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No matter your job, you need to hang up some of your skills at the door when you come home.
In the case of Halle Berry, that goes double for her bedroom door.
Over the years, her relationships have taught her some valuable lessons.
One thing that she will never do is bring her acting skills into the bedroom to please her partner.
She’s not gonna fake it
On the Tuesday, February 24 episode of the Sex With Emily podcast, Berry explained that she refuses to pretend to orgasm.
Being honest, she emphasized, helps her and fiance Van Hunt to not repeat the mistakes of too many relationships.
“Wehad to get there,” Berry reasoned, “so that he felt good about bringing us to orgasm.”
Speaking more generally, she said: “We had to say that we did it so that he would feel good about himself.”
Berry stressed: “Because what is that doing? That’s putting his needs before our own. And now I don’t do that anymore.”
“I’m like, ‘No, I come first like you come first to you,’” Berry affirmed.
“We both deserve to have this be a mutually enjoyable experience,” she reasoned.
Berry explained: “So we both can roll over and go to sleep because we feel good.”
She then contrasted this with an image all-too-familiar with pop culture depictions of straight relationships.
“Not one snoring and the other one looking at the ceiling, going, ‘What the hell?’” Berry illustrated.
This is all part of a much larger conversation
Berry’s appearance on the Sex With Emily episode spanned over 40 minutes.
Obviously, she discussed much more than authentic orgasms in that time.
There are numerous ways in which society has failed women. Just one of them is the way that, historically, many wives have not expected to orgasm during sex, because they were centering their husbands.
One of the reasons that past generations of feminism were (admittedly to a fault) focused upon the human body: because so many women felt both ashamed of and mystified by their own bodies, and often had no place to go for answers.
This ultra-narrow focus upon specific straight, cis women and their anatomy is not and cannot be the whole and breadth of feminism. But delving into topics like cervical mucus and orgasms can help some women to come out of their shells and seek happiness in relationships and life.
There is an old social media post in which a woman recalls a man asking how a lesbian couple “know” when sex is “over” since, in a cis couple, neither has a penis.
That is a classic example of someone telling on himself — either for not causing his own partners to orgasm, or for simply defining sex through his own pleasure.
Obviously, that’s anecdotal and far from universal.
But countless women can attest that they’ve had partners who think that sex begins and ends with an erection.
If someone like Halle Berry has encountered men who aren’t prioritizing mutual pleasure, what hope do women who aren’t famous A-list actresses who are gorgeous beyond reason have?
This isn’t a dig at Van Hunt
We don’t believe that she said any of this to shade her fiance. In fact, quite the opposite.
Earlier this month, she confirmed that the two of them are now engaged.
(Fans may recall that, last year, the news was that he had proposed — but that the answer was “on hold” for the time being.)
Berry and Hunt have been dating for nearly six years.
In that time, they’ve used social media to make it clear how sexually charged and satisfying their romance is. Good for them!