Performance vs. Presence
The first time I realised that I viewed sex as performance was in a meeting with a therapist some years ago. “I can’t perform right now” I told her. “I don’t know what’s wrong.” Gently, she pointed out what I’d just said. By saying those words, she told me, I was implicitly laying myself a trap. “Perhaps the real problem is that you are viewing your sexual body as something that should be performing, rather than having fun in the moment.”
It has taken some years, a host of books, and a multitude of varied experiences to let the lesson sink in.
One of the ironies of the brain is that it can convince itself of something for a long time, and then an event can shift it completely in the other direction. I had this with one particular sexual partner, who, in the course of the evening, had laid out a load of judgement on some friends of hers. Without realising it, this judgement had triggered something in my brain that said “better power up boy-o, because you don’t want to join that list.” This wasn’t her fault of course. She was just making conversation, letting her internal word soup pour out to a willing listener. But my box-up-top had decided to enter into Performance Mode, and, believing this to be good for getting me revved up for some fun, I wasn’t going to stop it.
You can tell something is wrong when you’re about to have sex. I’m sure it’s different for everybody, but for me, I have a pang of nerves down the front of my body, telling me that I’m not all that into this. Next, inevitably, the equipment doesn’t signal the fun it could be having. A wandering hand returns disappointed, and my brain starts to think up excuses as to why things downstairs aren’t firing up.
The last time this happened it sent me into an anxiety spiral that re-triggered me every time I entered into a new scenario where fun might be had. Why? Because my brain had done the best with what its ancestors had given it: association between negative experience and fear of repetition of such an experience. Hence the dive into what might be causing this.
Conditioning
Jiddu Krishnamurti, the philosopher, spoke often of conditioning being a key troublemaker in our how thoughts engage with experience.
“We are conditioned – physically, nervously, mentally – by the climate we live in and the food we eat, by the culture in which we live, by the whole of our social, religious and economic environment, by our experience, by education and by family pressures and influences. All these are the factors which condition us. Our conscious and unconscious responses to all the challenges of our environment – intellectual, emotional, outward and inward – all these are the action of conditioning. Language is conditioning; all thought is the action, the response of conditioning.”
There is no escape from conditioning, for it is happening all the time. It’s how our minds work.
However, becoming aware of the conditioning, Krishnamurti believes, is one way of being free of the vice-hold it can have upon our thinking.
In the society and culture in which I write this, The European-American “West”, I’ve found that the conditioning I received was of sex as a transaction. Not necessarily a transaction of money (although possible), but more often merely a transaction of “a good time”, of bodily fluids, of power, of ego, and occasionally of love. It is so very rarely spoken amount in honest terms, and the desires and fears around it so seldom discussed between partners, that is takes on something like a mythic quality, in which we all dance around it until it happens, and when it happens, we get through it as best we can, with as much fun and grace as we can muster. Much like discussing death in modern culture, we euphamise around it, see it a lot in our films, tv shows, and news broadcasts, and yet never really face the realities of it head on, accepting it as something of profound vulnerability, and to be cherished or honoured when it happens.
Presence
Presence is the opposite of performance. While performance demands near-perfection, presence requires nothing but awareness. While performance demands instant results, presence is curious about what, if any, the results might be. While performance is quick, presence takes its time. While performance demands changes, presence wants you to stay exactly as you are.
The ability to be present, the ability to be thoughtless in certain moments, and to just allow things to pass as they come at us, joyfully and with complete awareness, is the greatest gift we can give ourselves.
Sexually, it allows us to see the other person not as somebody to impress, somebody to conquer, or another notch on the belt, but as a real human being, with needs and desires and the potential for joy of their own. By giving them your presence, you open them up to an experience in which your requirement for their performance is out the window too, and the delectable aspects of sex: touch, taste, breath, and arousal, are made central.
Sex is perhaps a more concentrated example of this, but it applies elsewhere: when interacting with friends, family, our partner; when in a business or work setting. Are we performing a role that we believe will make others impressed? Or are we present with what is flowing before us?
