Deep or shallow, I’ve always feared the water. I’m not a strong swimmer. I always flounder when my toes can’t touch the sandy floor of the beach or the tiles of the bottom of a pool - more out of panic than anything. It is a perceived danger, rather than a real danger, but it feels like danger all the same. As a child, even shower cubicles made me nervous. Water can still clog your throat and nose in the shower, can still sting the film of your irises and birth tears.
This is what fully giving myself to sex feels like to me: taking a step and standing beneath the full pelt of shower water. Contact, both slow and sudden. Almost too scalding at first touch, until your body adjusts. The catch of breath as water trickles from your scalp, spilling over your forehead, threatening to blind you. The realisation that yes, you cannot see so well, but you are still okay: you are standing there warm and clean and born anew. Different than you were before.
In recent years, there has been growing emphasis on the notion of women knowing exactly what they want when in pursuit of their own sexual pleasure. Historically, emphasis has been placed almost solely on the significance of male pleasure within the confines of intercourse between heterosexual people. As Audre Lorde writes in her groundbreaking essay, “Uses of the Erotic”: “We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.” Professor Elisabeth Lloyd, a biologist at Indiana University, highlights this issue of the “ orgasm gap” (also known as “orgasm inequality”) in her book The Case of the Female Orgasm. Heterosexual women engaging in sex with straight men, after all, are statistically the demographic least likely to achieve orgasm. (To give you a simple numerical picture: 95% of heterosexual men say they usually or always experience orgasm. Comparatively, only 65% of heterosexual women say they usually or always do.) In light of these statistics, encouragement for women to seek out and prioritise their own pleasure as a response to this long-running sexual inequity is well-intentioned, necessary, and good. But the sudden expectation for women to be able to voice exactly what they want with confidence and clarity is unrealistic. We are seeing a wealth of self-help adjacent articles targeted towards women (with go-get-’em titles like How to Ask for What You Want Sexually and What to Say When a Guy Asks What You Like In Bed) which seem, to me, though sometimes helpful (and again, usually well-meaning) to be perhaps slightly missing the point.
Many of my women friends who sleep with men have in fact expressed feeling pressure to overperform their own desire .
There’s a common experience of feeling like pleasure must be theatrically, unnaturally displayed in order to feed the male ego; that women must moan, must revel in sensation, not to enjoy an intimate touch for themselves so much as to let a man know that he is good in bed. Early in adolescence, many of us were inculcated with to verbalise pleasure to a ludicrous, pornographic degree. In pornography , performers are always screaming about how good everything is, about how much they want it, and mine is a generation who was raised online, who have often learned to engage with sex through the internet before we have with partners. Many adolescents, women especially, habitually mirror porn stars in the early stages of their sex lives - and porn, with the rise of AI, is only becoming more ubiquitous. Porn is everywhere, and everything feels like porn. As a woman, it feels almost inevitable to somehow become reminiscent of a porn category. Even the notion of a confident woman taking control in a sexual counter can be a manufactured male fantasy in and of itself.
Aside from the idea of being constantly forced to perform for the male voyeur inside your own head as well as the male voyeur outside of it - much of the more well-intentioned discourse surrounding the verbalisation of female pleasure seems to be negating the fact that sex is not the same as masturbation . What you like when you’re alone in the bedroom might not be the same as what you like when you’re with someone, or someone else, or someone different. We are increasingly finding that desire not necessarily just for women, but for many people of all gender and sexual demographics is largely responsive, rather than a spontaneous event. Sex with partners, at its best, is an act of mutual exploration and shared discovery. Often, pleasure is found in not knowing what you want from the start, but in slowly learning, in being patient with yourself and with others through the duration of this complex education - an education that will never truly end, and that is part of every sexual experience, when people are really connecting, rather than performing. As Katherine Angel writes in Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, “Working out what we want is a life’s work, and it has to be done over and over and over. The joy may lie in it never being done.”
I believe that sexual pleasure with someone else can only truly be found through vulnerability, through the radical act of maybe not knowing, in being willing to potentially even embarrass yourself in the pursuit of something greater. I don’t think you have to be in love to experience pleasure, but I do think you have to be honest and true and brave with yourself and whoever you are engaging with. You have to acknowledge that this is a shared place of literal and metaphorical nakedness, open in this moment to just the two - or however many - of you you. And there is a deep eroticism to be found through safe and gentle vulnerability. You have to allow yourself to enter - in the words of Bjork on Vespertine, her most egregiously horny album - that hidden place, together.
“When it comes to sex, there is pleasure to be had in vulnerability. It can be what makes sex joyful - the giddy rewards of stepping haltingly into the water, the gasp on contact, the relief in the finding of ecstasy. We need to be vulnerable - to take risks, to be open to the unknown - if we are to experience joy and transformation,” Katherine Angel says. “That’s the bind: pleasure involves risk, and that can never be foreclosed or avoided. It is not by hardening ourselves against vulnerability that we - any of us - will find sexual fulfillment. It is in acknowledging, and opening ourselves to, our universal vulnerability.” You have to be at least partially naked in order to have sex in the first place. You may as well allow yourself to be naked in more ways than one.
None of this is to say that you should be vulnerable when you don’t feel that it is necessarily safe for you to do so. But you must be ready to break down your own barriers when you feel that you are capable of it, when you feel that it is time. Doing so creates those gossamer-fragile moments during sex when our most personal selves are exposed bare, when we are seen and taken for who we truly are. I think that to be vulnerable, you have to allow yourself to be fully emotionally present and open, not to allow yourself to close off, which can be exhausting, but so rewarding. Crucially, this involves being open and honest with yourself as well as your partner . Take stock of where you are and how you feel, in every moment. Remember that if you are brave enough to model vulnerability, your partner is more likely to feel safe enough to respond in kind.
“Gently disintegrate me,”
begins W.S. Graham’s poem ‘Enter A Cloud.’ Allow yourself to disintegrate, to be dissolved and to be absolved. Allow yourself to voice your pleasure, yes, but allow yourself to not know and to be naked so that you are able to truly discover that pleasure in the first place.
