Ahhhh I’m getting sick of reading BAD SEX ADVICE for women!
I’m especially sick of reading and hearing BAD SEX ADVICE for women who want to bring back their sexual desire.
I’m so sick of it I throw up my hands in the air and make noises! And not sexy noises!
It seems the ruling consensus in BAD SEX ADVICE for women who want their sex drive back seems to be a long list of “how to pleasure your man.”
No! No! No! This will not work! Sexual desire is complex and multi-faceted. Low libido in women will not be helped by focussing more on what the man wants. YOUR PLEASURE MATTERS!
We need to unlearn EVERYTHING we learnt about sex.
Sex is NOT something that women do just to pleasure men or about getting more okay with doing sexual things that men want and love. If your relationship starts out like that your sex drive aint gonna last the distance. If you want to have your mojo for the long haul in a long distance relationship you have got to start being REAL. Take charge of your own pleasure.
I know that’s a very strong storyline in a LOT of porn out there but it is not true and we need to let go of this idea like –now!
I see a lot of clients where men (bisexual or heterosexual) have learnt everything about sex from porn. In particular, porn where women are faking their sexual pleasure and the scene centres around the man’s pleasure and orgasm.
This makes sense because good sex education in our culture is pretty thin on the ground! It’s normal for young people to be curious about sex and so they get their main education from porn. This is problematic in itself. The current basic education (–here’s how you put a condom on a banana and here’s how to unwrap a tampon-) does not prepare young people to navigate sex and relationships in our digital climate.
Current education is often delivered far too late. The average age of first exposure to porn is 12. Two-thirds of young people in the UK have watched online porn by the age of 15. 42% of porn scenes depict violence towards girls and women.
Porn is pretty confusing sex education for girls and boys. Imagine if you’re a teenage male virgin who spends years and years watching porn without any dose of criticality -because you’re way too young for that and school didn’t teach you any of those skills—- and now imagine that boy as an adult about to have sex for the first time with a real life woman.
This porn education can lead to real life sex where the man is purely focussed on his own pleasure and at the same time has unconsciously eroticised women’s physical pain.
This bad porn sex education aka “conditioning” really stuffs with men’s radar to identify women enjoying AUTHENTIC sexual pleasure. And I’m not talking about BDSM at all here, I’m talking “standard issue” hetero porn.
And no, I’m not an anti-porn crusader by any means! I’m purely speaking about the problems of teenagers using only porn as their sex education.
If young men only learnt all about sex by watching women PRETEND to have sexual pleasure with someone they’re not necessarily attracted to, whilst performing in front of camera and a camera crew then how are they supposed to know when their sex partner is faking an orgasm? And a recent study found that 85% of men believed their female partner had an orgasm during their last sexual encounter but only 60% of women said that they did.
That’s a lot of women being dishonest out there and a lot of men not realising it.
Jenna Jammeson spoke about having sex with men she found physically repulsive and having to fake desire on camera.
“Arnold Biltmore had a soft, pasty body; a porous, greasy complexion; and a kindergarten haircut, parted in the middle and combed to either side. Nothing about Arnold turned me on. And in ten minutes I was supposed to have sex with him.
When our scene started, he tried to kiss me. I turned my head away from the camera, so that no one could see me grimace…. As my head kept bumping into his stomach while I gave him head, all I could think was, ‘What the hell am I doing here? This is disgusting.’ ”
I had one wonderful young couple who came to see me for sex therapy and relationship counselling. Let’s call them Jack and Jill. Obviously not their real names. Jack told me they were here to see me for Jill’s low libido.
Jill had been faking orgasms for the entire three years of the relationship and Jack had no idea her orgasms weren’t real. Now Jill’s desire had almost completely disappeared because she was sick of faking and wasn’t enjoying sex. Jack was frustrated that the sex had ended and wondered why Jill had “become frigid overnight.” Jill was sick of doing things she didn’t want to do but Jack wanted to do because “everyone does that.” Well everyone in his favourite pornos might.
No amount of “how to pleasure your man in bed” ie BAD SEX ADVICE tips would help this situation and I’m so glad they came and see me.
They needed a creative sexpression therapy and sex ed road map stat!
Jill originally felt like sex had to be about what Jack liked hence her burn out. Jack couldn’t tell Jill was faking because she was doing everything actresses do in the porn he’d watched. It felt safer for Jill to cater to Jack’s pleasure than be vulnerable and say what she wanted and needed. Jill’s main priority and all her energy during sex were about making Jack feel like he “did” a great sexual performance on “her.” Jack had never seen a woman in a porn scene online say no to aggression, violence or crossing boundaries.
We’ve got all sorts of things at play that we worked through here;
- the broader social and cultural implication about gender and sex (the man as the “sex boss” the woman as always sexually submissive)
- the words used to describe sex (he nails her/she takes it/I’m going to bang you etc)
- unlearning what they’d learnt about distorted messages from porn and re-learning about healthy and respectful sexual relationships, boundaries, limits, consent etc
- their emotional barometer–brushing needs under the carpet
- a new responsive to the other-understanding genuine response
- whether they believed their needs were important or worth articulating
- some overdue good and healthy sex education.
- sexual communication and the confidence to say what you need! For example- the ability to own your pleasures and your desire. To say- THIS IS WHAT I LIKE! This is what I want.
Jack and Jill were only having sex in the missionary position with Jack’s body pressed down on top of hers. This made it very difficult for Jill to orgasm and that, alongside the other stuff that she didn’t enjoy at all- combined to explain her lack of interest in sex.
Some women don’t orgasm from vaginal sex alone and Jill needed to feel confident enough to explore and experiment with Jack- try new positions, get in control and enjoy genuine sexual pleasure.
Not faked, not a performance. Not just focussed on looking sexy all arranged on your back on the bed but REAL. RECKLESS ABANDON. WILD. SENSUAL. INTIMATE. SEXY AS FUCK!
So don’t fake orgasms. Please. Ever. Ever ever ever. Just stop now.
Being genuine, intimate and vulnerable with your partner is DAM SEXY!
I liked Jack and Jill. They came willing to do the work to change their relationship. They did all the homework exercises. Their enthusiasm as things started to change was infectious.
Jack stopped making Jill do things in bed she didn’t want to do and she learnt to communicate her sexual boundaries. Jill’s sex drive came back. Jack and Jill completely and utterly transformed their sex life. Jill no longer fakes orgasm with Jack and they no longer only have sex in the missionary position. Jill has taken charge of her own orgasms and has begun having orgasms in intimate explorations with Jack. She’s finding her voice and not giving her expectations away to Jack. Jack has been learning about real female desire and satisfaction.
They look like a completely different couple now. The energy has changed. They look like a couple that only just started dating a few months ago. The chemistry is off the charts.
BOOM! I love a happy ending. Well it’s more like a happy beginning for this young couple as they continue to work on their healthy sexual exploration together.
If our schools had a program intergrated into our sex education (and the Australian government is looking into this right now) or a framework for kids to decode, contextualise and analyse porn then kids would have a way of testing these values against real life relationships and sex and not accept this as “real sex.”
Kids would also learn to critically evaluate the violence towards women shown in so much mainstream porn and dicuss consent and boundaries. How much better would this make our daily life!
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Back to the topic of talking about giving yourself away to someone else needs for a moment… Porn star Jenna Jammeson in her book, “How to Make Love Like A Porn Star” speaks about how she was giving herself away to the needs and expectations of the men in her life.
“Joy had booked interviews and photo ops for me every ten minutes. And I was excited to do all that work. I was willing to do anything to be someone who everyone loved. Looking back on it, it was just a new type of insecurity replacing the old one, and I was giving myself away to the needs and expectations of the public instead of the needs and expectations of the men in my life. It was just a new form of dependence developing. And it was equally detrimental to any sort of emotional stability.”
It’s not sexually empowered to only ever have sex in the way your male partner wants and put all of your energy into pleasing them at the expense of your own pleasure. Sure this might be fun to do some of the time of course but by no means should this be the default mode.
I’d like to close with a worrying excerpt from a book that thousands of women have bought and read. More bad sex advice for women. Please book a session with me if you want to bring your mojo back. Don’t read the below book! No!
Joan Sewell writes about a book she read called “Date Like a Man” by “dating coach” Myreah Moore.
“In it (Date Like a Man) there’s a section with the bold title “How to Have Sex Like a Man.” But very curiously, the majority of the chapter deals with what men want sexually, not women. Here are some of the headings:
Men Like Blow Jobs
Get to Know Mr. Happy
Kiss It, Lick It, Squeeze It, Tease It
Deep Throating
Men Like Women Who Swallow
Men Like Pornography
Men Like Lingerie
Men Like to Talk Dirty
Men Like Women Who Bring on the Noise
Men Like Women Who Are Flexible
Men Like Lesbians”
“I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido” – Joan Sewell
Book in with me to bring your mojo back and learn a new sexual and relationship repertoire
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