What Straight Men Can Learn About Sex From Queer Women

“Isn’t it just foreplay?” This is a question that I, and many other queer women, receive from nosy strangers or friends wanting to know more about the mystical process of lesbian sex. It’s a strange and extremely intimate question that I think puts an unnecessary boundary line between “sex” and “foreplay”. The subtext is that two people (often, but not always) without a penis between them can’t have “proper” sex.* “Proper” sex, of course, being penis-in-vagina penetration — although, come to think of it, I don’t think anyone ever asks gay men if they’re having real sex.

The way foreplay is discussed in Cosmo-style “women’s” media presents foreplay as a warm-up, too, as a way to get women physically aroused before penetration. This may be important, but if you see acts typically associated with foreplay (and with sex between vulva-owners), like oral sex or fingering, as the equivalent to running a lap of the field and doing a few hamstring stretches before kick-off, then of course you are going to devalue those acts, and the people primarily associated with them. Rather than seeing them as pleasurable, sensual, and indeed sexual in themselves, they become comparatively tame, seen as unfulfilling and inadequate. This creates a hierarchy of sex acts in which some are, bizarrely, seen as more sexual than others, rather than simply being different to each other. Oral sex is still sex, for example. You wouldn’t do it instead of a handshake.

But studies show that women who have sex with women tend to orgasm more frequently than women who have sex with men: let’s call it the orgasm gap.† Anecdotally, fewer of my women-oriented friends have faked orgasm than those who have what I see as the misfortune of purely heterosexual desires.

Maybe straight men should do more so-called “foreplay”. What can they learn from women who have sex with women? For the benefit of my straight sisters, I’m willing to share my hard-earned insight. However, it’s important to note that everybody (and every body) is different; not everyone will agree and that’s just fine.

First up: everyone can do with more communication. We all know this, but it can be harder to put into practice. For instance, even though I’ve had very similar anatomy to everyone that I’ve slept with, it hasn’t always meant that I know exactly what to do when clothes are shed — every body is different! To straight men with penises who are disadvantaged by not having had prior years of practice, don’t let that put you off. Just be gentle, at least to begin with, and ask what feels good, even if it’s in one-word questions like “higher?”, “slower?”, etc. Practise good listening and pay attention to non-verbal cues, too.

From what I’ve heard and read and understand about the world, people with penises don’t always understand what it’s actually like to have a vagina. Studies have different results about how pleasurable penetrative sex is, but a common theme is that women are far less likely to orgasm from just penetrative sex than from clitoral stimulation or a mix of the two. Think of it this way: if a vagina has a tampon or a menstrual cup in it, and there are no health reasons to make it feel painful or uncomfortable, the vagina-owner shouldn’t be able to feel it. It’s just not that sensitive, especially when compared to the thousands of nerve endings in the clitoris.

So instead of seeing penetration as the pinnacle of sex, shifting focus to activities that tend to be associated with foreplay like oral sex or grinding might be more fun. Also, while fingering may have a reputation as a teenage act, fingers have many advantages compared to penises. They’re more bendable and biddable, for a start, and you can use one or four depending on what feels best. It might be worth adding to your repertoire.

Part of my beef with the foreplay question is that it implies a linear progression through sex from a fixed start to an obvious end. But sex doesn’t have to have a beginning, middle, and end! Instead of a three-course meal, it can be a buffet where you dip in and out of different tasty treats depending on what mood you’re in and how your body is feeling. It destroys the concept of foreplay as a prelude to other acts by disrupting the typical sex narrative. And it can make sex last longer, too, because it only ends when you say it does, not because you’ve checked everything off a mental list.

So in rethinking our ideas about foreplay and its relationship to sex, I think there is a lot of pleasure to be gained, especially for the straight women out there fighting the wage gap and the orgasm gap. Let’s stop seeing foreplay as a supporting act to a headline performance; let’s start seeing sex acts as songs on a playlist that you can shuffle and replay and pause according to how you feel in the moment.

* NB: a disclaimer that a lot of the language we typically use to talk about sex and sexuality doesn’t allow for nuance around gender identity. I’ve tried to make clear that not everyone with a penis is a man and vice versa, but it’s possible that I’ve messed up in some places, or in the whole article. If that’s the case, let’s talk about it!

† These are the terms used by the survey, which aren’t necessarily the most nuanced, but they are the best that I have to work with for now.