These Moves Are Anything But Boring

Let’s start with what we actually know: the source material is just four words—“These moves are anything but boring.”—attached to a headline about missionary sex variations. It’s not exactly a policy shift or a public health alert. But if we’re going to treat this as cultural signal noise worth translating into something useful for a real community, we need to look where the conversation is already happening. And right now, one of the most persistent, quietly influential threads in American sexual wellness discourse isn’t about novelty—it’s about the opposite: the growing number of people who find even exceptionally well-made, intentional, slow-paced experiences… underwhelming. Not because they’re awful, but because they don’t spark. Sound familiar? It’s the same tension driving conversations around films critics call “boring” but audiences defend as profound—think Tar, Jeanne Dielman, or the slow cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The parallel isn’t accidental. In both cases, what’s being rejected isn’t quality—it’s the expectation that depth must always feel like stimulation.

This matters in a city like Minneapolis, where long winters, high rates of seasonal affective disorder, and a cultural tendency toward understatement create a unique feedback loop between interior life and emotional availability. Minneapolis isn’t just another metro—it’s a place where the Walker Art Center routinely programs durational performances that test attention spans, where the Minneapolis Institute of Art hosts exhibitions on quiet resistance and mindfulness, and where local therapists at Washburn Center for Children and Hennepin County Behavioral Health increasingly report clients describing not trauma or anxiety, but a flatness—a sense that things are “fine,” but not alive. It’s not depression. It’s anhedonia’s quieter cousin: the inability to derive pleasure from things that *should* be pleasing, even when they’re done well.

That’s where the macro-to-micro shift happens. The global trend—people rejecting “boring” excellence—lands locally as a quiet crisis of intimacy. Not because Minneapolitans are repressed, but because they’re thoughtful. They overthink touch. They schedule connection like a meeting at Target Field. They wonder if the lack of fireworks means they’re broken, when often it just means they’re out of sync with the myth that great sex must always feel like a highlight reel. The truth? Some of the most attuned, connected experiences are slow. Repetitive. Almost boring—by design. And that’s okay. In fact, it might be the point.

So how do we talk about this without reducing it to a tip list or a performance metric? We start by naming the local anchors that already understand this terrain. The University of Minnesota’s Program in Human Sexuality has long studied desire not as a drive to be maximized, but as a fluctuating landscape shaped by stress, sleep, and seasonal light. Their research shows that Minnesotans report higher rates of responsive desire—where arousal follows intimacy, not precedes it—than the national average. That’s not a deficit. It’s a rhythm. And it aligns with what sex educators at Courage to Change, a Minneapolis-based collective specializing in queer and non-normative intimacy, observe: clients who’ve been taught to chase spontaneous passion often feel like failures when their bodies don’t perform on cue—even when the sex they’re having is deeply satisfying in hindsight.

Then there’s the cultural infrastructure. The Trylon Microcinema in Northeast Minneapolis regularly screens films that demand patience—works by Chantal Akerman or Kelly Reichardt—where meaning lives in the spaces between action. Audiences there don’t complain about pacing; they lean into it. That same mindset could transform how we approach intimacy: not as something to optimize, but as something to inhabit. Imagine a workshop at The Cedar Cultural Center where participants explore touch not through escalation, but through repetition—returning to the same gesture, the same pressure, the same breath—for ten minutes straight. No goal. No variation. Just presence. It sounds boring. Until it isn’t.

Given my background in cultural interpretation and community storytelling, if this trend impacts you in Minneapolis, here are the three types of local professionals you need to know about—not as fixers, but as guides:

• Somatic intimacy educators: Look for practitioners trained in modalities like Somatic Experiencing or the Gottman Method who emphasize nervous system regulation over technique. The best ones won’t teach you recent positions—they’ll aid you notice what your body is already saying during the ones you already know. Ask if they work with responsive desire and if they’ve collaborated with University of Minnesota researchers.
• Queer-affirming sex therapists**: Especially those affiliated with Hennepin County Behavioral Health or in private practice near Lyn-Lake. Seek providers who explicitly reject the idea that “good” sex must be novel or intense, and who employ frameworks like pleasure-based consent or erotic mindfulness. They should be able to cite how seasonal light shifts affect libido in northern climates.
• Slow intimacy facilitators**: Not therapists, not coaches—think of them as curators of embodied experience. These might be artists-in-residence at the Walker or Springboard for the Arts who design silent, touch-based workshops or durational eye-gazing events. The key? They frame slowness not as a lack, but as a discipline. Ask whether their practice includes reflection time afterward—and whether they’ve ever screened a film at the Trylon to set the mood.