Sex Is Natural. So Why Are So Many People So Bad at It?

By Liz Langley, AlterNet. Posted March 3, 2009.

"We do know [that's] not true for people. It's not even true for animals," says Dr. Marlene Zuk, professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn About Sex from Animals. "Not that animals have to work for simultaneous orgasms," she jokes, but if you have weird circumstances, biology might not get the last word.

"It turns out that if you take a baby monkey, and you raise it without the companionship of other monkeys, when it grows up, physiologically it's fine, but it won't know what to do in terms of sex," Zuk says, citing the landmark studies of Dr. Harry Harlow, whose controversial work in the 1950s (the famous "cloth mother / wire mother" studies) gave us an idea of the importance of affection and socialization to all facets of healthy development.

The monkeys who were raised apart from parents and peers "when [they] encountered members of the opposite sex, they just screamed and ran." Monkeys raised around only peers their own age did better, and those raised in normal circumstances were fine.

The point is that biology alone didn't cut it.

"Animals don't need to see somebody else having sex to know how to have sex themselves -- it's not like they were learning, 'Oh, that's where that goes,' " Zuk says. "It's more that if you grow up knowing how to interact socially, you know how to interact sexually."

In other words ... it's holistic.

"We see sex as something we do with someone else," Winston says, "we see it as something outside ourselves. But sexual energy is the life force," and shouldn't be compartmentalized. "It's about our family, our friends, our community, the media," it's how we interact with the world.

But as easily as many of us interact with the world, we're not always eager to bring it our sexual questions.

"(Women are) programmed from an early age to accept Cosmo's version of mind-blowing sex, and most men and women don't understand that on average most women don't orgasm during sex," or that it takes women an average of 20 minutes to get fully aroused, Jensen says. Women "often don't know how to please themselves, and if they don't know what they want, they don't know how to ask for what they want."

What everyone wants most, she says, is permission -- to be playful, to relax and to ask.

"Men are receptive and as inquisitive as the women are," she says. When she hears, "Men don't know what they're doing," she thinks "Yeah, they were never informed by our gym teacher," about our anatomy. "Men are cause-and-effect oriented ... if you tell them that you can put two fingers in the inner vaginal wall and make this motion, like 'Come hither,' then you'll be creating a sensation for her G-spot, it's like, 'Ooooooooh!' The look on their face is priceless. It's like they need permission to be boys again," to enjoy the intimacy of play.

One gentleman came to her after his wife had left a party, which was unusual because, usually it's women who stay to order toys. He just seemed lost and didn't know what to do for his wife, a beautiful woman who refused to have sex with the lights on and to whom he'd give 30 minute massages before intercourse.

"I'd just love for her to be OK with herself," he told Jensen, a key problem for a lot of people and a reiteration of Winston's point: That our relationship with ourselves is key to our sexual development

"We have to accept ourselves for what we are and what we're not," Jensen says. "We always think we're distinct and separate, but we all have the same fears and need for love and acceptance."

Back in Winston's Maps class, our commonality is clear, but how much we all differ is brought squarely home when she shows a series of photos of vulvas.

Sounds funny, but despite ownership, most women don't really see tons of vaginas -- even for a good look at our own we need a mirror and a miner's helmet.

If we see them in porn, they're either manicured or busy -- not quite the comparison we need in the real world.

See more stories tagged with: women, sexuality, sex ed

Liz Langley is a freelance writer in Orlando, Fla.

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