Member-only story
Sex Isn’t Sexy
Sometimes it’s not even close
Saying “no” to sex is new and weird.
For men, discussions of sex in single life turn on questions of “getting” “it”: how to, how much. Less discussed is the inevitability of mediocre sex, and what to do (emotionally) with it.
One of the side-effects of having spent your twenties riding the person you love is the total difficulty of unknotting sex and love. Your body gets the first — without the second — and freezes up. Wait, what is this? Where’s all the other stuff?
(After, when I ask how they’re feeling, I want poetry.)
Eventually I develop a kind of script for when it’s about to go down. “Listen, I’m into this, but just so you know, I’m probably not going to want to have full sex. I need time. But I want you to feel good, so we can do other things.”
Becoming comfortable saying this was transformative.
Men are supposed to want sex as a default. And we’re conditioned to think about sex as this definite, transferable unit. (“Every hole is a goal.”)
Even if it wasn’t “great”, you still “got” “it”. Free pizza, right?
Cultural encouragements on saying no and setting boundaries are focused on women, because they are obviously the higher priority, and one of the subtle…
