagina , commonly used, at least in the medical sense of the word, refers only to one part of things.So, too, clitoris , vulva , introitus , labia , and all the other parts. Nicole, former student of semantics, had therefore decided to use pussy . “I’m super big on reclamation of terms,” she told me.
    She put lube on her fingers. She explained that she and Justine were old friends who got regularly tested for sexually transmitted infections. We should always use latex gloves. “Sex is not worth dyingfor,” she said. She explained that she would be touching Justine’s clitoris with no more pressure than rubbing a finger across an eyelid. Around the room, men and women touched the pads of their fingertips to their