For example, I once dated a guy who couldn’t make me come, through no fault of his own. This was at a point in my life before I’d had my first orgasm, and I thought I just couldn’t. When our conversations turned to my lack of orgasms (as they often did), he focused on how frustrating it was for him. He’d gotten plenty of girls off before, but I was a tougher cookie to crack. Apparently, I made him feel like less of a man and sexually incompetent. Each time he went down on me or we had sex, my mind could focus on nothing else but trying to come. Rather than relaxing and just enjoying the sensations down below, I would get stressed out and find it even harder to get aroused. Needless to say, his little “pep” talks did more harm than good.

I hope I never run into a guy who does the same thing. Although now I don’t have the same troubles, it’s a common issue for a lot of women. Every one in three women has difficulty reaching orgasm, and three in four can’t come from sex alone. What finally worked for me was experimenting with a vibrator and making sure to try by myself when I didn’t have to worry about another person. Once I got comfortable actually having orgasms, it was much easier to train my body to respond to fingers, a tongue and sex itself.

Before my battery-powered orgasmic breakthrough, however, I never faked it. The thought seems silly to me: Why pretend like you’re coming when you’re not? Doing it to stroke your partner’s ego isn’t a good reason at all. It just leads your partner to think they’re getting you off when they’re not, and they’re not very likely to change what they’re doing. It was definitely uncomfortable replying “no” to the question “Did you come?,” but it helped in the long run. Great sex comes in part from honest and clear communication.

I always find it cool when guys operate with a “ladies first” mentality in mind. With heterosexual sex, men get aroused faster than women do, so there’s an issue with timing. Women on average take 20 minutes to reach climax. A man’s orgasm usually means the sex is over, so if the guy gets off first, chances are she won’t.

One of the most vital pieces of information for me is knowing when my male partner is coming. I was once going down on a guy who gave me a “courtesy tap,” thinking I knew what that was. I didn’t. The unexpected orgasm caused a commotion that involved getting come up my nose. I spent the next few days smelling semen. Super fun.

The best way to avoid that, I think, is for guys to verbally communicate that they’re about to come. It may seem weird announcing it in the middle of a blowjob, but whoever’s going down on you might want to know so they can prepare themselves. It’s just good manners.

What totally fails in terms of sex etiquette is when guys get really aggressive about having their partner swallow and push their partner’s head down. Not cool. Not to mention they might hit their partner’s gag reflex and end up with vomit all over them. I’m pretty sure that’s a situation everyone wants to avoid. The spitting versus swallowing debate is one that should be had when both people are capable of speaking, not midejaculation.

There’s also the matter of condom etiquette. In my opinion, guys should always have a condom on hand if they think they’re going to get laid. Yes, their partner should have condoms, regardless of their gender, but it’s always nice to see a guy come prepared (no pun intended). There’s nothing more disappointing than getting hot and bothered with a guy only to find that neither person has a condom.

Last but certainly not least, there’s the matter of the O-face. Most people look a little dorky when they come, but some people’s reactions are just strange. My favorite is the girl from “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” who moans in a low monotone and then declares, “I just came.” Her total lack of reaction to her orgasm is hilarious. But really, laughing at someone’s O-face totally undermines the pleasure roller coaster ride they just took.

It feels sort of silly and outdated to talk about etiquette (or even use that word, at the very least), but I do think being mindful of other people during sex makes sense. If it can help prevent someone’s orgasm-trouble shame or a come-up-the-nose debacle, I can rest easy. This way, we spend less time worrying about what we’re doing in bed and more time just doing it.

Contact Elisabeth Bahadori at sex@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter: @lisabaha.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this article incorrectly attributed a scene to the film “Wedding Crashers.” In fact, the scene is from “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.”

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I’m sad to say I’ve never even witnessed a naked run in person despite being here for almost six semesters. Blame it on the fact that studying in the library during Dead Week makes my anxiety levels shoot up and my otherwise nonexistent claustrophobia emerge. It’s grown in my mind as an event of complete liberation, a short moment during which you feel the air on your skin and shake off the finals stress that gnaws at you while you study.

I also imagine it as a moment of human connection, when we can all come together and take an honest look at one another. Nudity has such strong ties with vulnerability: We’re born nude and after that are usually only nude around people we’re physically intimate or very comfortable with. Public nudity serves the rare (and much-needed) purpose of showing us that we’re really not all that different, provides a time to realize that the “perfect” bodies in TV shows and magazine ads aren’t the norm.

Last semester, someone on Facebook posted a link to a video of the naked run. It was a shaky minute of naked people streaming by, less the glorious revelry that I imagined and more of what it actually was: a quick distraction from writing papers, cramming for finals and generally wanting the semester to be over. A couple of days later, jittered out on coffee and clutching my blue books, I walked past two guys near Wheeler. One asked the other if he’d seen the naked run, and the reply he got was, “Yeah, too much bush.” On a campus where tattoos, piercings and neon-dyed hair is common, I didn’t expect to encounter closed-mindedness about physical appearance.

But it seems like a lot of us still have the media’s idea of beauty in mind. Even if the majority of us don’t look like the supermodels we’re trained to admire, we still feel it’s appropriate to hold others to impossible standards, especially when it comes to public nudity. It’s almost as if we feel like we have a right to only see “beautiful” bodies. This has been on my mind lately, in part because of the show “Girls.” Lena Dunham’s frequent nudity on the show seems to have started as much commotion as the show itself has.

When I first saw her naked, I was confused more than anything. My brain just wasn’t used to seeing women who looked like that on a television show. She wasn’t a toned Victoria’s Secret model look-alike, with a size-two body and perfect boobs. Instead, I saw a woman whose body had quirks and weird proportions. She looked real. What was she doing on TV?

Last week, I read a piece by Margaret Cho about being asked to cover up in a traditional Korean spa, where nudity is encouraged to the point of being mandatory. The reason? Her numerous tattoos were offending other spa visitors. She was surrounded by naked women but ostracized simply because her body was adorned with art while theirs were not.

It saddens me to know that we live in a world in which the human form can be construed as offensive or distasteful. Obviously, there are cultural norms and laws in place regarding nudity, but outside of that, the naked bodies we see should come with little surprise and even less judgment. Instead of fat-shaming or otherwise criticizing, maybe we should admit that it takes a lot of courage to be naked in public. At the very least, just because you may find someone’s body less than aesthetically pleasing doesn’t mean you should vocalize your thoughts.

By the time I graduate, I expect the naked run to be checked off my bucket list. To be honest, it’s still completely romanticized in my head. I imagine running in slow motion to Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” while pages of notes flutter down around me dramatically. This scene is full of its standout characters: the 200-pound guy wearing a Daft Punk helmet, the pink-haired girl with a Spongebob tattoo on her left buttcheck, the skinny guy in Converse high-tops.

It won’t matter if the people around me can grace the covers of GQ and Cosmo. I won’t care how much the boobs bounce or the junk jiggles. What will matter is that a bunch of Berkeley kids got together during the worst time of the semester to scream and run and enjoy the simple art of being butt-naked, no matter what the butt in question looks like.

Contact Elisabeth Bahadori at sex@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter: @lisabaha.

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A 16-year-old high school girl from Steubenville, Ohio, drinks at a party. She starts to feel sick and passes out. Two football players use this as an opportunity to drag her unconscious body from one party to another. They rape her, urinate on her and live-tweet the whole thing while their friends watch and laugh. Please tell me, was that girl asking for it?

A former Steubenville NAACP leader thinks she was, calling the victim “drunk and willing.” Women are constantly scrutinized and blamed for violent crimes that are committed against them because of their clothing, their personal choices and their alcohol consumption. Society teaches us: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t murder. But when it comes to rape, the message is clear: Don’t get raped. Rape is an act whose responsibility, time after time, falls on its victims, not on its perpetrators.

We have to wonder why. Is it the media, which unfortunately uses the female form as an object? Turn on the TV, and look at how many half-naked, writhing women you find in commercials for cars, for beer, for food. The media tells us we can have the woman just as easily as we can the new bacon double cheeseburger. It’s all there for the taking.

Women can’t win in this world. There seem to be only two positions open to us. The first is the role media creates, in which women exist only for the pleasure of men, to be walking, talking sex dolls who never say “no.” If we reject this objectified role and demand to be treated as people, with freedom to choose what we wear and sleep with whom we like, we get labeled as cockteases and whores. Female liberation exists only within the confines of patriarchy.

All of our choices, then, become tied to sex. What we wear, what we drink, whom we smile at are all just open invitations for men to exercise their physical dominance over us. I wish I didn’t have to say “men” and “women.” It saddens me that rape is also a gender issue. Yes, female rapists and male rape victims exist, but the majority of rapes involve a male aggressor and a female victim. It is disempowering for us all that women are portrayed as wanting to be maimed sexually and that men are portrayed as insatiable beasts, incapable of rational thinking and unable to control their sexual desire.

I’m sorry to the man outside of BART who tried to start a conversation with me. It was late, and what I gave you in return was no eye contact, no “hello” back. My fingers tightened around the pepper spray in my pocket. I’m sorry to the men who have good intentions but are treated like criminals simply because they’re male. That’s not fair.

But it will continue to happen. I will keep ignoring any man who talks to me late at night. I can’t be the nice person who I am when one in four women will be a victim of rape or attempted rape by the time she leaves college. I can’t help but be on guard when I know that 50 percent of rape victims who come forward are accused of lying. I will not feel safe in a country in which the media mourns the damaged football careers of two rapists and not the poor 16-year-old girl whose life they ruined. I can’t sit back and relax when only 3 percent of all rapists end up in jail. I am a woman, and let me be honest: I am terrified.

My fear grew when I found a website called avoiceformen.com, a self-proclaimed anti-feminist website that runs articles whose topics include why women are the only ones who can stop rape and how women actually enjoy being raped. Part of their sick, twisted logic is that women often like rough sex and that some have rape fantasies, so rape is OK and should be encouraged.

Let me make myself very clear. Enjoying rough sex is not asking to be raped. Even having rape fantasies is not asking to be raped. There is a monumental difference between playing out a fantasy with a sexual partner you trust and feel safe with and being forced to have sex against your will. Making excuses for rape does nothing but perpetuate rape culture and encourage rapists.

For those of you who think women are “asking for it,” you’re right. We are asking for something. We are begging, pleading, demanding a world in which we feel safe and respected. We’re asking to be treated like decent human beings. We’re asking for an end to rape and rape culture. When will you finally listen?

Contact Elisabeth Bahadori at sex@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter: @lisabaha.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this column incorrectly stated that one in four women will be raped by the time she leaves college. In fact, one in four women will be a victim of rape or attempted rape by the time she leaves college.

The post Asking for it appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Instead, we fall together in a mess. You pull my dress off and leave my shoes on, for some reason. You make this terrible grunting noise while taking off your belt. We’re awkwardly squeezed into a twin-sized bed, making out. My hair gets caught under your elbow. You decide to go down on me. It reminds me of a blind dog furiously lapping at a bowl. You give up after a few minutes. The condom’s across the room, and I get out of bed and grab it. The sex begins, and I remember once again that you are not Ryan Gosling and that this is not Hollywood. The rhythm is off, and my neck keeps getting pushed against the headboard. The moans that fill the silence seem forced.

If trying to coordinate an intimate act with someone isn’t hard enough, there’s also the distracting internal monologue. I once got coffee with a friend who complained about first-time sex with her crush. All she could think about, she told me, was how much she was moving around. Apparently her ex told her she wasn’t “lively” enough during sex. Now, she was focusing on wiggles and hip gyrations rather than enjoying herself.

The tendency to be sidetracked by tiny details is a common one. In fact, the economic world has a term for it: paralysis by analysis. It describes what happens when we overthink a decision so much that we’re too paralyzed to choose at all. I think the term can be applied to the bedroom as well. We often worry so much about how we look or what our partner is thinking that we don’t enjoy one of the most pleasurable acts out there.

Research indicates that 40 percent of women and 30 percent of men experience sexual dysfunction, a broad term that includes lack of desire, arousal problems and performance anxiety. So much of these issues stem from being in our heads during sex rather than in our bodies.

I think people often forget that being in bed together is already an indicator that your partner finds you cool or witty or, at the very least, sexually attractive. By the time you’re between the sheets, the hardest part is over. You’ve usually gone through the awkward getting-to-know-you stage and established that there’s mutual interest. Sex is supposed to be the fun part that comes afterward.

Not to mention your partner probably isn’t fixating on whatever imagined problem you have. No one cares if you have a double chin in missionary or if your orgasm face looks like you bit into a lemon and then got punched in the chest. I promise no one is staring at your thighs or counting to see whether you have a four-pack or six-pack (or any pack at all). Most of the time, everyone is just stoked to be getting laid.

If you’re really in your head during sex, slow things down. Focus on your breathing and the sensations of your body. Talk to your partner about how you’re feeling.

I once dated a guy who had trouble keeping it up. Instead of ignoring the limp elephant in the room, we talked about it. He told me he was nervous, and I told him I was, too. Sometimes, just hearing your partner tell you they’re experiencing the same thing is enough to solve the problem. During the talk, I reassured him that I found him attractive and liked sleeping with him. We never ran into the problem again.

Real-life sex, with all its chaos, is rarely like the movies. Expecting it to be perfect from the get-go is only going to lead to disappointment. The act involves complicated movements that require synchronization, the exchange of body fluids and so much more.

Most people don’t look like models. At some point in your life, you’re going to fart or queef during sex. Let’s get the embarrassment over with now. Getting paralyzed or overthinking it takes you out of the moment. Shit happens. Let’s laugh about it and then keep having awesome sex.

Aside from continuing the human species, sex exists for pleasure. We may want it to be seamless every single time, but is that really the best marker of good sex? You can’t enjoy it if you’re busy analyzing everything down to microscopic detail. Let’s be real. It’s not some test of your beauty or body. It’s just sex.

Contact Elisabeth Bahadori at sex@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter: @lisabaha.

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I decided to be open-minded and give it a go. The resulting orgasm was so intense I could feel its waves throughout my entire body. When I tried to return the favor later that week, a simple “So?” didn’t cut it. I had to convince this guy to let me use a finger on him, and after only a few minutes, he begged me to stop. It wasn’t that we needed more lube or that my nail was sharp. The problem, as he so eloquently put it, was that he felt “gay.”

I tried to reassure him, but no avail. Now, this guy was straight and had never shown any signs of being homophobic. I didn’t really get it. Why would he react so negatively to something he’d been eager to try on me just last week? We talked for a bit longer, and then it was settled: His back door was (and would remain) firmly shut.

What a shame. Anal play allows for prostate stimulation, which can bring a guy to orgasm all by itself. In fact, the prostate is such a source of pleasure that it’s often referred to as the “male G-spot.” It can be indirectly stimulated by gently kneading the perineum (the space between the anus and testicles), but a finger right on it provides much more intense pleasure.

A lot of straight guys, though, will freak out if you mention it. I once asked my friend’s boyfriend if he ever let her do it to him. Instead of answering, he chided me for thinking he was “some kind of homo.” Quite the charmer, this guy.

For all my heterosexual male readers, let me tell you something. Having a finger, butt plug or dildo in your ass does not make you gay. It makes you awesome. First, it shows that you know what you want, which is hot. Second, it shows that you feel comfortable about your sexuality, which is hotter. Third, it’s going to lead to a mind-blowing orgasm. You can judge for yourselves whether that’s hot or not.

Let’s keep in mind what the word “gay” even means. In its original sense, it means “happily excited,” and now, in more common usage, it’s a synonym for “homosexual” (which means your sexual desire is directed towards someone of the same sex). Please note that nowhere in the second definition are butts mentioned.

By insinuating that anal play makes you “gay,” you are literally saying, “I believe that a finger or toy near or in my anus will force me to be attracted to men.” Yeah, and me painting my nails is going to make me fluent in Portuguese. Guys, a vibrating dildo in your behind will not make you gay overnight. In fact, it won’t make you gay at all.

To be more precise with our language, then, the notion is that anal play will make you be perceived as gay. May I ask what is so wrong with that? It’s not like someone is mistaking you for an avid neo-Nazi. It’s more similar to being asked if you’re British. A simple “no, I’m not” will clear things up, and then we can all get on with our lives without making a big fuss of it.

This stigmatized response to anal play just points to societal homophobia. Gay people have sex, fall in love and suffer heartbreak just as straight people do. They’re not some vulgar separate species. They’re not animals. Let’s stop acting as though being mistaken for gay is some big insult. It’s not.

For those readers who are interested in trying anal play, here are a few guidelines to make it as enjoyable as possible. First, try to empty your bowels a couple of hours before play, and then take a shower and clean your anus. Start with something small like a finger, and make sure to use anal lube, which is thicker than traditional vaginal lube.

The two most comfortable positions for anal play are on all fours or laying down with your legs pulled into your chest. Get comfortable, go slow and stop if you feel any pain. The male prostate is located about an inch inside the anus, toward the stomach.

A great first-time experience is to have your partner gently massage your prostate while going down on you. When you’re comfortable with a finger, look into butt plugs, anal beads and dildos.

By all means, if you’re not into trying anal play, don’t do it. I just hope you have a better reason than “that’s just gay.” For everyone else, get your toys ready, and in the original sense of the word, go have a gay old time.

Contact Elisabeth Bahadori at sex@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter: @lisabaha.

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Partway through my senior year of high school, my then-boyfriend and I had the number talk. Although we were happy with each other (and our sex life), we both got insecure. My insecurity manifested itself in the form of wanting way-too-detailed knowledge. I quizzed my boyfriend on the names, order and places in which he’d slept with other women.

At one point, I told him that I wished he’d been a virgin when we’d met. This jealousy was directed at women he hadn’t spoken to in ages, some of whom lived across the country and were in no way a threat to our being together. For some weird reason (psych majors, feel free to weigh in), knowing all of this extraneous detail made me feel better about his number, which was higher than mine.

What is “high” or “low,” anyway? One survey puts the average number for women at  four and the average for men at seven. I’d venture a guess and say those figures will be higher for current college students, mostly because of our “raging” hormones and the Van Wilder-esque hook up culture.

The way the number fits into our sex lives is bizarre. First off, there’s this weird double standard. If women have numbers that are too low, they’re either considered prudes or are accused of lying (talk about a serious Madonna-whore complex). If women have numbers that are higher, they’re seen as slutty or easy. Men have it the opposite way. A high number indicates sexual cunning while a low one screams, “I’ve got no game.”

We’re so aware of this stigma that it changes how we calculate our number. Women tend to under-report their number, while men exaggerate theirs. Why do we care so much? It’s not like one little number reveals any real information.

It doesn’t influence whether or not you have a sexually transmitted disease. There are plenty of people in the world who ended up getting an STD from their first sexual partner. (And on the other end, it’s very possible to have had many partners and be totally clean).

It’s not like your number is actually an indicator of how good you are in bed. Case in point: I once slept with a guy who was known as a ladies’ man. But he couldn’t have found my clit even if it had a flashing neon sign and multiple arrows pointing to it.

Nor does having a high number mean you’re promiscuous. If you start having sex at 17 and have one partner a year, by the time you graduate college, your number’s at five. If you’re a woman, that’s already higher than the average. But having one partner a year seems fairly tame, especially compared to those whose life motto is “Get-Money-Fuck-Bitches.” Similarly, having a low number doesn’t mean you’re pure or inexperienced or pretty much anything at all.

Your number is just that: a symbol that indicates how many sexual partners you’ve had. Society has absolutely no reason to be making normative claims about your sex life. Anyone who tells you that you should be at some predetermined number by whatever age is just being close-minded.

Not only that, but all this numbers talk is simply a way for us to play the comparison game. Your number doesn’t need to match that of your friends. It shouldn’t be dictated by your gender. It doesn’t matter if it’s higher or lower than your sexual partner’s. More often than not, knowing your partner’s number just leads to anxiety or jealousy (or, in my case, anxiety masked as curiosity).

The best answer I ever got to the numbers question was from one of my roommates during sophomore year. We were giving each other a play-by-play of our previous and current relationships, and I asked her what her number was. She looked me straight in the eye and said, “I can’t really answer that. Some were one-night stands, others were people I was with for years. It’s too simple to make each partner correspond to one notch on my bedpost. It completely overlooks my history with each of them.”

If none of the other reasons is compelling, I hope that one is. Whether you take those words to heart and keep your number under wraps or you share the digit freely without fear or shame is irrelevant. The choice is yours. What we should make sure of, however, is that we’re focusing on the quality of our sex lives, not the quantity of our partners. At the end of the day, your number ain’t nothin’ but a number.

Contact Elisabeth Bahadori at sex@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter: @lisabaha.

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To this day, I wax my arms and armpits. I shave my legs. For a very long time, I also waxed — you guessed it — down there. In high school, my friends and I decided to get our first bikini waxes together for moral support. We took turns on the table as the sweet Taiwanese woman violently ripped muslin from between our legs, alternating between shushing our cries and muttering “it’s OK” under her breath. My pores bled that first time. But I walked out of there with my head held high, slightly uncomfortable with my cotton underwear rubbing against raw skin.

My boyfriend at the time loved it. The guys I dated later followed suit. Each would talk about how sexy it looked, and whenever I walked out of the salon, I knew that night I’d be getting oral. The awkward growing-out phase between waxes was my nightmare. The new hairs growing in would be painful (not to mention unsightly), and each partner would make it clear he just couldn’t wait for the next time I got waxed.

Then I started dating a new guy. One night, while I was between waxes, we were lying in bed naked. He turned to me and with some embarrassment said, “I kind of like pubic hair.” Once I got over my surprise, I decided to grow it out, in part to turn my partner on and in part to see if I liked my own pubic hair. Until then, that possibility had never really occurred to me.

Turns out, I love it. It’s this little patch of darkness that covers up my sexy bits. I feel seductive and womanly. The days of scalding wax and searing pain are gone. No more red bumps or ingrown hairs.

The trend, especially among college students, is to go bare. Statistics show that around 70 to 88 percent of women and 58 to 78 percent of men partly or fully remove their pubic hair. With numbers like those, getting rid of pubic hair isn’t even a trend anymore — it’s the norm. How did we get here? Porn, the great trendsetter of American sex, seems to be the most obvious choice.

Your hair serves a purpose. First off, it traps pheromones, erotic scents that are biologically designed to make your partner want you more. Not only that, but it helps protect against sexually transmitted diseases, which we all know are common on college campuses.

Think about it. You wax or shave, creating tiny cuts in your skin. Then, if you happen to sleep with someone who has herpes or HPV, it’s way easier for the virus to come in contact with your skin. Condoms can’t help, since they don’t protect against the STDs that are spread by skin-to-skin contact.

A lot of people remove the hair for aesthetic reasons. My guy friends tell me they shave because it makes their penises look huge. Newsflash: However big your dick looks isn’t going to change how big it feels. My girl friends tell me that it looks pretty and makes them feel clean. I can understand the appeal, but really we just end up looking like prepubescent girls. I don’t want to look like a 5-year-old. I want to look like a woman. Going bare doesn’t make your pussy clean. Taking regular showers keeps your pussy clean.

It scares me how deeply society has internalized this aesthetic trend. When Sasha Grey, a well-known porn star, sported pubic hair during her guest spot on “Entourage,” Twitter exploded with things like, ‘Entourage was wild. So was Sasha Grey’s bush. #EW” and, “…disgusting. IT’S 2010!” It’s not just that we feel dirty or gross with pubic hair. We go so far as to bash other people for their downstairs grooming choices.

Now, I’ve been there. I’ve done the shaving, the waxing, the agonizing. It wasn’t until that one guy who told me he liked hair that I even considered the possibility of going au natural. Sometimes all it takes to get over the fear or shame is one person to tell you it’s OK.

You may not get that from our society. The people you sleep with, the porn you watch and your own internal voice might be giving you the same discouraging message. But I’m not. Pubic hair is sexy and liberating, and even if you choose to keep shaving or waxing, just make sure you’re doing it for you. It’s your body. If anyone gives you shit for being empowered and confident about the choice you make, give them the finger and kick them out of your bed. They don’t deserve to be sleeping with you anyway.

Contact Elisabeth Bahadori at sex@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter: @lisabaha.

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