Bad Listeners Are Bad in Bed

When I made my sexual debut, I was dead set on being good at it. I got perfect grades, was a decent athlete, a talented performer. Like anything else, sex was something to master. To excel at. When friends talked about their experiences I listened intently for tips, information, errors to avoid. A close friend and I studied Cosmo together like it was gospel. We pored over listicles of “mind blowing tricks”, furiously highlighting key tactics.

To those familiar with that era of Cosmo - and cringing on my behalf - don’t worry. I didn’t attempt most of those misguided recommendations. Aside from that one time I drunkenly attempted to unzip a pair of jeans with my teeth. I digress.

I was lucky to get an incredible sex education at an appropriately early age. (Thank you, Unitarian Universalism!) I embraced sex positivity and promiscuity without shame. I also discovered my orgasm fairly easily. Praise be to showerheads and the senior at my high school who casually mentioned hers.

But in those early years of being sexually active, I wasn’t orgasming with partners. That chapter from the end of high school through college and into my early twenties was all high fives and post-game celebration. I would have been thrilled if my roommates had doused me in Gatorade when I came home after a hook up.

I was fucking for sport. Sex was another achievement. In truth, on some level I was protecting myself. Shielding against being exploited or laughed at for being “bad”. In choosing sluttery, it was like I was trying to get ahead of a cultural trap that positions women as objects for free use. If I fucked them first, they couldn’t fuck me.

For all my education and positivity, I never internalized the notion that sex is presence and pleasure, not performance. This was a larger life lesson to confront, as I had equated achievement with happiness for many years prior.

I was faking orgasms in almost every encounter I had. I was performing what I thought good sex looked like, without actually letting myself have any. And when I started to shine a light on this, I realized it came down to a safety issue. I thought that by fucking with a kind of guard up - a hardened exterior - that I was impervious to emotional harm (I wasn’t) and that I’d never be taken advantage of (I was).

I was doing deeply intimate things with people I kept at arm’s length. Of course I wasn’t embodied in the experience. Of course I wasn’t cumming.

Eventually, I drummed up the courage necessary to ask for what I knew I liked. The right partner(s) eventually came along and I found the confidence to advocate for myself. With better vetting, and clearer communication, I was able to foster a sense of safety even with casual partners. I built tolerance for the the crazy faces and body contortions necessary, and for the quiet moments of tension or nothingness I needed to relax into the sensations. This took years, and deserves its own essay. Easier said than done.

I share this history to demonstrate that a sense of “safety” can be quite a subtle, nuanced, slippery thing. We tend to think of safety in extremes, in black and white. Yes or no. But a lack of felt safety doesn’t necessarily mean anyone is knowingly violating consent, or even that we ourselves are aware that we’re not fully consenting.

Which is why I find that consent, curiosity, listening, and attunement are linked concepts. Because consent is ongoing. It’s not a checkbox or carte blanche.

Sexual arousal requires safety. An embodied, moment to moment sense of freedom to slow down, speed up, redirect, or express anything that you’re feeling without consequence. When that freedom erodes, the nervous system registers threat. And under threat, the body protects itself and often numbs out or dissociates. Desire disappears. Arousal becomes inaccessible. Sometimes there is pain where there was never pain before. The body, in its intelligence, begins to enact the no that we didn’t feel safe enough to express.

For many of us, much of the sex we have isn’t with strangers but with familiar, long term partners. And even in those relationships, the checkbox model quietly deteriorates the dynamic.

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