10 Ways to Screw Up Your Sex Life: Lesson 2

Most of us are looking for a quick fix to our sexual dilemmas. We want a pill, a DVD, or a series of complex finger movements that will magically make us less anxious and more confident about exposing our true sexual selves. While no such pill exists, and I don’t believe anyone can guarantee that their way is the best way to have sex, I do think there are a few things many of us do that work against the chances of us getting the sexual pleasure we desire.

Over the next nine days I’m going to be blogging a bad-sex tip a day. If you’ve got bad-tips of your own please consider sharing the wealth.

Today’s Bad Sex Tip: Ignore Your Body

The idea of a perfect body is a fiction. None of us have perfect bodies. But we’re inundated with pieced together visions of beauty: An unattainable ideal we all compare ourselves to. In response many of us turn away from our bodies, pretend they, we, aren’t there.

Some of us have good reason to turn away from our bodies. We may live with temporary or chronic pain, we may have experienced our bodies as betraying us, acting in ways that don’t match how we feel at the time, doing things we don’t want them to do, and not doing other things we wish we they could. It becomes easier to think of our bodies as something outside of ourselves, or at least separate from who we are.

But whatever your body is like, your sexuality is part of it, and you ignore your body at the expense of genuine sexual pleasure and empowerment. Being in your body, whatever that means to you and for however long you can stand it, is an important part of sexual growth.

I’m not in any way proposing a sort of aspirational “love your body” effort. Most of us have reasons to hate our bodies, and while hating your body probably isn’t the greatest path to sexual pleasure, at least it’s a kind of engagement (one that can be redirected or re-told). My argument is that the worst thing you can do is ignore your body for extended periods. To pretend it’s not there, it doesn’t need to be attended to.

It’s not easy. But in both literal and figurative ways our bodies are what we’ve got to work with and it’s the work of figuring out what to do with your body and your partners’ bodies, what you want to do with these bodies, that helps us expand and deepen our sexual experiences.

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