When it comes to love-making, some like it rough

By Anna Wolff and Rob Siewert

Sex is fundamentally a physical act, two bodies coming together in an expression of desire and passion. It’s only natural that sometimes love and tenderness can give way to lust. Intense physical lust is nothing to be ashamed of and people shouldn’t be afraid to explore it. The important thing to remember is to set and respect personal limits and integrate more physicality into your love-making slowly and carefully.

Rough sex is both titillating and a primal expression of human sexuality. Sometimes you just can’t deal with whipped cream and sprinkles and you just want to nail your lover against the door the moment you get home. Exploring sex with a rough edge can be both fun and enlightening. The territory is vast, ranging from simple nipping and hickies to BDSM and whippings. We’d like to focus on the fluffier side of rough sex.

Many people don’t realize that they are already experimenting with rough sex. The most common first exposure to the rougher side of sex is love bites. Nibbles and bites are a great way to start expressing your desire for your lover. Just remember to keep the bites gentle, start out with places like the shoulders and butt where the skin is a little tougher and move on to more sensitive areas if you and your lover both enjoy the nibbles.

Once nibbling and love bites enter your sexual repertoire, you can explore new territory. Hair pulling is another activity that both you and your lover can enjoy. Like many areas of rough sex, it should be attempted gently at first. The scalp has hundreds of nerve endings and stimulating them close to orgasm or as a form of foreplay creates a nearly euphoric high. The object of the hair pull is to grab a large portion of hair close to the scalp, then gently lift the hair away from the scalp. Be careful, however: if you grab too little hair, it will just plain hurt. With some practice and acceptance from your partner, hair pulling is a sexy way to transition between positions and intensify intercourse. While one may attempt to pull other hair, we highly suggest against that.

While adding a little extra physicality to your sex can be a lot of fun, there are some practices better left alone. We do not recommend autoerotic asphyxiation, at all, ever. Choking commonly comes to mind when thinking of rough sex, but just because it springs to mind quickly does not mean it’s a good idea. The added intensity that people find from a lack of oxygen comes from actually killing brain cells, which obviously is not a great idea. It is also easy to go overboard and apply too much pressure– crushing a Styrofoam cup takes the same amount of pressure as crushing a windpipe. So remember to be careful when exploring the rougher side of love-making, but enjoy.

Leave a comment