(Content Warnings: Heavy discussion of past sexual abuse, gender dysphoria, and fatphobia; frequent gif use.)

My first orgasm was as Elizabeth Swann.

And before you scroll to check who wrote this – no, dear reader, I’m afraid this is not a scintillating personal essay written by Keira Knightley. It is a scintillating personal essay, I guess, but the author is just your average Jane/John/Jamie from America, writing sexy stuff while still in pajamas.

What I mean is, my first orgasm occurred when I was pretending to be Elizabeth Swann while my high school sweetheart went down on me in their aunt’s guest bedroom.

It was the summer after my junior year of high school. Dead Man’s Chest had just come out in theaters, and we’d already watched it on the big screen at least two of the six times we’d go during its run. Despite that summer’s enthusiasm, I hadn’t always been enamored with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. When I’d first begun dating Buster, I’d insisted Johnny Depp was an overrated creep (and given that he’s been outed as a biphobic abuser, I’m proud of my baby queer self’s intuition — you were right to be wary, teen Betty!) and the movies were clunky and over-hyped. But like most things Buster liked, the series grew on me.

And honestly, how could it not? I grew up largely sheltered from television and missed out on ass-kicking lady icons like Xena and Buffy. Elizabeth Swann was like a grown up Hermione Granger; like Hermione, she was adventurous, vulnerable, and brilliant, but because she was an adult (and admittedly a bit more male gaze-y) she was also unflinchingly sexual and completely in charge of her shit. As an awkward teenager dealing with some serious internalized misogyny, body issues, gender dysphoria, and childhood trauma, I saw in Elizabeth Swann the kind of woman I craved to be (at least some of the time.)

And she was a sexy pirate on top of it! It was like role model Christmas.

My first orgasm was pretty good, as orgasms often are. It was the full nervous system equivalent of taking a warm bath: hot, immersive, and yet profoundly natural-feeling. I felt it from the tip of my toes as they curled in the sheets, all the way to my mouth where my lips were buzzing so hard I couldn’t speak for a full minute afterward.

When I did speak, though, I kept my voice carefully tailored to imitate Swann’s husky English accent, exhaling “Jaaack…” like it was a long-practiced prayer. (Or a curse. It sounded all hot and ambiguous like that.) I even had my chin jutted out in that sexy-confident way Knightly favors throughout the movies.

Buster — who was panting against my pussy and probably not yet aware of the magic they’d preformed with their now smirking mouth — crooned lowly, “That’s me, lovey.” Their eyes were half-lidded and mischievous; they were the hottest thing I’d ever seen licking their own lips wet with my come.

“Come here, Jack,” I insisted, every bit as sexual and comfortable as Elizabeth at her most brazen, and Buster crawled up my body, kissing me messily and totally lacking the beaded beard their fake accent called for – though they were rocking the appropriately dark eye makeup just fine.

Our Sex Life Now

Sex can be awkward and intimidating even if you have relatively little baggage to bring to bed. But every time I indulge in some sheet shenanigans, I’m also bringing along lifelong shame over my body, frustration with my gender identity, and the trauma of having been sexually abused both as a child and as an adult. Additionally, I’m autistic, so I have a whole slew of sensory and emotional complications to navigate. My bed is buried under a small village of suitcases.

For a married couple, Buster and I have a lot of sex. We solemnly swear to get up to no good at least once a week; sometimes we double or triple that, and sometimes we skip it completely. After over a decade together I feel that’s pretty frequent, especially when considering we both suffer from bouts of anxiety and depression, Buster works full-time and has a very long commute, and I’ve got so much crap going on in my head. A healthy sex life is a sex life that’s fulfilling for everyone involved regardless of frequency, but for us, indulging regularly is part of keeping it healthy.

I attribute the consistency of our sex life to my partner’s endless patience (or endless sex drive), and to Elizabeth Swann. And Harry Potter. And Maggie Rhee. And Jason Todd. And Buffy Summers. And Obi-Wan Kenobi. To be honest, it’s a pretty long list.

Role playing during sex isn’t exactly ground-breaking. People have been pretending to be animals and knights and maids and morally corrupt authority figures for as long as sex has been around; getting more specific and portraying your favorite Jedi or Power Ranger isn’t much of a stretch. It’s an effective and almost instantaneous way to “shake things up” by adding fresh tension to the dynamic you already have with your partner(s), or by creating an entirely new dynamic.

But more than that, it can be a tool for exploration and healing through sex.

How We Got Started

Our adult-rated playing pretend sessions began months before my first orgasm, though physical sex wasn’t originally incorporated. Like a lot of nerds in high school, we both enjoyed role playing online, exchanging cliché-riddled paragraphs detailing our characters – sometimes original, sometimes borrowed from a beloved book or show – falling in love and saving the world via instant messenger. (Rest in peace, AIM.)

It was one of the first interests we discovered we had in common before dating, and it was how most of our subsequent flirting was coded. Our sexual inclinations towards each other became threaded into our text fantasies starring wizards and witches, superheroes, and pirates… It was inevitable that our role playing would spill into real life.

At first, we just played around in-character while going on walks together, indulging in small talk as Harry Potter characters. We chatted about magic classes, the impending wizarding war, and Hogwarts gossip. It was a fun, creative, and deeply immersive way to get out of our own heads while also getting to know each other, because our opinions and feelings naturally bled through the veneer of our characters.

It also allowed us to play with roles we weren’t yet comfortable claiming for ourselves, including different gender identities, D/s, and bondage. Baby Betty wasn’t confident enough to present as queerly masculine, or tie up and dominate a partner, or verbally berate said sub with erotically humiliating dirty talk – but Severus Snape was. And so Severus Snape I became.

Over the years, Buster and I have figured out dozens of characters that mesh with certain moods, picking out go-to character couples that suit our inclination for bondage, or power play, or the sweetest of vanilla shmoop. The gender identities, sexual tastes, and relationship dynamics of the characters we enjoy are widely varied, and there’s reason for that: our gender identities, sexual tastes, and relationship dynamics are widely varied.

Reaffirming Gender

Although I’m almost 30, I still struggle with my gender on a near-daily basis, and it can cause me a lot of frustration, especially when I want to get physical with my partner. Slipping into a familiar male character’s headspace allows me to step around the ever-nagging question of am I a guy? and instead just… be a guy. I don’t have to fret over what I want my anatomy to be called today because my character calls his junk a dick. I don’t have to feel anxious about my body and how my partner perceives my maleness because the character is male.

(And it’s not as though I can only portray cisgender male characters to achieve “comfortable maleness.” Buster and I both frequently play as trans guy characters… though since it’s always us, they’re technically all trans.)

Of course Buster would honor and support my identity if I ever settled on words that concretely defined me. My indulgence in male characters isn’t because I don’t think I can be a guy. I know that – at least sometimes – I am one. It’s just that sometimes I just want to bypass my own bullshit and fuck as a dude, and role playing helps me do that.

And dysphoria can go in all kinds of directions. I spend a lot of time floating around in gender soup, and it’s not always maleness I’m seeking. When I’m feeling disconnected from feeling like a woman or can’t quite grasp my frequent anchor of agender, picking a decidedly female or nonbinary character can help me with those headspaces as well.

Coping with Trauma (TW: Rape)

When I was a preteen, a friend of my father’s molested me over the course of a summer vacation. I was fat, and even at that age I felt useless because I was sure I’d never earn male attention, the supposed pinnacle of validation for someone assigned female at birth. When D began to hurt me, I went out of my way to keep it hidden because I thought it was the best gift I’d ever been given: being seen as desirable.

As an adult, I’ve been date raped by two different men.

I have nightmares a lot, especially in the summer time. If a movie or a book includes sexual abuse without warning (and sometimes even with warning) it can make me physically ill. Sometimes, if I’m not expecting it, a casual touch from Buster in the wrong place will panic me. I can’t help but be terrified of men who are taller than me, of men who flirt with confidence (often entitlement in disguise), of men who become too friendly too quickly.

And being fat feels like it has its own trauma. I’ve spent my entire life being a punch line, whether it’s in a late night tv show monologue or from the rolled down window of a passing car. It’s a 40 billion dollar industry to shame me, despite studies showing that diets are largely useless and the relationship between health and weight isn’t clear-cut. As a queer person, I’m used to strangers debating my right to be respected as human, but my fatness is more accessible to bigots than my queerness.

I’m proud of my body for being able to withstand these experiences. My body is a survivor. But sometimes the trauma associations that come with my body are exhausting; they rob me of the ability to feel bold, sexy, and strong. Sometimes it takes portraying a character I consider bolder, sexier, and stronger than myself to embrace those feelings again. I can use a character’s headspace to step out of my own. Characters like Boo, for example, handle their bullshit a lot better than I do. I’m happy to hand over the reigns sometimes.

Because some days, I can’t stand the thought of being touched. Other days, I can’t conceptualize why anyone would want to touch me. And on those days, there are characters who I can rely on to bring the power or the confidence I lack in bed. Like training wheels on a bike, role playing is as a tool that can help me achieve balance. It can make me feel safe to ride a little farther, a little faster, with my head held high.

Encouraging Exploration

Beyond gender affirmation and coping with trauma, role playing allows me to immerse myself in less-imperative-but-still-important shit, like dominance roles and kinky headspaces. From D/s to trying out new impact toys, using characters as a springboard for experimentation has made me way more adventurous than I’d otherwise be. I don’t have to worry over if I’m X enough to accomplish Y. I can just be X and do Y as I please. (Assuming, of course, I’ve done my research and have talked it over with Buster!)

I don’t feel like the kind of person who punishes their lover with floggings – hell, if anyone in this house should get punished, it’s me, for regularly slacking off on household chores. But I have a dozen characters who are not only exactly the kind of person who doles out punishment, they love doing it! (Lucy Wells, Minerva McGonagall, Leonard McCoy, Hope van Dyne…) The urges are still mine, the character is just a vehicle to get into the right headspace and enjoy it… like putting on some lingerie to get in the mood after spending all day having to be a sexless office drone.

Sometimes I want to be a mean kitten who tops from the bottom and demands nothing short of spectacular sex from a thoroughly hassled service dom. Sometimes I want to be a relaxed daddy dom who looks after their darling and offers loving but firm directions in all things. Sometimes I want to be a greedy 24/7 sub who exists purely to receive orgasms. And I can become any of these things as soon as I pick a character.

These things are all parts of me that are held back by limits I put on myself. Sometimes these limits are due to valid reasons – I don’t have the spoons or even the desire to be a daddy dom more than just occasionally, for example – and sometimes these limits are just due to irrational or negative thinking. Pouring my sexual desires into a specific character lets me dismiss all those self-imposed limitations and just be.

And it is so, so freeing.

In Conclusion, I Guess

When I decided I wanted to start a sex blog, one of the things I knew I wanted to focus on – and was the most excited to write about, besides toys – was role playing. From the first time I tried lowering my voice to drawl boredly like Severus Snape (and erupted into nervous giggles immediately after) at 16, to last night’s brief indulgence in my original character Bobby’s pup space, I’ve been learning and loving everything that role playing can add to the bedroom.

Because holy shit, y’all, it is so much weird, kinky fun.