How To Do Sex And Stuff

3 p.m. RedTube break! I pretty much masturbate daily. (The perks of freelance.) Today I’m at the apartment, in our bedroom. I always lock the front door, just in case. Helps me melt into the moment.

I was very excited when I saw that The Sex Diaries are back for the summer. Years ago I used to binge-read them, going through the archives to see how all those anonymous people Do Sex.

There’s definitely an element of pervy voyeurism; one horny jail inmate peeking into the cell of another. But there’s very little sex writing out there that takes on the actual context of sex, as well as the mechanics. There’s a lot of sex writing designed to arouse (almost never not cringeworthy), or educate (never not boring), but the best sex writing situates the actual sex within someone’s actual life.

Take the woman quoted above. She talks about masturbating and fucking her boyfriend and sexting her sidepiece and all that good horny stuff, and she notes the why’s as well as the how’s. She can masturbate during the day because she works from home, for example, a practice my friend Emily once called “dialing O on the pink telephone,” which I will share any chance I get because I think it is the most perfect euphemism of all time.

We’re all kind of fumbling in the dark — pun intended — when it comes to sex, and I’ve heard enough platitudes and morality tales to last me a lifetime, seen enough porn to know what I think is hot and not, traded enough numbers to know when someone knows what they’re doing and when they’re honest enough to say they don’t. And there is no better or smarter way to learn something useful about sex than to just listen to a story about how it was done and how that felt. Even if it’s totally different than what you would ever want! Or something you do but very differently! The value is in the telling, not the teaching, you know what I mean?