Sexual Performance Anxiety: Going for the A+ Grade in Bed

Research on sexual performance anxiety has typically focused on men’s problems of getting or maintaining an erection because of fears that they will not be able to “perform” satisfactorily in bed. Traditionally, men are heavily socialized to be sexual experts, always ready to pursue all sexual opportunities whenever they occur, and to be great at sex. That pressure can kill an erection, plus more importantly, reduce desire, satisfaction, and pleasure with sex. Easy, private, fast access to a wide range of porn and porn-like standard shows on streaming services only serves to reinforce high standards for men’s sexual performance. Look awesome, be ready immediately, make your partners orgasm immediately, and go all night if need be.

It is embarrassing how late we researchers were to ask women in any detail about their pressures to perform at high levels during sex. Some work from our lab caught us up somewhat and, yes, women also feel these pressures, and along the same lines. They are socialized to look incredibly sexy, to be up for anything sexually, and to be highly sexually responsive, meaning able to have an orgasm because of their partner’s magic and with minimal effort.

Do you do backflips to impress your partner?

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We studied 228 couples and found that when one partner felt high-performance anxiety, both partners experienced lower sexual and relationship satisfaction. This makes sense to us. Separate interviews with men and women about this type of sexual problem made clear that there is often a running dialog insisting that they control how they look, worried that their partner would be disappointed, focused intently on their partner’s expressions to judge “how well” they were doing, and often urgently wanted to hurry up their desire, arousal, or orgasm to keep pace with what they assumed their partner expected. Others described getting angry with themselves for not feeling in the mood or for being distracted by other things, such as racing, off-base thoughts, or just general feelings of being overwhelmed.

The good news is that many also had some effective coping strategies, including what we call “approach strategies” of talking to their partner, suggesting alternative approaches, and decelerating to an intimate, less sex-focused activity for a while, such as a massage. Others used less effective “avoidant strategies” to cope such as just going through the motions, faking orgasm to get it over with, or stonewalling (refusing to talk about it).

As you might guess, approach strategies were generally linked to better outcomes and improved satisfaction by both partners.

What you might not have guessed: Experiences of sexual performance anxiety did not appear to differ for men and women.

Some other surprising components are that sometimes the “audience” is not the partner, but one’s peer group or what appears to be an even broader group of imaginary onlookers. This may be linked to the explicitness of details about other people’s lives that we are now privy to. Like most areas, we are going to think: Am I meeting or exceeding the norm? Many of their responses made us worry that people feel that they have to be exceptional sexually to be normal, which, of course, is absurd. And statistically impossible.

The first defense against this type of anxiety is identifying the patterns of thoughts, images, and feelings that are perpetuating it. Then call yourself on it.

Do you expect every partner to be extraordinarily skilled in bed? You do? Then you might need to check your expectations at the door. It is difficult to enjoy oneself, to have a partner enjoy themself when you are essentially engaging in sex as if you were being filmed. Like much of the advice found on these posts, sex, like life, is more pleasurable to the extent that you are present for it. And, if your pleasure is not important, just that of a partner, remember that one of the biggest turn-ons is knowing that your partner is enjoying themselves, and that’s hard to do if you are faking things from start to finish.

Thinking too much makes it hard to be in the moment

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