The Inner Game of Sex

Americans do not enjoy sex totally. We are a driven people. There is a post–New Testament God keeping score on our bedroom games, and the newest version of the Protestant ethic is, "Thou shall pursue a full, active, regular, frequent, satisfying, varied, exciting, healthy, normal sex life." We have had our sexual revolution, but we are still governed by the style, if not the rules, of Puritans and Victorians; we are compulsive, anxiety-ridden, competitive, relentlessly self-improving, perpetually self-critical. The morality has changed but not the habit of moralizing. Sex, of all human activities, should be the one we enjoy most freely, yet it is one of the most ruled and regulated. The old regulations made people feel guilty; the new ones make them feel inadequate.

Is there an antidote to the American way of sex? Perhaps. Japan is admirably free of sexual hang-ups. One reason for this is the pervading influence of Zen in Japanese life. Now Zen has become popular in America. We've had Zen in archery, drawing, flower arrangement, judo, karate,aikido, motorcycle maintenance, tennis, skiing and creative management.With all this, there should be a Zen approach to sex.

There is. People have been putting Zen into their love-making for ages. The word Zen means meditation, and meditation means turning off theverbalizing mind and letting what is be. So the essence of Zen in sex is to function naturally and pleasantly without bugging ourselves.

Anything and everything we do can be a means of meditating, of doing Zen. Timothy Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis has applied thisidea to Western sports, turning tennis into an opportunity to meditate.We will enjoy tennis more, he says, if we will do four things: Abandon self-criticism; rely on spontaneous learning processes; concentrate on here and now; shift our goal from outward success to inner growth.

These four principles can just as well be applied to sex. The first rule of the inner game, and maybe the most difficult for anyone raised in this culture, is to give up the habit of judging ourselves and everything we do in terms of positive or negative—good or bad, right or wrong, success or failure. We all know that in any skill when we are self-critical, we become awkward, stumble and fall, lose touch with thesources of inspiration. It's as if we had two selves that might be called the player and the spectator. The player is pure action; it does notthink in words and it needs to concentrate. The spectator observes and intellectualizes. When the spectator gets out of hand, starts holleringout criticisms from the side lines, giving unnecessary advice, trying to control the player's actions, calling attention to the score, the player develops two left feet. If the spectator starts acting up like thatat a sexual performance, it will spoil that performance.

For instance, a man may find that when he is making love, especiallyto a woman he doesn't know well, he seems to be two people. One of themis in bed doing things to and with a lover. We might call this person the Player. Pure action. In contrast, the second self, the Spectator, isstanding back, criticizing, like a director at a pornographic movie—a very anxious director, who says things such as, "You've played with that nipple long enough, idiot. Go on to the other one, quick." Or, "She doesn't like the way you're stroking her. Too mechanical. She's losing interest. Think of something else to do."

Whenever you have to make a move—strike up a conversation, make a romantic gesture, display your expertise in bed—the Spectatorfeels somewhat nervous. Whenever your self-esteem depends on the outcome of some effort, there is stage fright. That terrible paralysis. That pounding of the heart, trembling and clamminess of the hands, draining hollow in the stomach. The mind goes blank, speech and gesture turn to wood. You feel terrified of making a fool of yourself. It strikes when you are in bed with someone you badly want to impress. It can ruin an experience. Liberating yourself from stage fright is what Zen is all about.

You are so in the habit of labeling everything either good or bad that it's hard to imagine any other way of thinking. There is another way, though: being completely aware without judging. Stop classifying what you see as good or bad and simply look at the facts as they are. I am a camera. For example, if a woman doesn't have an orgasm when a man makes love to her, he doesn't have to blame himself or her, or treat the incident as a calamity. He can simply note the fact, recognizing that the explanation for it is not yet known.

Millions of American women worry about their breast measurements. Millions of American men worry about their penis size. Such concerns only measure the national insanity. If a man's erect penis is four inches long, he needn't say, "My penis is four inches long and that's a disaster." Nor should he try to use positive thinking and say, "My penis is four inches long and that's marvelous." That would be just as much a distortion of reality. He just says, "My penis is four inches long." Period. Or maybe, "So what?" Scientific fact. No praise, no blame.

Americans are obsessed with numbers. Poor Alfred Kinsey. He wanted to free us from guilt. He wrote that there was so much variation in our levels of sexual activity (he found one man who regularly had 30 orgasms a week and another who'd had only one in 30 years) that we should stop using words such as normal and abnormal, much less good and bad.

Everyone has ignored that statement and remembers only that Kinsey counted everything that could be counted. And Kinsey's statistics have given us a new way to feel guilty. Four orgasms a week is above average,therefore good. One a week is below average, therefore bad. How many ofyou keep count of how often you get laid? Hands, please. Quite a few, we see. How many of you try to count the number of orgasms your women have per night? Still a great many. How many worry when either number falls below a certain level? That's what we suspected.

But if we don't criticize our performance, how are we ever going to improve? How do we learn anything? Most of us think we are taught the right way to do things by hearing a lecture or reading a book. Then we practice while observing our performance carefully for mistakes. If the mistakes are too numerous or seem insurmountable, we go to a teacher, coach or therapist. Or we read a dozen more how-to-do-it books.

The instructions in The Joy of Sex are so detailed and complicated that any couple who wanted to follow them would have to have crucial passages printed on the sheets or lettered on the bedroom ceiling. And a man would need the coordination, reflexes, strength and enduranceof an astronaut to make ideal love. But also like an astronaut, he would always be working from a check list.

It is possible to improve a skill without consciously trying. In fact, it seems to be the better way. When you are trying to do something, the Spectator frequently talks too much, filling your mind with confusing instructions that are hard to follow. When the Player takes over, however, it will sometimes perform virtual miracles, moves that are brilliant and instantaneous and could be achieved only through inspiration. You've had moments when you were on or hot and did something memorable,a clever conversational comeback, a skilled bit of driving that got youthrough an emergency or an inspired move in lovemaking that sent your partner to a new height of ecstasy. Left to do its thing without a lot of nervous chatter from the Spectator, the Player will find ways to growand improve that surprise you. For instance, you might suddenly and spontaneously introduce a new kind of sex-play in a relationship. The first time a man goes down on a woman, he may not know (unless she asked for it) how she will take it. She might see him as a nasty pervert or—much more likely—she might love him all the more. Sometimes a woman will react both ways at once. After all, she has a Spectator and a Player on her side of the net, too.

There are two aids to learning with a quiet mind. One is the use of mental pictures instead of words. If people watch good golfers or tennis players in action, or movies of them, their own game improves afterward. If you want to be better in bed, you should read pornography, whichprovides images rather than instruction, and go to sex movies. Pornographic movies are being exhibited with sound, color and wide screen in most of our big cities these days. Sex therapists have also recognized the value of visual images. Couples now spend weekends sprawled on cushions and watching both pornographic films and movies made especially for sex education.

The other way to learn is through practice. From the strange point of view prevalent in this culture since at least the fall of Rome, getting lots of practice in games, the arts or business is praised as diligence, but getting lots of practice in sex is denounced as promiscuity. In sex, as in most things, the more you do it, the better you get at it.Some people think it intensifies the pleasure of sex to save it for special occasions. Not necessarily. Sexual malfunctions are more likely toarise in people who enjoy sex only rarely. Nor is there any reason to fear running out of steam. Most of us have a lot more sexual energy thanwe usually use.

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To keep the Spectator quiet and the Player practicing, you have to concentrate, which means keeping the mind in the here and now. Gallwey writes, "Concentration is the supreme art, because no art can be achieved without it, while with it anything can be achieved." He suggests thattennis players concentrate on the seams of the ball as it flies back and forth. You might try concentrating on your lady's navel.

Sex in the Western world is like an O. Henry story; the whole point is in the outcome. India developed tantric yoga, the use of sex as a means of meditation, in which the last thing anybody wants to do is get it over with. In his book on tantric yoga, Philip Rawson writes. "Indianeroticism always focused on the inner state of erotic possession." The ideal of lovemaking "is a protracted ecstasy of mind and body, whose fires are continually blown by prolonged engagement and stimulation of the sexual organs, not mutual relief."

Keeping the mind in the present means not worrying about how things will eventually turn out. A future-oriented man can be greatly troubledif he sees a good-looking woman on the street. There he is at five minutes to nine on Monday morning and all he can do is look. He sours the pleasure of looking by not being satisfied. It's no good, he thinks, unless he can have more. Or he is having dinner with a lady and finds (concluded on page 276) Inner Game of Sex (continued from page 152) himself worrying about whether or not he'll be able to get her into bedin an hour or two. What he should do is bring his thoughts gently back to the food and the wine and the conversation of here and now. If he doesn't keep his mind on now, there may not be anything happening later.

A friend had an experience that illustrates the rewards of being unconcerned about the future. In his early 20s, he'd had only four bed partners in his life and he had learned that, except on rare occasions, hewas capable, at most, of two orgasms a night. Then he started an affairwith a woman who, for most of her married life, had had sex about once a month. She thought anything her partner might do would be prodigious.The man didn't care whether or not he impressed her in bed.

He found himself making love with his friend three times a night just about every time they went to bed. His low-key attitude relieved him of the pressure to perform, and that put him in touch with feelings he hadn't been aware of. He never planned or even expected his improved performance. It simply happened, like inspiration. "We'll just be lying there after the first time," he told me, "maybe talking or just petting a little bit. And all of a sudden, I'll be ready again. And even then, I'm not sure I'm going to come. But I always do. Again and again."

Masters and Johnson call our habit of focusing on climax the "end-point release orientation." As an antidote, they recommend "sensate focus." You should direct your awareness toward the pleasant sensations you're experiencing now, without having a goal in mind. Sensate focus has cured impotent men and non-orgasmic women. Told by the therapist to let the partner stroke and massage him or her—not touching the genitals and not trying to have sex—many a man, no longer wondering whether he will or won't get a hard-on, and many a woman, no longer anxious about whether or not she will come, finds new life in a body that hasn't felt anything in years. The chill becomes a tingle again. It's almost as good as high school back in the greasy Fifties, when the height of a Saturday night's pleasure was to spend hours necking in a parked car till our lips were lacerated and swollen. Those were inhibited times,but concentrated. One squeeze of a breast, one finger-tip contact with a nipple under a partly unbuttoned blouse was emotional capital that could be invested in a week of fantasies. Screwing was out of the question. We were thus spared the blight of goal-oriented sex. There were somemen, Masters and Johnson have observed, who did their sexual basic training in whorehouses, where the ladies were always telling them to hurryit up. If they took the lesson too much to heart, they became premature ejaculators, another malfunction arising from worrying about what's going to happen instead of appreciating what is happening.

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A man who tries to retard his orgasm is thinking too much about the future. Holding back, by doing mental arithmetic, thinking about business worries or simply stopping all movement when orgasm feels near, has long been considered the height of male sexual sophistication. But sometimes the result isn't as satisfying to either party as it is supposed to be. Going with the flow often works better; sometimes the man's vigorous, uninhibited thrusting will bring on the woman's orgasm. Sometimeshe will have a second or third erection and will take longer to reach his second or third orgasm, thereby greatly extending his partner's pleasure. Nature has a way of taking care of us when we don't try to fool her.

Playing this kind of inner game in which the obstacles to be overcome are one's own mental states, Gallwey explains, "frees the player fromthe fruits of victory; he becomes devoted only to the goal of self-knowledge, to the exploration of his true nature as it reveals itself on level after level." In the Orient, the idea of sex as a means of self-awareness is not as strange as it might seem in our own culture, in which sex is often seen as a manifestation of our animal side, which is thought to be lower than our mental side—as if the mind were not as much a product of animal evolution as the hand or the stomach. One of thesacred stories of India tells how the god Krishna made love to 16,000 girls in one night. Hindu and Buddhist holy pictures frequently show thegods and goddesses in sexual union.

Janwillem van de Wetering, a Dutchman who went to Japan to study Zen, tells of a Zen monk called Bobo Roshi—a title that translates literally as Master Fuck. Unable to achieve satori after years ofmeditating on his koan, he climbed over a wall of his monastery and wandered through the streets of Kyoto. A prostitute in the Willow Quarter took him in. Having lived as a monk for so long, he didn't realize what was happening till she started to undress him:

Then she took him to her bath, that's the custom here. Your shoulders are massaged and you are dried with a clean towel and they talk to you. Slowly you become very excited and when she feels you are ready, shetakes you to the bedroom. He must have been quite excited after so manyyears of abstaining. At the moment he went into her, he solved his koan. He had an enormous satori, one of those very rare saloris which are described in our books, not a little understanding which can be deepened later but the lot at once, an explosion which tears you to pieces and you think the world has come to an end, that you can fill the emptiness of the universe in every possible sphere. When heleft the woman, he was a master.

Sex for the sake of illumination may make it sound like a sort of spiritual masturbation. Actually, the view of sex we're exploring makes it impossible to be self-centered. The stage fright that spoils sex comes from too much concern about one's own standing in the game. With the Zen approach, you stop asking "How am I doing?" And when a man stops seeing his lover as his judge or competitor, he can enjoy sex all out. That will make him a better lover, because a person who thoroughly enjoysdoing something is good at it. He is free of the feeling that he has tocontrol or impress his partner; he is playing with her, not against or upon her.

We already have the capacity to enjoy sex fully right now. We don't need any improvement; we need only to get out of our own way. Toward the end of The Inner Game of Tennis, Gallwey explains that the book should not be taken as a manual for self-improvement: "Admittedly, much of this book may seem to read that way, but speaking as a man who was once a compulsive self-improver, I want to make it clear that the last thing I wish to do is encourage any notion that you should be any different from what you are right now." From this point of view, we are already perfect just as we are. If sex seems to lack something, the solution is not to try harder but to remove whatever is blocking it. Many people complain that their sexual experiences seem unreal to them. They've pushed their thinking, worrying Spectator between themselves and the wordless, thoughtless realm of the Player. That is sad, because sex should be enjoyed in all its here-and-now glory, fun, playfulness and profundity. A change in attitude can help restore delight.

"'We'll just be lying there after the first time, and all of a sudden, I'll be ready again.' "