I come from a highly conservative background where our sexual health information was entirely about abstinence, and based on fear of pregnancy, disease, and shaming. Sex was talked about as sacred, but basically seen as a commodity that had the highest value the first time you traded it, and depreciated rapidly. We did the whole ‘hand a rose around the room and fondle the petals until they fall out’ exercise my school. I was never supported to develop a language to feel comfortable communicating about sex, because the model of sex I grew up with assumes that I would never need it – I would remain a chaste virgin until I was married, then I would instantly become happily sexual and permanently available for sex with my husband. There was an assumption that ignorance about sex and an inability to communicate about it would possibly more likely keep me from having it until marriage. This model lacked the idea that I would still need to be able to communicate consent, comfort, pleasure, enthusiasm, or any other needs or feelings even once married. I once sat through sex education at a camp, as a ‘youth leader’, listening to the talk for the young boys, which was outside, round a campfire, with a bunch of adult men basically saying “Sex is awesome, don’t do it until you’re married”, and then to the talk for the girls, which was inside, everyone sitting at individual desks in a classroom, while the adult women said “Sex is risky and you could get pregnant, don’t do it until you’re married”. I was so angry that we were not telling girls sex is awesome, that they got the ‘sex is scary’ story, that I folded the paper handouts into airplanes and threw them at the presenter until I was thrown out of the room. I had no language other than this to communicate my frustration and distress.

Many of us grew up with variations of these ideas where communication about sex is unnecessary, and they have been cast in a romantic glow – that if it’s ‘real love’ your partner will just ‘know’ what you want and like, or that a ‘real’ wo/man knows how to satisfy a wo/man. That if you’re in love you will be perfectly sexually compatible and never need to negotiate that. That all ‘decent’ people  like the same sexual behaviours and therefore never need to communicate about their desires. On the other hand, sometimes these ideas have been taught to us with a brutal resignation – I was once advised by a female friend that “it takes a long time for women to get used to sex, and I don’t think they ever really enjoy it”. Tolerating miserable sex is seen as being grown up and understanding that real life isn’t like the movies. This is really sad.

These kinds of ideas can make it challenging to communicate about sex! But, there is a big difference between privacy and shame. The former is a part of our healthy function as people, the latter is painful and destructive. Many of us (me included!) feel embarrassment and uncertainty when we try and talk about sexual stuff. That’s okay! My experience has been that if you can untangle embarrassment from shame then it’s not such a big deal. I talk about sex quite a lot, here on my blog, in my relationships, and in appropriate ways with people I help support in my mental health or queer supports work. In fact, it turns up as a topic all over the place, even in my work as an eating disorder peer worker. Sexual health and needs are not side issues in our lives, they are often key foundations in our relationships and health and happiness. However, I still get embarrassed! I still blush – I’m part German and have fair hair and white skin, my blush response can be pretty incredible! You don’t have to be some kind of emancipated modern person to learn how to communicate about sex. 🙂 It does get easier with time and practice.

Part of this is about education. I started reading and learning about sex, anatomy, being queer, child development, and so on as a young adult because I needed a broader framework than I’d been provided with in my upbringing. I remember the intense shame and self loathing I experienced as a young person, and the fear that myths and misinformation created in me. I had a vision of a future in which I would not be trapped anymore in the shame, terror, self hate, loneliness, and awful double binds about sex I had been living in. I was taught women are not interested in sex – so when as a young person I naturally started to mature sexually, I thought of myself as deviant and evil. I was taught that being gay is wrong so I feared and suppressed my natural interest in other girls. I was taught that once a man is aroused he “reaches a point of no return” where he cannot stop sex, so I learned that I was not permitted to stop or change my mind once a sexual act had begun. I was taught that after marriage a woman’s body belonged to her husband, so she cannot deny him sex. I was taught that if an adult man touches a girl child that is abuse, but if the genders are reversed no harm can be done. I was taught that men cannot be raped, and that women cannot be sexual abusers. I experienced peer based sexual abuse that was not seen as abuse by anyone I sought support from because the others involved were also young people, so I learned that what happened to me didn’t count, and the trauma reactions I suffered were simply me over reacting or being a drama queen. I witnessed sexual abuse, the entangling of sex and violence, sex and shame, punishment, sadism, entitlement, and humiliation. I became a repository of horror stories as other people confided secrets to me. I became a silent witness to peers helplessness in engaging their own sexual abuse, unwanted abortion, and incest. I was trapped in a nightmare mess of conflicting messages about sex through which I attempted to mature into an ethical, passionate, adult sexual woman. The result was disastrous and life threatening, an intense inner conflict and self hatred, warped frameworks about sex, relationships, and consent, and a clash between unbounded desires and terror. All of this happened in secrecy and silence, without a language to communicate, with no way of understanding what went wrong or how to set things right.

What I did have was this vision of myself as someone who was no longer afraid. Someone who could use correct anatomical terms without stuttering, who was comfortable with their own sexuality. Someone who might even have great sex, who could talk about it, ask for what they wanted, navigate consent, explore, explain, support, nurture, and adventure. It wasn’t a clear vision and I couldn’t believe in it all the time but by this star I set my course and began to inquire.

We need a language to be able to even think clearly about any of these areas. Communication and consent are profoundly connected ideas, without the ability to communicate, consent is not possible, and without the knowledge that we are allowed to express or deny consent, we have no foundation for our communication skills. So where do we start? Building communication skills in this areas started for me with a language I could engage.

Find a language you like for everything about sex. When you spend time with a sexual partner, work on a language you both like! What words do you both feel good about for your bodies, for different sex acts, for toys, lubes, for asking if the other person is interested in sex, for boundaries around what you are consenting to, the whole works. For some people this is pretty easy and there’s not a lot of hassle. For others many words or terms are highly negatively charged and you may need to be creative to come up with ways of communicating about sex that are fun, respectful, useful, and don’t increase stress. It doesn’t matter if this private language makes no sense whatever to anyone else, as long as it works for whoever is involved with sex with you.

You need to be able to clearly communicate nuances, because sex and consent is more than yes/no! This is kind of frustrating considering that a whole lot of our culture hasn’t really wrapped their brain around the idea of yes and no yet! There’s a whole conversation here, the need to be able to communicate things like “It’s late, let’s go to bed, naked is good, lets kiss and cuddle but I’m not in the mood for anything else” or “Yes, I’d love to have sex, but I feel like this or this and not that (kind of sex) today”, or “How do you feel about trying this new (toy/position/game/whatever) today?” or “I’d really like to sleep alone tonight, don’t take it personally, I’m not upset with you and I’d love to have you over again on Friday if that works for you?” or “I know you’re not feeling into sex tonight, but I’m really worked up, do you mind if I take care of myself in bed while you hold me?”. If you’re not used to this, these conversations are hard at first. Whether you’re setting the scene with a new sexual partner or trying to introduce more communication into an existing relationship, it can be scary and awkward and stressful. But then, so can sex without communication.

People who engage in types of sex that are risky use back up forms of communication to make sure everyone stays safe. This might sound a bit silly, but if you have any concerns about communication this can be a wise idea for any kind of sex. Some of us struggle to say things clearly. Terms that require a high level of confidence and assertion can be difficult. They can also be tangled with unintended meanings. So, where ‘stop’ might be difficult to say, and feel confronting and rejecting when all the person is trying to say is ‘please pause for a moment, I need to gather myself’, or ‘sit up a bit, I can’t breathe well’, a safe word can be less challenging.

Practice it! If you have high anxiety or difficulty with boundaries, you may really struggle with this. So, silly as it sounds, practice it with your partner or with each partner. Sit on the bed, have a massage, and say your safe word. Touch stops, and then starts up again when you ask for it. If verbal communication is sometimes compromised – due to disability, anxiety, dissociation, switching, or anything else – have a ‘safe touch’ that is used the same way. It needs to be easy and simple – a pinch, tapping the other person twice, clicking a ring against the bedhead… This is especially relevant for any form of sex where you can’t see other person’s face. It can be difficult to tell sometimes if the breathing or sounds are pleasure or distress, and that uncertainty can add a lot of unnecessary anxiety to sex. You need easy ways to check in that don’t feel too awkward – “Are those happy sounds?”. Especially if you or your partner have a lot of stress around sex and communication issues like this – checking in needs to become the norm to keep sex emotionally safe.

Don’t let anything make you feel awkward because of this, I know that we never see this in movie sex or sex in books. It is critical that you both want what is happening, that neither has frozen and that sex is not migrating between consensual and abusive. We as a culture are still struggling to understand that this happens, and we don’t give people the tools we need to navigate sex and keep it good. Safe sex doesn’t just mean stopping when they say no, it’s about not doing anything they haven’t said yes to, and about learning how to communicate no, and yes, with enthusiasm and without shaming.

This isn’t the final word on this topic, in fact it barely scratches the surface. Communication about sex is linked to but also distinct from our communication skills in other areas. Assertiveness is part of this but also insufficient – we shouldn’t have to be highly assertive, we should be working to create safer environments where it’s easy to communicate even if we’re feeling very vulnerable. If you’re interested in exploring ideas about the nature of consent further, I suggest reading “Yes means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape” by Friedman and Valenti. I hope that my simple, if unusual, suggestions might start you thinking about these topics in your relationships, and help you come up with creative ways to build in more, and easier, forms of communication about sex.

This article is part of a series about emotionally safer sex. Try also reading

In our culture we have the idea that a relationship is a linear progression from strangers to intimacy, from distance to closeness, from a touch on the hand to ‘home base’. We also think that you never lose ground you’ve gained. Once you’ve reached second base, second base is always available. Once you start having sex, or seeing each other naked, or kissing in public, those are now always allowed and to be expected. This does not make sex safe. If one or both partners have any kind of anxiety around sex, this pressure, the awareness of these norms being set to new places, dramatically increases the stress because even after a great time together, they will now have to either put up with contact they don’t want, or fend off a partner who thinks this is the new norm, whenever they don’t feel comfortable with it.At the extreme, this assumption of the new ‘normal’ between you, what is okay and acceptable and to be expected, becomes a sense of entitlement. We might not mean it that way, or think very much about it, but it’s pretty easy to start making assumptions and to treat sex like something we are owed. People who, for whatever reason, already feel anxious or unsafe about sex, can be highly sensitive to this dynamic. It may not stop them having sex, but it can certainly stops sex feeling safe.

I’m not being naive here, and this is not about desire discrepancy – the partner with a higher sex drive is not bad or wrong. This is about the way you engage sex. This is about both of you always having the right to say no and not be shamed, as much as the right to suggest sex and not be shamed! This isn’t about building sexual rejection into your relationship. It’s about not building in entitlement, unawareness, or distress. We do not have the right to coerce our partners into having sex with us. We have the right to feel desire, attraction, and arousal. We have the right to want sex. We have the right to make choices about who we want as a partner, who we want to be sexual with, how we want that relationship to work, but I do not believe we have the right to demand sex, from anyone, ever. That belief and those values are part of what help me to be a safer sexual partner, and to require emotionally safer sex from my partner.

Sometimes when I talk about this idea with people, there’s fear. People get anxious that if their partner is truly that free to refuse sex, they would never have sex. People get anxious that if they refuse to have sex with their partner, their partner will have it with someone else, or leave them. There’s ideas about owing each other sex, that having sex once implies a contract that you will have it again, or that certain types of relationship choices – such as moving in together – mean you are now permanently available for sex and lose your freedom to decline. Push these ideas a little further and we move into rape apologist territory – that what you wear signals that you’ve decided to have sex, that the person who pays for the night out is owed sex, that if you’ve kissed you’ve offered an un-revokable consent to sex, and so on. I get some of these ideas and how pervasive they are- mainly because I’ve been severely tangled in them at times myself. And I’ve suffered, and I’ve hated myself. I know what it feels like when there is terror, shame, self-loathing, guilt, obligation, rebellion, recklessness, misery, and humiliation choking me during sex.

Here’s the nub. If you or your partner feels like this during sex – it’s not really sex. We have other words for sexual experiences where one person enjoys themselves while another one screams inside. I’ve learned that not having sex is far, far better than having bad sex. Sometimes people are shocked by my many years of voluntary celibacy. It’s almost a taboo in our culture to make a choice like that – not for lack of opportunities, or for lack of desire, but to chose to decline sex. (Of course, there’s nothing particularly special or holy about it either, and it’s certainly not better than anyone else’s choices. It was just what I wanted at the time.) I’ve made stupid decisions in the past that any sex was better than none. I’m old enough now to be wiser about that. I’m wise enough to want no more bad memories about sex.

There’s another way, and it might feel frightening or radical, like it opens the door to rejection or a total lack of sex. I’ve found that for me, it has the opposite effect. Sex is not a contract but a song, a dance, flight.

So, try to reset the norms each time, back to dating, back to checking. It might feel stupid, as we have almost no cultural support for this idea. The higher the level of anxiety and the more communication difficulties you or your partner have, the more important this is. Don’t assume anything. Sex last night doesn’t mean sex tonight. Nakedness being fine yesterday doesn’t mean you can wander in and brush your teeth while they’re in the shower the next morning. Don’t force a stressed partner to constantly say no. Assume no first, and check to see if it might be a yes. This approach also gives freedom for people to have difficult reactions after sexual contact. Even if the experience is wonderful, it can stir things up. Breathing room is critical at times. Allow the relationship to move between romantic and platonic. Last night was hot sex. Tonight is cuddles while wearing pajamas. With safety comes freedom. Unless you make it very easy and comfortable for your partner to say no, you are not having safe sex. Unless you make it safe to initiate sex without being shamed, you are not having safe sex.

As a multiple, this need to reset norms and check again is especially important, as I switch to non-sexual parts or to child parts. Properly covering non-sexy clothes or PJ’s are worn on nights when my child parts are around, or are kept next to the bed in case they turn up unexpectedly on other nights. Nakedness does not cue sex – sometimes it is platonic. For my system this is critical, it reduces shame and stress about sharing a bed, a bathroom, and life with another person when some of the time Sarah is a child, or a guy, or someone who’s not in a sexual relationship with my partner.

Resetting the norms doesn’t have to be horrible – anxiety ridden, stressed, depressing. It can be sexy as hell. If you’ve never done anything like this it will take time to find your rhythm and get comfortable but it does get easier. Talk it through. Find what works for you both. Own your own desires and let your partner own theirs. Lean over and whisper “You look incredible tonight, can I kiss you?”

You might like this video that links the idea of having sex to music jams:

This article is part of a series about emotionally safer sex. Try also reading

• 6. Communication and Consent
• 7. Find Freedom