From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop by Maria Yagoda. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
COMMUNICATION 101
What had become clear to me throughout my research is that the most important determinant of pleasurable, satisfying sex is good communication. It’s not even close. You can Kegel every morning and fall asleep to masturbation meditations every night, but if you can’t communicate during sex and about sex, you will be disappointed. A lot of us are disappointed.
Indeed, one of life’s great tragedies is that other people cannot magically anticipate our desires; they require explicit cues, usually words. But, oh, how we long for them to magically anticipate! How we long for partners to intuit what we want, like sensitive Bill Hader types do in the movies, because that would mean our raw chemistry was so powerful that words were rendered obsolete. From rom-com sex scenes and most porn, we’ve learned that if people cannot telepathically predict the exact kind of sex we want to have or the exact way we like to be touched, we must be incompatible. We either settle for this, convincing ourselves that sexual compatibility isn’t everything in a relationship or a one-night stand, or we don’t, jumping ship entirely. There is another, more difficult option, and that is opening a pathway to free and ongoing communication, which requires rejecting the idea of sexual chemistry as a fixed, rigid thing.
“No one’s training us how to ask for what we want and need,” Pleasure Activism author adrienne maree brown told me. “How do we express a no and a yes, those very, very basic tools?”
The payoff of this work—learning to ask for what we want and need—is significant. Couples who communicate about sex—particularly about their concerns—have been shown to have more satisfying sex lives. Communication is associated with better orgasms and greater overall sexual well-being, according to the Journal of Sex Research. 1 But good communication pays off only when there’s good listening. When do we learn how to listen in bed? We don’t.
The unfortunate reality is that without good communicating/ good listening between partners, sex will usually be “endured,” as my sex coach put it. You will endure (and give) touch that isn’t quite right, and you will be too scared, tired, or insecure to say anything. Countless people I spoke with recognized that practicing communication would improve their sex lives, but still couldn’t bring themselves to do it—they didn’t want to hurt their partner’s feelings; they didn’t want to ruin the mood; they didn’t even know what, exactly, they wanted because enduring sex was all they’d ever known.
Communication is hard! It is hard in general, and it is even harder when genitals are involved. As it turns out, our comfort level talking about our bodies outside of sex is directly correlated with our comfort level talking about our bodies during sex. So, if we’re completely uncomfortable with everything, where do we start?
TIPS FOR GOOD SEX
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TALK ABOUT SEX OUTSIDE OF SEX
Pamela Joy, the sex and intimacy coach, suggests forming a discussion group with close friends to talk about sex. She offers a free resource on her website called “Down to There Circles” that proposes discussion prompts, questions, and resources for weekly gatherings, in-person or virtual, with four to eight friends. Her theme for the first meeting, for example, is myths surrounding sexuality. She poses discussion questions like, “What messages did you receive as a child around sexuality? In the home, in the world?”; “What messages do you receive now? How do these impact your sex life today?”; and “What messages would support a healthier relationship with your body and sexuality?”
Listening to sexuality-themed podcasts is another way to develop a comfort level surrounding taboo conversations. I like SexualiTea, hosted by a certified sex therapist (Mia) and a sex and kink educator (Kia), and Better in Bed, hosted by sex coach Sara Tang. Consuming sex-positive content from Instagram sex educators can help build your vocabulary, too. Eva Bloom (@whatsmybodydoing), Yana Tallon-Hicks (@the_vspot), Portia Brown, Gabrielle Smith, and Gabrielle Kassel are a few of my favorite creators in that space.
Eventually, you’re likely to become more comfortable talking to your sexual partners about sex in daily life. One comfy place to start is with meta-communication—communicating about communication. An example: “I would like to talk to you about something, but I’m feeling kind of nervous about it.” If you’re scared your partner will feel criticized, share that. Vulnerability is not the enemy. Try to initiate uneasy conversations in spaces where you both feel comfortable, like in front of the Puppy Bowl.
If you don’t tend to have regular partners where there would be regular opportunities to talk about sex outside of sex, be brave and create those opportunities. Make the most of those awkward fifteen minutes when you bring your date back to your place and just sort of stare at the ground in silence before making out. Recruit inanimate conversation pieces to help you—sometimes I’ll leave a vibrator out on the coffee table before going on a date, so if we return, I can be like, “Oops, how did this get here!!” This is a good segue into, “I love my vibrator,” which is a good segue into using it during partnered sex—something I love, but am not always comfortable asking for during the act. Sharing sexual fantasies outside of sex is a great way to lower the stakes and plant the seeds for future experiences.
If you’re still terrified of “kitchen-table sex talks,” i.e., sex talks in casual settings—a term first coined in Dr. Laurie Mintz’s excellent A Tired Woman’s Guide to Passionate Sex— check out mojoupgrade.com. It’s a quiz designed to help couples communicate their fantasies. “We spare you the fear of embarrassment by ensuring that we only show you the questions where you both have indicated a willingness, not those where one or both of you said ‘no.’”
Another communication lifeline you can throw yourself in advance of an expected sexual encounter, Magee (the codependency coach) suggests, is setting boundaries ahead of time, even over text—say, “Let’s keep things friendly tonight, and if there’s chemistry, we can do more another time.”10 Or perhaps you’re stressed about something else, like how long it takes you to orgasm. You could say beforehand, or during the make-out stage, “Just so you know, I don’t usually orgasm during sex,” and that might help take some of the pressure off. Working with a sex therapist or coach is another way to practice sexual scripts that you struggle with in the moment.
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OUTSOURCE INSPIRATION
To communicate well in bed, we first must deprogram some of the toxic messages we’ve spent our lives internalizing: namely, that passionate sex is wordless and that good sexual partners intuitively know what we want. We learned these messages through media, and we can unlearn them through media as well. OMGYes videos and ethically made, feminist, and queer porn offer wonderfully vivid inspiration for how to kindly direct somebody during sex and course-correct when you want something different. Dipsea is an app that’s basically audio porn, featuring inclusive and sex-positive stories that turn you on and offer inspiration.
Practicing communication and consent also helps minimize some of the sting we ordinarily attach with yeses and nos. We can take inspiration from the BDSM community, where setting boundaries isn’t a rebuke, but a requirement.
“My definition of domming is creating a space where someone feels comfortable enough to be at their most vulnerable and competent enough to advocate for themselves,” pro-domme and sex educator Lola Jean told me. “Yeses and nos aren’t successes and failures, just information. We attach emotion to a lot of these things when our partner says something like, ‘I’m not having a good time.’”
Pro-dommes are among the best sex educators out there, and many educators in the BDSM community offer online resources, videos, and tutorials that deal with effectively communicating in sexual contexts, a big part of which is boundary-setting. Lindsay Goldwert’s book, Bow Down: Lessons from Dominatrixes on How to Get Everything You Want, is a fantastic resource as well.
Lucy Sweetkill, the New York–based pro-domme and sex educator, told me that the structure of BDSM offered her the tools to negotiate her sexual desires and have sex that was truly fulfilling. BDSM, and sex work more broadly, requires negotiation long before anything sexual happens—and the negotiation is ongoing. In advance of sessions, Sweetkill’s clients fill out extensive questionnaires on their likes, dislikes, desires, and hard nos. She reviews these answers a second time when her clients arrive in person. “It’s time to confirm, ‘Hey, you wrote these things. You said you’re interested in these things. You meant that, right? And here are the things you say about your limits and your boundaries. You meant that, right?’” she told me. “You create this process where negotiation is very important, and conversations have to be had before you even start anything. People need to agree with what possibly can happen. And when we end our scene, we know we ended and what we expect to happen afterward. Having it totally broken down into all these steps is something we don’t do in regular life when it comes to relationships and sex. There’s so much place for miscommunication and assumptions and stuff getting messed up in the messaging.”
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PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE
“It takes time and repetition to be a good communicator,” Sarah Casper told me. “It’s really hard to get that when you’re an adult. I still make mistakes, but I like to think that I make less than I did three years ago.”
Part of being a good communicator is being a good listener. Don’t assume that you know what your partner wants without checking in with them; reject the myth that asking your partner what they want makes sex less sexy. Practice active listening in every part of your life, and practice giving your partner opportunities to speak up, by asking “Does this feel good for you?”
To keep conversations productive, Laurie Mintz recommends starting sentences with “I” rather than “you,” which can come off as accusatory. “Contrast how you would react if your partner said ‘You never go down on me!’ with ‘I’d love you to go down on me more often,’” she said. “My guess is that the ‘you’ statement would result in you feeling attacked, defensive, or guilty. The ‘I’ statement, on the other hand, would hopefully be an entry into constructive dialogue.” If full sentences feel like too much, practice these words: “Faster.” “Slower.” “Harder.” “Softer.” “Yes.” “No.” “Ouch.” “Wrong hole.”
To build confidence communicating outside of sexual contexts, Martin’s The Art of Receiving and Giving offers numerous low-stakes, sex-free exercises. One such exercise is the “Three Minute Game,” first developed by Harry Faddis, that I described earlier in the chapter. It requires two people who take turns asking two questions—“How do you want me to touch you for three minutes?” and “How do you want to touch me for three minutes?”—and the other person does the agreed-upon action for three minutes, only if they are willing. “When your partner asks what you want, pause to notice what sounds wonderful. Ask for it as directly as you can,” writes Martin. “When you ask your partner what they want and they tell you, pause again and notice, ‘Is this a gift I can give with a full heart?’ Set limits as needed.”
For those of us who mostly have sex with people we meet on the internet, these tools are a little more challenging to practice, but not impossible. I am blown away (the good kind) when someone asks me, “Can I kiss you?” after a successful date. The real challenge will be—and this hasn’t happened yet—when someone asks me and the answer is no. (Usually when someone wants to kiss me who I don’t want to kiss, my body language is so severe they don’t bother trying.) I’m playing out such a scene in my head, where someone asks and I don’t want to, and my instinct is to lie, even in this low-stakes brain scenario—anything but say no, I don’t want to. (“My doctor hasn’t actually cleared me to kiss right now.”) Something I recently learned in a therapy program is that lying is actually bad. When we lie to “protect” another person’s feelings, we send a message to ourselves that our authentic needs, desires, and values are not important. Authentic communication builds self-esteem. Self-esteem builds better sex lives. The prosecution rests its case.
Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop is available from Amazon and Bookshop.