Use Your Words

Sexting is an art, and there’s more to it than just good grammar

Sentence construction. Past participles. Split infinitives. I used to pray for the perfect balance of these elements in a man. Good grammar is sexy. It’s a verbal caress. It’s a turn-on. I don’t want to be mentally editing his dirty-talk, mid-coitus. So I was giddy with happiness when The Boyfriend showed every sign of knowing his gerunds from his present participles. I thought I’d struck gold. Fleetingly, I toyed with the idea of sealing the deal with a marriage certificate, lest some other subjunctive-sniffing vixen got her claws into him while I hemmed and hawed. But that train of thought came to a screeching halt the day I realised The Boyfriend is abysmal at sexting. In action, he can make me blush from the roots of my hair to the tips of my toes, but the subtle art of innuendo is lost on him. It’s like he didn’t even stop for a cursory glance at the chapter on courting in the digital age in Growing Up For Dummies.

Now, I’m the kind of girl who won’t give up without a fight. So I soldiered on, redoubling my efforts to elicit a halfway sexy response. ‘Come on, you can do it,’ I silently urged as I sent him strategically lit photos in my sexiest, most uncomfortable lingerie; the kind so obviously crafted for the purpose of visual gratification that I’d rather scrub my lady parts with pumice stones than wear it to bed. In response, he spent an obscene number of thousands to fly back into town for the night, a highly desirable consequence, no doubt, but my inbox continued to stare at me in taunting silence.

After about a fortnight of banging my head against what appeared to be a brick wall, I was ready to throw in the towel. All told, I still emerged the winner. Imagine if he could sext, but he did so with dangling modifiers and misplaced semicolons? Shudder. I would count my blessings. All I needed was The Best Friend to back me up and a few bottles of wine to blunt the knife of disappointment lodged in my gut. To find a man who knows where to put the apostrophe but never texts dirty is a sublime form of torture for a writer.

Two bottles of some very cheap wine later, we came up with a manual for sexting etiquette. Let me elaborate:

While sexting isn’t the same as sex for some very obvious disease-and-intimacy-related reasons, unless you want to spend the night with your bookmarked Youporn videos, go slow. Test the waters with flirting before telling her about your sexy schoolteacher fantasies.

This is the cul-de-sac for most couples. After you’ve been flirting for a while, one party is bound to develop a back/foot/neck ache that can be magically cured by the online ministrations of the sextee. While this can open the door for touchy-feely texts, use this tactic too often and you’ll be left with a JustDial link to massage parlours in your area.

True, sexting is tricky. Sometimes, you’re using one hand to type. Other times, you’re nodding along as your boss drones on about financial projections for the next quarter. But if the sextee has to struggle to understand the words in your erotic epistle, chances are, s/he is already browsing her/his Twitter/Facebook feed.

Nobody wants to feel like s/he is doing the dirty with an M&B-inspired tween; so do away with ‘folds of pleasure’ and ‘mounds of milky flesh’. Be clear and concise, instead: ‘I want to ____ and ____ your ____ with my ____.’ It’s hot.

Don’t Instagram and Photoshop pictures of your boners/décolletages. It’s weird. Also, tighty-whities and Crocs? Not a good idea. Most importantly, make sure you’re both on the same page. Sending photos of your genitals to someone who doesn’t want to see them is in poor taste at best and sexual harassment at worst.

Just when I’d made my peace with the fact that my perfect grammar man would never send me a perfect sext, we had a breakthrough. Last night, I texted him saying that I wanted fuller lips and I was going to get a lip-filler. His response: ‘Come here, I’ll kiss and show you how you’ll look.’ Oh my.

About The Author

Sonali Khan