Delving into dirty talk and direct communication in the bedroom.
How do I dirty talk effectively in the bedroom? How do I start talking when my natural inclination is to remain quiet? What do I say? How do I get over the embarassment?
I’m going to be going through a lot of foundational questions and things to say to build on when you’re first approaching dirty talk with a partner — I’m using explicit examples throughout, so expect NSFW text.
Dirty talk is a funny thing because it’s pretty natural for us to talk to each other in the bedroom, to communicate as we go, but it can be hard to navigate what exactly to say — it can feel embarrassing, can feel excruciating, to say some things out loud, simply because they feel too revealing or too vulnerable, or even too rude and too demanding.
I think people get anxious about dirty talk for similar reasons they might get anxious using the phone: it can feel like there’s an expected script or standard that other people know and you don’t, and silences can feel awkward or uncertain!
After all, if there’s an awkward silence, that means you’re doing dirty talk Wrong, which is bad, and you’ll probably be punished by rejection or isolation or some other secret social punishment!
In practice, this is not the case.
There are two bad outcomes with dirty talk — one is that you say something that your partner finds uncomfortable, whether it’s insulting or just not something they’re into, and is a turn-off for that reason; the other is that you say something that is just silly and makes you laugh, and is a turn-off for that reason.
But sex is an intimate engagement with another person, and that means some vulnerability — that can also mean the potential to make each other uncomfortable or to make each other laugh as a matter of course, and you should be able to communicate when these things do happen (which sometimes, they will!), so you can move past them.
It’s understandable to not want to fuck up intimacy, but it’s far better to have a hiccup that you can then communicate around rather than go with something that doesn’t work — whether that’s touch, talk, or something else — and not feel empowered to say that to your partner, or to set a boundary.
Communication is key.
Where do you start?
Firstly, there’s the basic and most effective: checking in with your partner and asking the most simple questions.
- What do you want me to do to you?
- What would you like to do to me?
- What do you like? How do you like it?
These questions can be great, but especially if you’re shy or uncertain — or just overwhelmed — they can be too open-ended. You might just blurt out “Anything!” or “Whatever you want,” or just return the question.
This can be frustrating when you’re trying to gauge where someone’s at, but just repeating the questions aren’t necessarily helpful, so it can be great to narrow the field down significantly and ask yes or no questions.
- Do you like it when I touch you here?
- Do you enjoy watching me stroke your cock? Like how my hand looks, how my fingers look?
- Do you like how my tongue feels? My lips, my mouth?
- Does that feel good?
- Do you want more?
And also giving options — Harder or softer? My mouth or my hand? Do you want this position or that position?
When we ask, “What do you want?”, unless someone has a specific scene or fantasy in mind, it can feel too huge a question to answer — or, out of politeness or shyness or a out of a need to please others, we turn the question around automatically.
It can simply feel too vulnerable to say “I want you to do this to me and I want to do this together,” especially if you haven’t had sex before and you don’t have a pre-established rapport — it can feel presumptuous or too demanding, too rude, even.
So instead of asking about the conditional or the future, what we can also do is ask about desire in the past tense.
- Have you done this before?
- Do you do this a lot?
- Have you fantasised about this? Have you fantasised about me?
- Do you think about this often?
And with that as your basis you can think of the future tense in more grounded ways too —
- Will you think about me later?
- Will you think about this when you touch yourself?
- Will you think about how I’m talking to you, how I’m touching you?
The above questions are all an easy way to start off with dirty talk because you’re establishing basic check-ins between yourself and your partner — this is great to begin with because you’re working out each other’s preferences and also feeling out consent organically.
I find some more blunt consent negotiations to be difficult at times — not because asking for consent is in itself unsexy, but because when we look at consent as if we’re ticking off options on a checkbox, or when they’re entirely open-ended, they can either feel mechanical and perfunctory or too wide and overwhelming.
At the same time as you’re asking for someone’s consent or where their boundaries are, you’re also able to affirm your enjoyment of something, to lend voice to your enjoyment or pleasure.
Another great thing that works for dirty talk when the actual talking is the exciting thing is simply narrating what you’re doing — it can feel silly at first, but it can also really help give you a basis on what to say and what to talk about, alongside asking questions as you go.
You’re saying what you like out loud — what turns you on, or what you think might turn them on, rightly or wrongly.
See my hand on your thigh, feel my palm on your skin? Do you like the way I’m touching you? Look at how my fingers slide inside you so easily, you’re so wet it’s just a perfect glide — do you like how they feel inside you, how I’m fucking you with them? How I can just tug at the edge of your hole, just like this, or press up on your g-spot like this? Wish they were bigger? Want me to go faster?
Or…
Look how your tits fill my palms up — do you like my hands on your tits? I love how they feel when I hold them, I love how heavy they are, love your nipples, too. Want me to squeeze them? Tug, pull, twist? Ooh, does that hurt? Did you like it? Shall I do it harder, softer? Shall I suck them instead?
One of my favourite tips that was ever given to me when I was a phone sex worker which I still think is great is to try to match whatever language your partner uses.
So when I was a PSO, examples would be if a client uses “boobies”, use “boobies” — if they use “breasts”, then that, et cetera. Because that was the word the client was starting off with, you knew that that was a word they had a preference for or were most comfortable with.
With our partners, there might be words for genitalia or body parts or activities that your partner, for whatever reason, finds upsetting or they dislike — and there might be some words that they really love and find a big turn on.
Certain words might trigger dysphoria or old traumas, or people might just hate the sound or mouthfeel of certain words — like how some people hate words like “moist” or “panties”.
It’s worth exploring together what words you both like or if you share any dislikes. Some words have the same sort of feel — boobies, willy, and twat go together; cunt, tits, and cock also go as a matched set, I find.
You might find that you like more indirect words instead — “there”, “here”, or “between your legs,” “where you’re open,” — or you might like old-timey words, like “cunny” or “cockstand”, or more degrading ones.
Especially if you’re using dirty talk alongside specific roleplays, you can very much tailor your dialogue to the situation or the scene you’re playing out, whether that means making giving yourselves period-typical phrases to use or giving yourself puns to play with.
There’s often an instinct with dirty talk to basically immediately try to match whatever you’ve heard in pornography — in the first instance, you probably don’t talk like most of the professional actors you might see in porn. Even if you’re also a US American, you might not be a Californian who’s spent years in the porn industry. You have your own inflections and ways of speaking, your own preferences, and there’s no reason that the way you talk with a partner or partners should match a Los Angeles porn studio production standard.
In the second instance, a lot of studio-made pornography tends to equate dirty talk immediately with degradation. If that’s your kink, that’s great, we’ll get onto that directly!
But just because you’re talking out loud about sex while you’re having it doesn’t mean that it has to be degrading.
Let’s say you like rough nipple play, and degradation is a part of that for you — you might like to play with words like “teats” or even “udders” rather than words like “breasts” or “tits”, but that degradation would be worth discussing first. The reason words like “teats” and “udders” are degrading is because of the parallel to animals, especially livestock, but that can also come with trauma for some people, especially because they’re degrading terms that can be really loaded with a lot of weight-based trauma.
Some people see the basic dialogue of “You’re such a slut, you’re greedy for this, you’re a whore, you love it,” in porn and jump directly to that, but —
Are you a slut?
It’s considered a dirty word, yes, but a word isn’t automatically hot or sexy just because it appears in porn. The degradation in a word like “slut” or “whore” comes from basically saying, oh, you have a lot of sex, and that’s Bad and Shameful. You enjoy sex, and that’s Bad and Shameful.
If you’re into being degraded but you have quite a positive attitude to sex, you might not actually feel that words like those have much of an impact on you. It’s worth playing around with words and seeing what actually feels hot and sexy, and what feels empowering or exciting or degrading in the right way for you as an individual.
You can play with insults or curse words, degrading descriptions — the natural extension of calling someone a “slut” might be talking about how loose or open someone’s holes are, how much their cock is leaking and how much it’s straining to be touched, how desperately they lean in for more of a touch, how hungry they are, how much they crave touch.
Alternatively, you could dig into how shy your partner is — if they’re shy or embarrassed to look at themselves or what you’re doing together, if they’re blushing or shivering or averting their eyes, if they laugh nervously.
And obviously, you can praise them! You can say how beautiful your partner looks, how attractive or how handsome, how much they turn you on, you can enthuse about how their skin feels against yours, how tight or wet they are, how hot the noises they make are, how the light looks reflecting on their skin, how much you like how they smell, how they taste.
And then of course, you can play with nicknames and titles!
Pet, darling, sweetheart, love, baby, honey, et cetera — these are all the standard affectionate names; calling someone your fucktoy, I think you’ll agree, has a slightly different vibe, ditto your cumdump or similar.
Pet names like kitten or puppy can be utilised in pet play but also just in general affection, and you can also use more literal ones — “lover” or “wife/husband/spouse” can be so charged with love and affection.
Titles like Daddy or Mommy, Mistress, Master, basic titles like sir, or Mr/Ms/Mx _____, Goddess, Professor, Headmaster, Captain, etc — a lot of these are great in the context of a specific roleplay or scene, but again, you might just find some title particularly works and scratches an itch for you.
Again, it really doesn’t matter if it would be silly to an outsider or someone who isn’t you or your partner, because unless you’re performing your sex for an audience, other people don’t really get an input — and even then, just because you’re performing doesn’t mean you’re accepting feedback!
Dirty talk is partly so great because it lets you experiment with tone and kink, especially new tones and kinks you haven’t really considered before, without fully committing to a scene or a piece of equipment — you can just float ideas and fantasies and see how much you click with them, how excited your partner gets or not, and so on.
Rather than narrating what you’re doing in the moment, you could instead narrate a fantasy that you have and would like to approach or roleplay in future, anything from a student/teacher roleplay or a negotiation between the archetypal pizza guy and the customer who can’t pay, to fantasies of public sex or sex for an audience, even to things like doing a sexy roleplay based off your Dungeons and Dragons characters, or dirty talk based off your blorbos in your favourite show or other fandom.
The world is your oyster — dirty talk is something that it’s up to you to explore in terms of what you like or dislike most, where your preferred boundaries or stopping points are, stating things out loud or explicitly and letting yourself and your partner connect on those points.
Dirty talk is so great and so full of potential to explore — and it can be the perfect basis to exploring sex as an attentive, communicative partner.
That does often require some vulnerability, because expressing our desires and the things that we love, the things that excite us, can be vulnerable, but at the same time, we’re listening and engaging with our partners — the vulnerability is mutual, and facilitated through the ways we talk to each other.
Not only can that communication be great for making sex more satisfying, more exciting, or just different to our usual fare, allowing for greater or a different kind of connection with our partners, it can also be a great vessel for self-discovery.
Only once we start saying out loud what we want and what we like do we realise it sometimes, and dirty talk is great for that, too.
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