July 3, 2013

I’m a 24-year-old woman who just ended a five-year relationship. It sucked. I cried. It was my first breakup, so I’ve felt totally insane for the last three months. Now I’m in the dating world, and I go out with people only to find that we have no physical chemistry. My mother says, “You’re just picky.” How am I supposed to enter my slutty years if I rarely have a physical connection with someone? I’m starting to think I’m broken; the last few years, I’ve felt pretty cut off from my sexuality. I feel like I formed some sort of sexual block. Is there a pill for this? How do I break the dam?
Bring Lass Overtly Clearer Knowledge

Here’s how you break the dam: You get high, you consume porn (text or vid), and you read Daniel Bergner’s book What Do Women Want? Adventures In The Science of Female Desire. (“It should be read by every woman on earth,” Tracy Clark-Flory of Salon writes. “You want a female Viagra? This book is as close as we have to it.”) Don’t do all three at once, of course, lest you grind the gears off your sex gaskets. But do all three, over a long weekend, and try to relax and listen to your body and allow your erotic imagination to speak to you.

And give yourself a break, BLOCK. Some folks need more than three months to bounce back after ending a five-year relationship. Don’t force yourself to date right now if you’re not ready. Get high instead, read Bergner, and take in some erotica. And when you are ready to enter your slutty phase, BLOCK, hang on to your pickiness. In my experience—ahem—picky people are likelier to enjoy their slutty phases and likelier to survive them.

A filthy double meaning did leap instantly to mind, CLAMS, but it involves so unspeakable a violation that squeamish and/or sensitive readers might wanna skip to the next letter (or read some other advice column). Here goes: “Clam digging” is something you can find necrophiliacs who are into chicks doing with shovels in graveyards in the middle of the night. Moving on…

If you go for it and it ends badly, MLIA, then you were definitely getting in over your head. If you go for it and it doesn’t end badly, then you weren’t getting in over your head. The only way to find out for sure which it is—in over? In under?—is to go for it. So go for it. And send pics.

You live in San Francisco. If you rule out as a potential partner any straight guy who’s appeared in gay porn, CALI, you might have to move to another city. Here’s something that might be easier than moving: Change your perspective on the meaning of sex between men. When a straight girl messes around with another girl, no one thinks of her as any less feminine. But a straight guy who messes around with another dude is seen as less masculine. The belief that gay sex is somehow emasculating, and that guys who’ve had gay sex are less manly, is pure homophobia. And this particular kind of homophobia—your particular kind of homophobia, CALI—is killing your desire for your boyfriend. Willing yourself to see what was masculine and manly about your boyfriend’s gay porn experience—he wasn’t afraid to explore his sexuality because, hey, your boyfriend is one of those completely fearless manly man types—might help you get past it. Good luck.

Here’s how you handle it: You assume he’s not an idiot. A porn star on a gay dating site figures that most of the other guys on the site will be “familiar” with his work. So there’s no need to broach the porn subject, as he most likely assumes you (and everyone else he meets via that site) already knows. Don’t stress about it. If you want to ask him out, ask him out. When he mentions his work (perhaps during a convo about your respective careers), tell him you know his work and you’ve enjoyed it, and let him steer the conversation from there. If he wants to hear about your favorite films, scenes, come shots, etc., he’ll ask.

“You lost; love won. You can get over it and come to the wedding and have some cake or you can fuck the fuck off. Your choice.”