Three New Rational Rules of Sex
One of the most irrational yet widespread assumptions about sex is that there is a “right way” to have it. In the first volume of The Truth About Sex: Sex and the Self, I devoted a section to the evolution of that assumption from its roots in Roman philosophy, medieval theology, and Victorian psychiatry, respectively. For most of Western history, our religious doctrines, our national laws, our customs, and much of our thinking about sex has simply assumed that missionary position heterosexual intercourse in a monogamous marriage is normal and everything else is a deviation, something that abnormal or sinful people do. Until the late 20th century, psychiatrists too demonized everything from masturbation to homosexuality as “diseases,” perpetuating Victorian ideology instead of relying on the actual medical science which amply demonstrated otherwise.
Evidence shows that the only “wrong way” to have sex is to have sex that you or your partner do not enjoy. Equipped with data and studies as we are these days, sexologists can generally agree that psychological harm derives from unwanted or non-consensual sex. Behaviors where all partners feel fulfilled are acceptable, regardless of the precise way in which the partners fulfill one another.
If you look at sex and relationships without moral judgment or religious ideology, all sexual relationships which satisfy both partners are positive sexual relationships – whether they are casual or permanent, straight or gay, poly or monogamous or anything else. When it comes to sex between consenting adults, there is only one important question: was it good for all involved?
Over time, there have been so many false lessons about sex, and so many arbitrary boundaries, that most people end up completely confused about what is and is not acceptable. It’s not surprising that adults often look for rules on how to have a functional sex life. Unfortunately, many of those rules come down to pat clichés that are handed from generation to generation without question, rules like “casual sex is bad for you” (nope) or “fetishes are bad” (nope) or “open marriages are doomed” (nope, no more so than monogamous ones).
No one has ever been able to make a rational case to explain why such behaviors are bad quite simply because there is no rational evidence for it. There may be reasons why people who enjoy casual sex or have fetishes have problematic relationships but usually it’s because of judgment and shame stemming from those unquestioned rules and standards about what normal sex “should be.” I think many of our old rules about sex should have been laughed out of existence around the time doctors stopped examining the bumps on people’s heads to determine their mental abilities.
So I’m going to set out what I think are the only three rules you really need to know about sex.
1. Sex is as complicated as the adults having it
A successful sex life depends on individual variations in the people having it.
2. Diversity is normal
Everyone is wired a little differently.
3. Every adult can have good sex
Each of us has the capability to give and receive sexual pleasure.
These three rules are the framework for this book and for a complete adult education (or re-education) in sex. They express the most important concepts every adult needs to grasp in order to make their sex lives work for them, individually, and to develop a more sensitive and optimistic view of human sexuality in general. They apply across the board to every sexually active adult, regardless of orientation, sex, gender, or sexual identity.
It’s strange how many people seem to believe that the solution to their sex problems should be something you can bleat out in 25 words or less. People want fast fixes, especially for problems they are embarrassed to talk about in detail. Many is the time people have emailed hoping for magic bullets or saying, “Just tell me what to do in bed and I’ll do it,” as if my telling them to manipulate genitals in a certain way will resolve the lifetime of inhibition that led them to a sex therapist in the first place.
Similarly, when a woman emails, “How can I get my husband to stop masturbating?” expecting me to deliver a meaningful answer in a quick email back, I take a deep breath, and ask her to make an appointment.
When I can spend an hour with someone, I take a full sex history. I can delve into the circumstances that created the problem and evaluate all the factors – is the behavior hurting their sex-life, is he compulsive about it, does he lie about it? Only then can I provide advice that will work for that individual couple.
I usually have to start with cold facts: so in the above case, I’d have to mention that there is no way to stop masturbation (psychiatrists devoted themselves to a cure for masturbation for a century until they finally, grudgingly, accepted that it wasn’t a disease in the first place). Also, it’s normal for adults to masturbate, married or not. What’s less common is for a partner to worry about or interfere with their spouse’s masturbation. Until I have a complete picture, it’s possible that the real problem is that the wife thinks it’s a problem, and that it’s her issues, not his, that need to be addressed.
Because people are generally unaccustomed to talking about the personal details of their most intimate relationships, they often never find out if the sexual behaviors they experience are normal or not. Instead, they base decisions upon what they learned growing up. The problem is that when you grow up in a culture where people are chronically ignorant about sex, the dialogue about sex at home, at school, and certainly at places of worship is often tragically out of step with real life.
Everyone pays a lot of lip service to the social rules of normality. And many, if not most of us still measure ourselves, and our sex lives, according to the model that our society holds up as ideal: a man and a woman in monogamous wedlock, happily bouncing away in man-on-top bliss. But how many of us actually live by that model? How many of us wait until marriage to experience intercourse and then stick with that one “normal” position for life? How many grown-ups are strictly monogamous and strictly heterosexual? Actually, a minority of us.
Most adults experiment with other positions in bed. Most adults enjoy sexual variety to some degree. Very few of us wait for a marriage license to begin sexual activity. Many of us have bisexual experiences, especially in youth. Even that segment of American culture which viciously demonizes promiscuity and upholds virginity as the golden standard, can’t uphold its own belief system in the real world. A 2009 study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, for example, cited data which showed that contrary to their core religious belief of chastity until marriage, 80% of 18 to 20-year-old unmarried American Evangelicals have premarital sex (as compared to 88% of other unmarried Americans in that age group).
That Evangelicals turned out to be as horny as other people their age is, well, basically what sex scientists like me would expect. Perhaps this is disappointing to people who think we should all practice what we preach. I think we should strike at the root, though, and learn to preach what we practice.
A scientific way to look at the study is simply that human sexual identity (needs, lusts, behaviors) trumps religious identity. Even though the study group’s primary belief system explicitly prohibits pre-marital sex, 80% of the surveyed adherents nonetheless chose sexual desire over religious belief. If they were completely unconscious of that choice, or attribute their behavior to magical spiritual forces, then it may suggest that the brain itself is wired to prioritize sex drive above spiritual feelings and finds ways to rationalize breaking its moral code. Where religious people may see “temptation,” a sex scientist sees someone’s brain perceiving a mating opportunity, and what they may call “the devil,” we acknowledge as the brain merrily churning up the hormones that compel us to mate.
Sex really is the most natural thing in the world, its primal consciousness buried in our deepest brain functions, and connected to a vast network of fluids, organs, and nerves throughout the entire body system. Its reach is so powerful that it may, at times, override other powerful human emotions, like altruism, love, or piety. This power may, in fact, be stronger in the moment than intellectual constructs, which may explain why sexual desire can be stronger than our powers of reason and land us in sexual situations we didn’t plan to get into in the first place. That may also explain why – when a disinhibitor like alcohol is added – sexual behavior itself becomes primitive.
There are very good reasons why we can’t allow humans completely free reign over their sexual behaviors. At the same time, there are better reasons why adults should learn enough about sex to make good choices, rather than fear-based ones. In this atmosphere of cultural shame, all too many of us let sexual fears and inhibitions dictate our lives.
It’s massively sad to listen to stories of people who, for lack of hard facts and a soft shoulder, have sex lives that are frustrating, depressing, and shameful. The inner feeling of being sexually viable (a nice way of saying “fuckable”) is so deeply rooted in the primitive part of our brain that when we feel sexually flawed or sexually inferior to others, the shame cripples our ability to form solid partnerships. People who think they are sexually unattractive in some way find it very difficult to integrate their sense of themselves as basically good people with their sexual image of themselves. I meet wonderful people sometimes who are ashamed to look me in the eye because they are about to admit that they can’t sustain an erection, and assume I’ll think less of them for it. This can be particularly painful to anyone who doesn’t fit into the conventional model of what sex should be.
LOUISE, an accountant in her 30s, was terrified that people would find out about the things she enjoyed in private with a man, including being tied up and spanked with paddles and canes. She blamed it on her profession: she worked in a very sensitive field and couldn’t risk being exposed, she said. She was afraid to keep BDSM toys in her house so she only played in other people’s homes. She did not want to meet any of her partners’ kinky friends, and was dead-set against attending any BDSM events or clubs, lest someone she knew saw her there. The list of rules and regulations she had created to shield her innermost sexual needs from the possibility that anyone in the “vanilla” world could use it against her was long.
Some of it was reasonable: being non-consensually outed can be extremely traumatic for anyone. It was wise to keep her sex life and her business life completely separate too. But, as we worked together, it was obvious that all her social fears about BDSM had warped her self-esteem and caused her to make bad choices.
Deep down, Louise really believed BDSM was dirty and shameful, and that people would reject and criticize her if they knew that in the bedroom she liked to be tied up and role play. Perhaps even more than that, she herself couldn’t stand the thought of being known as “a pervert,” because it was not how she saw herself. She saw herself as a normal, regular person not the kind of person who needed to be tied up and spanked to have an orgasm. Her perspective was that while she liked kinky sex, she herself was not kinky. It was just something she did, not who she was.
Her anxiety made her compartmentalize her BDSM life from the rest of her life:
Louise never introduced her BDSM partners to family or friends. That was unthinkable! She kept a non-kinky man in the picture to bring to family occasions, although she didn’t really enjoy sex with him. In private, she hooked up with kinky men she met on the Internet, using an anonymous handle.
I was sympathetic to Louise’s fears. Some of them were justified: she had signed a morals clause at work, and a scandal would cost her the job. But some of them were self-sabotage. She was miserable: she was smart and attractive and financially independent, and felt completely alone in life. I knew that there were plenty of men out there who would welcome the chance to get to know her – if only she let them. But since quality kinky men were turned off by her secrets and games, she ended up with sleazy ones who were just there to get their jollies.
Until you can accept that it’s really okay to need what you need in bed, that your personal sexual needs are, well, “just the way you are,” not some flaw or disease, nothing that says something is fundamentally freakish about you, but rather your own mind and body’s natural biology, it’s pretty tough to project the self-confidence that others find attractive. Not only did Louise and I work on her own inhibitions about BDSM, but we worked on her body language too. She walked around like a tight ball of fear, hands frequently clenched, a frozen smile on her face. People like that are predator magnets, radiating their insecurity and anxiety. As her mind relaxed, she learned to let her body relax as well. It was a first step forward towards projecting a sense of self-confidence and self-esteem, although the underlying work – of gradually learning to accept her sexual self without judgment – would take months.
Long before your conscious mind identifies what you really need sexually, your mind is absorbing and processing information – physical, emotional, erotic, and intellectual – that shapes your sexual identity. This is why many of us remember behaviors in childhood that seemed completely innocent to us at the time yet which we view as embarrassingly sexual when we’re adults. Most common, of course, are the weird things little kids do with their genitals – showing them to friends, exposing them in public, sticking things into holes, riding toys obsessively, rubbing against walls or floors – which, we later realize, is crazy perversion! What?! Though kids generally don’t understand what they are doing or why they are doing it, what’s important for adults to understand is that even when we are tiny tots who don’t experience sexual feelings the way adults do, our primitive brain is collecting information in preparation for that great day in the still-distant future when our bodies are fully ready for actual, conscious sex.
Needless to say, when children are exposed to sexual trauma – whether upon themselves or by witnessing it – their brains absorb and process that information too.
JERRY, a frail man in his 60s, said he had spent his life struggling with his demons. He hit the sexual stress trifecta: Shame, Guilt and Anxiety! For 40 years, he had tried to be something he was not and it was killing him. Literally. He had high blood pressure, migraines, chronic heartburn, eczema, was subject to panic attacks and some days he had twitches and tics too. His doctors told him to take more vacations. I told him that if we could get him to stop torturing himself, it would be better than a vacation.
After several failed marriages to women, Jerry was trying to deal with the possibility that he was gay. He wanted so much to be a good husband, but the same pattern repeated itself every time: he loved women, but after a while, they bored him in bed. He didn’t mind a vagina, he said, but he was not that fond of them either. They were okay. He preferred for his woman to perform oral, while he masturbated her with vibrators and toys. When it came to intercourse, he wasn’t always able to maintain an erection so he avoided it whenever possible. This had made some of his wives very angry.
Every marriage had ended with him fading out of the sex life, and then fading out of the relationship, generally blaming his ex’s bad temper or demanding nature, and finding someone new to rekindle his passions, at least for the first year or two. It was the fifth wife who finally figured him out: she told him he was gay, and that she wanted a divorce.
It wasn’t as if Jerry didn’t know. He just hadn’t wanted to accept that because he had gay fantasies in his mind that it meant he had to have gay sex in reality. He had chosen to lead a Christian life, he said. Then he told me a story about his youth.
At the Baptist church in which he was raised as a boy, Pastor Kirk was a hero to the kids, especially Jerry, whose own father was distant and cold. The pastor, though, always had time for a smile or an encouraging word, and possessed a natural gift for ministering to his flock, especially the children, who were regularly invited to the pastor’s home to play with his own progeny. Handsome, caring, learned, and extremely charismatic, the pastor became Jerry’s role model of masculine perfection. He wanted to be just like him when he grew up.
When Jerry was thirteen, his parents abruptly announced that they were quitting the church. Pastor Kirk was a bad man. No one was allowed to speak to him ever again. No one was allowed even to speak his name aloud at home. The law was laid down strictly and when Jerry started to cry and question, his father sent him to his room.
At school the next day, Jerry heard an incredible rumor. All the kids were calling Pastor Kirk a fag, and claiming he left his wife for a man. Jerry didn’t believe it. The pastor had been passionately vituperative on subjects like infidelity and homosexuality. When he spat out the word “sodomites” from the pulpit, the whole church felt his revulsion. How was it possible that Pastor Kirk had left his wife to live in sin as a homosexual?
Jerry was shattered. On some level, he was awed by the pastor’s audacity – as Jerry saw it, the pastor had risked it all for love. It seemed so romantic. Jerry was so conflicted he could barely eat for three days. He was finally able to break the spell of misery when he prayed to God and promised that he would never disappoint his family, his church, and God the way the pastor did. Secretly, Jerry was a little jealous of the mystery man who had captivated the pastor. He began obsessing over what kind of a sex life two gay men might have together, trying to imagine how Pastor Kirk looked without clothes. By his mid-teens, he was regularly jerking off to fantasies about Pastor Kirk and hating himself every time.
He convinced himself that jerking off to gay fantasies didn’t make him gay. As long as he lived as a straight man, he could be one. And so he resolved to marry a woman and to be faithful to her too. He felt in his heart that he could do it through sheer will-power. That’s what his faith told him. But now, sitting in my office, Jerry was finally realizing that despite the promise he made to God at age thirteen, despite all his striving to be someone he was not and to cover up his authentic sexual identity, he was a gay man who had lived a life of self-hatred.
The timing of this traumatic event could not have come at a worse period in Jerry’s biological life. Male puberty is a very vulnerable phase for most boys. Boys don’t produce testosterone until they hit puberty (usually 10 to 13). But once testosterone production begins, it can soar to the high end of adult normal. Suddenly, you have a little kid whose bloodstream is flooded with androgens at levels that rival or exceed his own dad’s levels of testosterone. Still, while their underlying biology is pumping adult-level hormones, the boys themselves are still children. They think, feel and act like children. They struggle to handle the underlying hormonal load – and so do their parents! In those years, boys must feel as psychosexually stressed as a woman during bad PMS. So if they are traumatized during that period, it can wound their sexual identity in ways we have yet even to comprehend.
There was only one positive option for Jerry now, and that was to find a way to make peace with himself. He couldn’t go back and change his life; he could not undo the damage of failed relationships; and he couldn’t make up for all the decades lost to having sad sex with women instead of the potentially joyful sex he might have had with men. I encouraged him to date men but he was afraid of it – even if they did develop feelings for one another, he could never live as a gay man. He didn’t know what to do with his gayness but he had a long list of all the things he would not do, and that included giving himself permission to love himself as he was. I was so sad for him. While I am, by nature, an optimist who thinks it’s never too late to find sexual happiness, Jerry was so broken and traumatized, he was just too frightened to change.