One Day on the Other Side

We’re all born with certain equipment between our legs—or not, as the case may be—and from that single biological fact flows an entire life’s worth of consequences: the color of your bedroom, whether you’re allowed to prefer My Little Pony or Transformers, whether going topless at the public pool makes you a pervert or just a guy cooling down. And then, inevitably, there’s sex.

There’s inserting and there’s being inserted into, and unless you happen to be Ranma—the character from the manga who switches genders every time cold water hits him—most of us will spend our entire lives knowing exactly one side of that equation. Which I find genuinely unfortunate. Not philosophically. Practically. Because the evidence strongly suggests I am navigating this with a map drawn by people who had never actually been there.

Everything I absorbed about what feels good for a woman came from three sources: cheap porn engineered to be implausible, locker-room mythology designed to impress fourteen-year-olds, and whatever actually happened the first few times I fumbled my way through the real thing. None of that constitutes data. It’s trying to describe the taste of something you’ve only ever seen photographs of. Of course we’re bad at this. We’ve never had a clitoris under our own fingers, never felt what it means to have someone inside us, never experienced whatever a vaginal orgasm actually is versus what we’ve been told it is by people who were probably also improvising.

So yes—if some fairy godmother materialized and offered me twenty-four hours in a female body, I’d take it without hesitation. I’d spend the first hour just touching myself, obviously. Then I’d find someone patient and enthusiastic and let them do their worst. For science, and because I’d like to come back with actual knowledge instead of decades of educated guesses. One day probably isn’t enough to undo a lifetime of operating from a single limited perspective—but at least I’d know what I was apologizing for.