Image by Richard Kadrey/Kaos Beauty Klinik.
This is a nice (and humorous) piece about paying attention during sex, and how mindfulness can help with arousal and orgasm. Of course, my porn-addled ADD brain only got halfway through the piece before I had to go find a hot photo to go with this post so you’ll have to tell me how it ends, snip:
The Journal of Sex Research has a fascinating article on the role of attention in sexual arousal and how we use our mental focus to explore and control excitement during sex. We can see from our everyday lives that attention is important for sex. We can distract ourselves to avoid sexual arousal when our mind has wandered onto sexual topics and we don’t want to get aroused, or we want to prolong sexual enjoyment without getting over-aroused.
We also can do the reverse and focus strongly on sexual fantasies or our partner to dispel other thoughts and lose ourselves in the sexual moment. However, the article looks at the scientific research on attention during sex and discusses how this can help us understand and treat sexual problems.
The drug industry has a lot invested in telling people that sexual difficulties are almost entirely due to problems with the genitals. For example, the website for Viagra promotes the line that erectile dysfunction is a problem with your cock, saying that “It happens when not enough blood flows to the penis”.
Which is a bit like saying poverty is when not enough money gets to poor people. (…read more, mindhacks.com, thanks Praemedia!)
It’s about time someone decided to write about this.
It’s so logical and obvious. Of course, if you’re focused on losing your job, keeping your job, whether or not this person is really interested in you, your cat, the car alarm outside, etc. You’re not going to be “in the moment.” And you just won’t be able to “perform.”
It’s just like panic attacks. If you have a panic attack at one particular spot in the day, and everytime you get there you think “I’m not going to freak I’m not going to freak I’m not going to freak” — Boom. You have the panic attack, further reinforcing it.
Just like the one time you can’t maintain arousal, and you keep telling yourself, “I’M GONNA GET/STAY HARD!” Boom down, like cement.
Yay for applied psychology!
Now the question is–how much does our overly jumpy technological society contribute to our inability to focus…