Article: Lifestyle What Men Get Wrong About Sex

Post by:Sandy
Esther Perel on facing rejection, how men’s sexuality is just as mental as it is physical, and why having good sex doesn’t necessarily mean having an orgasm.


What happens when you interview a famous relationship therapist? You go in with a bunch of questions that sounded smart when you wrote them down, but now sound quite stupid as you say them out loud. She does her best to answer them but you sense she is bored. She can tell they are questions designed to avoid other, deeper, more personal questions. So the interview is going badly.

Then, in an effort to keep the conversation from tanking completely, you offer up some of your own insecurities about sex and dating. You back into the questions that are really bugging you. That’s when she lights up. She starts picking you apart. In fact, in about an hour and a half, she deconstructs the whole shaky edifice of male sexuality in America.

At least, that’s what happened to me when I met Esther Perel, the Belgian-American psychotherapist and author of Mating in Captivity and The State of Affairs. Over tea and coffee at the Soho Grand, Perel gave me a personal seminar on everything that men (and women) get wrong about sex. Here, she explains why good old American pragmatism doesn’t work so well when applied to sex and romance; how Tinder is a tool for avoiding rejection; and why hookup culture is fueled by alcohol.

 
 
GQ: There’s a refrain in the sex and relationships discourse that the European level of sexual intelligence is higher. Why? Is it because all of the prudes moved to the U.S.?
Esther Perel: It's not all European. It’s also Protestant versus Catholic and Anglo-Saxon versus Latin. But there is something about sexuality [here in the U.S.], it becomes something you do versus a place where you go and experience. It’s a goal with an objective and an end. [It’s] the same way that Americans don't know how to flirt, because they are so goal-oriented. They [want to] score. What's the point of flirting if you're not going to score? There's no appreciation for the thing itself, the game, the possibility, the imagination. If you're not going to land the result, then what's the point? It's bringing American pragmatism to the erotic and the mystic.


To a place where it doesn't apply.
This model is very good for the economy, for the market, but not for the intimate landscape of relations, and that's part of why sex is taken out of the context of a story. It doesn't have a plot. It’s just an act. How was it? "It was good, we both came."

 
How do you bring the plot back in?
Start a new education program. Do something with the four-year-olds. Because that's when we are natural theologians, right? “Where do I come from, and where do we go when we die?” So that's the time when you begin to talk about that story. There's conception of self. People feel the ones they like, the ones they don't like, why they like them


"Foreplay is not five minutes before the real thing. Foreplay starts at the end of the previous orgasm."


I guess the problem is that sex can be an uncomfortable subject in this country.
There's a profound discomfort here. But the discomfort is not only with sex. The discomfort is with the body, with loss of control. This place is obsessed with self-control, and sex is a form of surrender. It comes with excess; it comes with loss of control; and it comes with pleasure. And pleasure that is not always productive for its own sake. All these things are held in great suspicion in the American psyche.

 
For men in particular, sex can be acquisitional, something they have to pursue in order to prove or confirm their masculinity.
Every gender is given license to seek its needs in a particular language. Throughout history, the language of women has been feelings and emotions, and, in there, they could wrap their lustful inclinations. The language of men has been sex, and, through sex, they can request acceptance, longing, connection, tenderness, intimacy, abandon. Sex is the gateway for a host of forbidden emotions in men. They believe that what they want is sex. They believe that they should want sex. If they don't want sex, if they're not always up for it, if that's not the only thing they have in mind, there is something wrong with them.


The assumption with men is that their sexuality is more physical than mental.
Male sexuality is often seen as biologically driven, autonomous, spontaneous, you don't have to do anything—you get a hard-on, it's there. He's always in search of an outlet, ready to do the deed. And it's so far from the truth. In fact I think [men’s sexuality] is massively psychologically driven. If you think about the fear of rejection, isn't that a psychological factor? If you think about the fear of inadequacy and performance anxiety, isn't that a relational matter? And if you think about not knowing if she's lying to him or if she's actually liking it—which she could do for 30 years, she could lie to his face and he would never know—if those are not relational aspects of male sexuality, then I don't know what is. Your sexuality is no less relational than that of a woman.

When we talk about male sexuality, we don’t often focus on the emotional and mental parts of it.
Do you know, the majority of research on loss of desire, or lack of sexual desire, is done on women? Because it's so ingrained, even in the science, that he's always up for it. If he's not, what's wrong with him? Maybe when he's depressed or anxious, he's not in the mood. When he worries about his job or about money, his parents dying, he's not in the mood. When he has gained 50 pounds, he's not in the mood. The fact that all kinds of internal experiences may affect his arousal is just inconceivable. The notion is: if you're a dude, wherever you can get it, you take it. It's unbelievably archaic.

"You learn that confidence is your ability to see yourself as a flawed person, and still hold yourself in high regard. Confidence is your ability to tolerate uncertainty."
How do you free guys from that?
How do you free guys from the thinking that their gender and their sex are one and the same? That they're tied into one, and if one isn't interested, than the other one is broken? It's a reeducation. [For instance,] foreplay is not five minutes before the real thing. Foreplay starts at the end of the previous orgasm. It's a whole different idea about foreplay, right? What does it mean to lubricate the relationship as a whole? Not to just say, "Shall we?" The most important turn on for everybody is confidence.

How do you get sexual confidence?
In the same way that you get confidence at work, or as you play an instrument. It's practice. It's learning. You gain confidence with experience, self-acceptance, maturity. You learn that confidence is your ability to see yourself as a flawed person, and still hold yourself in high regard. Confidence is your ability to tolerate uncertainty, without thinking that if you don't know you're not worthy. You don't say, “How was it for you?” You say, “How was I?” Confidence is the person who really says, "How are you? How was it? What do you love the most? Anything you'd like me to do more?"

That sounds very vulnerable.
It means you don't know everything. See, the male sexual education is that he knows without her having to say, and she thinks he knows without her having to say. Everyone colludes on the same myth. On what basis would you know without having said? Every woman is different. Ask! How does she like to play?

The crazy thing about asking is acknowledging to her that you don't know. That's the scary part. You say, "You know what? There's a whole freaking pressure on dudes to have to pretend that they know, when they know squat. I don't want to play that game, so I'm going to be a different kind of guy. Can you handle it? Do you want me to play the part of the guy who pretends, or do you actually want me to be the guy who really wants to know? You tell me, lady.”

People don't take the time to actually develop a certain comfort with the person, a certain ease. Then there's so many ways to be sexual that don't have to do instantly with intercourse and orgasms.


There is such an expectation [to know] that it produces false confidence. The false confidence produces exacerbated anxiety. The exacerbated anxiety makes people reluctant to actually want to engage with each other, because they're so afraid to fail, instead to try out a whole bunch of things and just say, “Who said this had to succeed the first time?”

 
It seems almost heretical to say that you can actually fail and it will be okay.
What is failure? What is bad sex? Bad sex is measured by the fact that he couldn't keep it up, that he couldn't come, or that he did and he came too soon? Or is bad sex the fact that midway he completely forgot to think that there was somebody there, because he was so busy making sure that he was functioning? She wants to feel that she matters, not that he's able to enjoy his own prowess. If he caresses her hair in a way that just gives her shivers throughout her entire body... that's pleasure. Him just being able to get it done? That is not pleasure.

"What is Tinder? Tinder is a rejection prevention app for dudes."
Speaking as the descendant of Puritans, there’s something about sex that is almost inherently scary.
And dirty. That's why everybody's freaking drunk these days. Because you're fundamentally scared. You're scared of owning it, of actually saying, “I want it.” The alcohol is a fundamental expression of the discomfort. It's not that people drink here just because they enjoy it. It's to get freaking smashed.

If you only want to have sex with someone after a few drinks, you probably don't really want to have sex with them.
You don't. You think you should want to. You think there's something wrong with you. There’s no, “Am I in the mood?” It’s: “There's a pretty girl here, therefore I should.” There's no checking in with yourself. Do you feel like it tonight? Maybe you don't. Do you want to run three miles tonight? No, you don't. Once you begin to make analogies, people get out of the exceptionalism of sex, as if sex was functioning with rules of its own.

Is it fair to say that the male hang up when it comes to finding intimacy is fear of rejection?
Everybody is [scared of rejection]. It's normal. What is Tinder? Tinder is a rejection prevention app for dudes. They don't have to do the effort anymore. Men get rejected a lot more than girls, it's true. Girls get rejected, but if she's pretty, if she has some cachet of some sort, she's less likely to be rejected than him. Boys deserve support for that. They are the initiators, they are the ones that have to make the moves. All over the world, that's the case.

How do you move beyond fear of rejection, or normalize it, or get comfortable with rejection?
You don't. You don't get comfortable. You talk about it with other people and you say, “It sucks.” The experience of being rejected, this experience of somebody loving somebody ends. The experience of jealousy, of loneliness, these are part of the human condition. Today people want to anesthetize their life from all these experiences. They want sure bets. This is life. You're going to be in pain, you're going to suffer, you're going to feel rejected, you're going to feel loved, you're going to feel jealous, you're going to feel possessive, you're going to feel generous, you're going to feel stingy, you're going to feel all kinds of things. That's the richness of our emotional lives. You're going to cry with music. You're going to read literature, and it's going to show you that you're not the only one. You're going to cry with your friends, and you're going to realize that they have gone through some of the same things. And, gradually, you learn to build resistance, to become resilient in the sense that you're going to beat back and move forward through these experiences of life so that you're not just a fragile creature.

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