do i even taste good?

flesh & performance

I have never centralized my own pleasure. I just thought I had.

I thought I had been deprogrammed from patriarchal, pornified sex. I enjoyed sex. I took pleasure in being pleasurable, in being sexy, erotic, desirable to the person I was with. And men being turned on by my performance turned me on. I thought that was me centering my pleasure. It wasn’t until I started picking apart the pieces within myself that I realized enjoying sex and centering my own pleasure are not the same thing.

I struggle to be comfortable when all the attention is on me. Not just uncomfortable — it feels wrong, like a deviation from my role. I am supposed to be the one pleasing, performing, being sexy. Receiving feels like a transgression. And so instead of being present, I am somewhere else entirely. Am I taking too long? Are they comfortable? Does their mouth hurt? Do their fingers hurt? Am I taking up too much space? Is this angle okay? All of it pulling me further from my own body, further from my own pleasure — and deeper into his.

This is not to say I haven’t been with partners who do center my pleasure. But even then, I rush. There’s a feeling of taking too much, of overstaying my welcome in my own moment. Like their generosity has a limit and I am already close to it. So I move through it quickly, trying not to be a burden. And underneath that is something else entirely: he is perceiving me. Looking at me. Tasting me. And suddenly I’m wondering… do I even taste good?

But nothing we do exists in a vacuum. And when I sit with that — the rushing, the anxiety, the inability to just receive — I have to ask where it came from. Women have been taught, in every possible medium, that their role in sex is to please.

I remember being seven years old in a grocery store, looking up at the magazine rack and seeing beautiful women on every cover with words like “12 Ways to Please Your Man” and “7 Ways to Drive Him Wild.” And when you think about the reverse: how often do you see men’s magazines, books, movies, songs truly dedicated to centering women’s pleasure? It’s not even close.

I went to a private Catholic school, so I never had sex ed. But what I did have access to was Twitter porn, Wattpad fanfiction, Tumblr, and every sex scene in every TV show and film I’ve ever watched. And the sum of that created a beautiful monster within me. You learn from watching and reading — and some of what I learned has given me beautiful, erotic experiences, and some of it is probably more detrimental than I’m even aware of right now.

When I reflect on my past experiences, it’s difficult to look past how much of that was learned. My body has been primed, almost on a biological level, to derive pleasure from being perceived. From the performance of being a hot, sexy, erotic woman. Not from the sensation itself. Not from my own experience. From his.

I think it’s important for women especially to take the time to deconstruct their relationship with sex, how they show up in it, how they experience it. I’m not here to kink shame. But maybe we kink evaluate? Shame doesn’t help anyone. But reflection might.

Think about why you don’t like getting eaten out for more than five minutes. Reflect on why you like it when your boyfriend slaps you in bed. And even as someone who is rather fond of an occasional “yes daddy” here and there — you should probably think about that too.

What I’ve found is that when you go on this psychosexual journey of exploration, it becomes more exciting, not less. I have had to learn what it actually means for me to feel sexy, sensual, erotic. Not for someone else. For myself. What lights me up. What makes me feel warm in all the right places. And what I found surprised me. Some of it is more vanilla than I expected. Some of it is stranger, darker, more psychosexual than I ever imagined. The people I’m drawn to, the way I like to be touched, the way I like to be perceived — all of it shifted when I started paying attention to myself instead of performing for someone else. There is more to play with, not less to enjoy. It doesn’t have to take away everything you like and turn it into something dark.

And what I can tell you is that the real version of you in pleasure looks nothing like what you’ve seen on screen. Your moans might be scratchier, stranger, louder than you expected. You might turn into something more animalistic, more primal, more feral than you ever knew existed inside you. Not a hot girl performing for a camera. Just you. Finally.

Get curious with yourself. Learn yourself. Explore. Go deep into the shadows no matter how scary they look, because sometimes the dark is exactly where you find the thing that will make you reach levels of ecstasy you never could’ve imagined.

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a small but meaningful note —

this publication has been rebranded from “musings of a twenty-something” to:

memento vivere.

“musings of a twenty-something” carried me for a while and i’m grateful for it, but i’ve outgrown it.

memento vivere is latin for “remember to live” — and that’s what this space is becoming. a place to feel and experience deeply, to break apart conditioning, to reflect on desire, culture, and the human experience. everything we’ve been taught to want, and everything we’re slowly unlearning.

thank you for being here. it means everything.

janice

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