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Description

Good Sex is hard work. Sophia knows it’s not easy to have a hot sex life, but she’s more than willing to put in the work to get it.

 

Find Sophia on Twitter @1followernodad. She’s also got a newsletter on Substack called Here’s the Thing: https://1followernodad.substack.com/.

 

Check out all of Sophia’s work in GQ here: https://www.gq.com/contributor/sophia-benoit

 

As expected, Good Sex contains mature themes and may not be appropriate for all listeners.

 

Stay up to date with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia.

 

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Sophia Benoit

Sophia Benoit  00:00

I was such a horny kid. I mean, I was writing fake little stories that were like young adult novels, but they were all just basically porn like it was not there was not a narrative arc there. A lot of the like porn I created not porn, the sexual situations I created as a younger kid were actually less written down. The stuff I wrote was often the build up to people making out and having sex. But then I’d get too embarrassed to keep it on a computer that was in my family home. And that was like the era of like a computer room. So it wasn’t like I had a laptop, you know, where it actually came out and was expressed was when I was playing with Barbies. My Barbies, we’re always fucking each other. Everyone was cheating on each other. Everyone’s having each other’s baby like with American girls. It was like here’s other girls that are my age and like having tea and riding horses, which is very fun.

Sophia Benoit 

A barbie was like an adult woman with tits. So I was like, hell yeah, here we go. There were like 15 Barbies that I got from my cousin; one can love triangle doesn’t even begin to cover it. Everyone was dating one guy for the longest time until we got a couple more Ken’s, but everyone was just filthy. I guess it was probably fun for them, you know? So any porn that I like, wrote, it was really like a directing situation. Playing with Barbies, and writing these stories was just like, yeah, this is so hot and horny for me as like an eight-year-old. Hi, I’m Sophia Benoit, and you’re listening to GOOD SEX, my pronouns are she her, and I’m a writer for GQ. And good sex is hard work.

Sophia Benoit 

My relationship to sex growing up was very much shaped by the fact that I was overweight for my entire childhood. And so, so much of my desire around sex was made to feel really taboo on another level more than just like, Oh, I’m a horny kid, I don’t want my parents catching me jerking off. It was not only do I not want my parents to catch me jerking off, I don’t want anyone in my life to know that I even have crushes on people or that I would ever want sex because they might respond to that with disgust. And I felt disgust about it on some level, because I had internalized those messages that like, this is weird that you would ever dare to think that someone would have sex with you.

Sophia Benoit  02:23

So to me sex became a topic that was a joke, because I think I had to find a way to talk about it, because I always wanted to be talking about it. Because again, I was a horny kid. So I was always trying to make it clear when I was joking about it, that I thought that it was transgressive and that it was something out of my reach, or that these stories were for shock value, and that I knew the role that I was supposed to play, which was I’m not supposed to think it’s realistic for me to have sexual desire, and for that desire to be fulfilled. Reshaping my relationship with sex, came about super slowly and very accidentally. And I think it came about a lot through trial and error of still holding myself back from thinking that I could be liked by somebody or be attractive to somebody, especially in college, I was just around these like very toxic men and like still seeking a ton of male validation.

Sophia Benoit 

And at the same time, I was slowly undoing some of that through the internet and through like finding women who were feminists and that were talking about sex in ways that were sex positive and talking about sex in ways that weren’t just a joke, and then reading about sex, and reading romance novels, and reading all kinds of different depictions of like healthy attitudes towards sex. Eventually, the lesson that I learned was kind of this idea of, it won’t kill you to say things that are really vulnerable. And in fact, most people are way more receptive to vulnerable things than you might think. And then it’s never over, the work is never done of getting yourself to a healthy relationship with sex. You know, you write about it, you read about it, you figure out what you’re into.

Sophia Benoit  04:13

Working at a magazine as a sex writer, where the dominant gaze is this straight, cis male gaze. In an ironic way, it’s been easy for me, because I think so much of the world is already in the straight male centric world. We’re already looking at the world through the eyes of GQ. In so many ways. I do try my hardest to think of what I would want men to hear not because of a benefit to me, I think of it in terms of actually benefiting men. I think most people, big generalization, want to be having good sex. I mean, if they’re interested in sex, once we have good sex, I want to be having hot sex and I want to be having good relationships and good relationship talk.

Sophia Benoit 

And I think we have a really limited amount of vocabulary around it. And I think especially for men, there’s not very many good avenues for them to talk about sex and talk about the ways they desire sex and talk about the ways that they’ve succeeded and failed at having good sex. A great example of this is, dirty talk, I think men fail astronomically at dirty talk. Most women I know would love it if men would learn how to talk dirty. And not be weird and awkward and stiff about it or disgusting. And I think it’s a hard thing to learn. I mean, I used to sit in my car and practice saying words out loud whispering it so it’d be like cock, put your cock in me, because like, to me, I was like 18.

Sophia Benoit 

And I was so uncomfortable saying that word because I’d never had said it before, which is a reasonable thing. I’ve been told it was a bad word. To me, that now doesn’t really feel that uncomfortable to say, because I sat in practice in a car being like, I want your cock so badly. I want your cock so badly, you know? But I think people need to have a place to be vulnerable to them and say, hey, it’s reasonable. If you don’t know how to do this, it’s reasonable. If you don’t know how to do dirty talk, that’s good. But like, here’s why it’s hot. And here’s why you should learn and here’s why you should care.

Sophia Benoit  06:33

I think terminology matters a lot in good dirty dogs. So anyone who says like penis during sex is that’s not gonna work. So I think part of it is just getting into the zone. And I don’t think it’s necessarily being aggressive, which is often the dirty talk that I think men are shown. A lot of good dirty talk is more about expressing desire and expressing urgency. So it’s like, I want you now versus like, yeah, fuck me. The first one is so much hot. I mean, the second one’s also hot, too. But like, I’m about to come. Those things are like very eye centric, which is good actually for dirty talk, like this is one of the few times that I think men should like talk about themselves more, you know?

Sophia Benoit 

The funny ways that writing about sex and relationships is infiltrated my life, has been some of the experimental things that I’ve done for articles, whether it’s trying to vape while having sex, like Leo DiCaprio, which was hilarious and did not work, or using a candle like a sex candle. That was kind of a nice way to artificially spice things up under the guise of, hey, we need to try this for an article. But I think some of the stuff that I’ve learned from writing about sex is just how much work it takes to be good at sex and to have a good sex life. I don’t think that most people are just like, crash landing and a great sex life for years on end.

Sophia Benoit 

And I don’t think most of us expect it to take a lot of work, because we haven’t been told that it takes a lot of work to have a good sex life. And also that most of the work is communication and emotional work rather than physical work, which is not necessarily what we think of. I care a lot about good sex. And I care a lot about the fact that with my current partner, I said that like he has a timeline coming up, where he’s not getting my current partner, deadlines coming. He’s the only sexual relationship I have. So I care a lot about it. And I put a lot of work into it. Things like going to couples therapy, which I had written about multiple times, and talked to a bunch of couples therapists about I don’t know that I would have gotten into couples therapy as quickly for myself and my boyfriend if I hadn’t been writing about it and talking to people and hearing from other couples and being like, oh, we’re on a pretty normal good path. But there’s always room for improvement.

Sophia Benoit  08:51

The number one thing I would tell any guy that is looking to expand his repertoire, and emotional bandwidth for sex would be to read erotica and read romance novels and especially read stuff written by straight women if that’s the genre of people that he’s currently sleeping with. Because you see in those novels, good dirty talk what’s hot to women, how you can progress from like corny buildup in foreplay into sex, which a lot of the times is cut out of porn fabulously so I love watching a good porn gif. But it doesn’t give you those extra pieces around dick in vagina or dick in butthole, dick in mouth, all the other places you can put a dick.

Sophia Benoit 

But like it doesn’t give you the pieces around it just gives you this like middle. I mean it would be like getting an IKEA instruction booklet and only getting like page four or five and six and then being like good luck with your college bookshelf. You’re never gonna build a good book show like you’re just not, it’s not gonna happen. You can follow me on twitter at @1followernodad. You can find my newsletter: Here’s the thing, on Substack and you can find my book coming out July 13. Called: Well, this is exhausting. Thank you for listening to GOOD SEX.

CREDITS  10:10

GOOD SEX is a Lemonada Media Original. Produced by Claire Jones and Matthew Simonson. Our supervising producer are Kryssy Pease and Xorje Olivares, and our executive producers are Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer. Music is by Dan Molad with additional music from APM music and sound design is by Matthew Simonson. If you like GOOD SEX, the show, not you know, why don’t you rate and review us on iTunes. And you can follow us on all social media at @LemonadaMedia. Thanks for listening!