It’s a lot of pressure for women. Then increasingly for men, there’s a lot of pressure to perform, to be very in tune with what women want, but there’s still not a lot of encouragement for women to speak up about what they want. And then a lot of that comes from porn culture. It’s entertainment, just like Disney, you know, so Disney does a wonderful job of feeding the romance culture. Porn does a wonderful job of feeding the sex culture.
And then we end up with these couples who are sort of, you know, a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And what they find themselves in is a situation where there is so much information, there is so much knowledge. Some of it good, some of it bad, like I said, but they dunno how to integrate it. They don’t know what to do with it. In some cases it’s information overload. So that’s sort of how we ended up here.
After speaking with Cyndi, I asked listeners, through an email list survey about desire, whether they’ve ever seen in porn and tried to emulate-only to have it go not so well. Here are some of their responses:
Some folks said they either don’t watch porn or don’t try to emulate it. Those who have tried to recreate something from porn in real life had lots of experiences to share.
Several people mentioned shower sex. One listener said, “I thought I broke my back https://besthookupwebsites.org/hookup-apps-for-couples/ or ribs when we both fell.”
One person put it really well, quote: “They don’t show the warm up, only the main event. Recipe for disASSter.”
Others pointed to hard or rough sex that looked hot or fun and ended up with bruises or feelings of disrespect.
Someone else tried a shoe-job, which involved, quote, “sticking the penis in a shoe and letting her pump the heel of her foot to a climax.”
The body types portrayed in the porn you watch may also play a role, according to one listener’s experience. They said they’ve learned that, “some positions are more challenging if your penis is average length.”
Other responses included standing up during sex, a golden shower and basically any wild sex act that turned out to be awkward, or even funnier, than they anticipated.
It’s not bad to get ideas from porn, in my opinion, as long as you keep it all in perspective. I think of porn like cooking shows, where you see the ingredients, a few activities and then bam! Perfect, magazine worthy creation. I imagine that behind the scenes and parts that were edited out would show a lot of preparation and messiness. Plus those chefs, like porn stars, are professionals. And at least for me, when I try a recipe from a chef, it seldom turns out magazine worthy – if I complete it at all. But those cooking shows often do make me hungry…just saying.
Speaking of appetite, Cyndi also explores myths around desire and libido in her book that I think so many of us can learn from.
You may have heard me and others on the show talk about responsive versus spontaneous desire. The ways Cyndi talks about these desire types are the most nuanced and helpful I’ve encountered.
August: I’d love to touch on three of the desire/libido myths that you bring up starting with that they are inherent within all of us. What’s wrong with that idea?