[sexual techniques] How do I improve communication with my boyfriend about long-term issues with sex life?

Hey reddit! So I’ve been with my boyfriend for over 18 months now, and we’ve been living together for the past 7. Apart from this, we have very few problems – which is partly why I want to solve this now, sorry for how long this is, but it’s been a long time coming.

We weren’t able to have PIV sex for 6 months due to a necessary operation my boyfriend had, and the recovery after, but we did everything else and it was really good. Once he got the all-clear, we had PIV sex for the first time and it felt really different.

All the touching we’d been doing up to then seemed to be ignored for the main event – at least on his end. I don’t get off from penetration and this seemed to annoy him, he would often ask which one of us was ‘doing it wrong’ – and kept ignoring me telling him I wouldn’t get off from penetration. At one point he told me to see a doctor about it, though he now seems to accept it happens to a lot of women. We’re now at a point where there’s more foreplay but he keeps asking ‘are you ready’ and similar, which makes me feel pressured to move on to penetration like he wants.

Recently, he’s stopped sex multiple times to ask me to be more assertive/dominant in bed, which isn’t something I feel too confident doing. I’ve done it before when just pleasuring him, and don’t mind it then, but it doesn’t make me feel sexy/confident like he seems to expect, or turn me on, but causes mild anxiety instead, which doesn’t put me in the mood for anything. So when he tries to get me to act that way now, it tends to stop things, rather than start some porn-type scene and wild sex.

Friends have told me to ‘just do what he wants’ but I think that’s ignoring the lack of communication we’re having at the moment. He tries to talk during sex, when I don’t want to start arguments, but then won’t talk about it afterwards when I try and bring it up, or deflects the questions, especially when I ask whether it’s something he wants from porn. I tried to suggest how porn differs from my sexual experience, but that doesn’t seem to have translated, and I also tried to start a conversation where we said outright what we wanted from sex, but he cut that off pretty quickly. Any ideas on how to talk about this and actually change things?