This is a series on how to be good at sex, written by me - a mega slut with a penchant for keeping spreadsheets and overanalyzing social trends and incentives. 'Good sex' can mean a lot of different things, but for the purpose of this series it means 'turning a woman into a thoughtless sexbody, a moaning hornycreature, with no other space in her mind besides the sex that's occurring with you, a complete overwhelm of pleasure'.
Teaching people to be good at sex via text on a screen is hard. I want to give lots of really concrete, data-based advice, but there’s inevitably some art to it, a slow approach from the side. To some degree you have to gesture poetically at the fuzzy goal, and hope that somehow the reader might find their own way to it.
This post is a squint-at-it-sideways attempt to express a nuanced mental state, so update lightly, update poetically, take it as a frame to roll around under your tongue and use or discard the way that makes sense for you.
An old viral thread of mine went like this:
Men are werewolves.
As an escort, I'd have dinner with an intelligent, perceptive man - a CEO or something - and I'd think, no way he's a werewolf. When we end up in bed, he'll remain himself, conscious, alert. But no; they transformed every time into an unrecognizable sex creature.
It was really startling for me. I thought I'd get some kind of continuity between the man and the wolf. I thought at least some men wouldn't have wolves at all. I'd had sex with a lot of women, and they don't become wolves! But the men became different, felt different.
It was as if their soul had left their body, like the perception and intelligence vanished ,and they went from a competent, suited, Wall Street king to a sweaty, slightly pink body hungrily groping you, eyes half-lidded, breathing heavy "baby you like that?" directly in your ear.
It's insane. And don't get me wrong — I did enjoy some werewolves — but all of them transform, and the transformations are more startling in men who have to present nonsexual to the public. The ones that act as though they've never thought of sex —those are radical shifts.
Being an escort has given me the werewolf eye. Every politician, philanthropist, celebrity looking sane and in control, they're just a few short steps away from tit-induced mania. Inside all of them is a flushed man hammering away at a vagina like an autistic kid building legos.
Comedian masturbates in front of coworker? Philanthropist pursues aide? Politician cheats on wife? These aren't abnormal, they are par for the course; little, slightly-more-visible blips in the giant undercurrent of men's repressed sexuality, only newsworthy cause we're in denial.
If you think for two more seconds though, my argument above might actually seem against common sense. After all - women tend to rate 'men getting lost in the passion' pretty well in my survey on sex. They love the idea of being 'lost in a primal energy'. And, doesn't the female fantasy stereotype feature men getting so worked up by her hotness that they can't help doing some ravishing? So how does werewolfing differ from primal embodiment and the romantic ideal? Why wouldn't women love this?
Firstly, I think this argument comes from a misunderstanding of the way women relate to men's primal energy. Men see women swooning in the arms of animalistic men on the covers of romance novels and assume that she's swooning in response to the animal. But no - it's in response to something totally different, which I'll explain below.
Secondly, I don't think werewolfing is inherently bad! Really I think it's inevitable, and you should relate to it as a tool to harness as opposed to a flaw to suppress. I know one man - one of the best sexual partners I've ever had - who actually amplified werewolfing in a counterintuitive way.
So here's my attempt to explain why men werewolf, the mistake in distinction they're making by doing so, and why the key to blowing her mind is in the complete opposite direction to most men's strategies.
A part of the answer here is terribly simple - the problem is you're werewolfing before she does.
Remember - the goal of good sex is to turn her into a thoughtless sexcreature, all personality and drive and monitoring replaced with sheer overwhelming pleasure. It's harder to get her there than it is you.
This is an ancient, well-known problem between the genders; men escalate faster than women, their engines rev quicker, they're more aggressively horny - and lots of sex advice focuses on having the men slow down. Foreplay! they shout. Light candles! Do massage, or whatever!
I think this is often solid advice, but misses a more fundamental, somewhat counterintuitive frame that seeps out into everything.
When women agree to fuck you, often they're agreeing to the version of you with a soft penis. They're agreeing to the version that made witty jokes and noticed something subtle about her and has stuff in common. That version is in the mode of trying to fuck her - it’s a goal-driven, clear, it’s tracking what makes her laugh and doesn’t, it’s in careful attunement with her facial expressions and tiny flashes of pleasure or aversion. That person, she thinks, might be able to make her lose her mind. That person is perceptive, deliberate, all his wits about him. She can see he's got his hands on the steering wheel, and all she needs now is a good, primal engine.
Werewolfing is the engine. The problem isn't werewolfing, the problem is an engine with no steering wheel.
Women swooning over primal men in romance novels who lose control and ravishing them aren't, in a sense, swooning over the loss of control at all. I'd argue it's more likely these men have immense control, because the more horsepower in your car, the more attentive you need to be to the direction you point it. From a woman's perspective it only feels like a loss of control, in the same way you might feel terrified and helpless in the passenger seat of an expert driver. The 'loss of control' in these fantasies isn't 'letting go of the wheel', it's about being desired so fiercely that the men can't help but step on the gas.