Everyone's Telling You How to Fuck. There Is No Right Way.

Many of us are painfully familiar with the proscriptive aspects of our culture when it comes to pleasure. Cultural linchpins like don't masturbate – you'll ruin yourself for a future (currently entirely hypothetical) partner. Or you'll go to hell. You'll be a slut. You'll stretch your vagina out. It's dirty.

For those of us who have had the opportunity, privilege, and desire to start moving through that haze of bias over our pleasure, many people are experiencing a void. If I shouldn't avoid pleasure, how do I do it right?

Enter prescriptive pleasure. AKA – This is how to do pleasure right; and if you aren't doing that, you're doing it wrong. This time, the call is coming from all over: from Christian married couples, to sex toy vendors, to the manosphere to ritual practitioners.

There is a case for hyperbole here: In any sort of advertising, there is an effort to convince customers to execute a call to action. Therefore, writing things like "If you're not fulfilled, it's because you touch yourself wrong" can be eye catching. It also, unfortunately, robs a complex topic of all its nuance and distills our sexualities into one drop: They know what we need. It also places us exactly back where we were in the proscriptive era: the non-experts on our own bodies.

Pleasure, by its very nature, is subjective. It's a delicate and perfect bundle of personal experiences, physical realities, culture, society, time and place, and fantasy. It reacts to its environment. Much like all of us, it shrinks when it's told what to do and blossoms under acceptance and curiosity.

Can anyone but you know what you need sexually?

In long... Kind of, in the context of sex education.

In short... Absolutely fucking not.

In the absence of fact-based sex education, we glean hints from each other (who are unfortunately equally uninformed). For instance, the upswing in choking among youth having casual sex is directly related to internet videos normalizing this type of behaviour. Nobody educated them, so the algorithm did it instead. Fact-based sex education changes lives. Research consistently shows that it reduces risky behaviour (like said choking), increases contraceptive use, decreases unwanted pregnancy, and even improves attitudes toward gender equity. Crucially, it doesn't tell people what to want; it tells them how bodies and relationships can work, and then gets out of the way.

Which is exactly where prescriptive pleasure loses the plot.

If sex ed is helpful, what's the problem with prescriptive pleasure?

Here's the rub. There is a fundamental difference between teaching facts about bodies and relationships and saying "this is how yours should work." Here are a few examples of the difference.

Most cis women do not orgasm from penetration alone / If you don't orgasm from penetration, you aren't attracted to your partner.

It is normal to experience phases of low libido / If your libido is low, it's because your cortisol is messed up.

Arousal non-concordance, or your body's arousal not lining up with your mental arousal state, is totally normal / If your brain and body aren't agreeing, there is something wrong.

Some people find increased intensity of orgasm using vibrators / You've never had a real orgasm until you have one with a vibrator.

What can I do with that?

Since our bodies and brains are not one-size-fits all, our pleasure can’t be either. While one person may love the feeling of grinding against a pillow, another may absolutely hate it. While someone may adore orgasms with their partner, another may genuinely prefer them solo. While one person may love impact play, another may find it violent. While one person may adore ritualized orgasms, another might find them tedious. The same person may find that through their lives, they go from loving, to hating, and back to loving receiving oral stimulation. 

A great place to start is reading Emily Nagoski's Come As You Are and Come Together. She does an excellent job breaking down why each of us have different turn ons and offs, and how understanding them can lead to more fun. Notably, she doesn't rank sex acts by worth or outcome. As Nagoski puts it: "Pleasure is the measure of sexual wellbeing - it's not about how often you do it, what room you do it in, what positions, how many orgasms you have. It's whether or not you like the sex you are having."