Why Can't I Just Relax and Enjoy Oral Sex?
You like oral sex.
At least, you like the idea of oral sex. Then someone actually goes down on you and suddenly your brain has been assigned twelve administrative tasks.
Am I taking too long?
Do I look weird from down there?
Do I smell okay?
Are they actually enjoying this?
Should I be doing something?
Why haven't I come yet?
Nothing kills the ability to disappear into pleasure quite like monitoring your own performance at enjoying it.
WHY CAN’T I RELAX DURING ORAL SEX?
Oral sex puts you in a slightly unusual position. For a while, your pleasure is the entire point. There's nothing you necessarily need to do back. Someone else is paying very close attention to you, and that sounds fantastic right up until your brain decides to pay very close attention too.
Instead of feeling what's happening, you start observing yourself having it happen. There is actually a name for some of this: spectatoring. It's when attention shifts away from sexual sensations and toward monitoring yourself - how you look, how you're performing, what your partner might be thinking.
Research into women's sexual anxiety has found exactly these kinds of thoughts, including body-image worries, wondering whether a partner is enjoying themselves and feeling particularly self-conscious while receiving oral sex.
In other words, your body is trying to have sex. Your brain has opened a meeting.
WHY AM I SO SELF-CONSCIOUS RECEIVING ORAL SEX?
Because there is no particularly delicate way of putting this: Their face is right there. Which can suddenly make things you've barely thought about all day seem extraordinarily important.
How you look. How you smell. How you taste. Whether you shaved. Whether you should have shaved. Whether everything down there is somehow the correct shape, colour and degree of symmetry.
This isn't some bizarre insecurity you've invented. Research on oral sex has found women reporting self-consciousness about genital scent and appearance, sometimes to the point that it interferes with their ability to focus on pleasure.
So no, you're not the only woman who has been offered something pleasurable and responded by mentally reviewing her grooming decisions.
ARE THEY GETTING BORED?
This might be the most impressive trick our brains pull. Someone willingly goes down on you and somehow you end up worrying about them. Their neck. Their jaw. Whether they're tired. How long they've been down there. Whether they secretly want to stop.
And now you're no longer receiving oral sex. You're conducting an imaginary customer-satisfaction survey. Maybe that's part of what makes receiving pleasure surprisingly difficult. You're not managing anything. You're not immediately reciprocating. You're not taking care of somebody else's experience.
For a few minutes, you're simply the person being attended to. Maybe receiving pleasure requires something many women aren't particularly practised at: not being useful.
WHY CAN’T I ORGASM FROM ORAL SEX?
And then comes the thought guaranteed to make everything wonderfully relaxing: Why haven't I come yet?
Now you're keeping time. You wonder whether your partner is keeping time. You notice you're almost there. Then you notice that you've noticed you're almost there. And somehow you're nowhere near there anymore.
Not orgasming from oral sex doesn't mean something is wrong. Some people simply don't orgasm that way, while others need different or additional stimulation. And oral sex can feel very good without ending in orgasm.
The problem is when orgasm quietly becomes the proof that the whole thing was successful. Then pleasure gets a deadline. And deadlines are famously sexy.
HOW DO I GET OUT OF MY HEAD DURING ORAL SEX?
Probably not by lying there thinking: Relax. RELAX. Why aren't you relaxing?
Instead, notice when your attention has wandered from what you're actually feeling to what you're imagining. You're wondering what you look like. Come back to what feels good. You're worrying that you're taking too long. Come back. You're thinking about whether they're enjoying themselves.
Come back.
And if something genuinely doesn't feel good, that's different. Say something. Move. Ask for something different. Stop.
Receiving pleasure doesn't mean becoming passive. It means you don't have to perform being pleased while it's happening.
MAYBE RECEIVING IS THE HARD PART
There is something oddly vulnerable about letting another person concentrate entirely on your pleasure. No immediate repayment. Nothing to accomplish. No respectable finishing time. Nothing particularly useful to do. Just attention.
Maybe that's why something that sounds so simple can make the brain so spectacularly busy. Because for a few minutes, you're not being asked to take care of anyone else's experience.
You're the experience.