How to make sex of all kinds pleasurable
Whether you’re having solo, partnered, or multipartnered sex, and whether you’ve had sex zero, 100, or 100 thousand times, these tips will come (wink) through for you.
Forget any myths you may have learned
“So often the barriers to pleasurable sex aren’t lack of skills, toys, or attractiveness,” Tanner says. “More than likely, it’s that we’re buying into myths about what we’re allowed to want and need during sex.”
This is especially true for cisgender women and other folks assigned female at birth. Here, Tanner says, having more pleasurable sex means “getting more comfortable with taking up space, asking for what you want, and saying no to what you don’t want.”
To get more comfortable asking for those things in the bedroom, they recommend starting *out* of the bedroom.
Want your partner(s) to put their phone away at the dinner table? Ask. Need your boo to help out with the laundry more? Tell ’em. Wish your lover gave you more words of affirmation? Request it!
Masturbate
“Many of us are taught that when we have partnered and multipartnered sex, that our pleasure is our partners’ responsibility,” Reeves says. It’s not!
“I encourage people to build a pleasure practice with themselves to learn what they like without the presence or performance pressure that can come from having another partner in the bedroom,” she says.
“Then, they can take that knowledge to create more pleasurable sexual experiences for themselves,” Reeves says.
Her recommendation: Spend at least an hour a week learning the land of your body.
Quit performing!
PSA: You aren’t going to look like a porn performer while you get it on.
Porn performers, after all, are actors. Expecting your sex life to look like a porn performance would be like expecting an IRL surgery to look the way it does on “The ER.”
“When [we] perform in the bedroom, we end up in our heads thinking about how we’re performing, rather than in our bodies actually experiencing pleasure,” Tanner says.
“Thus, to have a more pleasurable sex life, we must challenge the myths of how we’re supposed to look in the bedroom.”
Use your words
“Ask for exactly what you want,” says erotic educator Taylor Sparks, founder of Organic Loven, one of the largest BIPOC-owned online intimacy shops.
“Most partners want to please their beloved and want to know if something isn’t working so they can bring you more pleasure,” Sparks explains.
Some ways to express what you want in the moment:
- “That feels so good!”
- “Can you do the thing with your tongue you were doing a minute ago? That felt so good.”
- “A little to the left.”
- “Can you add in a finger?”
- “A little slower…”
Communicate nonverbally, too
In addition to using your words, use your hands, hips, and legs to tell your partner what feels good!
For example, if you like the rhythm of their hips, wrap your legs around them. If you need more pressure, thread your fingers through their hair and pull them closer.
And if you don’t like what they’re doing, tilt your hips away.
Nonverbal communication can be easily misread, so it in and of itself usually isn’t enough — but when combined with verbal cues, it’s 100 percent effective.
