(hell, yeah) Scarleteen

You were so tired you literally fell asleep in the middle of sex, leaving your partner all, “Umm? Hello?” You tried to do something sexual you thought was super-sexy but the other person thought was weird, silly or downright gross. You were pretty sure you were rubbing someone’s clitoris until they mentioned, and only afterward, that you were nowhere near when you thought you were right on target. Something one partner of yours thought was the hottest thing ever turned out to be something that, when you tried it with another person, bored the pants not even off of them, but right back onto them. Your biggest turn-on is someone else’s buzzkill. Your idea of what your own sexy is doesn’t match up to someone else’s. Your earnest sexuality right now is someone else’s tired sexual cliche, or a phase in their own sexuality they’re now past.

In any of these situations or many others like them, you might feel like you were bad in bed or someone else might think that about you. Despite how crummy or embarrassed we or others might feel in these situations, and despite a lot of messages we might get out and about in the world that being “bad in bed” is the kiss of sexual death, the truth is, mediocre sex, sexual things we try which just don’t land, or what we or others experience as downright lousy sex — and I’m not talking about sexual violence, abuse or other kinds of sexual non-consent, I’m talking about consensual sex — happens. It happens a lot, as it turns out. When it does, life, including our sexual life, really will usually go on. If we let it, it always does.

Here’s the biggest thing to know about that, before I say anything else at all: When sex is consensual, we all have the right to be our own idea or someone else’s idea of who or what is “bad” in bed. Sometimes; anytime. That’s because we’re human. While we can give consent — or ask for it — for a given kind of sex, and put a lot of specifics on that, what we can’t ask anyone for, nor can anyone insist on with us, is that there is consent ONLY if sex is totally awesome. No one can ever promise that or be expected to deliver that. We also have the right to suck at sex in someone’s estimation because anyone else involved always has the right not to have sex with us or, if they already have, to opt out of sex with us at any time, or to choose not to have sex with us again. And, for that matter, someone we have any kind of sex with gets to be our idea of a lousy lover because we have the right not to have sex with them, to opt out of sex with them at any time, or to choose not to have sex with them again.

Read the rest at Scarleteen here.