When I was 11 years old, an ice cream man offered my friend and I a free cone if we agreed to show him our (non-existent) boobs. We refused, and ran off, embarrassed. But I learned that day that I possess something men want; something men will give me things – sometimes simply attention – in exchange for. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what the thing they wanted was, but I could ascertain that, regardless of my age, my body held for them a certain sexual value.
What I couldn’t, obviously, fathom as a child was how this knowledge (learned far too early) would shape not only my understanding of sex as an adult, but my very relationship to intimacy. I had grasped the importance of being desired by men early on, but it would be many years until I figured out where my own desires fit in. Or even what they were.
And so, I have spent much of my life thinking that sex is for a man’s pleasure rather than my own; performing desirability, as women are taught to, instead of feeling I could, or even should, explore my own. I have, therefore, had a lot of sex that’s left me dissatisfied or feeling, well, nothing much at all.
I’m not alone in this — far from it. Studies repeatedly find a notable disparity — around 22% to 30%, at the lower end — between the rate at which men versus women orgasm in heteronormative, partnered sex across all age groups. So while men are orgasming pretty consistently in partnered sex (70% to 95% of the time, depending on the study), women are not (we’re orgasming roughly 46% to 58% of the time). That there is virtually no orgasm gap in same-sex couples suggests that this is not so much an anatomical issue (‘women are just harder to make come!’) as it is a matter of whose pleasure we’ve learned, culturally, to prioritise.
But I didn’t know any of this until a few years ago, when, after spending most of my twenties unable to orgasm in partnered sex, I started sex therapy. And there began a journey that helped me disentangle the myriad sex myths I’d internalised growing up, transforming not only my sex life, but my relationship to myself and my body.
Failure to launch
I went to an all girls’ school for my entire adolescence, so boys were a novelty: they were scarce, and thus their attention was finite and infinitely precious. That I tirelessly chase their affections was a pursuit of great importance, at least according to the girls magazines I inhaled every weekend. There was great value, it seemed, in boys liking you.
In the background to this soft power induction into the halls of male gaze teen romance was a sex education that consisted of just two things: don’t get pregnant and don’t get an STI. Notably absent from any conversation surrounding intimacy was the notion of pleasure. We learned that sex was something to fear rather than look forward to, and thus that sexual exploration was a route best left untouched. As Coach Carr in Mean Girls reminded us: if you have sex, “you will get pregnant and die”. When pop culture wasn’t warning us away from sex completely, it was reinforcing a male-centric model of sex that depicted it in a singular, P-in-V way.
And so, from the very beginning, the bar was set exceptionally low when it came to what I could expect from sex. Because I’d never learned that pleasure was something I should expect from intimacy, its absence when I started actually having sex was unnotable. Sex became, then, a performance: something I did in order to win the affection of the boys and men I wanted so desperately to like me. Because, as it transpired, sex was the very thing they wanted — and the very thing that was mine to give (slut!) or refuse (prude!).
A sexual spectator
As my sexually active years progressed, I frequently felt pressured to have sex I didn’t really want. There was even that one time, maybe several, when I was not sufficiently conscious to know what was happening. But in the absence of any language around boundaries or consent, and lacking not just experience but the foundations of even a rudimentary erotic literacy, there was no way of making sense of experiences that didn’t feel right, however commonly shared among friends they may have been. None of us had the words to articulate the imprint they left on our bodies. Moreover, discouraged from exploring our sexual selves, few of us knew what our boundaries were: it’s hard to feel confident in your ‘no’ when you’ve never learned to feel your ‘yes’.
In the midst of every sex-as-performance, I’d often experience a sort of floating feeling — as though I was stepping outside of my body, monitoring my every moan and groan in accordance to what I thought the person above me wanted. Years later, I learned this is called ‘spectatoring’ — a term coined by sex researchers in the 1970s to describe a person becoming an ‘observer’ rather than an active, present participant during sex. Spectatoring can, they noted, fuel performance anxiety, since you become stuck in your head and disconnected from your body: exactly where you need to be to experience sexual pleasure. It was a disconnect I came to know well.
After the demise of my first long-term relationship when I was 23, sex returned to what it had been before the relationship had started at 18: anxious, ashamed, and largely disconnected. I’d find myself getting lost in my thoughts as I wondered what the other person was thinking: did they think I was ‘bad’ at this? Was I doing it ‘right’? Was it supposed to feel like this? What else should I be doing to make the guy on top of me feel good?! I stopped being able to orgasm in partnered sex and, unaccustomed to masturbating, I grew increasingly adrift from my body. I put this down to my simply not being a very sexual person. To sex being something other people did with joy and ease, but with which I was destined to struggle and, increasingly, avoid.
But then one evening, some five or so years later when I was 28, I met a woman at a dinner party who inadvertently changed my life. She spoke candidly about her struggles with intimacy, inviting me, through the sheer force of her own honesty, to be open about my own. When I admitted I couldn’t orgasm and didn’t enjoy sex much at all, she advised I get in touch with the sex therapist she’d just been seeing. There is a route to better intimacy, she promised, sending me the woman’s number immediately.
I’d never heard of sex therapy before, nor considered my relationship to sex something I could actually work on. But this sex therapy evangelist sitting across from me was so convincing as to the untold benefits of working through the issues I’d previously thought made me uniquely broken, that I agreed to book in a session the following week. I was intrigued more than anything, and figured I had very little to lose. My relationship to sex couldn’t feel much worse.
Homecoming
Over the weeks then months that followed, my sex therapist — a Sydney-based woman called Aleks Trkulja, who I met biweekly over Zoom — coaxed me back into the body to which I’d become a permanent spectator. While I’d gone into our sessions assuming we’d talk about masturbating techniques and novel sex positions, instead we started with my relationship to my body. After all, we have sex in our bodies, she reminded me, so that’s where any healing we need to do must often begin.
I admitted to Aleks that I was still struggling with an eating disorder — one that had defined my connection to my body for as long as I could remember — and rather than analysing how this may be related to my parental relationships, as other therapists had done, we spoke about it in connection to intimacy: specifically, the impact this mind-body-disconnect was having on my capacity for pleasure. It was a carrot versus stick approach to luring me out of the jaws of self-destruction in which I’d felt trapped for so long, inviting me to take better care of myself if only to be able to better enjoy sex. Aleks supplemented this reframe with homework that encouraged me to spend time being present in my body, noticing the enjoyable sensations it could offer me day-to-day: there was an exercise that involved placing my hands on different parts of my body and withholding criticism as I did so; another practice whereby I’d write down several pleasurable, non-sexual sensations I felt throughout each day; still another whereby I’d spend time exploring my own sexual touch, slowly and intentionally.
And of course we spoke about my previous sexual experiences too. It’s not surprising you don’t enjoy sex, she re-assured me, when a lot of the sex you’ve had has been unenjoyable, bordering on non-consensual at times. Moreover, when we have sex because we feel we should rather than because we want to, she explained, we create a mistrust with our body. We are telling our body that we will put it in situations we don’t want to be in simply to placate someone else’s needs. We are telling our body that sex isn’t always a safe space, that it’s one in which we don’t advocate for our own pleasure.
As our sessions progressed, I felt as though we were unpicking the vast tapestry of myths and ideas that had hitherto informed my connection to both sex and my body. With Aleks’ help I began questioning ideas around sex and ‘purity’ that had been instilled in me since I was old enough to understand what the ‘virgin’ Mary symbolised — that a woman untouched is good; that a woman touched is bad. I began to shake off the associated idea that what a woman chooses to do with her body warrants some sort of value judgment as to who she is: demarcating her as either Madonna or Whore, labels thrust upon us to ensure we always see sex in relation to what men want and how they see us. And I started to question what kind of sex I wanted to have, and what I wanted sex to mean to me. I approached new potential dates and lovers with a novel curiosity that increasingly replaced the shame I’d once associated with intimacy.
After several months speaking to Aleks I had an orgasm during a one-night-stand — as much a shock to me as to the man between my legs when I jolted violently with surprise. It was the first of many orgasms that followed my months in sex therapy. But that wasn’t the only thing that changed, however welcome a change it may have been. Learning the value in exploring my desires finally gave me the language with which to express those desires, and also establish my boundaries when sex didn’t feel good. To say no in the face of sex I didn’t want. And as part of rebuilding trust with my body I stopped making myself sick. I started to care for my body, replacing my obsession with self-punishment with the pursuit of pleasure.
Starting sex therapy set me on a journey that has felt like a reckoning. I realised that my connection to sex had been built on a sex education rooted in fear, and an understanding of intimacy based on a one-sided perception of desire: woman as object to be desired and man the desiring being. It was only in learning to swap the former position for the latter, that I began finally to move from performance to pleasure, and to finally come home to my body.
Pleasure: The Reclamation of my Body by Emma-Louise Boynton is out now via LEAP.
