Insecure in bed: where it comes from and what helps

Insecure in bed is almost never about your body, but about your head. While you make love you step out of the moment and look at yourself from a distance: am I doing this right, does he still find me beautiful. That self-monitoring dims your arousal before it even gets going. You become less insecure in bed the moment you stop watching and start feeling again.

By Victor, gigolo in Amsterdam.

Why am I so insecure in bed?

Being insecure in bed rarely comes from something being wrong with you. It comes from your attention turning inward at the wrong moment.

In bed you are visible, and being visible makes you start watching yourself. You watch your belly. The sound you make. How long it takes before something gets going. There is all sorts in that gaze. A remark from fifteen years ago that still echoes somewhere. An image from a film about how sex is supposed to look. Or a time you showed something and nothing came back.

I can already hear you thinking: so it is down to me. No. For many women this feels like performance anxiety in bed, the fear that you fall short before anything has even happened. That fear is not about skill. Nobody has to be able to do anything here. It is about the expectation that you are being judged, and that expectation is almost always louder than reality.

What is spectatoring, and why does it dim your arousal?

Spectatoring is watching yourself from a distance during sex, as if you were a spectator of your own body. Masters and Johnson coined the term when they saw how often people in bed are not taking part but looking on.

You split in two. One part of you does, another part stands beside it and hands out marks. And that second part almost always wins, because judging soaks up so much attention that little is left to feel anything with.

There sits the real mechanism. Arousal needs attention that goes to your body, to what you feel and smell. Research shows that attention which turns inward instead, to how you come across, lowers arousal rather than raises it. You cannot be the spectator and the one enjoying it at the same time. It is one or the other.

Why does performing backfire exactly?

Performing backfires because desire and arousal in many women are responsive: they arise during sex, not before. The urge only shows up once something pleasant is already going on. Rarely the other way around.

That matters, because performing asks exactly the opposite. It asks you to be aroused on demand, at the right moment, to the right degree. Your body does not work that way. The longer you wait for the urge before you do anything, the longer you keep waiting, because that urge sat on the other side of the first touch.

Picture your arousal as a system with an accelerator and a brake. Pleasant, safe things give gas. Worries hit the brake: the thought that you are failing, or that he is getting impatient. You can floor the accelerator all you want, as long as your foot is also on the brake nothing happens. Insecurity is almost always the brake. And sexual confidence does not grow by giving more gas, but by letting go of that brake.

How do I become less insecure in bed?

You become less insecure in bed by stepping out of your head and back into your body, and by taking the performance bar away entirely. That sounds vague, so here it is concrete.

Back into your body. If you notice you are judging yourself, shift your attention to one thing you feel. The warmth of a hand, a breath, the fabric of the sheet. Not to force yourself, but because feeling and watching do not go together. You can only be in one place at a time.
Sensation, not performance. There is no finish line. An orgasm is not required, and coming quickly least of all. The moment something is mandatory, it is performing, and performing is the brake.
Take your time, more than you think. Count on half an hour just to land. That is not lost time, it is the warm-up lap. A woman who wants a result after ten minutes is pushing the accelerator while the brake is still stuck on.
Say it beforehand. One sentence, up front, takes away half the tension. “I am insecure about this” or “I need a little time to get going” changes the whole evening. You are then no longer busy hiding it, and hiding costs exactly the attention you need to feel anything.

None of these things is a trick. It is always the same move: silencing the spectator, so that someone is left who is simply there.

Does that pass on its own with more experience?

Not automatically. More partners or more mileage do not make you less insecure in bed, because the spectator just travels along. You can have sex a hundred times and stand beside yourself a hundred times.

What does shift something is experiencing once that there is no judgment. That your body does something while nobody is watching with a report card. An experience like that lands deeper than any advice, and sexual confidence builds up from there. Not from the idea that you can do it, but from the memory that it once went by itself.

That is also why on your own it only half works. Alone you do not feel the fear that comes up precisely when someone else is there, so you are not practicing what you actually want to learn. The difference is that you become relaxed while someone is lying beside you, someone who needs nothing from you.

What changes at a date with nothing at stake?

At a date with nothing at stake the spectator falls away, because there is nobody you have to satisfy and nothing you have to prove. Exactly the situation in which that self-monitoring has the least grip on you.

Nothing is mutual, and that is a relief. You do not have to do anything back, and there is no one else whose pleasure you have to keep an eye on. The attention goes only one way, to you. No morning after in which a look or a sentence suddenly takes on meaning. So nothing to prepare for either.

That is what a calm, attentive date looks like, and at intimate togetherness I describe exactly how we build that up together. If it is your first time with someone new, it goes slower still and entirely at your own pace. And if your main question is whether you are too old, too ordinary or too insecure to do this, you will find an honest answer to that at Still in doubt?.

This plays out more broadly than one evening with me, by the way. How sexual confidence grows within a relationship, and what hiring a male escort does in that, I wrote out separately in boosting your confidence in bed. That is a different story from this one, and gets its own room there.

What women tell me afterward is rarely about their performance. It is about their head being quiet for a few hours. That they were simply there, without a voice watching along and handing out marks. For some that was the first time in years. If you want to discover what that would be like for you, with nothing riding on it, you can calmly book a date sometime.