Polly Rayner explores how women can reclaim sex beyond performance and societal expectations.

Do you actually enjoy sex?

Do you come away from it buzzing about what a great time you had, feeling happy, feeling fulfilled? The way you would after a dinner with your girls, or a walk on the Downs? 

Often, women genuinely forget to enjoy sex. We are caught up in performing the ‘perfect lover,’ and forget to actually be the lover, to feel the love. This neglect of our own pleasure is easily done when the build up to sex does anything but centre our desires. 

As women, our foreplay starts not only in the bedroom, but years prior. Long before we get any action, adverts and films and books and little comments all plague us with imaging of the Ideal Sexy Woman. This sort of anti-foreplay serves only to build up stores of anxiety as to what we should look like or how we should act, and to offer us a selection of insecurities. These internalised, unattainable standards that the media plants inside us are ripe and ready for when it actually comes down to taking your clothes off. Am I skinny enough? Am I curvy  enough? Am I good enough at this? Am I too good at this? Do they like me? 

How about: ‘Is this any fun?’

It probably isn’t, if the previous questions are on your mind. 

Sex as a woman involves an unwanted voyeur – the judgemental gaze of a society that constantly deems us not quite sexy enough. And we’re always sharing the bed with the plethora of other women we are made to feel compared to. The Press, for one, bombards us with pictures of women we are either meant to miraculously look like, or are told to avoid looking like at all costs. And social media is essentially one long starting lineup of all our competition in likes and follows and attention. That’s quite the crowd of comparisons and pressures, when you’re meant to be trying to get off. No wonder we get distracted. 

Although it may seem obvious, it is important to consider if you actually like the other person. Often we are so tied up in seeing ourselves from the outside, through someone else’s eyes, and agonising over whether they like or love or fancy or hate us, that we don’t take a moment to ask what that person is bringing to the table, other than a fix of external validation, or content for the plot. 

In order to combat this lot we have been dealt, there are various tools available to us. The first, foremost, and often most elusive, is self-confidence. This, of course, is easier said than done, and is probably a lifelong mission for which there is no exact marker of having achieved.

But nevertheless, it is a utopia one must believe in, because although it may wax and wane depending on an infinite number of factors – the time of the month, the time of year, who you surround yourself with – you’re never going to reach it unless you can have faith in it being possible. The mental and the physical are of course inextricably linked. Feeling comfortable in yourself will make you feel more comfortable in your body, creating a feedback loop of positive experiences. 

As university students, many of us are writing essays on Simone de Beauvoir about being objects to men, or about Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory (both of which apply on a societal level, regardless of what gender you are having sex with). But what is the good of these essays if you can’t apply these theories and become your own subject, or see yourself through your own gaze?

Sex can feel as good as dinner with your girls, or a walk on the Downs. I hope you can believe that it can, and have mindful, intentional sex that leads you there. Although a slightly regrettable post-club/ post-breakup/ pre-checking-with-your-girls-if-it’s-a-good-idea shag is all a very forgivable part of the learning experience.