I’ve been talking to women about sex and want to share three sex lies we all seem, at one point or another, to tell ourselves. They each have to do with some imagined “shoulds.”
The first is that there are couples out there who are having perfect sex, and they’re having it at perfectly regular and frequent intervals, and that the nature of their perfectly loving, perfectly satisfying sex (which is hot and ,heavy every time) is as constant and as reliable as their morning coffee. This anxiety-based fantasy is guaranteed to make us not only feel immensely deficient, unsatisfied and defective, but to become insane over how many times a week (day??? ) that couple has it, versus how many times a week (month???) we have it-and then, of course, the insistent additional thoughts: Which one of us should be initiating it? How many times? Am I too passive? Am I too demanding?
Can I ever get you to stop this? Can I ever prove to you that the variations in sex–in frequency, in who initiates it, in where couples HAVE it, in every possible aspect of it, varies enormously? Will you ever be satisfied to know that whatever you’re doing is, in fact, normal? And that nobody else has it all that much better? There are couples who have sex every other day and like to have it on the kitchen floor because maybe the tiles are warmer there and the kids can’t hear. There are couples who have intense, deeply satisfying sex– but only when they both really feel like it, which may be, by the time they agree on having it and have the time for it, once a month. Or they may live apart, and have it less frequently. So what? We all do what we need to do, and it’s different for every couple.
Now, to the second “should” lie: The idea that other people are having blow-your-head- off, transcendent sex (compared to poor you, who doesn’t have that ever). Well listen, that kind of sex is a lucky stroke (you should pardon the goddess’s pun) but, my dears, it usually happens, when it happens, with someone you just met on a vacation in New Zealand and will never see again, or with someone you don’t get along with and basically can’t stand, or–and this I hear a lot, of course–with someone who belongs to somebody else. Heightened sex usually has a forbidden quality to it–it’s either unexpected, illicit, weirdly unloving, making up after a terrible fight, or takes place somewhere where you’re unlikely ever to meet again. In real relationships, those that are ongoing and, dare I say, committed, sex is as changeable and flawed and imperfect as everything else we all do together, with delightful highs and disappointing lows. That’s the truth. There’s no such thing as perfect sex for both partners day in and day out.
The third “should” lie: “If I’m a great lover, we’ll both have great sex.” The other side of this is, of course, the idea that you’re NOT a good lover and that’s why sex is so… dull.
Listen up: It’s not that expertise isn’t helpful to good sex, but the minute you equate skill with pleasure you begin to think in terms of “earning” love. So you behave differently, focusing on yourself and your performance rather than on giving it all up to mutual pleasur and fun. This is women’s version of performance anxiety, only instead of fearing you won’t get an erection, you fear we’re not pretty enough, thin enough, responsive enough, vocal enough, supportive enough, assertive enough, feminine enough, and so forth-all of which, you decide, turn him off and THAT’S why sex isn’t fabulous every time. Great: You’ve worked it out so the man you have sex with finds you nauseating! Great job!
No, please, don’t do any of this. This last obsession is a guarantee of bad sex. It’s like starting out with a fabulous bottle of Pinot Noir but abstaining from drinking because it would appear too selfish or greedy or unfeminine to slug some down. So then, to be generous, you give your lover the whole bottle. What fun for him! No, no, no, my lovers. Taking is intrinsic to sexual pleasure. Not only that, but it’s precisely what distinguishes sex as a pleasure from sex as a service!
