What do you think about when you’re having an orgasm?

Nothing. 

Maybe you’re thinking, but I know I’m not thinking. My mind is clear. My mouth goes on autopilot, the sounds coming out of it may occasionally be words but they have no intellectual thought behind them. The “oh god”s and “fuck”s are almost a mantra. I am a blank puddle of nerve endings, completely open to sensation. I have no control over my rapidly contracting lower abdomen or my flailing limbs. My back arches, dragging my shoulders over the now damp sheets, pushing my hips down into the mattress. Warm inner forearm skin pressing into my hip bone and leg hair gently crunching against the back of my thigh. 

What’s going on here is pure haptic sensation. Touch. 

Touch is a basic human need. My go-to example for this is the post-Ceasecu situation in Romania’s orphanages. We need physical contact with each other. We need to touch and to be touched. Both sexual and non-sexual snuggles produce Oxytocin, which scientists say appears to stimulate bonding and might do things like help our bodies heal faster. I’m not a scientist, but I know anecdotally that skin-on-skin contact relaxes people. A good hug really does help. Laying around with each other like a pile of kittens is so delightful that Jess and I’s couch for years was an almost non-stop cuddle-puddle of whatever friends happened to be over at the time. 

Yes, I am going directly from a paragraph that starts with abused orphans into a paragraph about sex.

The process of peeling my clothing off with another consenting adult and finding the most enjoyable ways to fit our naked bodies together is something I think of as my inalienable right as a person. It might be one of the main points of being human and alive. When I share my body with someone, I’m sharing more than the purely physical. When everyone involved allows themselves to be truly open, we all come away with more of something (amazing and indefinable) than we started with. Putting someone’s appendage into one of your orifices and opening yourself in a personal and emotional way are two different things. When they happen simultaneously, that is where sex becomes so wonderful that poets start to make sense and you lose the ability to pronounce ‘fine motor skills’ much less make use of them.

What do you think about when you’re having an orgasm? 

I’m too busy feeling.