Sexual Intelligence by Marty Klein

Author:Marty Klein
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2012-02-09T10:47:34.863000+00:00

Boundaries

Enjoyable sex requires that we invite the violation of our personal boundaries and accept that we’re going to breach someone else’s boundaries. Of course, that’s part of what demands and facilitates intimacy in sex.

Much of sex involves putting a part of your body inside of someone else’s body—a tongue, a finger, a penis; a mouth, a vagina, an anus. For some people, this voluntary, temporary violation of personal space is what sex is all about. But if you’re not comfortable with this, the firmest erection or most luxuriant lubrication won’t be worth much.

Are you emotionally present enough and comfortable enough to provide useful feedback to your partner while this is happening? If not, how can he or she possibly know what your experience is like? Some people like words, while others like gestures. Still others imagine that the psycho-erotic fusion is so complete that each partner just intuits the other’s experience. (Sounds like being stoned back in the sixties.) For a grown-up in the twenty-first century, actual communication is your best bet.

But some people are extremely inhibited about expressing themselves. They imagine that their experience should not be acknowledged, or that the very expression of it is unattractive or inappropriate (which is like saying, “I want to make complete sentences, but I try to do so without ‘k’ and ‘g’ because they’re so unlady-like”).

Some people hesitate to communicate during sex because genuine expression renders them vulnerable, which is scary. They’re right—someone’s more likely to know how you feel when you express yourself. As a therapist, I investigate what exactly makes this troublesome: Does experiencing pleasure contradict someone’s self-image of being demure or wholesome? Does feeling anything sexual conflict with someone’s self-image? There’s something missing from sex without actual communication. What could explain such inhibition?

One thing that makes the boundary violation in (consensual) sex more comfortable is being confident that it will end when sex ends—the way serious competition in weekend tennis is okay if we’re certain that it will end after the match. We lob the ball up high if our opponent is facing into the sun, but after the match we don’t toss their car keys into the bushes, out of reach.

If personal boundaries are not respected outside sex, however, it’s hard to choose to lower boundaries within sex. In fact, if there isn’t a healthy division of power in a relationship, sex might be the one place where someone gives him- or herself permission to say no. Of course, sometimes people do this indirectly, via having a headache, picking a fight, being too tired, or taking on extra projects.

Salvadore’s trauma had very little to do with sex. In order to divorce him and marry someone else decades ago, his ex-wife falsely accused him of assault, got a court order banishing him from their kids’ lives, and then took all their money. He was so grief-stricken by this, and exhausted from endless rounds of lawyers, social workers, and psychiatrists, that he eventually lost his job, too. He withdrew from people in general, and from women in particular.

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