This article is about 'sexual intelligence', a new term - for me - that I discovered in my recent reading. It's a book by Marty Ralf Klein, a committed US sexologist, entitled "Sexual Intelligence: What We Really Want from Sex and How to Get It". The book is in English and, as far as I know, has not been translated into German. That's why I'm summarizing some aspects in this article that I found particularly interesting. Some of them actually coincide with my twenty years of practical experience and are presented by the author in an interesting way. The interesting thing is the definition of 'sexual intelligence' and what Klein means by it. His own thoughts always flow into the article.
I hope you enjoy reading and gain a lot of insight!
The complex meaning of sex
Sex is not just an 'activity' - it is an idea, a symbolic concept. However, our ideas about sex are often so complicated that we make the activity itself complicated.
After falling in love, many couples experience a decrease in intensity and mutual desire. We stop idealizing our partner and look at our partner without rose-tinted glasses. As soon as we go through this phase, we experience that love no longer reliably triggers desire because the 'disillusionment' of unfulfilled expectations and promises as well as everyday life get in the way. In this phase, the effort of initiating sex seems to outweigh the perceived benefits.
Sex over the course of time
If we want sex to remain part of our (relationship) life even after the initial excitement, we can't rely on hormonally induced lust. We can't rely on being overwhelmed by love and passion, and we can't rely on there being nothing better to do.
Time passes, we solidify our relationship, we find each other as a couple. But what about the actual sex we'll have when we get to it?
If we hold on to the idea of sex that we experienced as teenagers and/or newly in love, but now have a mature body with all its weaknesses and our relationship no longer has the freshness of the initial infatuation, we will have problems.
What if it doesn't work?
We should change some of our ideas about the meaning of desire and arousal, of sexual 'function' and 'dysfunction'. We should change our attitude towards sex.
We humans want sex to be 'natural' and 'spontaneous', to 'just happen'. Many refuse to engage in adult sex and instead retreat into adolescent sex - affairs, romance novels, internet chats, constant porn consumption, low desire.
Sexual intelligence
"Sexual intelligence is the ability to keep sex in mind regardless of what happens during it," writes Klein.
Sexual intelligence, the author continues, "is expressed in the ability to generate and sustain pleasure even in a situation that is not perfect or pleasurable. It is the ability to adapt to changes in one's body; it means curiosity and open-mindedness about the meaning of pleasure, closeness and satisfaction, and the ability to adapt when things don't go as expected - when the lube runs out, one of them has to go to the toilet during sex, the erection goes down or one of them calls the other the wrong name."
Sexual intelligence is the ability that allows us to progress from adolescent sex to adult sex. It's what takes us from hormonally-driven sex to the sex of our choice.
According to Klein, sexual intelligence is "what takes us from 'sex must affirm me' to 'I affirm my sexuality'".
The three components of sexual intelligence
What most women and men want from sex is far more than just physical pleasure. Equally important is the desire for intimacy, closeness, connection and affirmation of the relationship.
Together, these three aspects of sexual intelligence are what make our eroticism flow. They support functioning without placing functioning at the center of our sexual thinking or experience, according to Klein:
- Information and knowledge
- Emotional abilities
- Body awareness and well-being
Information and knowledge
It is obvious that knowledge of the functions of the body in the sexuality of men and women and knowledge of basic psychological dynamics in the relationship have a significant influence on the success of an intimate encounter.
It is therefore advisable to obtain sound information about this.
Emotional abilities
In this context, emotional skills are primarily understood to mean the regulation of negative emotions such as shame, pressure to perform, insecurity and feelings of inferiority. Without this ability, it will not be possible to implement knowledge about sexuality and adapt our sex life to the inevitable changes that occur throughout life.
Body awareness and well-being
Inhabiting the body or, in other words, increasing one's presence in the body is a central component of fulfilling sexuality. Nothing in the sense of critical and scrutinizing observation of whether everything is 'working' properly. That would be fatal and would produce the exact opposite. This kind of presence in the body can be developed. A mindfulness-based practice - as in body-oriented sexual counseling according to Sexocorporel - supports this form of physical awareness.
Inhabiting the body means, for example:
- that we can perceive and control the movements of our body (thanks to proprioception) and that
- we sense how our body relates to its surroundings - including other bodies (kinaesthetic awareness).
Sexual intelligence - Klein explains further - requires both abilities so that we can relate our body to our partner's body without much thought or effort. Proprioception is a sixth sense, our 'sense of position'.
Kinesthetic awareness is the continuous, ever-changing sense of where our body is in time and space. It is the body's three-dimensional radar - even without constant conscious awareness.
How does this relate to sex? Here's an example from the author: "Proprioception gives us a sense of how we need to move our arms to hug someone. Kinesthetic awareness lets us know how far we need to stretch and how strong our hug needs to be for the recipient to get the hug we intend. Then, of course, there is the social ability to judge whether this person wants a hug from us or not."
An uninhabited body
An uninhabited body is foreign land. What we don't know usually makes us feel insecure. Especially when it comes to doing something with someone who means a lot to us. An unfamiliar body leads to considerable disturbances in our intimate lives.
People with proprioceptive difficulties often cannot do the following well:
- Instinctively know what different parts of the body need to do to move in a certain way
- Instinctively know how much pressure is needed to stroke an arm or squeeze a breast, for example
The situation is similar when people have difficulties with kinaesthetic perception:
- They have problems assessing exactly how their body movements feel to others.
- To accurately assess how close they are to another person and how fast they are actually moving.
Conclusion
So being sexually intelligent means nothing more than viewing and experiencing sex as something that changes over time and with us. Similar to how we adapt our running pace when jogging or other similar activities to our physical - and mental - condition. If we fixate on EPO (= erection, penetration, orgasm) and/or orgasm-must as the only real sex and see everything else as a failure, we may experience sex less often and put so much pressure on ourselves that we are likely to miss out on the pleasure and fun.
Being sexually intelligent means that we accept that pleasure changes over the course of a relationship and that we should critically question our ideas in this regard. However, it is not a matter of passive and resigned acceptance. Rather, it is a living process that follows the twists and turns of our lives and allows us to be alive in the change.
If you want to learn more about this topic, I recommend reading Klein's book "Sexual Intelligence".
Last but not least: In my various offers (individually, as a couple or in a group), the development of 'sexual intelligence' always plays a major role!
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