Dirty Talk Dos and Don’ts

by Jill Provost

Less than 48 hours after meeting Ryan, I was straddling him in a nightclub, giving him my first-ever lap dance. My relationship with him was, from the beginning, more sexually charged than any I’d been in.

On our first date, he gave me a goodnight kiss, along with a two-handed ass squeeze. “I thought he was a bit forward,” I wrote in an email to a friend the next day.

It shouldn’t have surprised me, then, when our first romp in bed introduced me to the world of dirty talk. Being a writer, I consider myself sensitive to the English language. Typos irk me and misspellings make me shudder. When Ryan indoctrinated me with those three mellifluous words, “Yeah, suck it!” my brain refused to process the command. “Isn’t that what I’m doing?” I thought. He had to have meant it literally, because to utter that phrase for any other reason would be vulgar, contrived… disgusting! This, I thought, is why adult films are always better on mute. I decided my best move was to ignore him.

But I was unaccustomed to between-the-sheets dialogue—or monologues for that matter. Each time he spoke, I’d snap to and say, “I’m sorry. What?” (I earned a blue ribbon for best manners in kindergarten.) He may as well have been speaking in tongues. Most of the time I had no idea what he was saying, and I preferred it that way. It was too hard trying to figure out what he meant by the things coming out of his mouth; things you only heard in porn movies; things you heard uttered by your drunk college roommate when she dragged home her night’s conquest and you had to lie there, pillow over your head, pretending to be asleep, all the while judging, silently judging: “Ew! Who says that stuff?”

As it turns out: my boyfriend.