How to Have Phone Sex Without Laughing

Illustration by Zoe Gigis

Speaking as someone who tends to take myself a little too seriously, improvisation is not easy. I don’t feel comfortable acting outside of my normal conventions, let alone taking on a role. Needless to say, dirty talk has always been a bit hard for me. It requires the enactment of a persona that is dormant in day to day life, or in some cases has never existed. I started engaging in sexting in my pre-teens but it felt pretty distant from the real thing. When certain language made me uncomfortable, I would squeamishly hit the send button and pretend it was nothing more than a game. Take the word “cock,” for instance.  I think most of my female friends can agree, it feels ridiculous to use in any format. It’s so harsh, but maybe that’s what people like about it? There’s something powerful about referring to body parts in that way. Regardless, I still couldn’t say it out loud. At the start of my sex life, I let my partner lead with the sex talk, while I played along in what I considered a safer way, by moaning in encouragement. 

With my very first sexual partner, I tried to say his name once during sex, but he stopped and asked “what?”, so I dropped that for the determinable future. Instead I was mostly silent, basing my intermittent moan strategy off of movies I’d seen, or off of my limited experience viewing exclusively heteronormative porn. In most of these depictions of heterosexual sex, the man said things like “yeah, you like that?”, and “tell me you want more” while he waited for his female partner to say yes. It was like he was coaching her in the act of ego stroking. He knew that she liked it, and just needed the verbal confirmation. Of course, this is a ridiculously false narrative. 

Later in my young adulthood, I had partners that encouraged me to experiment or lead the discourse on my own. I think at the time it was still out of my realm of capability to throw words out freely. Nonetheless, it was a game changer realizing that I was allowed to. Then I had partners who called me things during sex, like baby. Before I’d personally encountered that word during a sexual encounter, I thought it was a demeaning way to refer to a female partner, as if she were a child. I proclaimed to dislike it. But in the heat of the moment, it felt different. I liked the way it sounded, and I liked how easy it was to say. So I started saying it back, and I think that was the main enabler to truly communicating during sex. That word made it easier for me to step outside of myself; easier to participate. 

Then comes phone sex, which if I’m going to place at the very top of the hierarchy of difficulty, right below video chat sex. When you’re with someone in person, you can rely on body language for at least 80 percent of the interaction, and the physicality makes it easier to be present in the moment. My inner sex persona, which has only just begun emerging in the past year or two, is comfortable with body language, not the phone, not video. 

The idea of masturbation still feels like a very private thing to me. In a way it has nothing to do with sex. So the fact that phone sex requires a lot of self initiative, paired with non-stop narration, is a big hump to get over, to me. I doubt I’d ever gotten around to it if I didn’t date someone who was travelling frequently. My last boyfriend had to travel between Canadian provinces, and the US for week long work trips. The longest I went without seeing him in our four-month interlude of romance, was just over three weeks. We would sext, but it felt frustrating doing so when I knew I couldn’t see him that night or the next day. One night, we were texting back and forth rather late at night (him in a hotel, and me at home) when it started to escalate. A lot of the sexting revolved around statements of wishing we could do something in person, and describing what those somethings were. At one point, I realized how much I wanted to hear his voice, and it kind of naturally transpired. Neither of us had done this with a partner before, and confided in each other via text that it might be awkward. I was nervous, he was nervous. Neither of us really knew how to start it. Fifteen seconds into the first go, I started giggling, and had to reel myself in. But I think that kind of laughter during sex is important, especially when you can share it with your partner. None of it should be too serious to laugh at. However, I did try to sober myself in the second approach, so as to increase our chances of getting through it. 

This is how I managed not to laugh: we started by talking in a regular conversational tone, telling each other how much we missed each other. I muted the call to clear my throat, and then started back on the theme of narrating what would be happening if we were in person. I had headphones in, because free hands seemed essential, and I tried to focus on the sound of his voice. I figured that if I could forget what we were doing, I might relax. So I just listened to him breathe for a little bit, and kept talking, until lo and behold it naturally progressed. Except for the part where I interrupted the dialogue to ask how I would know when it was over, because the pacing seemed a lot less obvious to me without certain body signals. Other than that moment, it was mostly smooth sailing. (We decided the answer was that we would tell each other when we’d finished, by the way).

While the loss of my phone sex virginity remains to be an isolated event, it seems to me that it acted as a stepping stone towards more comfortable sexual discourse. I’ve noticed that I don’t feel as silly when I transition to sex talk and I can laugh during sex, but it’s no longer out of embarrassment.