hen I first discovered the power of soft sex, I felt like a traitor to my gender. As a guy, I had grown up with the notion that roughness was good, that for women, a hard man was good to find, to paraphrase a military recruitment slogan. It took a two-year hiatus from relationships, and sex, to bring about this quiet revolution -- it was a Copernican revolution, really, because it turned everything I knew about myself as a lover upside down. I came back to lovemaking with a not-quite virginal innocence. I was a beginner again, but instead of going at it with an athletic fury to make up for lost time, I eased back into it with patience. My lover and I favored foreplay in the nervous early days of getting to know each other naked. As I grew accustomed to using only my mouth and fingers, the male-side view of sex, and our macho terms for it, "mounting," "banging," "nailing," "pile-driving," became increasingly alien and hostile-sounding to me. Plus, my lover was having seismic, tsunamic, Technicolor orgasms just because my tongue was exerting a gentle, modulated pressure on a certain sweet spot of hers. As her pleasure more and more became my pleasure, I opened my imagination to what it would be like to be her. I became permeable, passive; I listened, looked, and learned. A co-worker of mine, a guy in his thirties, says years of experience have taught him to communicate. "The sex I have right now is monumentally better than sex in college. I can talk to women now about what they like, what works, what doesn't. I'm much more attuned in bed to her sounds, her movements."