This is a comment by Mike on the post “Panda Three-Way“.
I’m not really sure what’s going on here, but I cannot help but wonder about the potential for a false solution.
On the one hand, it seems extremely attractive: having a “guide” (for lack of a better word) could easily reduce anxiety and make everything more enjoyable.
But on the other hand, why is there so much anxiety in the first place? If a couple is open, honest, and communicates freely, fear over “performance” should go away on its own.
It seems like this set up would bolster confidence but not do much for communication. Confidence can reduce anxiety, certainly, but what’s really more important: knowing that your performance will please your partner, or knowing that the relationship you have with your partner is stronger than any performance issues that might crop up?
This could certainly solve the former, but isn’t the latter more important?
Photo credit: Flickr / David Stanley
About the Editors
Its not as if confidence and communication are mutually exclusive and you can only have one or the other. I agree that communication may be more important in the long run but if the confidence is not there the run might not last that long (or at least that’s what is said of people who are low on confidence and self esteem but wonder why no finds them attractive).
And also the confidence might help some people open up the communication channels. Who is to say that a person might not be so lacking in confidence in the bedroom that they are simply unable to talk about things that may come up during the relationship (and this is of course not limited to sex)?
Danny,
To put this comment in perspective, my real concern was about a new paradigm of sexual initiation that was proposed in the original article.
While there are definite benefits to confidence, the confidence in the original piece related to knowing how to please “a woman.” The specific method involved having sex with someone who was not your actual intended partner as a “learning experience” that could then help you to have sex with your actual intended partner. As women are not interchangeable, what pleases one woman often has little bearing on how to please another.
This means that while you might gain confidence, you will then be confidently doing all the wrong things because your learning experience had nothing to do with your actual partner.
If, instead, the focus was always on communication, then you wouldn’t need to worry about whether or not you were pleasing your partner: she would tell you. I have a hard time believing third-party derived confidence is an acceptable substitute for this kind of communication.
Good point about not assuming that his next partner will be exactly like his first one. He was initiated into having sex with _a particular_ woman, not all women.
You make a good point that this encounter is not necessarily a useful education moment. It depends on how the big pandas handled it. He may not “learn” much more about sex just because there were two teachers instead of one.
Now I’m wondering what the role of the older male panda was in the first place. Couldn’t the woman by herself tell him everything he would need to know?
While your point is good when I was talking about confidence I was not talking about thinking women are interchangeable. The confidence I’m talking about is being able to try things out, get over the first time jitters and so forth. In fact now that I think about it I believe even more that confidence is a part of communication (and might be a precursor to it for some people).
I think its possible that after having that encounter with that older couple he may have gotten the chance to get those common insecurities out of the way so that when he has his next sex partner he be able to talk open with them about why wants to try, things he’s already done, talk about what he’s into, etc…
To use myself as an example the only sexual experience I have is one instance of going down on a woman (which didn’t happen until I was almost 30). Before that I was actually a bit scared of what would I do if I ever had a sexual encounter. But now that I’ve done that I at least know that I have at least one starting point the next time I have sex. No that doesn’t mean I think that the next person I’m with will like oral (I think that’s the false you confience you speak of) but it does mean that I have at least some competency in at least one sexual ability. And that bit of competency gives me a bit of confidence to talk things over with my next partner on what we do.
In short I think that confidence could help people with communication skills in a sexual relationship.
Danny,
You may very well be right. I’ve never really had many issues with confidence, for whatever reason, whereas communication was definitely something I needed to learn how to build; mostly because it needs to be carefully built up each time you enter a new relationship.
I guess we all tend to see our own problems in other people, even when it’s not appropriate. You definitely raise a good point.
And you raise a good one as well. Its definitely true that learning what one woman likes doesn’t not mean learning what every woman likes. In I think we see this play out in how guys watch porn, see that a lot of the women in porn are “size queens” and then conclude that all women (that are into men) go around with some deal breaker condition that a guy’s penis must be at least a certain size or she won’t give him the time of day. Not only does this leave a lot of guys thinking they can never please a woman but (and here is where your thoughts on false confidence come in) you also have a lot of guys thinking that all since they have a large penis that they will automatically be just want a woman wants.
And how many times have women stated in on this site alone that (at least to them) size doesn’t matter and then go onto list what does matter?
Um … Mike, have you ever actually HAD sex? If so, I congratulate you on your absolutely stress-free coupling.
I’m pretty sure that for the rest of us, sex was a pretty stressful event the first several times we had it. And for us completely unlucky people who’ve had problems in the past, it continues to be stressful and anxiety-provoking.
This comment seems entirely weird to me.
My first time was with a girlfriend I had already been with for 2 years (most of high school). We had discussed it at length, taken all the advance steps we could to allay each others’ concerns, and had practiced communicating about our pleasures and desires during fondling and make out sessions before actually taking the plunge into intercourse.
I’m also in my twenties, so I grew up midst more permissive attitudes than existed historically, and I grew up in an area where the public schools began sex education in 2nd grade. I can understand if this sort of experience was impossible for many who are older than myself, but it also seems like it’s entirely possible for the generation that is just becoming sexually active now.
All I can say is that if this is actually the case, then good for the younger generation. I’m Generation X and I don’t think there has ever been a generation as screwed up sexually as we were, so I’m guessing there was nowhere to go but up.
If it’s creepy, is it really much more creepy than learning about sex from simply watching two slightly older people have sex on a video? Maybe for virgins, some sexually explicit videos could come with voice-over narration by the actors or directors, giving insights to the uninitiated. “Now, in this scene here, we had a problem with getting the angle just right, so we….”
Yeah, but there’s certain technical stuff which can be better explained by someone with experience.
Perhaps this should shed some light on the issue: I don’t yell at people often, but the last time I did was when a female friend of mine told me she was shocked by how many people were virgins when they came to college, because where she came from, virgins were “people who couldn’t find people to have sex with.” I didn’t scream, but I certainly raised my voice, and calmly and forcibly told her to “shut up and/or stop talking” because she had offended me and every single one of my friends. When she protested, I repeated myself. She apologized and told me she didn’t mean it in an offensive way.
Virgins are still often treated like crap, regardless of what anyone wants to believe. Luckily, I have the guts to stand up for myself, regardless of whether its a guy or a girl questioning me. What’s unfortunate is that many guys do not.