HowAboutWe – Date Report

Steph Auteri is HowAboutWe’s sex columnist. Read her past columns here. 

I was 20 when I gave my first BJ. As I knelt on the bathroom floor of the apartment I shared with three other girls, locked in there with my boyfriend for privacy, he gasped. “Where’d you learn to do that?” he asked.

“Just winging it!” I said.

The positive performance reviews only multiplied over the years. As such, you’d think there’d be no room for improvement. But when I got the chance to review the BlowGuard, years later, I figured a little extra help couldn’t hurt.

So when my husband and I took a romantic weekend trip to a B&B in upstate New York, I packed my new toy instead of sexy lingerie.

We spent our first full day in New York doing tastings along the Canandaigua wine trail before we finally retired to our room at the Acorn Inn. Tipsy, and with only one thing on his mind, Michael immediately stripped down to his boxer briefs and lay back on the elevated canopy bed, where he attempted to strike a sexy pose. I, personally, don’t get much sexier than my granny panties and fuzzy, Cookie Monster pajama pants, but I was thrilled to have something else up my sleeve. I presented the BlowGuard with a flourish. Michael sighed.

What followed did not exactly unfold with the sexy smoothness of soft-core porn. A couples toy designed to prevent teeth nicks during oral sex, while also delivering “mind-blowing” pleasure via a small, bullet vibrator, the BlowGuard reminded me of those mouth guards football players wear. Nevertheless, after making faces at myself in the bathroom mirror (“Can we please have sex now?” Michael shouted from the other room), I readied myself for sexual nirvana.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t stop giggling as I made the slow dive toward my husband’s crotch. Finally, my husband became so impatient and frustrated with my inability to stop laughing — or do anything remotely pleasurable for him — that he insisted we move forward without it.

“Besides,” he said, “it’s scary to see that thing coming at my penis.”

I’m incredibly lucky to have a husband who’s open to trying new things with me, and who lets me reveal the particulars of our sex life to The Entire Freakin’ Internet.

I know it can be awkward for him when someone he knows IRL reads about something we’ve done in bed.

But he continues to let me do that thing I do. Like the time I:

 • Talked him into attending a sexy soiree. (We were thisclose to having sex in public. My tight jeans were the only thing that got in the way.)

 • Dragged him to a cuddle party. (“That was weird and creepy,” he said. “Never again,” I agreed.)

 • Started spouting off statistics mid-coitus. (Oh, who am I kidding? This has happened way more than once. “Oh, by the way, did you know that blah blah blah percent of women can’t orgasm from vaginal stimulation alone? Ian Kerner suggests… ” And on and on. I am a delight in the bedroom.)

 • Persuaded him to appear in a Women’s Health article, for which we test drove a vibrating cock ring as a means of spicing up our flagging sex life. (A coworker of his recognized him as she was flipping through the magazine, and copies soon circulated throughout his office, reaching as high as his CEO.)

I know. I wouldn’t marry me either.

Especially after that Women’s Health debacle. “Everyone saw it!” Michael said when his coworker’s discovery first happened and it started spreading like wildfire from person to person. I felt so damn guilty. I mean, everyone in the office was faxing it to each other. Making a big, frickin’ deal about it.

But Michael being Michael, he took it all in stride. “I felt awkward, but I was still proud of you,” he later told me. “Some people were offended by it and wouldn’t talk to me (not that I wanted to talk to people like that anyway). Some were acting all lame with lame jokes about it. Some people poked fun for a couple days. But most people were probably jealous,” he concluded.

I know that many consider sex writing to be a frivolous thing. But I love that it provides me with the opportunity to tackle female sexual health issues. I love that it lets me show woman they’re not alone if they don’t always enjoy sex. And I love that it allows me to provide a forum in which others can be comfortable opening up around what can often be a difficult topic.

My husband understands this. He knows it’s important to me. He knows that I enjoy doing it. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that I also get paid.

Besides, he says, even with all of the awkward, uncomfortable moments that can sometimes pop up — and even though, most of the time, he’d rather just have a regular, old roll in the hay — telling people he’s married to a sex writer does give him a certain sort of cachet.

“Everybody thinks I have the best sex life,” he says.