Is Sex the Adult Version of a Standardized Test?
- Miranda Wylie
- Oct 17
- 2 min read
“Your presence. That’s what I enjoyed the most,” Mayra said while slowly rolling onto her side to come up to seated. She was naked, laying on the living room floor in a nest of pillows and soft blankets in a house rented for the weekend. I had been invited to spend the afternoon with Mayra and her client to skill share. I shared the practice of Sensate Focus touch.
Mayra is stunningly beautiful and disarmingly intuitive. Once at an event we were paired for an activity that required us to share what we saw in each other after eye gazing. “You’re wise. Stop hiding,” she reported matter-of-factly. I was stunned. This was our first encounter. I immediately wanted to hide and defend myself with a “you don’t know what you’re talking about” kind of stance, tempered with a gratitude for being seen. She was like that whip smart eyes-in-the-back-of-her-head Mom who walks into a room and calls the shots before any kid has acted. “Don’t even think about it,” she says as the kid weakly retaliates, “I wasn’t doing anything.” But she knows. She always knows.
It’s important you know that I was touching a gorgeous woman’s naked body with no limitations except time (15 minutes) because of how I touched her. It was important for her client to witness how I touched her. We didn’t begin here but this is how we ended—with access to her naked landscape and my touch the same since before when we were clothed and touched only hands.
My fingers moved slowly, with curiosity rather than intention. I wasn’t trying to elicit anything—not arousal, not relaxation, not even pleasure in the conventional sense. I was simply paying attention. My breath was steady. My mind wasn’t racing ahead to the next touch or evaluating the current one. When I traced the inside of her forearm, I felt the subtle temperature difference between the crease of her elbow and her forearm. I noticed the texture of her skin, the almost imperceptible pulse. There was no escalation in my mind, no hierarchy of body parts. Her shoulder blade received the same quality of attention as her inner thigh. Her collarbone, the same as her breast.
For me, this is what presence can feel like: an all-consuming attention that expects nothing in return. It’s the opposite of the touch most of us know, especially when it comes to sex. Often the touch is always asking: “Is this working? Are we there yet? What’s next?” But with Sensate Focus my hands move with simple curiosity not because they were trying to arrive anywhere.
Often I found myself edging more towards the erotic when touching her hands—the webbing between fingers, the small bones of her wrist—than when my palm grazed her breast. I couldn’t have predicted that I would be more aroused when circling her wrist bone as opposed to her nipple. But this is the beautiful unfolding that can occur when we open the aperture of possibility in our touch and our bodies.
Read or listen to the rest of the story on Substack.
Audio recording by me.
