Teaching Good Sex
12 Dec
I finally read the article Teaching Good Sex from the New York Times. It’s almost a month old, but I just caught wind of it. It’s amazing, a very long read, and it covers a lot of really important ground. Essentially, it’s all about different ways to approach sexual education for young people, but I honestly think that it’s equally valid and applicable for people of all ages.
Above, I’ve included a video that was linked to in the article. It’s about things we “learn” in porn and how they aren’t actually true, and I think that this is the case (at least initially) for pretty much any mainstream porn consumer. Whether it’s fear about size, not knowing how to get/receive oral sex or how to get comfortable about sex in general, it’s all contextualized pretty poorly in most porn, and that’s where most people are getting their information.
I also wanted to share an excerpt from the article that is completely revolutionary and I hope that everyone who reads it will take it to heart:
Vernacchio has a way of getting at its positive potential without ignoring the fact that, however good sex may feel, it’s sometimes best left off the menu. “So let’s think about pizza,” Vernacchio said to his students after they’d deconstructed baseball. The class for that day was just about over. “Why do you have pizza?”
“You’re hungry,” a cross-country runner said.
“Because you want to,” Vernacchio affirmed. “It starts with desire, an internal sense — not an external ‘I got a game today, I have to do it.’ And wouldn’t it be great if our sexual activity started with a real sense of wanting, whether your desire is for intimacy, pleasure or orgasms. . . . And you can be hungry for pizza and still decide, No thanks, I’m dieting. It’s not the healthiest thing for me now.
“If you’re gonna have pizza with someone else, what do you have to do?” he continued. “You gotta talk about what you want. Even if you’re going to have the same pizza you always have, you say, ‘We getting the usual?’ Just a check in. And square, round, thick, thin, stuffed crust, pepperoni, stromboli, pineapple — none of those are wrong; variety in the pizza model doesn’t come with judgment,” Vernacchio hurried on. “So ideally when the pizza arrives, it smells good, looks good, it’s mouthwatering. Wouldn’t it be great if we had that kind of anticipation before sexual activity, if it stimulated all our senses, not just our genitals but this whole-body experience.” By this time, he was really moving fast; he’d had to cram his pizza metaphor into the last five minutes. “And what’s the goal of eating pizza? To be full, to be satisfied. That might be different for different people; it might be different for you on different occasions. Nobody’s like ‘You failed, you didn’t eat the whole pizza.’
“So again, what if our goal, quote, unquote, wasn’t necessarily to finish the bases?” The students were gathering their papers, preparing to go. “What if it just was, ‘Wow, I feel like I had enough. That was really good.’ ”
This is really the most interesting thing I think I’ve ever read when it comes to discussing sex and pleasure. If we could just get rid of all our hang-ups and expectations and focus on how to have a delicious experience for ourselves and our partners, sex would always be awesome, piping hot and satisfying!
















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