How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Stoya and Rich here. It’s anonymous!
Dear How to Do It,
I am a woman who has trouble orgasming with a partner. I need to focus in a way I find difficult to do with another person in the room. I am not bothered by this. I have plenty of orgasms on my own. I also love having sex, and don’t feel like anything is missing from it.
The only time I’m bothered by not orgasming with my partner is when it bothers my partner. It makes me feel like there’s something wrong with me, even though I am fine with it for myself. My boyfriend really wants me to orgasm with him, and he wants me to use my vibrator on myself with him. I don’t want to. It doesn’t feel sexy to me; it feels like a means to an end. Just being observed and feeling pressure to orgasm will distract me from my pleasure and prevent me from orgasming. I would rather not be goal-oriented during sex and would like to just experience pleasure organically.
He keeps saying he’s not putting pressure on me, but I feel like he is just by this still being a conversation despite my having articulated my thoughts about it. Although I appreciate that he wants to give me pleasure, I think my orgasm should be about what I want, not about pleasing him.
—I Come in Peace
Dear I Come in Peace,
Sometimes we get stuck on interpretations of words. Your boyfriend might conceive of “pressure” as “coercion,” where in your definition, you (rightly so, in my opinion) also include “reintroducing the subject multiple times in fairly quick succession after being directly told nom” which is otherwise known as “nagging.” It sounds like he’s focused on a false idea that introducing your vibrator will bring you to orgasm with him, when you’ve presumably explained that it’s about the factors you list in your letter and his presence—not to mention the pressure he’s putting on you—will prevent an orgasm from occurring. That failure in communication is the main problem here.
It’s possible that your boyfriend needs you to be significantly more blunt than you have been, so consider whether that’s the case and, if so, change your approach accordingly. Do think through whether this prioritization of his preferences over yours, and over facts, shows up in other areas of the relationship. And see how a conversation about what the concept of pressure means to each of you goes.
There’s absolutely a world where you, at some point, want to try having an orgasm in the same room as your partner and work out ways to make that more likely. But that’s almost certainly not going to look like you bringing your vibrator into the situation to cater to his pleasure.
—Jessica
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