Snippet from a post I just read over at Met Another Frog that got me thinking more about this:
When you get naked with someone and sleep with them, you not only let them see your body. You’re also letting them see you at your most basic level. The part of you that you spend a lot of time trying to pretend isn’t there. We’ve been taught to separate our hedonistic sexual selves from our demure, proper, tax-paying selves, and to keep the sexy part under wraps. To borrow from the ineffable Lil John, we are all supposed to be “a lady in the street and a freak in the bed.”
So when you get intimate with someone, you’re letting that part of yourself off the leash. You’re introducing another person to a side of you that even you don’t even always see. And that’s a scary prospect. It becomes much easier if we embellish our sexual selves and mask those drives we have with a more theatrical approach. If we distance ourselves from our sex lives, then maybe we won’t be held responsible if we do something wrong...
We become the embodiment of who we think our partner wants to be with because it’s safer than being ourselves. We act out a script in our head that’s been successful in the past, or we embellish our moans and cries of pleasure because we think it’s what our partner wants to hear. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad strategy. Sex can be stressful and each new partner presents unique challenges, preferences, and learning experiences. Retreating behind a sexual persona can make it a bit easier to have confidence in yourself.
This only becomes negative, in my opinion, when our obsession with being “perfect” prohibits us from enjoying ourselves. Even though having sex with another person is a shared experience, it is still a way for us to express ourselves. Becoming a caricature can alienate us too much from what we want and need. I think this tends to fade naturally when we develop a long-term sexual relationship with a partner, and this facilitates the development of those lovely little layers of intimacy.
As I've mentioned before, I have streaked my eating club. Twice. I also regularly go around shirtless for varying lengths of time, usually on Thursday evenings but sometimes other days of the week too. No one is really sure how shirtlessness became a rule of Middle School Drinking Game night, but it is one we hold people steadfastly to (unless they're realllllly uncomfortable with it, because violating people isn't cool). Occasionally I will lose my bra too, for various lengths of time. This Thursday night my pants eventually came off too and I watched (really really terrible) porn with a bunch of my friends from my eating club while caressing and being caressed by a female friend (which was turning me on way more than the porn, which was legitimately horrible for reasons we don't need to get into). And I was entirely comfortable in this situation. I like these situations because they help me get comfortable with my sexual self, in the context of hanging out with a group of my closest friends whom I feel will accept all of my selves.
The problem is, I don't think I'm that same sexual self when I'm actually in hooking up with someone. At least, not necessarily or not always. I'm always wondering what that person is thinking, or what they'll think about me if I do Thing X or don't do Thing Y. If my partner suggests a different position or that we do something else, I comply; at least, when this has happened, I have always complied. And that's not to say that I've never initiated anything or taken control, because that's entirely untrue, but...how much of my compliance is me wanting to be exposed to other things, and how much of it is wanting to please my partner, and how much of it is for my own pleasure, and how much of it is me letting myself be bent (pun very much intended) into a sexual mold that is not my sexual self? How much of it (a large part, I fear) is me being terrified of doing something wrong or not being able to do something and being judged for it?
How do I determine who gets to see which parts of my sexual nature? Is that an intimacy I should give to people I'm only physically intimate with? What do I lose by letting people see that side of me?
How do I learn more about who that side of me IS without letting people see/participate? But how do I know that I like what I like in the act BECAUSE I like it, rather than because the person I'm with wants me to like it and I want to make that person happy? I suppose that I know that the things I recreate when I'm having private sexytime are things I know that I like. But then I also suppose that I don't necessarily have to like the same things with Person B that I like with Person A. Different personal relationships can (and maybe even should) engender different sexual relationships, right? And I also suppose that the first time or even first couple times you get intimate with someone, you're doing more figuring out what they like and the ways in which you're compatible than you're actively expressing yourself. And I've never really been past those first few times.
It's becoming clear to me that many of my sex-related questions/concerns/thought experiments can't really be addressed until I have a longstanding sexual relationship with someone. Boo my sex life.
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