Sexology Bae Says: What Does it Really Mean to "Explore Your Sexuality"?

Welcome to the first post of the “Sexology Bae Says” Series! Here, I answer questions readers ask me through the “Ask Sexology Bae!” link. All questions are as anonymous as you make them, and a great way to give me content suggestions or ask me things if you want my perspective. My Instagram and Twitter are also a great way to connect with me.

The following was sent to me by a reader: “[The phrase] ‘Explore your sexuality’ is so overused that I don't even know what it means. I know the process is different for all, but what questions do you even ask yourself to begin?”

I love this question for a few different reasons and I completely agree with the sentiment. Access to the internet has allowed us to form community, meet people with different identities, and help us discover and validate our own.

This is absolutely gorgeous, but queer identity is not the end all, be all of sexual exploration.

Source: theqmmunity.tumblr.com

At the same time, an unfortunate byproduct of this kind of discourse is that it unintentionally conflates sexual exploration with queerness, kink and/or promiscuity—as in you have to have queer sexual experiences, a “hoe phase” of some sort , or develop an affinity for bondage gear in order to truly know who you are as a sexual being. This isn’t true, of course, but it is messaging that I know I saw pretty frequently growing up. This also contributes to asexual erasure because there’s an implication that you have to be interested in sex in the first place to understand your sexuality!

The internet, for all its benefits, has a tendency to take a perfectly fine concept and run in into the ground and grind it into dust. I feel like sexuality discourse falls victim to this at times, too. A lot of the times, I feel like the idea of exploration is left intentionally vague by sex educators to avoid coming off prescriptive—that is, instructing people on what they should or should not do.

Most sex educators try to present information for folks to absorb so they can do with it what they see fit. But like the question states, what if you have no clue where to start?

My first piece of advice is to take a sexual self-inventory. What are you definitely interested in, kind of interested in, and not really interested in sexually? Thinking about the multitudes of ways that humans can experience sexual pleasure that isn’t just from “sex” is also super important when trying to understand your sexuality. Think about what you think would feel good to experience in the context of a sexual situation and go from there, because there aren’t really wrong answers.

You shouldn’t feel like you have to do a particular activity to make your sexuality valid either. When there’s something you’re not interested in, you don’t have to do it because it seems like everyone is doing it and you feel left out because you’re not into it. For example, there’s a social renaissance about ass-eating (or analingus) right now. Personally, I can take it or leave it. I wasn’t into it before it became popular and I’m still not now that it is. I’m not going to pressure myself into doing something I have no desire to try just because it’s cool now.

On the flip side, you should feel secure in the sexual interests you do have, as long as they’re ethical, all parties are able to consent, and expectations are clear ahead of time (especially when other people are involved).

Like I mentioned above, you also don’t need to engage in sex at all to better understand your sexuality. Exploring, for you, can be learning the methods of masturbation that are most pleasurable, or what kind of porn you like, or if you’re into kink. You don’t need to overthink it.

New Year, Real Me: 2019 + Big Honesty Energy

I woke up on New Year’s Day with a burning desire to shake the metaphorical table. I spent last year trying to get my blog off the ground, put my name out there, and find my way into the sex writer in-crowd. I’ve enjoyed being part of this community and the opportunities I’ve had because of it, but I also feel stuck. I fell off creating content in the last months of 2018 due to my personal life crumbling in front of my eyes, but that really wasn’t the root of my problem. My voice was stifled, and I was the person stifling it.

I made a tweet a few days ago about building my own lane in 2019 and I genuinely feel ready to do just that.

I wasn’t being honest in my writing because I was too busy trying to toe the line between being woke enough to avoid a call-out and palatable enough to find acceptance in the (overwhelmingly white) sex blogging community. Nobody likes an angry (confrontational, antagonistic, or contrarian) Black woman, right?

But that’s not why I’m here. This May will mark 2 years since I bought the Sexology Bae domain and started developing this brand. I set out to create a space for me to educate others about topics across the sex & sexuality spectrum from my perspective as a millennial Black woman from the US South, because it was a voice I desperately needed to hear and I got tired of waiting for it. I’ve been speaking to issues that are important to me, but there’s a clear lack of authenticity in my voice because I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing and falling out of favor with the powers that be.

I found myself trying to fit in a box that was already overstuffed and wondering why I felt like my limbs were hanging out. I felt so much discomfort as a writer but considered it part of growing pains and not the result of trying over and over again to make myself something I’m not. I won’t go into specifics yet, but I used my time away to interrogate what I really want to say with this blog, and I’ll be sharing pieces of those realizations as time goes on.

It’s hard creating a brand that is separate from yourself but is also rooted in your personality, ideas, and beliefs. I’m working my way towards making Sexology Bae less of an alter ego and more of an extension of myself. But in order to do that, I have to be honest with myself and my audience about what’s important to me.

Being silent about the things that bother me won’t get me or this blog anywhere. If I allow opportunities to educate others to pass me by, my role as an educator is moot. Bringing up problems within this industry might make me less popular, but that’s a risk I have to be willing to take. Thankfully, this blog is still primarily a hobby and not a necessary income stream for me, so I have the privilege to take risks that other folks with similar identities may not.

One of the things I love most about this blog/brand is its constant evolution and capacity for change. I stepped into 2019 challenging myself to confront those awkward or problematic moments that exemplify the disparity between words & actions within the sex education/writing arena. It’s cute when you get tagged in a Twitter thread for folks looking to follow sex writers of color and your site gets boosted and you get a few hundred new followers, but what about when you create a call to action for marginalized white folks to examine how they’re complicit in racism and there’s silence?

I don’t believe in perfect politics, so this whole honesty and challenging the status quo thing is probably something I’ll slip up on or otherwise fail to hold myself and others accountable to as time goes on. I’m writing this as a form of accountability and an attempt to build community to open the doors for radical honesty. And just like I plan on putting myself out there to hold folks accountable, I’m also ready to own up to any mistakes I make along the way while figuring this out. No one is above critique, regardless of their identities or position in a community.

My hope is that by pushing myself to be honest and use my voice the way I’ve always intended, I can get that much closer to making this space, this brand, this identity what I first imagined it to be all those years ago.

Sometimes Sorry Isn't Enough

I low-key wish I had a better, more legitimate, reason as to why I’ve been gone for so long, but the truth is that the past few months have really put me through the wringer emotionally and I couldn’t focus on repairing myself and my relationships and function as “Sexology Bae”. It felt disingenuous.

Instead of spending 18 paragraphs going into detail about everything that has gone wrong in my life recently, I found it better to welcome myself back into the blogosphere with a reflection and unpacking of the lessons I’ve learned over the past few months. My general goal as a writer is to write things I’d want to read, and this is something I really need to hear right now.

In relationships, romantic, platonic, or whatever, we’re bound to do things that hurt people we care about. Sometimes it’s by accident. Other times it’s an intentional lashing out because of our own pain. And occasionally it’s that fucked up I-know-what-I’m-doing-is-wrong-but-I-don’t-want-to-consider-consequences-right-now-because-I-think-the-short-term-benefit-is-worth-it. It might even be a combination of the three, but the point of it is that the result is the same—someone you care about is hurt and it’s almost completely up to you to fix it.

Image of the author, 2018.

I don’t believe in taking complete ownership over anyone’s healing but my own for a myriad of reasons, but we have some measure of accountability to people we’ve hurt. It’s hard to process when you’re as apologetic as can be but that isn’t enough. Vowing to change your actions—and actually changing them—might not be enough. I’ve had to sit with this feeling for a while now, and let me tell you, it’s not fun.

What do you do when you’ve done all the “right” things and still get hit with “i’m good luv, enjoy” or the more timely “thank u, next”? If you’re me, you wallow in self-pity, completely isolate yourself, and pray that the other person (or people) comes around and doesn’t leave you hanging. And then you eventually face reality and start to move on with your life knowing that you’re the friend/ex/lover/whoever that someone thinks about when they have a flash of emotional pain.

Not owing anyone forgiveness is a very powerful sentiment and one that I agree(d) with, until I was on the receiving end of it. Don’t get me wrong, I still agree with it now, but it SUCKS to move on and take your L knowing that there’s a very good chance someone you once had an extremely strong connection with wants absolutely nothing to do with you ever again, and it’s your fault. We want to believe that we’re fundamentally good people and because we’re good people, our mistakes can and should be forgiven regardless of their actual impacts on another person.

This may come across as me trying to position people who hurt people as the true victims. Let me clearly state, I am not trying to do that at all. If you’re an abuser or otherwise intentionally cause people harm you can go straight to hell. What I am saying though, is that we are all people, capable of very genuine and very horrible sometimes-unintentional mistakes.

No one should feel obligated to hold grace for someone who caused them harm, though, and that’s a very painful lesson I think we all learn at some point or another in our lives when we’re the offending party. Right now is that time for me.

As someone who’s caring to a fault and more often than not puts the needs of others ahead of my own, I’ve mostly been the injured party in my dealings with others, not the one who caused hurt. But I’m on the other side of the fence now and working to heal the pieces of myself that were broken enough to allow me to hurt others and find comfort in these lessons. It’s easy to go on an apology tour with the people you’ve hurt and run down the list of ways you can (and have) change(d) in order to convince them you’re worthy of being part of their life again. It’s harder to do that and live with knowing that, at least for right now, it’s not good enough. And very well may not ever be.

Yes, time heals wounds and changes our perspectives, but I’m not banking on that. There’s always a chance it might not and I’ll end up in a worse situation than before trying to make amends with someone when I spent months or years refusing to confront myself and my actions because I thought it would all turn around for me.

I’m coming to terms with being okay with not being okay with what I’ve done and the resulting fallout. It’s something I have to carry with myself, and much like accepting any other flaw undoing the shame and stigma of being a kind of shitty person is sticky because it’s new territory for me. But I’m back, as much as I can be, with new perspectives and a lot of growth I’m ready to share with you all.