Content note: This essay deals with consensual but not-entirely-wanted sex, as well as dissociation during sex.
I have been thinking a lot lately about the concept of responsive desire, as laid out by Emily Nagoski in her earthshattering book Come As You Are. This type of desire, in contrast with spontaneous sexual desire (i.e. getting randomly turned on and then wanting to fuck), involves getting turned on in response to sexual stimuli – porn, erotica, touching, kissing, what have you – and then wanting to have sex. It’s not our culture’s favorite narrative for how the so-called sex drive works, but it is fairly common.
I think a lot about how my own mostly-responsive desire affected what I affectionately refer to as my “slutty phase”: the period from about November 2015 to August 2017 when I dated and fucked many people in quick succession, mostly from Tinder or OkCupid. Most of that sex was bad, as hookups are wont to be, and I think that’s largely because neither I nor my flash-in-the-pan partners understood how my desire worked.