Sex is as Complicated as the Adults Having It
Introduction
You’ve heard people say it a million times: “Sex is the most natural thing in the world.” And it is – for every other species except humans.
For better and for worse, it has been humankind’s unique biological destiny to have an unnatural relationship with sex. Unique to our species, we intellectualize sex. We also feel shame and guilt about sex; we lie and cheat about sex; and we think it’s noble to rise above our lusts and pretend sex isn’t as important as it is to us. We are, when it comes right down to it, as bizarrely repressed and baroquely ritualistic as it gets in the great wide world of sex. If any of the species whose sexual antics we routinely giggle over on YouTube knew what humans went through to get laid, I wonder who’d get the last laugh.
In the first volume of this series, The Truth About Sex, I focused on the two most basic and fundamental elements of sex: masturbation and orgasm. It came as a surprise, I suspect, to people more familiar with my work on BDSM and fetish sex, and my history of tackling unusual and radical sex topics. For fans of my more radical work, this volume will clear up any confusion about why I decided to start the trilogy at what I consider the very beginning – the relationship each of us has with our own genitals and sexual desires.
I also know a key step to a balanced sex life is to develop a more positive view of orgasms, a harmless behavior long demonized for no rational reasons, and now, in the 21st century, something all the sciences, from medicine to sexology, can agree is healthful, and perhaps even key to longevity. So I felt I should start my trilogy with a basic sex-positive primer designed for both adults and their kids to gain familiarity with their own bodies, and to develop good sexual health habits through education.
As masturbation is the fundamental building block of adult sexuality, and the first type of sex most of us have, you’d think people would do it naturally and not worry about it, but it’s the rare and fortunately uninhibited person who feels that way. Most people are hung up about it, think it’s wrong, can’t talk about it, get stressed out if their partners do it, and essentially manifest all the fears and inhibitions you would expect in any intensely sexually repressed culture. Years of clinical experiences have shown me that people who find masturbation difficult or embarrassing bring their inhibitions with them into their sex lives with partners. The ongoing myths about masturbation and orgasm as somehow dangerous or unhealthy activities that one should avoid have done more to screw up adult relationships than most people will acknowledge.
It’s a basic principle of my therapy practice to help people emotionally connect to the importance of loving our individual erotic potential and embracing that potential by developing healthy, mature, and regular sexual habits according to our individual needs. I consider it a basic requirement of an adult’s sex education to know that masturbation is good for you, and that orgasms are healthy. By the time you’re in a relationship or planning to marry, you should also understand that sex is as complicated and magical as love, and that sexual intimacy enhances our quality of life.
Instead, our culture and laws treat sex as something that is so dirty that we need not only to be protected from it, but prevented from having it. We still abide by 18th and 19th century beliefs that sex is a dangerous force which has the power to pollute minds and drive adults mad.
As I see it, much of what we label as sexual dysfunction (meaning inorgasmia or a woman’s inability to climax, and erectile dysfunction or a man’s inability to sustain an erection until climax) are consequences of this enduring perversion of sexual intimacy. When you grow up in a world where depictions and descriptions of the beauty and fun of sex are considered obscene, while ghastly sex crimes make national headlines, you can’t help but come to believe that sex is fundamentally unsavory.
It’s a tragic social lie. Sex itself doesn’t contaminate anything. Real life is not a Victorian morality piece in which pleasure invariably leads to dissolution. In life, people can be celibate and still be monsters; or they can screw every sailor who hits shore and still be saints. The number of blow jobs you have performed and the number of people you have bedded don’t factor into whether you are a good parent, partner, business associate, colleague or friend in daily life.
To me, it’s sex-negativity that contaminates human behavior. One commonplace in a sex therapist’s life is the client whose aggrieved partner/spouse/fling is threatening to out them. I’ve had male clients whose wives threatened to call their employers and expose information about their husbands’ fetishes if they won’t give them up; I’ve had female clients whose husbands threatened to expose their interest in swinging or kink to win child custody cases. Worse, people on the sidelines often cheer the bullies on, re-enforcing the notion that if someone doesn’t act the way you think they should act in bed, you have the right to destroy their life.
Sexual blackmail, using sex as punishment, deliberately provoking jealousy, and making sex the scapegoat for bad relationship skills has been the human condition for thousands of years. But it doesn’t have to be.
MARISSA AND TOM fought over everything. I’ve never seen a couple fuss at each other quite as much as they did. If one recalled something happening on a Tuesday, the other was certain it was a Thursday; if one remembered a restaurant called “Three Guys” the other swore it was “Two Guys.” They fought over money (Tom wouldn’t buy her the house she really wanted). They fought over the house they had (Marissa never kept it clean enough to please him). They fought over their dog, Mr. Wiggles, who Marissa considered ill-behaved and Tom thought hilariously lively.
But they were seeing me because they believed they only had one real problem: Tom’s anal obsession. As Marissa explained it, something was wrong with Tom because he was always looking at anal porn of men having things stuck up their butts. At first, she tried not to think about it but then he started asking her to do it to him. When he brought home a butt plug one night, she told him she was done with the marriage. The way he pestered her for sex all the time was bad enough but this was the final straw. In private, she told me she thought he was gay. Who else but a gay man wants anal sex? She said their sex had never been very good but now she could barely stand to be in bed with him.
Tom didn’t think he was gay. He knew other men had all kinds of wild sex with their wives. Marissa wasn’t a prude when they first met, but now after 14 years of marriage, she treated her vagina like a prize he had to earn each time. To him, it wasn’t such a prize anymore. He got tired of constantly asking for it. Marissa and Tom decided to see a sex therapist as a last step before filing for divorce. It made them sad to get divorced, but they couldn’t live like this.
Tom couldn’t look me in the face as he nodded and mumbled his way through the session with his wife. But during a one-on-one alone with me he found it easy to tell me things he never told his wife. As it turned out, he became fascinated with anal sex after the spark had gone out of their sex life. His wife didn’t seem interested anymore so he went looking around the Internet for something new and different. When he found the anal porn site, it turned him on so much he convinced himself it was the answer to their sex problems. Marissa’s hostility stumped him at first, then angered him. It was proof that she didn’t care about their sex life and, by extension, about him. The angrier she got, the angrier it made him that she wouldn’t have sex with him. Meanwhile, he’d started feeling insecure about whether or not he was normal.
This part of the problem is easy for a sex therapist to work on. In reality, anal eroticism is very common,
