A couple of weeks ago, I appeared on Girls Gone Deep, a Lifestyle podcast hosted by two women–Elle and Vee–who aren’t afraid to dig into the details of any part of their lived experience. Whether it’s love, labia sizes, jealousy, or kinks, you name it, and they’ll go deep on it. It’s one of Mr. Honey’s favorite Lifestyle podcasts precisely because of the vulnerability they bring, and I was honored to come and speak about a topic that’s been lighting me up recently: performance anxiety in bisexual women.
March was a big month of swinging for me (and Mr. Honey): We spent a week aboard the Temptation Cruise, the most newbie-friendly Lifestyle event we’ve experienced, followed by a week at Hedonism II for Swing Breakers, where we made more deep friendships in the Lifestyle than ever before. Despite the fact that Temptation is geared toward newbies, and Hedo is an anything-goes event that I think is more suitable for people already comfortable in Lifestyle settings, they both left me with a similar sticky feeling: on both trips, I met several girls who said they loved dancing with and kissing girls, but that eating pussy “didn’t do anything for them,” or “wasn’t for them.” I thought, how can that be? To love girls but not all parts of them?
Then I realized, I was acting like that too.
I love Temptation because over the course of the week I get to watch people with no Lifestyle experience, no girl-girl experience, and no concept of swinging become Lifestyle enthusiasts. We asked a girl on day one or two whether she liked girls and she responded, “I don’t know. I know I like dick.” By day five her partner was referencing her “bisexual awakening,” and she was enthusiastically bisexual. It’s magical how rapidly these transitions can come. And still, they can also come slowly, like mine.
If I’m honest with myself, there were signs I was bisexual early on. I was always fascinated by breasts, but I thought that it was normal to be curious about how my own body might develop. I had a huge crush on Angelina Jolie, but I told myself, “Who doesn’t?” In college, I kissed so many girl-friends that my long-term boyfriend agreed to accept a rule I conjured: “It’s not cheating if it’s a girl.” But still, even after my first bisexual experience in the Lifestyle, where I licked titties and ate pussy and tasted her come, I hesitated to call myself bi.
The day after our first lifestyle experience, I remember taking a walk and reflecting to Mr. Honey how I was surprised that I wasn’t more impacted by the girl-girl play, how I expected it to be more profound. Whereas before playing with a woman I was worried I might be a lesbian, afterword I felt rather blasé about women. What I said mirrors perfectly with the reflections of Jess, a newbie from Season 2 Episode 2 of Swing.
Jess and Kevin enter the house enthusiastic about the possibility of girl-girl play. But every time they get the chance, she shies away. Ultimately, she kisses girls, but mostly she giggles and plays with her partner, Kevin.
She reflected to Dr. Jess the next morning: “I thought it would be some big life-changing experience where I’d feel like, ‘Oh my god I just like girls so much!’ and I just didn’t feel some rush that I thought I would. Maybe it’s because I’m not experienced with women, or, I don’t know if I don’t have the level of attraction that I think I do, in my head. Or maybe it’s just nerves, I don’t know.” She concludes, “I thought it’d be a lot easier to get lost in the moment.”
Dr. Jess responds saying that “this is perfectly normal,” and that “performance anxiety is one of the biggest detractors from sexual experience.” Hmm. Performance anxiety. That makes sense for me.
Even though it was hot, whenever I thought back to eating that woman out our first night in the Lifestyle, I didn’t feel arousal, I felt fear. I remember being so nervous down there, wondering if I was doing a good job and if it felt good to her. The visuals, the tastes, how it felt, it was all foreign to me and it didn’t excite me as much as it terrified me.
On Girls Gone Deep, I break down a little bit I think was going on. First, I wanted to “do a good job.” I’m ordinarily quite good and confident at sex, and trying something new, I think, threatened my identity as a “good lover.” Experiencing fear is one thing, but experiencing existential anxiety is this big, amorphous fear that can be so paralyzing, it feels as if there is no way through. That’s what I was experiencing. That, on top of a second, existential, identity-threatening anxiety: failure to please.
As a woman, I think it’s our primary social conditioning to be pleasing to others. When in doubt, please others! It can be normal for us to please others over ourselves, and even to experience a sense of self-satisfaction when others are pleased by us, even if we ourselves are not satisfied. So the failure to please, or worse, failure to have any idea on how to please, is super scary for me as a woman.
The combination of these existential threats (failure to please and failure to be a good lover) made playing with girls so frightening, so threatening, that I went into threat-response mode, feeling the desire to freeze, flee or fawn (fight is also a response but more common in men). Doesn’t this describe Jess’s experience? She freezes (does not initiate play with girls), flees (actually avoids play with girls), and fawns (giggles when involved with girls). Fawning is when we immediately act to try to please to avoid any conflict, and giggling is a way of fawning: we make ourselves small, innocent and childlike, basically saying, “Don’t hurt me, I’m so cute!”
The Girls Gone Deep hosts, Vee and Elle, conducted some Instagram polls right before the show that showed that the majority of women polled (90%) describe being attracted to women but hesitating to play because of fears of not knowing what to do.
Jess was experiencing that same fear: “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I feel very awkward. I feel like I kind of need to be walked through it.” Isn’t it nice to know, if you feel this way, you aren’t alone?
I’m so excited to be talking about this, but you might be wondering, why is this all coming up now, three years after your first girl-girl experience in the Lifestyle? Well, on Temptation, I had a breakthrough experience. After playing with two or three couples, I noticed I hadn’t eaten any of the women out. I had wanted to, but in the moment I froze. I was thinking, “Why would I? Mr. Honey could do a better job.” Or, “What if I screw it up?”
The following day I was to lead a new workshop offering of mine, “Sensual Pussy Play,” and I felt like a total imposter. Fearing the workshop would be a disaster, I asked Mr. Honey for precise instruction I could relay live to the workshop participants, memorized it, and provided it in the workshop the next day (with great success, the room came to a roaring crescendo of orgasms…yay!).
Later that day, after my workshop, we hooked up with a couple we were extremely excited about, but still, in the room, I got nervous. I wanted to pleasure the woman and loved kissing her, but fear was gripping me again. But while I was giving her husband head, she came behind me and gave me a big lick from front to back. That pushed me over the edge. Her enthusiasm about me ramped up my enthusiasm about her, and my arousal outweighed my fear: I had to taste her pussy.
When I got down there, I felt the fear, but then I remembered what I had just instructed a whole room of participants to do: “Ladies/receivers, get out of your head, feel into your body; Men/givers, tell her how good she tastes, moan as you taste her change, use a flat tongue and don’t overstimulate the clit.” I took my own advice, and she came again and again.
When I got to Hedo, I felt in a new groove! I felt less fear. It wasn’t that I felt no fear, but now, my arousal outpaced the fear. That’s enough. That I knew I could make a woman orgasm with my mouth made my mouth water at the thought of eating a girl out. Instead of fidgeting and wanting to flee, I wanted to dive in.
Jess describes a similar change after receiving some helpful instruction from Mike (of Mike and Holly, experienced swingers in the house).
Mike: “Well, how do you like your breasts touched? Just do that.”
Jess: “When he said that I should do what I like, it clicked! Like duh, I should do to them what I find pleasing to me.”
Mike: (To the women being touched) “If she’s comfortable with it, ladies, can she kiss your breasts? Only if she’s comfortable with it?”
Ladies: “Yeah!”
Jess: (Licks and kisses breasts) “When I am playing with their boobs, I really like that they’re getting pleasure out of it, and I know they’re getting pleasure out of it. They gave me that feedback that they were enjoying it or they were moaning, that made me feel more at ease, like, I can do this.”
Sometimes, we so badly want others to feel good we can’t feel good without some reassurance from them. I don’t see anything wrong with that: we need confidence before we can feel arousal. Host of It’s My Pleasure Podcast, Danielle Savory (from whom I’ve learned so much about neuroscience and sex!) explains: “When we feel bad about ourselves, we can’t suddenly feel good.” This is, at base, what performance anxiety is: a bad feeling.
This bad feeling–the fear and the threat to our self-esteem–it can convince us that maybe we aren’t as attracted to women as we thought because in the moment we literally can’t feel the arousal. All we feel is fear. Know this is a common experience, and if you want to, you can work through the fear.
What cured the bad feeling for me and Jess? Explicit instruction. (And, shout out to Mike, encouragement!) Listen to my episode on Girls Gone Deep for such instruction and encouragement. Or ask someone you know who’s confident with women 🙂 It’s okay to need it broken down. And it’s okay to need practice. As Elle recommends on the podcast, it can be endearing and connecting to mention to your play partner that you are nervous. See all the gems the podcast is gonna bring you? Go check it out now!
Kisses to you on your journey, may your arousal outweigh fear and allow enthusiasm to reign,
Honey