Standard Deviations - 9/23/10

One of the more annoying truisms that floats around the sex-advice world goes something like this: “The most powerful sexual organ you have is your brain.”

What makes this statement aggravating is not its content — it’s entirely true — but that it reeks of consolation.  It’s like one of those “A for EFFORT!” or “EVERYONE’S A WINNER” stickers your kindergarten teacher slapped on every assignment you ever turned in (hopefully, though, they never penciled in that on any homework you had).  It’s hard to think of intellect being applicable to sex — after all, for most people, the ability to list all the phylums while simultaneously f*cking someone’s earrings off is a niche skill, at best.  Still, the ability to use one’s brain in the bedroom is an incredibly important, undervalued skill, and nowhere is there a better way to showcase that than in the art of foreplay.

By foreplay, I don’t mean the obligatory five-and-a-half-minutes of fingers-and-tongue prior to the main event — high school notwithstanding, oral and manual sex are play by definition.  Foreplay is the tone that you set before you get there, before the clothes come off and the video camera turns on, before you get down to the whole passionate delightful filthy business of it all.  And yes, it’s pretty much essential.

Good foreplay is an act of architecture.  What you are aiming for is to create a space in which sex is not only desired, but where it’s also comfortable and uncluttered.  In college, especially, this is important — how do you invite someone into your bedroom when it’s also your living room, your study room and in some unfortunate instances, your kitchen as well?

In foreplay, what you’re trying to do is answer the question, “How can I get me and my partner to leave behind the stresses of the day and kindle a mutual attraction?”  (Another translation: “How can I get laid?”)  Sex is never good if one partner is thinking about their impending Chem exam and the other is thinking about whether they’re about to throw up half a pint of Jägermeister.  The bed-study-living-room analogy is true for your room, but also for your mind and your body — so how do you tune out the noise and translate you and your partner’s focus to pleasure only, instead of the millions of other things you might have to do?

It depends from partner to partner.  A dinner for two is usually a good bet; it removes you from immediate campus life and creates a bubble in which you two are the only important things in the world.  (Hopefully.  In practice, try avoiding talking about things stressing you out, or flirting with waitresses/other patrons while at the table.)  For the more socially-inclined, going together to a large party, separating for a while to flirt with others and then coming back together to press all hot and sweaty against each other on the dance floor could also be an option, to merge flirtation with light role play.

But then again, foreplay doesn’t have to be elaborate.  The joys of the information age make it easy to remind someone, even in the middle of a busy day, that there are better things to think about than whether or not that B- you got will affect your final grade.  Dirty texts are come in many flavours—from the teasing (“I was just thinking about how last night you did that _____ with your ____ and it made me shiver”) to the demanding (“I want your _____”) to the lingering (“Be home at __ and I’ll be in your bed wearing the ____”) to the pictoral (… yeah, no example of that appropriate for this paper).  The possibilities are endless, and limited only by what you can think of.  After all, as another annoying truism goes:  “Remember, it’s not the size of your brain that counts.  It’s how you use it.”