In bed, men still prioritise performance over pleasure. Why?
Read the full article on Esquire by Jonno Seidler here.
Sex is one of the few pastimes most everyone partakes in. But as Jonathan Seidler discovered—at a sexual wellness event, no less—only half of us seem fluent in the language of pleasure. Why?
“JONNO’S GOING TO A SEX PARTY TONIGHT,” my wife tells friends over coffee at the bakery near our place. “Wow,” says Alex, one of the husbands, as he grips my shoulders. “You really do have all the fun.”
I should preface this story by stating that we don’t have one of ‘those’ relationships. My wife and I are more likely to lose our car keys than throw them in a bowl on a Saturday night. But still, I am going to a sex party (of sorts). It’s hosted by Normal, a new-ish start-up that sells toys and products for the bedroom as a means of funding freely available educational resources around sexual wellness. On this particular night, the focus is a course the company’s launching around body image and its psychological impact on how we enjoy—or don’t enjoy—sex. Holistically speaking, the focus is pleasure, which, in theory, should be a broadly universal, gender non-specific topic.
I try to explain this to Alex, who says if I’m getting a complimentary vibrator, he’d prefer his to be blue.
After 10 minutes, it dawns on me that I’m one of three men in a very crowded room, and almost certainly the only straight one. While this is not a situation alien to me, it strikes me as strange that for a pastime beloved by the entire population, only half of it is represented at this particular party.
“Am I the token guest?” I wonder aloud to a group of 20-something-year-old women I meet by the vulva cupcake stand. They laugh politely, and we discuss their relationships to sex and pleasure in general enough terms that I won’t have to sleep on the couch when I get home. I’m struck by how remarkably well equipped everyone here seems to be with the language of pleasure, not to mention the understanding of how they can achieve it, both in company and alone.
But I’m also left wondering when this particular demographic learned to express themselves this way. Was I too busy listening to sad indie bands in my uni years that I missed the memo? And what about other guys I know, who still make jokes about wanting to nail their hot babysitters from ten years ago? Inside the party, as I listen to conversations about mutual masturbation and finding partners with similar kinks, it really does feel like a new sexual revolution is in full flight.
So I have to wonder, where are all the dicks? Are we being left behind, or, more pertinently, are we leaving ourselves behind?
"When we speak to CIS mean, they'll often turn their pleasure into a punchline."
"When we speak to CIS mean, they'll often turn their pleasure into a punchline."
Dr David Demmer is a clinical psychologist with a research background in how gender and sexuality influence mental health. “Sex for men is often considered very much a physical act with few cognitive or emotional elements to it,” he tells me.
“Given that pleasure, or at least the exploration of what we find pleasurable, needs to contain all of these, many men may feel that these opportunities are not open to them.”
Stacks up. I learned about sex-ed by rolling a condom on a banana, having ‘the talk’ with my Mum and watching increasingly high resolution pornography that started in printed form before ending up on the same phone I use to take calls from… my Mum. I’ve also worked with a number of health companies that specifically target men, and Dr Demmer’s assessment checks out; it’s all about the physicality. Specifically: can you get a boner and ‘stay up’ for as long as humanly possible like all those unrealistically endowed plumbers with 11-inch dongs who, in the adult film universe, always seem to be conveniently ‘in the neighbourhood’.
Georgia Grace, known simply and delightfully as ‘G Spot’ on social media, is a certified sex and relationship practitioner. She knows a thing or two about male anxieties that tend to overwhelm conversations around sex.
“A lot of the cisgender male clients I see in session are concerned with lasting longer or getting hard and staying hard, and their arousal impacts their sense of self, their gender identity and what they assume sex should look and feel like because of the heteronormative narrative that sex equals penetration,” she says. “When I’m working with men, they will often identify a great deal of shame they have around not being able to live up to what they think it means to be a sexual man.”
This is not to throw sexual wellness companies, who’ve played an outsized role ushering in this revolution in how we think about pleasure, under the bus. They don’t all design their courses or products solely for women, but it doesn’t take much online sleuthing to see that female-identifying people make up the majority of their audience.
Lucy Wark, Normal’s founder, is straight up about it.
Read the full article on Esquire by Jonno Seidler here.
