Your moans are muffled by your pillow. You want to scream out, “Yes, baby, harder!” but the idea of being overheard by your roommates — or even worse, your neighbors — silences your horny ass. Instead, you bite onto the soft down-pillow and let your eyes roll back into your head. But, is silencing your sex life putting your personal, relational and community’s health at risk? That’s what Sweden’s Gabriel Wilkstrom thinks.
One pissed tweeter. A citizen tweeted a complaint at the health minister saying that his neighbor was being too loud during coitus. Wilkstrom, being the sex-positive public figure that he is, responded with: "Sounds nice for them, I think. Good for their wellbeing and thus public health as well."
Not just girl talk any more. Many people openly talk to their girlfriends about being loud or vocal during sex, but now experts are weighing in. Dr. Ian Kerner, a licensed psychotherapist and sexuality counselor, specializes in sex therapy. "Couples who are able to communicate around sex are healthier and happier," Kerner said in an interview with Broadly.
This includes loud sex. Vocal sex can be a part of that communication that the doctor mentioned, thus loud sex is good for couples. "Copulatory vocalization — making noise during sex — is an essential way of communicating with your partner, letting them know what feels good, what doesn't necessarily feel good," said Kerner to Broadly.
Noises can act as a cue to orgasm as well. "Many studies have shown that women who vocalize a lot during sex, that it's not often as much about their own pleasure [as] it is about signifying to their partner that it's okay for them to orgasm,” Kerner explained.
Being vocal and uninhibited adds to the pleasure of sex. It’s obviously a turn on to hear your partner making some hot noises during sex! Being able to vocalize what we are (or not) enjoying is important, but it’s definitely easier said than done.
A lot of couples resist dirty talk. We repress our sexuality. "We know our favorite positions. We know where our partners like to be touched, where we like to be touched," Kerner said to Broadly. "But we don't necessarily share fantasies. We don't necessarily share feedback. We don't necessarily vocalize — that probably goes back to all the little developmental experiences that we have along the way that focus on hiding sex, or shame or embarrassment around sex."
Are we all prudes? "We live in a very sex negative, somewhat Victorian, shame-based society," Kerner said. "Not only do we not vocalize during sex, we don't even really communicate about sex, whether it's on the level of fantasy, or simply giving feedback to our partners.”
The model around sex was not always centered around pleasure. "You have sex to have children, and anything outside of that was considered either a sin or a disease […] Two hundred years ago, masturbating was literally considered an organic disease that could be cured by surgery,” explained Kerner.
Societal norms affect the ways in which we look at sex… and in the ways that we have sex. "If you're not having attached, monogamous lovemaking — if you're masturbating to porn, if you're engaging in non-monogamy, if you're engaging in kink — a lot of people in this country would pathologize that, and say something is wrong with you,” Kerner said to Broadly.
However, loudness is not a requirement to high-quality boinking. Nor does it indicate whether or not sex is good or bad. Some people get off on being quiet, actually!
There’s more than one way to have sex! "There's all kinds of ways to have sex, and loud sex does not automatically have to equal good sex," Kerner explained. The doctor added that sometimes, loudness can be inauthentic. This was the case for one of his own patients...
Fake it… ’til you make it? One of Kerner’s patients faked orgasms during louder sex, which stunned her partner. The woman was normally very auditory during intercourse, so he thought she was producing legitimate orgasms."For her, that was part of the performance of sex," Kerner explained. "We do have to distinguish between real sex, the sounds we make during real sex, and the sounds we make when we perform."
Who cares if we hear people getting down and dirty? Kerner says that no matter how (or how loudly) you are having sex, it’s a part of being human. We hear our neighbors walking upstairs, we hear them arguing, we hear them crying and so on. Hearing them make love is just another sound that we need to learn to tolerate.
Kerner speaks up about Wikstrom’s statements. "I think what the Swedish minister was trying to say is that it's better to live in a society where people are having sex and troubling their neighbors with the noise, than live in a society where people are not having sex.” Amen, brutha!
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