The exquisite beauty of the sexual exchange

My eyes widened, pupils dilated like a lonely and feral animal who’d known a hunger for far too long. Flooded with the warmth of a newfound excitement, my belly soothed like the great pangs of an incessant hunger had finally been quenched. The burn was smooth, like the pouring of a fine whiskey down my esophagus. Butterflies danced their delicate dance inside me as my nerves felt the simultaneous tinge of fire and ice — the electricity of attraction.

Before me, she rested nude, halfway in between a position of laying and sitting, knees raised up toward the Heavens above, eyes darting downward at me awaiting my next move. Curious and playful, our stares always reach each other like two swords capable of severing human flesh meet in a sword fight.

There’s something powerful about the realization that you’ve met your match — when you look a woman in the eyes, and you know it in your bones that you have the most profound respect for her. This is the kind of fruition that changes a man.

Finally stripped of the imprisoning shackles of clothing, this moment, the one that unfolds as you prepare for sex in all of its profundity and glory to unfold, is quite special. I sense a lot of people miss out on the subtleties of it. The immersion of our brains in the sweet chemicals of attraction that flood us and arouse our senses.

Oral sex is a full-body experience, and it’s, in my singular opinion, the highest form of sex. Going down on a woman takes precedence over penetrative sex in my world. The sweet joy of her pleasure is the chief concern of my bedroom.

Sex without foreplay is a fraud, so long as I’m capable of it. Sex without cunnilingus is counterfeit sex if the option to go down on her is available. It might spend, but it’s missing an essential piece of what defines great sex for me. It’s not that sex without cunnilingus isn’t good, it’s just that it isn’t as good as it could be.

We all know that most women can’t get off through penetration alone. But that’s not the reason why. I just love the act. There’s so much intimacy in oral sex. Our mouths are places we like to keep clean. Close your eyes and imagine a cockroach crawling across your skin. This might make you uncomfortable if you’re afraid of cockroaches.

But no matter who you are, the thought of one crawling in your mouth is enough to make you cringe.

It’s not just the vagina that’s sacred, and sacred it is, but the mouth is as well.

There she laid, splayed before me, awaiting my next move…

I stared down at the beautiful, soft, brown folds of flesh that make up her outer labia. I admired her body for the ravishing work of art it is. I thought about how the entire history of the universe preceded that moment.

I thought about how the entire history of the world and the vast span of evolution, the countless millions of years of cyclical life and death, reproduction and regeneration, all had conspired to forge the beautiful being whom I was looking down upon. I could tell by the look in her eye that my emotion was matched.

She was experiencing a similar cataclysm of emotions inside of her.

I closed my eyes and dove…

The oral sex began and we both arose out of the banality of ordinary life that had been interrupted by our sudden attraction for one another. Attraction, that ongoing process between two sexed organisms that served as the engine that drove the entire expanse of human history through the causal chain and down to the moment where my lips met her flesh.

The resulting shock to the nervous system — a moment that had been sculpted through causal necessity since before either of us was born. We were basking in our nature-given rights. Each lap of my tongue, a communication, an expression without words of my deep and sincere appreciation for the beautiful fullness and fecundity of life.

When we have sex, we communicate with experiences, not words. We use our bodies to transfer information. We manifest our internal feelings in physical reality. We convert our emotions with a filter that transfers the digital to analog through the mind-body firewall and out the other side — our bodies are roughly approximate translators of emotions, a bridge between the boundless inner worlds of the mind that we use, through sex, to communicate endless internal experiences.

Little did I know at the time, this sexual exchange was one of many in a serial line that would characterize our ongoing relationship that’s been several years in the making since then.

The Meaning of Sex

I’m about to fill you in on a little secret.

In these moments, a silent conversation takes place. We converse with ourselves — and we converse with our partners.

What’s the subject of this conversation?

The meaning of sex.

Sex means different things to different people. It means different things to the same people at different times. Sometimes we have sex for love. Sometimes we have sex for comfort. Sometimes we have sex to express our affection. Sometimes we have sex to show our partners how much we care about them.

In that moment, I was communicating my willingness to spend an indefinite amount of time with this person. I was communicating my care. I was communicating my attraction and desire. I was communicating my promise to be a better man when called upon to do so; to accept my responsibility towards her on into the future.

Science has established that one of the most crucial aspects of a sexual experience, and our sexual relationship with someone more broadly, is sexual communication.

Opening a verbal dialogue about sex is one of the most consequential things you can do in your sexual relationship with your partner(s).

Sexual communication is vital for the nourishment of the sexual soul. It serves as the substrate upon which our sexual relationships can grow and blossom into a fertile garden of exuberant delight.

Meta-analyses have revealed that sexual communication feeds our sexual desire, boosts our sexual arousal, facilitates the logistics of the sexual experience (things like lubrication, erectile function, and orgasmic ability).

What’s most important, sexual communication doesn’t always have to be verbal. It should be verbal when we talk openly about sex. But sexual communication doesn’t have to always be verbal.

We tend to forget that sex is a conversation with bodies instead of words — with hearts instead of minds.

Why else would so many people love those long gazes during sexual encounters, when we stare into one another’s eyes longingly? There is so much communication happening, every split second that our brains are overloaded with appreciation.

Communication with the body isn’t limited by the poor approximation of words to the things they intend to describe.

How easy it is to get wrapped up in sex as merely an activity we do in pursuit of pleasure? Or what about maintaining a certain standard of sexual expectation, a standard that was arbitrarily established; a baseline of what we want for our individual lives? How often is sex just about that and nothing more, in our minds?

But sex is never meaningless. It always has meaning, and we communicate that meaning through our actions every time we go to bed with someone else, every time we flirt, and yes, every time we choose to allow them into our mouths by giving them oral sex.

Joseph A. Cornacchia