In today’s episode of Lizardho Did Not Know What Sex Was I was like RECENTLY out when this all started. I was born and raised LDS, I knew nothing of the intricacies of gayness, especially not tgirl stuff, so I was feeling kinda isolated. I didn’t know any good gay bars (or even bad ones), I didn’t know where to find gay clubs on campus, I didn’t have any gay friends locally (because I’d been raised Mormon), so I looked up “gay networking apps” hoping to find something to help me meet fellow queers. And lo and behold, the App Store presents me with some newfangled application called “Grindr,” a gay networking app for all members of the LGBT community! Boy howdy did I ever luck out, right?
So I download it, I make a profile, and then a bunch of family comes into town and I set it all aside. I’d literally JUST finished making my profile, so I thought “well, once my cousins head out I can come back to this and start swiping,” ya know, like the naive virgin I am, and instead what happens is I spend the whole day playing with cousins and being the fun queer cousin and watching movies and playing games and telling jokes and stuff and then they leave to sleep for the night.
Once they’re asleep I go “well let’s start swiping and see if I can make any friends” which I quickly learned was NOT how Grindr worked because people can just cold message you. No swipes needed, just locked in on a profile and BAM here’s a DM. And a bunch of these guys hadn’t uploaded pictures to their profiles - weird - but at least they were being nice and sending pictures directly to me and OH MY GOD it’s a cock tsunami. The first message I open is a penis with, I shit y’all not, TWO bends in it. Like, “this episode of sexame street is brought to you by the letter ‘s,’ for Sexual Harassment” style two bends. I remember just gawking at it for a bit while I rationalized what I was experiencing. Surely this is a fluke, a bizarre mishap on a dating app, SURELY this man has sent me this in error, or barring that, he’s sent me this because as the only person on earth with a serpentine penis he is looking for someone with an s-shaped vagina and has become increasingly desperate with time. Maybe he sent this to me because he knows tgirls get our shit made custom and he’s hoping one of us has a designer pussy with a loop-da-loop in it? Who tf even knows, but surely the next one won’t be GACK it’s cock it’s just penis and balls all the way down. I got 20 messages that first evening WITHOUT prompting and all 20 messages were dick pics from faceless accounts.
By the end of that day I came to learn what most people know already, which is that Grindr is attempting to redefine the word “cockpit” in the worst way. Once I knew that, I acclimated quickly - I only messaged trans women, I always messaged an opening that was something like “Hey, I promise I’m not a chaser I’m just recently out and desperate for friends” which worked shockingly well. I learned to ignore DMs from faceless accounts, I learned to ignore dick pics, I wrote a better profile for making my intentions on the app clear, I even made some friends! It was so nice! I was chatting with people, I was getting support and finding places to go and it’s all coming together to help me feel more confident. I even got some good makeup tips that really had me feeling like hot shit.
At this point, about three months have passed, I’m not looking for a relationship, but I’m also open to the idea of maybe going on a date? Like a normal chill low-stakes first date or two? Which didn’t seem to be the norm on Grindr but I wasn’t desperate so I could wait.
Well one day I get a message from a guy with a face pic on his account. He looks cute. He is respectful and interested in me. He sends me pics of his recently-painted fingernails and his hands are stunning so when he asks if I would ever wanna hang out I say “sure.” Later that evening he messages me “Netflix and chill?” and I swear to God I did not know what that meant. I knew NOTHING but I was also cursed with the Dunning Krugerest of brains and so I thought “Omg, that sounds like such a cute idea! Watching Netflix, calm conversation, no expectations, I love that!” And I ignored all the red flags my big smart brain was throwing out because I was in the midst of Puberty 2 and was coping with it by being stupid.
So I put on some makeup and a dress and headed out. I walk through the kitchen out to my car and drive over to his place. I scope it out because I’m not a total idiot and see that he wasn’t lying about having roommates, although it looks like they’re doing something outside. But that means I at least have some witnesses to my arrival in case this guy’s a phobe or whatever.
So I go up, I knock on the door, and the guy answers the door, and there are a few things that become immediately apparent.
One - this guy lied a LOT about his height - I am like 6 inches taller than him, which meant I was probably around 30 lbs heavier than him, which meant I felt like a huge cinderblock. Just looking at him made my brain do to my shoulders what Christmas magic did to the Grinch’s heart - I felt like a dysphoric cartoon linebacker.
Two - this guy also lied about his “length” because despite being on HRT for like 7 months I was still bigger than him by a lot. Homeboy was flying at full mast and was about the same size as me when I was flaccid.
Three - I could accurately assess point #2 in the front doorway to his house because he was NOT wearing pants. He was wearing a shirt, but was what one of my friends called “Winnie the Pooh-ing it” in the sense that he ONLY had that shirt on.
Four - He was stoned as FUCK and physically trembling a little bit. It was probably excitement, but because I was now feeling hella dysphoric it made me feel even bigger and manlier than I had before.
So here I am, 6’0”, 180 lbs, pre-FFS so I still am insanely clockable, looming over some 5’6” cis guy with his dick out and my brain was fully lying to me - the dysphoria was awful, I thought I scared him with my massive body, AND he’s evidently expecting sex instead of a chill conversation and Netflix because he’s got his l’il unwashed peener out flopping around like a Republican pixie stick and he says “Wow, you’re stunning! Can I have a hug?” and I immediately burst into tears because I feel dysphoric and I hate that, I also feel HELLA shallow because I’m fully judging this guy for not being taller than me (which I actually care VERY little about, I’ve had crushes on guys who were barely 5’1”, but he said he was 6’2” on his profile so I was expecting to feel small and felt a bit miffed), then feeling like an asshole for being shallow, then feeling like an idiot for not considering that Netflix and chill might have a different meaning on the LGBT Nutworking App, then feeling like an even bigger asshole for leading this guy on, then feeling scared because I’d never had sex before and I didn’t really wanna try it out tonight, and so I just start bawling. And all of this happens mentally, internally, in the course of about 0.3 seconds, so from the outside looking at it it looks like this:
“Hey” *penis wiggling around like a branch swaying in the wind* “Wow you’re stunning, can I have a hug?”
He just kinda nervously stands there, closes the door in my face, then reopens it with pants and guides me inside. He gets me a glass of water and once I can catch my breath he asks what’s up and I say “I thought we were gonna watch Netflix and chill together” and he says “Yeah, the “chill” in “Netflix and chill” means sex” and I was like “Oh no, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know” and he’s like “It’s fine, we don’t have to, I mean, we CAN, I’m obviously not gonna say no, but we CAN just talk” and so we talked for a bit while I tried to think of what I wanted. And in the end I decided I’d rather have sex with someone in a moment where I knew that’s what I was getting into so I could like…actually be ready and I left. I’m skipping some steps, there were some awkward attempts to show me it could be fun that mostly ended with me holding an unwashed flaccid penis while he smoked joints the size of tampons and swore that he had never not been able to get hard before and he was SO sorry, but that’s mostly just awkward and tedious so I’m skipping it.
The moral of this story came later (unlike me lol) - despite everything in that interaction being WAY better than it could have been (after-all, I could have been killed, or physically harmed, or forced to do something I wasn’t ready for) I still felt consumed by this oppressive feeling of guilt. It was overpowering, it was nauseating, I felt dirty and evil, like I had *sinned* in some way. It was awkward, I hated it, and it was just endless. I didn’t know how to talk to trusted people about it because in hindsight I was ignoring a lot of risks to have a date because I was excited to go on a date as a woman!
Fortunately, I was playing World of Warcraft Classic at the time. My guild master was a therapist who thought I was hilarious. So she knew I’d been off for a few days and asked what was up. I said it was NSFW, they said we’re an adults-only guild and I could dish, so I started sharing and partway through this she asks,
“Sweetie, were you like…Mormon or Catholic or something? Most people don’t feel this upset about consensual kissing,” and I’m like “K, listen…” and she and the rest of the guild kinda calm me down and that was nice. I even ended up in like a sort of online situationship/FWB/bf-type thing with a guy from my Guild who was really sweet and understanding to me and he chatted to me about sex and there was a point where he was like “Nobody feels as guilty about consensual sex as a fundamentalist Christian girl” and I was like “wait, oh shit oh shit, I know something about that” and I looked it up and mathematically speaking that is true.
Women raised in fundamentalist Christian religions experience extremely frequent and shame-oriented messaging about sex, and that causes them to (surprise surprise) feel extremely frequent and intense feelings of shame related to sex. This creates problems for these religions, where these women are expected to be virgins until marriage when the shame switch is supposed to flip off enough that you can get pregnant 11 times and happily fuck your husband every time he wants so it won’t be your fault when he cheats.
It’s a ridiculous problem set up by these churches to keep people busy focusing on silly bullshit instead of stuff that matters. It’s set up specifically to control people’s relationships by bringing the church into bedrooms, so even in secret you have to feel like someone is there with you. It’s set up to make people feel bad for being human. And it causes women to not want to have sex, even when they get married. The talk these churches give about how sex is something that permanently alters people and makes them worse and dirty and unlovable FOREVER is scary. It’s almost mythically scary - like it’s some subtle but permanent change to my being that I can ignore or even enjoy in the short-term but that will eventually end up destroying me in ways that I cannot comprehend but will almost certainly be agonizingly painful, like the Christian version of whatever the fuck Big Tobacco was doing to people in the 40s.
And the fact of the matter is that sex isn’t some kind of mythic soul nicotine - it’s a silly thing people do. It’s like tickling, it’s like knitting, it’s like jogging for fun, it’s like board game nights, it’s just a THING people can DO with their time, it’s not a spiritual litmus test, not a divine minefield, it’s just a ridiculous thing people do with their genitals. It’s NOT that deep (spiritually, physically it can be as deep as you can take it) but people act like it is because they know it’s a thing most people want to do and if they can make you feel alone in that by building shame around it so nobody talks about it, then you feel outnumbered and alone when it does start to become an aspect of your life (if it ever does, because this blog loves the aroace community and we all know not everyone wants sex.) It also helps churches make bodies religious in a way that allows people to assign virtue to things like weight, grooming, and hygiene.
Sex is just fine - it’s a fun thing to do when it’s right (i.e., with consent, adequate hydration, and an attentive partner.) It can help you feel closer to to them. It requires vulnerability that can strengthen some kinds of relationships. It can help you bond with people and exercise in a way that is fun. It can also be painful, it can be dangerous, it can lead to conflicting feelings or even health risks, but it’s not inherently good or bad despite the pros and cons. It’s just fine.
And because a lot of my followers are exmo I wanted to talk about this. And also because a lot of this puritanical shit is baked into the loaf of US culture I think it’s important to address. To any followers who can relate to feeling overwhelmed by shame when thinking about sex, to any followers who feel “gross” or “dirty” because they want sex, because they did something sexual, because they think about sex, just know you’re not alone. Know you’re not the only one who got hooked by all the shame-inducing messaging. And then know that there’s nothing wrong with you. Exposure can help the feelings of guilt and shame go away, but if you’re not ready for that, then even if you can’t feel it yet you can know that you’re not some sick twisted sex freak for liking sex. This is true for women, but also for men and enbies. It’s true not only for those who are being explicitly shamed but for those who are learning the shame from observation.
Sex is fun, it is cool, is it silly, it is exciting, it feels good, it can be risky, but it’s overall enjoyable BECAUSE IT’S OK TO ENJOY IT. And because that is true, the inverse is also true - you do not HAVE to enjoy sex. You do not have to do it at all. It is not an obligation to do it or to like it in the same way it is not do it or hate it.
Be better to each other. Be better to yourselves. Be gayer, read more Terry Pratchett, and do weird sex stuff if you wanna.
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