My Orgasmic Lies: A Selection from Tracy Clark-Flory’s Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey into the Heart of Desire (2021)
“By outward measures, I was a bona fide sex writer who sang the feminist gospel of sexual pleasure—but my personal life made me feel like an impostor. This had surfaced cringingly in a recent phone interview with legendary sex writer Susie Bright when I asked about her youthful explorations with ‘casual sex.’ Casual sex, she guffawed. Since when was sex casual? ‘Every time I was with someone it was intimate,’ she told me. ‘I just don’t find sex to be this jaded, cynical, stoic exercise. How do you manage to do that and have an orgasm? I don’t.’ Neither did I.
Recently, I had started casually sleeping with Tim, a friend of a friend, who told me, smilingly, ‘You come so easily, babe.’ The truth: I lie so easily, babe. I didn’t know how to stop lying, either. My orgasmic lies spiraled for the same reason that lies generally spiral: the desire to protect the original fabrication. . . .
I got an email from Dan Savage . . . asking me to field a reader question for him. For years, I had read his Savage Love advice column, in which he addressed all manner of sex quandary with his signature style of empathy drenched with acerbic wit. Now, having noticed my writing at Salon, he was forwarding along a reader letter and asking me to weigh in.
‘I am a 23-year-old female, sexually active for seven years, and I can’t reach climax,’ the letter read. ‘I am extremely frustrated. I have a wonderfully patient and helpful partner. He has tried hard to no avail. I can’t even get myself there. I feel like I am broken.’ Here was Dan Savage asking me to give advice to myself. Worse, here was Dan Savage asking me to give advice to a better version of myself. At least this woman, who signed her letter Frustrated Annoyed Person, was not faking her orgasms. . . .
Then, a couple of months later, I tearfully told Tim that I loved him, and it was as though I’d replaced the batteries on my orgasm. Ah, right, intimacy. That old thing. Within a few months, I was having regular orgasms and no longer faking it. What a turnabout, what a success, what a disappointing narrative development. This felt like solving the vexing equation of sex + y = orgasm with the variable of ‘love.’ It played right into the same stereotypes—about men’s indiscriminate seed-spreading and women’s need for commitment—that often fueled criticism around casual sex. ‘Admit it, the bar scene is a guy thing,’ in Stepp’s memorable words. I wanted to be able to drink like a man and watch porn like a man and fuck like a man and get off like a man, not exactly appreciating the distorted stereotype of this guiding inspiration.
No matter, the orgasmic finish line had been crossed.”—Tracy Clark-Flory, Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey into the Heart of Desire (2021)
