On sex and performing
The book Three Women by Lisa Taddeo rocked my world. Through the true stories of the three incredibly courageous women who shared their stories with the author, I and thousands of women around the world had reflected back to us the way in which we orient our lives around men. So much of our sense of self comes from the attention given to us by men. Such attention – the look, the kiss, the text messages, the sex – gives us such a sense of validation. To get this validation, we often learn to perform. I don’t know quite when I first learned to perform sexually for men, but it was early on. I discovered how incredible my body could feel early in my teenage years, but I also started performing for my partners pretty much as soon as I had one.
The book Untamed is also currently rocking my world. In it, Glennon Doyle writes:
I knew how to become a billboard for myself, and after a boy had chosen me, I knew what to do next. I knew what kind of panties to be wearing and how to arch my back just so and how to make the right noises at the right time. I knew what sounds and moves would make him desire me even more and make him think I desired him. Sex was a stage and I was the player.
I knew how to be desired.
I did not know desire.
I knew how to be wanted.
I did not know want.
Later, after describing her first sexual encounter with her now wife, Abby Wambach, Glennon finishes the chapter with seven powerful words:
I don’t act anymore. I just want.
* * *
It occurred to me this morning that (generally), men want to perform sexually for their partners – or at least, that’s my understanding. Perhaps for men, feeling that they’re ‘performing’ for your partner gives them a sense of your own virility and manhood. Perhaps it gives them a sense of identity and security, quelling any fears that they’re somehow not enough. I don’t know. I’m not a man.
But I do know what it’s like to be a woman – to be me.
Women have been sold a thousand products that we’ve been told will make us desirable. We have been told that we need to act a certain way to get what we most deeply crave. We’ve been told to be fake to find closeness. We’ve been told that it’s more important to show a pleasant lie than the messy, awkward, raw truth. We’ve been shown how to look desirable so that we feel desired. We’ve been told not to want, told that to be wanted is enough.
But it’s not.
It’s not enough for me anymore just to be wanted. I want to want. To desire as I am desired. To be in my body as I meet my lover, not to be in a state of psychic retreat while my body does what I think he wants it to do. There is nothing that can compare to being in that state of genuine desire, of not performing, of being anchored in my wild, erotic sexuality.
At best, performing sexually gives us a false kind of high, a rush of validation, but like a sugar high, it’s temporary and the crash afterwards leave you feeling hollow. Unseen. Unknown. Unmet. Like real intimacy and real life exist just beyond your grasp, beyond a glass pane that grows ever more unshatterable with each performative moan.
And for our partners (in a heteronormative, heterosexual relationship), I think the same is true. A woman who pouts and moans might give their partner a certain kind of satisfaction, the same kind he gets from watching porn maybe, but the difference between being intimate with someone who is performing and someone who is being real are worlds apart. The first objectifies. The second blows the fucking doors off.
Performing is an act done for the other person in order to try to get our deep need for closeness met. But it’s not like being a musician or a dancer or an actor. The performance is not a gift. It is a lie. It does not nourish the performer. We don’t get a deep satisfaction from it. It doesn’t create reciprocity. Only being real does that.
Letting go of performing does not mean that every time I have sex, I lovingly gaze into your partner’s eyes for the whole thing (although experience tells me there probably will be a large amount of eye contact). It doesn’t mean sex becomes vanilla. Far from it. Some of my most delicious and incredible sexual experiences have been wild and animalistic, raw and untethered. But it comes from a different place than when I am performing. It’s really about honest self-expression, raw and unfiltered, without affectation. To experience this, I have to be IN my body and my experience, not watching from a distance. It it inside out, not outside in. It arises from the depths.
One of the byproducts of this approach to sex is intimacy – the ability for my partner to really encounter me, to see me as I am, to get to know me. I’m no longer acting, hiding behind a facade, feeling one thing whilst showing another. My internal experience and the movements of my body, the expressions on my face, the way I exhale, the opening and closing of my eyes – they become as they are when I am alone in your bed with no one watching. I become congruent, authentic, real. This is a terrifying and liberating frontier. This, I believe, is where our inner selves call us to venture.
Women who are connected to their wildness are untameable. We are a force to be reckoned with. We have what it takes to truly change the world. We can reach to our lovers and extend the gift of true intimacy and belonging. Sometimes we will orgasm. Other times we will not. But the experience will be ours, for and from us, for and with the other person. I want to live like this.
I know when I’m performing, and I know when I’m being real. And I want to be real.