Sex is the most delicious all-you-can-eat buffet, but when you're eating out with others, building an erotic menu together can help you make the most of your appetites. Never underestimate the power and eroticism of a good meal.
Building an erotic menu is a regular staple in the homework exercises I give to my clients who want to move away from their current, mostly boring and unappetising ways of having sex and towards more creativity, pleasure and deliciousness. Where so many couples in long-term relationships get stuck is that they default to what works and is 'good enough', this is often synonymous with what is easy and convenient. The fast food of sex.
No stranger to fast food myself, it has a time and place but when it is the centre or only part of your diet, it's a quick slide down to malnourishment, disappointment and sometimes even aversion. Our bodies deserve better than that. Building an erotic menu is a fun and collaborative to re-write our sexual scripts, and to make it a habit to check in with ourselves and each other about what we want from any sexual experience. In an ideal world, it should never be assumed or expected that we want the same mains or desserts each time or in the exact same way, because there's a point when you just get sick of having the same old pasta. I'm sure it does the job, but baby it could be so much better.
You can build a solo erotic menu and/or one that is shared. These menus can change as often as you'd like to stay in alignment with our ever-changing preferences, abilities, energy and time. What I love about the menu and food-as-sex analogy as a whole is that you can dress it up or down however you want. You can change the entrees, mains and desserts each time or keep them the same. You can make it a 9 course meal. You can just do an appetizer. It also normalises that everyone has different preferences or dietary requirements when it comes to deciding what we want to eat and that it can change by the minute.
The idea behind the erotic menu is that it is a tool to support communication and helps "set the table" so we have ideas about what we want for tonight, what we don't and what's on the chef's specials. It is a framework that also encourages continual exploration, deeper understanding of our needs and our bodies, and an opportunity for better communication. It helps us see sex as the collaborative, creative and delicious dream that it should be.
What does this look like in reality? However you want - that's the whole point. A great starting point is focusing on what the parts of a sexual experience that you do currently or have previously enjoyed, and build it out from there. You can make it as niche as what kind of positions you want, but I suggest thinking bigger and thinking more erotic and more sensual. Remember to take the learnt emphasis away from boring old penis-in-vagina (PIV) sex. I once heard a fellow sex educator describe PIV sex as the "white bread of sex" - it's a great addition but you wouldn't make it a whole meal. I've included a sample menu that I created for Sex with Sel to get your brain juices flowing.
Who's horny? I mean, hungry?
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