Content warning: the title. While this essay is neither explicit nor vulgar, it talks frankly about the topic at hand in a PG-13 sort of way, and may be NSFW for many instances of W. I secured approval from LW leadership before posting.

What on Earth is this essay?

Well, I started wondering about the above question, and I decided to ask some people. I know a lot about what I want sex with me to be like—what sort of person I want to be in the bedroom, what sort of impact I hope to have on the people I’m intimate with. And of course I get substantial feedback through people’s nonverbals and little bits of pillow talk and so forth.

But I’d never really actually just asked, directly. So I did! I sent a broad, open-ended request for info to thirteen of the twenty-four people I’ve ever had sex with, and got back responses from twelve of them (and a polite “no thanks” from the thirteenth). I left out the ex from my longest relationship (who spent several years after breaking up with me being really quite vicious at unpredictable intervals), and there were a number of people (including a bunch of one-offs) that I had no way of getting in touch with. But represented among the respondents were:

4 AMAB men, 4 AFAB trans/nonbinary folk, and 4 AFAB women
3 partners with 8+ encounters (a person I’ve been having sex with for 20 years, a person I’ve been having sex with for 10 years, and my current fiancé) and 9 partners with 1-7 encounters each
At least five people I hope/expect to sleep with again
More people than you might naively expect for whom I was something like their first sexual partner, or their first male partner, or their first partner since Something Bad in their past (whether recent or distant)

Why this post?

A few reasons. First, I often think by writing, and I wanted to digest and distill and … collate? … the various responses I’d received, and make them all make sense together, and an essay felt like a pretty natural way to do that.

Second, I really liked the idea of there being something for potential future partners to look at, that was rooted in the direct, first-person data of past partners rather than wholly filtered through my own self-report. It seems like good information to have available, for people who are wondering if they would like being physically intimate with me! And I am fond of...