March 7, 2014 - Written by: Becky Solomon

Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby…

After having a conversation with a few friends recently, I started noticing a disheartening pattern forming. Apparently, even with a few of us approaching 25, we still find it bloody awkward to communicate about sex.

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It’s not necessarily our fault that we still get all squeamish about it, we’re Brits! We can be the worst at handling awkward situations. But with sex, not communicating really causes a problem, and I am aware of a few people who have gone along with something because they thought “I guess I’ll let this happen”.

It seems that some girls are being made to think that if you have “led a guy on” so far, you can’t really back out, otherwise you’re a “cock-tease”. If we do back out, we’re scared of upsetting guys who are now a little… frustrated.

It shouldn’t be like this – if at any point we don’t want to go ahead with whatever might make us feel uncomfortable, we need to say no and men need to man-up and just have blue balls for a while. It may be because we’re just not in the mood, or we feel like things are going a little too fast, or we’ve decided after all that, we just aren’t that attracted to them.

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We need to be confident and honest, so it’s firmly installed in a guy’s mind that there is always a point you can turn back from. Would you want to sleep with someone who wasn’t sure they actually wanted to sleep with you?

There’s a bit of a weird “play hard to get” culture that’s formed; women will change their mind. So how are we supposed to truly convince someone that really isn’t what we want to do? It’s the culture where “no” actually means “yes, you just aren’t trying hard enough yet” which is sending the wrong sorts of messages to guys that “no” on first mention, isn’t necessarily a no. If at any point we aren’t interested, we’re labelled “frigid” or “bitch” as if there’s something wrong with us (way to handle rejection there).

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It’s not an issue that just affects teenage girls thinking about their first time, it happens to people in relationships too (ever thought, let’s just get it over with?) But we absolutely should be communicating and that comes with confidence. If we don’t have the confidence to say “I actually don’t feel like having sex tonight”, then we either need to find the strength somewhere or take a good look at the relationship.

We should all have the confidence to say “no”, whenever the damn well we like, without feeling obliged to do anything. And absolutely say “yes” when you want to! Enough with the mixed messages – we should be teaching mutual respect, confidence and openness instead of this hard to get nonsense. We should absolutely be talking about sex. Who knows, maybe in time we’ll be as open as the Netherlands…