A note before we begin:
I am not a sex therapist, psychologist, licensed sexologist, or anything else that would suggest I paid for my bias. I hold no credential. What I hold is attention paid over a long time and a belief that the conversation we keep having about sex is missing the most important part of it. This post is written for people who want to understand their partner written from a guys prospective.
There Are No Emails in Sex
I was on a long drive back to where I grew up one day and didn’t want to listen to the routine music, books, or podcasts so I turned on the radio. As I was scanning, a female radio personality’s voice caught my ear. More than her voice it was her question:
“Why is cheating on a sexual partner bad, and why? If you’d like to share your thoughts call us at…”
Luckily the phone was plugged in so all I had to do was hit the icon and enter the numbers as she spoke.
“Hello, thank you for calling. Do you have an answer to the question?”
Her screener asked. As I outlined the response he cut me off.
“Please turn off your radio and hold on.”
Next the DJ’s voice comes in and we start our conversation:
“So, tell me why cheating is bad…”
“Well aside from the cliché erosion of trust, it’s telling your partner that they are not worth your undistracted attention.”
“Okay, but what is that and why is that bad?”
“Undistracted attention means that nothing else in the world matters outside of that moment with them. There are no emails in sex. Sex is the one thing that truly requires both people to be 100% present and in the present.”
“Okay, I see where you’re going, but is that just for you, just for men, or just for women?”
“It’s different for men and women.”
“Alright, now you have me locked in. How’s it different?”
“Well, for a man — if my partner cheats, a man will take that as her saying that she doesn’t feel safe with him. That there is a physical deficiency in his ability to protect her. Her sleeping with another man is also a challenge for the current man to step up to. The problem is, that is very toxic.”
“Okay, then if that’s the case for men, what about a woman, since you know us so well.”
“To a woman, a man cheating is telling her that she’s not worth his time. Time is the one thing that we never get back — it’s really the most valuable thing we have. A man is there to provide the emotional, physical, and intellectual aspects of sex to a woman. All of those are carried in the passage of time. All she asks is that in that time he’s undistracted. And when he cheats it’s deeper than the physical.”
“Wow… Give me a second. I wasn’t expecting that angle.”
It was clear that she wanted to have the conversation go on, but she’s a pro and pivoted to the other callers. It was a great conversation and soon enough my clear signal started to get choppy. Ultimately I drove further than the radio signals would carry and never heard how the show finished.
In the book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson introduces the concept of a slow hunch. This is a thought that may take years before it turns into a fully formed awareness. This call with the radio DJ was a slow hunch for me.
I was raised for a large portion of my life almost exclusively by my mother, who felt it was her obligation to raise her sons to be for their lover’s, partner’s, and spouse what she felt she didn’t have from hers. I was taught to cook, to listen, to push back, to challenge, to love, provide, and be curious in the bedroom.
“It’s more about being with her than it is about being in her.”
She once told me, but that didn’t resonate until many years into my marriage as an adult. A sensual moment turned into an intimate one when it was more about laying with each other and experiencing the peace of an undistracted moment. We ultimately fell asleep and woke later to one of the more memorable moments of our marriage.
That’s how it’s been. But all coins have three sides; the his, the hers, and the middle.
The Thin Edge of the Coin
The middle of the coin is the thinnest part of it. There is only room on it for one at a time and it’s an effort to reach. When it comes to sex the thinnest part is almost exclusively for the man. The man is expected to be a certain length and thickness. He is pressured to meet an undefined duration, intensity, and rhythm. If he fails, as was pointed out to the Radio DJ, he risks being cheated on because he is physically incapable.
Missy Elliott’s “One Minute Man” and Gillette’s “Short Dick Man” are just two of many songs made into club anthems shaming men for lack of performance or presence.1 There has not been a single song that does the same from a man’s perspective to a woman. Even though TLC didn’t speak about the specifics below the waist, they did say that they didn’t want a man who could not provide. As the lyrics repeat, I don’t want no scrubs…
On the opposite side of this argument is the over-sexualization of women in music. Biggie Smalls literally had a chart-topping song where he listed by name and detail who he’d have sex with, which was more complimentary to the female anatomy than derogatory, but still out of line and disrespectful at the very least. When music supports the beastly and emotionally absent conquest of sex, we continue to promote sex as a function, not a moment.
We have been studying the male libido for approximately 4,600 years and the female libido for roughly 59. That is a difference of over 4,500 years. That is not a gap, that is a canyon.2
But somewhere in that canyon, two questions never got asked: at what point did a man stop and ask — what am I actually looking for from sex? And at what point did a woman ask what would make this a truly satisfying experience for him?
What Fills the Silence
Without the home being a safe space for those maturing into sex, girls, boys, men, and women are left looking to an industry built on selling sex to teach them what intercourse is expected to be. Schools should not be where our children learn about how a man and a woman tune out the world to tune into one another.
Research shows that as many as 40% of adolescents engage in sexual behavior before parents discuss sexual health with them.3 And research from Cornell University found that parents who treat teen sexuality as something to control or suppress produce teens more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior. Parents who normalize and discuss it openly produce children more likely to engage in safe practices.4
Men are pressured to be of an expected endowment while women are groomed to accept that sex will mean painfully aggressive domination. Men will thrust into a woman with the same intensity of what they see, falsely interpreting her agony as enjoyment. She will see her ability to endure this as what it means to satisfy him, and neither will walk away closer to the other.
This is just the action of sex between the pair. The societal bias on who is responsible for pleasure is overwhelmingly skewed to it being a man’s job. Over 90% of all sexually explicit media portrays sex as being only for self-pleasure which peer-reviewed research has shown to significantly decrease sexual intimacy and connection in long-term relationships.5
The Long View
If we take a long view of the problem we can show just how much time men spend on learning how to be the perfect lover, or being blamed for not being the perfect lover compared to the woman owning that responsibility. For the past four and a half millennia men have been trying to understand their role in pleasing a woman, compared to the last roughly 60 years for women.
The earliest recorded treatment for erectile dysfunction dates to approximately 2600 BCE. Egyptian scribes were writing about it by 1600 BCE. Female sexual dysfunction as a physiological rather than psychiatric category was not formally recognized until Masters and Johnson’s work in 1966. The International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health did not exist until 2001. Formed specifically because women’s sexual health was perceived as being neglected by the medical establishment.6
The heart of the problem is also the source of a solution. In a male-dominated society, a man’s insecurity is what men studied. If a man could please a woman, then he would ensure her loyalty and lust. This begs the question: why are we insecure? The answer to that is the same as the answer to: why do men watch pornography?
The insecurity and interest lie in a lack of interaction and feedback from our partners.
The Scene Nobody Talks About
In Waiting to Exhale, Whitney Houston’s character Savannah is having sex with a man who grunts with enjoyment. The camera shows her face confused, mute to the physical interaction while her voice as the narrator begins to mock him for his enjoyment.
The acceptance of damning a man to failure, and showing that sex for him must be as monotone for her as what she gives to him, drives men into the fantasy world of pornography where they see a woman engaged, interactive, and sexually receptive. Because the sexual stoicism of their actual partner is what’s truly emasculating.
This is not a small thing. Research confirms that the correlation between female physiological arousal and her subjective experience of arousal is remarkably low.7 A woman’s body can respond physically while her mind is elsewhere. But the inverse is also true: her cognitive and emotional engagement is the engine of her arousal not a passenger. Which means her stillness is not neutral. It is absence, qnd he can feel it.
What We Actually Need From Each Other
No one can authoritatively say what anyone wants from anyone. What I can say, just from the lens of my life, is that I’ve seen men often lack the attention we give to our lovers. We want the feedback that slow is right, or even that stopping to bask in the moment will be as meaningful to you as it is to us. For a moment, lose yourself with us and ignore body issues to be naked with him. He’s forgotten his body image issues because he trusts you.
Social media has told him his “dad bod” is sexy in the same way that a V-taper is. A woman’s body is not the point when the clothes are off, her interaction is. In this time when TikTok and Instagram algorithms optimize humans for 2-second decisions on stay or leave, the once frowned upon 2-minute lover is now a two-person marathon to see who mentally loses interest first. Does the feeling of their warm skin call you back, or is it the sound of their secret voice?
Do you find pleasure in the horizontal dance connecting you from shoulders to hip? The intimate exchange of sexual rhythms should slow the passage of time. As your breathing synchronizes, your senses and intuition flood your brain with each other to replace images from your screen. Unlike the pantomiming of literal actors that allows others into your bedroom via your thoughts, this moment becomes shared in ways that no one else is allowed to know about.
We should not parade our sex. We should not demonize it either. We should understand it. Both of us, at the same time, for the first time.
Sources
All factual claims in this post are sourced from peer-reviewed research and established journalism. References below correspond to superscript numbers in the text.
1. Short Dick Man (20 Fingers feat. Gillette, 1994): US Billboard Hot 100 peak #14, Billboard Dance #3, #1 in France, Italy, El Salvador; gold certified US and Germany. One Minute Man (Missy Elliott, 2001): US Billboard Hot 100 peak #15, UK Singles Chart #10. Wikipedia, Songfacts.
2. History of male sexual dysfunction research: earliest recorded treatment ~2600 BCE (Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine). History of female sexual dysfunction as medical category: Masters WH, Johnson VE. Human Sexual Response. 1966. International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health founded 2001. McCabe MP et al. Incidence and Prevalence of Sexual Dysfunction in Women and Men. Journal of Sexual Medicine. 2016;13(2):144-152.
3. PMC / JACK Trial research: Lorimer K et al. Engaging parents in digital sexual and reproductive health education. BMC Public Health. 2020.
4. Schalet AT. Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex. University of Chicago Press. 2011. Also: Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, Cornell University. Psychology Today. December 2018.
5. Leonhardt ND et al. An organizational framework for sexual media’s influence on short-term versus long-term sexual quality. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 2019;48(8):2233-2249. Also: The Effect of Pornography on Marriage and its Societal Impacts. NEXUS: The Liberty Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. 2023.
6. Gurtner K et al. Erectile Dysfunction: A Review of Historical Treatments. American Journal of Men’s Health. 2017. Angel K. The history of ‘Female Sexual Dysfunction’ as a mental disorder in the 20th century. Current Opinion in Psychiatry. 2010;23(6):536-541. Kleinplatz PJ. History of the Treatment of Female Sexual Dysfunction(s). Annual Review of Clinical Psychology. 2018.
7. Handy AB, Stanton AM, Meston CM. Understanding Women’s Subjective Sexual Arousal Within the Laboratory: Definition, Measurement, and Manipulation. Sexual Medicine Reviews. 2018;6:201-216. Chivers ML et al. Agreement of Self-Reported and Genital Measures of Sexual Arousal in Men and Women: A Meta-Analysis. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 2010. (Female concordance r=.26; male r=.66.)
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