If you’re like me, and get all your sex advice from internet trend pieces, you know that having sex is harder than ever. We’ve been boning for roughly one billion years, and still somehow never knew what the best sex things were until they happened in a popular TV show, or to three friends of an enlightened writer.
These things go in phases. Butt stuff? So 2015. Cunnilingus? More like done, dingus. Handjobs were in for a second there, but that was an entire week ago. Now handjobs are more out than someone wearing white after Labor Day, and I guess also that person is jerking you off.
No, the hottest, trendiest, hetero sex move of the moment is penetration. Fucking. Taking your genitals, putting them up next to someone else’s genitals, and pressing them together until one goes inside the other. I promise that it will blow your goddamned mind.
I know, it sounds weird. We’ve all been raised by Hollywood and glossy magazines and the porn industry to think genital sex is something grownups don’t do—that it’s for randy teens, or deviants, or just as an appetizer for the main course of other sex things that aren’t actual sex. But trust me on this: if you haven’t mashed bits in a while, you may have forgotten just how much fun it can be.
“You know what the best thing about having a penis in my vagina?” said my friend, who is totally real and not made up for the purposes of this coming across as something other than just a personal essay. “It’s a lot less painful that him putting his penis in my eye, or in that little hollow of my clavicle, or most of the other places on my body. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but it actually feels...good? If I didn’t know it was crazy, I’d think it was supposed to go there.”
She’s not crazy. I didn’t talk to an accredited sexologist, but if I did he or she would probably tell me that human genitals have a relatively large amount of nerve endings for their surface area. When you stimulate those nerve endings, it registers in the brain as pleasure. And when one person’s sex organ rubs against another’s—rubs against it repeatedly, in rhythm, because if you’re feeling crazy you can have sex for more than one thrust, unless you’re Mormon, in which case keep on soaking—things start to happen in the limbic system. That’s right: for all the knocks on it, penetration feels good. Don’t trust your own lyin’ senses; trust science.
One of the things that makes sex the best sex move is its flexibility. If you get bored of doing it, there are as many as two different positions in which you can fuck. (If you’re feeling particularly naughty, there are rumors of a third.) What’s not to like?
With this much going for penetration, the tastemakers will soon catch up. Pop stars will put out songs about how they’d like to have their penis in a vagina or butt, or their vagina or butt around a penis, as the case may be. Movies will be made about men and women wanting to have sex with each other, and perhaps will show them pretending to do so. But don’t wait for penetration to be on-brand. Go have sex now with someone who also wants to have it. Go forth and fuck, no matter how forbidden it might feel. That just makes it all the sexier.
And do it before penetration is no longer cool. You have three days.