Sex Is a Place You Go, Not a Thing You Do
Sex Is a Place You Go, Not a Thing You Do
A friend sent me a little clip the morning we recorded. She knows I love Esther Perel, and she knows that Esther and I share the same accent, so there was a bit of teasing in it too. But the line stopped me cold. Esther says the prevailing model of sexuality is that sex is something you do. And then she flips it.
"Where do you go in sex? Where do you go with this other person inside of them?" — Esther Perel
I have been thinking about that ever since.
The castle and the prison
Esther uses an image I cannot get out of my head. Your body, she says, is like a chateau. Some people love to reside in every room of it for as long as possible. They take that journey easily, they explore it, they invite people in.
And then some people find their body is a jail, and the only thing they want is to get out of there as fast as possible. They have no interest in another person coming to visit a place where they themselves do not want to be.
That is the whole thing, isn't it. Some people want to show you their castle, the dungeon and the high Rapunzel tower and everything in between. Other people are already not enjoying living in their own castle, because for them it is a prison. We are talking about your body, your mind, all of it. For them, letting someone in is hard. And she does not mean letting someone in through an orifice.
She actually said orifice, by the way. It is a clinical word. It is the same word in French, which is funny, and it is just as unappealing in both languages. But that is exactly her point. Sex is not going into the orifices. It is supposed to be deeper than that.
Function versus satisfaction
Let me recap the way she frames it, because this is the part I want every couple to sit with.
Function is: did it happen? Check. Everybody orgasmed, great. Except sometimes not everybody orgasms, and that happens too.
Satisfaction is a different question entirely. Did you go somewhere? Did you leave yourself behind?
"The foreplay is five minutes before the real act. That's the heterosexual version of it. It's a rather male model. You know it happened because this thing proves it. That has nothing to do with sexual satisfaction." — Esther Perel
Master made a good point here, because it would be easy to turn this into a man-bashing thing, and it isn't. She talks about the man who sleeps right after, and yes, that is a cliche, but it is not always true.
"It's reciprocal. So if the partner doesn't let you go there and you do the same thing, it's genderless." — Master
Sometimes the women do not want to explore either. Sometimes a woman says, "I was there, I'm not sure, I'm not sure I liked it." And my question for her is gentle but real: why weren't you present? Why weren't you there? Sometimes the man cannot fully go there because he can feel that she is not fully there. It limits both of them.
Why most relationship advice misses this
Here is what bothers me about most relationship advice. It is all about function. Have sex this many times a week, talk this many times a week, and you should be fine.
But all human interaction is more complex than a checklist. It is about the philosophy behind it, the communication, how you feel, and that feeling of desire. Master told a story on the episode about an ex of his, back when he was filming the same kind of adult content. At one point they stopped having sex, and when he said so, she answered that they were doing a blowjob every week on camera, so what was he complaining about.
"It's not sex. It's not like intimate sex." — Marian
That is exactly the trap Esther is describing. One performed act a week in front of a camera is function. It is not desire and it is not intimacy with a person who loves you. The act happened. The going-somewhere did not.
Master and I lived a version of this ourselves. When we started the Piper Blush channel and were still filming, there was a stretch of about a month and a half, two months, where we were having sex on camera but not in our personal life. We had a goal, we were exhausted, we kept saying let's do sex later, I need to sleep to work tomorrow. The difference is we knew the on-camera thing was not the intimate thing. We did not confuse the function for the connection. And eventually we found our way back to the real thing.
Trust is the door
So how do you actually go somewhere? People have asked us this, and the honest answer is harder than any technique.
I think the openness people chase with substances, the way everyone seems to let go on MDMA, is real but borrowed. It is hard to reach that same letting-go with your partner, sober, just the two of you and nothing else holding the door open.
"I think submission and the fact that we're in a master-sub relationship has helped us with that sometimes." — Marian
But I want to be careful here, because it is not really about the master-sub label. It is about trust. It is about how much you trust the other person, and how willing you are to be fully yourself and honest with them. Being yourself is hard enough in everyday life. Now imagine being fully yourself during sex, with nothing performed and nothing hidden. That is the place Esther is pointing at. The collar and the dynamic just gave Master and me a structure to practice the letting-go inside of. The trust is what actually opens the room.
So I will leave you with her question, because it is better than mine. The next time, do not ask whether it happened. Ask where you went. And if the answer is nowhere, ask yourself why you would not let yourself leave.
Listen to the Full Episode: Browse all episodes
Read the Book: Why Submissive Women Are Happier
Join the Conversation: Join Happy Submissive