Sunday, September 19, 2010
I haven’t been able to quickly find the survey I read a few years ago, but I’m going to cite it now and come back and amend this entry with a link later…
A large, popular sex survey was done by some Canadian magazine a few years ago, and it had a lot of interesting results (because hello… it was a sex survey…) but there was one statistic that leapt from the screen and branded itself in my mind.
In response to the question, “Would you like more intensity in your sexual experiences?” Thousands of respondents seized their pens and gave one common response in thundering unison: Yes!!!
100% of respondents to this survey said “Yes, I would like more intensity in my sexual experiences, thank you very much.” My thoughts spun around that universal agreement and has continued to do so ever since… It was a very straightforward question. It didn’t ask, “Are you dissatisfied?” It just asked if you would like more intensity.
Twenty years ago, I sat in a 12-step meeting listening to a bunch of drunks and drug addicts sharing about their recovery and one guy said something that similarly made a lasting impression: “I’m not addicted to ’drugs,’ What I’m really addicted to is ’more!’”
The two ideas seem related to me. Okay, the two ideas are obviously related, although one references sexual experience in general and one references a behavioral disorder. What I know is, these statements are true for me in both contexts. I would also like more intensity in my sex and I am addicted, for want of a better word, to “more” in all areas of my life. I want more food, more money, more love, more clothes, more muscles, more sex, more semen when I cum, more men shooting their loads all over my body…
Forgive my related tangent… There’s a lot to chew on in the assertion that all people want more intensity from sex, so I will just chew on this one little morsel over here: Safe sex is, reputedly, less intense than unsafe sex, and is therefore counter to our natures (unless it includes some measure of increasing excitement, in spite of the apparent nature of safer sex, and safety in general, being the quality of “boring”).
“Safe” is sometimes used interchangeably with “boring.” What we experience as excitement is actually our reaction to a symphony of chemical reactions in our bodies that include adrenaline and insulin and cortisol and testosterone and a mad soup of hormones and enzymes and… stuff… that makes us react to life. It seems the top cause of excitement is threat, a sudden perception of danger that puts us into response mode.
So there is something inherently more exciting in the moment a bare cock slides into your ass than in the experience of a becondomed cock making its benign entry…
Dog bites man: Danger is thrilling. Lack of danger doesn’t make those same chemicals pump into our veins and so “safe” sex has less appeal because… we all want MORE INTENSITY.
Oh sure, we can settle for safer sex, for a primary focus on the elimination of threat and taboo, but if we’re going to continue to experience the fleeting satisfaction of sexual excitement, we have to find ways of not being TOO safe… of taking responsible sexuality to a more exciting level without genuinely endangering ourselves…
I think this is actually part of why jack off clubs can work well for some people, the key element of newness, the natural “not 100% safe” feeling we get with a stranger’s cock in our hands allows us a modicum of thrill… There’s also the disorientation—for the newbie, anyway—of group sex, but even community sex, social sex practice when one is accustomed to seeing sex as an exclusively very private act…
We are, thankfully, not wired to be excited only by danger. Evolution has provided us with a long menu of options for feeling excitement… Like shaking up a routine, changing roles, changing scenes, changing partners… As the manager of a JO club, I consider these drives in the context of running a successful non-profit business, sustaining a community…
I think there’s a lot I understand about men and the way they relate to each other as friends, lovers and casual sexmates, and so I do not take it personally when relatively few men are consistent members of the club, but come and go, sometimes disappearing for weeks, months or years only to reappear later, fatter or thinner or stronger or weaker or very much the same… but just ready to experience some excitement from the experience again. Many can do that with a JO club.
This is why the Jacks has, by design, a loose architecture of rules, that allow some latitude and encourage exploration within some boundaries. This is why most clubs deemphasize the “safe” aspect of the sex and instead focus on the kink part, the thing that’s fun for us rather than the no-fun things we are being safe from…
I’d be interested in comments related to bringing more intensity to shared masturbation. God knows, a lot of men continue to find ways of adding intensity to solosex… What do you think?