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A New Approach To Anal Play

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Curious about backdoor play? Want to explore the thrilling potential of this highly sensitive area – but don’t want to get hurt? Our approach to anal touch offers 100% pleasure, 100% pain-free stimulation. With a deep respect and understanding of the body, we can access way more erotic pleasure, emotional intimacy and connection.

Ready for a new approach to anal? Tune in to this podcast episode, and come over to PleasureMechanics.com/Anal for more resources.


Podcast Transcript:

Podcast transcripts are generated with love by humans, and thus may not be 100% accurate. Time stamps are included so you can cross reference or jump to any point in the podcast episode above. THANKS to the members of our Pleasure Pod for helping make transcripts and the rest of our free offerings happen! If you love what we offer, find ways to show your love and dive deeper with us here: SHOW SOME LOVE

Chris Rose: 00:00 Welcome to Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:05 We are the Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we have compassionate, passionate conversations about sex and sexuality, love and relationships, shame and guilt, all the things you need to know to have a more pleasurable, satisfying and fulfilling erotic life. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com where you will find a treasure trove of resources awaiting you. You will find our complete podcast archive and if you go to pleasuremechanics.com/free, you can sign up for our free online course, The Erotic Essentials. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/free to get started with us right away. On today’s episode, we are talking about a part of the body that has exquisite pleasure potential that can open up so much arousal and orgasmic capacity for all bodies. That is the site of so much potential care and love and connection and yet often gets either ignored or mistreated. We’re talking about the amazing asshole, the beautiful butt hole.

Charlotte Rose: 01:20 The awesome anus.

Chris Rose: 01:23 Yes, it is time to change the conversation about the asshole, the anus and anal play. We have been teaching about butt play now for 13 years. Our very first project together was all about prostate massage and for the past 13 years we have witnessed in culture kind of a mainstreaming of anal sex. People are talking about it more, more and more men are really excited about exploring prostate orgasms and pegging and prostate play. And what we are noticing is that even though the conversation around anal is going more mainstream, it hasn’t really been updated. And we are still getting so many emails from people who are trying anal sex and having terrible experiences with it, who are hurting their lovers without meaning to, while trying to give them pleasure.

Chris Rose: 02:16 And also just from people who still experience a lot of shame and guilt and fear about this part of the body. So we want to introduce you to a new approach to anal play, one that respects this part of the body and opens the door for so much more arousal and pleasure and intimacy if you choose. And even if you never choose to play with your butt in bed after listening to this conversation, we hope it’ll at least diffuse some of the shame around this area so it can be more integrated into your sex life. Even as just a neutral thing, if you can go of but shame you’ll have more pleasure available to you.

Charlotte Rose: 03:03 Yeah. This area is so exquisite. There is so much sensation available. And as a culture we haven’t been educated around how to touch this part of the body with skill, with confidence, with care, with kindness because we’re so used to denigrating the ass. It’s one of the greatest insults you can call one another. You shit head, you asshole. That is not a loving, caring kind thing that we’re naming one another. And so I think this translates into how we touch this part of the body, how we think about it and how we relate to it. So when we start with the understanding that the butt hole, the anus is incredibly sensitive, we can start to treat it in a different way.

Chris Rose: 03:48 So when I receive email after email from people who are trying to explore anal play and are excited about it, are eager for the pleasure that they’ve heard is available here and yet come up against discomfort, pain, kind of failed tries at this with one another, I recognize that even though this conversation about anal sex has gone mainstream, the image of anal hasn’t yet changed. Many people will see anal sex depicted in porn and then try to recreate that at home. And unfortunately porn is not sex education. It is fantasy, it is entertainment, it is highly edited and it is professional performers.

Chris Rose: 04:36 This would be like watching an ice hockey game and then just throwing yourself on the rink with no training, you’re going to get hurt. So while we can respect porn as sexual entertainment, we need to recognize it is not education. And the way anal sex specifically is depicted in porn is a recipe for disaster. This isn’t like trying a different sex position, maybe it doesn’t work and you just go back to doing your thing. If you try to have anal sex the way you see it in porn, you can do major damage to the body and you will create an experience that no one wants to replicate.

Chris Rose: 05:16 And so many people have already had this experience in their body and so we need a radically different approach to anal pleasure. And we have one for you. We have one for you because our background in this is one of anal massage. Charlotte and I both learned how to touch the anus, how to give prostate stimulation through the framework of erotic massage. And I was reminded of how different this approach was recently when I was listening to Dan Savage’s Savage Lovecast. And someone called in about anal stimulation and Dan Savage said, “Fingers don’t feel good in the butt.” They’re bony and pokey and just go to do butt plug instead.

Chris Rose: 06:07 And my heart just hurts when I hear him say this to his millions of listeners, it’s not the first time I’ve heard him say this. And clearly Dan Savage has never received a proper prostate massage. When you approach the anus through the lens of massage, everything changes. And we can start experiencing anal stimulation as purely pleasurable, incredibly tender and gentle. And then from that place, start opening up to more intense penetration if you wish. So this is the first difference in our approach. When we talk about anal stimulation, we are talking about the whole range from light external stimulation of the external anal sphincters. That whole area that’s just inches away from your genitals, from light external stimulation, all the way up to deep penetration. That whole spectrum is available to us and counts as anal play.

Chris Rose: 07:14 So the first thing I invite you to do is to kind of erase the image of the full anal sex being plowed into kind of thing and just put it out of your mind because that is not how we start. And for many people that idea is so overwhelming and intimidating that they don’t even want to begin the conversation. What if instead the invitation was gentle massage of the external anal area to add all of these layers of sensation and pleasure to the erotic experiences you already enjoy? So that’s the first major difference is that we approach it as a spectrum of stimulation. The second major difference in how we approach is anal stimulation is for the recipient’s pleasure. The person whose butt hole is being touched, their pleasure is centered in the experience and then shared with the giver. This is radically different than how most people think about anal sex.

Charlotte Rose: 08:22 I think we are used to the idea that the receiver endures some kind of discomfort in order to give the giver a gift.

Chris Rose: 08:31 A gift, a tight hole to fuck is really what we’re talking about. This is the paradigm most people have is I will suffer through something to give a person with a penis, a tighter hole to fuck. No thank you.

Charlotte Rose: 08:44 We really encourage you not to do this, to stop doing this. This is a cultural idea. It totally makes sense why people feel this way. This is what we’ve been taught, but we really you to stop that dynamic and to take on the idea that anal pleasure when done well, when done with skill can be incredibly pleasurable for the recipient and that is who you are. Having this experience for, that is why we’re doing it. And that is a different approach for both people in the sex act. It’s a different kind of sex.

Chris Rose: 09:18 The other major difference that the massage approach brings us to anal play is that it respects the anatomy. When we’re doing massage, we get to know the body so intimately that we can respond exactly to what the body wants as it wants it. We meet it at that place of just right. And this is true when you’re massaging someone’s shoulders, which is why when I heard Dan Savage say butt play with a finger feels like some bony finger poking you in the butt, we’ve all had a shoulder rub where it feels like someone’s just poking you carelessly with bony, rigid fingers.

Chris Rose: 09:56 Contrast that to an exquisite shoulder massage, and that’s the difference we’re talking about here. So through our techniques, what we invite you into is touching the butt with so much care and awareness that you are giving it exactly what it wants as it wants it. This turns out to be incredibly important for the anus, partly because of its anatomy. When we know what we are made of, when we know what our bodies are designed to do, we can play with them so much more effectively and unleash all of the pleasure potential that is inside us all. So for so many people, when they have anal sex without understanding how the butt works, it leads to either less than optimal experiences or painful experiences.

Chris Rose: 10:51 Through our techniques what we promise is 100% pleasurable, 100% pain free every time. And that’s true. If you’re going to just do external stimulation or go all the way to a fist inside your butt, the big kind of penetration that some people crave can be accomplished without a moment of pain. You do not ever need to endure pain to get to pleasure. This is one of our foundational understandings here at Pleasure Mechanics. It can be all pleasure all the time. So how do we do this? What is the approach? So how do we do this and what does the anatomy of the butt tell us about anal pleasure? So I want to take you on a tour of your asshole.

Chris Rose: 11:40 And first of all, let’s just address the fact that a lot of people have shit shame. They think of this area as dirty and they think of it as a one way hole. That’s kind of what some people say to dismiss anal sex. We want to start from the idea that the anus is part of the sexual system of all bodies, this is true whether you have a vulva or a penis. The anus is part of your sexual system. The nerve endings of the anus are tied right in to the nerve endings of your genitals. The muscles of the anal sphincters are part of your pelvic floor, part of those muscles that contract with every orgasm you’ve had and the anus in and of itself is a site of great sexual potential.

Chris Rose: 12:36 It’s not a bystander, it’s not kind of a bonus. It is an intimate part of our sexual system that many of us have ignored or numbed out or disregarded. So it’s time to bring it back and just integrate it into a sense of your sexuality. And the goal of this conversation is not to make everyone into an anal sex fanatic. You never need to include anal pleasure in your sex life if you choose not to. But we can all get to a place of more anal neutrality, of understanding this as part of our sexual system and shedding some of the shame that might be holding back your pleasure without you even knowing it.

Chris Rose: 13:16 We cannot be completely comfortable and open to our sexual pleasure if we have shame and constriction and tension around our asshole. So let’s start with a tour of the asshole. So imagine your genitals, visualize them, think about them, and notice that the genitals and the anus are inches apart. They’re connected through this band of muscle called the perineum, which for some is in between the vaginal opening and the anus and for others is in between the testicles and the anus. The perineum itself is actually a site of great pleasure and we should probably do an episode all about perineum touch and how we can stimulate this area. It’s a nexus of nerves and muscles and you can really use the perineum as a secret spot of stimulation. We’ll table that for another episode. I like that idea, perineum pleasures.

Chris Rose: 14:19 Just below the perineum is the anus. This little beautiful pucker of flesh. It is a sphincter muscle, which means it is a muscle that opens in a circular radial fashion. We have them in different parts of our bodies. Our eyes have sphincters, our irises that open and close to light. The throat has a sphincter and the anus has a sphincter. Fun little anatomy fact, as humans are developing in embryo the sphincters, the tube that becomes the tube between your mouth and your anus is one of the first features to develop in the human fetus. And this passageway between our mouth and our anus is intimately connected. And again, maybe we need to do a whole other episode about the connection between the mouth and the anus and all of those things.

Chris Rose: 15:15 So the anus is the other end of the tube that starts at your throat, right? It is the end of your digestive passage and it is the opening to the rectum. So this sphincters are incredibly important to know about. On the external anal sphincter, the external area of the ass. So all around your asshole extending out into the perineum intimately connected with their genitals is one of the densest concentration of sensory nerve endings found on the human body. I will repeat that. The external anus has one of the densest concentrations of nerve endings found on the human body. When we hear that we have to think pleasure potential, nerve endings are what give the clitoris and the penis so much pleasure potential. And these nerve endings are directly tied in to your sexual response cycle.

Chris Rose: 16:20 So what this tells us is external anal stimulation, just touching the outside of the butt with no intention of going inside can add so much sensation, so much pleasure to the arousing activities you already enjoy. It’s like having a whole other area to stimulate that most of us ignore or freak out if our lover even approaches it. So let’s just take that in for a moment that all of us through all of our sexual experiences have this whole other area with all of this good potential for pleasure and we don’t touch it.

Charlotte Rose: 17:05 I love to think about the whole pelvis. The whole pelvis is one huge sexual system. As Chris was saying earlier, and so many of us just focus on the front. But if we register that all of it is connected intimately, then we are literally missing out on half of the pleasure potential.

Chris Rose: 17:26 And not only are we ignoring it, but so many people hold so much shame and tension that they’re not ignoring it, they’re actively constricting it. They’re tightening their butts, they are somewhere in your head you’re kind of worried if your lover is going to see it or touch it or smell it. God forbid you fart in bed and that tension is actively blocking pleasure. It is actively blocking blood flow to your genitals. If you tense your butt, that muscular constriction blocks blood flow to your genitals, blood flow creates erection and helps arousal. You’re actively blocking nerve pathways that send pleasure signals to your brain.

Chris Rose: 18:11 And if you want to experiment with this, try masturbating and really tightening your ass and having a lot of butt constriction and notice the difference. You’ll notice how much but tension and anal constriction can block pleasure. Okay, so the external anal sphincters are rich with nerve endings and we can approach that area with a whole set of techniques designed to stimulate those nerve endings. Just like we have techniques to stimulate the penis, just like we have techniques to touch the clitoris and internal vaginal techniques to stimulate these parts of the body, we have techniques to touch the anus specifically.

Chris Rose: 18:59 This is the beauty of the massage approach, our massage lineage, and when we say a massage approach, Charlotte and I both went to school for this shit. We are certified butt masseuses. We are both from a lineage, the erotic massage lineage that has spent countless hours studying the sexual system, studying what we are made of and designed specific techniques to bring as much pleasure and relaxation to these areas as possible. Anal massage can be the most relaxing experience and just part of a full body massage or it can be one of the most highly erotic experiences. So when we say massage techniques for the anus, this is just like we have specific massage techniques for the shoulder muscles or the feet.

Chris Rose: 19:51 Respecting the anatomy and understanding the anatomy gives us keys to unlock pleasure. And these are all of the techniques we share with you in our courses and that are easily learned. And once you have these skills in your hands, they just become part of how you touch and make love to one another. You become fluent in the language of touch. That is what massage offers you. And as we describe all of this touch, remember that all anal touch needs lube. Really all erotic touch can benefit from some lube, but definitely anytime you’re touching the anus and especially if you’re going inside high quality, good lubricant is essential because these tissues do not self lubricate. And lube will just make all of your touch glide and slide and feel so much more pleasurable.

Chris Rose: 20:48 Just like massage oil for full body massage makes every stroke feels so much more delicious and allows you to glide into the body, into the tissues, lube allows erotic touch to slip and glide along these sensory nerve endings with way more grace. And lube is your friend in all erotic touch, but it is essential for anal play. And if you don’t already have a great lube that you love and trust, you’ll find recommendations for our favorite lubes on the resource page for this episode, that’s pleasuremechanics.com/anal where you’ll find more information about everything we are about to share with you. Yeah. All right.

Chris Rose: 21:35 So when we massage the external anal area, when we bring all of these beautiful techniques, when we learn how to use our hands or a toy to just touch the external anal area, most people will experience additional arousal, more electricity and charge behind their arousal. And a lot of people report that it just opens up their arousal and it makes it feel bigger and more expansive and fills their whole pelvis. As Charlotte was saying, you get a sense of uh. That’s the whole thing and you can then integrate this kind of touch sometimes all the time, part of the time into things like oral sex or if you have one hand in the vagina, you can have one hand on the anus and lightly stimulating it and you just bring new levels of pleasure to that sex act.

Chris Rose: 22:32 Now the anus has two sphincters. We’ve been talking about the external anal sphincter is the one that is just on the outside of your body and you can consciously control it. You can tighten it and relax it. Do it now with me. Yeah, you can feel that flex. About half an inch or inch beyond the external anal sphincter is another sphincter muscle, the internal anal sphincter. This is incredibly important. The internal anal sphincter is not under your conscious control. Your body has to relax it and want it to open. This is really important because for a lot of people, they open up that external anal sphincter and start to penetrate and feel that next ring of muscle and it is tight.

Chris Rose: 23:30 It has not yet opened to the touch and this is where a lot of people get hurt. When these sphincters are forced open, that’s when tissues get damaged, that’s when pain happens. That’s that huh that a lot of people experience during anal touch. That feeling of tension and constriction and pain comes when we push past the resistance of these muscles. So how do we approach this differently? With the techniques of anal massage, we allow the internal sphincter to open on its own, you get invited in. And this feeling of having your finger right on that internal sphincter and giving the body so much pleasure that you feel the body open up to you is one of the most exquisite sensations I know.

Chris Rose: 24:23 It’s such a moment of, “Yes, I want this.” It’s a moment of trust, it’s a moment of invitation. And when the internal sphincter opens on its own, you can then glide past it and you have achieved graceful penetration. And this can happen again with a finger, a toy, and the advanced is with a penis or a larger toy. But we firmly believe we all should start this play with our fingers because then you learn together with your partner what this feels like, and fingers are much less intimidating than a penis and much more sensitive than a penis. You can rest your finger right on the butt and it’s just such a beautiful… We get a little reverent with this because it feels so good when it is done well.

Chris Rose: 25:16 And when you’re arresting your fingers right on that internal sphincter and it opens up, you feel how easily you can slide in. There’s no resistance, there’s no pushing, there’s no forcing, there is no pain. And if there is a moment of discomfort, you notice it. This is how we guarantee pain free because we teach you how to notice the first moment of discomfort and then ease back and wait for the body to want more.

Chris Rose: 25:48 This is one of the most important skills we can bring to anal touch is paying exquisite attention to what it wants, to what the body that you are penetrating is asking for and then giving it what it wants.When you are touched that way, you feel seen, you feel held, you feel heard. And this is when that emotional vulnerability of anal sex, where that trust, that intimacy becomes exquisitely available to us because we can open up to one another with trust and with confidence that both people want it and then so much more is possible.

Charlotte Rose: 26:27 And then after you have gently and gracefully entered past the two sphincters you get into the rectum, poop doesn’t live in that. It passes through that during a bowel movement. So you don’t have to worry about that.

Chris Rose: 26:42 Well, a lot of people are concerned that if you go into the butt hole, you’re just slamming into a wall of poop. This is not true. As Charlotte just said, poop is stored in the intestine and only passes through the rectum when you are actively pooping. So this is really important to know. Your rectum is four to six inches of open space inside your pelvis that is again, intimately connected with your sexual system. So it is a portal we can use to access our sexual system. What happens once we’re inside the rectum?

Charlotte Rose: 27:17 On the outside of the anus, there are so many sensory nerve endings as we were talking about, but on the inside of the rectum there are not. There are pressure receptors. You will feel a feeling of fullness of pressure and some people really love this sensation, but it is a very different experience than the pleasure of the external sphincters. So I think it’s really valuable to know that these are different sensations and some people will really like one or the other. Some people will really enjoy all of that being stimulated and to have both of those sensations.

Chris Rose: 27:49 I just notice this. So many of our images of anal sex go straight to big penetration and big fucking. And to know that most of the sensory nerve endings are on the outside, you never need to penetrate to get to them. But what does penetration open up? Why penetrate at all then? What is so amazing about penetration with one or two fingers with a small toy or if you want to get larger, is that it is an internal pathway to the sexual system. And this is why. So from the inside of the rectum you can touch the genitals. For men, this means the prostate and the internal root of the penis. Guys do not know that up to two thirds of the length of their penis is inside their body. Most guys relate to their penis is something that just hangs outside. It is not.

Chris Rose: 28:50 It extends deep inside the body, is firmly anchored into the pelvic muscles. And when you go inside a guys butt, you can start stroking his cock from in side and you start feeling that root of the internal penis and his sensation expands dramatically. And we will do more episodes soon about how we can get specific in our approaches, whether we are touching someone with a vulva or someone with a penis. Because there are very specific techniques we can bring to those bodies and different ways those bodies have been socialized to think about anal sex. So we want to get more specific with that in future episodes. But for now, just register that from the inside of the butt, you can touch the internal root of the penis, the prostate. Meanwhile, the other hand is touching the external penis and you have the entire sexual system in your hands ready to stimulate and play.

Chris Rose: 29:54 Equally, on someone with a vulva if you’re going through the anus, you can touch the backside of their vaginal wall and the G-spot through the anus and also the internal roots of the clitoris. Once again, you can have one hand inside, one hand outside and you have their entire sexual system in your hands. This was a revelation for me when we’re so used to just touching the external genitals. When you get your hands on both parts of the same time, I feel like the sexual system starts to make sense as a whole. As you were saying, it kind of occupies the entire pelvis, you feel it integrated and then you feel its pleasure potential start coming to life. So why do people like internal anal play? Some people, as Charlotte said, love that feeling just of the fullness and the fullness of having something in your ass makes everything that’s happening to your genitals feel more intense.

Chris Rose: 30:53 Some people love the emotional vulnerability of opening that up and feeling that openness and the receptivity of anal sex. Just that emotional experience of being opened up is really hot for a lot of people and other people love it for the sensations of that external anal sphincter being opened up, getting slid past and stimulated with every stroke and then that internal pressure and every stroke putting stimulation on the genitals from the inside. For a lot of people, this is a formula for exquisite pleasure and incredible connection and it becomes possible when we approach this area with more respect.

Charlotte Rose: 31:37 And paying attention to the nuances of all of the sensations and muscle tone. There’s so much you can gather as the giver of this kind of touch and it is really valuable to do this with your hands because that is how you can learn and gather the information and discover what your partner is, what that body is up for. Because their mind might be up for something else but their body will be ready or not and you can feel for that and not push past that second sphincter. As Chris was talking about because the body really needs to feel safe and comfortable and turned on and relaxed in order for that second sphincter to open. And this is why we love to start with a full body massage, move on to butt massage and then move on to the external anal sphincters and then keep going as the body wants because this way you can really seduce the body into relaxation and feeling comfortable and then more pleasure available.

Chris Rose: 32:40 The other beautiful thing of using your hands instead of a toy is that the fingers are designed to gather information. We read braille with our fingertips. That is how incredibly sensitive they are. And so with your fingertips, with awareness, you can feel the nuances of your partner’s pleasure opening up. And Charlotte was saying you develop that trust by going as slowly as their body is telling you to go. When you are being touched in this just right way, it doesn’t matter if it’s on your shoulder or on your butt hole. Being touched with this level of attention builds so much trust and intimacy.

Chris Rose: 33:28 And think about how different and experience this is if you are really relaxed after a full body massage, your lover’s fingertips are on your external anal sphincters. They’re lovingly touching your genitals, you’re super aroused and there is no rush. There is no agenda. That is a dramatically different experience than kind of being on your hands and knees and bracing for what’s coming, which is how most people prepare for anal sex. This is such a radically different approach to anal play that you might be having images of just like relaxing massages and little fingertips massaging cute little butt holes.

Chris Rose: 34:11 What I do want to say is this is all preparation for the wildest, most vigorous, most beasteal anal fucking that you might want to have. When you learn how to touch the butt this way, you can start developing confidence and preparation for anal sex starts being just a pleasurable opening up. And for some people then after several sessions of this, they can go from one finger to two fingers to three fingers to a penis or a dildo in however little as much time as that takes. But those first stages of arousing and relaxing the body, approaching the external sphincter, lavishing it with a lot of touch and technique, slowly going inside and listening for the body to invite you in, all of those stages are important. No matter if you’re staying with one finger inside or if you’re going all the way to deep big penetration.

Chris Rose: 35:16 This is how the anal sphincters like to be touched. This is how they like to be opened up. This is based on the anatomy and the physical map the body gives us for pleasure. So we have given you a tour of the asshole, of the anus as part of your sexual system and we hope that this has given you a new perspective on how this area can be approached or radically how it can be approached with a ton of respect and care and love and how different that approach is from how we see anal sex depicted in porn. We need to really readjust our attitudes and our expectations before we try to integrate this as a pleasurable sexual experience. Because for a lot of people, if they know that their partner wants anal play, they jump right to the porn version and they say, “No way.” Or they go back to a painful experience they’ve had in the past and they say, “No thank you, I tried it once. I never want to do that again.”

Chris Rose: 36:19 What we need to do is come to more of a neutral stance where we understand what our bodies are made of, we understand how the anus fits into our sexual system, we understand how to prepare and deal with the hygiene issues so that shit shame and worries about poop don’t get in our way. And then we can start integrating anal stimulation on our own terms. You are not trying to perform the porn model or re-enact harm that has happened in your past. With these new attitudes and with all of the techniques that we guide you through in our courses, we want you to have a pleasurable experience of your butt hole, however that looks for you. The topics of preparation and hygiene are a whole other conversation and we have put together a resource page for you at pleasuremechanics.com/anal, A-N-A-L, very short and nice.And there you will find all the information you need to approach this with calm and confidence and clarity about how this part of the body wants to be touched, about the sexual erotic potential of the anus. We invite you to explore.

Charlotte Rose: 37:47 Yes, I hope there’s so much pleasure for you ahead. We also want to remind you that you can add this into your own masturbation. If you are curious about this and there isn’t a partner available to explore this with you, please know this is something you can just begin to explore and add into your masturbation now.

Chris Rose: 38:06 And for a lot of people that’s an easier way to start exploring this and gain some confidence and understand how this part of their body fits into the rest of their sexual system. Just dropping a hand down and holding gently, just place a few fingers on top of your butt and then masturbate how you normally do. Don’t try to stimulate it, just feel it and hold it with some love and respect and see what that feels like. That’s a great first step for all of us. Dr. Jack Morin, who wrote the book Anal Pleasure & Health. He was one of our early mentors in our sexological body work training. He recommends that in the shower every time you shower, just take a soapy hand and run it along your butt crack. Which again is such a simple thing, but how many of us do that as we touch the rest of our body and care for it in the shower?

Charlotte Rose: 39:03 And it’s just a great way to begin having a relationship with this part of our body of getting to nurture it, as Chris was saying. To kind of begin to dissolve the shame and the ignoring of it that so many of us do in this culture.

Chris Rose: 39:16 And notice how you wash it in the shower. You might do it just quickly. You might do it a little roughly and even with a little disgust. Can you bring that moment in the shower to a moment of self respect and love and thanking this part of the body for doing the job it does? We did not get too evangelical about the anus on this episode. This was our rained in version. But we need to remember that the anus is an essential part of the human body. We could not survive without it. We need to respect it and bring some love to it instead of just degrading it all the time.

Chris Rose: 39:59 If you want to have a pleasurable relationship with your genitals and your anus as you’re having sex and you want to have great orgasms and you want all of that pleasurable benefits, then throughout your day we need to be respecting the parts that will be giving us this pleasure. We can’t degrade and ignore the asshole and have a relationship of shame and fear with it and then expect it to bring us to orgasmic highs on Friday nights. This is a 24/7 relationship we have with our bodies and for many of us we have some healing and repairing to do in our relationship with our anuses.

Charlotte Rose: 40:38 And probably because of that, if you begin exploring your anal area and you actually don’t feel that much, that is also very normal. There can be some numbness at the start of your exploration because we’ve had all of this shaming, this tension and constriction. So know that that’s okay. If you start exploring and you’re like, “What am I talking about? There’s not that much sensation here at all.” That can be part of the process. And as you begin to pay more kind, reverent attention to your ass, it will begin to wake up.

Charlotte Rose: 41:08 So pairing the sensation with erotic stimulation that you’re already familiar with and already enjoy is a great way of beginning to match up those neural pathways to associate the anus and sensation there with erotic pleasure. So as Chris was saying earlier, masturbate and then just add a little sensation to the anal sphincters and see what happens over time. But because we may have had a lifetime of a relationship of not being kind to our butts, it may take a little while for this beautiful relationship to open up as well. So give it some time, some patience and some attention, and then see what opens up.

Chris Rose: 41:48 Right. And remember for most people, their first experience of anal shame is when they’re getting their diapers changed. It goes that far back. Babies are not ashamed of their assholes. As parents, we can attest to this. Babies have this integrated sense of their bodies and then shame and fear and guilt is learned over time. And so if you’re a caregiver when wiping your first little poos was like, “Gross, smelly, yuck.” Or if you were like exploring your body as a baby and then your parents swatted away your hands, those are the first interventions and we have to excavate that far back. What have you learned your whole life about the anus, about anal sex, that it is dangerous, that it is dirty, that it is painful.

Chris Rose: 42:43 These messages are deep in us and they come from an approach to anal sex that completely disregards the anatomy, that approaches it as a hole to be fucked, that doesn’t care about the experience of the person being penetrated because they are being degraded. This is just the truth of how most of us understand anal play and we are turning that all on its head. And we are saying that this is an exquisite sacred site of sexual pleasure. It’s an important part of your sexual system that can be touched with precision, with skill, with confidence, with love.

Charlotte Rose: 43:22 With presence.

Chris Rose: 43:23 With so much emotional presence, and like trust between the partners that you open up to a whole new relationship with this part of your body. And you discover the pleasurable potential that is just waiting for you to tap into. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/anal for way more information about anal touch, anal hygiene, anal preparation. We have all of that information waiting for you. And if you are ready to learn these skills in your own hands, if you are ready to try these techniques out on your own body or the body of your lover, if you are ready to experience this pleasure we’ve been talking about, check out our online courses.

Chris Rose: 44:10 They’re both listed on pleasuremechanics.com/anal, we have a prostate massage course, we have an anal sex for women course and you will learn all of these techniques stroke by stroke. We teach them on silicone replicas, so you get all of the explicit anatomy, but with none of the distracting factors of being taught on a real body. You get Charlotte’s masterful hands who have done thousands of hours of prostate massage, thousands of hours of anal massage demonstrating these techniques. And I really love when we hear from course members who say it was one thing to hear you talk about it. It’s a whole other thing to see you do it. So since we can’t be in a workshop together and we can’t demonstrate anal massage live for you, this is why we’ve put together our video courses so you can learn from our hands in real time.

Chris Rose: 45:11 And some people watch these videos and then integrate the techniques next time they’re making love. Other couples will watch them while they are exploring one another’s bodies and follow along stroke by stroke and talk through it and discover a whole new vocabulary of pleasurable touch. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com, check out our online courses there. You can use the code speaking of sex for 20% off and let us guide you into the incredible orgasmic potential of your asshole.

Charlotte Rose: 45:45 Yes, we love this. We are so excited for you to explore and experiment with and discover there’s so much available there. So may it be beautiful, may it be gentle, may it be delicious.

Chris Rose: 45:59 And we are going to be following this conversation up with some deeper dives into anal play for men and women and how we’re socialized to think about that. If you have questions about anal sex that were not addressed in this episode, please email them to me at chris@pleasuremechanics.com. And if you love this show and want to support us, come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/love, join our inner circle and you can ask us questions there and get priority access to our inbox. Yes, pleasuremechanics.com/love, pleasuremechanics.com/anal for way more information and we wish you so much anal pleasure.

Charlotte Rose: 46:48 All right.

Chris Rose: 46:50 I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 46:51 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 46:52 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 46:53 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 46:56 Cheers.

Sexuality, Disability, Chronic Illness and Chronic Pain

This page is a living document to share resources related to sexuality, disability, chronic illness and chronic pain. This is a HUGE topic and the links shared on this page each do an amazing job from different perspectives. If you have resources that you feel belong on this page, please email them to us at chris – at – pleasuremechanics.com

Whatever your new reality, you are not alone. Whatever you are experiencing, it has been felt before. For many people, this simple truth can be deeply comforting to take in and remember in moments of overwhelm.

It can be powerful to build community around your new normal. Online communities can offer invaluable resources, emotional support and community news to keep you up to date on your conditions.

Strategies To Find Community

  • Ask your medical team for referrals to online or local groups
  • Search [your condition] on Instagram and look for accounts you resonate with
  • Search [your condition] on Facebook and look for groups with a vibrant membership. Expect to quit many groups you join – each group has it’s own pace and culture
  • Search [your condition] + “activism” and look for groups advocating for your community, research and treatment options, and then get involved!

Conversation Starters

Use these conversations starters to begin a dialogue with your lovers, friends and family – or to reflect or journal on solo!

  • What’s your diagnosis?
    • Getting common language about what you are experiencing is important. Make sure you, your medical team and your community are on the same page about what you are experiencing! 
  • What’s your daily experience now? How variable is it? 
  • How much pain are you experiencing? Where? What does it feel like? Is it predictable?
  • What changes have there been in your day-to-day activity?
  • What are you feeling afraid of?
  • What are you feeling angry about?
  • What are you feeling grateful for?
  • What kind of support do you need more of?
  • What experiences are you longing for?
  • What are you worried about not experiencing again?
  • What do you feel left out of, socially?
  • How has your erotic or sexual life changed?
  • Do you have any worries about your sex life you want to talk about?

Recalibrating Pleasure, Joy & Belonging

Pleasure

  • What is bringing me the most pleasure right now?
  • What senses are still open to pleasure? What senses are tender or painful to engage?
  • What are you curious about right now?
  • What is one thing you could take away from your bedroom and one thing you could add to make it a more pleasurable space for you to be in?


Joy

  • How has your illness or injury impacted your sense of purpose in the world?
  • What are you most looking forward to?
  • What are you excited about right now?


Belonging

  • Where does your communities gather? Are these spaces still accessible and comfortable for you?
  • Are there alternate ways you could engage with your community?
  • How has your role in your family changed?
  • How has your role at work changed?
  • Do you feel like a burden to your caregivers?
  • What are ways you can contribute more, with your current limitations respected?
  • Who do you want to talk to? Who do you want to listen to you? 

Map Your Love Pod

A powerful concept from the Disability Justice movement is that of “pods” – the very real networks of people and service providers that surround each of us! Living with illness or disability means we MUST map out our local support community and take stock of all the support we have – and where we might need to intentionally fill in some gaps.

Read more about pods and get pod mapping worksheets here.

What has changed?

After illness, injury or any other huge change, it is important to be honest about what has changed. What are the big adjustments you will have to make – and what is actually still pretty normal underneath all the other changes? What is your body up for? What are you wanting? What are you capable of?

The answers to these big questions will change over time, so the important thing is to be able to check in and communicate clearly about what is real for you, right now.

Areas to keep checking in with:

  • Diagnosis, Illness, Injury, Medications, Side Effects
  • Sensory changes – sensitivity to light, smells, touch
  • Mood and personality changes
  • Energy, Stamina & Fatigue
  • Intellectual and emotional changes

Remember, no matter what your body is up to right now, you are wholly human and inherently worthy of being loved, cherished and respected.

What do you want to feel?

Sex is a big word that contains a lot of human experience, feeling and emotion within three little letters. 

We need to get more specific than “I miss sex”  – what are you longing for? What are you wanting to experience? What do you miss? What are you craving?

Here are a few podcast episodes to help you start thinking about the many factors of your erotic life as you adjust to a new normal

  • Spontaneous Vs. Responsive Desire
  • Dual Model Control Of Arousal : Learn about the “gas and brakes” model of arousal
  • Your Body Is Good Enough
  • What Do You Want?

Experiencing Pelvic Pain?

If your illness, injury or other big change has left you experiencing pelvic pain or sexual pain, here are some resources to help you address that. 

You don’t have to suffer in silence. There are trained professionals ready to support you and assist you! 

  • The Pelvic Pain Assessment is an interactive survey through pain symptoms inclusive of sexual health and life quality. Once the assessment is complete, the result is a printable PDF that serves as a tool to facilitate patient doctor communication and referrals.
  • Pelvic Floor Professional help:
    • Dr. UC at YouSeeLogic.com
    • Dr. UC on Instagram
    • You can locate a pelvic health physical therapist near you here or here.

Books, Articles & Compassionate Education

  • This Is How We Do It Vice article series featuring first person narratives about sex with a wide range of conditions and disabilities
  • Pain Is Really Strange
  • The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability
  • Dating With a Disability
    Advice from Robin Wilson-Beattie, “inclusionista sexpert” on navigating dating and sex with a disability.
  • Disability Justice Resources
  • 10 Principles of Disability Justice

Educators, Artists & Creators

  • Disability After Dark is a fantastic podcast hosted by queer crip (his words) Andrew Gurza and features interviews about sex, disability, ableism, queerness and more.
  • Chronic Sex
  • Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled femme writer, organizer, performance artist and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent.
  • Sins Invalid: Sins Invalid is a disability justice performance project that centers people of color, queers, nonbinary and trans people with disabilities.

Passionate Transitions Interview with Lucie Fielding

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

We are all in constant states of change, growth and transition – so how can we learn to embrace change with a spirit of curiosity and perhaps even passion?

On this episode, Lucie Fielding joins us to share her brilliant frameworks about coming into passionate relationship with our embodied sexual selves. Lucie joins us to generously share their ideas as they are being developed for the book Trans Sex: Clinical Approaches to Trans Sexualities and Erotic Embodiments – Update! The book is now available: Trans Sex by Lucie Fielding

Free Printable Zine from Meg-John Barker

Podcast Episodes About Gender, History of Queerness & Full Spectrum Sexuality

  • Passionate Transitions with Lucie Fielding
  • The Gender Galaxy
  • In Graphic Detail: Interview with Meg-John Barker

About Lucie Fielding

Lucie Fielding is a resident in counseling at Creating Change, PLLC. Lucie completed their MA in Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2018. In addition to their counseling education they hold a PhD in French with a specialty in erotic literature.

About their work, Lucie writes: “My background in literature and history attunes me to the powerful ways that myth, image, metaphor, and cultural scripts shape and inform the narratives we carry with us as we move through the world as well as how these narratives can write themselves on our bodies.” Lucie identifies as a queer nonbinary femme, and uses she/they pronouns.

Resources About Gender

  • Trans101, a lovely series to spend some time with to discover the basics of gender, transgender people and the range of trans experiences and identities
  • The Gender Spectrum, a glossary of language used to talk about gender and gender identities

Transcript for Podcast Episode Passionate Transitions: Interview With Lucie Fielding

Podcast transcripts are generated with love by humans, and thus may not be 100% accurate. Time stamps are included so you can cross reference or jump to any point in the podcast episode above. THANKS to the members of our Pleasure Pod for helping make transcripts and the rest of our free offerings happen! If you love what we offer, find ways to show your love and dive deeper with us here: SHOW SOME LOVE

Chris Rose: 00:01 Welcome to Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris from pleasuremechanics.com, and on today’s episode I am joined by the fabulous Lucie Fielding to talk about change and becoming and transitions in all of our erotic lives, and how we can approach change with more curiosity and passion. I first met Lucie at the AASECT, The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists, and when we met, it was very clear that we had met kindred spirits. She’s brilliant and wise and lovingly invites you into new perspectives on your erotic body and experience. So, I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Lucie.

Chris Rose: 00:52 I thought it was a great one to close out, to transition, as it were, out of our libido series. We have spent the past four episodes looking at libido and sex drive with fresh perspectives. How can we reevaluate some of the most fundamental assumptions about our sexualities that we have been taught from myth and disinformation, out of even like a harmful sex culture? How do we reevaluate what sexuality is, how it lives in our bodies, what this for is that moves through us and seems to move us in, sometimes, very unexpected directions in life? What is eroticism and sexuality?

Chris Rose: 01:42 I love that we, as a community, can go into these conversations and ask these really big questions together. I continue to get really amazing emails from you all, as you unpack these themes. Keep them coming, chris@pleasuremechanics.com, and if you want to support this show, and the work that we’re doing, and be part of our inner circle, and in closer dialogue with me and Charlotte, come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/love, pleasuremechanics.com/love, where you will find some options to throw us some love, support the show, and step into our inner circle of supporters.

Chris Rose: 02:25 All right. I am so excited to introduce you to Lucie Fielding. As I said, when I walked into their workshop session at AASECT, I was blown away by their wisdom and soulfulness. It turns out Lucie has been a listener of our podcast for a while, so a friendship was born. It was a really wonderful to meet and share our thoughts. This, I think, will be the first of many conversations we share with you. Let us know what you think, and how this applies to your life. I’m waiting to hear from you over at pleasuremechanics.com. All right. Here’s my conversation with Lucie Fielding. Cheers.

Chris Rose: 03:10 Lucie, welcome to Speaking of Sex.

Lucie Fielding: 03:13 Thank you, so much, for having me.

Chris Rose: 03:15 Can you, please, start us out by introducing yourself, and the work that you do?

Lucie Fielding: 03:19 My name is Lucie Fielding, and I am a non-binary femme. My pronouns are she, they. I am a resident in counseling, which basically means I’m a therapist under supervision, working towards licensure. I’m also a sex educator and a writer, and I’m currently working on a book entitled Trans-Sex Clinical Approaches to Trans-sexualities and Erotic Embodiments. That will come out in late 2020.

Chris Rose: 03:57 I’m already excited for part two, when we bring you back to talk about the book. Based on our workshop together, at AASECT, when I just was dazzled by your wisdom, I really want to set a very specific scope for this conversation and talk about this idea of transitions in all of our lives, change in all of our lives, and how we can come into a more passionate relationship with change and transitions in our erotic lives. So, that’s where we’re headed, today. Can you start by defining some of this language on your terms? What [crosstalk 00:04:38] by erotic embodiment?

Lucie Fielding: 04:41 Sure. Erotic embodiment. Embodiment… So the root verb is to embody, and there’s two senses to that. One is that corporeal sense, “I am in my body. I’m aware of… I have an internal sense and external sense of my body. My body in space, my viscera. Then, the second sense is the social and cultural sense, the fact that we embody things. We embody norms. It’s the idea that cultural scripts, narratives are constantly, and images, are constantly intersecting with our bodies, bombarding our bodies, forming our bodies in space. They have a lot to say about what our bodies are for, what they can do and what they can’t do, or what they should do, more properly, and what they shouldn’t do. It often comes with a moral aspect to it, or a normative aspect. So, embodiment is about, in some ways, the ways that our bodies are moving, not just as corporeal things of blood and guts and viscera and fluids, but also formed by, through, and in culture.

Chris Rose: 06:32 Mm-hmm (affirmative). I really appreciate this dual lens for embodiment, because we talk so often, on the show, about erotic embodiment, but we have to remember that that doesn’t happen in individual beds.

Lucie Fielding: 06:46 No.

Chris Rose: 06:47 It doesn’t happen in individual genitals. It happens in this social web of culture, and your writing really points to that so beautifully.

Lucie Fielding: 06:54 Thank you. Yeah, I really try to… I see both in my work as a therapist and in the book and in my teaching. I really want us to be cognizant of the fact that we don’t come in, simply as individuals with our subjective feels that so much of it is conditioned or in response to and conserved some troubling or, a term to talk about perhaps later, could use some mystifying.

Chris Rose: 07:38 How is your sense of your understanding of erotic embodiment been informed by this other term you talk a lot about, transition and change.

Lucie Fielding: 07:48 Yeah. The book, itself, is written for providers working with… And I mean providers very broadly. I mean mental health providers, medical providers, I mean body workers, I mean surrogate partners, I mean, pelvic floor therapists, the whole gamut. So, when I talk about… And the population I’m talking about is, of course, trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming folks and how we, as providers, can better host conversations about sexual expression, erotic embodiment, for trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming folks, but my sense is that these conceptual frameworks, in the book and in my teaching are really applicable to all bodies.

Lucie Fielding: 08:54 It’s just that my starting point… Instead of starting with cis heterosexual bodies, white able-bodied cis heterosexual bodies, I want to start with trans and non-binary and queer bodies, and start from there because so much… My observation has been that so much of the research, the great sexological research that we depend on and that we draw from, and many of the great sex education books that we love… I adore Emily Nagoski’s Come as You Are, or Laurie Mintz’ Becoming Cliterate or Girl Sex 101. They are all starting from this position of cis women’s bodies and cis women’s sexualities. That’s great, but what happens is that trans and non-binary folks have to often extrapolate from cis experiencing. So, I want to flip the script on that because I think that there’s a lot that trans and non-binary folks, and queer folks, generally, have to teach cishet folks about embodiment and erotic embodiment, specifically.

Lucie Fielding: 10:32 This notion of transition, to come back to that question… I’m sorry to wind back to it… is the sense that our bodies, that transition is not just for trans and non-binary folks. It’s not just about these very prescribed pounds of social transition and legal transition and medical transition, with all of the steps that go into that. Our bodies are constantly in transition. Our sexual bodies are constantly in transition. We are aging. Our hormones are constantly shifting. We’re acquiring illnesses. We are acquiring disabilities. We are recovering from illnesses. We are recovering from injuries, and all of that is a transition. It’s a passage. It’s a process that we are always engaging in, if we really think about, because stuff is happening to us in our lives and to our bodies, and it’s impacting the way that we are relating to one another and, particularly, relating to one another sexually and relating to our own bodies as sexual bodies.

Chris Rose: 12:04 When we think about how we relate to these transitions, these passages, these changes, it’s so clear that we often have a relationship of loss, of grieving, of yearning, of thinking of what we’re leaving behind, as we age or as we change, and we forget sometimes that change is the great vehicle of discovery, of excitement, of curiosity, and you invite us into this more balanced… I don’t want to say positive because I feel like you hold the whole spectrum of the emotional experience of change, but you remind us of the joy and excitement in change, as well.

Lucie Fielding: 12:51 Yeah. I hope so. At least I think we often put it in terms of change involves or implies gains and losses, and that’s, I think, once in binary thinking that I want to eschew whenever possible, but also I think we need to talk more about variation and difference, and that’s the framework from which I talk about change, that our bodies vary and that, yes, that passages do imply some grieving process because you are moving from one state to another, but it’s a constant thing. There are, instead of looking at nearly in terms of what is lost or what is gained, I want to think about, what is the difference? What opportunities open up that this change allows me to consider?

Chris Rose: 14:19 That’s such a more generous question.

Lucie Fielding: 14:21 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 14:23 What is the role of passion in this? You talk about quote “coming into passionate relationship with the embodied sexual self,” which is just a sentence I could read over and over again. This word, passion, talk to me about, because I tend to think of passion as overrated, kind of, this external lustiness we feel with another person. How do you think of passion?

Lucie Fielding: 14:45 When we talk about sexuality, we often talk about intimacy. We talk about sexual intimacy. What I want to talk about is, in some sense, two relational energies. There is intimacy, which is often about coziness and comfort and feelings of safety, and it feels yummy. It’s about knowing. Passion, for me, and this comes a lot from relational psychotherapists like [Stephen 00:15:26] Mitchell and folks like Esther Perel, who really talks about the intimacy passion energies.

Lucie Fielding: 15:35 Passion often marks the beginning of our relationships, and it’s an energy that is steeped in not knowing, in mystery, in fantasy, in, just like, raw desire, sometimes even lust. It’s from that period where we sincerely are gobsmacked by another person, by partners, and I think that, that’s really an exciting space to inhabit. The observation that folks like Esther Perel talks about is that, often, what happens in relationships is that, and I talk about it in terms of that pina colada song. What that tells is the story of, you’re with a partner, and he describes as, the partnership as a favorite song, but it’s a worn-out recording of that favorite song. The relationship has gotten stale, predictable, definable. You get into this illusion, and it is an illusion that you know the other person.

Lucie Fielding: 17:02 Do you know all there is to know about another person? That’s a trap, and the guy in Escape, of course, answers the personal ad and then shows up at the bar, O’Malley’s, and lo and behold, who should walk in and who wrote the original ad that he responded to, but his current partner? Then, he says, “I never knew.” That is the space that passion can create. It’s that place of, “Huh. That was an illusion that I knew everything about the other person.” In fact, we are infinitely expandable because we are always transitioning. We are always in the midst of change and variation.

Lucie Fielding: 18:08 What I do, in my work, is I take that interpersonal lens that Esther Perel talks about, that escape really highlights, and I make it intrapersonal. I’m talking about our relationship to our own bodies and how we get a little bit too cozy and comfortable with how our bodies work and how our bodies are supposed to be interacted with, and what they’re for. You’ve talked about this in previous episode, the episode on what you can do with soft penises, which just such a great episode, because it’s all about this, that we have this cultural script that says that the only thing penises are good for is being hard and penetrating, and they intersect with mouths or with anuses or vaginas, but that’s their function, and if they don’t interact with bodies in the particular way, then, they’re disordered or, God forbid, dysfunctional.

Lucie Fielding: 19:35 So, to come into passionate relationship is to deconstruct that script and say, “Huh, I don’t have to use a penis like that. I don’t even have to call it a penis. I don’t have to interact with it in particular ways.” A sex educator that I met at Philly Trans Wellness, a big conference for both community members and providers in Philadelphia every year, put on by the Mazzoni Center, there was a workshop for community on making love to a trans body. There was this really incredible discussion of swirling versus bobbing. We have this idea… This is in reference to oral sex. …that usually… and it’s very gendered …that bobbing is about blow jobs. You bob a penis. Then you swirl a vulva. That’s what you do when you’re engaging in oral sex with holders of a particular genital configuration, but what if you swirl with a penis? What does that do? A lot of… One thing that’s really important to place here is the idea that trans and non-binary folks, we have a complicated relationship to our bodies, a very nuanced relationship to our bodies.

Lucie Fielding: 21:30 Sometimes, we… and especially toward genitals. I know, for me, when I am having sex with a partner, it is really dysphoria, body dysphoria, gender dysphoria, comes up for me when I feel like my parts are being treated as what society might say that they are, might assign a particular gender to, or connect a particular gender to, and how I interact with them and want them to be interacted with. So, I call my genitals, my clit, and we have so many creative and fabulous ways to describe our parts. One participant yelled out, in this same workshop, that they referred to their… a trans masculine person referred to their vulva as their man cave, and I just loved that, just rethinking that.

Chris Rose: 22:56 In the trans community, we have no choice but to articulate our own realities, to come up with our own language, to define who we are again, and again, and again. So much of this is an invitation for everyone to be in this inquiry and self-naming process so that we can be more authentic and more present with one another and ourselves.

Lucie Fielding: 23:26 And with ourselves. Yeah.

Chris Rose: 23:28 Do you want to talk anything, more, about this turning the passionate gays inward. I feel like so many people have a sense of what that might mean, feels scary. It feel inaccessible. What happens if we turn our gays inward and what do we discover there? Do we give ourselves permission to know ourselves?

Lucie Fielding: 23:52 Oh, it is scary. Change is scary. What I would invite folks to consider, and I can talk a little bit to this, is to consider as my dear friend and colleague, Ray McDaniel, whose practice in Chicago, [Tactical 00:24:18] Audacity, is amazing, they and I were talking about my work in the book. They introduced this lovely distinction between feeling safe and being safe and that, so often, we are safe, but we don’t feel safe. So, part of it is making… Part of this moves ability to lean into the fear that attends this process of coming into passionate relationship, because it is the unknown. You don’t know what you’re going to find.

Lucie Fielding: 24:59 There’s something really exciting about that, but there’s something really scary about that, and it’s important to acknowledge that. The first step is getting to a place where you are, in fact, safe. You are being safe, and you may not feel safe, but it’s about making an accurate assessment of your safety. Part of that, from a therapeutic perspective, we talked about often, one of my favorite therapeutic metaphors, is the metaphor of the container.

Lucie Fielding: 25:40 We talk about that therapy is about creating a safety container in which sensations, images, feelings, thoughts, that might be too scary, too overwhelming to face alone or outside of that space, that the container provides that sense of containment that I feel bounded by this really ethically drawn space. I can go to certain places because I am safe, even if this is a little scary.

Chris Rose: 26:27 So, therapy might be one of those containers. I think we can work on creating that container in our friendships and in our love relationships.

Lucie Fielding: 26:35 Totally.

Chris Rose: 26:36 On the individual level, I think, some people use journaling or art practice or even movement practice to create those containers for yourself of, how do you just carve out a little bit of time to go inward and see what’s there, get to know yourself?

Lucie Fielding: 26:52 Yeah, and kink practices are modeled on the same kind of idea. I talk about expanding the container metaphor to think about bounded chaos. I think about therapy and kink sayings as very much within that framework, that, as long as there is that container you’ve negotiated, you know that somebody is going to recognize that if you are getting overwhelmed and that you need a safe word out, that, that’s going to be respected and, indeed, welcomed and not shamed, and you’re going to be thanked for articulating that need to move out of the sink space. With that knowledge, so much can happen within that, once you have that negotiated frame. That can happen within friendships. It can happen within romantic relationships and, as you know, it can happen just with ourselves and through intentional practices. Any kind of mindfulness practice is, in a sense, establishing that container.

Chris Rose: 28:25 What do you say to people who are afraid of the flames? We often use fire as this metaphor for passion. So often, I hear from people who feel like if they open themselves up to their eroticism, if they start actually articulating their passions, their desires, they’ll be overwhelmed, they’ll be consumed by it. How do we maintain a sense of self while also allowing ourselves to take the plunge?

Lucie Fielding: 28:57 I think that, that’s where the container comes in because you know that you’re going to be held back from going too far. So, I think it individually in terms of mindfulness practice. We talk about one of the prompts that I give for visualizations is this idea of, your mind may wander. That’s okay. That’s what minds do, so honor that and then try to see if you can bring your awareness back to the present moment, to your embodied awareness. That’s baked in. I can’t say that it is a totally safe move to come into passionate relationship. I think, if we felt safe, and we were safe, there would be no incentive for us to move towards something different to change. That just wouldn’t happen. We’d just keep doing what we’re doing, but we have to get to a place that almost…

Lucie Fielding: 30:30 A friend of mine who is a Health at Every Size nutritionist in D.C. talks about, with respect to disordered eating that, at some point, you have to decide that, and really understand that, the disordered eating patterns are not serving the goals that you have for yourself, that they’re, in fact, hindering you. Being in that place of, “Oh, I feel totally safe,” that may not be serving you, but that you need some of that distance that separatedness and that sense of not knowing, in order to move away from that desire to just stand pat.

Lucie Fielding: 31:30 A dear friend and sex therapist that I adore, Doug Braun-Harvey, talks about ambivalence is essential to the change process, that we need to have that sense of, “Oh, I don’t know if this is good or bad.” There are costs and benefits to all of this that I need to weigh. Hopefully, we get to the place where, ultimately, where we have been is not serving us as much as where we could go, even if that implies a sense of not knowing and charting a new course, remapping, revising, revisioning our relationship to our bodies.

Chris Rose: 32:26 I’m struck that, sometimes, these are incremental changes and small changes and, then, other times, they truly are swan dives into an unknown, and that sometimes the suffering is left behind, once you take the leap. I’m thinking, so much, about so many of my trans friends who, kind of, swirled in a stuckness for so long, and as soon as they articulated something for themselves, as soon as they named a change that was coming, whether that be, “I want to explore hormone therapy,” or “I’m changing a pronoun,” or, “I’m changing a name,” or any big step into their transition could feel, both, like a liberation and the first step into a gauntlet.

Lucie Fielding: 33:16 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 33:18 I think we need to remember that, with erotic change, that it’s like those feelings will co-exist. There will be excitation and terror, freedom and fear, the exciting of running forward and wanting to be held back at the same time, and to feel those feelings in you, at the same time and have them both be okay, is one of the skills, here, to develop.

Lucie Fielding: 33:39 Yeah. There’s a great Hélène Cixous quote [inaudible 00:33:44]. She’s a novelist and critical theorist. She talks in her book, The Book of Promethea… It’s, I think, the beginning of the book. “Once one is in the fire, one is bathed in sweetness. Here I am, in it. Once one is in the fire, one is bathed is sweetness.” It seems scary, like, “Why the heck would I want to jump into the fire?”

Lucie Fielding: 34:21 I’m not saying you jump into actual fires. Please do not, but it can feel that way, that we’re going to be burned by this, that it feels unsafe. It’s not what one is supposed to do, but that place of, “Here I am, in it.” I think about, to talk about my own transition because I’m much more comfortable, I think, talking about myself than I am talking about my clients, at this point, and their stories, because I’d have to do too much amalgamating of their stories to anonymize it.

Lucie Fielding: 35:16 I think about the ways that I was having sex prior to coming into relationship with my embodied sexual self, coming into a passionate relationship, it felt good, but where I am now is fricking amazing, multiple orgasms, full-body orgasms, and I’m not saying that… Your mileage may vary. I’ve made particular choices with my life, so I don’t want to name my experience and say, “Everyone will do this, will feel this way,” but I just know, and I know what it is… Going back to… You mentioned the word swirl just a few seconds ago, so it brought me back to swirling.

Lucie Fielding: 36:19 The distinction between when somebody bobs and when somebody swirls my clit, when somebody interacts with my clit as a clit, instead of as a penis, I can feel it and it’s amazing. It’s not that I didn’t feel great when somebody would bob, but it’s that swirling just feels yummy, and it feels like I’m deeply, deeply seen in my body and in myself, and I’m being affirmed, and I’m being held, and then I can go to places with my pleasure and in my pleasure, both with myself and in relationship to my partners, and experience forms of transcendence that I really couldn’t before, when I was so stuck in my head. It was like, “This is okay.”

Chris Rose: 37:28 Yeah, I really want to draw that out for a second because we can just look at the friction of the stimulation and leads to full-body orgasms, but that is not the story here. The story is your entire process over many years of coming into relationship with yourself, honoring your truths, revealing yourself, choosing a partner who will see you and hold you fully, like holding a certain standard for yourself, and that’s part of what Audrey Lorde talks about with the Erotic, raise the bar for what we expect in these meetings with one another.

Lucie Fielding: 38:06 And with ourselves.

Chris Rose: 38:07 Yes.

Lucie Fielding: 38:08 And our meetings… Solo sex is one of the starting places for this, and I can’t emphasize that enough. It’s like… We say that it’s hard to tell people what we like unless we know what we like. So, like playing around and figuring out what toys work and, what do you want to call your parts? What feels good? What kinds of movements feel good? What kinds of frictions feel good? Start with yourself and maybe genitals aren’t involved at all for you, and that is totally cool, and you can have mind blowing sex without ever engaging the genitals. So, I also want to make space for that.

Chris Rose: 39:06 Truth. So true. But you must engage the mind.

Lucie Fielding: 39:11 Yeah, and the mind as part of the body, not just this separate… We talk about the dualism, which is another piece of binary thinking. I talk about the embodied psyche that the mind is seated within the body. You can’t distinguish one from the other.

Chris Rose: 39:36 And we talk about this as a super power, because when you fantasize and wake up the mind, you are waking up the body, and you will feel the thrum inside, and this is the perfect chance to explore, through fantasy, what your body is viscerally responding to.

Lucie Fielding: 39:55 So much, yes.

Chris Rose: 39:57 Lucie, thank you, so much for stimulating our minds, today. I’m sure there’s more to come. Where can people find you online to get more of this delicious stimulation?

Lucie Fielding: 40:07 Sure. I have a website at luciefielding… Lucie spelled with an I-E., luciefielding.com, and also you can find me on Facebook. Again, I have a professional Instagram feed, @luciefielding.

Chris Rose: 40:30 Mm-hmm (affirmative), and we will link that all up, in the show notes page. Lucie, thank you, so much, for your time [inaudible 00:40:35] today.

Lucie Fielding: 40:36 God. Thank you. It is such pleasure talking to you. I love the pod, and it is just… It’s an honor, and a privilege to talk to you and start to share my work with your listeners. So, thank you.

Chris Rose: 40:52 All right. I hope you’ve enjoyed that conversation with Lucie. You might want to listen to it again to let these ideas sink in a little deeper. If you have any questions about this episode or anything you hear on the podcast, come on over to pleasuremechanics.com. We’d love to hear from you, and if you want to show us your love and support this show and the work we do in the world, come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/love, where you will find ways to support our work and step in, to our inner circle of supporters.

Chris Rose: 41:28 Thank you, so much, to all of our patrons and supporters, and members of our online courses. We love you and love supporting you in your erotic transformations. It is an honor to serve you, and we hope to work with more podcast listeners in these intimate ways, in the coming years. We will be back with you next week with another full episode of Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris, from pleasuremechanics.com, wishing you a lifetime of pleasure. Cheers.

Sexual Frustration

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Sexually frustrated? You are SO not alone. Sexual frustration can be a deeply painful experience, especially when you feel like there is no end in sight! If you feel like you are pent up, shut down, or itching with unmet sexual needs and desires, this episode is for you.

Where does sexual frustration come from? What do we do with sexual frustration so it doesn’t cause so much suffering?

In this episode, we explore the roots of sexual frustration, what we can learn about frustration to help us out of it, and strategies to take the edge off when sexual frustration is tormenting you.

Check out the complete podcast mini series on libido and desire: Pleasure Mechanics Rethinking Libido Series.

Big thanks to Emily Nagoski for her brilliant books that help us understand the science of sexuality. Come As You Are and Burnout are must-reads to understand your human erotic experience!

The Science of Sexual Frustration by Emily Nagoski.


Transcript for Podcast Episode: Sexual Frustration

Podcast transcripts are generated with love by humans, and thus may not be 100% accurate. Time stamps are included so you can cross reference or jump to any point in the podcast episode above. THANKS to the members of our Pleasure Pod for helping make transcripts and the rest of our free offerings happen! If you love what we offer, find ways to show your love and dive deeper with us here: SHOW SOME LOVE

Chris Rose: 00:00 Welcome to Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:05 We are the Pleasure Mechanics. And on this podcast we have honest, soulful, explicit conversations about every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com, our forever online home. Where you will find our complete podcast archive. All of our resources waiting for you. And when you are ready, our online courses so you can take a deeper dive with us and master new erotic skills in the privacy of your own home. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com to get started and go to pleasuremechanics.com/free to sign up for our free online course and dive right in. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/free.

Chris Rose: 00:48 On today’s episode, we continue with our rethinking libido mini series. We are taking a deep dive into the question of libido and trying to create some pathways out of the suffering that this question of libido creates for so many of us. You can find the complete podcast series at pleasuremechanics.com/libido where all of our episodes and resources are gathered conveniently for you.

Chris Rose: 01:16 On today’s episode, I wanted to talk about sexual urgency and the frustration that can come when you know exactly what you want. You know what you want and you’re just not getting it. A lot of our libido talks, we’ve been focusing on the folks who have lost their libido or feel very low desire, or don’t know what they want. And I want to acknowledge those of us who know what we want and aren’t getting it. And that’s where the suffering is. What do we do with sexual frustration? Where does it come from? What do we do with it? And how do we live well, whether or not our sexual needs and desires are being met?

Charlotte Rose: 02:00 Yeah. We want to talk to those of you who are feeling like you are sexually frustrated and in either the frustration stage, or the anger stage, or the despair stage of your experience of your own sex life. And try and give you some understanding and some context for your experience and a few ideas. Though I don’t know if we’re going to solve that whole issue in this podcast.

Chris Rose: 02:25 We try you guys. But we want you to hear that this experience of sexual frustration is really common. It’s really common and there’s a range of it. You can experience sexual frustration in moments when you’re turned on, and horny, and aroused, and can’t seem to go anywhere with it. Or you don’t have access to relieving that feeling. Or you can experience sexual frustration over decades when you are in a relationship where sex is no longer an option, or you’re not in a relationship and don’t feel like you have access to sexual partners. This is true for so many people for so many different reasons. And the feelings that arise when our sexuality is not meeting our expectations can be deeply painful.

Chris Rose: 03:16 So, we want to talk about this. Sexual frustration. Where does it come from? So the old model would suggest that sex drive is something that lives in us, builds up this pressure. Needs to be released or else it wreaks havoc in our system. And as we talked about on previous episodes, this is an old model that relies upon this idea of sex drive like hunger is a physical need that if it’s not met, causes physical damage. So we’ve debunked that myth, and we have turned our understanding of sexual desire as a motivational system. We’re motivated by the good stuff sex brings us, and that is the system that drives our interest in sex. So we’re motivated by physical pleasure. We’re motivated by touch, by orgasms, by physical intimacy, by emotional intimacy, by the social status and belonging that sex brings us. By so many different rewards. It’s a reward system.

Chris Rose: 04:22 So what happens when you don’t get the reward? What happens when your body is activated? You feel desire, you feel horny, you feel sexual wanting and longing. And it doesn’t get met.

Charlotte Rose: 04:38 There can be such deep frustration, anger, and despair. And it’s a really uncomfortable feeling. As well as feeling distracted by sex or the desire for some kind of sexual activity. A lot of the time. This is what we hear from a lot of men specifically, but I think a lot of people can experience this as well.

Chris Rose: 05:00 So we got a flood of emails from you all, and I wanted to pull just a few experts so we could hear the experience of sexual frustration from your words. So thank you to everyone who wrote in. These are just a few excerpts from some of the emails. Charlotte will get us started by reading one testimony of sexual frustration.

Charlotte Rose: 05:22 I was sexually frustrated when I believed that the only good sex was penis and vagina sex with my wife. I would wait patiently day after day for her to take care of her wifely duties, and try my best to be a loving and affectionate husband in the interim. I was in pain and internalizing the sexual frustration. Then she went through menopause and any hope for sex went out the window. She just didn’t want it anymore, and she hoped I would outgrow my longstanding sexual desire. That didn’t happen. I couldn’t see myself going to my grave without the joy of sex again.

Charlotte Rose: 06:00 I went to counseling, and the counselor suggested masturbation as a reasonable alternative. This was a frustrating solution for me because I was taught at a young age that masturbation was a sin. It was an act of desperation by a guy who couldn’t find a willing sexual partner, a pussy to fuck. It was a sign of social failure. And to make matters worse, my wife refused to have anything to do with it. She didn’t want to participate in my act of masturbation. She just wanted me to go off somewhere and take care of my sexual needs, and leave her the hell alone. To her, it was a shameful act. Her repulsion coupled with early learning caused me to find that with masturbation came guilt and shame. Time for more counseling.

Charlotte Rose: 06:47 After a lot of soul searching and reaching out to others to share my dead bedroom story and after doing tons of research on the benefits of masturbation, I came to realize that I was bamboozled and brainwashed at a very young age. Not only was it unrealistic for me to think that my wife could take care of all my sexual needs. It was simply wrong to think that masturbation was some form of adultery, a serious sin. I needed a way out, and I found it.

Chris Rose: 07:16 Thank you. So that was just one excerpt from a story of a longterm marriage and one man’s quest to navigate his sexual frustration within it. Here is another story from a totally different guy. Notice what comes up here.

Charlotte Rose: 07:31 For a long time after I stopped having sex with my wife, I thought I could just do this. Just have this be my life. But I had a heart attack three years ago, and I realized this half life I have been living just makes me feel too sad, too lost, too empty. I can’t accept a life like this anymore. A life devoid of intimate, sexual, animalistic pleasures. My life without this kind of sexual giving and taking seems so arid to me. So empty, so painfully absent of that mutual animal gratification and exploration. And becoming more than you are by engaging in something bigger than yourself.

Chris Rose: 08:13 Okay. And one more.

Charlotte Rose: 08:15 Your connection between having a high libido and feeling undesirable or undeserving rang painfully true. Perhaps also a feeling of being immoral, insatiable, corrupt, and ultimately empty and alone. But for the torment of this high libido. Yet start untangling it from this ill understood notion of just more sex, as if a culinary craving could be satisfied with just more food. And specifics start to emerge. Something spicy, something salty, something specific that can be had and can be satisfying if we can manage to name it and ask for it.

Chris Rose: 08:55 I love you all.

Charlotte Rose: 08:56 I know. Such high caliber, beautiful people, you all listening to this.

Chris Rose: 09:02 Thank you for flooding our inbox with your testimonies, your stories, your struggles, your success stories. So notice as you listen to those stories, what parts resonated for you? What words, what parts of their story do you feel yourself in?

Chris Rose: 09:22 So one of the things we notice here, and it brings us into this question of where does sexual frustration come from. Is that there is a mismatch between the sex life we want and perhaps expect, and the sex life we’re having. A mismatch between what we expect and what we’re experiencing. And the truth is our sexual expectations for most of us are way out of whack. We live in a world of sexual myth and fable, that is not grounded in the lived reality of how our sexualities function. And we’re in a sexually broken culture where so many of us have experienced such deep levels of trauma and shame and guilt, that many of us are not available for one another.

Chris Rose: 10:09 So in a lot of your stories, and I’ve come to call it the hotel room in the sky. We have this sense of what is possible, what is the ideal sex life. If we could meet a willing partner that wanted us just as much as we wanted them and there were no limitations. And our cultural context was a sex positive, rejoicing, celebratory culture where all bodies were safe and we all had sexual development that was wonderful. What would be possible in the hotel room in the sky? In that hotel room in heaven where your sexual fantasies could come true.

Chris Rose: 10:52 For most of, us that is not our sexual reality. So the gap it turns out in psychology, in the human animal. Frustration, the experience of frustration comes in the gap between expectations and experience and our inability to feel like we can control this situation.

Chris Rose: 11:14 So Emily Nagoski does a great job talking about this part of the brain where frustration is born, called the monitor. And the monitor is our part of the brain that is very useful. It kind of monitors, it keeps track of external circumstances. Maps our expectations onto those circumstances and tells us how much effort and resources we should have to invest to fulfill our goal. And it kind of keeps track of those time and resources, and investments in our goals. And then either rewards us when we fulfill goals more easily than expected. That feeling of woo Yahtzee. And then it creates frustration and pain in the brain when our goals feel out of reach or it’s taking more time or resources than expected. And I’m going to bring you right into the beautiful example Emily Nagoski gives us that we can all relate to. Road rage.

Charlotte Rose: 12:19 So you do the same drive every day. It takes you about 15 minutes. This one day you get in the car, you hit every green light, you get there in 12 minutes, and you park and you feel good. You’re like, “Yes, it’s going to be a good day. Everything is flowing, it’s all working. Awesome. Here I go.”

Charlotte Rose: 12:40 The next day you get in the car and you hit every red light, and then you hit a construction zone, and maybe even a car accident. And this drive takes you 30 minutes. And along the way you are going from frustrated and annoyed to anger. You just keep getting enraged that this is taking so long, and it’s not supposed to take this long, and why is it taking so long, and I should have taken this other road. I’m such an idiot. I clearly should have taken that other path. And on and on, right? I think we all feel-

Chris Rose: 13:13 And if it goes on long enough, you hit despair. I will never get there. I should just get out of this car and start walking. I’ve said that before. So just notice that range from frustration, to anger, to despair. And notice, you’re sitting in the car. There’s nothing you can do about it. But our brain starts playing this trick on us and it starts activating a very physical state. Road rage is not an idea. It’s not an emotion. It’s a full body experience that can have lasting effects on your day, on other people’s days. It can even turn violent. Right? So what is the experience of sexual frustration compared to road rage?

Chris Rose: 14:01 So what I find fascinating about frustration is that we don’t have this universal sense of sexual expectations. It’s not like an inborn human thing where we expect sex to be a certain way. It’s very culturally trained. And it very much depends on your cultural position and how you were raised, and how you were raised to think about sex. What expectations were you told to have?

Chris Rose: 14:29 This emerges so clearly in some of these stories we share that talk about marriage. Because for so many of us, marriage is a social goal that part of the package deal is a sexual partner for life. Part of the marriage package deal we have been told is sexual access to our partners. And not only sexual access, but that they will want you. They will want to have sex with you. They will continue to choose you and make you feel like the one. Over, and over, and over.

Chris Rose: 15:02 So that expectation when it is not met becomes incredibly frustrating. Incredibly frustrating. Because within the dead marriage bed that this guy spoke of, it’s not just the lack of sex that’s frustrating him. It’s the lack of emotional connection. It’s the lack of feeling like we’re in this together. It’s not feeling wanted, it’s not feeling desired. We take all of these different unpleasant experiences, all of these unmet expectations, both physical and social needs that we’ve bundled up into this relationship. We notice our frustration about them and we wrap it up all in a package called sexual frustration.

Chris Rose: 15:44 So some of this is relational. The expectations we bring into our relationships, and then the reality of those relationships. And we’ve talked about this on previous episodes, how sex is so contextual. So we cannot expect to people’s interest in sex to always line up. And sometimes this mismatch goes on for a few months or a few years. Sometimes it then goes on for decades. So in that mismatch of sexual interests and expectations, is the suffering within that relationship.

Chris Rose: 16:17 But I also want to acknowledge the sexual frustration that I almost think is a baseline for so many of us. Because we have sexual desires, sexualities that want to be expressed. Physical needs and emotional needs that are just unmet in general. Whether or not you’re in a relationship, whether or not you feel like you have access to dating. You have that confidence to find sexual partners. I kind of think so many of us have a baseline of sexual frustration that makes it easier to go into anger and despair because so few of our sexual social needs are met as a culture.

Chris Rose: 17:01 Let’s break some of these down. Touch. Touch is one of the biggest needs bundled up into sexuality. Our need to be touched, and held, and feel our sensations in our bodies. So many of us relegate that to sex. So when sex disappears, our opportunity to be touched disappears, and we’re left touchless. I am shocked sometimes when I ask people, how many people in your life can you receive affectionate touch from? Very few people can name more than five. Two of those people might be your parents that live in another state that you get a hug from a couple times a year. And the truth is even when you’re getting touched from another affectionate source, a friend or a child. The touch that comes in sex is different. It’s different. It’s full body. It is not just affectionate, it is passionate touch. And it is touch on all parts of your body. Your genitals get touched, your naked body gets touched, and your naked body gets to press up against another naked body, right?

Chris Rose: 18:12 So when we talk about the touch of a hug, or a handshake, or even a really affectionate friend who’s going to cuddle with you on the couch and throw their arm around you, it’s not the same as being in naked, pressed up against another body, sweaty perhaps, moving, breathing, feeling all of those feelings together. Feeling like you’re being touched in the ways you want to be touched. All of that is so good. That is a huge reward for the human brain. So if you’re not getting that, the frustration just of not getting touch and then not getting that level, that intensity, that potency of touch can be deeply frustrating. So what is another human need, human desire that we roll up into this package?

Charlotte Rose: 19:00 Intensity, like a need for cathartic intensity release. Yeah, I think we want high peak moments in life, and sex can be that. Where there’s breathless interest and excitement. And when we think about that, we think we’re craving orgasms. But perhaps we’re also craving just intense release.

Chris Rose: 19:22 Right. So physiologically, an orgasm is the build up of muscular tension and arousal. And then it cascades into involuntary contractions of the pelvic muscles. When we talk about wanting to come, when we talk about wanting … I get all of these emails from guys about I want to blow a huge load, and there’s always something about the visual of a lot of it. And I think in that is they want intensity, they want a really good orgasm. And some men talk about this rising up from within them and then something coming out. Think a lot of it feels like this open expansion after having an orgasm. However you feel that post orgasmic bliss, the best of that, part of that is like a hormonal cascade that happens after orgasmic release. That can chill us the fuck out. Sometimes we just need to build up intensity and then relax into contentment.

Chris Rose: 20:27 So sex gives us access to these two parts of our nervous system. Excitation and relaxation. Building up of arousal and cascading into enjoyment, joy. Both of those states are states our body craves, and we do not get enough of in our modern life. Frustration sets in.

Chris Rose: 20:50 What’s another need that we bundle up into this package deal? Social fucking belonging. Social belonging and acceptance. So much I have come to believe of the magic of sex is feeling accepted, feeling a sense of belonging with another human being, feeling safe in that connection.

Chris Rose: 21:12 Turns out it’s a vital human need. We are a social species reliant on one another for survival. This is the emotional experience of attachment. It first happens with our caretakers. Infant children cannot survive on their own. A baby, a human baby left untended to will perish. All of us know this deeply in our bones.

Chris Rose: 21:39 As children this comes up, I am hungry. And if an adult doesn’t come and feed me, I will die. I am alone and if an adult doesn’t come and hold me and protect me, I will die.

Chris Rose: 21:51 As adults, this emerges as this feeling of wanting another human to see you, accept you, and maybe even attune to how you are feeling. That alchemy of someone else showing up for you and being present and being like, “How you’re feeling, I’m feeling it too.”

Chris Rose: 22:14 And this comes up in these dialogues about sexual frustration when it’s like I just want someone to want me as much as I want them. I just want someone to want me so badly, that I can smell it on their body. Right? We have this sense of when someone wants you, that feels so good. And that’s not just about feeling pretty. We tend to think of this idea of feeling desirable as this very a skin deep thing of I just want to feel pretty and feel desirable. That’s capitalism speaking. That’s the commodification of beauty. What we all want is to feel loved, accepted, and belonging. And this isn’t about longterm relationships. You can feel that sense of belonging when you’re fucking a stranger, and you both look at each other in the eye, and you’re just in that moment together. You are feeling something mutual, and you’re feeling it together. So feeling our feelings together and having someone give a shit about how you feel, really important human need. And that gets bundled up into sex.

Chris Rose: 23:24 I remember, and it has been so long, but it was 10 years ago we did a survey about blow jobs. And I was expecting guys to say, “I just want to deep throat. I want her to make eye contact.” All of the tropes about blowjobs that we thought would come up in this survey. And I remember being stunned that so many guys reported, “What I love most about getting a blow job is feeling accepted, feeling like my penis is going in her mouth and that she wants it there.” That feeling of being home in someone else’s body is about acceptance and belonging.

Chris Rose: 24:03 So you can see. So we’ve named touch, intensity, excitement and enjoyment, feeling our feelings together, feeling accepted and belonging.

Charlotte Rose: 24:16 I think intimacy is one other huge one.

Chris Rose: 24:19 Intimacy different than belonging?

Charlotte Rose: 24:21 Is it more that I though partnered you and me are one. We are important to each other. It is related to belonging, I guess, but I think a lot of people get emotional intimacy and connection in sex if they’re not having deep emotional intimacy anywhere else in their life with anyone else. It does become a concentrated moment during sex.

Chris Rose: 24:46 Yeah, and I would like to interrogate what that means. What is that emotional intimacy you’re feeling? Are you being allowed to feel your feelings? Are you feeling safe to feel your feelings? Or is it that you feel seen and accepted? Therefore, you’re alleviating your shame. Because another core piece of sexual frustration we all walk around with is feeling shame. Feeling like part of our sexuality is not good. It is a sin, and therefore we carry this sin within us. We carry this poison within us. And in those moments where a lover sees you and accepts you for all of who you are, something within you is healed. I can be seen for all of who I am and still be loved, still be held, still be safe, still be accepted, still have a home, still have kin. These are deep emotional experiences, and we have lost our language for all of this, right? Part of why we’re breaking this down and really talking about all of the different components of the sexual experience is so we can get more specific. And we all just don’t walk around feeling frustrated, and angry, and in despair around our sexuality without being specific about where that suffering is coming from.

Chris Rose: 26:08 Okay, so all of your expectations about sex. All of the needs you are bundling into sex, that lives in you as a certain expectation. When that is met by a sexual experience that is really different, that is really a far gap from that expectation. That’s when frustration kicks in. The monitor in the brain starts going crazy and flagging you, and creating mental discomfort that can then become very physical discomfort. Remember that road rage feeling. That pain and discomfort is a signal to you.

Chris Rose: 26:45 So when we feel this frustration rise, when we are in anger or despair about an unmet goal, that frustration. We have a few choices. One, we can change the goal. Two, we can change the kind of effort or resources we’re investing in that goal. Or three, we can investigate that ratio between the goal and the effort. Right? At one of these points, you can intervene and change your experience.

Chris Rose: 27:13 So back to road rage. Charlotte and I did a lot of traveling in our car at the beginning of our relationship, and I was very susceptible to road rage. It was a learned response in my body. And if we would be stuck in traffic, I would just fly into anger. And Charlotte would say something like, “Well, we’d just be hanging out anyway and now we’re just hanging out in the car. What’s the big deal?”

Chris Rose: 27:37 So she changed the goal. Instead of the goal being get to our destination, the goal was to enjoy one another. So she changed the goal and that changed my mental frame. And now we can get stuck in traffic, and I kind of just turn her and I’m like, “So we’re going to hang out for a while. What do you want to talk about?” Or sometimes when we were stuck in traffic, we would play a little bit. I have some very fond memories of being stuck in traffic and having an orgasm in the road.

Chris Rose: 28:08 So changing the goal. Changing the goal is one major place that we have a lot of control and that can look a lot of different ways. And we’ll talk about that. Two, changing the resources or investment you’re putting in towards the goal. I can’t really think of a road rage example. If you’re stuck in traffic, you can’t really change the resources. Maybe you can get off at a next exit, and that would be changing the goal though.

Charlotte Rose: 28:35 No, I think that would, because your goal is still to get there. It would be changing the routes. You’re changing the effort. Instead of just sitting there, you’re taking a different I think.

Chris Rose: 28:43 Right. So maybe it takes longer mileage-wise, but you’re recalibrating your effort and your resources, and then have a different experience. So even if it takes you longer to get there, you won’t be stuck in traffic. And then the third thing is to intervene with what we call the criterion velocity. A big word for your brain sense of that effort to outcome ratio.

Charlotte Rose: 29:07 So changing the idea that it should take 15 minutes to get from A to B and it’s not, so you’re frustrated. Instead, it’s taking as long as it’s taking because I’m in traffic. And that’s annoying, but that’s okay. I am safe. I am okay.

Chris Rose: 29:20 Right. You’re acknowledging the different reality to your brain, and then saying recalibrate your expectations. We are not getting there any time soon. Chill out. So how does this all relate to sexual frustrations?

Chris Rose: 29:34 So a lot of us need to change our goals. A lot of us need to change our expectations when it comes to sex. We do not live in a culture where you will have a buffet of pussy in front of you all the time. We don’t live in that culture. We don’t live in a world where you can have a harem. Right? A lot of guys write to me and they’re like, “I just wish I could have” … and it’s like, great. Wish for it, fantasize about it. Your goal in this lifetime, in this body, in this sexuality right now is what? Is what? What are our expectations that are realistic and grounded in our current context? Because your expectations can change over the years, and they’ll change with different contexts.

Chris Rose: 30:23 But if you’re experiencing frustration, you need to ask yourself what is your expectation in this moment? And I think this is the strategy that got us through our really long stretch of being without sexual intimacy when I was sick. Because our expectation was not that I was going to be in my sexual prime. We totally recalibrated expectations and we stated new goals. And I looked at Charlotte in the eye and I was like, “I need you to believe that I can get better.” And I think we even had some really tearful, I’m tearing up just talking about it. But I said to you what I want is that when we get through this, that we still love each other, that we don’t have resentment, that you’re not angry at me for this period. I want to get through this, that you still want to be my lover on the other side.

Charlotte Rose: 31:14 Totally. That you still want to have sex with me when we get through the other side, I think was one of the quotes. And it was about, the goal was to stay connected. The goal was to be kind to each other. The goal was to do the long haul and make it as joyful and pleasurable as we could, knowing that sex was not a priority. We were in survival. And that was okay. That is part of what you sometimes get in a life package. Somebody gets sick and-

Chris Rose: 31:43 Sometimes I said to you, “Baby, how are you doing? You’re not getting”-

Charlotte Rose: 31:47 What I’m used to.

Chris Rose: 31:48 Yeah, Charlotte, I mean talk about it. She had a high sexual needs, and she was being tended to for years beautifully by my masterful hands. I disappeared. I was gone, and I would be very fearful in these moments of aren’t you frustrated? Aren’t you freaking out? And she’d be like, “Honey, we’re in this. I know what I’m expecting.”

Charlotte Rose: 32:09 You’re alive. Yeah.

Chris Rose: 32:11 So we recalibrated our sexual expectations. And then what’s really important is we’ve recalibrated them again.

Charlotte Rose: 32:19 That is really important.

Chris Rose: 32:20 We noticed the context was changing and we recalibrated again. And now we have to live into our new expectations.

Charlotte Rose: 32:27 Yeah. A new stage, a new era. Because it is easy to get stuck in what you have been doing because that becomes your normal of course, even when context then change slowly over time. Yeah, this is such an important piece. I think also especially for people after they get through those first early years of having kids, because that is also a time where I think expectations should change around how much sex and how much loud noise you’re going to be making. But then at some point, that does shift and getting used to a new reality, and really putting effort in to shift that.

Chris Rose: 33:03 And reminding each other of the new reality and coming, if you’re in a relationship. Talking about your expectations actively. That in of itself will relieve frustration.

Charlotte Rose: 33:15 Then you can just be honest and tell the truth to each other. It makes you feel so close. You get that feeling of love and belonging when you’re like this is the truth that we’re both in.

Chris Rose: 33:24 And in those expectations, naming the why’s. We’ve just laid out all of these motivations, all of these rewards. And it is really different as a partner to hear we never have sex anymore. I just want to have sex. I need sex, sex, sex. Versus I feel like we’re not connecting anymore. I just really want to have fun with you. I want to be playful.

Charlotte Rose: 33:47 I miss you in this way.

Chris Rose: 33:49 I miss the way your body smells after you come. Making it specific will help that conversation. And we’re going to talk in a moment about what taking the edge off your neediness does. And one of the main things it does is it makes you less desperate. And there’s nothing desirable about desperate.

Chris Rose: 34:13 Okay. So changing expectations, changing the amount of investment and resources you’re putting into those expectations. So this is when you’re chasing a feudal goal, and you’re just getting more and more frustrated. Doing the same thing and expecting different results. So if you’re stuck in this with your partner, and you think you’re doing all the right things, and you’re still not getting sex, and if you’re in this loop, you got to shift up your resources and your investment towards the goal.

Charlotte Rose: 34:42 You may want to think about changing the amount of effort you put into your sex life, and think about if spontaneous sex is not as realistic right now, what kind of effort can we put into creating a different context, creating a different structure for our relationship? Can we get a babysitter? Can we plan time where we’re going to touch, but there isn’t necessarily the goal of sex. We focus on massage. You have different conversations. You create a different context.

Chris Rose: 35:12 And this is especially important if you have a shared goal. If you and your partner are both in the same expectations and you’re not seeming to get there and you’re both frustrated. Yes, we both want an active sex life. We both want each other. Why do we keep missing the boat? It might be that you’re putting in the wrong kind of effort, and you’re trying to bike somewhere, you need a boat to go. Or something like that. So recalibrating the resources you’re investing towards your goal, and that can look a lot of different ways.

Chris Rose: 35:42 And then the third is admitting to your brain out loud that it might take a little more work to get to your goal or that your goal is a little further off, or we need a longer path to get there. This really emerges for me when sexual frustration is coming because one partner is blocked for some reason. One partner is dealing with trauma. One partner is dealing with an illness. If there’s kind of a mismatch of desire. Sometimes, and I hear this all the time. “I love my wife so much, I would never leave her, but I am going crazy.” So then in those situations, we need to think about yes, maybe setting different goals. Maybe putting in different kinds of resources. But also thinking about the long haul that if your goal is ultimately to reconnect with your wife, you might need couples therapy, you might need 10 dates where you don’t have sex, but you do a lot of full body massage. You might need a lot of different steps to get there. But you will be frustrated if you think after that first massage date, she’s going to be ready to have sex, right? We need to have a realistic calibration of what things will take to reach our goals.

Chris Rose: 37:05 So, we have unpacked sexual frustration. I kind of feel like most of us live in some baseline of sexual frustration in a culture that is not reverent and celebratory of our sexuality. That doesn’t allow full range expression of eroticism. That cordons off intimacy and affection into romantic relationships. So what do we do with the sexual frustration? I feel like the first thing is really acknowledging it, and getting specific about the contours of your frustration. Why are you frustrated? Is it the goal? Is it the effort to goal ratio? What parts of sex are you so hungry for that it’s turning into frustration and anger? What are your unmet needs? And then on top of that, what are your unmet desires?

Chris Rose: 37:59 Where else in your life can you start getting those needs fed? And in this, and we’ve talked about this. If you’re really hungry for touch, try to get a professional massage. If you want intensity, you can take up an intense sport or that martial art could be a two for one. You get touch and intensity, and social belonging. It’s a three for one.

Chris Rose: 38:21 It’s these moments in our life we can make choices to feed parts of ourselves that are not being nourished. And I am not saying this is a substitute for sex. I really want to make that clear. When I suggest these things, it is to take the edge off. It’s to fill your bucket a little bit so you don’t feel so empty.

Chris Rose: 38:43 And what that does, when we take actions that then meet our needs that bring us pleasurable rewards, that feels good as an organism. You are taking some agency. You’re taking active steps towards your goals, and your brain will feel better. Your monitor will chill out a little bit.

Chris Rose: 39:06 What it also does socially is it takes the edge off and you become less desperate. And I really want folks to hear this. Whether or not you’re in a relationship or you’re trying to date in order to have a sex partner, however you’re seeking out your sex partner, there is nothing desirable about desperation. Because sexual desperation tells us that anyone will do. There’s nothing special about you. I just want to get my rocks off so much, and you’re the one that’s available right now. Think about the contrast between feeling desperate and feeling calm and confident. When we’re calm and confident, we can make good choices. We have something to offer in return for our ask. And it’s not coming from a totally empty bucket of fill me up.

Charlotte Rose: 39:56 So the other thing you can do to handle your sexual frustration is to turn your attention to yourself, and to create a really enlivening, beautiful masturbation practice. Yes, it is not sex with another being. We get that it is not the same. But you can bring some level of interest, curiosity, novelty, and excitement to yourself. You can make it more than just a release. A quick jerk off, the same way you’ve been doing it for ages. Bring some energy that you would want to bring to another partner, and make it good. See what more you can explore. Use your body as a laboratory and play. And also, don’t hold it as a sexual failure that you are spending your time masturbating. Think of it as a pleasure that you’re offering yourself. You’re filling the bucket, as Chris was saying, in some way. You’re serving yourself. You’re allowing your eroticism to live within the context that you’re in right now. It may change over time. But just let it be a good thing in your life and something that is nourishing. And this piece about not holding it as a sexual failure I think is really important because sometimes that become so pronounced that masturbation just doesn’t feel like it is what you want to be doing.

Chris Rose: 41:18 Well that’s the discharge model that is saying I have to masturbate because I don’t have access to the real thing, and I have to get this thing out of my body. Most of us still masturbate in the discharge model. We are not giving ourselves the opportunity to experience masturbation as sexually fulfilling. Our attitude blocks that possibility from even being there. If in your attitudes you think masturbation is second rate, it’s just a quick release. That’s what it will be. If in your attitude you can think about it as a pleasure lab, as a training ground, as a way you honor your own body, and take care of yourself, and run the excitement, or intensity, or tenderness that you want. Maybe it will be incrementally more satisfying. And again, take the edge off your sexual frustration. Yeah.

Chris Rose: 42:14 We’re talking about taking the edge off. I am not promising that any of these strategies will ameliorate your sexual frustration altogether. What we can learn to do is not suffer from that sexual frustration. We can acknowledge it and be like right, there is something I am wanting and not getting. I can either look at the effort I’m putting into that goal, I can recalibrate that goal, or I can just come into a better relationship with the effort. Right? A better sense of okay, there’s something I want. There are rewards I’m seeking. A lot of us treat sex like something that should just be magically appearing from the sky of pussy. Right? It’s just like rain down upon us. And it’s interesting that some of those perspectives come from straight men. And then I get a lot from straight women of their expectations are so low, that they don’t even know what to hope for. Right?

Chris Rose: 43:15 So where are our expectations set socially has a lot to do with our sexual culture. And the people that report this sense of frustration, and I will dare say even entitlement. There is a sense of being entitled to something that you’re not getting and therefore your worth and value is being questioned. We need to recalibrate socially, our expectations of one another as sexual beings, and come into a better sense of those expectations together and what it takes to get there, right? If we all want to get to the hotel room in the sky, it’s going to take massive social cultural changes in our sex culture. If you want to experience that kind of sexual freedom in your life, what will it take? It’s not just going to appear. Like any other goal, like any other thing you’re working towards, these things don’t just happen. And a lot of the frustration comes from either not having the right goal or not having the right effort towards that goal that will get you there.

Chris Rose: 44:26 So examine that for yourself, and I hope this conversation has been useful to people. I know it won’t take the edge off for you. Maybe it will. I think maybe in unpacking this, some of the suffering could be relieved. But it’s going to take action in your life and body to shift how you’re feeling. So think about what action steps you’ll take, and how to reel ourselves in from this pit of despair, right? If we think about frustration, anger, despair. So many of us are kind of at that pit of despair. How do we walk it back? How do we walk it back, get back into the anger zone, then to the frustration zone, and then on the right side of that where we’re feeling like our goals are being met, our expectations are reasonable. We’re kind of in that flow that we want to be in.

Charlotte Rose: 45:14 We found ways of having a sexually fulfilling life, perhaps just with ourself, which is totally possible. And that not having the sex that you think you should be having makes you a failure. That piece is so important that we can’t connect those too. That not having the sex you want makes you a failure as a man. That is such a thought out there in culture.

Chris Rose: 45:37 Or a woman.

Charlotte Rose: 45:38 Or a woman. Right. But we have to dismantle that, and know that that is not the truth.

Chris Rose: 45:42 Yeah. And a lot of this episode we have been talking about the high libido, the high desire, the sexually frustrated as masculine. That is just a convenience here. We all experience this. So many women I talk to are sexually frustrated too. So many women are sexually frustrated. We’re all sexually frustrated, I think. To one degree or another at one point of our lives or another. So this is not a gendered experience. And that idea of the urgency, and the blue balls, and the nut that needs to be released. That is all old model discharge talk. We all have sexual goals. We all have sexual over awards we’re seeking. We all want to feel touched, we all want to feel loved, we all want to feel belonging. And sex is a vehicle to feel all of those things, but it’s not the only vehicle. It just happens to be a potent one, a power train, a turbo charger. I’m out of metaphors.

Chris Rose: 46:46 We hope this has been useful to you. And remember, the whole libido mini series is at pleasuremechanics.com/libido. So you can listen to the full arc of our conversation about rethinking libido.

Charlotte Rose: 47:01 And when you’re ready to master new erotic skills, come over to pleasuremechanics.com and discover our suite of online courses that can teach you beautiful erotic skills that you can share in the bedroom this evening.

Chris Rose: 47:16 All right, so come on over to pleasuremechanics.com. Check out our online courses. Use the code speaking of sex for 20% off. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 47:25 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 47:26 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 47:27 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 47:30 And an alleviation of your sexual frustration.

Charlotte Rose: 47:33 Yes.

Chris Rose: 47:34 Right cheers.

Desire: The Pleasure Of Wanting

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If there is no such thing as a sex drive, what is that unmistakable and potent force that moves us, motivates us and pulls us towards the pleasures of erotic exchange? It’s not a drive, it’s desire – the powerful force of wanting, the complex motivational system that allows us to imagine into future states of possibility.

Challenging thousands-old understandings of the human “sex drive,” the latest science suggests a new model of erotic desire – rather than a drive to discharge or satiate a need, erotic desire is a complex system of motivations in relationship with the external and social world. It’s all about motivating behavior to pull us towards imagined future states of pleasure and joy. Desire is a work of the imagination, in deep dialogue with our physical bodies and social selves.

It’s time to welcome back the mystery and power of erotic desire – and that starts with getting curious about what is calling you. If you give yourself more space for wanting, what do you want more of? What do you want to experience? What do you want to feel?

Check out the rest of the Rethinking Libido Series here.


Transcript for Podcast Episode #351: Desire ~ The Pleasure Of Wanting

Podcast transcripts are generated with love by humans, and thus may not be 100% accurate. Time stamps are included so you can cross reference or jump to any point in the podcast episode above. THANKS to the members of our Pleasure Pod for helping make transcripts and the rest of our free offerings happen! If you love what we offer, find ways to show your love and dive deeper with us here: SHOW SOME LOVE

Charlotte Rose: 00:00 Welcome to Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:04 I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 And we are the pleasure mechanics.

Chris Rose: 00:06 On this podcast, we have soulful, honest, explicit conversations about every element of sex and sexuality, and the lived experience thereof. We want to know how it feels for you and how we can create a more joyful, pleasurable world for all of us together. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com where you will find our complete podcast archive. There’s over 350 episodes waiting for you, but don’t worry. We have created some easy ways for you to get started. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/free and get started with our free online courses so you can dive in right away. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/free.

Chris Rose: 00:52 All right, we are in the middle of our libido series. We are doing a multi episode deep dive into this question of libido. Because so many people use the language of libido to describe their sexual struggle. So we wanted to really break it apart, invite in our sex therapist friends to help us with this one, and get a grasp on what we mean when we talk about libido struggles. If you are new to this series, check out pleasuremechanics.com/libido where you will find the complete series hosted for you. Also at pleasuremechanics.com/libido are ways for you to participate in this series and share your stories with us.

Chris Rose: 01:38 And we have been getting so many beautiful stories from you all. Thank you. And again, from all different parts of the libido narrative. We’re hearing from couples with wildly different libidos. We’re hearing from people who are in great relationships, but their libido is nowhere to be found. And we’re hearing from so many people with sexual urgency. With this feeling of yeah, I know what I want. How do I get it? What do I do with this feelings of urgency and frustration building in me? So next week we’re going to really talk about sexual frustration and take that on.

Chris Rose: 02:22 But today, I wanted to spend a few moments, a few minutes, the whole episode really talking about we got a lot of questions and pushback on this idea that there is no such thing as sex drive. There is no such thing as a sex drive. And if that is true according to the science, then what is this feeling in me that makes me feel like I’m making so many of my life decisions because of sex? Something is driving me around sex.

Chris Rose: 02:55 The language you use to describe this feeling is rich and wonderful, and really speaks to this idea that something is moving us with sex. We do feel driven, quite literally sometimes across borders. People give up jobs, people change their lives out of passion and desire. Surely we are driven, no?

Chris Rose: 03:21 So we want to talk about why there’s no such thing as a sex drive, what there is instead, and why it’s such a better invitation. Why this reframe will really transform how you think about desire and how we’re going to use this understanding of desire moving forward. All right.

Charlotte Rose: 03:40 So we’re going to talk about why there is no such thing as a sex drive, but we first want to thank Emily Nagoski for translating all of this science into a really manageable, digestible information that is found in her book Come as You Are. It’s a great book. We love it. We love her, is a great thinker. So all of this is mostly from her

Chris Rose: 04:02 From her, and then from her recommended references where we could dig more into the science she cited. She’s so good at pulling up, and by science we’re talking about behavioral science, anthropology, all of the sciences. Physical science, social sciences. Emily Nagoski is so good at pulling out of all of the science what we feel to be true and kind of giving us more clues about our human behavior.

Chris Rose: 04:31 So, sex drive. So by the sciences, drive is a word used to describe something really specific. And that’s an internal state that creates behavior to fulfill our needs. Our needs. And if those needs are not fulfilled, there is predictable, ongoing damage to the system.

Chris Rose: 04:56 So thirst is a derive. You get progressively thirstier. It motivates your behavior, ranging from getting up and getting yourself a drink of water to lapping out of a puddle if necessary. Right? Your thirst will motivate your behavior to satiate that need.

Charlotte Rose: 05:14 Hunger is another drive. When we need to eat, it will take priority over all else if we get to a certain state of hunger. It will increase and increase until we are entirely focused on getting food

Chris Rose: 05:29 And some say that social belonging is also a human need. And that if it is not fulfilled, there is a predictable and increasing state of damage to the organism. So these are our drives, and there has been a misnomer when we talk about sex drive. It was named a drive by a certain field of medicine at a specific time in history, and then it became popularized. But since then, systematically science has debunked the idea of it being a drive.

Chris Rose: 06:01 It was called a drive because it had thousands of years of medical antiquity behind it. And this is when I went to Emily Nagoski’s references, and I discovered this history of medical knowledge going back to Plato, for example. That understood sexuality as something that kind of stirred from within you, built up, and then needed to be discharged. This was our foundational understanding of sexual energy, of desire. It was built up and then discharged through ejaculation, through reproduction of the human baby. And this kind of then was adopted through the sciences over time and through different philosophies. And I’m kind of obsessed with this model. We’re going to be talking more about shifting our attitudes that sex is something to discharge. Because just for a moment relate to that. How much do you relate to your sexuality as something within you that needs to be expelled? Because this is the model that then was adopted and what was discharged was the evil of it, and the sin of it, and the impurity of it. All of this has been mapped into our language, right? And this is often what we think about when we think about sex drive. There is this well within us that gets to an uncomfortable point of tension and needs to be discharged.

Chris Rose: 07:28 Now, what are we motivated by? What are we driven by? What is this thing we all experienced in more or less degrees? What makes us want sex if not a sex drive? It is a less convenient term, but it is an internal motivational system. A complex internal motivational system in dialogue with your social context and physical environment.

Charlotte Rose: 08:00 So that is what your desire for sex emerges out of. That is the landscape internally and externally where desire emerges.

Chris Rose: 08:10 So desire is a motivational system. A motivational system experienced by you as an individual in relation to your external environment and your social context. Motivational system.

Chris Rose: 08:24 So what does that mean? What does that mean? Well, let’s start with what it’s not. A sex drive pushes you towards a behavior to satiate a need. Motivational systems pull you, they draw you. They pull you with wanting and longing towards a perceived future state. You are motivated into action by what this complex, beautiful human body of ours interprets as what will become a positive feeling state. So we are motivated into feeling sexual desire by the call, the longing, the draw, the wanting of specific feelings states, of specific social States, of specific outcomes.

Charlotte Rose: 09:14 Anticipation.

Chris Rose: 09:16 This is the wanting of sex, because this also becomes really important. The wanting of sex is different from the liking of sex. So when we’re talking about sexual desire here, the wanting of sex. That is driven by this complex set of motivations for you as an individual to feel something in the future. It’s very beautiful and poetic, but it’s also very practical, right? So whereas if you’re hungry, depending on how hungry are, you will eat just about anything. It’s not very specific. When you are drawn, this model of being drawn towards pleasure, towards belonging, towards joy, towards kinship, towards what you want. Is so much more poetic and specific to you at this moment, and so much more expansive. Because it’s not just this, “I have this thing in me and I have to get it out, and whatever I like bump into next is good enough.” It’s not this expulsion model. It’s this model that invites us to think about what is pulling us, what is calling us, what are we curious about? What are we longing for? What are we wanting? The wanting.

Chris Rose: 10:38 And this is where desire relates to creativity and all of these other human things. Because when we want something that is not in our current state, right? We want to feel touch, we want to feel an orgasm, we want to see our lover’s eyes as they look at us and I feel connected to them. I want to feel sweaty. What are your wants? That is what draws you into your desire. That’s what gives it specific contours. And equally when you want to see something in the world that does not exist yet, that’s what draws you in to that act of creation, of collaboration. And this is where it all kind of comes together in that eroticism, right? That energy that runs through us and between us as humans that draws us forward into the act of creation, and collaboration, and creating life force energy together.

Chris Rose: 11:36 All right. So if desire is a drawing out, a motivational system, then we can get really specific with what are your specific motivations. And what is tamping those motivations down? What is encouraging, what is exciting, and what is inhibiting your desire? Both within you as a feeling being. You as an individual, human organism. Your brain, your body, your history, your experiences. All interpret this sensory experience of your life, right? So what within you as an individual and within your social context, are influencing your desire? That’s a much broader conversation than what’s wrong with my sex drive.

Charlotte Rose: 12:32 This is so important for us all to hear. The language we hear from people often is that when they’re not experiencing high levels of desire all the time, they feel like quote their sex drive is broken. And this isn’t the case. This isn’t true. And it’s really important for us to know that and register that. We get so focused on this culture, on thinking that is us as an individual. That is broken, doing things wrong, not getting it right. But what the science says about desire is that all of us basically are responsive to our context. That our desire emerges from a combination of internal and external factors. Meaning that there is so much at play that creates our experience of desire in the world.

Chris Rose: 13:26 Right. And I want to pause for a moment because where this gets trippy, right? We can talk conveniently about this individual experience within a social context. But if you think of a fish in water, there’s the biology of that fish, the system of that fish, and then there’s the water, and we can distinguish. But of course, the health of that water impacts the health of the fish. So when we’re talking about your individual relationship with desire, your experience of desire, big factors on the individual level are things like stress, sleep, nourishment. Which are also social factors, right? If you’re working two jobs and are exhausted, where is the space for desire? But you’re working two jobs and are exhausted because of social factors, right? So let’s just acknowledge that. And you can see as we start pulling apart, we can both start getting really specific with all these factors, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

Chris Rose: 14:24 So part of our goal here, kind of an operationalizing desire over this series and these conversations, is to help you identify the pieces of this that you have the most control and agency, and to access to. And to acknowledge with love and tenderness the things that you do not have access to, the things you cannot control at this time. Or the things that we can only control together.

Chris Rose: 14:52 So I just want to say that because that fish might be feeling really sick. But if that fish is swimming in poisoned water, of course the fish is sick. I know all the fish in that bowl are sick. So we’re going to work on the fish, we’re going to work on looking around the water, but we’re also going to work on the health of that water overall so all the fish get a little better, little swimmers.

Charlotte Rose: 15:14 And we see clearly in that situation that it is not the fish’s fault. There is nothing wrong with them. They are not doing anything wrong. And that piece I think is so important for us all to install.

Chris Rose: 15:30 I’m just thinking about sad little fish swimming around. Okay. So this is why this is so important. Is because on this podcast in all of this work as a community, yes, we are going to work on becoming stronger swimmers. We’re going to work on expanding our erotic capacity, expanding our relational capacity. Doing sex better, building all of these skills that give us access to more pleasure in our bodies, to more connection with each other. And, why we always go to the social on this podcast is because sexuality is a deeply socially felt experience. So let’s look at some of that context now. I want to talk about this culture of desire idea. Because as soon as you realize that your experience of desire is so in relation to your external circumstances, you start seeing places you can intervene. You start seeing actions you can take within that context and you’re like, “I can put myself in a different fishbowl.” Right now I have the image of two fishbowls side by side and the one smart fish realizes there’s a healthier fish bowl, and he can do a belly flop up and out.

Charlotte Rose: 16:44 Take quite a bit of action to get there.

Chris Rose: 16:46 Totally, I mean we’ve all seen finding Nemo. Fish are amazing. So we’re going to all do a belly flop up and out into a healthier fish bowl. Wow. I do not expect that metaphor today. Okay, so the culture of desire.

Chris Rose: 17:00 When we talk about culture, the smallest culture you are in … so you have your individual ecosystem, your relationship to yourself, all of your thoughts, your attitudes, your body, all of that. We’re setting that all into this cultural context.

Chris Rose: 17:15 The first culture you’re born into again that you can’t control is your family. Your natal family, your situation. So your family is your first culture. And then as you build your own family later in life.

Charlotte Rose: 17:31 For those that do.

Chris Rose: 17:32 Well, we all have different families, right? So family is a culture and then community is a culture. Your neighborhood, your work community, the people you interact with. We’re kind of doing a ever expanding circles of community here. So individual, family, community and friendships, extended family. And then region, regional cultures and subcultures within regions, nation states, human culture of the globe. Within this particular geopolitical moment, right? That is the culture we’re talking about to the pulse of this globe itself. All of that context affects your desire.

Chris Rose: 18:18 And let’s just start, I was going to start at the micro, but let’s start at the macro. I think we’re all feeling this more than ever right now with the speed of information and awareness about this globe. Global events can impact your desire. How many emails did we get after the last election cycle that’s like where did my libido go? And that partly global events affect your desire because you become aware of them. They’re in your awareness system through the culture of your media consumption and your community.

Chris Rose: 18:55 So the global context of your sexuality, and we’re feeling that more and more. The cultural context, the culture you are born into. What it says bodies are meant to do, what different bodies have access and privileges to, how your body was treated within that. We can see how that has an impact on your experience of desire. Both your position being born into a culture, but then also your lived experience and that accumulated experience of pleasure, and reward, and punishment, and denial, and access to pleasure, and denial to pleasure, and what you’re told your value is and what you’re told your worth is. All of that accumulated experience in our bodies. That’s a big variable. That’s a big variable. Some of it we have control over, some of it we don’t. Again, dialing in the community, the culture that we live in day to day. Does that support the emergence of your desire? Does it inspire you? Do you feel erotically relevant in your community? Does your sexuality have a relevance in your day to day life, or do you live your day to day life as a very desexualized being with no erotic turn on, with no erotic relevance, and then you expect it to just show up on Friday night?

Chris Rose: 20:21 From there, your individual media consumption, the subcultures you’re a part of, the media, the books, the TV you watch, all of that has a deep impact on what is available for you to respond to. What will wake up and stir your desire. What will inspire you, what will call to you. And then again, the community of our home, our family. What are all of the factors there?

Chris Rose: 20:45 That is all of what mean when we talk about context. You wake up in this world in a whole series of different cultural contexts that all have influence over your experience of desire.

Chris Rose: 21:02 So when I get these emails that are like, “I don’t know why I’m not feeling sexual desire. I must be broken. What’s wrong with my libido? Fix my libido.” And then they lay out their life circumstances, we start to think what in those life circumstance makes sense for you to want sex right now? If you want to want sex more, how do we shift your life context so it would make more sense for desire to emerge?

Chris Rose: 21:31 So this is where we find the agency. It’s like our desire is not a fixed thing. It is not a gauge within us that I am a high libido person or a low libido person. And that means something about me. Desire is an active engagement through our bodies with the entire world.

Chris Rose: 21:51 One quick example of this where I become so aware of all of these different factors is when we go visit my family in Portland, Oregon. So when we go visit my family in Portland, Oregon, the town is crawling with queer, specifically queer women. And all of a sudden, my desire and sexuality wake up in the most an expected places because in the grocery store, there’s all these dikes flirting with me. And I’m sexually relevant to the community there.

Chris Rose: 22:23 And the baristas and the ice cream scoopers are loving our family and giving us winks and nods and free scoops, and it’s like our sexuality is irrelevant in the social community. So it wakes up, it is excited, is given gas, right? It is accelerated through that social context.

Chris Rose: 22:43 But then when I go to my mother’s house for example, everything about that context is the most quashing, inhibiting experience that even when Charlotte and I were there alone, and we were staying in my mom’s house and we had Portland all to ourselves, we couldn’t really get frisky and go to the strip clubs and make it an erotic vacation. Because we were staying at my mom’s house and it was such an inhibitor for me for so many reasons.

Chris Rose: 23:13 So this juxtaposition, right? What are all of the factors at play that will excite you or inhibit you? That will give fuel to your desire or quash it for now. And to remember that is an ongoing dynamic process. Everyday changing, always renewing, always ready for your active engagement in that process. Beautifully said. So it’s just exciting to think about what the pieces that you can have agency over. Where can you make small changes, big changes, dramatic changes, or micro changes that can really make a difference to you? If you know yourself, you know your relationship.

Charlotte Rose: 24:02 It’s a really powerful question. And if this all feels overwhelming, that is completely understandable. It’s just astounding what impacts and influences our sexuality, and what we want to do about that.

Chris Rose: 24:15 So again, if we can think about desire as a motivational system towards positive feeling states, then we can think about what motivates us and what those states might be. And then we can think about what is encouraging that desire and what is inhibiting. What is giving gas to it and what is putting the brakes on it. Emily Nagoski talks about the dual model control of arousal. So what puts gas and brakes on what feels good. And let’s start talking about the dual model control of desire. What puts the gas in brakes on what you desire, on your experience of desire, on what you are allowed to want. On what you are allowed to want.

Chris Rose: 25:04 Because these motivations, when we talk about the motivations, that sounds vague. Here are some motivations for wanting. I want sex because I want to feel loved and connected to another human being.

Charlotte Rose: 25:18 I want sex because I want to feel the pleasure of orgasms.

Chris Rose: 25:23 I want sex because I want to feel touched. I want my entire body touched, naked. All of it.

Charlotte Rose: 25:33 I want sex because I want to feel connected. I want to eye gaze, I want to feel loved, and intimate, and hell.

Chris Rose: 25:41 I want sex because I want to release some tension in my body and I want to get sweaty, and grunt, and feel messy, and just let it all out there and not hold back and be polite any more. This is fun. We could keep going. So add in your own. Why do you want the sex you want? Because we don’t all just want this vague idea of sex. You want a specific kind of sex. And we didn’t even talk about, so let’s do another round. I want sex to feel valued and that someone cares about me, and that someone will take care of me.

Charlotte Rose: 26:18 I want sex because I want to feel desired.

Chris Rose: 26:20 I want sex because I want to feel powerful, and I want to feel social status, and I want to demonstrate my social status to others. I want sex because I want to feel chosen and I want to feel special. What is motivating the kind of sex you want to have?

Chris Rose: 26:40 When we get honest about that, and I think we’ve talked about this in kind of the first episode. We’re thinking libido, when we get honest about what we want, there are more ways to get what we want. Those options are expanded.

Charlotte Rose: 26:53 So you’re saying when you get specific about the experience that you crave and long for, then you can find multiple ways, sex being one of them, but also other ways to try and seek out and create those experiences?

Chris Rose: 27:07 Yeah, and in this there’s a recognition that sex is very potent. So we’re looking at our motivations. We’re getting really honest about that. What is pulling us towards wanting sex? What is in that heady mix. And in the literature, they nod to the idea that the combination of the motivations is often headier than anyone individually. Which is why these packaged deals of someone choosing you, and then looking at you, and they love you, and they desire, and they want your body and you’re good enough and you’re chosen. And then you get touched and then you get an orgasm, and then you get that afterglow, and then you get pancakes. That is a wonderful mix of motivations all wrapped up into a desire to be taken home on a Saturday night, or a desire for your partner to give you the kind of attention that he used to give you.

Chris Rose: 28:02 What are your desires, what are they motivated by? And only then can we look at agency within this system, agency within yourself as an individual. And then agency to affect your context. To start playing with some of these gas and brakes pedals and looking at what will make watershed differences. Where are the gas and brake pedals that are constricting your desire so intensely? You’re barely feeling it anymore. How do we release some pressure there? How do we amp up gas in certain areas? This is the work of sexual agency. And it’s complicated, and it can be overwhelming. But we’re here for you.

Charlotte Rose: 28:46 So one of the questions I want to leave you with is what have you given yourself permission to want? What have you let yourself desire? And can you give yourself a little bit more room around that?

Chris Rose: 29:00 Are you talking about sexually in life? All of it?

Charlotte Rose: 29:04 I think it’s great to do all of it. To look in life because I feel like it’s an easier warm up. There’s more permission around that, and then move into the sexual realm. Because so many of us have constrained what we see as possible for ourselves. So give yourself permission to want. And as you walk around in the world, notice what else do you want more of. What sensual inputs are delighting you right now? Are you craving more of, are you interested in? And let yourself be guided. Let your curiosity be a part of your sensuality and sexuality.

Chris Rose: 29:43 But we need to, this is the anticapitalist sidebar. When we’re talking about wanting to want, we’re not talking about things and objects, and consumables. Because that is where all of this has been trained to focus. So when Charlotte says, “What do you want?” All of us could come up with a list of objects on our Amazon wishlist. This is not that question. It’s what do you want to feel? What do you want to experience? What do you want to create? What do you want to collaborate on? What do you want to feel and experience? Are the most important questions here. And even better if you can answer things that are not contingent upon spending a dollar. I want to feel artistically alive. I want to feel intellectually challenged. I want to feel deeply engaged. I want to feel more connected to nature. I want to get back into my love of art and color. What are the wants that have nothing to do with buying anything? Those are the erotic wants. Those are those sparks of life that are yours specifically.

Chris Rose: 30:52 And this is all a process of getting all of the breaks out of the way, all of the inhibitions. And we’re going to do another episode because I’ve been really geeking out on this idea of trained inhibitions. Trained inhibitions. If we get our inhibitions out of the way, give our desire a little more space. Feel your wanting. And we’re going to get really specific with that as the experience of desire. It is not a poison in you that needs to be discharged. It is not a pressure valve within you that’s going to because you to explode. These are old models, they are not accurate. And we are going to shift into a model of desire that is about active engagement with the world through and with your body, and you specifically. Specifically your desire. How do we activate that?

Charlotte Rose: 31:49 I just want a name for some people they may have the experience that those first things you were talking about, they might feel like they’re a pressure cooker that are going to explode. And partly, that’s because we have named that experienced that way over, and over, and over again in culture. So you may relate to that. And as we begin to shift our language and offer you other models, be curious and see if what we’re talking about does match what you feel, and if you can rename the experience.

Chris Rose: 32:17 And that’s what we’re going to do next week. We are going to tackle sexual frustration and reframe it. So if you have experiences of sexual frustration, if you are hearing all of this and you’re like, “Those ladies don’t get it. They don’t get what it feels to have like a rock hard penis that wants to fuck something.” First of all, I want to say I do get it. I do get it, because our bodies actually have the same amount of erectile tissue. But I do get it also because I have been in deep erotic engagement with thousands of men over the decades, and I have listened to you, and I understand what you’re feeling. And I want to understand more.

Chris Rose: 32:55 When you offer me your words and your experience, and this is true for all of your beautiful bodies that are in community with us and in dialogue with us. I just want to put out there that I am actively, deeply engaged with ongoing communities of men about their sexual experience. And I want to hear more. I want to hear more from all of you. But specifically for next week, I want to hear his stories of sexual frustration. Of feeling pent up, of feeling ready to explode. And tell me specifically what that felt like, and we will address it next week. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/libido, where you will find this complete libido series hosted for you. If all of this is just feeling really exciting, and overwhelming, and you’re ready to deeply engage with this topic. Right now if you’re listening to this podcast in September, 2019, our friend Vanessa Marin, the fabulous sex therapist, is about to throw open the doors on her wonderful course about libido and walking you through all of this overwhelm with friendly wisdom and a guided tour of what’s going on in your libido.

Chris Rose: 34:11 So check out the show notes page for that resource, other resources from our trusted friends. And again, this entire series is all together at pleasuremechanics.com/libido. All of the resources and episodes are there for you. We are so grateful for all of you for being part of our community. Thank you so much to those of you who support our work. And if you love this show and want to support the work we are doing in this world, come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/love and show us some love. All right, we will be back next week to talk about sexual frustration. I’m already excited about that. Contribute at pleasuremechanics.com/libido. All right, I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 34:55 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 34:56 We are the pleasure mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 34:57 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

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