I was dwelling somewhere in my late teens when it dawned on me that I wasn’t really any good in bed. I say it dawned on me, but it would probably be more accurate to say it was told to me when the day was dawning. I met her on a jaunt around Thailand during a full moon party, I don’t remember her very well, but I recall that she was Australian and I was mortified. I wanted to go anywhere that no one had ever told me I was crap in bed, but we were in my hotel room, and she seemed eager to continue assessing my performance.

Eventually we got back to it, and this time I had to endure the humiliating ordeal of being ‘coached’, or maybe trained would be more accurate. Yes I was the uncouth track, and she was training me. Apart from the obvious shame of the thing, what struck me most was that her preferences seemed to be completely at odds with my previous assumptions. It was somewhere around the time when she started explaining the difference between her clitoris and urethra that I realized that I had a lot of work to do if I was going to avoid this situation again.

The next day I did some soul searching, but nothing. It was only when I got home and locked myself in my room with my laptop that it all made sense. Porn. Porn had made this useless. Porn is great, but porn is not sex. I, however, had not made this disparity. I was a jackhammer. Minimal foreplay. Three fingers. Knuckles deep. All the way in. Balls slapping. Savage Finale. Victory is mine. I’d had girlfriends before this, but they were either too polite to say anything, or too inexperienced to know any better.

In Australia I met a woman who knew exactly what she wanted, and in turn it got me thinking more about what I wanted. It was only with my next girlfriend that I realized that I hadn’t particularly enjoyed having sex at such speed. I also discovered that it’s okay not to change positions more often than a teenager flipping through music channels. The next few months served as an unlearning process, so to speak, and I couldn’t believe how foolish I had been.

I can’t blame it all on Porn though. I mean, think of the poor folks back in the day. All they had was their imagination, and rudimentary drawings on the back of public toilet doors, but they could communicate, and so could I. This was always my problem. I just never took the time to ask. It seems strange that so many of us spend so much time in the active pursuit of sex. Whether we’re picking up musical instruments, or dumbbells, yet we spend so little of that time on getting good at it.