from my little book - 1

I've decided to write about my struggle with sexism, first thing each morning.

I've been finding it hard to make myself think about this stuff. I get all tense and jittery when it comes up. I even put off doing this today, for a few minutes, with nerves.

Where do I start, on a first entry? There's no background, no opened issues. Maybe I should start with what happened yesterday. It was nothing dramatic, it just seems a good practice for a daily entry.

I woke up next to my partner, a woman, and she was still sleepy. I stroked her back but she wanted to keep sleeping so I let her. I think I was good with that little bit of behaviour. When we were both more awake, I was quite horny and we had sexy cuddles and stuff. She wasn't in the mood and we didn't fully have sex. We talked a bit and lay there some more, then talked about getting up. As often happens, I realised this was my last chance to hve sex before we were up and busy. I started stroking my partner's body again and kissing her. She went along with me and we did have sex and it was nice. I don't know if she quite reached orgasm because she is always very quiet in that room. I don't think she quite did. I reached orgasm.

In our relationship, we each willingly have sex sometimes for the sake of the other, when we're not very horny ourselves. We each sometimes give the other an orgasm without having one ourselves. That's OK but I worry that I want my partner to do that more than I do it and that I pressure her to do it on occasions when she actually doesn't want to. I know that what I need to do is ask her about it but I haven't yet.

We had a consent conversation a couple of times. Once we talked about the different kinds of moods we have, where we have a certain level of desire or willingness to be sexual. I thought we might be able to start referring to those moods in a familiar way that we both understand and not need to explain it in detail. It hasn't happened because we haven't talked about it at all since, so the terms aren't familiar to us at all. Verbal consent is so outside my expreience, even though I and others practice it a lot in some ways. I ask if it's OK to do quite a lot of things with other people but with my partner I'm quite silent and I suppose I expect to be able to "read" her response from her body language. The trouble is that in that language, what looks like "consent" could be anything from "here he goes again doing this to me" to genuine desire, whereas verbally it's not consent unless the person says "Yes I'd like that."

My partner and I have flagged a future conversation about consent. I'd like to discuss what things she wants me to have verbal consent before doing. I can imagine it feeling a bit cheeky for me to put my hand down her undies, even in a hot moment, without asking. I actually like the idea, now when I think about it, of being asked verbally before my partner touches my penis, too.

Something that holds me back from just experimenting with verbal consent while we're having sex is that I'm hugely embarrassed about people outside the room hearing us say things like "Would you like it if I touched your clitoris now?" and knowing exactly where we're up to. But most requests are probably obvious enough to summarised as "May I?" so that part is probably mostly OK. We're both pretty shy about talking about sex as well, though, so that holds us back too.