Can We Become Erotically Over-Educated?

I guess the problem you describe isn’t so much education as competitive motivations for education?

Learning an additional erotic skill because I’m actually interested in doing it, I don’t see a problem with that. I would find it problematic if my motivation for learning to do something were a competitive desire to show off to an audience, or, if I were single, fear that nobody would want to get involved with me unless I’m an eight-armed supernatural being simultaneously wielding eight different SM instruments.

They might be asked to engage in some form of kink for which they have no skills, or perhaps no desire.
If it is ‘no desire’ rather than ‘no skills’, isn’t this the time to say ‘I’m not interested in doing that’? I thought people, including tops, are allowed to have limits.

Have we relegated the key ingredients of mental connection and bonding to second class status relative to technique?
Sounds like professionalisation to me. Some educators perhaps lose sight of the fact that not everyone wants to become an educator themselves? Professionalism can become elevated to a basic requirement by those for whom it is a source of income. Parallels which come to mind are, for example, performance artists in the tying-up-women rope bondage scene, who have covered their kink under so much sublimation they’ve become estranged from the idea that mere laypersons might do tying up for more immediate carnal purposes. Well, they get paid to do shows. Female prodoms who boast with their mad skillz find that their marketing talk has the economically convenient side effect of repelling the imperfect undereducated non-pro competition.

So I don’t think we need to be suspicious of a desire to learn stuff for a love of the activities and interaction. I’m suspicious of competitive financial motivations, of professionalisation intruding into personal love life, and of competitive motivations in people whose main focus seems to drift away from their and their partners’ personal enjoyment when they get their self-esteem caught up in a need to impress strangers.

Ever since The Mr. Boston Leather contest was rigged against me (I have solid proof) and the suicide attempt that followed it, I have felt like this for the past five years. When Mr. Boston Leather called me and all older leathermen DINOSAURS, it made things worse. I can completely agree with the feeling expressed in the article about feeling unable to perform anymore. I understand better than many sadly.

You frame this in terms of someone with lots of experience; the encouragement of this self-perception is and was a large barrier to my enjoying play as a less-experienced player. Becoming truly competent in kinky skills take a great deal of time and energy, but the lesson I started taking away from the community was not a desire for self improvement but a feeling that I was not good enough. Period. I didn’t know how to give people the kind of experiences that people bragged about, and so I was scared to play, I was scared to improve. Writing this now it occurs to me that this is a typical conflict in the way men and women are taught to be that plays out in creating the glass ceiling—men will often talk up what they can do, while women will often be more humble, and both will expect that they other is speaking the same way. Thus, I ended up feeling simply inferior to the men around me, and too intimidated to participate. Since there were plenty of other things in my life asking for my time and energy, and my sex drive is well blow average, I stopped trying to participate.