I was a guest on a podcast: Intimate Knowledge with hosts Brooke Burke, Meghan King Edmonds, and Sex and Intimacy Coach Lil Darville. If I recall correctly, I was asked what happened in my past that made me, a straight male, surrounded by everything from basic straight male bullshit all the way through to straight male evils, choose to walk away from it all and pursue what it takes for authentic female sexual pleasure and orgasm. I replied that the first component was I had always been strongly turned on by women getting or doing effective sexual pleasure even before my sex life began.
I visualized what I would do, what it would be like as a part of that; as principle-pleasure-driver, and later on as co-creating with her-- either role was attractive. The keyword being, 'effective'. I wanted it to be real; not an illusion propped up for my ego. I didn't want to turn to illusion as the solution to stark ignorance. In fact, if I was going to strongly value sex, then it had to be genuine.
Further, my erotic mind was never focused on being great in bed for no other reason than another way to posture in front of the mirror of my mind. The erotic excitement of authentic pleasure has as its foundation the results of strong mental and physical sex skills in the individual and mutual sex skills shared by a couple (or more). Ego trips, for me anyway, were a paltry motivator because all my sex partner had to do was lie to me and ego would be sated. Which leads to the next question, how did I disentangle myself from ego enough to be able to "take it" when my attempts were lackluster to whatever degree.
This is no small feat for most men at any age. Women tell me of far more men who are willing to admit they started out bad at throwing or catching a football, understanding the stock market, or accurately hitting a target with a 20mm cannon on a fighter plane. They accept the reality of their ineptitude in these endeavors and then joyfully begin the work on the way to mastery. However, when it comes to sex, the first step of accepting the reality of ineptitude, then the second step of gathering resolve to correct that through study and practice, is too much for those men to bear. Their egos lose it in the face of failure and would rather be lied to than reach for excellence.
I think that a great part of the severity of their fear is based on how poorly Male Culture (and our culture in general) prepares them for this. I tell clients, how can you logically be so upset about being bad at something for which you never had an option for quality instruction in the first place? The cultural dome of sexual ignorance covers everyone to start with, but you expect greatness to naturally spring from those conditions? That's ego's cheer-leading messing with your grasp of reality. You hear other imagined mental constructs like: just because they are manly men, they should automatically be great in bed. This is a construct that I believe comes from the same place in the mind/culture as, "You can't get better at sex by learning it from someone."
I faced those and related constructs in my own mind and what made me turn my back on all of them was my powerful erotic drive to be a part of what it takes to put a woman into authentic, high-intensity sexual pleasure. That drive made fear irrelevant. It gave me what I needed for the second step: resolve, to make mistakes in Her presence, to keep my eye on the prize. That's when I found out that most women (but not all, another blog post) are happy to cooperate, to work together to make sex better for both of us. Particularly when all they'd ever had between their legs was basic-bullshit male ego, or worse.
I'm a sex life coach, not a therapist, so I make their mistakes clear to men, or to women for that matter. We don't have time for anything else. The faster we sweep obstacles and old patterns out of the way, the faster we experience greatness. When I receive compliments on the sex skills I've honed, the thanks and acknowledgement does feel good, but what I glorify most highly is the erotic/orgasmic greatness created together.
That's the long way of saying what I tell my single women clients when they learn new sex things they can't wait to do, but where to find a man of the same mind. The best men are the ones naturally drawn to the spectacle and presence of real female sexual pleasure and orgasm. I have worked with male clients to discover or cultivate this erotic hot spot in themselves.
Many men start out with what I call, self-focused erotic interests. A simple example of that would be getting an erotic charge off of massaging/handling a favorite sexy body part(s) on a woman done so in a way that makes the experience most intense for his pleasure. Whether that translates into a hot/pleasurable physical experience for her isn't part of this focus. There isn't anything wrong with that form of erotic expression, but if that's the only way a man is enjoying a woman, (and her only kind of sexual exchange with him) then on one hand it is a limitation for the purposes of creating sexual novelty over the long run, and on the other could stand in the way of establishing sex expressions that require him to be considerate of her pleasure.
Even if a man is handsome with a hot body, if he's a one-trick pony with self-focus erotic interests, he's not as erotically interesting in the long run as the guy who is sufficiently physically attractive, but more sophisticated and varied in his erotic expression list and cultivated sex skills. In other words, she is less likely, for example, to have one or more orgasms with only this game to play with him. (Imagine if he were hot and sexually skilled!)
On an interesting side note, I hear things from women about stressing a lot about how much a man desires her. This could be a natural consideration for either gender, but why do I never hear that from men? I think it's because when you condition a woman to the same pattern (a self-focus erotic male mindset) in her only sex partner, or all her partners thus far, then it makes sense that women's perceptions of how sex works are heavily influenced by that pattern. Sexually-sophisticated women don't fret about that. They, like their male counterparts, are more often focused on bringing about a new sexual dish on their menu, or delving into introspection of what is holding them back in a minor way from moving up to the next erotic level.