less-direct-please
The Sex Thing I Apologized For Has a Name. Most Women Like It.
The words were always the same: “Less direct, please.” I said them to my first boyfriend in a dorm room with a clanking radiator, and I said them, in almost the same small voice, to the man I married. Every time, I added “sorry.”
I wasn’t sorry about the sex. I was sorry about me. Somewhere along the way I’d decided that the way I like to be touched was a defect: a fussiness to keep quiet about, and to apologize for when I couldn’t.
I thought I was the exception. A few months ago I found out I’m the rule.
It has a name
It’s called Layering: touch that reaches you through the surrounding skin instead of landing straight on the clitoris. In the OMGYES research, 64% of women said they like it.
Sixty-four percent. That isn’t a niche. That’s most of the women in any room I have ever stood in.
I’d spent my whole adult life apologizing for being in the majority.
Where the number comes from
I don’t trust sex advice by default. Most of it is one person’s opinion under a confident headline. This was different. Researchers from Indiana University and Yale interviewed more than 20,000 women, ages 18 to 95, about what actually feels good, in detail. Those findings became OMGYES, a site where women explain them on camera, in their own words.
The line that stopped me was on their techniques page: most of these things didn’t have names before the research. So nobody had been keeping a secret from me. There just hadn’t been a word to pass along.
What I found inside
I went in expecting a definition. What I found was women, describing their own versions of it: what they call it, when they first noticed it, how they’d tried to explain it to someone else. Some of their phrasing was so close to mine that I laughed out loud, alone, at my kitchen table.
I’m not going to try to explain it all here. Partly because they explain it better, with videos and animations I couldn’t do justice to in words. And partly because the most useful thing I took away wasn’t one move. It was the language: specific, unembarrassed ways to say what I like that sound nothing like an apology.
The conversation I’d been avoiding
I didn’t make a speech. I made it a discovery. One night I said, “I read something about women and sex that I think is about me,” and turned my phone around so he could see the 64%.
He read it twice. Then he said, “So when you say less direct, this is what you mean?” And for the first time in years I said yes without the sorry.
He wasn’t hurt. If anything he looked relieved. He’d been guessing for a long time, carefully, and now he didn’t have to. We spent the next week trying what the women on the site described, both of us curious instead of cautious.
One honest complaint
The videos are frank. Women talk plainly and show plainly, and the first one caught me off guard. I watched the rest with headphones in and the door closed. That’s a me thing, but if you embarrass easily, know it’s coming. It’s warm and matter-of-fact, more like a friend explaining than anything you’d stumble on late at night.
Who it’s for
If you’ve ever said “less direct” and then said sorry, this is for you. You weren’t being difficult. You were describing something two in three women like, before anyone handed you the word for it.
And partners: if she’s asked you to go softer and you quietly took it as a review, it wasn’t one. It was a clue. This is where the clue leads, and knowing beats guessing for both of you.
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