The 5 Senses of Sex: Sight and Desire

How can you experience sexual pleasure, connectedness, and intimacy on an even deeper level, savoring every encounter and quickly triggering intense desire? That’s the question we’re setting out to answer with our newest blog post series, The 5 Senses of Sex. Each week leading up to Valentine’s Day, we’re going to explore one of our senses—sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch—and its connection to the ways we experience sexuality, and then talk about how to consciously strengthen and use those connections to intensify pleasure. Ready to join me on this journey?

First, a note about bodies and ability

Before we dive in, I want to recognize the fact that bodies are unique. Not everyone has access to all five senses. Everyone has different levels of sensitivity for each sense, and there will probably be one or two that you strongly favor. There may also be one or more that make you feel uncomfortable to focus on or that bring up emotional struggles. All of that is normal. No body is “better” because of its combination of senses and their strength. If any of this doesn’t work for you or doesn’t feel good, that’s okay! This isn’t a set of rules you have to follow to be a great lover; it’s a map to help you explore yourself and your lover(s) in order to learn more about how your body works and what gives you the most pleasure.

How sight affects desire

I started with sight because it’s both the most obvious and also the most complicated for just about every sighted person. Of all the ways we struggle with self-consciousness, insecurity, and even shame when it comes to our sexuality, being anxious about our appearances, our facial expressions, and being seen naked by a partner usually tops the list by a factor of about a thousand.

Wow, we’re off to a sexy start, aren’t we?

Well, here’s the good news: The relationship between sight and desire is about a lot more than our faces or bodies, so if that’s too sensitive a place to explore, there are still many other ways to use sight to inspire desire!

If you’re nerdy about brains the way I am, you can go on some pretty deep dives reading about the reams and reams of studies that have been conducted to try to figure out why we’re attracted to some things more than others and why each of us finds certain things beautiful or desirable. (Spoiler alert: No one has all the answers!) For our purposes, it’s enough to know that there are a few different things going on when we look at someone or something that arouses feelings of attraction:

• We’re making decisions about what we think is going to be good for us in some way;
• We’re responding to colors, patterns, and shapes in ways that actually affect how our bodies feel—for example, some sights are commonly relaxing and stress-relieving, while others are exciting and create reactions like skin prickling and pulse quickening;
• We’re drawing connections between what we see and our memories of similar things that brought us pleasure, or finding comfort in the familiarity of what we’re looking at.

In very simple terms, “desire” is the reaction we have to something when it catches our attention strongly enough to create the urge to close the distance between ourselves and that something—to experience it or explore it more completely. There’s evidence that our reactions to things we find desirable are linked to the same area of the brain that governs curiosity. So whenever we see something and desire it, that’s a form of curiosity, creating a delightful kind of anticipation as our imagination kicks in. What would it feel like to touch that thing? What will happen if I kiss that person? The possibilities we start imagining are exciting; our bodies are filling in previews of all the pleasure we expect to get, and that just makes us want to get going!

Sight and intimacy

When we get past general ideas of beauty and pleasure and start thinking about sexuality and intimacy, sight plays a whole other role. It affects not just how connected we’re going to feel to a partner, but how good we feel about them and how much we’re opening up to them.

Have you ever met someone who made very direct eye contact with you, so that it startled you to feel so “looked at”? Most of us go through everyday life expecting people’s eyes to pass briefly over us, making only surface-level eye contact at most. In my experience, this is even stronger in crowded urban areas (and I think it’s partly why people from other areas think that big-city dwellers are cold or rude), but there’s a good reason for it—when personal space is very limited, not making eye contact is one of the few ways we have left to preserve some sense of personal space. It’s kind of a survival mechanism.

But as a result, there are quite a lot of us who are not used to being truly seen, and having a lover look deep into our eyes creates a feeling of vulnerability and trust that can be wonderful or overwhelming or both. You may have read about the famous experiment that suggested that gazing into someone’s eyes for four minutes will cause the people involved to feel bonded or actually fall in love.

Is that true? Well, yes and no. Maintaining a long, gentle gaze (not a hard creepy stare!) into the eyes of someone you desire or care about does release oxytocin, one of the brain chemicals involved in that feeling of falling for someone. Studies of couples in love compared to pairs of strangers or even friends found that the couples made eye contact 75% of the time while talking, compared to 30-60% of the time for ordinary conversation. No one’s sure whether eye contact creates intimacy, or whether it’s a sign that intimacy is present, but it’s a very powerful way to feel more deeply bonded to your lover.

Ways to use sight to increase desire and pleasure

Regardless of which of these things you decide to try, the common factor in all of them is to take your time and relax! You can’t truly fill your gaze if you’re in a rush or feeling anxious, so let yourself really focus on the way you’re exploring the delights of sight. It will keep you more aware and in-the-moment, allowing your experience to feel richer and more complete. And it will capture your attention more strongly, helping you let go of all the mind-chatter and little worries about everything outside the bedroom so that you can be even more immersed in pleasure.

Set a beautiful scene. Get ready for a night with your lover by preparing your space beforehand. It could be as simple as making sure the bedroom is tidied up and the bed is freshly made; it could be putting new sheets on the bed that are a gorgeously bold color. It could be changing up the lighting, or going to a whole different place—a private outdoor spot, a hotel room—that you both find lovely. It could be going the full scattered-rose-petals-and-candlelight route, or setting out restraints and toys you plan to use.

Pick out toys with a little extra aesthetic. This can be even more exciting if you’re just starting to explore using sex toys together! There are lots of high-quality, body-safe toys out there that are also just plain gorgeous. Picking out something like our bejeweled steel butt plugs, or a one-of-a-kind Bendable Glass toy, or a gleaming Rose & Thorns paddle by Creamed and Sugared, creates that extra sense of “ooh shiny!” that’ll make you all the more eager to get your toy home and try it out together.

Dress up…or down. There’s a reason lingerie is so popular! It’s not just that it’s made to look sexy and sensual, it’s that it’s a visual signal with a subtext that it’s time to get intimate. But classic lingerie is just one option for dressing for sex. What kind of clothing gives you a thrill to see or to wear? What gets your partner hot under the collar? Maybe it’s a uniform, or a well-tailored suit, or something that plays with gender expression. Maybe it’s an all-out costume, or something as simple as an oversized shirt unbuttoned down to there.

Adorn yourself—or each other. Take getting naked to a whole other erotic dimension by adding some accents like body jewelry—for example, the Crave Vesper vibrator necklace, or the Desir Metallique sparkling collar and cuffs. Try out pasties or beaded clamps for your nipples. Drape yourself in sheer scarves and strip them away one by one.

Get artistic. Use your bodies as canvases: Finger-paint each other with body paints (bonus: roll out butcher paper or a large piece of fabric on the floor and let your bodies create a unique painting as you have sex!) or engage in Pillow Book play by writing on your lover’s skin. Or, write on your own skin and let your lover discover your messages one by one as they undress you. If you're into candle wax play, you can make elaborate colored patterns on each other's bodies with different colors of wax.

Let yourself be looked at. This is an exercise I’ve done with many groups in workshops about awakening the senses. In my experience, nearly everyone on the receiving end feels nervous or giggly at first, but then begins to feel delighted or even cherished—and those doing the looking find themselves deeply fascinated by their partner. It’s best to each take a turn with both roles. Get comfortably seated facing each other, and for one to three minutes, one of you explores the other’s face with your full-attention gaze while the other focuses on letting themselves receive that attention. When you’re the one looking at your partner, let your eyes move around and notice all the little details of their face. What feelings pop up? Do you have a moment of joy seeing something you’ve always loved about their features? Do you feel surprised to see something you’ve never noticed before? At the end of that few minutes, tell your partner what you saw and how it made you feel. Then, switch roles and do it again. It’s hard to describe how good it can feel to be so lovingly (or lustfully!) seen in such an unhurried, deep way by a lover until you experience it.

Try the four-minute experiment. Step up the intimacy of your eye contact by sitting or lying close together where you can comfortably make eye contact, and gaze into each other’s eyes for a full four minutes. (It’s OK to blink—it’s not a staring contest!) You may find that you glance away now and then—that’s fine, just bring your gaze back after a moment. It’s natural, too, to laugh or blush or even cry. Let yourself be open to feelings that emerge as you do this—it’s often a very powerful, intense experience. When you first try it, do it without doing anything else; after that, you can experiment with doing this while you’re touching one another or having sex.

Let yourself be looked at, Part 2. This will be a very vulnerable thing for a lot of people, but it can be a great way to overcome feelings of body anxiety. Do the same “looking at—being looked at” exercise as described above, but this time, look at each other’s bodies. You can do this clothed or not, and either focus on one area of the body or the entire body. It’s helpful for the receiver, in this case, to be lying down and comfortable. You might be surprised at how many little details of each other’s bodies you’ve never noticed before and how good it feels to take that time to enjoy the sight of your lover’s body with no pressure to do anything but that. And hearing your lover describing what they see when they look at your body can make you feel cherished and desirable in unexpected ways.

Be a voyeur during your own sexcapades. If you’re used to lying back and closing your eyes during sex, try watching your partner instead. Savor the sight of them going down on you, or try a position that lets you see their face when they orgasm. If you have a large mirror, move it so that you can see your bodies in a variety of positions. If you’re feeling even bolder than that, you can set up a camera to take pictures or video of yourselves having sex so that you can look at them later to get in the mood again.

Put on a show. Take it from me and my experience as a burlesque performer—there’s incredible erotic power in a fierce or playful striptease! And no, you don’t have to be a great dancer to pull this off. You don’t even need music (though some great sexy music combines sight and hearing to devastating effect). Even if your lover has seen your body hundreds of times, striptease creates mystery and sparks desire and excitement as you slowly reveal yourself. The key is to actually tease them, showing glimpses of skin or under-layers before you fully remove a piece of clothing. Control where on your body they look by either looking at that spot yourself, touching it lightly with your hands, or moving it. It helps to practice a little bit beforehand, so you know how you’re getting out of a piece of clothing without getting tangled in it (hint: things that slip off or have snaps or zippers are easiest to remove). The best part? Stripping looks sexy on every gender, so you can take turns bumping and grinding for each other!

Sighted people process about 80% of our sensory input through sight alone, so use your creativity—there are almost endless ways to explore connecting with your lover with your eyes. Have another great way you’ve found to increase desire and intimacy through sight? Drop it in the comments! Make sure to check back next week for the next post in this series and enjoy feasting your eyes on your lover.