Sex is scary. Does anyone else feel that way? I used to, all the time. In fact, I went nearly a decade without having sex because I was so afraid of doing sex wrong, or accidentally revealing that I’m a woman who wants sex (and therefore should burn in hell, I suppose). I wasted a tremendous amount of time not experiencing one of the greatest joys being human has to offer.
Don’t be like me.
A few years ago, I Met A Boy, and went on a sexual healing journey.
It was long. It was arduous. I had to talk about sex, in front of other people! I had to buy a giant vibrating massager! I had to get over myself.
That last part was the hardest part, need I add.
Eventually, however, get over myself I did. And I learned things — about myself, about sexuality, about where I belong in this world and why.
I learned how to be at peace with my own sexuality. For a survivor of an abusive home, a rape, and various harassment and attempted assaults, this was no easy feat.
What I realized in the process is that we all struggle with sex. Mostly, our struggles are totally preventable and easily done away with. We just have to appreciate some basic principles about sexuality that no one ever teaches us.
Here they are.
Do: Spend a lot of time outside
The birds know how to do it. The bees know how to do it. Everyone out there knows how to do it.
And apart from a few unfortunate examples like duck gang rapes and stallions ‘covering’ underage mares, for the most part, they do it pretty well.
Nature figures it out because every individual animal, yes even you, is born with a template. The individual might fill in their desires as they go, so when it comes to mating time, that creature knows what they want. But bottom line is, that creature is deciding what it wants, when it wants it, and more or less from whom, during the course of its entire life.
That way, when it finds what it wants? It doesn’t need to consult ten of its friends, the five books about dating on its shelf, religious texts, and its parents before it makes a decision. Animals are not indecisive when it comes to dating and sex. They see something they want, they go for it, and if it doesn’t want them back they keep moving until they find someone similar but different.
Problem solved.
Animals in part have this part of life worked out because they put sex in its place. They know that most of the year has to be spent focused on foraging for food, trying not to get eaten by predators, and staring curiously at those weirdo humans in their weirdo cars going way too fast around hairpin turns. But come summer, or mating season, or lady’s-in-heat season, suddenly sex is The Most Important Thing In The World.
Yes, I know I’m compressing a zillion different varieties of animal sexuality into one lumpish category. But the point remains. Animals know how to do it. They don’t have to watch someone else do it, or get pointers from an elder, or be coached on their technique. They just get it.
The entire natural world just knows how to do it. Waves come and come and. Flowers point towards the sun, erect and unafraid. There is something to be learned from the way that all of nature moves toward pleasure, unafraid.
Don’t: Treat Porn like Sex Ed
Watch all the porn you want! I’m not going to tell you not to. But porn is a shitty teacher.
Most pornography you’ll encounter is written, directed, and shot for men by men. It is male-centered, which means the sex scenes tend to begin when the male participant gets aroused and end when he orgasms. It is often deliberately cruel and humiliating to women: in real life, most women like to be asked ahead of time whether it is okay to call them “bitch” or “whore” or come on their faces during sex. Worse, it encourages violence towards women, as men begin to experiment with choking and other potentially dangerous activities during sex with partners who have not consented.
So yes, watch porn if you want to. But be a thoughtful consumer.
More importantly, don’t turn to porn to teach you “how to have sex” or “how to please a woman.” Porn can’t do that and it’s not meant to do that.
Do: Educate Yourself
Thanks to the internet, we have worlds of knowledge about sex right at our fingertips. Whether you’re looking to read all about it, get some quick advice about what not to do, or learn more about what consent really truly means in the real world, what you’re looking for is out there.
Databases like Psychology Today offer articles from sex therapists and other professionals who regularly encounter, and solve, sexual anxieties.
Popular websites like Scarleteen offer excellent and fact-checked advice about consent, safe sex, and healthy relationships.
Heck, if you’re curious about what women want, check out romance novels! These smutty bastions of sin have kept seemingly buttoned-up women occupied for centuries. If you really want to get better at pleasing women, Outlander just might have something useful to teach you.
Don’t: Blame Your Body
What you look like is not the reason that people don’t want to sleep with you.
I promise.
People have fallen in love with other human beings who are ugly, financially poor, ostracized, and generally deemed ‘social undesirables’ since time immemorial. Sometimes, the rarity of a person’s looks or body is part of the appeal. Humans like to feel that they are appreciated, and that often means learning to love what society says we should not.
Even Western culture, lover of beauty that it is, sometimes reflects this. Movies like Fur demonstrate that even the “ugliest” of people can find love. Romantic comedies like Something New and The Big Sick increasingly explore love between members of different racial or ethnic backgrounds. Romance classically explores the excitement of love between people who normally fear each other by fantasizing love affairs between: human and alien (Roswell, New Mexico); human and creature-without-a-body (Every Day); and alien and alien (Defiance).
If we can all watch literal aliens fall in love, and root for the aliens? You have nothing to worry about.
If you have some sexual barriers, they’re most likely in your mind, not your body. If you do have a disability that gets in the way of having sex, by all means work with what you’ve got. But don’t confuse an actual real problem with a false social construct.
If you are particularly thin or fat, and you’d like to do something about that, maybe you can. If not, then that’s fine too! Very thin and very fat people fall in love and get married all the time. The barrier to sex does not lie in your thinness or your fatness. It does not lie in you having brown hair when you were taught blondes have all the fun. It does not lie in you being pasty white when looking like you just spent two months in Hawaii is all the rage.
The barrier to sex lies in your obsession with this thing, whatever it is.
Because you obsess about it, you don’t notice the many, many people on this planet who really don’t care. You also don’t notice the people who might already be in your life who find you incredibly attractive, and would very much like to take things a step further, thank you very much.
Quit blaming your body for the conditions of rejection that you create by hating your body, mmkay?
Do: Respect Your Body
Respect what your body looks like right now, but also? Take An Interest.
If you have a tendency to walk around looking like the Great Unwashed, then please, do explore showering-and yes, I do mean daily. And if you regularly dress like your mother picked out your clothes for you, then maybe try a stylist, or at least ask a personal shopper for advice.
You are not the only person with this body type to ever exist on this planet. Other people manage to look similar to you, yet have a better sense of style. What is it they do that you’d like to do more of? What is it they don’t do that is currently killing your vibe?
Ask your friends. I’m sure they have some ideas.
Seriously, we all need help sometimes. I, for one, spent years trying to put together a plus-size wardrobe that looked both professional and sexy. I eventually realized I just couldn’t do it. Instead, I bought a bunch of dresses I really liked that I could wear for work or play, and called it a day.
Clothes do not make the man, but they do communicate who he is to other people. Make sure that what you’re communicating fits the brand you’re trying to put out there.
And have some fun with it. There are five thousand kinds of shampoo, scented candles, just-for-fun outfits for dudes, and other varieties of fashion to play with. If you’re the kind of guy who always thought that caring how you look was feminine, frivolous, and therefore stupid, now’s the time to change those beliefs. Misogyny rarely scores high with the ladies.
Don’t: Give Up
Look, for all I know, you really may be the problem. Maybe when you feel ignored, you snarl and say cruel things that you wish you could take back. Maybe you have absolutely zero conflict management skills. Maybe you have a whole host of unrealistic expectations for how women ought to behave in relationships, and your idea of a relationship is “we flirted for five minutes.”
Maybe it is literally your fault that you go to sleep alone more often than not.
Even if all that is true, that is no reason to go hating yourself for it.
What the above situations all have in common is that they are temporary. You can change these situations by learning new skills! Easy as that.
Take a conflict management course. Begin a mindfulness practice or three. Learn to notice when you’re angry, then count to ten before you speak or text.
If you are consistently turning people off, the problem is probably your behavior, and the fact that you are not cute and/or rich enough to get away with being a douchebag. Those people do exist, but they are rare. Thanks to #metoo, they are getting rarer every day. Chances are you are not them.
That’s okay. You don’t really want to wander the world with that amount of douchebaggery emanating from you anyway.
Instead, be the bigger person. Step up. Think about who you want to be and how you want to impact other people, and then figure out how to do that.
Once you figure out what your personal brand is and how to live up to it, the right people will find you. That’s a promise.
Sexuality is a birthright. It’s your birthright. You will meet somebody who finds your particular brand of scruffy attractive, yes even when you’re sweaty, smelly, or puking your guts out in some San Francisco bathroom.
Let the universe help you out. It’s already trying to do that, I guarantee you. So don’t be the person who lets a million possibilities slip by because you’re too busy staring in the mirror thinking, do I look fat today?
Maybe you do! Maybe you don’t. Who cares! Go have fun.
Do what gives you joy and encourages you to embrace pleasure, and sex will follow naturally.
In Conclusion
You are the problem in your own sex life. However your body works, it works perfectly for the particular flavor of sexuality you are here on earth to bring. Whatever turns you on, as long as it’s not harming someone else, that’s awesome. You are not broken. You are not damaged beyond repair.
Wanting something unique, desiring sex that looks different from what you’ve been taught is the heterosexual norm? Doesn’t make you absurd and doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. People like all kinds of things — fat bodies and thin ones, vibrators and nipple clamps, pretending to be babies and pretending to be Klingons. Whatever works for you is what works, period.
So quit lamenting what you’re not. Start embracing what you are.
You have nothing to lose but your anxieties.
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This post was previously published on Change Becomes You.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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