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And while having sex in your teens and 20s will be a blast, you will really hit your stride by your mid-to-late 30s. By the time you're in your 50s and having sex nearly every day with your hot lover who thinks you're both brilliant and beautiful, you will never stop counting your lucky stars. But you probably won't get to this point without a bunch of rejections, starting now. Be smart and develop a brave attitude, because if he does reject you, there will be others. Many others. Hang in there! Be brave!
HELP--really. Listen to Dan and those among the millions of us loyal Dan fans (myself included) mumbling it under our breaths: DTMFA.
SIM's situation reminds me of a long past Savage Love column letter & comment session focusing on "What do our juices taste like?", printed in Dan's Savage Love compilation from 1998.
@6 Thanks, Sarah in Olympia! I couldn't have said it better to DIGS.
DIGS---congrats on finishing high school, and all the best in entering the adult world.
LW!- Sensitive
LW2- Insightful
LW3- FUCKING HILARIOUS!!
Maybe it will happen your first week of college, maybe it will happen with a guy who takes you out a few times, maybe it will be with the love of your life or your first serious boyfriend. Maybe it will be with crush-guy.
Whomever it is, though, I hope he treats you with respect and kindness. And I'm not sure asking a guy to bang you for graduation is a way to experience that. Like earlier posters said, you have a whole lifetime of great sex ahead of you. I'd recommend making sure he first time is one to remember. Whatever that looks like for you. Just don't feel pressured to meet anyone else's timeline.
Okay, I am kidding. I only suggest that in order to force the issue, because it's a safe bet that she will burst a blood vessel the first time you make out with some hot woman in front of her. Either she will dump your ass, or you can dump hers, if her being a fucking hypocrite on top of everything else is finally enough to open your eyes that she really isn't as wonderful as all that.
With that in mind, I'm going to suggest modifying Dan's advice a little. Do take note of the way social media has of making us all, if not depressed, wistful. (I hadn't thought of that and think it's brilliant that Dan did.) Do express your interest to this guy. (I also hadn't thought of the value of taking the risk for the experience of (possibly) learning to handle rejection with grace, another good thing to learn young.) But instead of going straight to wanting to fuck him, how about asking him out, seeing how that goes, and then saying you want to kiss him or make out a little? See how that goes, and take it from there.
You don't say what sexual experience you have, but from the sound of your letter, I'm guessing it's little or none. Even at the advanced old age of 18, it's OK to start slow. (And I applaud you for being clear on the difference between a crush and true love. You're doing fine.)
DIGS - Why do you want to jump to penis in vagina? If it's the hymen, you can get rid of it yourself. If it's the experience, or for pleasure, why not jack and jill off instead?
I'd suggest the pass be to make out, then deciding at each step if you're enjoying yourself and want to take the next step, rather than an initial offer of whatever kind of sex this guy wants. You might find that the way he kisses you feels too slobbery to get into, or the way he touches you does nothing or hurts, or he acts like a baby if consent is withdrawn.
I'm a little confused about why using your hand until you develop a relationship to explore sexually is a rejected option.
Also I hope you educate yourself about how to make responsible sexual decisions and develop reasonable expectations on Scarleteen's website.
[Oh, why couldn't the editor(s) have just removed the "-girl" from after "teenage" and before "crushes"? What a missed opportunity.]
BLESS YOU DAN SAVAGE, BLESS YOU.
Please make this one of your causes. Invent a word, do the thing, I beg you.
Oh yeah - CONDOMS, CONDOMS, CONDOMS. Don't let your first experience be ruined by an unplanned after-effect.
LW3: my girlfriend once accused me of smoking pot prior to having supper at her parent's house. At that point in my life, I was a non-smoker, so the question was absurd to begin with. However, I had recently switched shampoo and apparently the new one made my hair (and beard) smell like pot smoke. Weird. Sadly, I'm not aware of "Gee, Your Beard Smells Pussyriffic" shampoo.
I think it can also be a straightish woman who wants all the straight guys in sight to find her hot. Particularly given how public her fooling around with other women seems to be.
I'm reminded of a letter from a while back where the wife was very overtly sexual in public ("You know me, I am such a slut!" delivered to male acquaintances) and completely uninterested in sex in private with her partner.
That particular letter fell in the category "Okay, she behaved like this through seven years of dating, and after you married, and then throughout 10 years of marriage, and you're mad she never turned into a completely different person?" So learn from that: whatever her issues are, one of them is a complete lack of interest in having sex with you. It doesn't matter who she flirts with, makes out with, or claims to be in public: it matters how she actually treats you. She's shown you who she is: believe her.
1) It gets sexier.
2) Dan's advice to be sober enough to notice (in detail even!) what your partner is doing to you and how they're responding to what you do to them is dead on.
3) The internet version of people is a highly-edited one, mostly free of fact-checking, which is crafted to produce a particular effect. Usually "My life is super awesome all the time! And so am I!" Even a scrupulously honest and self-deprecating poster is putting forth a small, carefully curated version of their life.
http://www.youtube.com/user/mugumogu/
So SIM is left with how much she trusts her fiancé, and that comes down to a lot of factors about their relationship: what their personal and coupled history is, what she knows about him and his character, and what her own background is in regards to cheating or having been cheated on, and how much she is inclined to trust men in general.
While I would like to see this as a PSA to get anyone with a too-full, bushy, or straggly, scraggly beard to shave it and hide his infidelities (short, small, well-trimmed or maintained beards or short close-clipped goatees can be cute), I might also use it as a quick-and-easy IQ test: Anyone stupid enough to get extra-curricular pussy on his beard and not wash thoroughly before returning to his girlfriend/boyfriend/fiancé/fiancée/wife/husband deserves to be caught--think of it as a sort of Darwin Award for bearded, cunnilingus-loving cheaters.
HELP: Over the sub-dermal rumble of Savage Love readers mumbling 'DTMFA' under their breath, you might have heard a roaring, echoing, wall-shaking howl saying the same. That was me.
SIM: Whether the smell is pussy or pussy-adjacent: dude, hygiene.
P.S.
The ad for Teatro Zinzanni: When Sparks Fly on this site features someone who either is or looks exactly like Robert Blake circa Lost Highway, and it's freaking me the fuck out.
That guy has been in several Teatro Zinzanni shows. His name is Yevgeniy Voronin and he's a creepy-looking Ukrainian illusionist, who always performs absolutely silently with a total dead-eyed, blank stare. He does very good sleight of hand, and he's also good at gliding rather eerily around the stage. He's not one of my favorite characters at a Teatro Zinzanni show, but he's a memorable-looking one. He's meant to freak you the fuck out.
LW1 you could, like, just start out by making out with the guy. That's pretty fun.
I would add to the great advice from others that not only should you use a CONDOM, this time and EVERY time, but you should learn how to use one correctly. Don't assume the guy will know how to put it on. Condoms, if used correctly, are very very effective. Don't let confusion over how to use it keep you from using one.
Kudos for not thinking you're in love with someone you have almost never (never?) talked to. Before you decide to bang him, do talk to him. See how that goes: right now so much of what you know about him and what it (any it) would be like with him is based on fantasy and not experience of him as an actual person, like yourself. If talking is great see how kissing goes. Don't talk yourself into having to go through with it because you said you would, even if your gut starts telling you to stop.
It's an excellent idea to have your first time with someone you trust to still want to talk to you the next day. Which grows out of knowing more about them than how unspeakably hot they are.
38's statistic sounds dead right. I'll just add that I have heard a depressing number of women say something along the lines of "I started having sex at 16, started enjoying it at 19." For those 3 years they pretended to absolutely love sex, because they knew they were supposed to and they didn't want to seem weird.
Men, keep your body hair. It is intrinsically definitively masculine. Please.
Ab*So*Lute*Ly Perfect.
Thank you.
@SIM: I don't have a beard anymore (gee, following the first comment, it seems like there's a pun in there...maybe "now that I'm not a beard anymore"?), but I do know that Hot and Sour Soup and Tom Yum are two concoctions that remind me of healthy sweet vajayjay. And when I had a beard, soups, esp. thin brothy soups, tended to get in there. Still, personally, I wash my face a lot, and certainly after oral sex.
Indeed. Beards are cute on SOME people. SOME.
But only if they are trimmed, and the guy has made at least some effort at grooming.
Unfortunately more and more I see guys who simply decided to stop shaving or grooming their facial hair at all.
Even if someone has an otherwise decent beard face, hair growing down your neck or up to the tops of your cheeks doesn't look good on anyone. Werewolves may be the in thing in movies and TV, but in real life the Wolfman look just doesn't work.
SIM, that sucks.. Ask him! Gauge his reaction accordingly and carefully. Otherwise you'll be thinking about it for ever, and will get all jealous and suspicious, and start fucking your relationship up anyhow.
To join the beards or not beards debate, I always hated them, until recently. Now I am dating a guy with a nicely trimmed goatee, they're great!! I am a convert, at least, to a nicely trimmed neat beard, on somebody that's meant to have one and looks good with it, not on some hipster asshole that has a face full of what looks like pubic hair. Yuck.. Real men, real beards, HELL yes..
But, I also wouldn't mind if he shaved. Beards are a new thing to me in terms of sensation, and that rocks. You can do interesting things with beards, that I wasn't really previously aware of.
I've been interested in the comments from the guys saying that at their high school reunions they learned that their were classmates who were interested in them, but they were too oblivious to notice. I wonder if there are women who get together at their high school reunions saying they thought they were the only virgin and are surprised to learn that there were so many.
We need Dan to invent a word!!!
DIGS, I too was eager to rid myself of my virginity on the night of my high school graduation. Always a kinkster and a bit of a sex obsessed freak, I bided my time so that my sexlife would not interfere with my focus on the goal of graduating high school. I only participated in oral exchanges before accepting that diploma. The night of the graduation I ended up at a party where the parents of the host-kid provided the beer and wine coolers and took everyones' car keys at the door. I didn't have a specific boy I was after. I had been crushing on several boys in my class, and guarding my virginity until I was sure I would not ruin my educational aspiration.(I 'd correctly predicted that once I popped I wouldn't stop) as in non-stop pursuit of sexual satisfaction with many of my other priorities neglected. After 2 or three wine coolers at this graduation party, I flirted with the hottest boy at the party, and suggested that I'd like to go somewhere private. We had some of the hottest sex I've ever had. and I say this now at 38 years old and having had a VERY active and adventurous sexlife particularly in my 30's. I don't regret that decision one bit. I feel that I would have regretted not having done it since I always would have wondered how that would have gone. Throwing out conventional frigid expectations and breaking out of my shell had a positive impact on my life. Its not the worst thing in the world to be horny and know it. Not all of us can be satisfied by our own hand beyond 16 or 17 years of age. Some of us need to express ourselves sexually so as not to lose our minds.
SIM - had he just eaten some sushi?
Of course, the common denominator could very well be me....
HELP's protestations to the contrary, I believe he (or is it she?) may find solace in simply revealing the nature of their desire to roll out in a courtly fashion, and accept the love (or lack thereof) for what it is worth intrinsically.
However, there is a tertiary reason: it produces odd smells. They're not bad smells, just odd. Mainly it smells like my facial oils, which I didn't know had a smell until the first time I grew out my goatee. This is especially true if I've been stroking it (my beard/goatee) or combing it (no explanation needed, I hope!).
Occasionally when it gets wet, and especially when it gets sweaty (e.g. after a workout) my beard smells, to me, like sweet, healthy pussy. Unlike Dan, I like the smell of sweet, healthy pussy, but it does make me self-conscious. No one has ever commented to about this, so I don't know if anyone else notices, but it does further reduces the desire to grow a beard.
As a final note, the same effect occasionally happens, with much lower frequency, with my body hair. I hope this is helpful, SIM.
Pardon posting this twice, but I registered to post a second time so the link will show.
Nobody seems to be presenting the possibility that humans aren't wired to be monogamous, and when we try to conform to social norms of monogamy, it can affect libido over time. Daniel Bergner presents scientific support for the idea in his book "What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire", and frankly, I buy it.
I'm not trying to excuse the repeated violations of trust that are obviously occurring - that sh*t's not ok. However, I personally find dealing with the default expectation of monogamy to be an uphill slog, and am not surprised that many people don't even think to question it, or examine the possibility that it might be a libido-killer.
Nobody seems to be presenting the possibility that humans aren't wired to be monogamous, and when we try to conform to social norms of monogamy, it can affect libido over time. Daniel Bergner presents scientific support for the idea in his book "What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire", and frankly, I buy it.
I'm not trying to excuse the repeated violations of trust that are obviously occurring - that sh*t's not ok. However, I personally find dealing with the default expectation of monogamy to be an uphill slog, and am not surprised that many people don't even think to question it, or examine the possibility that it might be a libido-killer.
If it weren't though, fck ya, great platform to spread the notion to some of those stubborn types, that the beard fad has just about seen its time in the sun....
Ah; people must pay attention to spelling. I liked the opening, as it is completely not my style to address Mr Savage (which I rarely do anyway) when making a general point. I shall spare the assembled company a reference to Anne Meredith and nineteen pairs of stockings.
I'd draw another distinction for DIGS. Dan does good work when he notes that sexually active is not necessarily the same as PIV sex. The latter is usually associated with female virginity, and that's a shame because lots of women will attest that anal, oral and other sex is better for them. (It's a shame for other reasons too, like the way the religious right has teenagers believing that they can preserve their virginity by not engaging in one particular sexual practice while doing everything else.)
And yet, like DIGS, I put a lot of importance on virginity and that threshold between PIV sex and just petting. I'm not going to try to educate that out of her, not going to tell her that it doesn't matter because, if I remember correctly, it does. This is why I recommend that she spend some time on the thousand years to adore each breast. Coyness is not a crime, but it's not entirely without value either.
Humans exist in social groups and can't truthfully claim to not care what anyone thinks of them. Someone who truly doesn't notice or bother to abide by social norms sticks out as being seriously impaired.
WASH THAT BEARD! Between all oral-sex sessions (illicit or not), and social events. You might think people won't notice, but they probably will.
The 70-year-old Obijwe office-worker at my old school used to say, "There's only two things that smell like tuna... and one of them's tuna." Also, Pho's real popular in Minneapolis-- I've never had it, but I bet ya it smells like vag.
The "beard-vs-no-beard" debate is as stupid as the "ass-vs-tits" debate. To each their own. Also, Minnesota is really cold (like, -30) and OKCupid says Minnesota is the state people are least likely to shower regularly in, which probably correlates to not wanting to shave, either. Lots of beards here; most of them unwashed.
But be sure that you have enough knowledge of what pleasures you and how your body responds to arousal to coach him if you do wind up naked together. Chances are if he's like most teenage boys you'll be doing him a very big favor just by doing that.
All these years later, few of the "just get it over with" crowd have regrets. When you've seen how it all shook out, for yourself and for your friends, you see that how you lost your virginity has very little to say about how your sex life will go for the next forty years or so. It matters so much less than how you live your life, how you approach sex, how you communicate with partners, in all the years following.
So if you get together with this guy and it turns out to be a mistake, so what? You'll make lots of sexual mistakes over the years. Losing your virginity is not the defining act of your sexual life.
Go for it if you want to go for it, don't go for it if you really don't want to. You'll be OK either way.
--------------------
So she learns that sluttifying herself is not the end of the world, that she's the one who gets to decide where an action is sluttish or not, and if she cares. That's a big advantage, to my mind - the knowledge that someone else's idea of what constitutes sluttifying is as important as a fart in a windstorm.
And speaking of beards and pussies, the sensation of his beard when he goes down on me is absolutely wonderful. I encourage any het male capable of growing a decent beard to give it a try. If you or your partner(s) don't dig it, you can always shave it off.
From Ovid's "the art of love" , book 2 :
"Nor should it be forgotten that women, who are getting on in years, have experience, and it is only experience that sets the seal of perfection on our natural gifts. They repair by their toilet the ravages of time, and by the care they take of themselves manage to conceal their age.
They know all the different attitudes of Love and will assume them at your pleasure. No pictured representation can rival them in voluptuousness. With them pleasure comes naturally, without provocation, the pleasure which is sweeter than all, the pleasure which is shared equally by the man and the woman. I hate those embraces in which both do not consummate [...] I hate a woman who offers herself because she ought to do so, and, cold and dry, thinks of her sewing when she's making love. The pleasure that is granted to me from a sense of duty ceases to be a pleasure at all. I won't have any woman doing her duty towards me. How sweet it is to hear her voice quaver as she tells me the joy she feels, and to hear her imploring me to slacken my speed so as to prolong her bliss. How I love to see her, drunk with delight, gazing with swooning eyes upon me, or, languishing with love, keeping me a long while at arms' length.
But these accomplishments are not vouchsafed by nature to young girls. They are reserved for women who have passed the age of thirty-five."
@Tim Horton and others:
Seriously, the whole time I was growing up I heard the old refrain that men hit their "sexual peak" at 18 or so, while women hit theirs around 40. In my case, that proved to be accurate. However, if given this is a relatively universal "truth" there are some problems that arise from it.
The first problem is that 40-year-old women, on average, and no matter how artful they are at their toilette, are not as attractive to a 20-year-old man as a 20-year-old women, and even if he's aware of the appeals of a cougar, a 20-year-old man is likely not looking to form a real meaningful and serious relationship with a 40-year-old woman.
The second is that 20-year-old men are rarely attractive to a 40-year-old woman, in any way except aesthetically (perhaps not even then) and for their extremely brief refractory period. Because when talking about men, at least, "sexual peak" refers only to the degree of interest in sex and the ability to achieve, maintain, and quickly re-achieve very hard erections. It has nothing to do with skill.
Many older women are not cougars and don't want to be seen as such things (I find the entire conception distasteful and I don't have enough money to be a true cougar or anyone's sugar mama, myself). And still more are not satisfied by the mere presence of a hard body and an easily-achieved hard cock. They, as much as men, want skill, technique, open-mindedness, generosity. These qualities tend to be acquired in greater amounts over time. I've tried the "younger man" thing a number of times and it wasn't worth my time. I've found that men hit their stride closer to 40 themselves, and maybe even a bit later, but unfortunately, the ability to get and keep that rock-hard cock starts to be compromised, and the refractory period is typically a lot longer as men age (I've been lucky enough to know a few notable exceptions).
So it seems to me to be Nature's cruelest of jokes, and one aimed only at straight people. Two men would have the same interest-level, and physical ability at the same age, and would also have picked up skills by the same age; young lesbians might not necessarily have the most brilliant sex life, but youth and beauty might carry them -- but two 40-year-old women: watch out!
But then you get couples like the one @92 and it seems like sometimes patience is indeed its own reward. I hope you two just keep getting hotter and hotter.
Also, Tim Horton, if you and your friends are in your 30s, it's likely many of you have young children. Young children are great in so many ways and wonderful for so many things, but their effect on their parents' sex life is generally terrible for all sorts of reasons. But young children get older, and older still, and finally leave. If the marriages endure and the rest of the relationship is still good and some baseline level of (even dutiful) sex continues so the couple stills feels sexually connected, you and your friends may be very pleasantly surprised in a few years.
To be fair to the fundies, that was totally unintentional... oh, and hilarious. "I believe in Jesus. I must stay pure.... So just fuck me in my asshole."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ZF_R_j0…