Here's a short list of some things I think are totally awesome: + Squirming and moaning during sex in a genuine way, out of genuine pleasure! + Acting Super Excited when your partner wants to do something you're actually Super Excited about! + Being up for sexual experimentation and trying new things, while keeping track of your boundaries and saying no (or calling your safeword) to sexual things you really don't like! Those things are great. They're great when they happen in all kinds of sex, and I have no problem with how people experience or deal with with those things -- whether people get them from vanilla or S&M sex, or porn, or sex with multiple people, or queer sex, or whatever. All consensual sex is fine with me. (In particular, in pieces like the one you're about to read, I often have to make it really clear that I'm not anti-porn. OK? I'm not anti- porn. Got that? Say it with me now: Clarisse Thorn is not anti-porn. Yay, it rhymes!) What scares me, however--what continuously gets my goat, what still occasionally makes me feel weird about sex -- is how easy it is to perform those three things I listed above. Because I have always, since before I even started having sex, known exactly what I was supposed to look like while I had sex. I don't even know how I internalized those images: some of them through porn, I suppose, or art or erotica or what have you; some of them by reading sex tips on the Internet or hearing the ones whispered to me by friends. But I can definitely assure you that before I had any actual sexual partners, I knew how to give a good blowjob. I also knew how to tilt my head back and moan, and I knew how to twist my body, and I knew what my reactions and expressions were supposed to look and sound like -- I knew all those things much better than I knew what would make me react. There was a while there, where my sexuality was mostly performance: an image, an act, a shell that I created because I knew it was hot for my partners. I'm not say