A must read: Every mistake I’ve made in bed — and why there’s no reason to be shamed by any of them.

Every mistake I’ve made in bed — and why there’s no reason to be shamed by any of them.

I am loath to take part in the narrative trope that conveys, “Young women who have sex, in doing so, are embarking on a wacky, embarrassing, ill-thought-out comedy of errors,” without some recognition of how cool and worthwhile casual sex can be.

Sexual autonomy is often presented as “confessional”—either overly comic or overly melodramatic, and when a female sexual youth is described as a series of “misadventures,” it rankles me.

Upon taking in movies, magazines, and the anecdotes of others about the so-called bad behavior of a wayward woman they know, I so often feel like screaming, “She didn’t lampoon or victimize herself—she fucked someone!”

I have never once seen a young dude subjected to the same hand-wringing or false pity that his female counterparts are so regularly met with, or a guy who, in every other beat of his story about a physical encounter, feels the need to giggle or apologize it into an acceptable shape for his listeners.

If a woman has had sex that she likes: Enough with the jokey contrition. Sex doesn’t have to be bad to be good.

Just as destructive would be recounting a sexual past that’s been edited and finessed into a montage of soft-focus orgasms in which I am played by a young Natalie Wood, except with butt implants.

 I can’t pretend that all the sex I’ve had was that of a swanlike pinup sans an overbite that makes head risky if I’m not careful.

 Making mistakes is one of my very favorite things in this life, because then you become aware of how they were forged, and how to avoid them in the future.

 The key is not letting them define, discount, or dissuade you from the superb aspects of your sex life, or even seeing them as extricable from those.

 Fucking up is how you go pro. No need to be abashed or apologetic about that.
"To be cont"