Shawn Griffin on What Men Get Wrong About Sexual Shame

Men will tell me almost anything before they tell me about their sex lives. Job stress, a divorce, a father who never once said "I love you," a business that quietly went under. Sex is the last locked door in the house, and of everything behind that door, the hardest sentence to get out loud is that they use, or want to use, a toy.

What does the damage isn't the toy. It's the story a man tells himself about what the toy means, and the fact that he has never once said that story out loud to another human being.

So I brought Shawn Griffin onto the channel. He's a board-certified sexual wellness coach and intimacy educator who recently launched a line of anal training products called the Bussy Builder, built for anyone with a prostate. I didn't bring him on to sell that product. I brought him on because a man who spends his working life talking frankly about pleasure, shame, and anatomy has a vantage point most therapists offering sexual wellness for men in Hong Kong never get, and I wanted to borrow it for an hour. What our conversation kept circling back to is exactly what I hear in session: shame, size, bad first experiences, and who is allowed to feel what.

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There's often this shame, feeling like they're not good enough, like they need assistance, like their partner can't please them without it. Am I inadequate? Do they think something's missing? Honestly, that's far from the truth.

Shawn Griffin, board-certified sexual wellness coach

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Where the shame actually comes from

The shame almost always traces back to a single belief: that needing anything external means falling short. Not I like this. Not this feels good. Something closer to a verdict. A toy appears in the room and the mind writes the whole narrative in half a second. I'm not enough on my own. My body is failing my partner. Something is missing in us.

None of that narrative is required by the facts. It's inherited from a much older idea, the one that says a real man's body should be sufficient for everything, unassisted, on the first try, every time. That standard was never realistic and it was never kind, and it's one of the biggest reasons men avoid talking about sexual wellness at all, in a clinic or anywhere else.

The toy is not a referendum on your body

Two beliefs grow out of that shame, and both are false. The first is that pleasure is a fixed pie, and a toy in the room is taking a slice that belonged to you. Plenty of men experience it exactly that way, as competition, as a partner going elsewhere for something you failed to provide. That isn't what's happening. As Shawn put it, a toy "doesn't take anything away. Toys actually add to it. It helps you reach different levels of intensity, trigger multiple pleasure zones you can't physically please all at one time." It reaches what two bodies alone can't always reach at the same moment. Used well, it's one more way partners pay attention to each other.

The second belief is the one about length, and it does more quiet damage to men's sexual confidence than anything else I encounter. Shawn went straight at it: "It's not necessarily how long you are. If you know how to maneuver, you can get a lot done with not a lot." The anatomy backs him up. The most pleasure-dense zones, whether we're talking about a G-spot or a prostate, sit only a few inches from the entrance. Past that point, extra length mostly satisfies a different kind of fantasy. Men carry an enormous amount of private anxiety about size, and almost none of it is grounded in how pleasure is actually produced.

Your prostate doesn't care who you're attracted to

The most stubborn myth in this territory is that prostate pleasure belongs to gay men. It doesn't. It belongs to bodies.

One clarification worth holding onto: the muscular contractions of ejaculation involve the prostate whether or not it's ever been touched directly, and that's a different experience from the concentrated sensation of deliberate prostate stimulation. Both count as prostate involvement. They are not interchangeable.

Most straight men's avoidance of anal play, and by extension of prostate-focused toys, comes down to one sentence absorbed from the culture: sticking something up my butt makes me gay. Sexual orientation describes who you're drawn to. It doesn't describe your anatomy, and it certainly doesn't decide which nerve endings your body was built with. A straight man's prostate works exactly the way a gay man's does, because it's the same organ doing the same job.

Sex acts as proof of sexuality is a fairly Anglosphere anxiety, and it isn't what I meet most days here. With Hong Kong-Chinese clients, the resistance rarely shows up as loud moral panic. It shows up as silence. Sex, and anything adjacent to anal pleasure especially, simply isn't discussed within the family or even between partners, which leaves men without a script for asking the question, let alone answering it. The shame looks different on the surface. Underneath, the effect is identical. Men avoid something that could improve their lives because nobody around them ever gave them permission to bring it up.

A bad first time is not a verdict on the act

Here's the piece I found most clinically useful, and it has nothing to do with toys directly. A single bad first experience, especially one that never gets talked through afterward, quietly becomes the template for everything that follows. Often it isn't even trauma in the way we usually mean it. As Shawn described it, it can be as ordinary as "an inconsiderate top that didn't try to reach any of the pleasure zones" — no pleasure hit, plenty of intensity, and no good baseline reference for what the experience is supposed to be.

I recognise that pattern from the therapy room, wearing different clothes. Nobody sat this man down afterward and said, that was a bad experience, not a verdict on the activity itself. So the nervous system drew its own conclusion, and the conclusion stayed on, uninvited, for years. A bad baseline deserves a second look. Years later, if that's what it takes.

The one real risk

I'm not going to pretend toys are harmless in every direction. Any source of intense, reliable pleasure can start crowding out everything else if it becomes the only thing that works. Shawn is honest about it: a toy "emotionally desensitizes you. It does make you almost develop a crutch for that product sometimes."

That line sits in the honest middle ground between "toys are shameful" and "toys are always fine," and it's the one I want men to actually sit with. If a toy becomes the only route to pleasure, and sex without it starts to feel flat or anxiety-inducing, that's a pattern worth noticing, the same way we'd notice any narrow behaviour crowding out flexibility. The fix is cycling: practise pleasure with the toy and without it, so neither becomes the only door that opens.

Where this leaves you

Shame is what stands between a lot of men and a fuller, more honest sexual life. Not the toy. Not the size. Not who they're attracted to. What makes it hard is that nobody's supposed to talk about it, so nobody does, and every man ends up believing he's the only one.

For the record, the product referenced throughout is his own, the Bussy Builder, available at bussybuilder.com. That's not an affiliate link, and I have no financial stake in it. I'm mentioning it because he built it specifically to target the prostate at every stage of training, which is more than most products in this category attempt.

If any part of this named something you've been carrying, the pieces below go further. Read our companion conversation with intimacy coach Viv Kan for more on men, sex, and the stories we inherit about both. If shame around sex has ever tipped into something more compulsive for you, our piece on porn addiction counselling in Hong Kong covers the same crutch pattern in a different form. And if you want the fuller clinical picture of what sexual wellness for men in Hong Kong actually involves, start with what sexual wellness therapy really is.

When you're ready to talk about any of this with someone in the room rather than a search bar, you can book a free consultation with us. Nothing you bring in will be new to us.