Sexual confidence came up a lot during this week’s The Real Sex Education podcast, where we spoke to writer and comedian Jayde Adams about the way her sex education and sexual experiences have affected her. What she said provides considerable food for thought, especially as so many people assume they should be sexually confident. Indeed, losing sexual confidence – or never having it in the first place – contributes to many common sexual problems. Anxiety about ‘getting it right’ makes things go wrong. This then feeds fears that something will go wrong again, which can lead to sex becoming a fraught and hurried experience – trying to get it done before something bad happens. Ultimately, couples often avoid sex altogether. What may begin with one partner being a little reluctant can end with neither able to communicate about sex at all, both feeling they’ve failed and fearing they’re unloved.
Fear of judgement
Many people have a terror of being judged – not even necessarily by their partner. Rather, they feel as if there is some unseen arbiter of sexual prowess. This isn’t surprising given how much sex is around us. The media is full of it, and it’s used in advertising and entertainment so it’s impossible to escape. People’s fears of judgement are about sexual ‘performance’, the body’s ability to do what it’s supposed to and its appearance. Plus some of the advice about overcoming such fears actually feeds them. There are countless articles exhorting us to get fit, take control, aim for pleasure. Well, you would if you could, wouldn’t you?
Part of the problem is that sex is presented as needing to be ‘fantastic’, ‘mindblowing’, ‘incredible’. In reality, a great deal of sex is humdrum but comforting. The problem is we worry that this is boring and that we ought to be enjoying sensational sex, whatever that means. This can create so much pressure that all sex then becomes stressful.
Thinking back to early sexual experiences, many of us would say these were the most relaxed we ever had. In the good old days, a couple of fumbling teenagers, learning about sex together, used to discover what they enjoyed without pressure. That came later when we lost our innocence by reading too many of those ‘how to’ articles. Now, however, many teenagers have already viewed hours of pornography before they ever touch another human. The impossible bodies, sexual violence and unrealistic stamina of porn denies today’s young people the important rite of passage that fumbling sex was, replacing it with a feeling of never standing a chance of being good enough.
No expectations
Of course, some people’s early experiences aren’t good. They may be non-consensual, humiliating or disgusting, and this inevitably influences how we feel about the next time and the time after that. But even a one-off sexual experience can be tender, funny, loving and reassuring. The prerequisite though is a lack of expectation and a degree of confidence that probably only comes with having had a lifetime of super successful experiences, or of having none or few and little clue of what you’re meant to be doing. Very few people have that luxury. The former is probably only possible if you’re an uncaring narcissist and the latter has been ruined by too much exposure to sexual content too soon. It’s consequently important that sex education starts really young and focuses on issues like consent and consideration rather than performance and pleasure.
Pleasure is obviously pretty important, but it’s become yet another club with which to batter ourselves and our sexual partners. We now have response pressure, whereby we judge ourselves by our partner’s erection or orgasm – or their lack. Instead of taking responsibility for ourselves, we expect our partners to ‘make us’ enjoy sex or feel aggrieved when they don’t respond to our efforts quickly enough or at all. How can we be relaxed enough to respond genuinely when we are so worried about doing so?
I see many couples in therapy whose sex lives are ruined by this need to tick boxes which they assume will please their partners or which they need to reassure themselves. For some people, sex is so much a matter of getting and keeping an erection, and climaxing quickly before the erection goes, that there’s little pleasure in the experience at all. Equally, some people feel their orgasm is so important to their partner’s self-esteem and arousal that they feel obliged to have one, and then can’t. For them, sex is also just about delivering a performance rather than having a sensuous and loving experience or even just a truly spontaneous experience.
Spontaneity
Spontaneity itself is unrealistically valued. Prerequisites for sex include hygiene, privacy, time, a comfortable and safe environment, consent and contraception. This doesn’t even begin to take into account issues like feeling stressed or distracted or wanting to get it right. So spontaneity doesn’t really work unless you’ve planned it. Or, more realistically, spontaneity doesn’t really exist unless you have a plan to deviate from. What most people call spontaneity is actually the result of considerable planning, even if the partner is unaware of it. Nonetheless, many people resist sex therapy interventions which they argue are not spontaneous and which therefore, they say, don’t count. This way of thinking relies on both partners having the same idea at an identical moment and enacting it perfectly with all the prerequisites in place and no barriers. What they don’t usually realise is that life is full of barriers – such as children, not having a condom, exhaustion, pain, work, stress and lack of a private moment. A rock hard erection, orgasm on demand, or even slavish dedication to spontaneity won’t overcome these everyday obstacles. What does work is taking responsibility for our own experience and a bit of planning.
In the podcast, Jayde was interested to learn that in sex therapy we often ask couples not to discuss the touching experiments we set them. This means they have to manage their feelings without knowing what their partner is thinking. This is very hard, but once they start doing it they find it becomes extraordinarily liberating. The aim is ultimately to have each partner feeling secure about themselves and able to feel responsible for their own sexual experience. Far from making sex less intimate, couples find this makes them feel closer and improves both sex and their relationship overall. It takes away the need to please so that partners actually learn what turns each other on without feeling judged for getting it wrong. Sexual confidence thereby improves too.
Cate Campbell 