"Apart from the nudity the [most awkward moment] was when I first took a cunnilingus class."
Until recently, comedian-actor Luke McGregor had a serious sex problem: it terrified him, he didn't get to do it very often, and when he did he thought he hadn't done it very well. He even had a stand-up routine about how to get better at sex, which basically found him laying his ignorance of matters of the flesh out on the table. That concept has now been expanded into six-part docu-comedy Luke Warm Sex.
A frank and funny dissection of one man's journey through sexual discovery, the show finds McGregor enrolling sex therapists, nudists, relationship coaches, sexologists, erotic masseurs, porn stars, male escorts and even his parents in his quest to not just get better at 'doing it' but to embrace notions of sexual confidence, creativity, intimacy and pleasure.
"If you're talking and communicating it's a sex enhancer, whereas I thought that if you asked anything or talked at all during sex it would ruin the mood."
"I thought it would be a bunch of techniques but the biggest thing I ended up learning was that even if you learn something — let's say a particular way to stroke the clitoris — every single person is going to want a different speed or a different pressure or a different length of time, so the biggest thing for me was that communication doesn't ruin the mood it enhances the mood," McGregor explains. "If you're talking and communicating it's a sex enhancer, whereas I thought that if you asked anything or talked at all during sex it would ruin the mood."
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The show finds McGregor in various awkward scenarios, some obviously preying on repressed fears more than others.
"Apart from the nudity the [most awkward moment] was when I first took a cunnilingus class," he admits. "The instructor had stockings on but she opened up her legs and I went down and pretended to lick an apple which was filling in for her clitoris. I'd never gone down on someone before — I'm a big germophobe and I was scared about how it would taste or that I would dry retch — and even though I was only doing it on an apple all of those fears came back to the front and started getting really anxious and sweaty and I couldn't talk properly."
But now this hard work and sacrifice has paid off, McGregor believing that the Luke Warm Sex experience has proved resoundingly positive on his love life.
"I'm actually having sex now, which is something I've never done before," he laughs. "It had been 33 years of two sessions and then a lot more in the last few months. It was just that little change of not seeing sex as scary and seeing it as an extension of the affection you feel towards someone. It's fun now whereas I used to just roll over and pretend to go to sleep or say I didn't have any condoms. And I always had condoms, they were just out of date. It's great — I always thought I'd be someone who'd never get that part of their life sorted, but now that it is, it's amazing. I'm very, very glad I did a doco about it — I wish I'd done it in high school!"