The Performance of Sex

On the shift from pleasure to performance, and what it means to truly feel again

By: Eriel Pichardo

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Credit: Pinterest 

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Sex is complicated. It can be this fun and enticing activity you share with a partner or even a random person you meet on a dating app that you’ll never see again. It can also feel like doing drunk karaoke at a random bar or balancing on a yoga ball during your first high intensity pilates class—equal parts awkward and uncomfortable. 

But as I go through my “I’m young and this is as good as it gets phase,” I realize that sex has become more about performing rather than sharing an intimate moment where two people focus solely on each other’s pleasure.

Maybe it’s porn desensitizing us or hookup culture normalizing fleeting connections. But lately, these sexual escapades have become one-sided, mechanical, and eerily predictable. 

It seems almost normal that there’s this kind of honor, a false sense of mutual gratification, from being used as someone’s toy—only there to get them off.

We see it in the way we talk about sex, from sundresses and backshots to dick prints and grey sweatpants. We’ve created these sexual indicators as a means to determine what ‘good sex’ should look like, and it’s become something we’ve learned to adhere to. 

It’s no longer about simply enjoying sex, but looking a certain way while doing it— ultimately prioritizing optics over pleasure. Optics demands performance: the right arch, the right angle, the right sounds—techniques meant to be seen rather than experienced. 

We’re not having sex, we’re performing the version we’ve been taught to imitate: the pornographic, aesthetic, heteronormative script where pleasure is secondary to optics. 

A lot of our first encounters with sex comes from porn—a fantasy. We learn what we think sex should look like but not at all what it should feel like.

A lot of the sexual media that we consume focuses on domination, and while we are consuming it for our own pleasure, we fail to realize that it is misrepresenting realistic standards of sex. 

It highlights a symptom of the foundation we’ve built our sexual relationships on, rooted in gendered constructs and the commodification of sex. This leaves little room for authenticity, vulnerability, or genuine pleasure. 

There is a general distinction between biological sex and gender: the former is characterized by innate science and the latter highlights the idea of societal constructs dictating how we conduct ourselves. 

Sex is framed in a similar manner, being inherently based on procreation, penetration, and even male pleasure. Inherently turning away from the exploration or consideration of the source of power and information that comes from pleasure, the kind of erotic power Audre Lorde, a Black feminist poet and theorist, describes. 

Audre Lorde discusses the use of the erotic as a source of freedom, specifically stating that pornography is its antithesis. Sex has turned into encouraging female inferiority through the lens of the erotic as something fashioned within the context of male models of power.  

In other words, sex shouldn’t focus on what we are doing, but rather how fully immersed we are in the feeling of the doing. Gendered constructs have cultivated a society rooted in patriarchy, and it only makes sense that it impacts our sexual relationships. 

Sex shouldn’t feel mechanical or monotonous. It shouldn’t be a performance. 

Sex isn’t something we’re just doing—it’s something we’re performing to what we think is expected or desired. That’s exactly where we hit a sexual roadblock, specifically when what is desired is rooted in deeply embedded power structures. What we recognize as “normal sex” isn’t natural at all, but a product of centuries of cultural conditioning.

For example, penetration has become the center of sex, not because it’s necessarily pleasurable, but because it’s legible to the patriarchy. For many people, foreplay is an idea entirely thrown out the window, despite it being  something that actually grounds us within the experience and allows us to feel sex to its fullest potential. 

Women are expected and positioned as passive, responsive, and accommodating, while male pleasure is the endpoint. Pleasure is staged, predictable, mechanical, and extremely hierarchical. 

We’re pressured into the “right positions,” the “right reactions,” the “right body roles,” and the “right dynamics” — not necessarily because we want to, but because we think we should. We are essentially watching ourselves have sex by policing our own bodies from the inside. 

We must fully realize the power of the erotic and fully immerse ourselves in the sexual experience, something that starts outside of the bedroom. We have to start asking ourselves if what we’re doing, whether that be a job, a degree, a hobby, or even a sex position, is something we truly want. 

When we realize what we want, we fully immerse ourselves in our autonomy—our power. Only then will we be able to pull the curtain away and realize that the ideas we try to live up to are only holding us back. Maybe then sex will finally become something we feel, not something we perform.

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Eriel Pichardo is a recent UF graduate who is obsessed with culture, chaos, and the occasional existential crisis. He’s known for taking way too many green tea shots and ignoring his own advice