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Pace yourself. Slow sex, fast sex, and everything in between

Mar 17, 2022

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Pace yourself. Slow sex, fast sex, and everything in between

Watching most porn, the takeaway is that the quicker, the harder, the better. There’s not a lot of slow-paced intercourse going down. And while hard and fast sex has its own cheerleading team in real life, other-paced sessions have a lot going for them as well. Sometimes slow is just the build-up, sometimes it’s a main course all the way through to climax. Most important? Making sure there is enough of whatever you both – or all – like to get you off.

A recent study has shown that our intense lives mean our brains process everything around us at a rapid speed, perhaps ensuring we can stave off boredom. Anything but that, please! Maybe this has some bearing on how we like our intimacy. Is fast sex the logical next step? Or can slow sex serve as more of an antidote to 24/7 full-on energy? When it comes to relationship sex, the answer is a little less cut and dry.

The clichés that magazines trot out separate pace preferences by gender – vagina-owners like slow sex more (make love to me!), people with penises prefer it faster – but recent studies confirmed that neither of these generalities is true. They found that female-identifying people actually get aroused by fast-paced sex more often than male-identifying folks. But what about everybody else? These polls leave many out of the equation, and so aren’t really inclusive enough to take the real temperature of who is into what. Pace preferences are probably more of a day of the week thing, anyway. Gender isn’t what dictates how you like it.

If you are like most people, what you are in the mood for ebbs and flows. It depends on the time of day, where your head is at, even the music you’re listening to. The sex you want when you’re on a high from a great week at work is probably not the technique you want – or need – if you’re feeling kind of blue. And we are here to tell you that all of it is worthy and right. Validation, right this way!

You can elevate your couple sex by varying not just positions, but pace. If you tend to go at it hard, try consciously slowing down or evening out your stroke. If you or your partner have the most mind-blowing orgasms from slower sex, vary it up and go hard, and see where that leads you. Switch it up according to mood, place, partner(s), day of the week… There really is no one speed fits all sex.