Dear Luv Doc,
My boyfriend is great in a lot of ways, but he sucks at foreplay. Don’t get me wrong, he tries, and I am grateful for that, but he always stops at exactly the wrong time. It’s like he gets bored and moves on to something else, even if what he is doing is working. I don’t want to complain to him about it because I don’t want him to stop entirely, but I would like him to polish up his skills a bit. What should I do?
– Up to Here (almost … so close)
Well now! Sounds to me like you really hit the jackpot! Sex is always better with someone who is willing to put in some effort, so you should count yourself lucky. Evolutionarily, guys aren’t really wired to spend a lot of QT on foreplay – or post-coital cuddling for that matter. It probably has something to do with a primal instinct to not get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger while basking in the afterglow. Neanderthals might have been silver-tongued cuddle bunnies, but we’ll never know because they went extinct in the Pleistocene era. Hopefully they all died exhausted and content.
Since the Ice Age, the history of male sexual activity in Western civilization mainly involves whamming, bamming, and scramming. That’s no surprise. Evolution tends to favor selfish assholes. Speaking of assholes, Western Europeans through most of the last few thousand years haven’t been very enthusiastic bathers, so it’s somewhat understandable that the idea of doing a lot of prep work on the vag never really took hold. Sex was predominantly genital and primarily a conduit for sharing diseases, vermin, and an occasional payload of sperm. It’s no wonder that Western patriarchal society didn’t embrace cunnilingus. They could barely keep teeth in their heads, for Christ’s sake.
Eastern cultures, on the other hand, were smart enough to use water for something other than drowning witches. Consequently, they were much more inclined to take the time to get to know the godhead and learn how to give good head. The mere fact that the Kama Sutra recommends that the woman should climax first is still a pretty revolutionary idea in Western culture, where the female orgasm was, for several centuries, completely misunderstood.
Women, if they were unable to achieve a vaginal orgasm in the traditional three minutes of marital sex, were treated to occasional “hysterical paroxysms” at the psychiatrist’s office or maybe on the back of a galloping steed. If the latter two didn’t calm them down, they were shipped off to the loony bin because, you know, witches be crazy.
You, however, are a long way from crazy. You are simply suffering from uninformed boyfriend disease. It’s a two-step recovery: 1) Tell him exactly what you want and how and where you want it. 2) Buy him some books and send him some links and give him the tools he needs to achieve greatness … or at least an acceptable level of competency. Remember: The mere fact that he is willing means you’ve already won the jackpot.
This article appears in February 17 • 2017.
