Death and Sex

I have a friend, and he's dying. This musing is not meant for a pity party. It's just another one of those times where I take some random life lesson and apply it to sex. 

But my friend, with whom I have always talked about with unrelenting affection, is what society would probably call useless–he has lots of debt and no assets, has spent a couple of nights in jail for taunting the police, lives at the back of a shop that's filled with "antiques" but mostly crap. 

He used to spend hours hunched over cryptic crosswords and has tattoos inked up his right arm. He owned a late-night bar that dished up spliffs alongside toasties, he has enviable dry humour, and in another life, I imagine he'd be friends with Bowie.

He's one of the funniest and coolest people I know, and soon he'll be gone. I've been thinking about how best to describe this man, and there's one word that won't leave me. 

Authentic.

I know what you're thinking–authentic is like a narcissist's twin, everyone knows a narcissist, and we're all striving for authenticity or to be our best selves. 

But hear me out. 

I'm defining authenticity as the ability not to give a shit, or the Scientific American journal put it more eloquently:" authentic people behave in line with their unique values and qualities even if those idiosyncrasies may conflict with social conventions or other external influences." And this is my friend. Every goddamn time I see him.

But what's it got to do with sex? Well, you guessed it. The best sex is authentic. Duh, right?

But we forget this because most parts of our lives are very much centred on getting to the next place and doing so in a way that is most acceptable to others. Striving to become a "better" or "more successful" person but not necessarily an authentic one.

Platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok are the antithesis of authenticity. They encourage you to show your reel self, not your real self (see what I did there?).

The same applies to porn. Porn tells us to act out in a certain way. It tells us that we'll get pleasure if our vulvas look like that bald Pigglesworth from Austin powers, or our boobs bounce this much but not that much, and our dicks are big and stay hard forever. Prolific performance. Not authenticity. 

As the previously mentioned article put it: people feel most authentic when they conform to a particular set of socially approved qualities, such as being extroverted, emotionally stable, conscientious, intellectual and agreeable.

So strip all that away and think about what authentic sex means to you.

This isn't to say you suddenly turn into a selfish or inattentive lover. I faked orgasms all through my 20s. I knew it was inauthentic when I was doing it, but I did it because I thought it was what I should do.

And I jumped from one relationship to another, so I racked up a few fakes. One poor guy went for years thinking he gave me eight orgasms in one morning. Luckily we're still together, and I cleared that one up. 

What does authentic sex look like to you if you don't give a shit what other people think about you?