Gotta agree with the community praise, even if the only problem with the opening post was the "red flag" title.. after "clicking cautiously" the post itself was an honest posting of a delicate issue, so it's kinda hard to rage at that .. This discussion made me come up with a .. hypothesis? Is the very way we _learn_ actually incompatible with sex? Could this be at least one reason for issues that show up with age? Let me try to explain;
When you're first learning something, lets say writing (pencil, not keyboard)... you start with fumbling about, trying to figure out how to hold the pencil while trying to make a straight line, to meet it with another line at the top, cross it at the right spot.. you may also be trying to get the idea of the letters, to understand the shapes. All in all, stupid amounts of things you need to pay attention to and potentially be surprised about.
Over time, with repetition, the whole process automates, pretty much entirely. Instead of looking for the pointy end of the pencil, you just pick one up. You turn a paper to the exact angle you prefer it in. You think of a word and it pretty much just appears. Most of us here could probably write readable notes without even looking at the paper.
I heard an explanation of habits recently, by the notorious Jordan B Peterson, in one of his lectures (can't remember which, sorry). Roughly that when we repeat a process often enough, it quite literally builds into a small machine in our brain, always ready to "handle" whatever it is used for. Smaller and smaller the better we get at it - making it faster to process and less expensive energywise.. sounded quite reasonable. He also used this to explain why getting rid of bad habits is so hard - you'll have to basically build another machine to _suppress_ the original one AND handle the "input" in the new desirable way. The new one being easier to disrupt by negative states. So, you get emotional once, disrupting the new one, the old one takes over and back to the fridge you go.
Now, to compare this with sex and learning sex; well. It's not obvious that we'd learn only the "mechanics" of it, but it's definately a part of it. Getting "better" with the mechanics would automatically reduce the attention we have to pay to it, potentially reducing stimuli. Maybe already reducing enough to cause issues?
Thinking about the habit forming bit, what is a "smaller machine" in terms of brains? Less connections - less connections to unneeded bits, less memories firing? Less wicked thoughts firing? Less sensations getting registered?
Unless you intentionally try differently, will you learn just "good enough" sex, like you did with learning "good enough" writing. (Don't tell me you're proud of your handwriting...
) And then get "bored" because, you know, well, "good enough" isn't exactly exiting.Does this sound completely retarded, or might I be onto something? Or does someone know of a paper or a book around this? (Should I google that myself...? Why does it take this long to get the idea of google ...? Didn't I form that habit a decade ago? ...
)
