Performance Anxiety, or the Changing Borders of Boners

When I was in elementary school the map of Europe looked completely different. Germany was split in two, Czech and Slovakia were one, and a sprawling blot called Yugoslavia spread out in the south. A few years ago I took a bus from Belgrad to Dubrovnik and, over the course of a day’s ride, we crossed two borders, were inspected by three countres’ armies, and passed by groups of American soldiers with NATO bands on their arms. All of this where there had been a single country under a single leader a decade earlier.

In the last week I was surprised to find two different friends confess a terrifying impotence when on the verge having sex for the first time with someone they had genuine feelings for. Both described having a heavy and active sexual appetite that was most easily expressed with people they knew they wouldn’t care about. This breeds a kind of erotic freedom that allows a person to be bluntly honest about their wants without fear of rejection. If someone you’ve no serious interest in declines an advance, then so what? It’s about as damaging a blow as being told a restaurant is out of salmon for the evening, would you be willing to make do with snapper instead?

I sometimes get a sense of genetic vertigo during sex. I’ve found myself in the wet cinch increasingly distracted by the stakes of sharing your sundry reproductive fluids with another person. Last year, I was drunk and in bed with a woman I hadn’t expected to wind up in bed with. I hardly knew her. As my penis stiffened and she began reaching for it I had a rush of thoughts about what a total strangers we still were. As my body was surging with the want to be inside her, I wondered what the consequences of that would be.

What humorless diseases were lying in wait to be discovered in the weeks after. What exactly did sex mean to her? Was this just the acting out of a physical want for her, or was it a ritualistic foundation laying for a future relationship? Was I satisfying my own wants or was there a hope that this would lead to more? If the condom slipped off, or broke, and our DNA wound up combining into a new life, what would happen? Did she have high cholesterol? A history of mental instability that might be passed on? Would she be a stable partner with to raise a child with?

It was too much. I soon realized I was only partly paying attention to what we were doing, absently moving my mouth and hands while tumbling down a spiral of my own thoughts. All of my lust had turned fearful. I felt like a caveman spooked by a flash of lightning and loud thunderclap, brooding in vain about where all of these thoughts had come from. I still felt a strong fondness for the woman I was with, but there was a sobering leash on that fondness that reminded me I had only the narrowest understanding of who she was.

There is a lot at stake in sex, and there are significant cultural pressures to pretend their isn’t. Most of the time we can skate past these questions unencumbered, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there, like potential energy for the branching paths that lead into and out of our bedrooms.

Another night I was drunk again and back in bed with a woman I’d dated for a few months. I’d wanted her to be my girlfriend but we weren’t a good fit and she said no. We staid friends and after a night out drinking, our easy familiarity made it easy to fall together into bed with loosening clothes. We both wanted to have sex, but I pulled back. I wanted it, but understood in a superstitious hunch that there was nothing in the sex we’d have that would satisfy that welling ache. I was still in love with her underneath the affable calluses I’d forced myself to grow to keep our friendship.

Having sex would have hurt, like splitting a callus to expose the living tissue buried underneath all the dead skin. I told her no. “I feel too vulnerable,” I said—I wonder how many other men have ever said that to a naked woman in bed. She suggested a compromise: we could just masturbate each other instead. It seems fair in hindsight, but in the moment it sounded utterly depressing. If I couldn’t support the idea of sex, the idea of manually pumping and rubbing one another seemed hopelessly animalistic.

When I was in elementary school I thought I wanted to avoid having sex until I was married. I was raised in a religious home but it wasn’t a religious conviction. I didn’t care what god thought about my penis. It was a needlepoint view of what sex would really be like. I wanted it to be everything, a supernatural departure whose deepest meaning could only come from exclusivity. I’d daydream about my wedding night, getting as far as the first slow-motion push inward, which, to my seven year-old brain, was a cloudy, golden sort of essence. I had no real experience to compare this hypothetical to, so I filled it with every mystical fantasy I had about the universe being capable of receiving my ego like a long waited-for visitor.

When I look back, I see an infantile self-protection in those moments of sexual reticence, clinging to the wispy outline of a long-dead fantasy of my special purpose and the wet wonders waiting for it in moonlit bedrooms that never existed in the first place. My freshman year of college I lived in a dingy cement high-rise that passed itself off as a student co-op. It was populated by foreign exchange students and disgruntled grad students with uncorked eyes and unregulated facial hair. At the top of the stairwell that led to the roof someone had spray painted a phrase I could never really understand. “It’s not for me to change the world, but for the world not to change me.”

The idea of the world changing a person seemed fantastical. Surely the self was the one thing that would stay constant in life–the autocratic monolith that gave purpose to all the wandering and wondering. It’s scary to think of that self in smaller terms, to let the fracturing lines creep outward, dissolving the daydream of a greater purpose for the sake of satisfying another people. When you know what it is you have that another person might want, you can withhold it, enduring the stress of their unmet expectations with the compensation of knowing you still have something they’d want. In finally letting go, the beautiful absence of not knowing is filled in with the inconvenient details of another person.

Before I got on the bus to Dubrovnik, I spent 3 days in Belgrad. The city felt haunted and heavy. The streets would flicker to life nearing downtown, at the foot of the park on a hill that looked out over the Danube. The outlying neighborhoods were quiet and grimy, the old cement buildings cast long shadows over the sidewalk, every window curtained around a dark slit that protected the dull interiors of apartment living. My hotel room smelled like old cigarette smoke and must. The ceilings were high and the hallway a long, empty cavern. I occasionally heard voices coming up and down the stairway at the far end, but I never saw anyone else come in or out.

On my last day, I checked out invisibly, leaving my key on the desk in my room. I walked past the desk clerk in his stiff wool uniform with epaulets and headed downtown one last time. I could hear the chatter and honking horns the closer I got to the center of the city. In the middle was an old cobblestoned street blocked off to car traffic. I walked up it, moving through waves of strangers. Just before the end of the walkway was a big round fountain built so that the city dwellers would never go thirsty.

I didn’t know what the custom for drinking from it was, it was a ring of small streams arcing outward and collecting in a small moat at the base of the fountain. There were no instructions, no indication whether it was just supposed to be symbolic now. Then I saw a group of students stop in front of it, one of them interrupting his laughter to bend over and take a drink. As they walked away I went up to the fountain and bent in front of it, reaching out with my neck, my mouth open.

Image via University of Amsterdam Library