“Sex” is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.
You’re done with the daily grind—except for a little bump n’ grind. What day isn’t made better by some action with someone you care about? Even if that someone is you. People don’t have nearly enough sex—no wonder as a society we are so frustrated. But we not only need to have more sex, we need to have better sex. As you’ll learn, you may not be able to have one without the other.
Getting Owned
Look around you: sex is everywhere. Always has been, always will be. It sells movies, magazines, cars, boats, vacations, beer. Today it even sells cleaning products. In 2017, Mr. Clean ran a Super Bowl ad that showed their iconic bald guy sweeping not just the floors but the proverbial panties off unsuspecting housewives. There’s a reason sex is always everywhere. We’re never having enough of it. So we crave it, and we jump at every tantalizing suggestion of it—a fact that advertisers and media conglomerates are fully aware of, and use to their advantage.
Wanting more sex than we normally have is part of the natural order. It’s when we start having less sex than we normally should, which we’re seeing now, that things really start to go sideways. Statistics show that even millennials, who should be in the prime of their biological sex drive, are having less sex than ever before. That is despite the fact that, at least in theory, sex is just a right swipe away. Those in committed relationships aren’t doing any better. The average couple has sex only once or twice per week. A week! The average couple is also a couple of fucking liars—those self-reported statistics are about as reliable as the number of people who say they love to read and to hike on their dating profiles. Sorry, sport, but the aisles of my local Barnes & Noble are about as empty as the trails at your nearest national park.
So how do we explain this paradox? On the one hand, we’re a species designed to be obsessed with sex. And it’s seemingly more available than ever before. And yet, even with ample demand and accessible supply, we aren’t doing enough of it. What gives?
As with anything, it’s a choice. Sex isn’t happening because we are not making it a priority, and there are a lot of reasons why. For one, it might be because the sex we’re having is just not that good. In American culture at least, guys talk about “scoring” or “getting lucky,” even with their wives! If men are using this adversarial, zero-sum language to describe sex, it’s no wonder women want to have it only when men choose to do something incredibly romantic. You know what all this tells me? The sex isn’t very good. Regardless of whose “fault” it is, it’s clear that the sexual expectations of the average woman—who holds the power of sexual choice in the standard relationship—are so low that you gotta play all the games and win both Showcase Showdowns to make her feel like the price of putting up with suboptimal sex is right. If the sex was usually good, language and behavior like that wouldn’t occur as often, because everyone would be getting lucky. Both people would win.
So why aren’t we better at sex? The answer is actually shockingly simple: we’ve never been taught. As a culture we are absolutely devoid of any kind of practical sexual education, both for teens and adults. What do we have instead? Well, we usually start with lectures on how dangerous and bad and frightening sex is. Sex Ed should be called Sex Dead, since really it’s just a mechanism for adults to convince children that if they have sex outside of marriage or love, there is a 100 percent chance either they or their dreams will die.
Jimmy had unprotected sex after prom with a girl he liked, but didn’t like it, and the next morning he woke up dead of AIDS.
Sally wanted to be an astronaut, but she had sex once in high school, and now she’s got three kids and gives handjobs for crack.
Once we navigate the gauntlet of Sex Dead, most of us have parents who are so uncomfortable with the subject of sex that you can literally hear their testicles and ovaries drying up and shrinking back into their stomachs when you ask them about it. At that point, the only options left are cool uncles and porn (they usually come as a set), which is probably how most men learn how to have sex. Learning how to have mutually fulfilling sex by watching porn is like learning how to be a great boxer by watching Rocky films—it might be good for motivation, but the technique is wildly exaggerated, and the expectations are completely unrealistic. Whatever you’re into, it’s not gonna look like it does in the movies.
All of this leads to an unsurprising and troubling problem: all of us are insecure about sex. Is it any wonder why? If we’ve been told sex is dangerous, and all the sex we have ever seen is porn, and every pop song talks about filling Magnum XL condoms and a “juice box that is always wet,” how are we supposed to feel about ourselves (and sex) after the first several times we do it and perform like an amateur at an open-mic night? If we even manage to find the break in the curtains through all those folds in the fabric, the bright lights might trigger a massive case of stage fright and flop sweat, at which point we’re lucky to get one good line out before they’re laughing at us instead of with us. Just the thought of it is enough to give you a condition.
As a mentor to a lot of young men, I hear from a shocking number of twentysomethings with sexual dysfunction. They are putting so much pressure on themselves to perform that they psych themselves out. Many of them end up just avoiding sex, making excuses to themselves and their lovers. Or they do it in dangerous ways, like by ingesting copious amounts of mysterious gas-station boner pills. Just ask former UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones about that.
My fiancée, host of the sex and relationship docu-series Love Undressed, tells me she too hears frequent reports from the ladies of otherwise healthy males failing to achieve and maintain an erection. Stuff like this doesn’t happen to any other animal species but humans, because so much of our sexual behavior is about what’s going on in the head on top of our shoulders instead of the one inside our pants. I know, because that used to be me. (Told you this book would be honest, didn’t I?)
I have always been hard on myself. In sports, I would replay every missed shot, every mistake, a hundred times, chastising myself endlessly. But the good thing about sports is that if you make a mistake, you can go practice and fix the problem. With sex, there are no scrimmages, no preseason training, no two-a-days. Every day is game day. So in my early twenties, after a few bad episodes with a girlfriend who made me feel unworthy if I failed to perform to her standards, I was sexually incapacitated. I remember turning down countless sexual advances from women I was interested in, simply because the potential pain of failing to perform outweighed the possible pleasure of the sex. It was a truly awful period of my life.
But insecurities aren’t just for the boys. Women have become insecure about their smell, the shape of their vagina, their vaginal wetness, and even the color of their asshole! (A small but important aside: If there is one procedure that is completely absurd, it is getting your asshole bleached. I don’t care if it is so dark that it blocks out the sun like the undereye warpaint of an NFL middle linebacker, you don’t need to bleach your asshole. This is a prime opportunity to love the skin you’re in.)
Finally, there are the physical things that prevent us from both wanting the sex we need and having the sex we want. On a physical level, our hormones are way out of whack. Everyone has read those now-famous studies about how testosterone has dipped in the USA and worldwide. That’s just one part of the problem. It’s a symptom, not the ultimate cause, of our stilted sex lives. Just as our neurochemistry has been thrown out of whack for sleep and food, we also aren’t optimized for sex. We aren’t, for example, priming our pumps the way we should for the chemical foundation for arousal, nitric oxide. The result: our insecurities and insufficiencies continue to get the best of us.
We need more sex, and we need better sex. The better the sex we have, the more we’ll make it a priority. And that’s important. Men who have sex less than once a week have been found to be twice as likely to experience erectile dysfunction. So while this won’t be a guide to optimizing your Bumble profile, for anyone who has a partner available now or in the future, this chapter will explain the keys to having more sex and better sex. And in the process hopefully you’ll also rediscover something that is one of the great joys of the human experience—a chance for pleasure, fun, connection, and chemistry that has never been equaled by a drug or a pill or a potion.
Owning It
If you have any doubts about what you’ll have to do to “own it” during sex—or if you’ve reached peak frustration and are ready to just embrace your self-imposed celibacy—think again. Aside from all the self-evident benefits (uh, orgasm feels awesome!), sex is also important for our well-being. It relieves stress, stimulates endorphins and hormones, and is crucial for sexual health. Correlations also exist between improved aspects of mental health and immune function, and according to a recent report, frequent sex may help with depression, wound healing, aging, prostate health, and pain tolerance. It’s the next best miracle drug after exercise.
The reality is, sex and reproduction are at the core of what it means to be human. To incentivize it, to make sure we do it and propagate the species, is it any wonder that we’ve evolved so that sex makes our bodies and our minds feel so great? We’re designed to do the deed, to like the deed; now we just need to rediscover the desire to do more of it and do it better.
More Sex
More sex is something that everyone can get behind (or on top of, or underneath) regardless of age, gender, or sexual orientation. When couples are asked why they don’t have more sex, often you’ll hear them say they don’t have the time. I call bullshit! If you want to have sex, you will find the time. And as for the right time, there is no shortage of books with tips and strategies for the best time to have sex, yet all of them boil down to one essential reality: it depends on who you are. For most of us, though, the best time to have sex is going to be the most convenient time, which is usually after dinner (and why this chapter sits where it does in the book). The kids will be off to bed, your guests will have gone home, and you’ll have the benefits of a postdinner testosterone spike courtesy of the pro-sex meal you prepared. Then, once you do whatever self-care you need to feel clean and confident and sexy (we’ll talk more about self-care in the next chapter), you’ll be ready to get after it. The real way to ensure regular visits to Pound Town is to optimize your physical and mental states of readiness. That means managing both your hormones and a phenomenon known as hedonic tolerance.
HORMONES DRIVE THE SEX MACHINE
The drive to have sex is largely regulated by our hormones, particularly testosterone and estrogen. While a bit of an oversimplification, think of testosterone like the gas, and estrogen like the brakes. Too much gas, you might drive right off a cliff. Too much brakes, you won’t get anywhere. Interestingly, this applies both to men and women, regardless of the fact that we each have an abundance of one hormone over the other. And it is finding the right balance that becomes the essential thing for getting where you want to go, as fast and as often as you want to go there.
Caveat: About the Pill . . .
Because testosterone is so often in the headlines, we tend to think men have an easier time controlling these hormones than women do. But actually, it’s the reverse: for women, there is a more direct and ubiquitous form of hormone manipulation. It’s called the birth control pill.
According to the CDC, 28 percent of all women using contraception are using “the pill.” That’s well over 10 million women in the United States alone. The pill works by creating a hormonal environment that mimics pregnancy, thus preventing ovulation or the release of the egg. When taken correctly, it is over 99 percent effective in preventing pregnancy and 100 percent effective in convincing guys that they can finally throw away their condoms and bareback it.
Needless to say, when the hormone-based birth control pill was invented, men and women rejoiced. As they should have, when you consider its many benefits. There is just this one thing: changing the hormone balance in the female body mimics what happens with low testosterone in men. Adding estrogen and progestin to the body in pill form often leads to reduced sex drive and, according to a recently published study tracking a million Danish women, even depression.
And to make matters worse, another study showed that women who were on the pill were attracted to partners with similar immune traits, and repelled by those who were different, which is the exact opposite of what should happen with a hormonally balanced, normally functioning attraction system. So Jane meets Tommy while she is on the pill, and she is passionately attracted to him. Jane and Tommy get married, and Jane gets off the pill. All of a sudden her body is screaming “No!” because she is less sexually attracted to him on multiple levels. The pill not only scrambled her hormones but tricked her into choosing a biological mismatch as well.
While I’m not saying that the pill should be taken off the table as a birth control option, every woman should go into it knowing the potential hormonal downside and pay attention to how her body responds. Especially if sex is important to her.
Like so many of the tweaks we need to make to optimize our functioning and own our days, finding hormone balance is easier said than done at first, because it is a moving target. Testosterone, for example, decreases naturally with age, and estrogen levels can easily spike due to diet choices, exposure to pollutants like BPA found in plastic water bottles, too much stress, and even carrying excess body weight. The combination can leave even the sturdiest and most robust of people sexually inert.
Fortunately, there are numerous ways to naturally boost testosterone and hit the gas so your sex machine gets going again. Here are three:
Eat fat. To synthesize hormones like testosterone, the body requires adequate production of saturated fat and cholesterol. The connection between the two is so strong that one study showed that you can get testosterone levels to drop with a low-fat diet and bounce back on a high-fat diet. We should have hammered this point home by now, but just in case you need to hear it a different way, here you go: eating healthy fats won’t make you chubby, but it will definitely help you get one.
Get sleep. Sleep is the time when the testosterone factory is open for business. The restorative sleep cycles are when the body can prioritize things like necessary hormone production. Research even shows that every additional hour of sleep you get bumps up testosterone levels 15 percent or more, while those who experience sleep disturbances tend to have curbed testosterone production.
Lift heavy. When training under anaerobic conditions such as lifting heavy weights or sprinting, you are signaling to the body that you are the type of animal that needs to produce testosterone to flourish. Even in experienced lifters, whose bodies are used to the stress loads they endure, their testosterone increases with heavy lifting. So don’t skip out on leg day if you want to boost T production, because larger muscles contribute to higher testosterone.
HEDONIC TOLERANCE AND THE SPANKING MONKEY
The sex experts agree: masturbation is healthy (and we all do it). It provides a lot of the same benefits as sex, and it’s available on demand. Like Netflix. And like anything (including Netflix), it is possible to take something healthy and go overboard, to go from hormetic to toxic in the blink of an eye, or the push of a button.
Scientist-turned-consciousness-explorer John Lilly discovered this for himself when he gave a rhesus monkey access to an orgasm button. He inserted wired catheters into the orgasm center of the monkey’s brain, rigged a button that would neurologically trigger an orgasm, and handed him the controls. What he soon found was that over the course of a typical day, Sexually Curious George would spend sixteen hours straight pressing the orgasm button and eight hours sleeping. The monkey took breaks to eat too, but only briefly, and only enough to sustain himself. Lilly had basically discovered how to turn a rhesus monkey into a fourteen-year-old human boy.
While orgasm is definitely a signature of a life well lived, if we spend all of our time spanking the monkey like . . . well . . . monkeys, we will miss out on the diverse human connections that lead to the sex we really want, and we will find ourselves fallen victim to the principle of hedonic tolerance, whereby the more of something pleasurable you experience, the less pleasure you will take from it with each successive experience.
Hedonic tolerance happens with everything—sex, drugs, food, extreme sports. The first year you started drinking alcohol, it made you feel better than it does now. Eating ice cream for the first time in a while is better than finding yourself at the bottom of a Ben & Jerry’s pint for the eleventh day in a row. If you are masturbating constantly, not only will you diminish the amount of enjoyment you experience from the act itself, but you’ll diminish the joy of sex too. A tour of online support-group message boards for sex addicts and their horrifying stories of endless pornography consumption and marathon masturbation sessions is all you need to know that the key is all things in moderation, including moderation . . . and masturbation.
Better Sex
The key to better sex is not in the Kama Sutra (though it’s a pretty good read). It’s not some proprietary sexual position you can only learn by attending a love doctor’s seminar at an airport hotel. In fact, it’s only partially related to the act itself. The majority of the pathway to better sex lies in the quality of your interactions with a potential partner all the way up to the point that sex occurs.
BETTER ATTRACTION
When you break it down, physical attraction is really nothing more than a genetic and immune system assessment. Our bodies instinctively scan the bodies of those around us and produce an instant Maury Povich response—You can(NOT) be the father!—based typically on the presence of healthy genetics and differing acquired immune characteristics. And while this process might start with the eyes, using symmetry and bodily health as the big visual cues, it ends with the nose, thanks to the power of pheromones.
Pheromones are a chemo-signal that translates your immune system profile into a scent, designed to attract mates with different coverage than your own, and repel those with similar characteristics. In a study conducted on 100 college students, women were asked to smell the T-shirts worn by a variety of men. The women were demonstrably more attracted to men who had a different acquired immune system than them, while those with similar traits were described more like a “brother” or “father.” The evolutionary advantage of this mechanism is fairly obvious: not only does this help prevent incest, it increases the survival rate of the child by breeding more robust immune coverage.
We have a problem, though. We modern humans mask our scents with perfectly engineered deodorants, antiperspirants, perfumes, lotions, and body sprays. This confuses our natural attraction system and sets us up for a random chance at attraction when we get down to places where you can’t hide the smell anymore. If you’re one of those unfortunate souls whose milkshake keeps bringing all the wrong boys (or girls) to the yard, you might want to consider going easy on the colognes and perfumes and scented lotions.
BETTER COMMUNICATION
Let me tell you the most important, game-changing, life-altering way you can use your tongue to improve your sex life. To make words. And use them to talk with your partner about sex.
Why is it so hard to talk about sex? To talk, as Salt-n-Pepa said, about you and (s)he, about all the good things and the bad things that may be? Well, for one, all those bad things are a minefield of insecurities. She says, “I like it when you touch me this way,” and he thinks, Oh, so you haven’t liked how I touched you all those other times? So let’s just set things straight.
Everyone is different. Everyone likes different things. No matter how skilled you are (or think you are) as a lover, you will never truly know your partner unless you communicate. What are their desires, fantasies, boundaries, insecurities? What are yours? We all just need to relax a little bit and lay it all out there on the table. Maybe you aren’t into the same things, maybe you are. But if you shame your partner into lying to you about what gets them off, they are way more likely to do it behind your back.
Creating an honest discourse is absolutely vital, but it’s not just communicating with our partner that matters, we have to be willing to communicate in general. You gotta take sex out of the closet for it to bloom into its full potential. Open up about it, talk to your friends, and if your friends are uptight, listen to podcasts. Dr. Chris Ryan and Dan Savage both produce great sex podcasts. Make it as regular a discussion as your conversations about food, sports, politics, the weather. You might learn a thing or two . . . or twelve.
Like Larry Flynt famously said, “Relax, it’s just sex!”
BETTER POLARITY
Despite panning from all the critics for its shallow, predictable storyline and flat characters, the erotic power-exchange novel Fifty Shades of Grey sold more books than all the Harry Potter series combined. The popularity of what was once thought of as “fringe” sexuality went full mainstream. Why? Because it was about polarity, and polarity is sexy.
The metaphor comes from the idea of a magnet, in which there are two sides. Both sides are equally powerful, but the magnet will only be attracted to its opposite polarity, and repelled by the same. One of the reasons that power exchange is so exciting is that it exaggerates polarity. Take Mr. Grey, the young, physically perfect, controlling billionaire in the novel. He represents a very dominant polarity. Take Ana, the shy, demure, almost virginal college grad. She represents a very submissive polarity. There is already plenty of room for sexual attraction there. But then when Mr. Grey turns on his role of master in the power exchange, his dominant energy is heightened. When Ana submits to his will, her submissive polarity is exacerbated, and they both fall madly in lust, while the whole world squirms in their seats reading about it. If Fifty Shades were the business book of sex, it would be Good to Great.
As with the story, the basic premise of polarity or power exchange is that one partner takes the dominant role, and the other takes the submissive role. This is not gender-specific, but generally in a single session the roles don’t switch. There are a lot of toys and props associated with power exchange, but they are just different ways to create the underlying conditions. One doesn’t need to get lost in the props. The masterpiece is in the power dynamic itself.
In a relationship that struggles with polarity—let’s say a couple that has two dominant personalities, both with strong careers, and similar characteristics in bed—adding power exchange can be the air that allows the flame of passion to ignite. There are many methods and means by which you can play the game, but these are the basic strategies:
- Delayed gratification: The submissive delays gratification at the request of the dominant.
- Restraint: The submissive is physically restrained, or encouraged not to move certain body parts (hands, feet, etc.).
- Pain: The submissive endures trials of light to moderate pain at the request of the dominant.
- Observation: The dominant can observe the submissive for longer and more explicitly than the submissive.
Not only might power exchange ignite additional passion, it might just be one of the keys to mental health. In a survey of sixty-six dominant females, they described the services they provided for their partners as “therapeutic.” In a fascinating 2006 study, researcher Pamela Connolly compared power-exchange practitioners to the normal population and found that practitioners had lower levels of many negative characteristics, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and paranoia. Basically, they were chill AF. A study seven years later, by Andreas Wismeijer and Marcel van Assen, found something similar, this time about traits that, frankly, all of us would like to have more of in our lives: practitioners were more extroverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious than their nonpracticing counterparts. Practitioners were also found to be less neurotic and rejection sensitive.
Now, you don’t need to go turning your bedroom into a BDSM dungeon overnight. Nor should you do anything that your partner isn’t open to. But you should experiment. You should release some of those inhibitions. Build on some of those communication skills we just talked about and tell your partner what does and doesn’t turn you on. One of the more striking things from research about sex and power-exchange communities is how easily and often they are able to get into the flow state—a state of mental transcendence. In the words of Ron Burgundy, it’s science.
So if you’ve toyed with the idea of trying any of this, but found it too taboo because of cultural stigmas or your own hang-ups, let that stuff go and give yourself a shot at better sex. You might find you have the perfect capstone to your day.
BETTER SKILL
I have very little interest in being a sexual golf pro and coaching you on your strokes, so I am not going to waste your time running down a bunch of “techniques” that you can find in other books and Cosmopolitan magazine articles about driving that special someone crazy for days. Instead, what I want to offer you is a single skill that both women and men can employ, and that can bring a disproportionate amount of pleasure compared to the effort it requires.
It is all about mastering the squeeze.
For a man, purely physical sexual pleasure comes down to friction. Controlling the rhythm and pressure of the friction during intercourse is a skill that women, especially, are able to practice by squeezing the muscles of the pelvic floor. First discussed in the published research of an American gynecologist named Arnold Kegel in 1948, these exercises eventually took his name. A Kegel, as it is called, is a contraction of the pubococcygeal (PC) muscles, which is pretty much what you do to stop yourself from peeing midstream. If a woman can master the contractions of the PC muscles during intercourse, she can vary the friction to speed or slow the climax, taking the vagina from purely passive participant to pulsating pleasure pocket.
For men, the goal of the squeeze is something different. Training the PC muscles has been shown to increase the hardness of erections. The control of contractions works as a kind of pump to increase blood flow through the shaft. But the real magic happens when a man is able to use this skill to indefinitely delay ejaculation.
The problem with the male orgasm is that it usually only happens once, and if it happens too soon, it can leave a partner unsatisfied. Mainstream advice for men is pretty simple: “Think about baseball,” the idea goes. Yeah, right. If you can think about baseball while a sexy woman is moaning and writhing underneath you, using her own PC muscles to play with the friction, you are either a sociopath or a salary cap data geek like the guys from Moneyball.
Better methods for orgasm control are required. The way I see it, you have three choices. The first choice is simply, when you are getting close, to slow down or stop, shift your focus to oral or manual stimulation for your partner, and then restart when the engine isn’t quite so hot. This is basic brinksmanship, as the terminology goes. Or you can take manual control of the PC muscles that actually control the ejaculation, and keep them contracted so that they are unable to activate the launch sequence to release the ejaculate. It will take some time to build up the strength to execute, but the payoff is worth it. It carries very much the same pleasure of the orgasm, but without the release, and there is still the same biological urge to continue having sex.
For those looking for a Kegel training regimen, check out the app Kegel Camp; otherwise practice three-second contractions in sets of ten, as often as you think about it. As you advance, practice holding the contractions longer than three seconds. In the meantime, while you build up your Kegel strength, there is a third method that can accomplish something similar.
THE MILLION-DOLLAR SPOT
The legend goes that a man who struggled with premature ejaculation paid a million dollars to a Taoist sex master to learn of a spot he could press on his body to manually prevent ejaculation. This probably never happened, but the spot is not a myth. It’s your perineum, located between testicles and anus, and its contractions are what propel the ejaculate forward. By applying manual pressure with two fingers to this spot, you can delay or prevent the ejaculation.
When you do Kegel exercises, this is the spot you’re strengthening. Sure, it feels weird; but remember, no one can see you practicing. After a few years of practicing your Kegel contractions in the car, you may be able to delay ejaculation the way you take a cell phone call in that same car: hands free.
BETTER PHYSICAL PERFORMANCE
Sexual performance is both a physical and a mental game. We’ve already talked about some of the psychological factors that can interfere with sexual performance, but when it comes to the physical aspect, it’s all about making sure that the blood is gonna flow where you want the blood to flow. And as we discussed in the last chapter, the chemical that controls that is a molecule called nitric oxide.
Nitric oxide affects blood flow to your whole body, including your genitals, by regulating the restriction or dilation of capillaries. More nitric oxide equals more dilation, equals more blood flow. For dinner we talked about eating pro-sex foods that contained nitric-oxide-boosting qualities, and this is why. It’s basically natural, full-body Viagra (which itself actually works by capitalizing on the local release of nitric oxide during sexual pleasure and enhancing the effects).
Based on the research, one could argue that nitric oxide is the key component to your sexual stamina, sexual pleasure, and health. More blood flow to the erectile tissue (penis, clitoris) equals more surface area available for pleasure. It’s a pretty straightforward equation. The key is to find and take advantage of ways to increase your nitric oxide intake. Besides eating enriched foods, fresh air and sunlight have been shown to increase nitric oxide. Even laughing or watching funny movies can increase it. Interestingly, watching stressful or scary movies caused a restriction in blood flow, proving that if you’re in it for the sex, The Conjuring is not the way to conjure a massive boner. A comedy will always be the best option when you’re ready to Netflix & Chill.
BETTER MENTAL PERFORMANCE
The brain is the most important sex organ we have. Period. If your head isn’t in the game, your body is not going to be in the game either. Trust me, I’ve been there. So how did I get out of my funk? Compassion, both from myself and from my lover. If you see someone you love being really hard on themselves for making a mistake, like missing a shot in a basketball game, forgetting a line in a play, or playing a note off-key, what is your response? To make them feel worse about themselves, tell them how bad they suck? Or is it to have compassion, and shrug it off? I can tell you which one yields a better result! Sex is no different than any other performance.
If you have an unsatisfactory sexual performance, then treat yourself or your lover the same way you would treat someone in a sport. Have a laugh about it, smile, and don’t make it a big deal. If you remove the punishment for failure, you will remove the fear of failure. If you remove the fear of failure, you remove the activation of the parts of the brain you don’t want to be activated.
The other way to take the pressure off is to expand the definition of what constitutes successful sex. Starting sex with satisfying oral sex, or even a sensual massage, ensures that the experience will be pleasurable beyond the simple act of intercourse. In short, it takes the pressure off the things that are hardest to control—namely erections and vaginal wetness.
Last, just as with any sport, the key is to be in the moment. When I coach a fighter, like the great Cody Garbrandt, on the mental aspects of a great performance, I tell him to be in the moment. Feel the canvas beneath his feet, the energy of the crowd, and don’t think about anything in the past or future. Just be there in the big now. It’s the same with a lover. Focus on the smells, the sounds, the feeling of it all. Don’t think about what is going to happen in five minutes or what happened five minutes ago. Just be there. That’s all you gotta do.
Prescription
More sex, better sex. That is both the prescription and the goal. Simple enough, right? Hopefully what we’ve just spent the last few pages talking about will help you own the bedroom on your journey to own the day. To help get you over the hump, here are a few other things you can do.
OPEN UP AND TRY ONE NEW THING
If you have a regular sexual partner, the first intercourse you need to focus on is with your mouth. You gotta talk. Create a space where you can discuss openly anything that is on your mind. Your fantasies, your boundaries, your motivation, everything. Then mutually make a decision to help each other get better.
Experiment, push the boundaries, gently—or not. Get out of your comfort zone, but always be ready for feedback. Great lovers aren’t born; they are made out of good listeners. Besides, there is nothing you can implement from this chapter without the consent of your partner, so talk about it. Talk about what you read, talk about the studies; maybe they can read the chapter themselves. Then every time you talk, make a plan to try something new. Could be something little, could be something big. When it’s done, communicate how it went, how it felt. This can become a really exciting part of your sex life and certainly lead to more, better sex.
TAKE PORNOGRAPHY FASTS
The first time I took an intentional pornography fast was at age thirty-four. That meant I’d had pretty much twenty straight years of occasional porn, with a few weeks here or there when I accidentally lost access. Not any different from most guys I know. The reason I took the fast was unrelated to anything having to do with sexual optimization, however; it was part of a spiritual practice.
The task was to go twenty-one days without thinking a sexual thought. No fantasies, no masturbation, no sexual contact, nothing. I wasn’t even supposed to dream about sex, but on the eighteenth day, my unconscious mind disagreed with me. I had a wet dream. A grown man, having a wet dream—I just started laughing at myself in the morning. In any case, on day twenty-two, when Whitney picked me up from the airport, I was enraptured. Our connection crackled with electricity. Every piece of her skin was tantalizing, every smell intoxicating, and the touch? Forget about it. When we made it to the hotel room (barely), it was one of the best sexual experiences of either of our lives. We still think about that day now, years later.
So based on that experience, I’ll regularly fast from all sexual images and thoughts. Sometimes just for a few days, sometimes a week. Just as fasting from sugary foods helps bring out the sweetness of all food, fasting from overly indulgent sexual imagery helps bring the excitement back to all sexuality. It is the ultimate weapon against hedonic tolerance, and I highly recommend it. My only advice is to make sure that you set a goal that you can keep. Be realistic and stick to it. Start with one day if you have to. Start with six hours if twenty-four feels like an eternity. Build upon your successes rather than complain about your failures. And remember, the fast is going to just make the feast all that much better.
EVERY DAY FOR A WEEK CHALLENGE
Here is something simple that puts it all together: have sex every day for a week, each day trying something new. You are going to fast from all other forms of pornography, and just focus on your partner. If you run out of ideas, read a good book on sex, or listen to a sex podcast. See what happens, and tell your friends. We aren’t gonna make this world a sexier place all by ourselves. If we want more, better sex, we need to include more people and help them be better too.
Now Do It
When I was thinking about what holds people back from having better sex more often, one word kept rising to the surface: ego.
The biggest obstacle to improving your sex life is the ego. Think about it. When we’re single, the reason we don’t talk to more potential mates is that we are afraid of rejection. Or sometimes we choose the wrong mate because of our ego. We choose people we are not compatible with because their status or attractiveness will make us feel better about who we are, and maybe make others think better of us too.
In relationships, we don’t ask our partners what they like, because even the idea that we aren’t already exactly what they want is too much for our fragile ego to handle. The ego leads us to believe, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, that we were born as the kings and queens of all sexual performance. Of course, this only leads to all of us walking around terrified of not performing. We are afraid of how we look, or smell, or taste because the ego has wild expectations. We might not even admit to ourselves that we are not having as much sex as we should because the ego doesn’t want to admit our sex life needs some help. We might lie to ourselves about our addiction to pornography; we might be seeking high-risk, low-yield sex to unhealthily fulfill an emotional need. All things the ego will brush over, bury, or rationalize away.
The truth is this: the ego likes to hold us to an unrealistic standard of perfection. It is always thinking about what happened in the past, or will happen in the future. Well, guess what? Sex isn’t perfect! Not our genitals, not our partners, not us, and not the act. Sex is sweaty, messy, constantly changing, and happens only in the now. It’s different every time, and that very uniqueness is the beauty of the act itself.
Tell your ego to back off. Tell it that sex is not who you are, it’s just what you do. So relax, take the pressure off, and get back to having fun. Open up all your sensations and perceptions. Don’t rush anything. Communicate, broaden your scope of sexuality, and make a promise to yourself that no matter what happens, you won’t think less of yourself, or your partner. It might be a hard promise to keep, but if you do, I promise it will keep you hard. It just takes practice. The kind of practice that even Allen Iverson wouldn’t complain about.
THREE POINTERS
- The tongue is the most important sex organ on the body. Not because you lick with it, but because you communicate with it. Let down your ego. Talk to your partner about your likes, dislikes, and fantasies. Laugh if something you didn’t expect happens. Don’t take it too seriously. Your sex does not define you.
- If you enjoy your sex, you are going to have more of it. The more sex you have, the healthier you will be. Limit your indulgence in pornography, explore power exchange, be adventurous, and level up your sex game by mastering the squeeze.
- Ensure you are creating favorable sex conditions by supporting hormone balance, and managing nitric oxide. Remember that sex begins with attraction, and attraction begins with the nose, so be careful with masking your natural smells and pheromones.