How to Be Good at Sex: A Guide For Straight Men

Effing the Ineffable

Good sex doesn't start in the bedroom. It started at least a few hours ago while you were making dinner when she asked if she could help and you told her you could use her help stirring the mushrooms but when she tried she wasn't doing it quite right so you got behind her, shoulders around hers, and gently guided her hands with yours and showed her the way. And when she started getting the hang of it and you told her “You're doing great” and you lovingly squeezed her waist and give her a kiss on the cheek and told her “Thank you”.

Actually, no, it started that morning when you remembered she had to make an annoying call to the bank to dispute a credit card charge but you remembered how much she hates being on the phone so you did it for her while making coffee for the two of you before she even woke up.

But really it started years ago when, after some reflection, you realized you harbored resentment towards women that had been there since you were a teenager because you were taught that your worth as a man depended on validation from women. And that your father, and all men but your father especially, failed to model a healthy heterosexual relationship. You grew up thinking relationships were 1v1— that they were about keeping score and filling roles that were decided by other people. You grew up thinking romance had a shelf life and that true love, in the best case, just was not in the cards for you, and in the worst case didn't exist at all. Why even bother with relationships if the only thing in store is headaches? “Oh right, I'm worth less unless I attract women”. But the chase for women was all status games and posturing and even when it wasn't it was like taking a test where you aren't allowed to read the question. “Sorry, you texted too much and came off as clingy”. Or: “Sorry, you texted too little and came off avoidant and disinterested”. Somewhere along the way all this bullshit had you falling out of love with women and the love gave way to resentment and the resentment gave way to bad sex because sex needs love if it's gonna be good.

The answer to “how do I have good sex as a straight guy” begins with this: you love your partner and you have hope for your relationship. Your love and hope will guide you to derive pleasure from exerting effort like cooking dinner and doing chores. It'll lead to you communicating what you like, earnestly listening to what they like, and being attuned to both your bodies about what feels good. You'll implicitly trust your partner to reciprocate your effort and commitment so that when resentment arises (”I did all the chores this week and I feel like I'm pulling most of the weight”), it's a light sting rather than a pressure cooker that's left on month after month after month. Stings can be healed but an explosion can't.

This piece, and the answer to the question “how do I have good sex as a straight guy”, contains zero details about the mechanics of sex, and I'm genuinely sorry for how disappointing that is because it means the actual answer involves introspection and change which is a lot harder than like using the “come hither” motion with your finger or whatever.

Be nice to yourself, so you can be nice to your girlfriend, so she'll find you sexy and enjoy having sex with you.

But it's hard to love someone if you're in your own head all the time. It's hard to be genuine if you're constantly worried about how you're perceived. It's hard to let your body express your love in ways words never could when you spend so much of your life feeling like an alien in your own bodiy. It's hard to have hope for a relationship when you experience bad relationships time and time again and don't know how to process them so that you don't put your pain and hurt onto our partner.

Getting meta for a moment, it's odd that so much content on the internet for straight men is either predatory or misses The Point. Most of it assumes we have zero interest in being a good person and that we're eager to engage in negative-sum gender dynamics, or that we should be violent in bed, or incurious about our partners as humans. Take a moment to appreciate the absurdity of male “gurus” who buy their own bullshit so deeply they presume to know your girlfriend or wife better than you do because they “know” “women” and your partner — the love of your life — can be reduced to the guru's ill-conceived gender stereotypes. It's a desert out there for the straight guy who wants to be strong and kind and curious. Goku if he was a nerd, if you will. Or gigachad if he was a monk.

Tthe first step is unlearning society's definition of a man and reinventing a new definition for yourself from first principles. The second step is to learn to love women again.

Lover, Love Thyself

To get good at sex we have to start off by forgetting what it means to be a man. Clean slate.

"Forget how to be a man? And that'll make me good at sex? More omega-male liberal bullshit" You're saying, understandably skeptical. OK I hear you, but hear me out as well.

Listen:

The idea of a "man" is awfully convenient for society. A "man" is an unfeeling machine that takes care of business. That does what needs to be done regardless of how it makes him feel, especially if that feeling is suffering. That only ever acts logically so he's easy to predict. Someone who's better off isolated so that exhortations of the soul don't get in the way of simple incentives like money, power, and status so that when he's given a script to live by he sticks to it: “be a doctor”, “be a soldier', “don't complain”, “do not, under any circumstances, dance like a fool”. A “man” is physically fit and posesses desirable genetic traits. Men and slaves share a set of traits that conveniently benefit those in power, who get away with only valorizing these traits, not embodying them.

There is only one person that has to deal with the pain, confusion, and shame caused by living your life this way and that person is you. So men aspire eternally to this implanted ideal and they internalize the lie that if men were any other way then the world would be worse off; built into the ideal, even, is the notion a man is incapable of devising a better system, so they must not question it. And finally, the man is all too eager to believe this because if he has to suffer with no complaint, at least he can suffer for a reason.

Know that at the heart of every machine man is the deep humiliation of knowing they're living life according to someone else's expectations. If you can notice this in yourself it may feel like confusion, "I don't know what else I'd be doing", or shame, "if I don't follow the script I'll ruin my life", or regret "I can't accept that I wasted all those years not being myself; it's too painful", or anger, "fuck you I don't even fucking know who I am, life's a joke". Or possibly all of the above.

I promise to get to the actual sex tips in a second but first you have to know that I'm not framing things this way to get you mad at some shadow masters in a smoke-filled room who decided that this was the way things would be. Ideas that survive did so through natural selection and this particular mythology of a "man" is, in evolutionary terms, extremely competitive. It's a system where humans turn into homogeneous machines that, through the power of shaming men who don't stick to the script, instantly transforms them into another machine man. No other definition of masculinity had a chance to survive. I'll provide a better definition in a second (and as a bonus a definition of femininity too, only the best for you brüther) but in the meantime: bravo to the Machine Theory of Masculinity for doing so well.

A working theory of masculinity and femininity.

You're allowed to come up with your own definitions or even to pick freely from others' definitions based on your taste because this stuff is all arbitrary and definitions exist to serve human understanding. There's no such thing as a chair, and so on.

So with that being said, I invite you to entertain the idea that masculinity is not the opposite of femininity but that the two are complementary. You can be both masculine and feminine at the same time, and in fact being both is what our society values most. Your initial reaction to the previous statement might be to raise an eyebrow but I also invite you to wonder how much of your skepticism is because there's a part of you that thinks femininity is inferior or not worth exhibiting.

Masculinity is directly proportional to the amount of integration and agency your actions exhibit. Someone who's masculine demonstrates a high amount of both. Do you have a strong vision of who you are and what you want, or are you always conflicted? That's integration. Another lens is Internal Family Systems (IFS) which posits that your conscious experience and behavior is affected by versions of your self that were stamped into your subconscious at important or traumatic times in your life and that you can reintegrate these mini-”you”s through compassion and curiosity. Until you do so, you live a life conflicted.

Agency is your sense of how much you believe you can bend reality to your will, that you can make the things you want to make happen, happen.

Femininity is directly proportional to how much your behavior sacrifices your self-interest for the benefit of others. Fairly straightforward, I think, although I acknowledge as a straight dude I may be under-thinking the traditionally female half of this theory.

Here's the same graph with some examples:

The point of this framework is to get you to understand that it's okay for men to be feminine, it's good, even. You may also notice that aesthetics is missing from this discussion, “isn't being super into makeup and nails feminine?” you may ask. And I'm here to tell you that being confidently into makeup and nails is masculine as hell. This applies regardless of society's present view on any particular interest: Lego, books, working out, internet memes, etc. Any interest is masculine if you engage in it without shame.

All the quadrants are good in their own way except for the bottom left quadrant: low femininity and low masculinity. When we find ourselves here it's a sign we have room to grow. It's where we're born, after all.

Falling (Back) in Love with Women

Most straight guys secretly don't like women. It's likely they don't even realize it because they don't know of an alternative to the current dynamics. I can't blame them because society is structured specifically to make men and women hate each other. Most straight women don't like guys either but that dislike is more conscious. For women it's the fear of being physically hurt or murdered, pressured into doing something they don't want to do, or lied to in infinite possible ways. For guys it's the fear of rejection.

Our ancestors used to have to deal with dangerous fauna: lions, tigers, bears. Today we have to deal with dangerous psychofauna. Disinformation cycles amplified by recommendation algorithms, propaganda funded by billionaires, and dating apps, for example. Let's walk through the typical flow of a dating app: you feel lonely or you want to pursue a long-term relationship and 80% of people your age meet their partners online so you download Tinder. The psychofauna has fixed its eyes on you.

You match with a few women (if you're lucky), some of whom you really like and enjoy a short text interaction with. You naturally fill up with hope that maybe you've found someone who could be the one, an image of the two of you buying your first home together flashes in your mind. You're pushing a baby stroller down a beautiful suburban neighborhood. But her texts start getting shorter and ultimately stop coming altogether. You have no way of knowing but you offered to go to an Indian place but she really doesn't like spicy food so she took someone else's offer to get burgers and she didn't know how to let you down gently and she's gonna be too shy to reach out after being so avoidant. The psychofauna has devoured your legs.

I'm here to tell you that this really sucks and it's ok if it really hurts. It's a critical emotional hit every time it happens. But our reaction to this kind of situation is even worse: we say to ourselves “they have no obligation to us, I'm the idiot for even expecting anything from this situation. Buying a house together? Kids? Immature fantasies of a deluded mind, I didn't even know this person. I'm being cringe.” The psychofauna is digesting you and seeking the next prey.

Your fantasies about being with that girl were your childlike hope guiding you to love and you should listen to it more, not less — but only when the dynamics aren't completely fucked, which they absolutely are on Tinder. It's so fucked that getting ghosted early is actually the best case scenario, imagine actually going on a date and hooking up.

First of all: hookups make zero sense. Good sex can be a transcendental experience but it takes an emotional bond and knowledge of each other's bodies — the areas, pressures, rhythms, and angles that work for each of you — that's discovered through months of honest communication. You're absolutely not gonna get that from a hookup. There are a subset of people that claim hookups are fine but my guess is these people either don't know how good sex can be or the void in their heart is so painful that even a distraction for a night is good enough to make this cycle worth it.

And the reason we pursue hookups in the first place is we feel some negative emotion inside of us, usually loneliness, that we want to suppress. But by the end of a hookup the loneliness is even worse than before, driving us back to the apps. Tinder doesn't improve its bottom line by getting you a successful relationship, it improves its bottom line by getting you to think Tinder Gold is worth it.

The framework I offer you boils down to: “stop hating yourself so you can love your partner and everything will sort itself out between you.” Additionally, you need to get off the apps. Don't worry: you're not sacrificing anything. You're gaining a life free of an endless stream of emotional nukes targeted at your heart.

So you've figured yourself out

All the stuff other people torture themselves with: “am I texting too much? Am I not texting enough? Do I seem like a loser if my schedule is too flexible? Should I pretend I need to check my calendar before scheduling the next date even though I'm madly in love with this girl? Should I use a fake birthday so she thinks our signs are compatible?” now seem like nonsense. You're awesome so your love for your girl is awesome, it doesn't need to be molded or put through the filter of dating mind games. You've come home to yourself and you, in some mystical sense, have become a force of nature.