Sex advice 101

Common advice is often good

People often ask me for sex advice¹. So here is my basic, boring, solid advice. It’s mainly for men who date women²:

• Ask your friends/AIs what you could improve on

• Reduce the downside

• Take pride in “good enough”

Ask your friends/AIs

This is the most obvious, but that’s because it’s good advice.

When I think of my friends, the things that cause them to suffer the most are usually patently obvious.

Sex is no different. If you struggle to get dates consider asking close friends:

• Do I behave badly in conversation?

• Would you trust me with your female friends?

• Could I improve how I dress/look?

• Would you expect me to organise a good date?

All the rest of my advice won’t do as much good as fixing the clear flaw that all of your friends know.

The hard part of advice is often being in a good place to hear it. If my friends don’t give me advice, it might be because they are scared of hurting me or of me flying off the handle. If I didn’t have friends who I could ask, then I might ask an AI instead.

AIs (eg Claude and ChatGPT) are circumspect, resilient and pretty wise. You can describe your dating patterns and ask for advice. They aren’t going to tell, they handle rudeness/defensiveness well and give good advice. In many ways they are a great kind of advice giver.

But more generally, I try to thank friends for advice, even if it is hard or blunt. I try to pause after hearing it. Often I want to point out why advice is bad. But this serves to tax it. And as we know, taxes reduce the quantity supplied³. These days, I try to encourage even advice that seems bad to me, because I want more advice in general from those I trust.

Reduce the downside

Have you spent much time imagining being a woman? I remember a small female friend saying she almost never felt safe when outside. She was always a bit on edge, even in the middle of the day.

If this were me I would think a lot about avoiding the worst experiences. And I would avoid high variance ones, even ones that would probably be good⁴. As someone who usually dates women, I can try to take mitigations.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to give women a not-bad time. I haven’t always been successful in the past, but I have seen steady improvement, I think. I recommend spending time reducing your downsides:

• Create space for someone to say no. Much is made of enthusiastic positive consent, but I finding creating space for expressions of non-consent is underrated. I want both types of feedback, both "gosh, Yes!" and "ehhh, not into that right now thanks". Sometimes with partners I don't know, I will explicitly practice asking and receiving a "No". “Can I touch your shoulder?” "No". And yes, this is a bit weird, but if I can't bear 5 minutes of awkwardness with someone, I don't want to have sex with them. What if they don't want something, but it's too awkward to say no? When someone says “no thanks” that isn’t the end of the world, or necessarily the interaction, but it is to be taken seriously.

• Get tested for STIs if you have had a new partner since you last got tested or every 3 months. Yeah it’s annoying, but just do it. Women like it when I talk confidently about the sexual healthy mitigations I take.

• Explicitly praise negative feedback. I was fingering a friend recently and she said “oh I don’t like that”. And I was like “thanks for the feedback”. And yes this is a little patronising, but the median woman I date probably doesn’t tell me negative stuff often enough. I want to know if she’s not having fun. I adjusted my hand.

• Consider my bad patterns. I have asked various friends to write a list of my worst behaviours. I spend time writing when things went badly or nearly did. What were the circumstances? How could I have a general rule that would have allowed me to avoid that. Some examples in the footnotes⁵. A really hard part of this is acknowledging I probably behaved badly in the past⁶.

Reducing downsides isn’t just for her. It can be for you too. These days I have less sex that I think will plausibly upset me in the long term. Before I have sex with someone, I like to run through this mnemonic - RBDSM⁷ (which is easy for me to remember since BDSM is already a phrase):

• Relationships. Who are we in relationships with? Do we each know who else is important to the other?

• Boundaries. What is off-limits?

• Desires. What do we want out of this?

• Sexual Health. What are our sexual health practices?

• Meaning. What does this sex mean to us? Is it throwaway or deeply vulnerable.

If you have thought about what you want these answers to be and know what they are, the downside risk for you and them is likely to be much lower.

Take pride in “good enough”

I am a very self-conscious perfectionist. And I think this makes many activities worse. I set myself up to fail.

When having sex I am worried she won’t like it. And so I think about what I’m doing in every moment. This is stressful and tiring. It leads me to want to be selfish to preserve my energy. What a vicious cycle!

I don’t have great advice here. But I have been improving by trying to have small victories and then become confident in those.

It’s a bit like when I dance. Learn a small set of moves well enough that I can confidently perform them. Then take joy in doing so. This requires some time learning the moves and some time to feel joy.

I know it’s a big ask, but if you find someone who you have sex with regularly, I’d recommend trying to learn these two things - some moves and some joy. Find a few positions you and they like and then have sex a few times without thinking about it, in order to teach your body that it can be okay.

Writing this I feel a little insane. Does everyone stress about sex this much? Did you all learn this at 18? It is confusing to me that I have so much sex but that it is so stressful⁸. Let me know your thoughts.

Bonus round: Have sex when your dick is hard

I almost didn’t include this, but it’s been pretty transformative for me, given that I sometimes struggle to have erections when I want to.

For a long time I felt penetrative sex had to be end of a sexual encounter. Tosh! Nowadays if we are naked and my dick is hard, I’ll say “You wanna have sex?” And if they say yes, we do. I’d say the typical sex is much better.

I used to think that penis-in-vagina sex was sort of meant to be the end of a sexual time. And so often by the time I got there I was tired and sort of wanted things to be over. Now I slot it in anywhere that fits the vibe. Sometimes at the start or the middle, sometimes the climax. And feeling more confident about my ability to manage this part of sex leaves me less anxious in general. Again, I think a tremendous amount of sex for me is anxiety management.

Note this doesn’t mean one can do away with foreplay. If I come and then don’t want to be sexy any more, that’s probably a mediocre time for my partner. And I do think that’s my responsibility.

But, in my experience, women appreciate a hard dick a lot. In my experience, size is overrated, hardness is not.

This advice is pretty context dependent. If your cock is hard whenever you want it to be, this is less applicable.

Now work on these

If you have found this good advice, how might you put it into practice? Who are 3 friends you could ask right now? Could you spend 5 minutes considering personal bad patterns?

I think most self-help is bad because it provides too many suggestions and people take none of them. If you want to improve, I would recommend choosing 1 thing and trying that. You could take 5 minutes now. If you found something valuable here, do you expect yourself to change?

Wrap up

I have more advice and I intend to write a piece on that, but that advice is very specific Standard Deviant advice. It’s stuff that really might not work for you. In a very me frame. I think this is the basics I’d recommend to almost anyone.

1. I have a lot of sexual partners. My friends know this and sometimes they ask me for advice. I wouldn’t say I am particularly romantically satisfied, but if you wonder why I might give good advice, I have sex with a lot of different people and generally stay on good terms with them afterwards. This seems to be a life that many people want.

2. I have some more advanced advice, but it seems remiss to give that without giving the basics. Some of my advice may work for women, but I haven’t really thought about it with them in mind, so please take that into account.

3. My kink is forcing people to learn economics. Quantity on the x-axis, Price on the y-axis, the tax moves the equilibrium from P2 to P1, increasing the price and lowering the amount supplied - because it costs more, people buy less.

4. If you imagine a sunny day in the park with a 10% chance of rain, that seems a lot worse if you are the Wicked Witch of the West. If one feels bad outcomes more sensitively, one will weigh them more heavily. Many men would take a random one-night-stand if offered. Many women would not.

5. Pattern: Being blunt in a way that hurts people

• Theory: Often I feel bottled up and don’t know how to express and so I do so in an explosive or hurtful way.

• Trigger: I am feeling like airing hard or hurtful “truths”

• Actions: Be able to see the person’s body language. Consider not saying it. Try and understand how they feel rather than telling. Talk to an AI first and workshop the conversation

Pattern: Escalating quickly

• Theory: I sometimes try and escalate quickly in a way that women find off-putting, even if I ask for explicit consent

• Trigger: I am horny

• Actions: Have they escalated at all in the date? Would I guess they are horny or sort of take-it-or-leave-it. Talk about feelings. Ask if it’s okay. Consider leaving

6. I tend to think we as a society don’t reward people admitting fault enough. We act as if someone admitting fault is saying that fault was acceptable. So everyone hides it. I think a better world would encourage admitting fault and those who have grown as a result.

7. There is lots of internet content on RBDSM if you google.

8. People do ask me for sex advice, but I think they perhaps would do well to ask many people in happy relationships rather than one person who has sex a lot. I assume many people don’t find sex as stressful as I do.