[performance anxiety] what do you think what gives a man PA?

Do you have good sources on performance anxiety in women? I rarely read about these things and when I do it's usually either logically inconsistent or biased towards body image issues which have nothing to do with performance anxiety.

I often hear from women worrying about how they look and it is a legit concern and the anxiety is of course real but it has nothing to do with performance anxiety. Usually the women worries more about her own visual imperfections than men worry about those visual imperfections in women. Usually from what I hear women think men are more superficial than men actually are so once they decide to show themselves naked they overcome the anxiety by noticing that it's not as big a deal as they thought.

You can have body image anxiety AND performance anxiety. Men worry about not being considered attractive too in ADDITION to not performing as expected by women. These are two seperate issues. In regards your penis size you can worry about women not finding your penis visually appealing even though functionally your penis is fine and is able to perform as expected. So you can have body image anxiety WITHOUT also having performance anxiety. Like I said: completely seperate issues.

Other articles usually mention that women are afraid of "not enjoying sex" (as in not reaching orgasm) which is also completely different from performance anxiety. You can not enjoy sex and still perform as expected. If the women is satisified you performed as expected even though you didn't necessarily enjoy it yourself. Not saying "fear of not enjoying sex" is not a legit concern but it's not performance anxiety. You don't have to enjoy to perform.

One other thing I read often is that women worry about not being noisy enough and stuff like that and/or not showing 'correctly' to the man that they enjoy the sex. This is more suitable to be categorized as performance anxiety because it has to do with fullfilling the expectations men have.

Other articles mention that women who don't reach orgasm feel anxious and start to blame themselves. Which means that they should blame men instead which pretty much perfectly feeds into "men have to please women, not the other way around".

Other concerns are about getting pregnant which is a legit concern for both genders. Women worry about getting pregnant, men worry about getting women pregnant. But this is again not really performance anxiety. The same applies for contracting diseases. Legit anxiety issues/concerns but NOT performance anxiety.

Then there are articles which argue about women being taught to be ashamed of their bodies which in my opinion is incredibly unscientific. This might have been true many years ago and may be true in some cultures but it's definitely not true anymore for the society I live in. It's a legit concern in cultures that still work that way but in more west-ish non-religious societies I don't see this happening. Women can walk around almost naked and it's completely fine and can wear skirts and 'cooler' clothings in summer where men have to pretty much hide all their skin all the time in business dress codes but this depends on your field of work and company. But anyway... it's completely unrelated to performance anxiety.

There's a huge difference between being anxious to initiate sex due to non-performance related concerns and being anxious to initiate sex due to performance related concerns.

Women fearing that sex will be painful is certainly anxiety and a huge struggle but it's not performance anxiety. I think it's important to distinguish between sexual anxiety and performance anxiety. Performance anxiety is a very SPECIFIC case of sexual anxiety but not all sexual anxiety are performance anxiety.

Low sex drive fits into performance anxiety because if you don't want sex as much as your partner you're not fullfilling his/her expecatations thus it fits performance anxiety.

/r/sex Thread Parent