performance anxiety

Mindful Sex For Men With Performance Anxiety

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Mindful Sex May continues with an exploration of what mindful sex practices can offer men struggling with performance anxiety. This is one of the most common sexual struggles for men – you finally have the opportunity to be sexual with a partner, you start to get aroused, and then… worry, anxiety, fear and/or panic start to set in! Anxiety is the enemy of arousal – so what can you do to interrupt the pattern of performance anxiety?

Join us in exploring the practices of Mindful Sex – enroll in our online course, join the community of pleasure explorers and start practicing these simple yet powerful practices with us.

For a complete online sex therapy program specifically about performance anxiety, we highly recommend Vanessa Marin’s Modern Man’s Guide To Conquering Performance Pressure

Podcast Transcription For Podcast Episode: Mindful Sex For Men With Performance Anxiety

Podcast transcripts are generated with love by humans, and thus may not be 100% accurate. Time stamps are included so you can cross reference or jump to any point in the podcast episode above. THANKS to the members of our Pleasure Pod for helping make transcripts and the rest of our free offerings happen! If you love what we offer, find ways to show your love and dive deeper with us here: SHOW SOME LOVE

Chris Rose: 00:00 Welcome to Speaking Of Sex With The Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are the Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we have soulful and explicit conversations about every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to PleasureMechanics.com where you will find a complete podcast archive. While you are there go to Pleasure Mechanics.com/Free and enroll in the Erotic Essentials, our free online course, so you can get started right away with some of our best strategies and techniques for more pleasure in your life.

Chris Rose: 00:42 Hello. Welcome to the second episode of our Mindful Sex May series. This month we’re exploring different facets of mindful sex, different applications of these techniques and these practices. Today we want to focus on mindful cock. The mindful cock.

Chris Rose: 01:04 How can we unify mindfulness and presence and paying attention with the experience of the beloved penis and bring that penis to sexual experiences with joy and freedom and excitement and reveling in all of the pleasure penises can bring and receive and get rid of some of this penis anxiety that hangs so heavy over so many of us? There’s so much cock anxiety when you think about it. It’s a lot for that tender little organ to bear. You know?

Charlotte Rose: 01:42 It is. I think there’s so much and I think that a lot of men don’t know that because it’s such an isolating experience.

Chris Rose: 01:49 [crosstalk 00:01:49].

Charlotte Rose: 01:49 They don’t realize that other men are having such a similar experience and so many of them.

Chris Rose: 01:55 Yeah. All of them.

Charlotte Rose: 01:57 I think there’s some comfort to knowing that that you’re not alone in having some stress and anxiety and possibly some depression around having an erect penis and having it do what you want when you want it to do it and if it doesn’t then you feel like a failure. All of that is a very common experience.

Chris Rose: 02:14 Again, we’re going to highlight that the experience of anxiety and the struggle and the angst about it is not really about the experience of the penis. It’s much more about the cultural meaning and the emotional significance of what the penis is doing or not doing.

Chris Rose: 02:37 Just notice that. Notice how much of your struggle with your penis or with your partners’ penises how much of that struggle is about the actual what happens versus the meaning you’re assigning to what happens. There might be a very big chasm there.

Chris Rose: 02:55 To paint the picture a little more of what we’re talking about some penises have medical issues. Right? Some men have medical issues that affect their penises, circulation issues, hormone issues. There is a subset of penis issues that are quite medical in nature and that need medical attention and attention to your whole system, your cardiovascular health, your hormonal health.

Chris Rose: 03:21 If your penis function feels like it’s changing across the board, like how your penis functions in the morning, during masturbation, during partnered sex, kind of during all different conditions, if the erectile function, if the ejaculation function, if the urinary function … Like if something the penis is supposed to do it doesn’t do helpfully or if there’s pain during those functions that’s when you go to a doctor.

Chris Rose: 03:51 Many, many, many more of the struggles around the penis are conditional struggles. Meaning you can get erect and have an ejaculation that is satisfying during masturbation but not with your partner or with some partners but not other partners or during certain conditions and not other conditions.

Chris Rose: 04:13 When the penis function is conditional then we look to the psychological, emotional, social underpinnings of … It’s not the penis hydraulics that aren’t functioning. Right? It’s not the ejaculatory function that’s not functioning. There’s something in the whole system, the sexual system, that is going a little haywire.

Chris Rose: 04:37 This is why mindfulness can be such an amazing intervention for men, such an amazing practice, a training ground to rewire and reprogram their sexual system to create different outcomes. We’re going to engineer this mofo, right?

Chris Rose: 04:55 Dr. Lori Brotto, who is the leading researcher on mindful sex from the clinical applications of mindful sex, has for the past decade plus been focusing primarily on women, almost exclusively on women and their sexual experience, and having phenomenal results in her clinic. I will link in the show notes page to an interview with her.

Chris Rose: 05:17 She is now doing research on the application of mindful sex techniques for men and for premature ejaculation, for erectile dysfunction, for sexual performance after prostate surgery are the three main categories she is looking at and we are so excited to talk to her in a few months about what she finds in her research.

Chris Rose: 05:40 Let’s talk about how this might show up for men.

Charlotte Rose: 05:44 They just did a very small study to prove that it was a good idea to keep studying it and they found that the results of using mindfulness with men was very effective in the same way that it has been with women. It’s probable that they will find that it is awesome for men and I’m going to assume that it is but we will look forward to those studies.

Chris Rose: 06:04 We’re not doing like scientific research prediction here.

Charlotte Rose: 06:07 No.

Chris Rose: 06:09 Well, we have many data sets, right? We have also the data from all of the men in our mindful sex course who are reporting awesome successes and the most important data set, the only research that really matters for you, dear listener, is your research. It’s figuring out if any of these strategies and practices can help you struggle less and enjoy your sex more.

Charlotte Rose: 06:34 Yes. That is what we’re looking for.

Chris Rose: 06:38 Maybe that’s a good way to think about what we’re doing here because we’re not just going for this mind blowing 10 hour orgasm overnight kind of promise. We are going for less struggle, more pleasure. Less isolation, more connection. Less fear, more confidence.

Chris Rose: 06:58 How might mindful sex be a really useful tool if you experience situational erectile dysfunction … I don’t even like the word dysfunction. If you can’t always … If your penis doesn’t always do what you want it to do. That’s not even … This is the whole thing. All of the setups for men like erectile dysfunction means if it’s not erect it’s dysfunctioning.

Charlotte Rose: 07:21 Yeah. It’s not really fair.

Chris Rose: 07:23 Premature ejaculation is like ejaculation before you wanted it. Since when do we order our bodies around to do what we want them to do when we want them to do it?

Charlotte Rose: 07:33 Often but it’s not a good idea.

Chris Rose: 07:34 It’s all a setup. Just notice this. Even the language around the penises, how we think about penises and penis function, is a complete setup. It’s like if you’re not erect you are wrong and you are therefore less of a man, therefore your worth is devalued, therefore go crawl in a hole and die.

Charlotte Rose: 07:52 Oh my God. It’s so dramatic but I think [crosstalk 00:07:55].

Chris Rose: 07:54 It’s so fucking true, though. These are the emails I get all the time from men and they are good husbands, they are good partners, they’re great dads, they’re great at work. They’re like showing up in their life, they’re trying their best, and then when they can’t get an erection when they are a little bit aroused we slap them down and tell them that they’re lesser than.

Chris Rose: 08:12 It’s so cruel. I get really worked up about this. There’s so much cruelty done onto men’s sexuality that hasn’t yet been named, that hasn’t yet been unpacked. We’ve been spending the past 50 years looking at and talking about the sexual oppression of women and it’s time we talk about how this is impacting men because men are struggling, they are hurting, and they need support and they also need solidarity. Right?

Chris Rose: 08:38 The main message here, guys, is you are not alone. If your penis doesn’t always pop to attention, if it gets erect when it’s not supposed to get erect, when it doesn’t get erect when you kind of want it to, when you have ejaculations too quickly or not at all.

Chris Rose: 08:55 One way we can think about all of this it’s a mismatch between what you might be feeling and experiencing and how your genitals are behaving. This is arousal nonconcordance because so much of how this shows up is you have a sexual partner or you’ve worked really hard to get the attention of a sexual partner. You do a lot of effort to create a sexual opportunity. A sexual opportunity comes and you balk. You freak out.

Chris Rose: 09:26 A lot of the guys I talk to it’s like they can anticipate sex, they get horny, they can masturbate while fantasizing about fucking someone, and then at the time where they have a possibility, they have a receptive partner, someone is hitting on them, their wife is finally in the mood, they freak the fuck out and that anxiety loop then completely hijacks their neurology, their body, their physiology, and the penis doesn’t play. The penis doesn’t join the play in a way that we have taught men is necessary for their sexual pleasure.

Chris Rose: 10:06 There’s so many things to break down here, right? We can start at the end and say your erection is not necessary for sexual pleasure. We did a great episode recently about soft penis pleasures and all the ways you can enjoy a soft penis. We can start there but we also need to start at how can you show up for an arousing situation, receive that arousal, build that arousal, and not freak out and not spin into anxiety.

Chris Rose: 10:34 This is the main intervention of mindful sex. That’s amazing for all of us. I think it’s going to be rocket fuel for so many men to learn how to build arousal without getting anxious.

Charlotte Rose: 10:46 Because that’s what happens. You’re in an experience with a partner and you start feeling aroused and you feel those sensations in your body and then you start feeling nervous and anxious about what’s going to happen in the future and how is your erection going to be and is it going to stay and then you’re focusing all your attention on those thoughts and your erection starts to disappear.

Charlotte Rose: 11:08 That is what we want to support you in shifting. What we want to do is learn how to be aroused and feel the experience of arousal in our body while calming our thoughts, calming our mind, and being able to focus all of our attention on the sensations in your body of arousal.

Charlotte Rose: 11:30 Eventually over time the experience of arousal is not anxiety-producing. You can genuinely spend all of your attention focusing on how good it feels to be aroused and not be worrying about your erection. That is a process. That is a practice. There are things that we can do to cultivate that experience.

Chris Rose: 11:50 Well, and that you can stay aroused, stay in high states of arousal, and your erection will come and go and that’s okay. Right? When we think about the model of staying relaxed and aroused … Blood will flow in and out of the penis and there will be the full mast, half mast, all sorts of situations, but as you move dynamically through the sexual experience it will become less and less important and you experience pleasure in your whole body and your attention isn’t just on, “How hard am I? How can I thrust fast enough to get an ejaculation before I lose this erection?”

Chris Rose: 12:30 That kind of sprint is what a lot of men get into. It’s like, “I’m hard. I have the opportunity. Let’s go. Let’s do this.” That is not a great formula for sexual partners always.

Charlotte Rose: 12:42 For connection because you’re so focused on reaching the finish line, the imaginary finish line.

Chris Rose: 12:47 Right. You might be rushing your partner who is there and excited but needs way more time to warm up and then can get to the fucking. It puts a lot of pressure on that erection and it creates this thing of like if the erection goes away or if I ejaculate this opportunity is over.

Chris Rose: 13:05 I’ve been reading an article by an Olympian silver medalist who is coming out with a book about performance anxiety and erectile dysfunctions. We’re hoping to bring him on the show and talk really deeply about this.

Chris Rose: 13:21 One of the things I noticed is the juxtaposition between performance and athletic performance and competition that is so built into masculinity and how then a sexual opportunity becomes an opportunity to win or lose and that you kind of are self-scoring before you’re even get started. You’re worried about that winning and losing, you’re worried about where you are on that ranking card. Men are so like, “How do I compare to your other partners? Was he better than I?” That competition that’s built into the male ego …

Charlotte Rose: 13:56 Which we’re trained to do. That is not …

Chris Rose: 13:59 Right. It’s not because you’re an egotistical bastard. It’s because this is like your programming. Then women are trained to evaluate themselves on sexiness and desirability and how their body looks. Right?

Chris Rose: 14:11 We drop into a moment with a couple whose into each other, they want to fuck. His erection goes down, he has lowered his score, he feels like a failure, she feels like that erection is some reflection on her, she feels like a failure, and now they have to reconcile that failed sexual moment.

Charlotte Rose: 14:29 Yeah. It’s a downward spiral.

Chris Rose: 14:31 How familiar does this feel to you? How familiar does this scenario feel? I think it’s really, really common. Then there’s versions of this. There are a lot of strategies here. How does mindful sex fit into this?

Chris Rose: 14:45 Mindful sex is going to give you the strategies and the techniques so that you can first notice the patterns in your sexual response system, you notice the anxiety scripts, you notice what starts happening, and in that noticing there is so much opportunity because then you can start intervening, interfering with that script, choosing a different script earlier and earlier.

Charlotte Rose: 15:11 Part of what you get to do is begin to pay attention to what your first early signs of feeling anxiety or feeling stress as you’re getting aroused are. You have to be your own detective and figure that out and really pay attention to what your body does, what your mind does, what your thoughts are that start putting you into an unsavory loop.

Chris Rose: 15:33 We have tools to help you do that in the mindful sex course so you’re not on your own being a detective and you’re learning together also in community about the common patterns so you can start being, “Oh, yeah. That makes sense to me.” Then what happens when you’ve established these scripts and patterns where does the opportunity come?

Charlotte Rose: 15:54 Then you can begin to interrupt those thoughts, you can notice those thoughts, and replace them with different thoughts, which can then have a different outcome. You begin to train your mind to shift your attention where you want it to go instead of where it goes on autopilot.

Charlotte Rose: 16:13 We tend to think of those thoughts as real, as real truth, and sometimes they aren’t real truth. They are just programmed thoughts. When we begin to shift them to something more desirable it has an impact on our body and our body’s experience.

Chris Rose: 16:31 Then you start creating the opportunities for yourself to have different experiential outcomes. That’s when the secret sauce happens when your body experiences a different option, when your body experiences the opportunities to have relaxed arousal without a focus on the outcome and gets to feel how pleasurable that is, how joyful that can feel. You start reprogramming your neurology.

Chris Rose: 17:00 One of the fancy words for this is positive neuroplasticity. There’s a neuroscientist Buddhist teacher I’ve been really learning a lot from recently and he talks about this as installing the good. We’ll talk more about this in a future episode.

Chris Rose: 17:16 The important thing here is that when we have positive experiences we have to focus on them and tell our body to take it in as an option. Our brains are threat tracking monsters. The human brain is really good at threat tracking, at looking for the potential problems to solve.

Chris Rose: 17:40 One of the skills of mindful sex we learn to bring here is paying attention to what is in a more neutral way so we don’t project all of our anxiety and fears into the current moment.

Chris Rose: 17:55 There’s an opportunity here for open dialog with your partner where you have a conversation ahead of time, “If I don’t get an erection that stays erect for the entire time we’re playing it’s not because I don’t find you desirable. It’s something my body is doing right now. I just want to let you know ahead of time.” You pregame it and you set expectations differently. That can be a strategy.

Chris Rose: 18:18 If we go back to the juxtaposition of athletic performance and sexual performance one of the strategies we can think about here is practicing for the big event. One of the things that gives us confidence and skills to enjoy … If we even take off winning and losing, right? I don’t want to continue that performance metaphor but what helps you enjoy game day? What helps you enjoy your hobbies? It’s practicing and developing skills so you can be in the flow.

Chris Rose: 18:52 Whether that’s soccer or woodworking, I always go back to woodworking, whatever your skill is, we all know that by putting in practice and developing skills individually it helps us enjoy a flow state, an experience of something else. You put in the practice to experience the thing. We can break down so many hobbies this way.

Chris Rose: 19:18 Mindful sex gives us a set of practices, a set of strategies, a set of skills to work out, to practice with, to literally develop skills. This word practice can start feeling woo woo. Like, “What’s your erotic practice?” We’re literally practicing skills. It’s no different than dribbling a basketball. You’re practicing embodied erotic skills so that when your wife is looking at you and wants to connect and your penis is soft and you don’t feel good about that you have a whole suite of skills to deploy that allow you to stay in that present moment, look your wife in the eye, and enjoy whatever erotic opportunity is available for you.

Chris Rose: 20:07 Cumulatively, if we can stay present for all of those erotic opportunities, whether it’s the tender kiss on the shoulder before you roll over and go to sleep but you can really feel that kiss and be present to it and what it meant to the wildest of sex you can imagine. Right? That whole range of staying present for erotic opportunities, paying attention to them, feeling them fully, letting them in, that’s what your lifetime of sex is made of. It’s not the one Olympic performance. Right?

Chris Rose: 20:40 How do we develop the skills to stay present and available for the cumulative experience of being an erotic human? That’s what we’re practicing for. When it comes to the cock it’s about realigning the cock with the full man behind it so your penis gets to play with your full presence behind it and your penis isn’t this separate thing. We often treat it, it’s like this dangling, “Oh, it’s got a head of its own.” It’s this like dangling thing.

Chris Rose: 21:15 We’ve disembodied men from their penises. We treat them like they’re this demon beast that needs satisfying. You know? I don’t know. We have such weird narratives about the penis and how do we just treat the penis as a beautiful organ of pleasure that can give and receive so much pleasure, that’s fascinating and mesmerizing in its ability to change.

Chris Rose: 21:38 We need whole new dialogs about the cock. We need men who are willing to embody their cocks as lovers fearlessly and without shame and from this place and then tell other men what is possible and tell men about the internal penis and the pleasures of the internal penis and the pleasures of being penetrated. You’ve gotten me started.

Chris Rose: 22:02 Yeah. I get really excited about this, I get really fiery about it, because a lot of men confide in me and I suspect have conversations with me they’re not having with a lot of other people and this has been over the past 20 years. I have this sense of what men are struggling with and how men are treated in bed and how men treat themselves sexually. Like what men give themselves permission for and how men feel about their penises.

Chris Rose: 22:34 I’ve also been in erotic community. I’ve been with men who were fearless sexual explorers, who have devoted their life to sexual adventure. I’ve been inside so many men. I’ve had so many cocks in my hands, we have together, that we also know what is possible for men.

Chris Rose: 22:51 We have seen men in fully unbridled sexual power and it’s fucking gorgeous. This world needs more. I think there’s this sense of we need less of men’s sexuality right now and we don’t. We need more of men’s authentic, empathetic, emotional embodied sexuality because it’s fucking gorgeous and sexy and hot and beautiful and powerful and motivates men to do great work in the world and show up for their communities.

Chris Rose: 23:23 We all need this sexual liberation healing we’re talking about. This is not just for pussies. What does the liberated cock look like? We need to start painting a picture of what men’s sexual liberation will look like and what that will bring to women.

Charlotte Rose: 23:42 Part of what that looks like is men being in relationship with their own cock. This narrative of the cock has a mind of its own and you just have to follow your cock because you have no control over it. That is where men’s sexuality gets so messy.

Chris Rose: 24:03 Or that the cock is used to prove a point.

Charlotte Rose: 24:03 And dangerous. Yes.

Chris Rose: 24:06 The cock is used to prove your power. I mean, we’re getting into a whole other conversation here about …

Charlotte Rose: 24:10 But a responsible and mindful cock is when a man has a relationship with his own cock where he can know what it needs and he’s responding to it and he’s also being kind to himself, not talking badly, poorly to himself or his cock, but has a generous spirit with himself and has practices where he is able to cultivate that power. He is not letting it run away or prove a point but is letting it respecting his sexuality and his desire and his eroticism and giving it space but also cultivating it and communing with it and …

Chris Rose: 24:59 We’ve officially gone off the deep end. You just got a big honking laugh. With that, we really want this to be an invitation to all of you. You know, again, we’ve been getting emails recently about gendered language and more and more listeners want us to strip all of this gendered language out and talk about … We do. We talk about bodies. All of this comes back to the human body, the human experience of sexuality, of showing up for one another.

Chris Rose: 25:31 In this episode we’ve really been talking about cocks and people who are socialized as men and this male masculinity script that you’ve been given and that have led so many of you to a specific set of sexual experiences and a specific relationship with your penis and what it means about your masculinity and the performative, competitive relationship you have with your sexuality.

Chris Rose: 26:01 We can highlight these specific experiences and we can talk about the different socializations of men and women but ultimately these practices serve us all and they are amazing practices for human bodies, whether or not you’re in a sexual relationship right now, whether you’re queer or straight, however you identify, the mindful sex practices can serve you.

Chris Rose: 26:25 We really want these practices to be available and accessible. We have put them all in our mindful sex online course. There is special podcast pricing going on now at Pleasure Mechanics dot com slash Mindful that will take you directly to enrollment.

Chris Rose: 26:41 Enrolling in an online course means you have access to this resource library but it also means an investment, a commitment, for you to practice, to try things out, to let us into your erotic life in a deeper way, to try our techniques, to try our strategies, and see what changes for you.

Chris Rose: 27:04 Stepping into an online course as much as it’s, yes, unlocking new resources, it is stepping into an experience and then we are there to guide you along. We are there for you to shoot an email to being like, “This is what happens. It felt weird. What do you think?” I will be there for you with personalized coaching.

Chris Rose: 27:24 It’s a way we can make these techniques available to people all around the world at a really affordable way. That is why we do all of this work online. Pleasure Mechanics dot com slash Mindful. Join our mindful sex online course.

Chris Rose: 27:40 Then we’re thinking about traveling so go to Pleasure Mechanics dot com slash Live to tell us if you could join us in Los Angeles this August or if not in Los Angeles where would you like to meet us? We have wonderful responses coming in. It looks like we have a very busy travel schedule for the next 20 years.

Charlotte Rose: 28:00 Awesome.

Chris Rose: 28:01 Let us know where you are. If you’d like to come out to a live workshop experience with us go to Pleasure Mechanics dot com slash Live. The truth is many, many more of you will meet us online, join our online courses, do these practices in the privacy of your own home, feel the results of them in your own body, in your own relationships, report back to us.

Chris Rose: 28:27 We will continue to deliver you amazing resources to take you deeper into your erotic experience and together we have thousands of people gathered together into this online school all asking the question, “How can I experience more sexual pleasure in my life? How can I feel less struggle and more joy around my sexuality? How can we do this through daily practice through making incremental changes that have huge profound results?”

Chris Rose: 29:00 After 10 years we now have a community of people who have been making these changes, couples who are in totally new places, and that is feeling so exciting for me to have been working with people now for over a decade.

Chris Rose: 29:15 Join us. Pleasure Mechanics dot com is our online home. You’ll find it all there. Pleasure Mechanics dot com slash Mindful to enroll in the mindful sex course and join us for this Mindful Sex May and beyond. Yes. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 29:31 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 29:32 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 29:33 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 29:37 Manifested through daily practices. We’ll see you next time on Speaking Of Sex With the Pleasure Mechanics. Cheers.

Rethinking Sexual Performance Anxiety

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Rethinking Sexual Performance Anxiety : Free Podcast Episode

Sexual performance anxiety is the most common sexual struggle for men. Almost all men experience sexual performance anxiety at one time or another, and many men suffer with it for years on end.

So what exactly is sexual performance anxiety, and why does it impact so many men? In this episode we open up the conversation about performance anxiety, performance pressure and how we can switch tracks and experience freedom from performance anxiety.

If you are struggling with Performance Anxiety, we highly recommend the comprehensive and compassionate online course from sex therapist Vanessa Marin: The Modern Man’s Guide To Conquering Performance Pressure

What is sexual performance anxiety?

Anxiety is overwhelming fear or worry that hijacks your experience of life. It usually involves ruminating on negative thoughts, fears and perceived negative outcomes. For example, someone who has anxiety about flying will experience constant worry and fear about their plane crashing. Someone who has anxiety about heights will imagine themselves falling to their demise.

Sexual performance anxiety is the experience of anxiety about perceived failure to live up to an expectation of sexual performance.

Most often, sexual performance anxiety is triggered by lack or loss of an erection, early ejaculation, or delayed ejaculation. The anxiety is about perceived loss of masculinity, sexual status, humiliation or embarrassment in front of a loved partner, or a general sense of being not good enough to be worthy as a sexual being.

All of this anxiety can be traced back to the unrealistic expectations our culture puts on male sexuality.

Furthermore, stress and anxiety have the effect of shutting down erections. So the pressure to have an erection can in and of itself create the loss of an erection.

It is time to rethink the conversation about sexual performance anxiety, and liberate men from the overwhelming pressure to have an erection at all times.

The cultural myth is that men’s sexuality is simple, and given the opportunity to have sex guys should just be hard and ready at all times. Failure to perform causes deep shame and humiliation, female partners feel rejected and lash out, and a downward spiral sets in.

Performance anxiety is very much about attachment to a specific outcome and identifying with that outcome. The story goes something like this:

To be a real man, I must be able to get and stay hard. If I fail to do so, I myself am a failure and therefore not a real man.

Meanwhile, the female partner is thinking: to be a real woman, I must be desirable. If my partner finds me desirable, he will be erect. If he is not erect, I fail at being desirable.

This sexual script limits the erotic experience of men and women alike. It is time to understand that erection and arousal are not the same thing, and that the human sexual experience is so much bigger than penetrative intercourse.

In this podcast we introduce several key concepts that will help liberate you from the paradigm of sexual performance anxiety.

You will discover strategies to put into place both before and during sex, and how to change the culture of sexuality in your relationship, so you can have more satisfying sex more frequently.

Ending Performance Anxiety with Vanessa Marin

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Performance Anxiety is the primary sexual struggle of far too many men. What does performance anxiety even mean? What causes performance anxiety? How can guys overcome performance anxiety? What can partners do to help?

In this episode we speak with Vanessa Marin, leading sex therapist and creator of an amazing online course, The Modern Man’s Guide To Conquering Performance Pressure

We cover:

What is performance anxiety?
What causes performance anxiety?
Why is performance anxiety getting more common?
How can partners help or hurt the situation?
What role does porn have in creating performance anxiety?
How does performance anxiety relate to erectile dysfunction?
Is Viagra a cure for performance anxiety?
What role does sexual trauma play in men’s performance anxiety?

Next week, we’ll keep unpacking the cultural roots of performance anxiety and how we can shift our experience of sexuality from a performance to an experience. This shift is crucial in creating the conditions for fun, playful, joyous and highly orgasmic sex for both partners.

Be sure to check out Vanessa Marin’s awesome course: The Modern Man’s Guide To Conquering Performance Pressure

Join our Patreon to get bonus episodes, be part of the Pleasure Mechanics community and have a direct line to our inbox: https://www.patreon.com/pleasuremechanics

Note: We 100% recommend Vanessa’s course, and when you enroll Pleasure Mechanics earns a small referral payment to support the podcast and keep us going. Thanks!

Transcript of Interview With Vanessa Marin

Chris Rose: Hi, this is Chris from PleasureMechanics.com. Welcome to Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. On today’s episode, we have a special guest, Vanessa Marin, a leading sex therapist, and she and I take a deep dive into exploring performance anxiety and what underlies performance anxiety, and how to start overcoming it. You can find a complete podcast archive over at PleasureMechanics.com, where you will also find the opportunity to sign up for The Erotic Essentials. This is our free offering to you.

Chris Rose: It is a free online course that includes our foundational sex advice, so you can start building the sex life you crave on your own terms. The Erotic Essentials is completely free and you can find the signup at PleasureMechanics.com. Just go to the Start Here page. If you like our work and want to support what we do, please come over to Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics. P-A-T-R-E-O-N, Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics and sign up for a monthly pledge – $1 a month, $5 a month, and at $25 a month, and we are sending you pleasure packages.

Chris Rose: Our first shipment of custom Pleasure Mechanics stickers are arriving any day now, and so we will be getting our May pleasure packages out in the mail to you soon, so come on over to Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics and sign up for a monthly pledge to keep us going so we can create this free podcast for hungry ears all around the world. Before we dive into the interview, I want to acknowledge that we got a lot of feedback on last week’s episode about the history of masturbation, and we will explore some of that feedback and share some of your letters on next week’s episode, but I want to say we have heard you. Thank you for your feedback, both positive and the pushback. We welcome it all, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that next week when we bring you our next episode of Speaking of Sex With the Pleasure Mechanics. Here is my interview with Vanessa Marin. I found Vanessa because I was specifically looking for great information and resources about performance anxiety.

Chris Rose: I hear from guys all the time, whose primary sexual struggle is what they name performance anxiety, and this is such a common experience, but people feel really isolated with it and really ashamed of it, and so I want to start peeling back the layers on performance anxiety. This is part one of a two-part episode series. Next week, Charlotte and I will talk about performance anxiety and some of our takes on this topic, and Vanessa is the creator of a beautiful online course called The Modern Man’s Guide To Conquering Performance Pressure, and I do not recommend courses lightly. I only recommend courses that I think are great compliments to what we do here at Pleasure Mechanics and the tools that can be great resources for you, and I love her course. It is a very comprehensive look at performance anxiety and gives you a ton of techniques to start implementing right away, so I highly recommend diving into that resource.

Chris Rose: You will find a link in the show notes page, and please dive into that, and then ask us questions that we can continue to answer for you. Together, I think as a culture we can conquer performance anxiety. This does not have to be the main sexual experience of so many people with penises, so join us in the quest to culturally conquer performance anxiety. All right. Here is my interview with Vanessa Marin, and next week, we will continue the conversation here on Speaking of Sex With the Pleasure Mechanics.

Chris Rose: Cheers. Can you get us started by introducing yourself and the work that you do?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. My name is Vanessa Marin, and I am a sex therapist and author, and I work with people for a wide variety of issues and in a wide variety of formats. I offer video chat coaching, email consultation, and I have a little suite of online programs as well.

Chris Rose: What brought you to do sex therapy specifically?

Vanessa Marin: My story of getting started with sex therapy starts with my parents trying to have the talk with me, and I very, very vividly remember that conversation sitting in the back of my parents’ minivan, and my mom telling me, “If you have any questions about sex, you can always ask us”, and I remember it being really obvious in that moment that I was not supposed to ask any questions. It was very, very clear to me. I remember even at, I think I was about 11 or 12 years old, even at that young age thinking, “Why are my parents so embarrassed by this?” I did have questions. I was really curious, just kind of naturally curious like children are, and I really wanted to have that conversation, and I remember feeling, it was so strange that my parents who I was very close with and we’re very open and communicative and pretty much every other way, really didn’t want to have this conversation with me, so that memory really, really stuck with me.

Vanessa Marin: I of course had no idea that sex therapy was a career at age 11, but once I got a little bit older, realized that it was something that I really wanted to continue devoting my life towards.

Chris Rose: Did you become like me? Were you in the self-help section of bookstores and doing your own research?

Vanessa Marin: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I definitely loved just trying to find books, squirrel things away. Actually, my very first sex education, this is pretty bad, but when I was about 15, we lived next to a group of college girls, and one of them got rid of all of their Cosmo Magazines, and so I came home from school and I see this huge stack of Cosmos sitting right next to the recycling bins waiting to get taken out, and that just looked like a treasure trove to me as a teenager, so I squirreled them all back into my room and remember just kind of combing through every page, trying to soak up as much information as I could.

Chris Rose: I found you … Primarily, I was doing research because we just hear from so many men whose primary sexual struggle is what they name performance anxiety, and I found your work and I really love your course, so it’s called The Modern Man’s Guide To Conquering Performance Pressure. Let’s start with what is performance anxiety and why did you choose to use the word performance pressure rather than anxiety?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. I actually hate the term performance anxiety and performance pressure, because I think that they reinforce this idea that sex is about performance.

Chris Rose: Yeah. Yeah.

Vanessa Marin: I’m kind of constantly going back and forth on the name of that course. I might try to change it in the future, but there’s really not a great way to describe what these issues are without creating that idea that sex is about performance, that we need to perform like robots absolutely perfectly every second of the time. I go back and forth on that a lot, but the main concerns that the course addresses are erectile and orgasmic challenges, so having difficulty getting hard or staying hard, orgasming faster than you want, feeling like you’re not in control of your orgasm, or the other end of the spectrum, which is taking a really long time to orgasm or not being able to have an orgasm with a partner at all.

Chris Rose: Why do you think this is so common, because for a lot of guys, it’s not … The first thing we do is rule out medical concerns around circulation. Why is this so common when the sexual functioning is there, but then in the act of sex, it seems to go haywire? What are some of the things that trigger this, and how does it show up?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. I think that it’s actually over, maybe the last 10 years or so. I think that performance anxiety is something that’s really been greatly on the rise for, not just men, for all people. I think there’s a really increasing sense of anxiety that most of us feel about making sure that we’re doing this right and having our bodies perform exactly the way that we want them to do, do exactly the things that we want them to do in the moments that we want them to do them, and so that’s what I’ve really noticed has been contributing to this issue. I think the reality is that all men are going to experience occasional performance issues.

Vanessa Marin: I say this over and over and over again in the course, but our bodies aren’t robots. We’re not machines. We’re not perfectly calibrated to do the exact things that we want to do, and so I think a lot of men understand rationally, “Okay, this is something that happens.” It’s common, but I think that level of perfectionism and the pressure on this idea of performance has really increased that anxiety that a lot of men feel, and so something that maybe in a different world, they might have been able to recognize, “Hey, I was really tired that time, or I just wasn’t feeling at that time. It’s okay. We’ll try again next time.”

Vanessa Marin: I think it’s instead, causing that anxiety to snowball, getting worse and worse and worse and more and more intense, and then creating much more serious issues than it really needed to have been in the first place.

Chris Rose: Yeah. Do you see this as a cultural issue and kind of how we construct the idea of what the sexual experience is supposed to look like and what the male’s role in that experience is supposed to be? Like how much of this is a cultural myth versus a personal issue?

Vanessa Marin: I think a huge, huge portion of it is just a cultural myth that we’ve all internalized, so sex has always been something that’s been difficult for people to talk about. As a society, we really, really struggled with it, and we’ve paid the consequences for the ways that we talk about it, that we approach it on a personal level, and so there are a lot of different factors that get involved. There’s porn, there’s general perfectionism that we’re dealing with the ways that we live our lives and more public ways, so there are a lot of different factors that all buy into it, but I think the vast majority of it is really a cultural issue.

Chris Rose: Yeah. It’s so interesting because it’s so much of this is around the idea of getting erect to have intercourse on demand, and yet, we know that vaginal intercourse is not the way most women reach orgasm, nor find the most pleasurable, so both people are kind of lost in this myth and struggle. One of the things I love in your course is you have a section for the partners, and I love you to talk about what role the partners play in creating the anxiety or in creating the pressure, and how we can change our reactions to something like a soft penis, because so many of the partners I talk to internalize that as they are not desirable enough, and therefore the pain of rejection sets in. What is the partner’s role in starting to work through this?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. These are great questions. I am really upfront in the course itself. I kind of talk about the fact that I don’t have a penis, so I don’t know the firsthand experience of having performance issues, but as a woman who has slept with men, I have had the experience of having plenty of partners that had performance issues, and I have done absolutely every single horrible thing that a partner can do in those kinds of circumstances. I’ve taken it incredibly personally.

Vanessa Marin: I have cried, I have pouted, I have questioned whether my partner was attracted to me or whether they desired me, I was cold or kind of shut someone out, so I have done all of those things and I really get it from the perspective of the partner. I’ve learned my lesson and I behave a lot better now, but I like to share that perspective with the guys who are going through the course and also in that section of the course, that’s meant to be shown to the partner, just sort of acknowledging, “Look, this is stuff that we all mess up.” I messed it up really, really, really badly and I caused a lot of hurt to a lot of my partners that I deeply regret now, and I think it really comes down to recognizing that we all feel pressure around our sex lives. We all want to know that we’re doing a good job. We all want to know that we’re desired by our partners, that we’re desirable, and that anxiety that we all feel often leads us to doing hurtful things or acting in ways that just don’t serve us or our partners.

Vanessa Marin: That leads to one of those, the exact kind of situation that you’re mentioning with a soft penis, that a lot of men are so focused on being able to get hard to power into intercourse, when the reality is that that’s not the most pleasurable activity for a woman, and so it just we set ourselves up for these situations or we’re sabotaging ourselves, or we’re pressuring ourselves to do these things that actually aren’t going to bring us the most pleasure, or where there are other options that we could pursue, other avenues that we could go down, when I think it, yeah, just kind of comes back to recognizing we’re all kind of in this together. We’re all struggling with this in our own unique and individual ways, but it’s something that we can have healthier conversations about and try to get out of those patterns.

Chris Rose: As you mentioned, this is, you call it a near universal human experience, so we only talk about it really in terms of people who have penises. What is the equivalent term used in sex therapy for the female experience of this? Is there one?

Vanessa Marin: I don’t think there is one. I do use performance anxiety or performance pressure or sometimes perfectionism with my female clients. The ways that I see my female clients experience this is around orgasm, where a lot of women just feel an immense amount of pressure to be able to orgasm and to be able to kind of control their orgasm in the same sorts of ways that men want to, where it’s happening in the exact same moment and the exact right way. A lot of women feel pressured to have orgasms from intercourse, which like we just talked about is not the most pleasurable activity for a woman, so women feel that anxiety too. It’s just in different contexts in different ways, but it’s the same basic anxiety there.

Chris Rose: In the course, you talk about cognitive distortions. Can you talk about what some of the common cognitive distortions are and why they’re important to identify?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. I think it’s really important for us to pay attention to the specific thoughts that are going through our heads.

Chris Rose: Yeah.

Vanessa Marin: One of the concerns that a lot of my clients tell me is that they get really lost in their own thoughts, especially in the moment where they’ll start just getting very anxious about what is happening or what they think might happen, and there’s this feeling that their thoughts kind of take control, take over them, their thoughts become powerful, and so I work with cognitive distortions as a way to recognize these are just thought patterns that you’re having, but we can take a look at those specific thoughts, sort of dismantle them and try to help you think in more reasonable, more practical and more helpful ways that aren’t going to sabotage your abilities in the moment. A big one that comes up for a lot of men is catastrophizing, where they think that the absolute worst case scenario is going to happen that he’s not going to be able to get hard. He’s going to be completely soft, his partner’s going to laugh in his face, she’s going to go tell all of her friends about it, and he’s going to be the social outcast for the rest of his life. That’s an example of one where again, we can get in with that thought and dismantle. Okay.

Vanessa Marin: Yes. Going soft is not a desirable outcome, but it certainly doesn’t mean that all of these other chain of events that are going to unfold from that.

Chris Rose: Or that sex is over, right?

Vanessa Marin: Absolutely.

Chris Rose: One of your strategies you talk about is stay with her. In the moment of sexual connection, when it’s not going the way you want to, you urge people to stay connected and stay present with one another. What does that do? What does that change for the relationship?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. That technique … A lot of the techniques that I share, they’re really inspired by actual sessions that I’ve had with clients, and so I had a session that I very vividly remember with a couple where the man was talking about losing his erection in the moment and was going on and on about what a horrible thing this was and how he was so ashamed of it, and so upset, and he knew this isn’t what his partner wanted, and she must think he’s not a man, and really, just all these thoughts kind of spiraling and snowballing in the session. I remember his partner just having this look on her face, and I was very curious about what that look meant, and finally, she just sort of blurted out, “That’s what you think I want? That’s what you think I care about?” She told him, “I don’t care about you having this perfectly timed erection or this perfectly hard erection. That’s not what bothers me about the performance issues that we’ve been experiencing. What bothers me is that it feels like you completely check out mentally and emotionally in that moment, and I feel like I’m left alone. I feel like you’re in your own head, lost in your own thoughts, doing your own thing, and I’m just there alone when sex is supposed to be about connection, about two people coming together and being able to share a moment with each other.” That’s what I was getting at with that technique is this idea that I think a lot of men have these ideas of what their partners expect, and again, the idea is perfectionism, and the reality is that it’s not what most partners care about. Most partners want to feel like there’s some sort of connection between the two of you in the moment, so sex is about connection, not about perfection. That’s what that technique is all about, is trying to help you realize that even if things aren’t going exactly how you want them to go, even if your body isn’t cooperating exactly with what your brain wants to do, that you can still be connected to your partner and feel intimacy, feel pleasure, have fun, and just be there together.

Chris Rose: And change it up, change up sexual activities, and I think relieving that pressure on intercourse, we talk about this so often of creating a wider repertoire. This can include things like men receiving prostate play, going to hand jobs and oral sex rather than intercourse, having a wider playbook and taking the pressure off of intercourse can be game-changing for people. What role do you see porn having in this? I know this is a sticky conversation and there’s a lot of debate about porn addiction. Do you feel like there’s a link between either the psychological implications of seeing constantly erect penises on demand like bringing that entertainment into an expectation, or is there something going on physiologically with how men are masturbating to porn? Where do you weigh in on that?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. There’s definitely a lot of stuff that gets wrapped up in that. I mean, overall, I do think that porn can be a perfectly healthy, normal part of any individual or any couple’s sex life, but I think it’s just important like with anything else, for us to be thoughtful about the specific ways that we let it into our lives, so I think that a lot of performance anxiety can come from the ways we see sex depicted in porn. I try to be really clear when I’m talking to my clients that porn is meant to be entertainment. Porn is not meant to be a realistic depiction of what sex actually looks like.

Vanessa Marin: It’s the same way as the way we see love and romance in the movies. It’s meant to be entertainment. It’s not really how it actually works in real life. I think that if you’re watching a lot of porn, it can be easy to forget that, and you kind of start to think, “This is what sex is supposed to look like. This is what I’m supposed to do.”

Vanessa Marin: I do think that porn, we’re lucky that we have much more varied porn these days, so you are seeing more activities, a wider range of things happening. There’s a really exciting sub-genre of like indie porn, filmmakers who are trying to make much more realistic porn, which I really love, but I do think most of your mainstream porn is pretty focused on a rock-hard penis and moving straight along into intercourse as quickly as possible, so I do think there’s risk of a feeling like that’s what’s expected of you, that’s how you need to perform, is like this porn star who has the benefit of camera angles and multiple takes, and all sorts of other tricks and techniques for making the film look good. Then, yeah, in terms of the way that you masturbate, I do think that that can be a big issue for a lot of men, is that porn is fun to watch. It’s fun to watch two beautiful people doing really sexy things with each other, and I think one of the risks of that though is it can be very easy to get so focused on what we’re watching on the screen that we lose touch with our own bodies, what’s going on in our own bodies, and so a lot of men will tell me, “Yeah, when I’m watching porn, I’m kind of lost in that scene. I’m not really even paying attention that much to what I’m doing”, so that can lead to a lot of issues that develop when you’re trying to be with a partner, anywhere from not feeling turned on because you don’t have that really intense, explicit visual stimulation to just not understanding what happens in your body as you start to build up arousal and near orgasm, so it can cost a lot of different issues.

Chris Rose: A lot of the guys we talk to, some of them are experiencing lack of erection when they wanted. Others are experiencing the loss of erection when they get to certain levels of arousal. They almost find that there’s like a ceiling on how much arousal they can feel, and then the anxiety kicks in. What is the nuance there in the difference between being able to get erect in the first place versus losing it midstream?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. I mean, they both really just come down to anxiety, just anxiety surfacing in different ways. A lot of times, I’ll have men tell me that they will lose their erection, sometimes trying to switch sexual positions. Just having some sort of change can retrigger that anxiety of, “Oh, great. I got here, but what happens if I try to switch positions or try to do something a little bit different?”

Vanessa Marin: Sometimes it can happen when the man notices his arousal really starting to increase, that he just starts getting that anxiety kicking in of, “Oh, am I going to be able to maintain this throughout the entire time?”, or he might be feeling anxiety about, “Am I going to orgasm too quickly?”, so I think it just really all comes back to anxiety experienced in different ways.

Chris Rose: What is the word anxiety mean specifically? Like we think about social anxiety, anxiety around flying. How do you define anxiety here?

Vanessa Marin: Oh, that’s a really good question. I actually remember a teacher of mine when I was in grad school describing anxiety as excitement without breath.

Chris Rose: Yes.

Vanessa Marin: I really loved that description. It definitely felt like it fit a lot of different circumstances in my own life, but, yeah, I think anxiety is definitely a sense of there’s a heightened experience that you’re having, there can be a discomfort with it, and I think going along with it, a lot of us lose our contact to ourselves. We lose the sense of grounding, which breath can definitely play a huge role in just helping us feel that connection and feel that grounding, but it can feel extremely uncomfortable for a lot of people. A lot of people can feel like they have to do something. They want to try to get rid of it or fix it or address it, but there’s also this feeling of paralysis or confusion that goes along with it.

Chris Rose: It’s so interesting to really unpack the idea that excitement and anxiety are adjacent and that the excitement we rely on for arousal can quickly flip into an anxiety that shuts it down.

Vanessa Marin: Absolutely. Yeah. I thought it was such a great description, and also a reminder that breath is just one of the best things that we can do whenever we’re feeling anxiety, really just to improve our sexual experience or our life experience. I mean, breathing sounds like, I mean, it is the most fundamental activity that we do as humans, but far too often, we lose our contact to it and we can really experience a lot of different kind of side effects as a result, but breathing is one of the best ways. If you’re in the moment, you’re starting to feel anxious, you’re starting to worry about your performance, all of that. Being able to come back in your body and just take slow, deep, measured breaths is one of the most effective ways to really decrease any sort of issues from going on.

Chris Rose: You are talking to a breath evangelical here.

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. It’s really funny, a lot of times, I’ll have a session with a client and I’ll start talking about breath, and I can kind of see their eyes start to glaze over, or sometimes people will tell me, “It’s just not the sexiest suggestion.”

Chris Rose: Yeah.

Vanessa Marin: A lot of times, people are looking for me to give them some magical technique like, “Okay. Well, here’s what you do. You tap your right knee with your middle finger three times, and then all your problems are solved.” I know that breathing doesn’t sound very exciting or very sexy, but far too often, it ends up being really the most successful technique that you can employ.

Chris Rose: Then, when people try it, they realize how magical it is.

Vanessa Marin: Yup.

Chris Rose: It’s so deceptive and how simple it is.

Vanessa Marin: Yeah.

Chris Rose: We teach erotic breathwork in our Mindful Sex course, and I know you include Mindfulness in your course. What do you see as the correlation between mindfulness and sexuality?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. I think mindfulness is just a really great way for us to practice coming more into our bodies and just getting more grounded and more connected to ourselves. I think pretty much every single person that you talk to has had the experience of their brain feeling like it’s racing, their thoughts feeling kind of out of control, and not knowing how to sort of settle that all back down and come back into themselves and feel more grounded, more present in the moment. Mindfulness to me is a way to practice, practice that slowing down, and to really be conscious and purposeful about trying to train yourself to be that way, recognizing that we’re basically training ourselves all day every day to be very distracted, and scattered, and multitasking, and all of this stuff, and that it’s really important for us to balance that out with making a conscious effort to come back into ourselves, into our bodies and into our breath.

Chris Rose: Then, the piece of bringing non-judgment to our sexualities is the work of a lifetime.

Vanessa Marin: Oh, yeah.

Chris Rose: I think one of the things that we don’t talk about a lot with male sexuality is histories of sexual trauma, and I’m wondering how often this surfaces in your sessions where when you start unpacking the root causes of performance pressure, you start uncovering traumatic experiences that men have not had the opportunity to work through. Is this something you see?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. It is something that I see, and I think it’s not something that we talk about very often as a society, so that can lead to a lot of stress and anxiety for men who have had those kinds of experiences, that when we talk about sexual trauma and sexual abuse, we talk about women, and so a lot of men feel very left out of this conversation and like their experiences aren’t validated or aren’t real even in a sense.

Chris Rose: Yeah.

Vanessa Marin: I’ve definitely worked with a good number of sexual abuse survivors who are male, and they all talk about that same sort of feeling like, “I feel like I’m the only person who’s experienced this. I feel like such an outcast or such a freak in a way”, so I think it’s just so harmful and really unfortunate that we don’t give that more attention and more awareness because sexual abuse, we know regardless of the gender of the person that it’s perpetrated against is incredibly harmful, so it’s definitely something that we need to talk more about, that we need to have more resources about and more awareness about.

Chris Rose: Yeah. Yeah, I just am constantly fighting this idea that men sexuality is simple and easy for men, because those of us kind of behind the curtain see such complexity and such depth of emotion behind sex, that we don’t often give men the benefit of the doubt that they have. What do you want people to know from all of your years of working with men, with women, with couples?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah.

Chris Rose: What do you want men to know about their sexuality?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. I think you started talking about it right there, is that it’s just as complex and nuanced as female sexuality is, that it’s okay for men to have their own struggles, their own challenges, their own insecurities and anxieties, and it’s important to recognize those things and to give yourself the time and the space to work through them, because the more that you pressure yourself to have this performance perfectionism and to behave in these ways that you think are expected of you, the more you cut out the entirety of your experience, and cutting off parts of yourself, not allowing certain parts of yourself to be expressed, and there’s really so much to explore. There’s so much to sexuality beyond having a rock-hard penis or a perfectly timed orgasm.

Chris Rose: That kind of is the question like, why not just take Viagra? Wouldn’t that solve everything? Like how do you relate to Viagra as a tool rather than a solution?

Vanessa Marin: I think that Viagra is fantastic for men who have purely physiological reasons why they’re not able to get hard, so it’s a great drug and I know there are a lot of men whose lives have been changed by it. The problem is that we are prescribing it to men who don’t have purely physiological reasons for their erectile issues, and Viagra doesn’t work in those circumstances. Not only that, but I’ve worked with a fair number of men who have taken Viagra, thinking it’s this sure thing. It’s a guaranteed erection, and then when it doesn’t work for them, it creates even more anxiety and more fear, so I think it’s just it’s really important for us to recognize when it’s actually supposed to be used and recognizing that it doesn’t apply to probably a vast majority of the situations of erectile issues, that there are lots of other reasons that men might experience problems with that, with his his erection, and Viagra is not going to be the cure for all of those.

Chris Rose: Doing this deeper work, from the people you’ve worked with that have done this journey who have worked through the course and made these kind of attitudinal shifts, what are some of the outcomes you’re seeing beyond, “I’m able to get erect more frequently?” What are the reports from the field?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. The reports are really talking about a widening experience of what sexuality can really be, of what sex can really be. A lot of men will come back to me and say, “I had such a narrow view of what sex could be for me and of what I was capable of. I was so focused on these very specific aspects of it”, so really, this just kind of the whole horizon opens up of recognizing that there’s so much more, and not only are these other expressions of sexuality. These are not second best, like if you can’t get hard, you can do this stuff.

Vanessa Marin: If you can’t orgasm at the right time, you can do this stuff, but that it’s actually much more meaningful, much more pleasurable. That always excites me to hear that, and I think a lot of men also tell me that they developed a different kind of relationship with their body, that they felt like previously, it felt like they were always fighting with their body. On totally different teams, they were opponents, and now that they felt like they had more connection to their own bodies, a deeper understanding of their own bodies, and that really permeated through a lot of different parts of their lives. I’ve had a lot of clients talk to me about even physical pain issues, that once they learned this different way of relating to their body, they were also able to address the pain in a different way, so it goes beyond sex, which is really awesome and exciting to hear.

Chris Rose: Thank you so much for putting together this course. It’s so nice to have a resource to recommend to our community who are struggling with these issues, and it’s just beautifully comprehensive and I really highly recommend it, and I am excited to talk to you about your other offerings down the road.

Vanessa Marin: Great. Yeah, thank you so much.

Chris Rose: We will link up to the course in the show notes page and over at PleasureMechanics.com. Vanessa Marin, thank you so much for being with us.

Vanessa Marin: Thank you for having me.

Chris Rose: All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Vanessa. Please remember to check out her course. The link is on the show notes page over at PleasureMechanics.com. If you have any questions about performance anxiety or want to share your story of how it shows up for you and your experience of it, please get in touch with us.

Chris Rose: We will be recording a follow-up episode next week where Charlotte and I will continue this conversation, so get us your questions about performance anxiety, and the best way to do that is to join the community at Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics. P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/PleasureMechanics. This is where we are kind of creating the Pleasure Mechanics online community, and you can be in touch with us and ask questions, and get kind of first dibs at our email box because the truth is as the show has grown, I get hundreds and hundreds of emails a day, and so sometimes, it can take me months to respond to them if I ever get around to them at all, and I’m sorry if I have not responded to your email, but those of you who show your support for this show, even with a dollar a month, we appreciate it. Join our Patreon community and you have direct access to us, and we can respond to those questions and comments and ideas right away. Come on over to Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics, and join us there.

Chris Rose: We will be back with you next week to continue this conversation about conquering performance anxiety, which I think is a cultural project and a personal one. It has to operate on both levels. I hope today’s episode shed some light on your experience, and I would love to hear from you. We’ll be back with you next week with another episode of the Speaking Of Sex with Pleasure Mechanics Podcast. I’m Chris from PleasureMechanics.com. Cheers.

Female Performance Anxiety

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Women can suffer from performance anxiety too! Here’s how to overcome female performance anxiety!

In this episode about female performance anxiety, we cover:

how female performance anxiety is different from male performance anxiety
how to slow things down so you can enjoy sex more
different types of performance anxiety and how they show up
making vulnerability sexy rather than scary
how mindful sex practices can help you overcome performance anxiety

Here is the email that inspired this episode. If you have a question or topic you want covered on a future Speaking of Sex episode, be in touch! Click here for a complete podcast archive.

Hi friends

Thank you for this amazing opportunity to engage, share, learn and talk. I just discovered your site recently and am loving the info you provide and the way in which you do.

So here’s my question:

I recently broke up with my boyfriend after 6 years. We had a great sexlife; he made me come often and well. After my grieving period came to an end I started masturbating and I come quickly and beautifully. Sometimes in 3-5 minutes.

I’ve had sex with two men since and have not come with either- I’m anxious, nervous- what am I doing wrong? I even touch myself but I never reach quite the same pleasure mark as I do when I’m on my own or indeed as I used to with my partner. Sigh.

Please help.

Thank you.

I dedicate my first orgasm with a man to all of you sex angels.

Transcript of Podcast Episode on Female Performance Anxiety

Chris: 00:01 Hi, welcome to Speaking of Sex with The Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte: 00:05 I’m Charlotte.

Chris: 00:06 We are The Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we share expert advice so you can have an amazing sex life. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com where you will find a complete podcast archive as well as a wealth of resources for you to peruse.

Chris: 00:24 When you are ready to jumpstart your sex life go to pleasuremechanics.com/free and sign up for one of our free mini courses so we can deliver our best sex advice straight to your inbox, and when you’re ready to master new erotic skills, checkout our premium online courses where we guide you stroke by stroke in mastering new skills like foreplay, couple’s massage, or even erotic spanking.

Chris: 00:52 Be sure to use the code speaking of sex for 20% off the course of your choice. On today’s episode, we are going to be talking about female performance anxiety. We often think about performance anxiety as something men have to deal with, but we got an email from one of our listeners reminding us that women too can have performance anxiety. And let’s see how it plays out.

Chris: 01:18 Charlotte’s going to get us started by reading the questions submitted by our listener.

Charlotte: 01:23 She writes, “Hi friends. Thank you for this amazing opportunity to engage, learn, and talk. I just discovered your site recently and I am loving the information you provide and the way in which you do. Here’s my question. I recently broke up with my boyfriend after to six years.

Charlotte: 01:44 We had a great sex life. He made me come often and well. After to my grieving period came to an end, I started masturbating and I come quickly and beautifully. Sometimes in three to five minutes. I’ve had sex with two men since and I’ve not come with either. I’m anxious, nervous. What am I doing wrong?

Charlotte: 02:05 I even touch myself, but I never reach quite the same pleasure mark as I do when I’m on my own or indeed as I used to with my partner. Please help. Thank you. I dedicate my first orgasm with a man to all of you sex angels.

Chris: 02:23 Thank you.

Charlotte: 02:25 I like being a sex angel.

Chris: 02:30 Immediately what was interesting to me about this is when we think about performance anxiety in men, we think about the anxiety and the emotions that shutdown erection, thus performance, and this is the construct of sex that we think about is if you don’t have an erection, you can’t have intercourse, therefore you can’t perform, therefore you are a failure.

Chris: 02:52 And we’ve taken that apart and previous episodes and our advice is to move on with different activities, to use your hands, your mouth, to take the pressure off the erection. But this listener is talking about performance anxiety when it comes to pleasure. Like she’s still able to receive intercourse and so we wouldn’t name it like performance anxiety, but her experience of sex, her pleasure, her orgasm is inhibited by her anxiety.

Chris: 03:24 She actually used the term performance anxiety. It was in the subject line of her email. And so that’s why I made that connection at all. I wouldn’t have approached this as performance anxiety.

Charlotte: 03:37 I think this is a really fascinating and important subject to look at and for us to reflect on because there isn’t an overt erection for women, we don’t necessarily think about them performing. I’m having trouble with performance anyway because I feel like it’s not about performance and we talk about it in a million other podcasts, but we can’t see that something isn’t working, like the arousal system isn’t working in the way that one might hope and expect or one’s used to.

Chris: 04:10 I sometimes wish that female arousal like it was like at the carnival and you lit up the lights and then it was like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding and then intercourse is possible and like the pearly gates opened only when the arousal was enough like then it would be like, “Oh she didn’t perform it, only got to level three,” and I think guys would maybe like take it more seriously to get women aroused before penetration.

Chris: 04:31 This is the first episode of this podcast we ever did was about female arousal before penetration and intercourse. Like we feel really strongly about this subject, and we’ve talked about it a lot, but there’s no visual cue for a lot of people and there’s no marker of is she turned on enough to move forward with this sex act. And so-

Charlotte: 04:53 Because wetness is not a marker. Sometimes people think that it is and it’s not correlated to arousal or not being aroused. That is one of the main markers that people use and-

Chris: 05:06 Oh, she’s so wet, she was ready for it.

Charlotte: 05:08 Which isn’t necessarily the case.

Chris: 05:09 But for this person’s experience, for a lot of women’s experience, the deed of sex, the act of sex is not pleasurable, is not worth it and can even be painful or distressing if they’re not into it enough, if they’re not aroused enough to enjoy it. And so when we think about female sexual performance, we should really be thinking about female sexual pleasure and arousal and orgasm and how well the act is working for them as well.

Chris: 05:40 Let’s dive into this listener’s question. And what’s awesome about all of the questions that we receive from you is that no one’s alone in their struggle. So we get a lot of emails from women about orgasm during sex and not having orgasms with partners, even though they’re having orgasms during masturbation, and why is that?

Chris: 05:57 Let’s talk about this because what her information tells me is that the system is working. She’s having orgasms alone. And just like when we talk about male erection and we’d look at morning erections and erections during masturbation, just to see if the plumbing is working. Like that’s the baseline assessment. And so what she’s communicated to us and what so many women say is, “I can have orgasms, just not with my partner.”

Chris: 06:26 So we know that the system is working, her nerve endings are working, orgasms are possible. Where to from there?

Charlotte: 06:34 And then that you’ve had the experience of having orgasms with a partner. You know that that system can work. It’s just this new partner situation and I read it as there’re all these other emotional layers that are happening in a new relationship where perhaps there isn’t the trust or there isn’t the comfort or there isn’t the knowledge that they really admire and like you in this way that your previous partner had expressed and you guys had that understanding.

Charlotte: 07:06 It’s just there’s an emotional experience that is perhaps in the way of the orgasm. And we talked about this in the Turn Offs and Turn On podcast recently.

Chris: 07:20 Yes. If you haven’t already listened to episode 227 about the dual model control of arousal that is definitely relevant here. And the dual model control of arousal tells us that there are things that excite us and contribute to the arousal, your gas pedal. And there are things that inhibit us and detract from your arousal, your brake pedal.

Chris: 07:42 It sounds to me like the brakes are on and so when you’re adding the usual stimulation of touching your clitoris, that additional excitation isn’t enough to bring you to orgasm because you’re slamming on the brakes. So what are some possible breaks in this scenario?

Charlotte: 08:00 Just the newness of the relationship and not necessarily trusting them or knowing where the relationships going, not feeling the same level of connection.

Chris: 08:11 Well, she talks about anxiety, so an active anxiety means she’s worried about do they find her attractive? Is this a sex they want? Are they going to stick around for a relationship? What does this mean? Like all of those questions that go through our head with a new partner. Some of which are exciting and thrilling and build anticipation and others are kind of terrifying.

Chris: 08:32 Like you’re literally getting naked with someone new and exposing yourself and being vulnerable with someone new, and so of course your anxieties are flaring up. I think especially when you get out of a longterm relationship, you’ve been nestled in that cocoon of security and love and now you’re out in the world and dealing with life alone without a partner and dating and whether or not you’re just casually dating and exciting to be having sex with multiple people or you’re looking for your next partner, there’s still a vulnerability that comes with not having a secure partnership with the person you’re having sex with.

Chris: 09:10 And some of that is really exciting as I said, and some of it is scary, and so you really need to do an inventory of what your emotional states are with each new partner. In the meantime, I would recommend slowing it down, and I want to get there, but you keep mentioning this word trust. What does trust and orgasm have to do with each other?

Charlotte: 09:34 I think that for a lot of people having an experience of connection or trust can really allow one’s body to relax, and with that that can be more pleasure available.

Chris: 09:50 Yes, we know relaxation is essential for orgasm and what levels of trust are we talking about? So trust that they’re going to touch you well and not hurt you, trust that they are who they say they are and are they being authentic?

Charlotte: 10:07 Trust about where the relationship’s going, there can be concerns about STI or pregnancy, however you’re navigating that in a new relationship-

Chris: 10:15 Which might be a huge anxiety producer and like we shouldn’t glaze over that.

Charlotte: 10:19 No, it can be huge for some people absolutely.

Chris: 10:21 And just a side note, we don’t talk about sexually transmitted infections or unwanted pregnancies a lot on this podcast. We don’t really consider ourselves health professionals, we’re not trained medically. And so when we get questions about that, we refer you out to people who are experts in these topics, and a lot of our listeners are in dedicated longterm relationships and so we don’t talk about STI prevention and the sexual health side of things very often, but it is super important.

Chris: 10:53 If you’re navigating sex with new partners, preventing infection, preventing unwanted pregnancies is one of the highest anxiety producing things you have to navigate. And so making sure you are well educated about these things, that you have methods that you rely on, you know how they work and that you’re comfortable enough with them, that you can use them during sex, and if you have an infection, like so many people do, such as herpes or warts or something like that, that’s just kind of a chronic infection you have to know your own body well enough to know if you’re having a flare up, if you’re contagious or if you’re in remission, and then how to talk about that with new partners.

Chris: 11:36 We are going to try to tackle this topic soon. Bring in an expert on the topic because we don’t want to pretend like it’s not there, but if you’re having any anxiety about unwanted transmission of babies or diseases, then that of course is going to prevent you from having orgasms. It’s going to be distracting you. It’s going to be creating a fear response in your body. So yes, that’s huge.

Chris: 12:01 And then I think just the personal element of like, “Who am I fucking?” Like who is this person I’m letting into my body? Do they deserve to be in my body? Do they deserve to be my bed? Do I want to be naked with them? Sometimes we find ourselves having sex before we’re ready.

Chris: 12:15 A lot of adults kind of go through the bases. It’s like they kiss, they fondle, they do some touchy, touchy, maybe some oral sex and then they have intercourse. Like it’s this just natural progression of activities that you go through with each new partner, and I really want to encourage you to slow it down and not have sex with people so quickly even if you want to.

Chris: 12:38 I’m not saying be a prude and hold out. Even if you really want to be having sex, slow it down and see how that affects your anxiety. Keep your clothes on for a little while, stay in the make out session and notice what your body does when you slow down. Does it start relaxing into the person’s presence? Are you building that trust? Are you building the kind of communication where you feel like you can melt into the person’s embrace in the way that we have to do when we want to have orgasms with a partner?

Chris: 13:12 Because I think those are the orgasms of the partner that people are seeking. I think there’s this other way of having orgasms with a partner that you can use the friction and take your mind somewhere and distract herself from all the anxieties that you’re rubbing up against one another and using the friction as a sex toy kind of thing, and then you have orgasms in one another’s presence, but it’s not really together.

Chris: 13:35 You know what I mean?

Charlotte: 13:36 I do. That’s-

Chris: 13:38 Another-

Charlotte: 13:39 It’s nuanced. I think that excitement is so close to nervousness and anxiety. Fear is excitement without breath is what they say. Meaning the states of fear and the state of excitement are very similar in the body. The difference is when you’re excited, you’re a little bit relaxed as well, and you’re breathing fully and you’re able to stay present in the moment.

Charlotte: 14:04 When you’re afraid, you tense up around that excitement, your breath constricts, and you start going into the worry and the fear and the projected reality of what’s in the future. Like you can’t really be afraid in the present moment and be relaxed at the same time.

Charlotte: 14:23 Breathe baby, breathe. Breathe, and see if you can stay in the excitement realm, and if that means taking off less clothes or just doing play with your hands so that you’re exploring orgasm or exploring arousal together, but not necessarily having intercourse. Like maybe that could be a way that you’re exploring the connection and the excitement of building more trust, but keeping it exciting instead of anxiety producing.

Chris: 14:51 Yeah, for me, if I was writing the rules of sex from the ground up, I would recommend that everyone has orgasms with new partners before having any sort of penetrative intercourse.

Charlotte: 15:02 Yeah, that would be awesome. I think teenagers that’d be awesome also. Does a whole other stuff.

Chris: 15:08 It’s just a game changer. I don’t feel like someone’s genitals should be inside your body before you’ve gained that level of communication. And I say orgasm, I really mean high states of arousal. Some people cannot have the climax of orgasm, but they can get to high states of arousal that feel really great and cathartic if that’s where you’re at, great, but see how it feels for yourself to rewrite your own rules and slow it down and try to have orgasms with new partners before intercourse.

Chris: 15:42 Try all the other ways of engaging all the other things you can do. If you need help, check out our foreplay mastery course, but try to reach that level of intimacy and communication and relaxation with a new partner before you have intercourse and then see how the intercourse feels.

Charlotte: 16:00 Or go on more dates before you take off your clothes. I know that’s a crazy idea, but-

Chris: 16:07 She hasn’t really give us information about-

Charlotte: 16:08 Totally, but I think it’s just this point of like creating more of an experience of relaxation and trust before you’re trying to have an orgasm. Because if that’s what your body is needing … Like your body can have orgasms, you know how to do this. It’s really about it not feeling totally safe or this trust worth that I keep putting it to use.

Charlotte: 16:30 That’s I think the piece. And there’s nothing wrong with that, that this newness can be exciting, but trying to explore in the exciting realm instead of in the anxiety producing realm. And so doing what you need to do to create that situation, whether that’s more dating beforehand or more play that isn’t intercourse as Chris is suggesting.

Chris: 16:51 Well one thing we haven’t talked about is the partner’s skills, and so that’s of course this huge other factor is, is the partner you’re having desirable, sexy, exciting to you? Are they touching you well? Are they talking to you well? All of those things are in that sexual excitation category and then each new partner brings their own things in that inhibition breaks category.

Chris: 17:17 There is an element here where you might have to sleep with a few people before you find your next great partner.

Charlotte: 17:23 Yeah. And that can be part of the adventure and the fun.

Chris: 17:27 And there’s this balance here because I think our culture tells us, just find the right partner and everything will be okay. We know better than that. We know that there’s a lot to work on in your own sexuality, in your own relationship with your body to be able to have great sex, no matter who you’re with.

Chris: 17:41 You can be with the most skilled, sexy, amazing partner in the world and not have any fun if you don’t bring certain things to the table. The big advice here is to start managing your inhibitions, managing your emotional anxiety so you can be fully present, relaxed and aware as you’re having sex with new people and can start determining who you want to have sex with more often and invite back into your bedroom and into your body.

Chris: 18:10 And so do that by slowing things down, taking things one step at a time, focusing on your breathing. Breath is always good in the bedroom and in this case will help you stay relaxed and focused on the present moment, and notice what emotional anxieties are coming up. What can you deal with and what do you need to just be friends with and set aside and get back to your erotic experience.

Chris: 18:35 If it’s things like pregnancy, then you can deal with that by coming up with contraceptive methods that work for you. If it’s things like body image or emotional concerns about where the relationship is going, you may just have to gently make friends with that, set it aside and notice it’s there, but not let it overwhelm your erotic experience.

Chris: 18:58 Really just be gentle with yourself. You’re in a very significant process here of opening up to new intimacy after a six year relationship. That’s a big deal. So be kind to yourself as you move through this process and keep masturbating. I was so happy to read that part of it. Keep taking care of your own sexual needs. Keep exploring your arousal, keep exploring your fantasies and know that that is all fuel you’re going to bring into your next great love affair with a partner.

Charlotte: 19:30 And know that it makes total sense that your emotions are inhibiting your arousal, that that is an extremely reasonable and sensible thing that is happening in your body and in your experience of your sexuality right now. I love Chris’s advice of make friends with the emotions that you are noticing and see if that helps calm them so that you can be present to the physical experience and the excitement of what perhaps is happening.

Chris: 20:01 Let us know what works for you. We love hearing from you, and any other listener that’s having an experience where strong emotions are affecting arousal systems, we want to hear your story and what’s going on for you. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com and explore the site and go to pleasuremechanics.com/hello to leave us a voicemail message or send us an email and let us know what’s going on for you.

Chris: 20:28 We love hearing from you. I’m Chris.

Charlotte: 20:31 I’m Charlotte.

Chris: 20:32 We are The Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte: 20:33 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

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Performance Anxiety: Free Podcast Episode

Performance anxiety affects almost all men at one point or another. It can be a crippling force that drains all the fun out of sex.

In this episode (simply hit the “play” button above!) we explore performance anxiety and how to transform your experience of performance anxiety in your sex life.

Performance Anxiety Is Not Medical Erectile Dysfunction

Your first step is to check for any medical reasons. Do you ever get fully hard? Do you have morning erections? during masturbation? If so, equipment is working. If not, go talk to doctor.

Steps To Overcome Performance Anxiety

Detox From Sexual Past
- How much power do past events have over you now?
Redefine Performance
- What makes a sexual engagement successful
Redefine Erection
Actively Reduce Anxiety
Know How To Please Her

That’s the key to managing performance anxiety. Notice that you’re worrying and then do something about it. Simple. But not always easy. It requires practice. Lots and lots of practice. ~ Emily Nagoski

Practice During Masturbation

Get off computer and into body
Learn the edging technique (part of Foreplay Mastery) to discover how to pay close attention to where you are in your arousal cycle
Separate ejaculation from orgasm, and become multi orgasmic

Practice During Partnered Sex

Develop split attention
Focus on own sensation and partner’s pleasure at same time

Performance Anxiety Advice For Partners:

His erection is not about your desirability
Don’t create drama. It will make things worse.
Switch activities. Focus on the rest of his body or invite him to pleasure you!