The Universality of Butt Sex

It’s a new semester, you’re taking An Introduction to the Wage Gap in Child Labour, sitting bored in the cramped tutorial room. You didn’t do the reading, and a white man just walked into the room. A tote bag flops onto the table next to you. A hand, covered in rings and chipped nail polish, reaches down past the bubble-gum vape and pulls out a laptop. A laptop covered in stickers, from the Greens to BLM to one that just has a picture of Mitski captioned “I love my wife.” And nestled amongst a feat of signaling that would make Barthes proud, is a blue, white and pink flag. You’ve encountered, for the first time and up-close, a nonbinary person.

To perform a public good for this small, almost pointless-to-write about niche, here is my guide on how to seduce, and sleep with the non-binary person in your class. Take this both in reverence and with an immensely large grain of salt.

Seduction begins, as it always does, by establishing yourself in relation to them. You want to differentiate yourself from the other totewearing, oat milk drinking queers who normally swing their way. In seducing your nonbinary target, imagine you are the siren atop the rocks, offering to fix their relationship with their parents.

If you’re wondering, at this point, if the first step is surely to get their pronouns right, I’m sorry, but this isn’t for you.

Start with subtle but smart phrases. Compliment their niche tattoos that either have a paragraph long history or mean fuck all. Even their crustiest stick’n’pokes deserve your adoration (and perhaps later a gentle kiss to the scabbed and flaking ink). Make fun of the straight men in your class. Refer endlessly to the latest TikTok trends or your family traumas and how they led you to reading fanfiction. Make a point to overshare on something sexual, but don’t go too far. Tell them about a fetish, or your most recent hook-up and change the conversation immediately. Be casual and non-confrontational about your repertoire.

The next step in seduction is to convince them that sex with you will not induce a month-long gender crisis requiring two more trips to the therapist. (The formula for a nonbinary person’s therapy attendance per month is 1 + n where n is the number of years they lived at home.) This is probably the most crucial part of the entire process and the key is to highlight your expertise and previous experience in nonbinary forays.

Phrases to use include telling them that everyone else you’ve slept with also wears Docs, or that you liked Keith Haring before he was commercialised. Casually mention how you’re getting into crocheting, and how your pink strapon is hot pink, not just pink, and that the silicone is ethically sourced and recyclable. Try buying your own carabiner to incite a Pavlovian response from them. Be sure to be seen reading Sylvia Plath with cum or lipstick smudges on some of the pages.

When you move from the sussing out period to the downright flirting stage, there are two strategies. Going high or going low. Going high consists of things like giving them your favourite book to read, bonding over your mutual stupol