The conditioning around how a man is supposed to show up sexually is created early and reinforced constantly, through the bravado of older boys and men, pornography presenting the male body as perpetually willing, endlessly hard and apparently immune to nervousness, and through a culture that treats sexual performance as a direct measure of worth, confidence and masculinity itself. By the time most of us are actually intimate with someone we’ve already absorbed a fairly unforgiving standard, and we’ve absorbed the shame that comes with not meeting it too.
The constant hum
For me personally it showed up as a hum in the background of my intimate experiences. Checking, anticipating, watching my own body and watching my partner’s face for signals I’d filter through my own anxiety.
Arousal is not something you can will into existence through effort as it requires ease and genuine safety, and you cannot feel at ease while running a real-time assessment of your own sexual performance. The monitoring ruins the very conditions it’s trying to create, and so the cycle feeds itself. The anxiety creates an inability to function sexually, that then deepens the anxiety and makes the whole thing feel more permanent and more defining than it actually is.
What shame adds
What made this period of my life hard wasn’t the anxiety on its own so much as the meaning I attached to it. I had absorbed the idea that a man who struggles sexually, who isn’t performing like a porn-star in maintaining the kind of unwavering physical confidence the culture says is normal, is somehow failing at being a good partner and man.
When something feels shameful you protect it with silence, and the silence keeps it shameful. You lose any ability to reality-check your worst fears which inhibits access to a perspective that might allow you to see yourself and the world more honestly.
When change began for me
The progress I eventually made came through gradually, and sometimes reluctantly, letting go of the porn-star standard as any kind of useful reference point for real intimacy, and letting go of the idea that what happened in intimate moments was a test of my masculinity and worth.
Learning to return my attention to sensation and connection was essential. Something else that genuinely helped was solo exploration without performance pressure, getting to know my own arousal patterns and developing real familiarity with my own body rather than constantly measuring them against an unrealistic standard.
When I finally allowed myself to communicate honestly with a partner about what I was actually experiencing, I was able to release the shame and work on feeling safe in my sexuality. What I’d assumed would make me seem inadequate turned out to be an incredible way of getting closer and feeling safer with my partner, which in turn allowed my body and mind to relax.
When you let go
When you let go of the performance you get to experience presence. You, in your body, with another person, genuinely feeling what’s happening between you without fear. That might sound ordinary to some but for men who’ve spent years inside their own heads during intimate moments, it’s anything but.
You get your own pleasure back. When you’ve spent so long focused on performance, your own experience of pleasure disappears into the background. You’re so busy managing intimacy that you stop feeling it. Letting go of that, and allowing yourself to actually receive what’s happening makes an enormous difference.
The quality of connection that becomes possible is also next level. When you can be genuinely present with another person, you can feel deeper intimacy and pleasure. People feel the difference between someone who is with them and someone who is in their head. Presence is one of the most intimate and pleasurable gifts you can offer someone and yourself.
What I would say to other men
Your experience of your own body in intimate experiences is not a verdict on your worth or your masculinity. The version of male sexuality most of us absorbed growing up was always going to make us feel inadequate as it isn’t the truth of what true masculinity is.
Sexual function is very sensitive to our psychological states. Stress, fear, trauma, tiredness, relationship tension, a difficult week at work, all of these have a real and legitimate impact on how your body responds. They mean you are a person with a nervous system, very normal.
Sexual confidence, as I understand it now, has very little to do with porn star performance. It has everything to do with presence: the willingness to be honest with yourself and a partner about what you’re actually experiencing, the capacity to stay genuinely connected and the courage to let an encounter be what it is naturally.
That kind of confidence is available to you and it’s built through honesty, vulnerability, self-compassion and time. It produces something in intimate connection that performance, however polished, genuinely cannot.