Phone sex, dirty talk, and fear
I can hear the big happy orgy out there, but I’m afraid..
“My girlfriend is great,” said. “We go to shows, smoke up, and have some of the best sex I’ve ever had.” This is my Southern Californian duuuude, and he is still thrilled about this girlfriend he met last summer. She’s got everything going on that he wants… except the dirty shit?
“She doesn’t know how to talk dirty,” he told me in our call a couple of days ago. “She doesn’t know how to talk the way I like to,” which, if you remember his calls, would involve her pretending that he is a woman and his name is Wendy and he wants to be done like a sweaty, long-haired, nubile lesbian, with lots of frottage involving ass cheeks and double-headed dildos and egging each other on with words like “bitch” and “whore” and “slut”. (Yesterday we did something a little different, we got Jenna Jameson in for a threesome.)
The thing is, my surfer-dude lesbian is SUPER easy to do: he says exactly what he wants to do, likes to guide the scene himself, and talks a LOT. I don’t actually have to do that much in calls with him. I just make lots of slurpy noises during the make-out bits and the rim jobs; I call him “bitch”, and respond with appropriate enthusiasm to any new position change. I just have to listen; he tells me what he wants to happen.
I just have to listen.
This is, I think, the sticking point for most people who want to try dirty talk, but are freaked out. They think they’re going to have to pour out the filth, just scrape it up from the bottom of a barrel that feels completely dry, and they don’t realize that it’s really a conversation. No matter who is talking, it is a conversation.
And how do you make a conversation go? You listen closely. You’re not waiting to jump in with your own shit, but listening, really hearing, what the other person has to say. You listen deep, to the stuff underneath the words, to their actual feelings about the subject, to the things they want to ask but maybe aren’t yet articulating. You match the tone of your voice to theirs: they slow down and relax, you do too. They get a little slangy or colloquial, you do too.
That’s just one of the things I want to tell people, when they tell me they want to talk dirty, but can’t, when they tell me that they want their partners to talk dirty to them: It’s just a fucking conversation, at the core! If they’re awkward in regular conversations, that’s one thing. But they’re having conversations with me while they’re telling me these things! So what is really going on?
Here’s what I think: it’s not that these people don’t know how to dirty talk. They don’t know how to listen. Or they’re afraid of what they might hear. And they don’t know how to say what they really want. Or they’re afraid of what they might say. Yeah, you know, given the state of our society around sex, I think it’s more likely that they’re afraid of what might happen if they just pop out and say it.. They’re afraid of looking like a fool. Of not looking “like a man”. Of being a woman who wants sex so much. Of not wanting the things they’re supposed to want. Of wanting something so disgusting that no one would ever want to be with them ever again. Of burning in hell. Of not ever being able to unsay it. Of the secret getting out.
When my surfer-dude-lesbian says his girlfriend isn’t good at dirty talk, and that’s why he doesn’t want to do this fantasy with her, all I hear is, “I’m afraid to tell her. I’m afraid she won’t listen without judgment. I’m afraid.”
I want someone to listen, but I’m afraid.