A short time ago, I started thinking about the fact that I will often do things that are Type 2 fun when I’m having sex.

Quick recap for those who aren’t familiar with the types of fun: Type 1 fun is stuff that’s just fun. Things you enjoy. Things you like doing in the moment. Type 2 fun is fun that isn’t enjoyable in the moment, but that you enjoy the memory of, or telling stories about later. (For many marathon runners, for example, actually running in the marathon itself isn’t fun; it’s painful, uncomfortable, exhausting, and miserable. But there’s joy in having run the marathon—joy in being able to reminisce about it later and in the knowledge that you did it.) Type 3 fun is stuff that just isn’t fun at all—not in the moment, not in the remembering of it, and you are not likely to do it again.

My girlfriend Maxine says there’s also a Type 4 fun: something that isn’t fun in the doing or the remembering, but that a third party has fun telling others about. “Hey, you remember that one time when Bob had that firecracker, and there was that big pail of fish heads…?”

Anyway, I saw an online article that suggested you should never do anything sexually that makes you uncomfortable, which frankly I thought was terrible advice. That got me to thinking about my personal sex onion: the layers of things I will and won’t do in sex.

It looks something like this. Everything inside the largest circle is stuff I’ll do; everything outside it, stuff I won’t.

There’s a lot of stuff inside the circle I don’t enjoy. I’m not a masochist; I don’t get aroused from pain, and it never feels good no matter how sexy the context is. But I will allow lovers to do things like needle play or impact play on me if they’re into it.

I spent years developing the Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon because my wife, who knows my parents took me to see the movie Alien at far too tender an age and it terrified me for decades, suggested the alien facehugger could be made into a strapon sex toy:

My wife wearing a prototype (photo by author)

I am what Eunice calls a “reaction junkie.” It gets me hot seeing my lovers get hot. If there’s something that really really does it for you, something that lights you up and revs your motor, something that turns you on to the point of incandescence, I can probably make it work for me even if it’s not my thing. There’s something amazing and unbelievably sexy about seeing someone you love light up.

Even if it’s uncomfortable in the moment.

In fact, hidden beneath the layers of“ooh, sexy!” is a profound truth of the human condition, one that people who explore kink and people who run marathons share in common: Sometimes, in those moments of discomfort, you learn something about who you really are. Intense experiences bring out hidden parts of us.

As far as intimacy goes, it’s the most intimate thing I can imagine: allowing your lover to push your buttons, or being with a lover who allows you to push theirs, to see you in those moments of genuine authenticity.

I’ve allowed lovers to spank and crop me, to put needles into me, to give me forced orgasms one after the other until I pass out. All those things are inside my personal sex onion. I won’t say I enjoyed them in the moment of doing them, but I feel like all of those experiences have value—they’ve given me insight I might not have any other way.

Life’s cost of entry

The cost of entry of that insight is being willing to do things that challenge you. Which isn’t common, thanks in no small part to the number of people who will tell you, with apparent sincerity and the right intentions, never to do anything that makes you uncomfortable.

Which is advice we apply to no other area of human activity. (Can you imagine someone saying that about running a marathon, signing on for the Marines, learning to sail, learning ballet, or going mountain climbing?) We accept discomfort as the price for many valuable experiences…except sex.

Of course, none of this means you should allow yourself to be pressured into doing things you genuinely don’t want to do. I will almost certainly never run a marathon. Doing something onlyi because it’s uncomfortable…well, that’s the road to madness.

But rejecting something only because it might be uncomfortable? That’s not a way, I think, to live an interesting life. (You may not agree, and that’s okay. Your life, your body, your rules.)

Outcome vs Consent

See that circle down in the bottom right, the one labeled “things I’ve tried at are now a hard no”?

A long long time ago, in a whole different digital age, when LiveJournal was new and social media seemed alight with possibilities beyond political tampering by hostile state-level actors, I saw a conversation online where a guy said he’d never do anything sexual he wasn’t 100% comfortable with, because what if he tried it, he didn’t like it, and then his girlfriend asked him to do it again?

I told him, “then you say no. It’s okay to try something and decide you don’t like it.”

Boom! Mind. Blown.

But it’s true. It’s okay to say no to something you previously said yes to. Again, we understand this intuitively with everything except sex.

I’ve talked about this before, but many people also do a terrible job of separating consent from outcome. If you say yes to something, and decide that oyu hated it, even felt violated by it, your consent was not violated. If you say no to something, and someone does it anyway, then you decide you actually kinda liked it, your consent was still violated.

You cannot label something you agreed to do and then decided you didn’t like a consent violation. You can label something you never said yes to a consent violation, even if after the fact you enjoyed it.

If you freely consent to something, decide you don’t like it, and claim your consent was violated, you’re a shitty person. If you do something to someone who didn’t consent to it, then claim that it was okay because they liked it, you’re a shitty person. I feel like this ought to be obvious, but no matter how many times I say it, it’s not.

If no means no, then yes has to mean yes.

There are things I’ve tried I won’t do again. There are things that I didn’t agree to that weren’t terrible, that I even kinda liked, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was not okay to do something that violated my consent.

It’s okay to agree to things that you later find you didn’t like. Just don’t do them again. Your body, your rules, remember?

Taking apart the onion

The point here is that sex is a lot of things. You can have fun (Type 1 or Type 2!) during sex, yes, but you can also learn about yourself, and your lover, from sex. We know that we do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons…maybe we simply need to remember sex is no different. We know marathons are uncomfortable, but also that people choose to do them anyway, and running a marathon last year doesn’t obligate you to run another next year.