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force myself to believe it: even if a guy would like me more for faking and holding back and being so-called "low-maintenance" -- I tell myself it's a stereotype, but even if that stereotype is true of some men -- no man is worth doing that to myself. No man is worth that trapped, false, sick feeling.

***

Being a sex and S&M writer sometimes increases my performance anxiety. Occasionally I'll meet guys who seem to think I am equipped to give any man the Night Of His Life -- and that this is my goal at all times. Sometimes I feel like I should grab certain guys by the shoulders and shake them and say, "I am not your sex-crazy nympho dreamgirl! I'm a real person and I have real preferences, I do not exist just as your fantasy fodder!" But if I really like a guy and he's read some of my work, then I feel less irritation than concern that I won't stack up. It increases the urge to go all Sexy Dreamgirl Shell, rather than attempting to communicate.

Being a sex-positive feminist, I also sometimes worry that other women will read my work and it will increase their performance anxiety. I worry that writing about some stuff I like will be misinterpreted -- that it will lead other women to feel like, gosh, is this something liberated sex-positive women do? Is this something I "should" be doing? With some things I write, I get afraid that I've contributed to a nightmare world where women are "liberated" only in the sense that we can better perform for men.

I once read a blog post by a radical feminist writer in which she claimed that women always hate fellatio because it's always degrading and disgusting. She wrote something along the lines of, "I say this for the women and girls who believe that they have to do it." Part of me felt frustrated by the way she refused to acknowledge that some women really do like performing fellatio (and many other women don't love it, but don't mind doing it as long as they have great sex otherwise). In some ways, it felt like that writer was policing sexuality. But I empathized with her goal: She wanted women who don't like fellatio to relax; she wanted to help them recognize what they don't like. She wanted to decrease their performance anxiety.

I'd like to do the same thing, but I generally prefer to speak from personal experience rather than making claims about others' experience. Accordingly, I've often thought that it would be great if more sex-positive feminists would make lists of Things We, Personally, Don't Like. It's not the easiest project to sell, because one of the big goals of being sex-positive is to destigmatize sexuality and decrease shame. But if we destigmatize sexuality without encouraging good boundaries, then we're not moving forward; we're just creating more bad standards.

So hey, here's an example of a common sexual thing that I don't like: swallowing after giving oral sex. I love fellatio most of the time, and I like it when partners come in my mouth, but I really hate swallowing. In the past I've found a variety of creative ways to deal with this problem, some of which were hot (according to me, anyway) -- but usually I just spit it out in the closest sink. (The reason I don't like swallowing is that it makes me physically ill. No, I am not interested in your armchair theories about why this happens; evidence so far implies a physical cause, not a psychological one.)

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