1. Connecting with Your Body

Transcript

Hello, hello. This is Violet, pleasure coach and confidant for your sexual adventures. In this episode, we are going to be talking about performative sex.

So the first question that I want you to ask yourself when you think about the concept of performative sex is, am I worthy of pleasure? Now I doubt you will say no to this question, and this is what this episode comes down to. Do you feel like you are worthy of experiencing pleasure unconditionally? See, oftentimes we put conditions on our pleasure.

We put certain parameters around what should and should not be happening when we are experiencing pleasure or having a sexual experience, right? I should have my legs shaved. I should have my pussy waxed.

I should have makeup on. I shouldn't be menstruating. I should be married, engaged, in love, or in a relationship.

And a lot of these are common stories that you are probably used to telling yourself about when it is acceptable for you to experience pleasure given the conditions of your body or your relationship. And these conditions can show up in a multitude of ways during a sexual experience. So when you don't ask for what you want, or when you don't allow yourself to be loud, or you're insecure about your body and you're hyper-focusing on that, or you don't tell your partner that they're not licking you or touching you the right way, or you don't take breaks when you need to or when you're not feeling 100%, or any lack of communication that doesn't allow you to have a more elevated sexual experience, you deny yourself the potential for more pleasure.

I'm going to say that again. You deny yourself the potential for more pleasure. So let's talk about where we get these messages from or why these are the parameters around which we make our sexual decisions.

These conditions can derive from a multitude of different places, right? Culture, religious upbringing, family, laws, society. But in the context of performative sex, we are going to be talking about porn and the implications of porn as we move through our sexual experiences.

So, sex as we know it. What we've seen in porn or movies is not real sex. And I do want to make a note here that, yes, porn performers are often really having sex.

The physical act of sex is real, but the experience that is portrayed does not depict an organic experience that everyday people have. When porn performers are performing, that is what they are doing. They are performing.

What needs to be remembered about porn is that it is a genre of film. And just like any genre of film, it is meant to evoke an emotion. Horror movies are meant to evoke fear, rom-coms are meant to evoke laughter, and porn is meant to evoke arousal.

That's its job. It simulates sexual interactions in order to evoke arousal in its viewers. And porn performers are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing.

They are focused on how they will be perceived by the audience or external factors. This often translates to our own sexual experiences because for many people, this is the model that we've seen or this is the model that we've mimicked in our sexual experiences. And then we also have times where someone takes this model and uses it on another person and then that person uses it on us.

So it trickles down to us eventually. When we are having our sexual experiences with a partner, a random hookup, or just exploring our own sexuality, we are often worried about external factors. And what exactly do I mean by external factors? How we are perceived by others, how we look to another person, how we sound to another person, how we smell, how we taste, how we feel, right?

And what do all of these things have in common? They are all focused on how other people are perceiving you. And what we forget when this happens is that other people are not the ones in your body having the sexual experience.

This not only takes away from your own pleasure and looking inward during those experiences, but it also takes away from the opportunity for you to understand more deeply what is pleasurable to you. When you use all of your energy to focus on how you are perceived in any way by another person, by your partners, by imaginary people when you're having solo sex, by future partners, by people watching you on the internet, you are putting that energy into making yourself palatable for somebody else and what you're not doing is focusing on how you are feeling internally or what your internal experiences are bringing you. If you're so focused on how much your ass is jiggling or how you sound to another person, how can you focus on what you're feeling in your pussy?

Or how to get closer to an orgasm? Or what sensations in your body feel good for you? Or what areas of your body are erogenous zones for you? When you spend so much time focusing on what you should be and not what you are feeling, you're losing out on the opportunity to understand what is pleasurable for you.

This is also a very goal-oriented perspective, meaning that it is based upon expectations and involves requirements and conditions that need to be met. And I want to remind you, your sex life is not a game of football or a test. It should not have requirements and conditions that need to be met in order to qualify it as good sex.

And this goes for folks who are on both the giving end and the receiving end. If you're someone on the receiving end, how many times have you had someone on the giving end just rigorously rubbing an area of your body or fucking you in a way that doesn't even feel good or just like slathering their tongue on you and not really knowing where it is that is pleasurable for you because they're not paying attention to you? Because they're so focused on mimicking something that they've seen in porn? Or they're so focused on how they look that they're not taking the time to really read your body and what you're receptive to?

Also, if you're on the receiving end and if you are moaning and arching your back and simulating that you are experiencing pleasure, then your partner will think that what they are doing is pleasurable for you. So not only do you deny yourself an opportunity to understand what is pleasurable for you because you're in this kind of simulation, but your partner can't make corrections as to what is bringing you pleasure because they're not getting any feedback that would warrant making corrections so that they can do better for next time. Think about it like a feedback loop, like training an animal.

An animal does a certain behavior. Animal gets a treat or any sort of positive reinforcement. Animal will repeat that behavior.

It's the same thing with our sexual partners because most of the time they want to see us experiencing pleasure, but they might not know how. So we need to be the ones to communicate the needs of our own body, and we are the best people to do that. I can guess what you're probably thinking at this point.

Okay, Violet, how do I even know if I'm performing, right? How do I even know if what I'm doing isn't authentic to what I want to feel? So the first thing that I want you to do is slow down and feel how and if you are doing this.

So how I want you to do this, what I want you to do is strip it down. Strip every behavior you do during a sexual experience down to the bare minimum. Let's take moaning, for example.

Next time you are touching yourself or you're with a partner, try not to make a single sound. For people on the receiving end, moaning is often used to simulate pleasure and kind of make it so their partner thinks that what they are doing is pleasurable, or make themselves look more appealing or attractive to their partner, or possibly because they think they should be moaning when an act is being performed on them. So a really great way to know if moaning is coming from an intrinsic motivation, meaning it's because you want to or you feel like you really, really need to moan, is to just strip it down.

Don't make a single sound until you feel in your body that you can't do anything but let out a moan or a scream or something because your body is filling with so much pleasure and so much pressure that you feel like you need to expel some sort of noise or you're going to explode. That's how you know it's authentic. And this can be applied to a lot of sexual acts.

For example, when you're on the giving end and you're stroking someone's cock or fingering someone, do the same thing. Slow it down. Slow it down until that person is begging you for more, begging you to pleasure them in the way that they want to be pleasured, and then they'll communicate it to you.

They have to tell you what to do next or they'll burst. These are all great ways to begin understanding your body's baseline for pleasure and even begin understanding your own pleasure capacity a little bit better. And I hope you'll be able to take away these tools and experience a different perspective as you move through your journey of sexual exploration.

My name is Violet and you can find me everywhere as TurningViolet. Bye now.