A nympho or nymphomaniac: a woman
who craves as much good sex as she can get.
1. Men are drawn to you without exactly knowing why.
2. You keep a box of tissues next to your desk.
And they aren’t for your nose.
3. You notice when a man notices you. And you like it.
4. When talking about sex with your girlfriends,
you don’t mention how often you like it,
because they look at you with raised eyebrows.
5. You orgasm easily. And in multiple ways.
6. You talk dirty with your eyes.
Being a journalist who writes about sex
often gives me performance anxiety. Occasionally
I’ll meet guys who seem to think I’m equipped
to give any man the Night of His Life.
This is supposed to be my goal at all times.
Sometimes I feel I should grab certain guys by
the shoulders and shake them and say, “I’m not
your sex-crazy nympho dream girl! I’m a real
person and I have real preferences, I don’t
exist just as your fantasy fodder!”
But if I really like a guy and he’s read some of my work,
then I feel less irritation than concern that I won’t stack up.
It increases the urge to go all Sexy Dreamgirl
Shell, rather than attempting to communicate.
Being a sex-positive feminist, I also sometimes
worry that other women will read my work and it
will increase their performance anxiety.
I worry that writing about some stuff I like will be misinterpreted—that it will lead other women to feel like, gosh, is this something liberated sex-positive women do? Is this something I “should” be doing?
With some things I write, I get afraid that I’ve contributed to a nightmare world where women are “liberated” only in the sense that we can better perform for men.
I once read a blog post by a radical feminist writer in which she claimed that women always hate fellatio because it’s always degrading and disgusting.
She wrote something along the lines of, “I say this for the women and girls who believe that they have to do it.”
Part of me felt frustrated by the way she refused to acknowledge that some women really do like performing fellatio. And many other women don’t love it, but don’t mind doing it as long as they have great sex otherwise).
In some ways, it felt like that writer was policing sexuality. But I empathized with her goal: She wanted women who don’t like fellatio to relax; she wanted to help them recognize what they don’t like. She wanted to decrease their performance anxiety.
I’d like to do the same thing, but I generally prefer to speak from personal experience rather than making claims about others’ experience.
Accordingly, I’ve often thought that it would be great if more sex-positive feminists would make lists of Things We, Personally, Don’t Like.
It’s not the easiest project to sell, because one of the big goals of being sex-positive is to de-stigmatize sexuality and decrease shame.
But if we de-stigmatize sexuality without encouraging good boundaries, then we’re not moving forward; we’re just creating more bad standards.
So hey, here’s an example of a common sexual thing that I don’t like: swallowing after giving oral sex. I love fellatio most of the time, and I like it when partners come in my mouth, but I really hate swallowing.
In the past I’ve found a variety of creative ways to deal with this problem, some of which were hot (according to me, anyway)—but usually I just spit it out in the closest sink.
A more complicated example would be facials. As a sex-crazy nympho dream girl, I am supposed to love all facials all the time, to which I say: Bah.
I’m occasionally into degradation scenes, and facials feel really degrading to me, so there are circumstances in which a guy can come on my face and it’ll be hot—but those circumstances are rare.
I’ve got to really respect him and really trust him, and I’ve got to be really turned on and excited about whatever scene we’re playing out. And if a guy were to give me a facial without clearing it with me at some point ahead of time? Serious boundary violation. Not cool.
Have I destroyed your image of me as your sex-crazy nympho dream girl? Good.
