The Sex Myth

by Rachel Hills

  “Instead of playing it safe and boring, why not kick it up a notch?” suggests Maxim in a 2013 article on how to turn a first-time hookup into second-round sex. “Being bold with your position choice can make the first time more significant . . . and more fun.” Nikki, a model featured in Australian men’s magazine Zoo Weekly, tells readers to “mix it up a bit and be adventurous. Nothing’s worse than having sex in the same way and in the same place all the time.” Especially, presumably, during a one-night stand. When it comes to longer-term relationships, Glamour sex adviser Dr. Pam Spurr advises against routine. “Tender sex can be intense and produce amazing orgasms,” she counsels. “But it still requires variation to stay fresh. Try different positions, such as face-to-face while lying on your side, or sitting up in bed.”

  There is evidence that sexual variety is good for relationships. A 2012 study published in the Journal of Sex Research found that couples who are more willing to adapt their sexual behavior to meet their partner’s needs and desires have higher levels of relationship satisfaction. And in a culture in which penetrative, heterosexual intercourse is still considered the most legitimate of all the forms of sex, lifestyle kink can expand our sense of what is possible.

  But these acts aren’t just presented as an exciting expansion of sexual options. They are framed as an expectation: something that you must do, or else risk being thought inhibited, ungenerous, or old-fashioned. A low-level kink is now near compulsory, a way to prove that you are sexually at ease, modern, and “with it.” To be “vanilla,” on the other hand, is an insult or a source of embarrassment—as journalist Catherine Scott put it in an article for the feminist blog Bitch: “a byword for ‘sexually pedestrian.’ ”

  This dichotomy between intrepid sexual adventure and lackluster vanilla sex can be seen in an early episode of the sitcom Friends. Trapped in Monica and Rachel’s apartment during a blackout, the group exchanges stories of the strangest places they’ve ever had sex. Monica says she once did it on a pool table in her senior year of college. Joey had sex in the women’s bathroom on the second floor of the New York Public Library. Ross boasts that he and his ex-wife once did the deed on a Disneyland ride. Finally, Rachel admits with a sigh that the most exciting place she and her ex-fiancé Barry ever had sex was at “the foot of the bed.”

  Later in the episode, Rachel worries what her confession says about her former relationship—and about her. “I just never had a relationship with that kind of passion, you know, where you have to have somebody right there, in the middle of a theme park . . . Barry wouldn’t even kiss me on a miniature golf course.” The lack of sexual novelty in Rachel’s former relationship is a metaphor for the lack of desire between Rachel and Barry, as well as of his unsuitability as a partner. As Ross asks sarcastically, “And you didn’t marry him because . . . ?”

  Rachel’s comparatively cautious sexual history is a motif that continues later in the series. In the show’s seventh season, Rachel runs into one of her old sorority sisters, Melissa. When she tells Phoebe that the two of them kissed in college, Phoebe laughs in disbelief. “It just seems a little wild and you’re so . . . vanilla,” she says. “Vanilla? I am not vanilla,” Rachel protests. “I’ve done lots of crazy things!” In the eyes of her friends, Rachel’s perceived lack of sexual adventurousness is almost as great a perversion as if she weren’t having sex at all.

  By contrast, engaging in small acts of lifestyle kink is seen as a sign of sexual potency. Small with rosy cheeks and curly blond hair, Lacey grew up in a small town in the South. Sex was commonplace at her rural high school, and many of the people in her grade were married by the time they graduated, if they made it to graduation at all. Of her class of one hundred and twenty students, Lacey was one of only seven who went on to college.

  In some respects, Lacey is more conservative than her fellow students at the small public university where she now studies. At twenty-one, she has been dating her boyfriend for four years—and where for many of her classmates dating doesn’t mean much more than meeting up for sex, Lacey and her boyfriend schedule time together and hang out with each other’s family. She doesn’t like Rihanna and her “half-naked, vagina-thrusting” music videos, and she’s not a fan of the MTV reality series Teen Mom, either. “All it does is show how easy it is to have a teen pregnancy,” she says. “I think that’s why there are so many high school girls who want to have kids.”

  But in other respects, Lacey prides herself on being a little more “out there” than her peers. She has slept with only two people, but she and her boyfriend are “the most sexually active people” she knows, she tells me—and the most sexually experimental as well. They’ve role-played and dressed up in costumes, made love in an open field, and engaged in Fifty Shades of Grey–style BDSM power plays—although she clarifies, “Nothing too extreme, I don’t like paddles or chains.” The BDSM stuff makes her feel a bit “abnormal,” she admits, but it’s what she likes—and mostly, she is cool with that. And anyway, she says, “I can’t imagine sitting there and doing the same thing over and over. It might ‘work,’ technically speaking, but it’s going to get boring after five, ten, or fifteen times of doing the same thing.”

  Like being skilled and sexually active, lifestyle kink isn’t promoted only for its potential to “spice up” a relationship. It is also celebrated for its capacity to transform the self, for the way that it identifies an individual as modern, sexy, and open-minded. But the kink that is advocated in magazines like Cosmopolitan, Maxim, and Glamour is different in essence from the kind favored by people for whom kink is a way of life. Lifestyle kink is like a fashion accessory—something you try on to impress your partner or experiment with a new way of being. You might lock your partner to the bed with a pair of fluffy pink handcuffs, but the power play is understood to be a prelude to the main act of intercourse. Perhaps you try out a threesome or head to a swingers’ party, but integrating multiple partners into your everyday life would be a step too far. Fetish is often specific and idiosyncratic—one person might be turned on by dressing up like a nurse, while another will get off on being whipped with a riding crop. But in lifestyle kink, all fetishes are interchangeable. The turn-on is in the sense of transgression, not in the act itself.

  Although lifestyle kink is presented as a fun, even essential, addition to one’s sex life, articles about less conventional sexual practices are often infused with an air of ambivalence—that is to say, kink may be exciting, but it is also a little bit weird. For a 2013 story published in Glamour, sex writer Anna Davies embarked on a “personal pleasure hunt,” vowing to live out—and document—all her hottest sexual fantasies before her thirtieth birthday. Over a period of five months, Davies tries sex with another woman, books an erotic massage, has a fling with an older man, goes to “orgasm school,” and experiments with BDSM. But in each case, the fantasy falls flat. Hooking up with a woman only confirms that she is more attracted to men, and she leaves the orgasm workshop early, coming to the conclusion that she needs “connection to climax.” Her short-lived relationship with a sugar daddy turns her on, but she is turned off by how grateful he is that she is willing to have sex with him in the first place.

  The only experience Davies enjoys is the spanking, but even that leaves her conflicted. “When I thought about what had gone on . . . I found I couldn’t put it into words without people seeming concerned about my sanity,” she writes. As her experiment comes to an end, Davies concludes that although it has led to “some sexy moments,” it also made her feel lonely. At the end of the article, she reveals that she is now dating again, and this time she is looking for a more serious partner. But monogamy doesn’t have to mean monotony: chief among her requirements is “a partner in crime to help [her] come up with a new list” of acts to experiment with.

  The same ambivalence toward non-vanilla sexual acts can be seen in other women’s magazine articles about sex. In a Cosmopolitan article about the risks of living out your sexual fantasies, a woman who takes o
ff her clothes at an amateur strip club breaks up with her boyfriend the next day. “I realized I’d never have wanted to do it if I truly loved him,” she explains, warning that “it’s easier to live out fantasies with casual boyfriends” than with people you’re emotionally invested in. Another woman in the same article purchases an erotic massage while on vacation in Thailand and worries that it means she is secretly gay. Sex therapist Tracey Cox offers words of warning for anyone considering following in their footsteps. “Fantasies about you and your partner doing relatively ‘vanilla’ things are relatively safe,” she advises, but anything too edgy—like non-monogamy or BDSM—is risky to reveal. “Even if you have no desire to act out the fantasy . . . he may still find it disturbing.”

  Which leaves it unclear exactly how sexually adventurous the reader is supposed to be. If you are not experimental enough, you risk losing your partner’s interest—and outing yourself as someone who is uninteresting in return. But if nontraditional sexual acts are more than just an experiment for you, you risk being seen as a pervert. There is no “right” way to engage in lifestyle kink—only endless ways to get it wrong.

  “You Can’t Make an Appointment for Sex”

  Sexual skill and lifestyle kink aren’t just designed to make sex more interesting. They are also designed to keep us interested—to make us more likely to continue having sex, after the honeymoon is over and the initial rush of hormones runs dry. It is this desire to maintain sexual passion against all odds that underlies so many of our collective anxieties about sexual performance.

  You don’t need to be having sex to understand the importance of a good sex life. At twenty-three, Mariam is saving herself for marriage, a decision she made when she was sixteen and the Christian abstinence organization True Love Waits visited her Catholic high school. “I think people admire me for [waiting], but at the same time they think I’m an idiot,” she says matter-of-factly. But just because Mariam isn’t sexually active doesn’t mean she doesn’t have some very detailed ideas about what she would like her future sex life to look like. When Mariam gets married, she and her husband are going to have sex at least once a day, she tells me. “Morning and night sounds good,” she says. They will be adventurous, continually incorporating new positions, activities, and sexual techniques into their relationship. Most important, their sex will be spontaneous, resisting the dreaded malaise of marital “routine” for as long as possible.

  Mariam’s plans are based on more than just theory. She has been with her boyfriend for four years when we meet, and a few days after our interview, she e-mails to tell me they are engaged to be married. Mariam is a virgin, but her boyfriend isn’t—by the time they got together in their late teens, he had already slept with eight women. “He says he’s not going to let me rest when we get married, because he has to make up for four years [of no sex]!” she jokes. She has also learned plenty about what a good sex life should look like from friends who are sexually active. One friend, for example, had sex three times a day for months when she met her last boyfriend. “And it wasn’t even the first time she had sex. It was just some new guy she’d been dating.”

  Mariam is as clear on what she doesn’t want from her married sex life as she is on what she would like it to entail. “Anything less than two times a week is bad,” she says. “Or less than three times a week, even.” She is dismissive of the notion of scheduling sex. “My partner has one rule,” she explains. “We can’t book in our sex time. That is something that is not allowed. Like, you can’t make an appointment for sex.”

  Mariam is not alone in her hunger for a sexually exciting relationship. The passion she desires is the unspoken imperative that resides behind everything we speak of when we talk about good sex. We value spontaneity because it suggests that our libidos are still strong; we promote sexual variety because we hope it will stop our urges from waning. In movies, new couples tear off their clothes before they make it through the door and stay up all night talking and touching, their enthusiasm for each other a mark of their compatibility. When their relationship begins to atrophy, their sex life does as well. In a 2012 interview with New York magazine’s Vulture blog, actress Olivia Wilde advised women to listen to their vaginas if they wanted to know if a relationship was right. “Sometimes your vagina dies,” she explained. “Then you know it’s time to go.” Under the Sex Myth, after all, sex isn’t “just sex.” It is a barometer of the quality and status of your relationship.

  “Sex is a very easy thing to measure your relationship by,” admits Tom, a tall twenty-year-old with wire-frame black glasses and sandy blond hair. “It’s like a yardstick. Are we doing well right now? Are we having a good time?” As indicators of relationship success go, sex is clearly defined and simple to tally. Although Tom would feel strange counting the number of restaurants he’s visited in the last month, or how many bunches of flowers he bought for his long-term girlfriend, keeping an eye on the number of times they have had sex feels natural. “If you happen to be in a good spell, sex is a very easy way to notice that.” Likewise, if they haven’t had sex in a while, “you know that it’s not going so well.”

  Psychologists used to define a “sexless relationship” as one in which a couple had had no sexual intimacy in more than a year. More recently, that definition has expanded to include couples who have had sex less than ten times in the past twelve months. But for many people, the point at which not having had sex becomes a problem kicks in much sooner: not at less than a certain number of times per year, but at a certain number of times per week. For some, this is a matter of libido. But for others, it is also a matter of living up to the standards that have been set out for them. Most sex therapists stress that being in a sexless relationship isn’t a problem in and of itself, that relationships can be full of love and satisfaction without being sexually active so long as everyone involved is happy with the situation. But when sex is considered shorthand for vitality—whether our own or that of our relationships—the idea of a loving-but-sexless union can be a difficult concept to swallow.

  “I get scared if I don’t have sex at least a couple of times a week,” admits Holly, a New York artist who grew up in the Deep South. “Like I’m not showing the right amount of affection, or like there is something wrong with me. It’s not even about whether I’m enjoying it. It’s about whether I’ve hit that number.” She’s not sure why it matters so much to her. “I mean, when I say it out loud it sounds totally ridiculous. Like, why that number? What’s so special about two or three times a week? But in my head, it makes so much sense.”

  Ashley, whom we met in chapter 4, also keeps close tabs on how often she has sex with her girlfriends. “There is this thing called lesbian bed death,” she explains, referring to a term coined by American sociologists Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz to describe the typical decrease in sexual activity among long-term lesbian couples. “It is a huge, big deal in the lesbian community. People talk about it all the time.”

  When she was younger, Ashley and her friends used to swap notes on how often they had sex, checking in with each other to find out what was normal and find out how their own relationships were faring. “If you haven’t had sex however many times that week, people talk like you’re doomed,” she says. “It shows that it is the end of your relationship, that you may as well just be friends.” Ashley would talk about how often she had sex with the women she was dating, too, trying to fix any emergent issues before they grew too serious. “It’s like this disease,” she pronounces. “If you haven’t had sex in a couple of weeks, then you have to deal with it right away. There is always crying. And you just feel like shit about yourself.”

  Ashley is more relaxed in her current relationship, which she has been in for three years now. “It is the most beautiful, balanced relationship I have ever had,” she says, and it has given her the security to let her libido ebb and flow. “We’ll have loads of sex for a month or two, and then two weeks will go by when we won’t have sex at all. I used to th
ink that meant I was failing.”

  When sex therapists talk about sexless relationships, they are referring to partnerships that are absent of sexual contact of any kind. But when most people worry about the frequency of sex in their relationships, they are concerned with a more specific type of contact: how often they are having penetrative, usually heterosexual, sex. Even Ashley, who only dates women, defines whether or not “sex” has happened by whether or not there has been penetration.

  But although pleasure and physical touch are an important part of nurturing intimacy for most people, penetration is not the only way that sexual intimacy can be achieved. It is not even the only way we can achieve orgasm—or, for many people, women especially, the easiest or most pleasurable way to do so. Making penetration the standard-bearer for “real sex” diminishes other activities that can bring just as much pleasure: kissing, stroking, flirting, oral sex, spanking, role play, sex toys, and more. If it is the sensual bond between lovers that matters, why do we put so much emphasis on one particular form of sensuality?

  For one, not everyone prefers penetrative sex. Edward, the gay rights activist from Boston whom we met in chapter 3, has been sexually active since he was fifteen, but he didn’t have anal sex until he was twenty-five. He liked it, but it’s not a major part of his sex life even now. “I have a healthy sexual relationship, but it doesn’t look like what most people expect gay men’s sex lives to look like,” he says. The idea that “real sex” means a penis entering a vagina marginalizes gay, lesbian, and non-gender-normative people. But it also alienates anyone who doesn’t want to make penetrative sex the center of their sex life, whether due to personal preference or medical reasons.

  I meet Jasmine, twenty-four, on a humid spring day in Toronto. A grad student with short dark hair, Jasmine first had penetrative sex when she was nineteen; a little later than most of her peers, but not so late that it marked her as different or caused her concern. Nor was Jasmine worried when, once she did lose her virginity, it hurt—a lot. First-time sex was supposed to be painful, after all. “I just figured it was because I hadn’t done it before,” she says. But sex didn’t stop hurting, and after a few weeks Jasmine began to wonder if something was wrong. “I had friends who would tell me about their sex lives, and none of them had mentioned this kind of pain. I realized this should not be happening.”