The Erotic Dialect™: Your Personal Pleasure Language
TL/DR: A new framework for understanding what makes your turn-on tick.
So… What Is The Erotic Dialect™?
Glad you asked! Just like everyone develops a distinct accent or dialect when they speak, each of us builds a one-of-a-kind way of expressing, receiving, and navigating erotic connection. Over the course of our lives, we gather and develop preferences, habits, communication styles, and turn-ons that shape the erotic experience we want — and the one we’re best at giving. It’s a curated, evolving, sometimes messy set of cues, vibes, and experiences that make you go, “yes, that!” Think of it as your personal language for pleasure! And, it’s not fixed, either. Like any dialect, it shifts and grows as you do!
As you evolve, your Erotic Dialect does too.
A joke that once made you laugh as a child might make you cringe as an adult. Similar to how we develop a sense of humor, it adjusts and grows as we discover what makes us chuckle. So it is with The Erotic Dialect. Your Erotic Dialect can adapt and evolve with new experiences, life circumstances, partners, changing priorities, evolving desires, and personal insights. New preferences may emerge, and sometimes what was once appealing may lose its allure.
And just as a spoken dialect might evolve over time based on where a person lives, how long they live there, or whom they interact with, so might The Erotic Dialect.
Unlike setting out to learn a new language with all the grammar, syntax, and spelling rules, your Erotic Dialect develops gradually (and most often, subconsciously) over a lifetime. The people we love, the media we consume, the lessons we learn (or unlearn), and our life stages are all influenced by our experiences, social interactions, culture, world events, and a host of other environmental and circumstantial factors. We are constantly gathering and refining our erotic individuality and infusing it into our psyche as we go through our everyday lives.
So, what is your Erotic Dialect composed of?
Your Erotic Dialect might include physical features, like being attracted to people with a strong nose, a big butt, or a beard. Maybe you enjoy a little pain with your pleasure? Maybe the scent of vanilla or the way the body smells after a long workout drives you wild.
It could be you have to be intellectually wrecked before you’re physically aroused. (Yes, tell me more about why Shakespeare used iambic pentameter while I take my bra off.) Getting weak in the knees when someone uses a certain tone — like a slow, authoritative “come here” that bypasses your brain and goes straight to your spine.
You might find that certain non-verbal cues (eye contact and a whisper of a grin), textures (that faux fur throw would feel great under my naked body), sensations (hot breath on the neck or playing with your hair), or coming completely undone by the way someone bites their lip when they’re thinking? — Congrats! You just discovered more of your Erotic Dialect.
There are really endless possibilities and combinations, as your dialect is as unique as you are. Whatever fluently speaks your language of turn-on and makes you feel more in tune with your erotic self is a part of your Erotic Dialect.
Categories of The Erotic Dialect
Even though everyone’s Erotic Dialect is unique to them, there are core categories that many common characteristics may fall under. When thinking about what makes up your Erotic Dialect, it can be helpful to organize all the components into general categories. Here’s an example of four:
Desire and Arousal Type
How do you usually get turned on? A few years ago, sex educator Emily Nagoski popularized describing any given individual’s desire and response like an "accelerator" or the “brakes” in a car. For instance, some people’s desire for sex comes on fast — like pressing on the accelerator in a car. This is the kind we usually see in movies and TV: two people lustily grabbing each other in a burst of sexual excitement.
Other folks are more like brakes and may need to slow down to build the desire for sex. This could include time to feel safe, relieving some stressors, or experiencing more evidence of feeling desired. Think of wooing, seducing, or ensuring you feel safe. Generally, folks tend to skew towards one or the other, but in truth, throughout our lives, we may switch back and forth depending on context or life stage.
Personal Preference
Just as people have distinct tastes in food or music, they also develop preferences in what is sexually exciting, such as physical features, personality traits, sensations, activities, or themes they find erotic. Think — curly hair, expressive eyes, kinks, BDSM, tickling, romance, intelligence, wit, brattiness, fawning — and the list goes on and on.
Communication Styles
Verbal and non-verbal cues play a crucial role in expressing desires, feeling desired, getting aroused, obtaining consent, setting boundaries, and lots more. Like cultural differences in a spoken language, individuals have varying ways of conveying all the components that make up the kind of intimacy they like to give and receive.
Practical Knowledge
The way someone enjoys being touched — or touching others — is as personal as a signature. You will most likely add in the techniques that have given pleasure to yourself and to your partners in the past, and omit the ones that didn’t seem to get an enthusiastic reaction. Cultivating techniques and styles that work for you and please another person is not simply done by reading a book (though that’s a good place to start), but learned, practiced, and delivered with the intention of bestowing the most pleasure upon your partner.
By curating our desires and refining our dislikes, we can better verbally and physically articulate our needs to our partners, enhancing connection, communication, and certainly sex itself. Gaining an understanding of our unique Erotic Dialect can help us give voice to our inner sense that drives our erotic thoughts, feelings, and sensations (embodiment). We don't just intellectualize our desires and preferences — we get to know how they show up for us somatically as well.
Understanding Your Partner’s Erotic Dialect Helps Intimacy and Connection
It’s all about the four C’s: cultivation, communication, connection, and curiosity. In relationships, learning — or just appreciating — a partner’s Erotic Dialect is akin to understanding a new culture. When getting to know a new partner, both individuals might appear to "speak" a common language of intimacy. While you might have some commonalities in your dialects, it’s fun to explore how you differ. You might find nuances and expressions that differ greatly from your expectations.
One way to approach this learning process is to imagine each person as a unique country with their own cultural traditions, history, and language. Just as one might immerse themselves in a new culture by learning its customs, laws, historical points of interest, and topography — understanding a partner’s Erotic Dialect requires inquisitiveness, enthusiasm, patience, kindness, respect, and some time to get used to.
Getting curious about what comprises a partner’s Erotic Dialect can offer deeper and often more astute insight into their desires and preferences. It is also an acknowledgment to your partner that their experiences and preferences are seen, heard, and considered. Actively listening to their answers encourages more open and fulfilling discussions about intimacy. It stimulates dialogues about compromise, consent, boundaries, triggers, expectations, stressors, and even STI status. This invites vulnerability and strengthens connection and erotic bonds, building more pathways to sexual pleasure and (hopefully) enriching your shared intimacy.
… and there’s so much more.
I can’t wait to tell you even more about The Erotic Dialect in future posts — how The Erotic Dialect can illuminate the diverse and individual nature of your desires. How it can provide clues as to why you express the erotic in the ways that you do. How it might give you pause to consider what parts of your Erotic Dialect still work for you — and maybe what parts no longer work, turn you on, or are relevant to what you find fulfilling right now.
I truly believe that delving into this understanding of who you are erotically will help build greater self-awareness and erotic acknowledgment, and will improve intimacy, communication, and connection with partners at the same time.
Stay tuned, and subscribe to learn more. Better yet, grab a paid subscription for exclusive content/excerpts from The Erotic Dialect book.