Forgiving Myself: Bad Sex Secrets of a Sexpert (3)

This is Part 3 of 3. You can go also back and read Part 1 and Part 2.

Jeremy and I had such a great, dirty, rock-n-roll how-we-met story: I was representing an altporn company I model for by wrestling other half-naked porn chicks in fake blood and he was wearing only a saran wrap loincloth and playing in a band that preceded the blood wrestling. We met back stage, we made out, I took him home with me and we fucked like wild animals, fueled by liquor, rock n roll and the stains of fake blood. And then a weird thing happened: he called me afterwards and we had dinner and started dating.

Obviously, part of the reason he was into me was because he’d first seen me wrestling a girl in fake blood while wearing rubber underwear. This, I could deal with. I was relieved that we’d started out by fucking – now that we had that secured as a good thing, I was a bit more relaxed about getting to know the person behind the cock. What I wasn’t prepared for was how quickly the sex would get downright bad.

Now, despite my bit on Jack, I will have you know that it is not rocket science to get me off – I am one of those rare women who is capable of vaginal, or more accurately g-spot, orgasms. Through some combination of drunkenness and the fact that I hadn’t gotten laid since my breakup with Gracie two months earlier, the first time Jeremy and I fucked I came like crazy – but I guess I used up all the orgasms I was allotted in that one night. When Jeremy failed to satisfy on, I very tactfully made some suggestions about his technique; hell, I made my guidance sound like dirty talk. And he almost got it.

But then, the next time we had sex – fifteen minutes later – it was back to the same old thing, that thing that didn’t work for me. It went on like this, like a horrible broken record, me gently correcting him, and him generally mis-fucking me for hours. I began faking it, something I’d never done with a consistent partner, so he would just get off of me already. Unbelievable but true – I couldn’t keep up with him.

Lying in bed after a particularly awful, pussy-chapping fuck session, Jeremy put his arm around me and confessed that I’d been giving him the best sex of his life. The look on my face could only have been one of complete horror, though he didn’t seem to notice it. How was it possible that I was gritting my teeth and thinking of the queen while he was having the best sex ever? This seemed to me the ultimate in bad sex – sex that some else thinks is great. I found myself making excuses to avoid sex with him, angrily masturbating while he showered and thinking that maybe I understood why some many couples go sexless.

After these unfortunate and harrowing experiences all reared their ugly heads within a six month time span, I began to seriously wonder what damn business I had advising other people on sexual matters and how I could keep getting up in the morning and playing sexy for my clients and for photographers when I couldn’t get my fuck on with my own damn partners. My sense of rhythm was clearly off, I had hang ups that prevented me from fucking my hot girlfriend, and I couldn’t communicate my sexual needs to my boyfriend in a useful way. What kind of sexpert has awful sex all the time?

Perhaps the very thing that made me into fuckable commodity – the hype surrounding me as a sex worker, model and all-around slut – was exactly what was making my sex life unbearable. I had this dirty secret of bad sex because I felt I had an image to uphold. Though I was starting to see that maybe the hype was impossible to live up to, I still wasn’t cutting myself any slack

At brunch with a friend who also works in the sex industry, I confided in her and told her about my difficulties with Jeremy and the other partners I’d had recently. She started laughing, and by way of explanation, said that she’d been through the exact same thing with her long-term boyfriend. She said it wasn’t at all glamorous or hot, but they had worked through it ever so slowly, with no small amount of yelling and crying. Though not exactly encouraging, it made me feel better to know that I wasn’t alone in bad sex. My friend suggested I bring up this conversation with other sex people we know, and they surprised me by having similar tales of woe.

Porn performers, erotica writers, and sex educators I knew all had the same kind of wryly bitter and sometimes hilarious stories. Although at surface it appears that these ladies have a more impressive array of hot sex options than your average person, like me they had plenty of awkward and downright awful misadventures. Try as we might to separate our private sexual selves from our professional and public personas, we all found it really difficult to not feel that it was our professional duty to have interesting, good, communicative and boundary-pushing sex all the time. All of us felt guilty when we had bad or even just boring sex, as if we weren’t doing our part to live up to expectations.

Ultimately though, we were falling into the trap of stereotyping ourselves, believing the hype that we should be perfect sexual beings: hot, knowledgeable, sexually infallible. As immersed as I am in a life of sex, it probably is okay to have lousy experiences, though of course I’d rather not. Bad sex is a part of human sexuality. No amount of knowledge about sex can eradicate bad sex entirely, but maybe with effort and a little self-forgiveness, I can reduce its hold on me.