SEX ACCORDING TO MAÏA
Are you dominant or submissive? Clitoral or vaginal? Top, bottom, agnostic? Are you attracted to your partners’ physical beauty or their intelligence? Every summer, we’re bombarded with these kinds of quizzes—ever more creative when it comes to compartmentalizing ourselves. The promise is simple: to know ourselves better. But few warn us about the risk of locking ourselves into ever more narrow and rigid identities.
But the paradox is that we all experience moments when our sexuality is out of whack. After forty years of heterosexuality, some mothers find happiness in the arms of a woman. After the fourth Spritz, some dominant men find themselves on all fours. After two sleepless nights, sex addicts prefer camomile to a quickie. Sometimes, a one-night stand reveals the orgasmic potential of our breasts, an erotic dream brings out a new facet of pleasure, and sadomasochism is tested. “for fun” becomes a religion.
These surprises happen to thousands of people every day. To the point that if we were to stick together all the exceptions, all the altered states of consciousness, all the influences, all the surprises, the idea of a sexual “essence” would collapse. It is not exceptional that by dint of accumulating sidesteps, our preferences end up turning over like a pancake. The white geese become formidable dominatrices, the compulsive ones settle down: we should never say never.
Adepts of self-definition
If we were reasonable, we would therefore give ourselves a little leeway when it comes to self-definition. Not that we should write off all labels – it is perfectly true that identities like “asexual” or “queer” allow us to better understand ourselves, to better faire understand and create useful communities to resist discrimination… but this is less true for “cougar” or “shibarista” (adept of roping). As soon as we dig deeper, the sexual diagnosis tends to become nuanced. Contingencies appear. Contradictions pile up. Preference becomes a hasty simplification of desire and, after years or decades of being a couple, it can even start to resemble a cage.
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Add to your selections
It must be said that once the inclinations have been communicated to the people concerned, it is very difficult to go back. This is quite normal. It is so embarrassing to verbalize one’s secrets that one rarely dwells on the twists and turns of pleasure… especially since on the pillow, in a hurry, one can hardly imagine launching into an exhaustive conference (“I like the feel of wooden sex toys, especially oak or maple, except on Tuesdays and until further notice.”).
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