We all have sex. We all enjoy it. We don’t talk about it.
So we don’t have a socially acceptable, socially shareable vocabulary for sex in the #realworld – one that everyone is comfortable using both in general, public discussion, and as a way of articulating how much you enjoy what goes on in your intimate personal relationships, and what you’d like to do.
The language of porn has rushed in to fill that gap.
This isn’t ideal – especially speaking as a woman, because unsurprisingly, given how male-dominated the management of the mainstream porn industry is, the language of porn is predominantly generated by men.
The person who coined the term ‘fingerblasting’ didn’t have a vagina – because if you have a vagina, that term automatically makes you wince and want to cross your legs. (Well, it does in my case.) The person who came up with the term ‘getting your ass railed’ in straight porn, never had his ass railed. And while ‘bitch’, ‘whore’ and ‘slut’ can be turn-ons in mutually agreed and consensual dirty talk, to be addressed as such the very first time you get naked with someone can have quite the opposite effect – speaking for myself and for the many people who’ve shared similar experiences with me, from the regular male response when this approach is queried in a straight context – ‘But women in porn really like it when you call them that’… through similar ‘porn soundtrack’ issues in a gay/lesbian context.
We all get vulnerable when we get naked. Quite often, we aren’t sure what to say in bed, or how to express ourselves verbally. We may have no other frame of reference for ‘how people communicate during sex’ than porn. Which can result in language, and modes of address, that are borrowed, inappropriate and not necessarily welcome. Or a reluctance to say anything at all – which is a shame, because talking and communicating during sex in whatever form you both (or all) enjoy, is part of the fun and can be a huge turn-on.
So here at MLNP we’d love you to help us build a new vocabulary for #realworldsex. You’ll already have seen that our tags are different from the usual industry-standard porn classifications – our co-founder and user experience goddess Oonie Chase explains how to browse and search with them currently. We’d love you to tell us what language you use to celebrate and communicate around #realworldsex in your own individual way. Further down the line, we’ll be asking you to tag with your own terms; for now, please tell us in the comment stream below what your favorite words and phrases are. We’d love to know so that we can enlarge the vocabulary of MLNP, and provide us all with language we can all take forward into the bedroom and beyond, to talk happily, unashamedly, vividly and creatively about #realworldsex.
