Dear Reader,
When thinking about how I formed an understanding of my own sex life, I will never forget the educator I had in school who explained male vs. female sexuality to a roomful of impressionable teenagers thusly:
When it comes to sexuality, boys are like hammers and girls are like Swiss Army knives. One is direct, straightforward, and occasionally a bit one-note. The other is complex, multifaceted, and some might even say a bit complicated. In my (admittedly limited) lived experience, I've found this to be true. You ask a man what turns him on, and the answer is typically very concrete: big boobs, round ass, etc. etc. You ask a woman the same question, and the answers are all over the map and require a bit of context to truly understand: Sleeves rolled up on muscular forearms. Gray sweatpants. Grunting, but only certain kinds of grunting. It's the reason why men like porn and women tend to prefer smut--we like to fill in the gaps with our imagination. It's a little bit harder to spell out what turns us on in concrete terms.
Reader, it's even harder to answer that question when you've never been asked it in the first place, not even by yourself. And that's exactly the position I found myself in late last year when my husband approached me with a simple challenge: list out 10 things you would like to try in the bedroom.
It seemed like such a simple question, yet I found myself at a loss for days trying to come up with answers. 5 felt like a huge number. 10 felt impossible. I wandered around my house for a week, wracking my brain for inspiration and finding none. I hadn't looked at sex the way I might look at fun new restaurants opening up in my city; I didn't have a secret "list" somewhere of hidden desires I was just waiting for the opportunity to spring on my unsuspecting spouse. I wasn't even fully aware of what else was out there that I could try--had they released new sexual positions while I was busy being old and boring? I briefly considered getting a copy of the Kama Sutra and opening it to 10 random pages to pad out my list but rightly decided that was probably against the spirit of this mysterious challenge my husband was organizing.
Ultimately, I summoned the brain cells to put together a list of 10. I allowed myself the flexibility to include things I had already tried and liked. This helped me push past the mental block of coming up with totally new things to try. For a woman who heard the word "shibari" and assumed it was some kind of sushi, this was a necessary modification. As instructed, I wrote each one down on a separate index card, then tucked the cards into their own individual envelopes, which my husband had labeled with even numbers between 2 and 20. Pleased with my effort, I carried the stack of envelopes to the living room, where I used them to make it rain on my husband. This is Atlanta, after all.
