We’ve Taught Men How to Get Sex. We Haven’t Taught Them How to Actually Experience It.

Sexual confidence is not the same as knowing more about sex

Men have never had more information about sex. sex. sex.

There are countless podcasts, incredible books, magazines in Uncle John’s mancave, YouTube channels, Reddit threads, courses and entire industries devoted to teaching men how to get better at it.

There’s info about how to get hard, how to stay hard with a blue pill, some mixed support around how to last longer, tricks on how to “make her cum”, some useful tips on how to initiate without being a creep, steps on how to be dominant in the bedroom, how to raise testosterone, how to stop watching porn if there’s a struggle when it comes to the real thing, info about how often—or whether—to masturbate and climax, and strategies on how to become the kind of man women supposedly can’t resist. (Are we exhausted yet?)

And yet, after more than a decade of working intimately with men and their sexuality, I keep noticing something.

Men don’t need more sex tips, they don’t. What they need is somewhere to learn how to have a sexual body… to feel it, be engaged and actually enjoy it in a collaborative experience. Free of performance and theatrics!

Because knowing things about sex and knowing how to actually experience yourself sexually are two very different things.

And we’ve gotten very good at teaching men the first one.

The second? Not so much.

Where Exactly Were Men Supposed to Learn This?

Apparently the pressure is to experience a very small number of rodeos before being an ultimate Lover-Lover Man. We have this strange cultural expectation that men should simply know how to have sex and be the best at it.

Here you go, man. Here’s your penis, hope you aren’t too self-conscious about the size and oh.. Good luck out there.

Maybe there was an awkward health class involving a banana and a condom but nothing around deep pleasure and having fun!

Maybe there were some locker-room conversations. And garden variety porn almost certainly became part of the curriculum.

Then came girlfriends, boyfriends, hookups, marriages and a whole lot of trial and error with other people who were often figuring out their own bodies at exactly the same time.

Eventually, the internet and uninformed peers arrived to fill in the gaps.

And the internet has a lot to say about male sexuality, their cocks, their bodies and their T levels.

Some of it is genuinely useful and yet some of it is completely ridiculous.

And some of it leaves men even more anxious about their bodies than they were when they started.

I meet men who have consumed an extraordinary amount of information about sexuality and still don’t know how to answer a surprisingly basic question:

What does pleasure actually feel like in your body?

Not whether you’re hard, not whether you’re horny, not whether you’re about to cum.

What are you actually feeling?

For a surprising number of men, there isn’t much vocabulary between:

Not turned on → Hard → Really hard → Oh shit, I’m going to come.

That is not a character flaw, it’s a lack of explicit and honest education.

We’ve Taught Men to Manage Sex

Most male sexual advice is organized around measurable outcomes.

Get the erection- check

Maintain the erection- check

Enter the partner- got it!

Wait! Don’t come yet- oh shit!

But before you do all that, make sure she cums.

And during all of that, definitely.. under no circumstances don’t lose the erection.

Do not get distracted… stay focused, man!

Don’t think about whether you’re losing the erection because thinking about losing the erection will absolutely help you lose the erection. How soft is it now?

And eventually, orgasm but like at the perfect time when she cums too.

Congratulations.. slow clap.

Sex can start to feel less like a delicious embodied experience and more like managing air traffic at O’Hare.

I’ve worked with men who are incredibly attentive lovers and willing to do the work but are barely experiencing their own bodies because so much of their attention is monitoring the other person.

Wait, is she enjoying this? Am I doing it right? Is she close?

Am I taking too long? Is she taking too long? Am I going to come too quickly?

Am I still hard? Did she notice that I got softer?

Should I change positions now? What does that sound she just made mean?

Meanwhile, there’s an entire body underneath all that thinking that they’re barely noticing. The entire sexual experience has become a list of steps and your cock and that’s it. And eventually the nervous system starts treating sex like a performance review. Who needs that kind of pressure?

Being Turned On Is Actually a Skill

One of the things I wish more men understood is that being able to experience a lot of arousal is a learned capacity. Arousal isn’t simply something that happens to your penis. Instead, it is a whole-body state. Your breathing changes, muscles contract, attention narrows, sensation intensifies. Your nervous system becomes increasingly activated and then something fascinating happens. Most men don’t actually know what to do with all that sensation building up.

So they speed up.. grip.. hold their breath, still pumping, clenching and until boom..

orgasm then disconnect.

Or suddenly start thinking about whether they’re performing correctly.

In other words, they leave the very experience they were trying so hard to create.

This is one reason I spend so much time teaching men to notice their own arousal patterns before they’re at the point of no return.

What does 30% arousal feel like? What about 50%? 70%?

What happens to your breathing, your belly, your jaw, your entire pelvis?

Can you feel pleasure somewhere besides your cock?

Can you get very turned on without immediately needing to do something about it?

Can you stay there in the pleasure that you are feeling? Can you breathe there and connect with the sensation? Can you feel it fully?

This is where practices involving breath, sound, movement, pacing, sensation and whole-body awareness become incredibly useful.

Men don’t need another technique. What they need is a larger capacity for pleasure.

Your Penis Is Not a Report Card

This becomes especially important when something doesn’t go according to plan. Welcome to being a human, dude. An erection changes, orgasm arrives faster than expected or not at all. Desire disappears or comes in and out of the experience.

Suddenly the brain jumps in: What’s wrong with me?

And now we’re no longer having sex, we’re hopping over to troubleshooting. Not sexy. This is where I see the difference between sexual performance and sexual confidence.

Sexual confidence isn’t: I know I can stay hard for 30 minutes.

It’s closer to: Whatever happens in this room, I know how to stay connected to myself.

My erection changes?

Okay.

I’m more turned on than I expected?

I know how to work with that.

My partner asks for something different?

Great. That’s information, not an indictment of my masculinity.

Something awkward happens?

Nobody died. We are still here.

We laugh.

We adjust.

We keep going in the real moment.

I don’t know what my partner wants?

I ask.

That kind of confidence doesn’t come from convincing yourself that you’re the best damn lover out there.

It comes from becoming comfortable enough in your own skin and sexual body that you don’t fall apart when sex stops following the script that you may be used to or that has been taught to you.

Women Don’t Necessarily Need Men With More Tricks

There are plenty of techniques worth learning, don’t get me wrong.

I’m a sex educator, I teach some of them! But I don’t think most women are lying awake at night wishing their male partner had memorized another fourteen-step oral sex technique, no.

What many women deeply crave in a lover is something much harder to teach from a list:

Attunement and presence

Can you notice when someone’s body softens?

Can you feel when they move toward you? or pause.

Can you notice when something that felt amazing thirty seconds ago isn’t quite landing anymore?

Can you slow down without assuming slowing down means you’re doing something wrong?

Can you receive feedback without collapsing into embarrassment?

Can you become curious instead of defensive?

Can you be enjoying yourself enough that your partner doesn’t feel responsible for managing your entire sexual experience?

Sure, technique matters but not as much as you may think.

Technique without attention is simply choreography and this ain’t a show we are rehearsing. A great lover isn’t simply someone who knows what to do.

They’re someone who knows how to notice what’s happening in the moment! Freeedommmm!

Sexual Education Should Probably Include the Sexual Body

This is the part I find strange. We understand that embodied skills require practice almost everywhere else. You wouldn’t learn to swim exclusively through a podcast.

You wouldn’t expect someone to become a great dancer because they read a book about salsa, that would be absurd. You wouldn’t hand someone a violin, explain music theory in a few lectures and then wonder why they couldn’t play beautifully in front of a group of people.

And yet we expect men to learn one of the most vulnerable, complex, relational and embodied experiences human beings have largely through information.

Then when their bodies don’t cooperate, we tell them to try harder.

Or relax.

Or stop masturbating.

Or masturbate differently.

Or take a supplement.

Or squeeze their pelvic floor.

Or don’t squeeze their pelvic floor.

Or stop watching porn for 90 days and become a new man.

Meanwhile, very few people are actually teaching them how to notice sensation.

How to receive pleasure.

How to breathe while aroused.

How to recognize their own arousal patterns.

How to communicate desire.

How to tolerate vulnerability.

How to stay connected when something unexpected happens.

How to be highly turned on without immediately racing toward orgasm.

How to allow pleasure to move beyond one small part of the body.

How to remain present with another human being while all of this is happening.

That’s sexual education too.

In my opinion, it’s some of the most important sexual education we can give men.

Men Deserve Somewhere to Learn

I have enormous compassion for men around this because I hear about it daily from the men themselves or the women they are engaging with.

Truth be told, when I sit with a man who tells me he’s losing erections, coming sooner than he wants, struggling to orgasm with his partner, feeling disconnected from desire or simply terrified that he’s disappointing someone he loves, I rarely see a man who is somehow sexually defective.

I see a beautiful man who is trying very hard to show up and share.

Often too hard.

And somewhere along the way, nobody taught him that sexuality wasn’t supposed to be something he constantly managed. It was something he could actually inhabit.

Men deserve places where they can learn this! Places where wanting sex isn’t treated as shameful or wrong. Places where erections aren’t treated as measurements of masculinity… they come and go very naturally and yet attention and play are still available. Places where sexual confidence isn’t confused with bravado. Places where pleasure can be explored without immediately having to produce an explosive outcome.

Places where curiosity matters more than performance.

Places where a man can discover what his body actually feels like from the inside.

Because perhaps the thing that ultimately makes a man extraordinary in bed isn’t how many techniques he knows.

It isn’t how long he lasts, nor is it about the reliability of his erection.

It isn’t how convincingly confident he can appear, it is his ability to remain deeply connected—to himself, to his pleasure and to the person in front of him in the experience.

We’ve spent decades teaching men what to do with their sexuality.

Maybe it’s time we taught them how to actually experience it.

HimerosProject.com

Coming soon to Kindle and Amazon:
From the typewriter of Melissa D.
LAST LONGER
A Body-Based Guide to Arousal, Sexual Confidence & Becoming The More Present Lover She Craves…

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