Sex for Its Own Sake Doesn’t Interest Me. Pleasure Does: How to Learn to Give and Receive It
I have given pleasure to a great many people throughout my life and during more than fifteen years working with sexuality. Many have been surprised to discover sensations they had never experienced before, different ways of reaching orgasm, or an intensity they had never previously felt.
But I did not learn all of this on my own.
A huge part of what I know today is thanks to the people who have attended my sessions. Clients have taught me things without even realising it: they touched my body differently, did something that surprised me, or allowed me to observe responses I had not yet encountered.
Some of them truly surprised me. There were probably others whose contribution I did not appreciate enough at the time. I lived the experience, enjoyed it and moved on without stopping to analyse what they had done, why it had worked or what I could learn from it.
That has changed over the years. Now I observe much more closely. I analyse what I feel, what I make another person feel and what happens between two bodies. I incorporate every discovery, adding each new lesson to everything I have learned before.
Perhaps that is precisely why, after more than fifteen years, I now find it more difficult for someone to surprise me sexually.
It is not because I believe I know everything—the more I learn, the more aware I become of how much there still is to discover—but because my starting point is no longer the same. I have accumulated thousands of hours of experience, bodies, mistakes, discoveries and encounters with people who have also taught me.
And yet I still want someone to surprise me.
In fact, I love it when it happens.
Because it means there is still something I did not know.
This brings me to one of the most important things I have learned over all these years: we are very eager to demonstrate what we know how to do, but we are not nearly as accustomed to listening to the body in front of us.
We know positions. We know movements. We have watched porn. We have read where the clitoris is, where the prostate is, which areas should be stimulated and how long sex is supposed to last.
But knowing all of that does not necessarily mean knowing how to give pleasure.
And the longer I do this work, the clearer something else becomes—even though I still find it curious myself.
Before giving someone pleasure, understand one thing: you do not know them
There is no single technique that works the same way for everyone.
You can be extraordinary with one person and feel completely lost with another because everybody responds differently. Sensitivity, arousal, past experiences, hormones, age, trust and preferences all vary—as can the way someone feels on that particular day.
That is why, when I have someone in front of me, I do not assume I already know what to do, no matter how much experience I have.
I begin by observing.
How are they breathing? How do they move their pelvis? Do they come closer when I touch them or pull away slightly? Do they relax or become tense? What happens when I increase the pressure? What happens when I reduce it? Do they respond better to something slow, or do they need intensity? What happens when I find a movement that works and keep doing it instead of changing it?
The body is speaking continuously.
The problem is that we are often too busy trying to prove how good we are in bed to listen to it.
Let yourself be guided: it does not mean you lack experience
There is one very simple thing that would improve the sex lives of many people: losing the fear of asking.
Like this?
Harder?
Slower?
Should I continue?
Do you like it?
Show me how you like it.
Some people think that asking these questions reveals inexperience. I believe exactly the opposite. To me, it demonstrates attentiveness, confidence and a genuine interest in the other person’s pleasure.
Because if I have known you for twenty minutes, why should I know your body better than you do?
But this is where another issue appears—one I encounter constantly in my sessions: sometimes people do not know their own bodies either.
They cannot guide you because they do not yet know exactly what they need or what feels good to them.
Some people have been sexually active for years, yet they have nearly always paid more attention to giving pleasure than receiving it. Or to performing. Or penetrating. Or being penetrated. Or repeating the same routine over and over again.
When you ask them, “What drives you wild?”, they genuinely do not know.
And for me, that is where something fascinating begins.
Sometimes I try to discover a pleasure the person does not yet know exists
This is one of the parts of my work I enjoy most as a practical sex coach.
Some people arrive believing that they know their sexuality perfectly, but during a session, they begin to discover bodily responses they have never felt before.
Others arrive convinced that they are difficult, that they take too long, that they cannot have certain kinds of orgasms, that they always need the same thing or, quite simply, that “this is just how I am.”
And I begin to explore.
There is no obligation to reach a particular destination. There is nothing to prove. We experiment, observe and listen to the body’s response.
Sometimes, one new sensation follows another. Suddenly, that person realises that perhaps the problem was not that their body was incapable of feeling, but that it had never received the kind of attention or stimulation it needed.
I also want to be honest: I do not find it equally easy with everyone.
Some people’s pleasure is easy for me to read, while others are much more difficult. Some bodies respond immediately; others need time, trust, exploration or the opportunity to unlearn many things.
And that is precisely why I do not believe in universal sexual recipes.
If there were one perfect technique for creating pleasure, I would have found the formula after all these years.
There is no such formula.
There is only learning to read the person in front of you.
I have realised that sex itself does not interest me that much. Pleasure does
This is something I have come to understand with increasing clarity.
I am not excited by having sex simply because a body is available, because penetration is possible or because we can perform many different practices.
I am interested in feeling.
I am interested in creating pleasure and noticing how the person in front of me begins to change. I enjoy discovering something that works, watching their arousal increase and knowing what they are truly feeling.
I love giving pleasure.
And, of course, I love receiving it.
But there is something I find even better: giving and receiving pleasure at the same time.
That moment when both people are feeling, when there is no longer one person doing and another receiving, when both bodies are communicating continuously.
To me, that is far more valuable than being able to say that I performed ten different sexual acts during an encounter.
You can have a great deal of sex and feel very little.
And you can apparently do very little and reach an extraordinary level of pleasure.
Orgasm does not have to be an on-off switch
In another article, I explained my personal way of understanding different levels of pleasure. I use a scale to recognise where my body is—from feeling practically nothing to reaching the point at which orgasm becomes inevitable.
Over the years, I have learned that I do not always want to rush towards the maximum.
Sometimes the wonderful part is rising very high and staying there. Maintaining that state. Enjoying it. Easing off slightly and then rising again.
In my article about squirting and pleasure, I explain that I often prefer to remain at a nine or nine and a half, if I can control it, rather than immediately moving to ten and climaxing.
For me, knowing your own pleasure also means learning to recognise these different states and, when your body allows it, learning how to manage them.
But being with someone else brings an additional difficulty.
It is not enough to understand your own scale.
You have to learn to read theirs.
If I notice that something I am doing is taking you from a four to a six, and then to a seven, I do not need to change the movement just to demonstrate five other things I know how to do.
And if I manage to take you to an eight or a nine, perhaps the worst thing I can do is stop at that exact moment because I feel like changing position.
It may sound ridiculous, but it happens constantly.
Sometimes we stop doing exactly what was working because we are paying more attention to what is happening in our own heads than to the other person’s body.
Giving pleasure is not about collecting orgasms
Nor do I want to turn orgasm into an exam.
If, while I am touching you, I continually think, “I have to make this person come,” your orgasm stops belonging to you and becomes a demonstration of my sexual ability. I need you to come so that I can prove to myself that I am good. At that point, I stop listening to you.
The same thing happens when someone becomes obsessed with making their partner orgasm, producing squirting, maintaining a perfect erection or lasting for a specific amount of time.
Pressure enters the bed.
And pleasure starts walking out of the door.
I want to lead you towards pleasure, observe what happens and learn with you how far we can go. If orgasm appears, wonderful. And if we learn to remain at extremely high levels of pleasure for longer, that is wonderful too.
What matters to me is not being able to boast about the result.
What matters is what your body feels.
Limiting beliefs also get naked and climb into bed with us
Our bodies never arrive at a sexual encounter alone.
We arrive carrying everything we believe about them.
“I won’t be able to orgasm.”
“I’m sure I’ll lose my erection.”
“I’ll come too quickly.”
“I need a very long time.”
“I’m not good at giving pleasure.”
“I’ve never been able to do it.”
“At my age, my body no longer responds in the same way.”
All these ideas are present before anyone even touches us.
And when we enter an experience while constantly predicting what will go wrong, we stop observing what is actually happening.
There are young people with enormous sensitivity and older people whose bodies respond differently, but who can still reach extraordinary levels of pleasure. I notice significant differences myself depending on each person’s age, sensitivity, hormones and stage of life.
Age changes the body, of course.
But change does not mean that we stop feeling.
It may simply mean that you need to stop doing what worked twenty years ago and discover what works now.
That is why I am so interested in teaching people to know themselves. The better you understand your own body, the easier it will be to guide someone else in giving you pleasure.
You can be surrounded by sex and still find no pleasure
I have spent time in swinger environments and other sexually open spaces.
In theory, they might seem like the perfect places to meet people with extensive sexual experience. There is freedom, nudity, exchange, bodies and people who are accustomed to relating sexually to others.
And yet, for a time, I stopped going precisely because I was not finding pleasure there.
There was plenty of sex, but that did not mean that people knew how to give me pleasure.
I find this distinction extremely important.
You may have slept with a hundred people and still repeat exactly the same thing with every one of them.
You may know twenty positions but fail to notice that the person in front of you has spent ten minutes wishing you would change your rhythm.
You may consider yourself very sexually experienced and still not know how to listen.
The amount of sex you have had does not automatically determine your ability to give pleasure.
Experience becomes useful when you observe, learn and are willing to change what you do.
I am still learning, too.
That is why I want to explore some of those environments again and observe them from the place I am in today. Perhaps I will encounter a different sensitivity. Perhaps the standard has changed. Perhaps I have changed, too.
But one thing is clear to me: being surrounded by sex guarantees absolutely nothing.
Because sex and pleasure are not synonyms.
Some people know how to give, but not how to receive
I encounter this frequently as well.
Some people love giving pleasure because it allows them to control the situation. They are active, they know what to do, and they feel safe.
But when it is their turn to receive, they do not know how to surrender.
They find it difficult to let someone else set the rhythm. They find it difficult not to intervene. They struggle to say what they need—or simply to remain present and feel without thinking about what they should do next.
Some have spent so long giving that they barely know how to receive.
And learning to receive can be much more difficult than learning a new technique.
Receiving requires trust. It requires attention. You have to allow someone else to explore your body while remaining able to guide them when necessary.
You also need to know yourself.
If you do not know what gives you pleasure, the person in front of you will have to discover it with you.
And that is not necessarily a bad thing.
It can become a wonderful experience if both people understand that they are not taking an exam.
They are exploring.
For me, the wonderful part is being able to give and receive at the same time
Perhaps this is one of the most important differences between the way I experienced sexuality in the past and the way I experience it now.
I do not want to give only.
Nor do I want to lie down and only receive.
I want the pleasure to circulate.
I want to feel that I am creating pleasure and receive a response that creates pleasure in me too. I want the other person’s body to affect mine and mine to affect theirs.
I find that exchange far more powerful than dividing an experience into “now it is your turn” and “now it is mine.”
And when it truly happens, you often no longer know who is giving and who is receiving.
Both people are feeling.
That is what I am looking for.
So how do you leave someone speechless with pleasure?
After all these years, you may expect me to have a secret technique.
I do not.
I have experience, knowledge, practice and thousands of hours spent observing bodies. Naturally, all of that helps me.
But the most important tool I have is attention.
Do not arrive believing that you already know.
Ask.
Observe.
Touch, and wait for the response.
Allow yourself to be guided.
Pay attention to breathing, movement, muscle tension, sounds, and the ways the body changes.
When you find something that works, do not rush to demonstrate everything else you know.
Stay there.
Explore.
And if the person in front of you cannot yet guide you because they do not understand their own pleasure, discover it together.
Perhaps genuine sexual skill is not measured by how many positions you know, how many people have been in your bed, how long you last or how many orgasms you claim to have produced.
Perhaps truly understanding pleasure means doing something far more difficult: standing before a body you do not know, forgetting for a moment everything you thought you knew and having enough sensitivity to learn how to listen to it.
Because after many years working in the world of sex and sex coaching, I’m more convinced than ever:
I do not simply want to have sex.
I want to feel pleasure.
I want to give it.
I want to receive it.
And when I can give and receive it at the same time, that is where—for me—a sexual experience that is genuinely worthwhile begins.
