Pleasure Mechanics

The Origin Of Erotic Massage : Joseph Kramer Interview Part 1

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Meet our great erotic mentor, Joseph Kramer, Ph.D. and hear the story of how a gay boy born into a Catholic family followed his path to become an erotic pioneer and visionary.

Joseph Kramer, Ph.D.

In this intimate interview between student and mentor, Joseph Kramer shares his life story about discovering masturbation as a devout Catholic boy, leaving the Jesuits to celebrate being a gay man in New York City, and how he discovered the power of massage and breath. He generously shares the stories of the explorations and education that he gathered together as he developed the formal Erotic Massage modality that has spread around the world through his vast network of students, his educational videos and the professions he has pioneered. Check out his work and educate your heart and hands here!google.comOrgasmicYoga.com

Click here for Part 2 of the Joseph Kramer interview

Joseph Kramer has trained the world in the art of erotic touch, erotic breathwork and the profound presence that unlocks extraordinary erotic states. He is not satisfied with “paltry sex” and insists upon the exploration of the far reaches of what is erotically possible.

Joseph Kramer is a primary mentor of both the Pleasure Mechanics – in fact Chris and Charlotte met during a Sexological Bodywork training, and both are trained in the Body Electric lineage.

Joseph Kramer is founder of the Body Electric School, which still runs under new leadership and the New School of Erotic Touch. He has been teaching about erotic embodiment, somatic sex education and pleasure activism for over 40 years.

Currently, he shares his erotic wisdom at OrgasmicYoga.com and guides the global development of the Sexological Bodywork profession.

  • Joseph Kramer & Annie Sprinkle
  • Joseph Kramer & Annie Sprinkle
  • Annie Sprinkle, Joseph Kramer & Barbara Carrellas
  • Joseph Kramer, photographed by
    Rick McGinnis for the Village Voice, 1992
  • Joseph Kramer, photographed by
    Rick McGinnis for the Village Voice, 1992

Image credits: Thanks to Joseph Kramer and Annie Sprinkle for sharing personal photos. Thanks also to Rick McGinnis for images shot for the Village Voice in 1992.

Transcript of Podcast Episode The Origin Of Erotic Massage : Joseph Kramer Interview Part 1

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 from Pleasuremechanics.com. And on this podcast, we have soulful, explicit conversations about every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com where you will find our complete podcast archive. And while you are there, go to pleasuremechanics.com/free to sign up for our free online course, The Erotic Essentials. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/free and you will find our free course to get started.

Chris Rose: 00:39 I’m so excited for today’s episode because I have the distinct pleasure of introducing you to my great erotic mentor, [Joseph Kramer 00:00:48] Joseph Kramer is an erotic pioneer and visionary. He was born a gay boy in the 1950s to a devoutly Catholic family. Now, he’s 72 years old, living in Oakland, California, and his lifetime has been one of erotic service to the world.

Chris Rose: 01:12 He left his life as a Jesuit priest after discovering the reverent power of touch when he got his first massage. Joe is going to tell us his story of discovering the power of massage and breathwork together as he took Psilocybin mushrooms and shared blowjobs with his friends, and how this all crystallized into the practice of erotic massage, the combination of full-body massage, erotic touch, conscious breathwork and exquisite presence that creates one of the most exquisite, erotic experiences that I’ve ever known.

Chris Rose: 01:59 Joe went on to teach erotic massage all around the world in workshops, in professional trainings. He codified the category of erotic massage. And in this interview, he’s going to tell that story of how a little gay boy from a Catholic family, went on to become a global leader of sex wisdom.

Chris Rose: 02:26 This interview is so deeply personal to me because Joseph Kramer initiated me into my life of erotic service. I had been a sex educator before I met Joe, but when [Annie Sprinkle 00:02:40] introduced me to Joseph Kramer, that was my initiation into a life of erotic service. Into a life guiding others into what is possible in these human bodies of ours. What is possible, not only in terms of pleasure and erotic trance, and erotic ecstasy, and the amount of pleasure we can give one another, that’s part of what Joe taught me. But Joe also initiated me into these practices that teach us how big we can love. How much we can show up for one another.

Chris Rose: 03:17 Charlotte and I met in a training that Joe and I were teaching together, one of the first Sexological Bodywork trainings in San Francisco. So, Charlotte and I met very much through this work, so my love story with Charlotte and my family would also not have been possible if I was not working side-by-side with Joe. And while my life has been touched so deeply by Joe’s, and therefore your life, if you’re a listener of this podcast, that is just one of the ripple effects of his work, because he has trained tens of thousands of students. He has initiated so many people into a life of erotic curiosity and erotic service.

Chris Rose: 04:05 And from working with Joe, I know he doesn’t love to give interviews, he doesn’t do it often. So, I was really honored when he agreed to a long-form two-hour interview with me. And rather than start at the end, rather than start with all of his global accomplishments, and his schools, and the professions he has founded, and to talk about the global reach of his erotic knowledge, I wanted to start at the beginning. I wanted to hear his life story as it unfolded and share that with you as a story of an erotic pioneer, who’s curiosity and commitment to love and to pleasure created a life of erotic service to the world.

Chris Rose: 04:55 So, we are going to start at the beginning as he is born a little gay boy into a devoutly Catholic family and we are going to tell his story together. Gather round and join me for part one of my interview with Joseph Kramer, PhD. Cheers.

Chris Rose: 05:18 Hi, Joe.

Joseph Kramer: 05:20 Hello, Chris Rose.

Chris Rose: 05:23 So, Joseph Kramer, you are born a gay boy in a Catholic family in St. Louis.

Joseph Kramer: 05:31 Exactly.

Chris Rose: 05:31 Can you take us to that moment of your birth? How did the Catholic context of your childhood shape you from the beginning?

Joseph Kramer: 05:42 I don’t have a lot of memories about very early childhood. I have a couple I’ll mention. My mother and father were rabid Catholics. Not in the sense today of a rigid and political-type sense, but in a spiritual sense. So, they went to mass every single day. Every single day they went to church. There were times of travel, and obviously, they couldn’t, but this was part of it.

Joseph Kramer: 06:14 Part of my upbringing was family prayers, family rosary. Of course, prayers before meals and going to Catholic schools. The question came up, actually, and this was a question that was around in the 50s, can we talk to the Protestant kids in the neighborhood. Can we associate with them? There was an unspoken arrogance like we were saved and the protestants aren’t, the other people aren’t. But my parents didn’t say we couldn’t talk to the Protestant kids.

Joseph Kramer: 06:47 So, it was a really closed system. The values, especially the religion and spirituality. And it was definitely bifurcated. Pleasure was almost a bad thing. It was un-embodied. Our time on this earth, right from the time I was five and six years old, our time on this earth was just testing us for the real thing, which was heaven. We were watched at all time. God was watching at all time.

Joseph Kramer: 07:21 And I bought into this. I knew nothing else. How wonderful, God is taking care of us. I found the life of Jesus, especially his messages, the seminar on the mount, et cetera, wonderful. I didn’t quite understand the death and resurrection part of it. I don’t know if anybody totally understands that. But I bought into this. I didn’t even buy into it, it was all that I knew. It’s what I drank. It was like a fish in water.

Joseph Kramer: 07:54 I didn’t understand at the beginning, the anti-body and anti-sex. But I remember at about age three, and this is my earliest memory. I was taking an afternoon nap, I was laying face down, I had my hands in my underwear, and I was about three years old, and my mother said, don’t touch yourself there, God doesn’t like if you touch yourself there. And this was one of the first messages that I got directly to me about something I was doing that God didn’t like. And it was touching my own genitals.

Joseph Kramer: 08:38 There was no reflection, it was a reaction that stayed with me to the present. I remembered that. So, the genitals became this special place that God cared about. I could touch my elbow, or my feet, or my head, and God didn’t care. But if I touched my genitals, it was kind of like the story of the garden of Eden. You have the whole garden, but this one tree, you cannot eat the fruit of that tree. And of course, like Eve, as I grew a little older, and I’m not talking puberty, I think five or six, I started touching myself there because this is the taboo place.

Joseph Kramer: 09:19 I don’t know where this came from in me, but I learned to masturbate very early. And I learned to rub myself and it felt good. I had orgasms, and I remember them. And later, when I’ve studied this, perhaps 10% of kids masturbate very early on and have orgasmic experiences. Boys and girls and everybody around that and in between that.

Chris Rose: 09:50 Was that pleasure burdened by a sense of shame already?

Joseph Kramer: 09:53 No. Well, except that one thing from my mother. And I didn’t quite hook it together. I was masturbating. But in first grade or second grade comes the idea of confession in the Catholic school. And then the priest brings up one of the things that you might want to confess, and he’s telling these six and seven-year-olds, is if you touch yourself in an impure way, that was the terminology, and I was thinking, uh oh, that’s the name for it. I’m touching myself in an impure way.

Joseph Kramer: 10:38 But I didn’t quite get the concept of hell and mortal sin. It didn’t hook up until a little later. About puberty, again, the same priest and others said this is to test yourself here, will take you to hell forever and ever. And you’re put here by God out of love to do this experiment. And by touching yourself, you could go to hell. If you die without going to confession, you go to hell. So, I believed this.

Joseph Kramer: 11:15 That started maybe at 12, that every time I touched myself, I knew I had to go to confession. I knew I couldn’t go to communion. This is very interesting, because this is what I’m exploring right now. I’m realizing with all the emphasis on trauma, that there’s a large swath, if that’s the right word, of the culture that has had not specific moments of trauma, but in their upbringing, it might be culturally, for me it was spiritual, and I think a lot of people grew up with this exact belief system.

Joseph Kramer: 11:49 When I went to high school, to jump ahead of it, I went to a Catholic Jesuit high school, they had mass three days a week and they had confessions before class, confession during mass, confessions during break. And I would say, out of 800 boys, a couple hundred, maybe more than that, went to confession every day. There was just this unspoken thing of why you’re going to confession.

Joseph Kramer: 12:20 As long as we’re here, what happened after masturbation, my penis, this arousal, this pleasure, was, the prase early-on, was the crack in the cosmic egg. I was in this system, and this was the thing, I didn’t know it, but this was the thing that was going to be the crack to get me out of this closed system.

Joseph Kramer: 12:46 I would masturbate, and then I would go into terror. And I mean, actual terror. That if I died. And I would lay and I would think flames all over my body and that I was forever and ever. I can’t imagine that this was less worse than some of the other trauma terrors that people go through. And yet, this was thousands of times, because I masturbated a lot.

Joseph Kramer: 13:16 And every time, I had to go to confession, had the intention that you weren’t going to do this again. That was part of it. So, there was this system that placed huge emphasis on sexual arousal and pleasure and the body, and avoiding it. And the irony is, that when I broke out of this, this was what was important to me, still. And so, my work became about pleasure, and body, and an emphasis on starting with masturbation and penis.

Joseph Kramer: 13:50 I think it’s still there, and no wonder there’s so much drinking among, the Irish, they said, but among Catholics. It’s kind of a numbing out of body. It’s a physical way of being in alignment with the religious beliefs. And I haven’t seen a lot of speaking to this trauma that people carry. And I know other religious backgrounds, other ethnic backgrounds have similar suffocating beliefs.

Joseph Kramer: 14:24 When I was going to sex school, one man, a Mormon bishop came and got his PHD at the same time as I did. And he did his PHD on masturbation in the Mormon church. And there, there’s no confession, so, once you masturbate, you’re impure. And what his dissertation was, was suicide among boys because of this. And it goes on. They still teach this. And homosexuality and other body-based things that are not heterosexual marriage.

Joseph Kramer: 15:04 So, anyway, that was my experience as a kid. But the masturbation was an entrance, and why I kept going back to it, it was an entrance into some other way of feeling. There was an aliveness that I was in touch with. And that is still a major theme. That’s why I do what I do. Get in touch with the aliveness within. Our own aliveness. This is who we are, alive. We can call it embodiment today, but in those days, that was my embodiment practice, although in the system I was in, it was a horrible thing. Luckily hormones or whatever, I kept at it.

Chris Rose: 15:49 Let’s tell that story a little bit. So, you didn’t run fleeing as soon as you turned 18. Instead, you actually went deeper into your faith and joined the Jesuits. And as much as we can talk about the Catholic body shame and the sexual shame and that as a burden you carried from your faith, you also brought some gifts from your faith. Your love of teaching, your knowledge of pedagogy.

Chris Rose: 16:17 So, you were in the Jesuit community for several years. And then one of your theology teachers went to Esalen and trained in massage and came home and offered massage. He was newly indoctrinated and wanted to practice. Can you take us to that moment as a theology student and receiving your first massage, and how what you call the crack in the egg split right open.

Joseph Kramer: 16:46 I was still in this closed system, I would say. And what happened in late puberty, late high school, is I understood I was attracted to other boys and not girls. And in those days, I didn’t see homosexuality mentioned anywhere, except in prisons. And I remember being a 13 and 14-year-old saying is there some way I could commit a crime and get in prison, so I could be with people who would do with I do. Except I was the best little boy. I didn’t want to commit [inaudible 00:17:23].

Joseph Kramer: 17:23 So, I knew this was sinful, and I go, there’s no future for me as a person, except what the church offers, the milieu I was in was some status and to be of service by being a priest. So, this was a logical choice. I went to a Jesuit high school. There were 30 different teachers that I respected and revered. And they all seemingly had no sex, no masturbation, and this was the goal, the ideal. And they were doing it well and relating, and teaching, and being of service. My high school years were a great time.

Joseph Kramer: 18:06 So, at the end of high school, I go, yeah, this is the path that I’d like to do. I’d like to follow. I didn’t think, I don’t have any other options, but I wasn’t thinking other options. But in terms of this huge thing about sin, that was the only option that I had. So, I joined the Jesuits and was in the Jesuits 10 years.

Joseph Kramer: 18:28 I was studying theology eight years into the Jesuits in Berkeley. Luckily, I somehow got to Berkeley to study.

Chris Rose: 18:37 Was that a deliberate choice? Did you know there were gay people there and you went?

Joseph Kramer: 18:43 No. But, there’s certain things that are emblazoned on my mind, and I remember watching television in 1963 and seeing the free speech movement starting in Berkeley campus. And there were riots and Reagan was the governor. And I remember watching this, but it was all over free speech. I felt muzzled, of course, at the time. I was in high school. But I felt this aliveness. I couldn’t speak, there were no words. So, I went into the Jesuits.

Joseph Kramer: 19:20 And again, this was blissful because it was a celibate, non-masturbatory place, but it was with men who were idealistic boys, 17, 18, 19-year-olds. It was wonderful to be in that comradery and seemingly the part that was evil in me was being stamped down in a sense, or quieted.

Joseph Kramer: 19:48 I went through this and it was an education of the mind, it was an education of thinking. Jesuits are the thinkers and the teachers of the church and they run institutions, they run universities, and colleges, and have for the last 400 years. So, I thought this was a wonderful path, and it was a path of service. This is really one of the big things I took from Jesus, to be of service. And even from my parents, as Christians, that was big for them, was service. My father, especially.

Joseph Kramer: 20:30 So, to be a Jesuit. And I was in Berkeley, and I was studying theology. And theology is like mathematics. Like other things, it has almost no touch with reality, with the reality of the body. And yet, I was in California, Berkeley in the early 70s. There was just amazing things happening, bodily, but I didn’t connect with them for a few years. But I did intersect with them once, and you started the story.

Joseph Kramer: 21:03 A priest, who was my academic advisor went to Esalen and took a weekend workshop and came back. And I remember, there were maybe 200, 150 Jesuits who were in Berkeley in smaller groups, but we ate in a big dining room. And I remember sitting at a table with about six other young Jesuits, and this priest came back and said, I had a wonderful weekend. I went and studied Esalen massage down in Big Sur. And I need to practice. If any of you would like a massage, let me know.

Joseph Kramer: 21:40 There was this panic in all the people around me, and I looked. There was a thing in me that says yes. Right away, I said, yes, I would like that. And he said, well you need a massage table, it needs to be on a massage table. I remember taking the door off my closet in my room and tying it to my desk and putting blankets over it and all this. And I was really nervous because I was gonna be naked, because I was going to be touched. And I thought, but he’s a priest. Even my parents would be okay with this.

Joseph Kramer: 22:22 So, anyway, I got a massage, and it was a two-hour massage and he was meticulous. My attention, there was no distractions. My attention was at the point of contact for two hours. And I was feeling my body in ways that I never, ever felt before. There was not a fear that all of a sudden something was going to happen sexually, or that I get aroused, or all this, although I was naked. It was just feeling what was happening.

Joseph Kramer: 22:57 He went through my body up my face, my head, all the way down. Not my genitals, not my anal area. But everywhere else. And I do remember vividly the webbing in my feet and in my hands when he was doing this, especially in my feet. I knew I had webbing between my toes, but it was so delicious, I was so awake. He said, thank you and gave me this and left. And I realized that that was the most important two hours of education that I’d had in my whole life. I was introduced to my body.

Joseph Kramer: 23:40 And I want to say I had one other practice other than masturbation. And that was at age 14, I was in the car with my family a couple miles from my home, we were jogging home, and I got in an argument with my father. We were at loggerheads. He was at a stoplight and I just opened the door and got out and then he drove off. And I go, I’m two miles from home, how am I going to get home? And so, remembered I’d read about this senator from Wisconsin, Proxmire, I think. Someone who jogged. And I went that’s interesting. Nobody jogged in these days. I thought, I’ll try jogging. I was 14 or 13.

Joseph Kramer: 24:31 And so, I started doing running. And I ran two miles home. When I got home I was ecstatic. I started out like this, I just had this thing with my father, and I got out two miles from my home. I ran two miles. So, the next day, I went out and ran around the blocks, and the next day. When I was in Freshman year of high school, I joined the cross country team. And I was terrible, because I didn’t run fast, but I ran long distances for that ectasy. So, I found that as a practice. So I found masturbation and running were my two practices.

Joseph Kramer: 25:09 Now when this happened, this massage, there was a third entry, a third practice into my body. By the way, when I had that massage, I had been running for years every day, so I ran between five and 10 miles a day to feel. It was to feel aliveness, and I didn’t listen to anything. It was being with my body, like masturbation was being with my body or like the massage was.

Joseph Kramer: 25:41 Anyway, after the massage, I go, I want more massages. I was a Jesuit, I didn’t have any money. And I found, I don’t know how I can get money to get massages, but I had thought, I need more massage.

Chris Rose: 26:01 What did you do?

Joseph Kramer: 26:02 After that, I didn’t recognize that that was the beginning, but that was the beginning of the Jesuits are not a place for me. I need a place where I can get massage. Where I can get into a full-body feeling. I knew about my penis feeling. I knew the general feeling of running. But this was a sensuality of certain tissues that I’d never accessed.

Chris Rose: 26:25 Did you change the way you masturbated after that massage?

Joseph Kramer: 26:28 So, there were times in my Jesuit years when I masturbated, but I was still not a practice. It was a sin, still, and I believed that. In fact, I remember the first time I masturbated as a Jesuit. It was three years into the Jesuits, and I was in Denver. I went out with this friend of mine, who’s a priest now, he’s a seminarian. He says, do you want to smoke grass. We smoked grass and I said, I don’t feel anything. Then went back to my room, I just laid down, and all of a sudden I was touching myself and I couldn’t stop. It was so amazing.

Joseph Kramer: 27:10 So, the first time I smoked grass was the first time I masturbated. I was certainly guilty, but the grass was an access into the aliveness, into the feelings. The gift of being embodied in our body. And theologically, I was saying this is what incarnation is. The idea of God becomes man. And so the flesh takes on this role. And I go yes, it’s a celebration of my flesh.

Joseph Kramer: 27:38 I knew after that massage from my academic director. And he was my academic director and he gave me information and experience that got me out of the academics. And I left the Jesuits within a year.

Chris Rose: 27:54 And you moved to new york city.

Joseph Kramer: 27:56 I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn’t want to go back to St. Louis and the milieu I grew up in, so I moved to New York City, yes. And I also knew I was gay.

Joseph Kramer: 28:13 It’s a long story, but the short part of it is, after that waking up, I was much more open. And I told the Jesuits that I was gay. I was in Berkeley. There were people who were out gay. And the Jesuits were freaked out. The head of the school said no one’s ever come in here and told me that. I go, like one-third or one-half of these people are gay, no one’s ever told you that?

Joseph Kramer: 28:42 So, the Jesuits sent me to Toronto, and in Toronto, my spiritual advisor said, you know what, they’re not going to ordain you as a priest. They think you’re too much of a liability just saying you’re gay. They don’t want that out. They don’t want anybody as a Jesuit is gay. And he says why don’t you take a leave of absence, which was a wonderful thing. He was really a wonderful man. That took me to New York City.

Joseph Kramer: 29:11 And I knew I was gay, so I thought, I’m going to meet gay people. I started by going to gay Catholic masses with Dignity. And it was a wonderful, vibrant group of men and women, who so many of them had histories just like me. They were going to mass still in their 20s and 30s and 40s because this was important to them, but they were also gay and sexual. So, that was my first couple of years.

Joseph Kramer: 29:44 In New York, I met a lover very quickly, moved in with him. I had other loves. I was never monogamous. And what I recognized is another way out for me was sex. It was amazing. Every time I had sex, it was this extraordinary experience. It wasn’t paltry. I know a lot of sex and a lot of masturbation can be paltry, and that’s why I went this direction of teaching and my whole life. This is such an amazing potential in this activity we call sex with yourself, or with others.

Chris Rose: 30:28 I want to slow this down. So, this is 1975?

Joseph Kramer: 30:35 76-80 I was in New York, yes.

Chris Rose: 30:39 So this is pre-AIDS gay culture in New York City.

Joseph Kramer: 30:42 Yes, that was important.

Chris Rose: 30:44 Was this your initiation also to communal erotic experience? The bathhouses, the peers, there was a lot of gay sex communal culture at that time.

Joseph Kramer: 30:58 Yes, it was. The communal aspect of life was what was impressed upon me in my 10 years as a Jesuit. And it kind of flowed out of Catholic family life, the communal life, and working together as a commune. Jesuits teaching in schools together. The great work of life was done as a commune. So, your work and your play and your living was communal.

Joseph Kramer: 31:25 So, when I came out in New York, there’s this subculture. In the late 70s, there wasn’t many people, and probably it was mostly people who were very gay, Kinsey sixes. But it wasn’t above the radar. So, there were bathhouses, and bars, and places, but it was like a private realm. And by that, I mean, there was a lot of freedom. I felt huge amounts of freedom within this, of ways to relate to people.

Joseph Kramer: 32:05 I’m verbal, I was trained by the Jesuits in philosophy, and theology, and mathematics. And so, words were always part of it. So, whenever I was playing, words were a part of it. And I don’t mean talking dirty. I wanted to find out who this person was. Hey, do you like this? What’s going on here. When was the first time you ever did this. And shut up, I’m having sex. I got that a lot.

Joseph Kramer: 32:29 But yes, it was this communal aspect. Even with my partner, my lover, we had close friends, and they would come over and have dinner and we’d have sex together. So, it was very common that sex was a communal thing. And there wasn’t the fear of STDs or especially AIDS. And certainly, if there was, gonorrhea was probably the major one. You go to the clinic. I think I got gonorrhea once. I know I went to the clinic once or twice, I don’t know if I got gonorrhea, but there was no fear around having sex would be deadly or something really terrible for our health. So, hygiene wasn’t a big deal.

Joseph Kramer: 33:24 But it was an ectatic time. And most of the people who were out as gay, had to be really pioneers or explorers, or people who were expelled from their realities. There was this amazing group of people who had been involved in other communities but now were forming their own, finding their own.

Joseph Kramer: 33:48 I was in New York for three years. Later I learned about Wilhelm Reich and he said orgasms shake the pathology side of your body. That was one of his ideas. That an orgasmic capacity was about well-being. So, I think what was happening there was a Reichian therapy that I went through of vibrating out of my being. And it was heartful, too. I knew all these other people were aliens. We were aliens to the culture, and yet, we were making connections. I met amazing people and I have life-long friends from that period.

Joseph Kramer: 34:37 I had this, I called it sparking, and it was that when you meet people, you’re bringing your best, you’re bringing something and you spark, and there’s something that happens and you take away from that person. So, the sex was sparking. There are all these men who are empowering each other and giving gifts, and that’s kind of how I saw sex in those days. We’re doing this amazing thing. So, I had a ball.

Joseph Kramer: 35:05 And I realized other people came with more wounds and less enthusiasm. Everybody wasn’t in the same boat that I was in. When I later talked to people who we looked back on this, I was like a cheerleader. I put a lot of energy into this and people appreciated it. But it was this communal experience that influenced my work for the rest of my life was the communal erotic experience.

Joseph Kramer: 35:42 And I named it later. I go, I’m trying to think of a name for this. This is a co-created erotic vibratory force field, and that was as close as I could get to it, that there was, you could cut it with a knife sometimes what was created. So, yeah, that was my New York initiation into gay culture and co-creating gay culture at that time.

Chris Rose: 36:13 So, you’re in New York, you went back to the bay area and took an Esolen class, and then you came back to New York and started teaching your community.

Joseph Kramer: 36:24 I thought maybe I want to finish my degree in theology. I left the Jesuits with one quarter. I had one more quarter for a Master of Divinity. So, I went back for a month, just to see. And during this month I saw an ad for Esolen massage class. Four weeks for gay men. This is exactly what I’d like to learn. It was cheap, it was like $60 for a four-week class. Milo Jarvis, thank you, Milo.

Joseph Kramer: 36:56 But I went back to New York, and I now had a structure. And this is one thing the Jesuits taught me, was to teach. So, they’re teachers. And to start schools was a big deal for them. So, I offered a class. So, the very first massage class I offered was probably 79 to a group of Dignity people.

Chris Rose: 37:19 A group of gay Catholics.

Joseph Kramer: 37:21 Mm-hmm (affirmative). I remember I asked somebody to bring the music because we needed music, and he didn’t. And we were at this place a weekend away, and there was only one record. This was the year of records, still. And it was flute music inside the Taj Mahal. And sometimes I can’t listen to it because we played it over and over, but it was beautiful to this massage weekend.

Joseph Kramer: 37:50 It felt right teaching massage. I had taught English, I had taught religion. And there was one moment, Chris, when I said, I love teaching with my clothes off and everybody else’s clothes are off. How can I go back to teaching with my clothes on? So that was another watershed right there. Wow, teaching with your clothes off. It started there.

Chris Rose: 38:16 Teaching with your clothes off, but also ushering a group of people into this embodied state of massage. This is a gift you gave me of being the facilitator of that is a deeply moving experience. I know exactly what you mean.

Chris Rose: 38:36 So, this is 1979. How did the massage become the daoist erotic massage? How did this massage become erotic for you?

Joseph Kramer: 38:48 Let me first mention that this massage, in my gay non-stop sex, huge amounts of sex in New York, it wasn’t very hands and massage-oriented. It was sex. It was play. But hands take a little more skill, I guess. Or maybe not. But hands wasn’t part of it. So, for me, I was now had something new to introduce to my repertoire. In fact, I felt in New York, that casual intercourse, and people were not using condoms at that time, I just felt that this was private. This was between me and my lover. And that other types of sex, oral sex, blow jobs, and other things were what I did out in the world. But I didn’t know massage yet.

Joseph Kramer: 39:52 So, what happened after I learned massage, I actually moved back to the Bay area. I had a group of friends, and so we started giving each other massage with oral sex. So, I became good, I called it blowjob massage. I’m giving somebody a massage, I’m at the massage table sucking their cock and I’m massaging and waking up parts of their body while the pleasure, the excitement’s being generated, and I’m moving it around the body.

Joseph Kramer: 40:21 And the idea was never to become quickly, it was to not come. It was to feel your whole body. There was a second element here. One of my friends was really into psilocybin mushrooms. And I explored during my Berkeley years with LSD and mushrooms. But LSD was an eight, or 10, or 12-hour trip and psilocybin mushrooms was two, or three, or four, so it was more doable.

Joseph Kramer: 40:49 We would take mushrooms and receive and give these massages. Right now, I just bought a book yesterday, How to Change your Mind by Michael Pollan.

Chris Rose: 41:03 It’s on my bedside table, Joe.

Joseph Kramer: 41:05 Your bedside table. Well, what I understand is how to change your mind is psychedelics. And I go, whoa, I have to find out his approach.

Chris Rose: 41:14 A lot of what he talks about is the kind of breaking of the monitor of propriety, of the self-regulation that keeps us kind of caged. And so much of what we know about the erotic is the need to give ourselves permission to go to the ectatic. These states that we’re talking about, most people have never received permission to even think about, let alone explore. And psilocybin, I think, is one of those shortcuts to cracking open consciousness.

Chris Rose: 41:48 So, you’re exploring this with friends on the massage table, including oral sex. So much of how I think about the erotic touch work is we learn massage skills, we activate our hands as tools of pleasure, as tools of communicating intentional touch. And then we bring those skills to the genitals, to the anus. So, were you conscious of the moment where you started massaging the cock? How did these strokes start articulating themselves in your hands?

Joseph Kramer: 42:21 Well, first of all, the cock had a real prominence for me, right from the time I was four years old. So, it was never a handjob. I’ve heard of handjobs and finishing up and releases. But I never saw that as important. I thought, there’s a masterpiece to be created here. There’s a symphony, and orchestra. There’s all this pleasure. There’s connection.

Joseph Kramer: 42:47 As a masseur, and during the 80s, I gave maybe three to five thousand massages. I called myself a massage monk. And what I learned is touch isn’t a mechanical thing. Touching tissue, and my hands are feeling something and they’re reacting, and there’s this communication back and forth. So, there’s a language that’s happening. It’s not about a thought. It’s a language where I would touch and there would be a reaction that said go deeper or lighter or move around or what to do.

Joseph Kramer: 43:29 And what happened is more and more, the reaction I got from people I touched was, I don’t know how you did it, but you did exactly what my body needed. And when I thought of someplace I wanted you to go, you went there. So, that’s this communication. Not just on the penis, but on the whole body. Yes, when I touch penises, people go, I’ve never been touched like that before. Oh, my god.

Joseph Kramer: 43:55 There was one more element, and that was when I’m doing these mushrooms, my partner out here said a friend of his from college was teaching a breath class and it was going to last a year. I didn’t know what this was, but there were classes in body, in touch, in all kinds of things happening, so I said, let’s do it. It was a year in rebirthing breath, which is a breath where there’s no pause at the top or bottom of the breath. Or it could be slow or faster. But it’s no pause at the top or bottom.

Joseph Kramer: 44:35 When you do that, there’s a high, there’s an orgasmic feeling. So, all of a sudden, I had another tool. And I recognized that running was very similar to this because you breathe, but you use the oxygen up in the running. In rebirthing, in this breathing, you get the oxygen in and it isn’t used up, it goes through the blood to the cells, and there’s this ecstatic feeling of more and more vibrancy. That’s what the oxygen does.

Joseph Kramer: 45:06 So, with mushrooms, and touch, and blowjobs, and breathing, those were all the things we were exploring in 79 and 80.

Chris Rose: 45:18 And the breath workshop was with Claire Arneson, was that right.

Joseph Kramer: 45:22 She taught breath that year. And she did individual sessions with me. In the individual sessions, her background wasn’t Catholic, and she says, you have lot of rigidity in your body. And this is after I’m running every day for 15 years and I’m doing mushrooms and I’m learning this breath. But the breath, I learned there were places in my body, it wasn’t going.

Joseph Kramer: 45:49 And it’s, as you said, self-regulation that doesn’t serve us. So, I was regulating. And I thought, if I’m regulating my breath, I’m probably regulating sexual pleasure, also. I’m regulating all kinds of things that I don’t know about, which is what [Yeung 00:46:07] calls the shadow. Things that are influencing us that we’re not even aware of, habits.

Joseph Kramer: 46:14 But what happened is a lot of the people I worked on for massage work came in and they would come to me and they’d go, oh, they wanted to be jerked off because that was part of massage, they thought. I’d go, no, this is not what I’m about. That was in my private life. With this, I’m a professional masseur. Until one day, somebody said, you give the best Catholic massage, and that jolted me. I said, what do you mean? He says, you don’t touch the genitals. Other masseurs in 79, 80, 81 touched genitals.

Joseph Kramer: 46:49 Anyway, I remember the exact day. I was doing acupressure on someone. And I asked him to start breathing. I had not really used this breath in my sessions. But I was holding points on his body. He started breathing, I could see he was getting ecstatic. My other experiences with breathing and someone else had been blowjobs. But I wasn’t going to give him a blowjob. So I said, I’ve been trying this with some of my friends, I told him, where I touch your penis, I was so clinical, while you’re breathing to see what that would be like. I remember he was a therapist. He said okay, let’s try this.

Joseph Kramer: 47:34 So, I did with my hands what I was doing with my mouth and had him breathe. And he went into a place that I was going into with my friends, but we did it regularly. This is the first time he’d ever done this. And he goes, oh, my god, I just went someplace. I had an experience I’ve never had before. He came back every week. Four sessions, I remember.

Joseph Kramer: 48:01 But then I started thinking, maybe I should do this professionally. And it’s not handjobs. It’s not just giving somebody a release. It’s giving somebody a waking up because the breath circulates the excitement through the body. So, that was the beginning. I then decided, I need to advertise erotic massage, that’s what I’m doing. And the gay papers in San Francisco, where I got most of my clients, I lived in Oakland across the bay, I asked them to have a category called erotic massage. They go, no. I said wait, you have hustlers, escorts that are offering all kinds of kinky services and then you have massage. Finally, they said yes, an erotic massage category started which became very lucrative for them. And lots of people came to me.

Joseph Kramer: 48:52 I explored erotic massage with my hands, with breathing. And I found the breathing got people into their body. A lot of people disassociate when they go into sex, or they freeze from mild or major trauma. Or they’re distracted regularly. But whatever’s going on, if you’re breathing in a conscious pattern, you have to stay present to breathe. And I could tell right when they go away. So, I’m giving them the session, they just went away, and I would call them back. So, the breathing became this time when they … That’s why people had amazing experiences because they couldn’t eject out of the experience when they’re breathing.

Joseph Kramer: 49:39 I think the breath also circulated and relaxed and was pleasurable, but it was also a clue to me how I could keep somebody present for this erotic experience. And a lot of people, the erotic experience for them is ejaculation. A lot of men, and probably orgasm for women. But in this process, they had to pay attention to this whole process.

Joseph Kramer: 50:03 And I quoted a Catholic saint, often, Saint Therese of Lisieux. She said heaven is all the way to heaven. That was my statement that heaven isn’t out here. It’s just this whole process. So, that’s where Daoist erotic massage started. Yet, it was in my private practice, and I was quiet about it. I wasn’t ashamed of it, but I was private about it. I was advertised in papers, but I had no thought of like I taught massage, of teaching erotic massage or anything like this at this time. It was several years later.

Chris Rose: 50:49 I hope you enjoyed part one of my interview with Joe Kramer. Next week, we’re going to talk a lot more about erotic massage and teaching erotic massage in classrooms all around the world. Join us next week for part two of my conversation with Joseph Kramer, or visit us at pleasuremechanics.com for our complete podcast archive. And go to pleasuremechanics.com/free for our free online course. I’m Chris from pleasuremechanics.com wishing you a lifetime of pleasure. Cheers.

How To Make Oral Sex More Intense

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Does your pleasure ever feel stuck at “good enough” – and you can’t quite kick up the intensity when you want to?

In this encore episode, we share a ton of techniques for amping up intensity while receiving stimulation. Here we are discussing the specific case of getting enough intensity during oral sex to reach orgasm – but the tips and strategies will help you amp up intensity during any kind of erotic play.

Sometimes lovingly called the “get your face wet” episode, this classic episode from our archives delivers a ton of classic Pleasure Mechanics strategies for optimizing your experience of pleasure and arousal.

If you love the Speaking of Sex podcast and want to support the work we do in the world, show us some love!

A lot of people want skills and strategies to master the art of giving oral pleasure. We understand wanting to know what you are doing down there! More than any other erotic act, this is where confidence and enthusiasm are key.

But here’s the catch: for a lot of couples, the roadblock to more oral pleasure isn’t on the giving side. For many, the challenge is in the ability to relax and receive so much pleasure and intimacy.

After talking to thousands of people who struggle to receive oral pleasure, here are some of the most common thoughts that take us out of our pleasure:

  • Am I taking too long?
  • Is my lover getting bored?
  • Am I going to be able to climax?
  • Do I look weird down there?
  • Do I smell weird down there?
  • Am I safe?
  • Is my lover having fun?

These thoughts (and thousands of variants) spin through our brains, taking our attention away from our body and the sensations our lovers are providing. These thoughts create stress and anxiety – which shut down arousal and make pleasure feel even more out of reach. It is a vicious cycle that can feel impossible to break.

But here’s the thing – there are immediate steps you can take to be more available to receive pleasure (oral and otherwise!) Listen to the podcast below for a deep dive into the art of receiving oral sex.

When you can relax and fully receive the gift of oral pleasure, tremendous benefits await. Sure, there are the roaring orgasms that oral can create. But beyond that, there is an emotional gift of the intimacy that this act creates. For many people, receiving oral creates feelings of acceptance – when the most raw and vulnerable part of you is being taken into your lover’s mouth, you can feel truly held and loved.

So maybe you just want oral to become a more frequent and fun part of your erotic life. Or maybe you want to finally let your lover in and truly receive the loving attention they are offering you.

Tune in to the podcast episode, put the skills into practice and then let us know how it goes!

The episode originally aired as Speaking of Sex episode #210 : Oral Sex Orgasms Advanced Techniques

Sex Moves : Harness The Motion Of Your Ocean

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Sex moves! From wild rides to subtle shudders, moving your body during sex is key to unlocking a wide range of erotic experiences. Do you give yourself permission to move freely, or do you sometimes feel stuck in place?

In this episode, we explore the importance of movement during sex and give you ideas on how to get started exploring a wider variety of sex moves.

What holds us back from moving during sex? How can we overcome the shame and anxiety that can hold us back? This episode explores why so many of us hold still – in bed AND in life – and what we can do to unleash more freedom to move!

Share Your Thoughts! As this episode goes live, we already are planning part 2! There is SO MUCH to say about movement during sex – and we’ll keep exploring this theme next week! If you have something to share about this, please head over to PleasureMechanics.com/hello and share your thoughts or questions! Cheers.

Love the show? Show us some love us so we can continue to offer free resources for a more pleasurable world for all!

Resources mentioned in this episode:

The Pillo from Dame : A simple, beautiful and effective sex positioning pillow. Use the code MECHANICS for $15 off!

Fleshlight stroker toys: Practice moving during masturbation to gain more confidence.

For more on how to move during sex, check out Speaking of Sex Episode #176: How To Move During Sex

Podcast Transcript for Episode 324 ~ Sex Moves: Harnessing The Motion Of Your Ocean

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.

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are the Pleasure Mechanics. On this podcast we have soulful and explicit conversations about every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to PleasureMechanics.com where you will find our complete podcast archive, beautifully arranged for you in the Sex Index by topic so you can quickly find what you are looking for. While you are there, go to PleasureMechanics.com/free and sign up for our free online course, The Erotic Essentials, so we can get you started with some of our favorite strategies and techniques for more pleasure and more love in your life life life life.

Chris Rose: 00:48 Hello, everyone. I woke up this morning, and I was thinking that the past many podcasts have been very emotional and very much about our relationship to pleasure and embodying pleasure, and so I wanted to talk about fucking. I’m aware that we always try to strike a balance in this podcast between talking about the deep emotional and spiritual experience of sexuality, and we also want to talk about the mechanics of pleasure, what makes sex fun, why do we love sex, what motivates us to have sex, and how do we make sex more pleasurable. That’s really a big part of our mission. We totally acknowledge that making sex more pleasurable has everything to do with excavating body shame and healing into generational patterns of trauma and abuse, but it also has a lot to do with fucking, with movement, with the ways our bodies touch one another, or the way we touch ourselves when we choose to engage in sex.

Chris Rose: 01:58 Today’s episode is inspired by the old phrase, it’s not the size of the boat, but the motion of the ocean. Sometimes this phrase is used when talking about penis size, to say that the penis size doesn’t matter, it’s what you do with it. We just want to expand that way out and talk about the motion of our oceans, how we move during sex, the movement we put into sex, and the range of possibilities there, to acknowledge that there are so many different styles of movement, kinds of movement, ways to move during sex, how does this impact positions and the positions we choose, but also how do we adapt when our bodies aren’t able to move very well or if we don’t want to move very much. There’s moments to be a pillow queen. Let’s talk about the motion of our oceans. I think that’s the last time I’ll say that.

Charlotte Rose: 03:01 Quote the phrase. There’s so much here. I think that of course this changes in our lifetime. How we are fucking at 20 might be different than how we’re fucking at 50, and that makes sense, and it might not, depending on what you like to do, how your partner’s physicality is. I think it’s valuable again just to think about this and to put some thought into reflecting on this subject, because we often get into habits and routines with sex. Anytime we’re just challenging ourselves to explore what we do in a rote way, we’re going to open up some new possibilities and hopefully make some room for a little more play and a little more fun.

Chris Rose: 03:44 Totally. It’s about breaking up our scripts, because so often in the charged arena of sex, we fall into scripts and ruts and a safety zone of ways our bodies are expected to move, the kind of image we have of sex, and a lot of that gets very performative. I originally was going to call this episode sexual athleticism, but the word athlete comes from athlon, like triathlon, decathlon. It really is about competing for a prize, not what we are all about. Let’s throw out the idea of athleticism.

Chris Rose: 04:22 Then I thought about calling it sexual endurance and about building up stamina to move more, but when we think about endurance, we’re often thinking about how long does the penis stay hard so intercourse can go on. Also the wrong question when it comes to pleasure.

Chris Rose: 04:38 If we throw out performance, if we throw out endurance, and we center pleasure as the goal, we center the idea that we want to learn how to be in our bodies in the ways that bring us more pleasure and more opportunities for love and connection with ourselves, with other people, then it comes down to thinking about why movement is important during sex, what role does movement have, how does it change your experience, and then giving yourself permission to shake it up, try new things, get out of your scripts, to discover what you are capable of.

Chris Rose: 05:17 When it comes to moving during sex, a lot of us are preconditioned, a lot of us have these scripts that come from a pornified vision of what sex looks like. For a lot of people, the first image is missionary position. When you think of two people having sex, you go to the receptive partner lying flat on a bed and the penetrating partner, usually the man, on top, supporting his way, thrusting in and out. This is a good starting place to think about sex, but it’s clearly not the only way our bodies show up for sex.

Chris Rose: 05:57 When we talk about movement, when we talk about positions, I really want to invite us to think about the full range of sex, so positions when you are cuddling up at night to go to sleep, positions when you are kissing, positions when you are having oral sex and hand sex, and yes, intercourse and anal sex. Every kind of sex you want to have involves your body in some sort of movement. The ways we give our bodies permission to move and express themselves has everything to do with the sexual experience we have in the end.

Charlotte Rose: 06:37 While changing up your sex positions isn’t necessarily going to transform your entire sex life alone, it can be a piece of experiencing your body in a different way, which can give you an experience of novelty, and that can be interesting and exciting.

Chris Rose: 06:56 I want to start this conversation by acknowledging that when we talk about moving during sex, motion during sex, we’re talking about a really big range of possibilities that includes lying still, being very quiet, and also includes getting bestial, really moving your body, and going for really hot, sweaty, very vigorous sessions. That whole range between serene to vigorous to rough, all of those styles of sex involve movement and motion.

Chris Rose: 07:35 I want to say this because I think sometimes when we talk about movement, a lot of us start closing down because we are not moving like this image of swinging from the chandelier sex, the Kama Sutra with 169 positions to try, and we can feel insufficient or unworthy of great sex if we’re not able to move in certain ways, if our bodies aren’t capable of it, or we just don’t want to. Not everyone wants to be the cowgirl bucking wildly on top of a cock. Some people do.

Chris Rose: 08:11 How do we give ourselves permission to think about the role of movement and motion in our sex lives, while being really compassionate with where we are now, and also then opening up possibilities for what we would maybe want to try, what scripts we want to break?

Chris Rose: 08:28 As we talk about this, think about your own body, your own body’s abilities and limitations. We all have both of those. Find a place here just to give yourself permission to experiment with little things we talk about or to take this on and go big with it.

Charlotte Rose: 08:50 Right, because for some people, what might evolve their sexual experience is actually moving much slower and with much more gentle awareness and allowing the movements to be more flowy. Some people might be used to this jackhammer image and experience of sex. For you, experiencing the other part of the spectrum might be really interesting. For others, maybe you do want to try and build your upper-body strength and see if you can build your endurance, your physical strength, in order to be able to go for longer. All of this we’re wanting you to do with no judgment about where you are now and that one isn’t better than the other. It’s really about giving ourselves and our partners a broad experience of different kinds of sex, just to keep things interesting and to experience different kinds of sex together.

Chris Rose: 09:54 What is the role of motion and movement in sex? What’s the role of movement for us human beings? We are moving bodies. For me as someone who exercise was never available to me or never appealing, movement rather than exercise feels much more native to the human body. I’m reminded that even when in stillness, our bodies are in constant motion, our breath, our digestion, our blood flow, constant movement in these fluid bodies of ours.

Chris Rose: 10:33 When it comes to eroticism, there’s this esoteric way of thinking about the two bodies coming together and starting to move together into one or whatever, but really how I want to think about it is, what are the ways we move and use our bodies to enjoy the game, the play, the opportunity for pleasure that sex provides. We can talk about movement out in the world and erotic embodiment. Right now I really want to focus on the ways we move when we’re engaged in arousing activities, so masturbation, partnered sex, group sex if you want. How do you show up in your body once you’re starting to be aroused?

Chris Rose: 11:19 A really great way to start thinking about this is how you move during masturbation, because this is again, it’s a place where we can use as a laboratory, a training grounds, but it’s also your primary sexual relationship is with yourself. If you inventory, if you think about the ways you masturbate, most of us do not move, or we move very little.

Charlotte Rose: 11:44 Or we move our hands, but not our hips.

Chris Rose: 11:47 Right, so it’s either the furious jack-off, the just stroking with your hand, or grabbing a vibrator and clamping it to your genitals. A lot of us will just start building sensation by just stimulating the genital nerve endings, and then let that arousal build up into some sort of climax or orgasm. That’s the default mode for a lot of us. What happens if as you’re masturbating, you start moving your body a little more?

Chris Rose: 12:20 Charlotte mentioned the hips. The hips and the spine are great places to focus your attention when you think about moving. This is true for all genders, all bodies. The hips and the spine are really where you will get most results if you focus on different styles of moving the hips and then the spine as they’re connected.

Charlotte Rose: 12:46 This is about moving an erotic energy through your whole body. This is about expanding the experience of arousal into the rest of your being. This can support having more of a full-body orgasm instead of a genital sneeze, as we’ve talked about it in other ways.

Chris Rose: 13:08 What just came to me is, sometimes when we talk about this moving erotic energy and making your full body a vessel for erotic sensation, it sounds a little bit out there. Imagine you’re at a concert and you’re just sitting still and you’re listening to the music. You are allowing the music to just come into your body through one of your senses. You’ll experience that music. You might even experience pleasure through that music. What happens if you start swaying in your seat a little bit? Do you experience the music differently? What happens if you are able to get up and dance? Do you experience the music differently? Is it a different experience to sit in a chair and listen to music than it is to dance to that music?

Chris Rose: 13:54 Part of what we’re talking about is giving ourselves permission to dance during sex, to move our bodies in the ways that feel good, both to express ourselves and to feel more, to feel more. There is something here about movement and motion that literally allows you to feel more. Feel more sensation, but also feel more emotions. When we invite you to move a little bit more during sex and to notice if you feel more, I want you to pay attention to both of those things, both meanings of feelings. Do you feel more sensation? Do you feel more emotion? Do you feel more connected to the experience? Does it bring you into your body on another level so you can pay attention to what’s happening in your body? A lot of this is about placement of attention. I said we were going to focus on fucking and not on these esoteric things. When you are moving and you’re focusing your attention on that movement, you’re dropping your attention back into your body, away from your head and your distracting thoughts, and as you pay attention to your body, you get to feel what it is capable of more.

Chris Rose: 15:12 We’re going to start with masturbation. Next time you’re masturbating, get moving just a little bit more. This doesn’t mean you have to stand up and shake your whole body, though you could try that. Start with little subtle movements. As you’re stimulating your genitals, try just rocking your hips a tiny bit, just little, little rocks. Try circling your hips a little bit. Try wiggling your spine on the bed. Try putting your feet flat on the bed so your thighs are available to you and so you can thrust up into the sensation. Move your hips rather than your hand, as Charlotte beautifully said. If you’re playing with a vibrator, a great way to do this is to hold the vibrator still and then make your genitals go looking for the sensation. Hold the vibrator a little away from your body, and then move your body into it to receive the sensation, or put the vibrator on a pillow, straddle the pillow, and feel what that feels like to be in a totally different position while you’re masturbating.

Chris Rose: 16:23 This brings me to my other point. We talked about how motion gets you feeling more, it brings you into your body, it opens up more sensation and more emotional experience. When we move in different ways, it opens up different kinds of experiences, just like if I had you all in a room and I had you stomp across the dance floor, stomp it out like an elephant, ra da da da da. If we did that for five minutes, you would feel different than if I asked you to tiptoe across the floor and float like a butterfly. Those different kinds of movements will unlock different experiences in your body.

Chris Rose: 17:05 How does this apply to sex? When you get into different positions, when you express different kinds of emotions and different kinds of energies with your body, you get to experience different kinds of sexual energy, different kinds of emotional experiences during sex. If you’ve only had sex lying flat on your back, looking up at your partner as sweat beads form on their forehead, and just focusing on maybe the sensation in your genitals, you have not had the opportunity to fully express all of the range of sexual energy. What would it feel like to get on top and ride? What would it feel like to sit on your partner’s face? What would it feel like to be bent over the bed and someone riding you from behind? What would it feel like to be lying side by side almost in a spooning position while your partner’s hands slid between your thighs? Have you given yourself permission to explore the full range of what your body, not all bodies, but what your body can do and longs to do?

Chris Rose: 18:21 Again, if this feels scary to jump into with partnered sex, and you’re not in a partnership where you can just jump on your partner’s face and writhe around, you will baby-step up to this and you will maybe try some things in your masturbation. For partners who have been in a script for a long time, maybe been in scripts even pre dating your partnership, it can be scary to shake things up and to say out loud that you want to try different things. This is where the baby-stepping into it can be really useful, if while you’re having the same kind of sex you usually have, you just let your body move a little bit more, rock your hips a little bit more, let your hands travel, arch your back, stretch out, suggest a different position.

Chris Rose: 19:12 These small changes cumulatively can create huge differences in your sexual experience. Then as you get wins, as you have positive experiences, you can start building up towards bigger risky things, towards different kinds of movement, and develop the capacity to be foolish in front of one another, to play and to laugh during sex, and to make mistakes and to try things that might not work.

Chris Rose: 19:44 Some of this work is communicating with your partner about trying new things, but a lot of it, again, is that internal permission and confronting the reasons that you don’t want to move. One of the main reasons people don’t want to move more during sex is they fear looking foolish, they fear their body looking not sexy, they don’t want attention drawn to their fat and the way that it moves if they move.

Chris Rose: 20:17 Again, this goes back to performance, like if I can lie still, my partner won’t notice what my body actually looks like or something. Body shame really comes into play here. I’m going to use dance again. Just like if we got a group of 100 adults on a dance floor, put on some music, it would be really surprising to me if 100 people started dancing. We are so shut down, most of us, in this culture around movement and the freedom to move and play with our bodies, that it’s layered with sexual shame and body shame around sex, but it’s also just movement shame and movement disconnect. As adults, we’re cut off from movement. We don’t play in our bodies very often. A lot of us, even if we have a movement practice, it’s in the form of exercise, and it’s just as scripted as stillness.

Chris Rose: 21:18 Another tool here can be dancing, improv dancing, improv movement workshops. If you feel really locked and stuck in your body and just can’t move even alone, then there might be some work to just get out of the rigidity that our culture has ensnared us in. We live in a very sedentary culture. This isn’t a comment on exercise. It’s just a comment on how our bodies are trained to be polite and still and quiet. Then we bring that politeness to bed and lock down and wonder why we don’t feel more.

Chris Rose: 22:02 Again, this isn’t just telling everyone to get wild and be crazy in bed and breaking a sweat all the time. This can be very subtle and beautiful and gentle, and it can be rough and bestial. I really want to hold both of those extremes, because both can be filled with movement. Even just trancing into your partner’s touch and moving just a little bit and breathing, you’re still moving and circulating energy, and you’re not locked up still.

Charlotte Rose: 22:36 I think that’s the piece is that we do experience such rigidity and frozenness in our body often. That is what we learn culturally, as you were just saying. Literally anything that encourages your body not to be frozen and rigid will allow you to feel more. That’s why the movements can be so tiny. It can be the tiniest circles, the tiniest undulations, but just that you’re bringing your attention to breaking yourself out of frozenness and rigidity is what will create more sensation.

Chris Rose: 23:14 What do you do with the fear of foolishness, the fear of like, “I’m not going to look sexy if I move in this way?”

Charlotte Rose: 23:21 You can always have a conversation with your partner ahead of time to say, “I want to experiment with this. I was listening to this podcast. I’m just going to try moving a little bit more.”

Chris Rose: 23:28 “Close your eyes.”

Charlotte Rose: 23:30 “I don’t know how it will look, but I’m just experimenting with how it will feel, so will you experiment with me?” The truth is that for most people, any kind of further engagement, any deeper way that you’re engaging with being in sex is going to be sexy, because we’re all moving against just being shut off. Moving more is a way of showing active consent, like you’re into this, you’re here, you’re present. All of that is going to be sexy. I think it’s mostly that we’re judging ourselves. This is why exploring again in masturbation is such a great way, because you can feel that awkwardness if you have that alone and be like, “Okay, this does feel different, so maybe I should keep trying it or find a way that I begin to feel more comfortable.”

Charlotte Rose: 24:24 I remember in college when I discovered that somebody else was masturbating in a different position than I had done, and I was like, “Wait, that’s possible? You can masturbate lying face down or on your knees?” I had no idea. I just always was on my back.

Charlotte Rose: 24:39 Just playing with those and seeing how it does make your body feel, because it can be so dramatically different. It’s such a small change that it can be exciting and interesting to experience your own body in a different way. That’s exhilarating.

Chris Rose: 24:55 I want to talk to the guys for a second, because I think when we paint this image of being frozen during sex or staying stuck or staying still, we often think of the woman, the receptive partner, who can just lie there. Guys are often charged with being the more active partners, with being the one doing the thing, the thrusting, the penetrating. This is a lot of pressure. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of pressure. A lot of guys write me emails where they’re like, “I don’t want to have to be in charge and in control of the sexual scenario all the time. When’s my chance just to be done?” I think this is a really important question. Oral sex is a great opportunity to just lie back and be done.

Charlotte Rose: 25:41 Erotic massage.

Chris Rose: 25:42 Erotic massage. We have all these options. I also think it’s really important for all of us to acknowledge the physical work of fucking. I think it’s really important for women to hear that being the active partner, being the penetrator can feel like a lot of work. It can feel like a lot of physical stamina. It can also just feel like emotionally you’re the one in charge of the situation, you’re the one that has to be the architect of both of your pleasure. That can be a lot of pressure. Using different positions, using different kinds of movement can be a way to relieve that pressure on men and give them a chance to lie back and have sex in different positions that they can rest.

Chris Rose: 26:36 I also just want to say to the guys that part of your pleasure is movement. I think men have been taught that their sexual pleasure comes from the friction on their cock. If you really think about your experience of sexual pleasure, the movement of fucking is part of it. When you’re moving your body in that rhythm and you’re moving your hips, it creates a full-body experience that again is different than just sitting stationary in your office chair stroking your cock.

Chris Rose: 27:11 Part of I think what we crave in our idea of partnered sex is the ability to move together, is the opportunity to, and some people experience this as that stress relief part of sex, the ability to get physical, grunt, sweat, move some energy, is part of, again, the human desire for sex is that release we feel. A lot of us will feel that release more profoundly if we do break a sweat, if we do get out of breath a little bit. How do we build up towards being able to be more vigorous if we choose? I’m really choosing words carefully here because I want to honor all bodies, all forms of movement, and not privilege vigorous jackhammer sex over slow mm.

Chris Rose: 28:12 I think about the motion. I said I wouldn’t say it, the motion of the ocean, there’s those moments where there’s big pounding waves and it’s very visible, but really the motion of the ocean is all underneath the surface, it’s the deep currents. Sometimes sex feels like that, where you’re riding these deep currents together and it’s this big wa wa wa wa. Then sometimes it’s waves and crashing and pounding. Both are delicious and we want to experience the full range.

Chris Rose: 28:51 If you want more vigor, if you want more power and strength and energy to come through, starting to move is the first step of giving your body permission to move more, experimenting with different positions, because if you try to just hold yourself up on your hands and fuck from your hips, that is very hard to do for five, 10, 15 minutes. It’s like doing a plank and fucking at the same time. Figuring out different positions in bed that allow you to be vigorous without necessarily using muscles you don’t have, as you build that capacity.

Chris Rose: 29:34 Again, masturbation can be a great thing. If you get a fleshlight or a male masturbator that you can actively penetrate so you’re not just using your hand, you then have the opportunity to fuck into something while you are masturbating. I’ll put some links in the show notes page. Male sex toys have come a really long way. Just like there’s no shame in using a vibrator, there shouldn’t be any shame in using a masturbation sleeve or a masturbator to fuck while you are alone.

Chris Rose: 30:05 Having that opportunity to fuck while alone will give you a lot of chance to build your endurance, to try different positions, to experiment and notice if my knees are out this far, how does that feel, if my knees come in more narrow, what does that do to my hip movements, how much more endurance do I have if I stand up, if I stand up and we adjust our bed height so it’s a good fucking height. There’s ways of making your bed higher or lower so it’s the right height for you to put someone on the side of the bed and go right into them with your pelvis. That will unlock so much more movement, just the nature of standing up.

Charlotte Rose: 30:46 I think that’s such a great position for somebody who wants to not put so much pressure on their arms, but be able to experiment with more vigor. It can be an easier position to get more intensity.

Chris Rose: 31:03 As the receiver, I think a lot of people have the fantasy of being fucked up against the wall. Maybe it’s just me. As a big girl, being picked up and fucked against the wall was only available to me a couple times when I got to meet giants, and that was awesome, but it’s not something that would be physically available to me in our partnership, say, or with a lot of partners, because I am 200 pounds. I want that sensation of being suspended. Being on the side of the bed and I can sit up and wrap my arm around my partner’s neck maybe while fucking has that same physicality, but then I’m supported.

Chris Rose: 31:45 This is another way to look at it is what are your fantasies telling you about movement. If you had all of the physical capabilities in the world, if gravity didn’t apply, how would you want to move during sex? What are some of the images that come to you? Then how can you back-engineer that to work with your body?

Chris Rose: 32:06 Another tool that’s really great here are sex pillows. Our friends at Dame have just released a new sex position pillow. Again, I’ll link to it in the show notes page. These pillows are little triangular wedge pillows. I love the one from Dame, because it looks like a reading pillow. You can just keep it on your bed the whole time. These are great for exploring different positions and supporting your hips or your back. Most traditionally they’re wedged under your hips to raise your hips up to a different height, which might make it easier for your partner to penetrate from different positions, from their knees. It might relieve some pressure on your lower back.

Chris Rose: 32:49 How do we accessorize movement? Some people love a bed frame that they can really grab onto and then move into. Sometimes we need a piece of equipment to brace ourselves again and then create the movement we want.

Chris Rose: 33:04 If you ever have the chance to go to a sex club or a sex party and you get the opportunity to fuck in a sling, for example, that can be a totally different experience than being on a bed. Then some couples love that and invest in sex furniture for their home. You can get sex chairs and slings and all sorts of accessories. For most people, we need to just start with giving ourselves permission to move a little bit differently during arousal. We can’t just to the slings and the swings and the chandeliers, because we haven’t even given ourselves permission to start moving a little bit, shaking our hips, writhing our backs, reaching up and grasping our partner in different ways.

Charlotte Rose: 33:58 We musn’t fall into the capitalist trap, thinking that if we buy new things we will have different experiences. It’s going to start in letting our bodies experience something different and expanded. If and when we want to keep exploring, we can purchase items that will allow us to change our experience, but please don’t feel like you have to do that, that’s what you’re missing in your life in order to have better sex. That’s what the world will tell us, but it’s not true. It’s in your body always first.

Chris Rose: 34:27 She just got erotically anti-capitalist on us. That was hot. It’s true, we are often taught that the accessories will unlock the experience. Accessories support an experience that you give yourself. Let’s think about movement. Let’s think about the motions of our oceans and again, give ourselves permission to try new things, to break out of our script, to experiment with what our bodies are capable of, while having as much compassion and freedom from self-judgment as we can, because we are not all sexual athletes. Being an athlete is not the prerequisite for sexual pleasure and fulfillment.

Charlotte Rose: 35:14 I want everyone to really hear that. You do not have to be a sexual athlete in order to have incredible sex. You, your body, whatever level of ability, can have extraordinary and fulfilling, satisfying sex as you are.

Chris Rose: 35:29 The truth is, as much as I joke about you, Charlotte, winning the gold medal for hand jobs at the sexual Olympics, or perhaps you get two gold medals in multi-orgasmic pleasure-receiving as well, she’s a titleholder, but there are no sexual Olympics, there is no competition, there are no judges in your bedroom. The only measure of your sexual pleasure is your experience of it. It’s entirely subjective, even the idea of being sexually fulfilled. That is yours to define at this stage of your life. There are no sexual athletes. There’s performers. Porn performers do us a great service by sharing their bodies and performing for our entertainment, but you are not a sexual performer. You are a sexual being in relationship with yourself, with your partners, with the world. You get to experiment and experience your own body on your own terms. All we are saying right now is that movement and motion is part of that. It’s already part of that.

Charlotte Rose: 36:41 It’s something to explore and experiment with and get curious about, about how much more it can make you feel, how much more it unlocks. It is something to play with, not something to do right or wrong, not something that you’re failing at or doing well, but bring a spirit of curiosity and play to it and see what happens.

Chris Rose: 37:05 The willingness to be foolish. I think in giving ourselves permission to dance, to move during sex, to unlock these rigid bodies of ours, it’s really useful to stop worrying about what it looks like and start focusing on what it feels like and be willing to laugh at yourself.

Chris Rose: 37:27 One of the best things I think that ever happened in my erotic embodiment was I lived with a roommate in San Francisco many years ago who was this delightful gay men, and we used to have ugly dance parties, where we’d put on fun music and dance just as ugly and weird and awkward as we could be. For both of us, this was a process of freeing our bodies from a lot of shame and a lot of judgment. We would just end up sweaty and laughing and just loving one another. Just loving one another because we are allowed to be silly and foolish.

Chris Rose: 38:04 Dance with a toddler sometime. Go to a kids dance party and notice the freedom they have in their body to just jerk their fists around and shake their booties. They feel unabashed because they haven’t been socially conditioned to be preoccupied with how their body looks to others.

Chris Rose: 38:25 If all else fails, use a blindfold. Use a blindfold. This is great advice if you want to get on top for the first time and try cowgirl position, but you’re worried about what your body will look like and you’re worried and that takes you into performativity, put a blindfold on your partner, and then they can’t see you and it’s all about feeling. Put a blindfold on both of you and then try moving more and just focus on the feeling. Turn the lights out. Do it in the dark. Never thought I’d give that advice. We want to encourage you to move, and move on your own terms. Try small movements. Try big movements. Shake it up, and explore the motion of your-

Charlotte Rose: 39:07 Ocean.

Chris Rose: 39:08 … body. We love hearing from you. If anything from this podcast inspired some thoughts or questions for you, you can always email us at Chris Rose@pleasuremechanics.com or charlotte@pleasuremechanics.com and let us know what you’re thinking. We really appreciate all of your supportive emails, all of your gratitudes. We are really grateful to be talking to you all. I just want to say that. I’m really grateful that you’re listening, that you’re engaged in this conversation, that you are curious and invested in creating a more pleasurable sex culture for us all. I love you. Thank you for being part of our world.

Chris Rose: 39:52 Come on over to PleasureMechanics.com where you will find all of our offerings. When you’re ready to explore new erotic skills, check out our online courses and use the code speakingofsex for 20% off the online course of your choice. If you just want to show us some love and support the show, go to PleasureMechanics.com/love. That’s PleasureMechanics.com/love. You’ll find ways to support the show and be part of our inner circle.

Charlotte Rose: 40:23 We have decided to be sponsor-free so that we can bring you just the information, we can just share what we want to share without adding all of those pieces in. A way that you can support us continuing to do that is to contribute to our Patreon, which is at Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics. We really, really, really appreciate your support there. Thank you.

Chris Rose: 40:51 Our Patreon is almost at the point of making up for my decision to drop sponsors, but we’re not quite there yet. We would love a few hundred more of you to join the Patreon at Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics, so I can tell my mama that dropping sponsors was a good idea.

Charlotte Rose: 41:12 Not just a value-based choice.

Chris Rose: 41:15 My mom was like, “Wait, you got advertisers and then you said no?” “Yeah, but mom, it was compromising my editorial voice!” Please show me and my mother that I made a good choice and support our work, keep our lights on, keep food in our bellies, at Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics, or go to PleasureMechanics.com and check out our online courses and support us that way. Either way, we hope that we are bringing more pleasure and joy and permission into your life, that we are slaying some shame with you, and paving the way for a more pleasurable relationship to your body, your sexuality, and to each other.

Charlotte Rose: 41:59 We are cheering you on.

Chris Rose: 42:01 We fucking love you.

Charlotte Rose: 42:03 You can do it.

Chris Rose: 42:03 Show us some love. Come back next week for another episode of Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris Rose.

Charlotte Rose: 42:11 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 42:12 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 42:13 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 42:16 Cheers.

What Are You Hungry For? Interview With Dawn Serra

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Close up image of ripe blueberries with words: "What Are You Hungry For? Interview With Dawn Serra Podcast Episode"

What are you hungry for? What do you crave? What do you want so much you can taste it?

The fabulous Dawn Serra joins us for a conversation about recovering a joyful relationship to pleasure, desire and hunger. We explore what food and sexuality have in common as arenas of experiencing and realms of both struggle and liberation.

If you are ready for a deep dive into your relationship to pleasure, power and desire, join Dawn for her Power In Pleasure online course*, a 5 week experience enrolling now and starting July 21 2019! If you have been wanting to rewrite your scripts around pleasure and come into a more joyful relationship to your desires, join Dawn for this supportive group experience.

Colorful mosaic of small images of fruit, flowers and other nature imagery. Words read Power In Pleasure: A New Course By Dawn Serra

For more from Dawn, tune into our previous podcast episode:

Body Confidence with Dawn Serra

*When you enroll in this course we receive a small portion of the sale to support the podcast and our work. We have been through this course and highly recommend it!

Transcript of Podcast Episode What Are You Hungry For? Interview With Dawn Serra

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. This is Chris from pleasuremechanics.com, and on today’s episode, we are speaking with the fabulous Dawn Serra about hunger, pleasure, and desire. Dawn is one of my favorite thinkers in the field about sexuality and bodies, and at the end of our conversation she will invite you into a new course she is offering, a five week exploration of your relationship to pleasure and power and desire and hunger in your body. It’s a beautiful course. It is one I have gone through myself, and I highly recommend the experience if you are looking for an in depth exploration of pleasure and your relationship to it. Really, these questions of desire and worthiness, and what you allow for yourself is what this course will help you address in a safe, supportive community.

Chris Rose: 01:02 Without further ado, here is my conversation with Dawn Serra about hunger and pleasure. I will link in the show notes page to my previous conversations with Dawn and the collaborations we have done in the past. Of course, I will link to her new course which is enrolling now to start on July 21st. If you are listening to this now, consider this invitation and enroll using the link in the show notes page. If it is not the right moment for you or if you hear this in the future but are curious what Dawn is doing, that link will take you to her website and all of the events and offerings. She always has something going on. Here is my conversation with Dawn Serra. Remember, you can find all of our podcast archives at pleasuremechanics.com. Cheers.

Chris Rose: 01:51 Dawn Serra, welcome back to Speaking of Sex.

Dawn Serra: 01:55 Thank you so much for having me back.

Chris Rose: 01:57 Mm-hmm (affirmative). We will link to our previous conversations in the show notes, but for newcomers to the delightful Dawn, will you introduce yourself and a little bit about the work you do?

Dawn Serra: 02:09 I am a sex and relationship coach. I am about to finish my certification for being a body trust provider through Be Nourished. I have a podcast called Sex Gets Real. I run an annual online free summit Explore More. My spheres are really around pleasure, bodies, connection, healing, and how all of that ties to the erotic and sex, and even just the ways that we move through our lives and our relationships. I’m really diving deep lately into the connection between hunger and desire and the ways that we approach food and the ways we approach sex, and how often those things are deeply linked. It’s been a really, really, really extraordinary space for me this past year and a half, to be able to go really deep into this. It feels really yummy.

Chris Rose: 03:10 Mm-hmm (affirmative), and this is exactly where I want to focus, is this question of hunger. Pleasure and hunger, hunger and desire. What does it mean to be hungry for something? You’ve been doing so much beautiful thinking about these intersections. Will you just take us gently into these waters? How do you think about the word hunger right now?

Dawn Serra: 03:38 I think that it can have so many different meanings, but often when we think about hunger we tend to go straight towards food, which is practical of us. But, I also really like thinking about hunger as the things that we feel we need in order to be nourished. When I think abut the things that I need in order to feel nourished, the things that I want that would give me a sense of satisfaction or that would give me a sense of aliveness, those things extend far beyond but do include food. I think about touch. I think about connection and community. I think about play. I think about people that I love and tapping into my senses.

Dawn Serra: 04:37 When I really thinking about hunger from this place of the things that would nourish me and there’s this kind of wanting, this craving or this need behind it, it’s so much bigger than food, but definitely, definitely includes it. We tend to have a really complicated relationship with food because of diet culture. I think something else for me when I think about hunger is also that it’s complicated for a lot of us. That, hunger starts out fairly straightforward for us as tiny humans, but becomes very complicated for us as we grow into adulthood, especially in this particular iteration of culture. Yeah, I think it’s an important thing and a complicated thing.

Chris Rose: 05:24 I’m noticing that you went to hunger for what we need to be nourished, rather than fed or in order to survive. You one upped this notion of just feeding our bodies as a functional thing, and went to this idea of nourishment.

Dawn Serra: 05:42 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 05:42 What does the word nourishment mean to you?

Dawn Serra: 05:48 That’s a really great question. When I think about nourishment, I think about kind of a tiered experience. At its foundation, nourishment is what keeps me alive. It’s the things that feed my cells, that keep me breathing, that keep my body safe. And, I want to do more than survive. I want to thrive. I want to know joy. I want to know curiosity and play. For me, nourishment is what sets the stage for all of those things that bring me that deepest sense of aliveness. What nourishes my creativity? What nourishes my curiosity? What nourishes my play?

Dawn Serra: 06:47 When I think about nourishment, I think about not only the mechanics of keeping this body going, but also all of those less tangible things that keep me connected to my life, invested in my life, able to do the things that I like to do in this body as it is right now. It’s very sensitive to what is rather than the dream of what I wish was.

Dawn Serra: 07:21 I also think about nourishment as something that gets me to a place of satisfaction. You know, it’s not just, as you said, functional. I think that there is a cultural story that we should be treating our bodies as if they’re machines, but we’re human beings, we’re not machines. We are so much more than just input/output, and what you see is what you get. Right?

Dawn Serra: 07:53 When I think about nourishment I also think about some of those things like spirituality. How can I be spiritually nourished? How can I be ritually nourished? I think some of the things that go into that are love and acceptance and witnessing and healing. I think all of those, for me, are inside of nourishment.

Chris Rose: 08:19 Mm-hmm (affirmative). I’m curious, in your journey, as you’ve expanded your understanding of pleasure and nourishment and embraced and kind of practiced it in your life, has the importance of sex changed? Has it gotten deprioritized? Has it been complicated in some way? Like, is there a way we over focus on sexuality sometimes as a placeholder for a bigger conversation we haven’t had yet? Does that question make sense?

Dawn Serra: 08:56 Totally makes sense, and 100% yes. You know, that’s another thing that I want to tread on very lightly and with a lot of nuance. I think sex is so important for so many reasons. I think sex has the potential to be deeply nourishing, to expand our awareness of body and self, to deepen into pleasure that we didn’t know is possible. I think sex can help us do those things. And, I also think that there are so many pathways to embodiment, pleasure, connection, nourishment, feeling love, feeling connected beyond sex.

Dawn Serra: 09:45 I think that we often struggle to recognize those things because there’s such a hierarchy of pleasure that we have in this culture, and we’re taught that sex is the epitome of manhood, that sex is what makes you free, to be engaged in sex is to be someone who is sex positive, is to be someone who is evolved. All of these labels that we’ve kind of piled on top of sex, and I think sex is just one piece of this massive, massive puzzle of all the ways that we can get so many of our needs met.

Dawn Serra: 10:30 As I’ve started doing this work, it hasn’t shifted my love of having really delicious, yummy sex, but I think that it’s really shown me that, often, we are using sex culturally speaking but there’s also a very gendered element to it as well, that is a stand in for being able to say, “I feel lonely and I’d like to connect. I’m feeling stressed out and I could use a way to relax. I am feeling distant from you and I’d like to feel closer. I don’t have enough play in my life, I wish I could be silly.”

Dawn Serra: 11:10 I think so many of us put so much pressure and importance on sex, and when we start doing this work to really examine what are all the things that we’re hungry for, what are all of the things that could potentially bring us a sense of nourishment and connection and being seen, and in these imperfect versions of ourselves that we are, we start to see all of these other opportunities for getting needs met and also for being able to connect with people who are at a variety of places in their lives and in our lives. Our options become so much greater when we can kind of blow it out and stop focusing just on this one thing as a means to get so many of our other needs met.

Chris Rose: 12:02 Brilliant, beautiful, bam. Love it.

Dawn Serra: 12:05 Bam.

Chris Rose: 12:07 I’m curious, because you have been in this immersion around pleasure for many years. In the past year, I’ve noticed you’ve been bringing a lot of work around mindfulness and embodiment practices into what you’re sharing with your community. Can you speak a little bit about the practices of pleasure in your life and what space you’ve created for them, and then what those practices have brought you?

Dawn Serra: 12:37 Yeah. I think the first thing I want to start with is I am just like everyone else in that, prioritizing pleasure is fraught and it’s hard and it’s really easy to forget to do or to deprioritize in service of other things that feel more pressing. My practice is woefully inconsistent sometimes. Part of the work is being okay with that. I don’t want this to turn into another weapon with which I beat myself. I think so much of the work for me has been in yes, planning for big delicious luscious events that I can really just sink into for a longer period of time.

Dawn Serra: 13:31 But also, what are all of those micro points throughout the day and throughout the week where I can just really touch in for a couple of minutes, maybe a half an hour, and just really kind of feel into something yummy at the pace that fits that day. I think so much of what I’ve found is that, whether it’s a five minute slow walk outside or standing out on my balcony and just letting the sun be on my face for a few minutes and the wind in my hair or savoring a really delicious bite of food, even those small things are really important to just helping me to be present and helping me to kind of feel into this body that’s sometimes really hard to be in.

Dawn Serra: 14:22 That’s also given me a way to be a little bit more resourced. I’ve also really been thinking about the ways that I have deeply internalized the stories and the messages of capitalism. I’m trying to really start untangling that messy knot of my productivity does not determine my value, but it is hard to break up with that story. By having these small pleasure practices, I’m finding that disrupts that a little bit. That’s also a really helpful way to start kind of shifting some of those stories.

Dawn Serra: 15:03 Some of my pleasure practices include smells that I really enjoy. I love the smell of lavender and so I have some lavender bunches around my office. Sometimes I’ll just take a few minutes to smell that and just really be in the smell and the scent of the pleasure of that for a few moments. I get so much pleasure from play, and so at least once a day, sometimes more, I will cajole Alex into playing a game with me. Then we’ll do something really fun and ridiculous. Sometimes the game lasts five or 10 minutes, sometimes it lasts an hour. But, at least once a day there needs to be some type of game playing. I also have taken a lot of pleasure, I realized recently that one of the things that brings me tremendous pleasure is experimenting in the kitchen. I’m sure part of that is, prior to being in sex education, I was a food blogger and I was teaching cooking classes.

Chris Rose: 16:05 I didn’t know that.

Dawn Serra: 16:09 Yeah, I know, right? Hidden secret. Being in the kitchen for me is also deeply pleasurable. It’s not even necessarily about eating the thing, although that is also really pleasurable, but spending multiple days making sourdough bread or spending a couple of hours, like last night I made Mama Funko’s Cereal Milk Ice Cream. Just doing those things of being really present and watching things develop for me is a big pleasure practice. For a while, I had stopped doing that because I was just too busy or too tired. I realized several months ago that, even though it does exhaust me sometimes being in the kitchen for multiple hours, I feel really happy and nourished at the end. Like, it’s a good kind of tired. I’ve been prioritizing that a lot more. Our kitchen right now looks like a great big experiment because I’m just trying so many different things and that feels fun.

Dawn Serra: 17:09 For me, a bit part of the pleasure practice is finding the micro moments and honoring them, like, noticing them. Noticing that I slowed down to take a picture of that flower I really liked, and being a little bit mindful. Then, also some of the bigger things. Can we take an afternoon to go lounge at the park and read books? Or can we go hang out with our friends and have a great big dinner party full of really rich discussion. That, for me, is one of my greatest life’s pleasures. Or, we just got back from three weeks away, and while we did work while we were away a little bit, I was only working at like 15% capacity because I was trying to really center pleasure.

Chris Rose: 17:54 When people hear this, they may feel a stirring of hunger. Right? I think often in our podcasts when we paint pictures of what is possible, I’m sometimes aware of this kind of dual thing of painting the picture of what’s possible, and also knowing that there’s this kind of gap between feeling the hunger for these pleasures, feeling the hunger of three weeks of vacation, and then the steps of creating that as your reality. What is your process between recognizing hungers, kind of discernment between hungers that are fantasies and hungers that are things that you might actually give yourself permission to reach for? Then like, bumping up into those places of like, how dare you ask for that? How dare you ask for an afternoon off reading in that park? The ways we’re taught not to be hungry.

Dawn Serra: 18:59 Yeah. I think that’s part of the work, and that’s one of the reasons why I mentioned nuance earlier around this is, our lives are all so different. The ways that we move through them are very different. We experience different levels of access to resources and support and all of that is real and true. I want to be very careful to never prescribe to someone the way to do pleasure, the way to do hunger. I can’t possibly know what it’s like to be an indigenous trans queer person who is poor. I could never know that experience.

Dawn Serra: 19:52 I think one of the parts of this work is really taking an honest look at our lives and taking a look at, what are some of the things that maybe I can change, maybe I can influence but they feel scary, and what are some of the things that it’s just the way they are right now and I might not be able to change them but maybe I can do something different within them? I think those are important. Maybe I have to work three jobs right now to keep a roof over my head, and not working three jobs isn’t an option. Then that’s true. How, inside of that, can maybe I find small moments to be able to feel into some of the things that I’m hungry for?

Dawn Serra: 20:36 I think inside of that too is some grief work, and that’s one of the things I have really found is important. I talked to Afro Sexology earlier this year and they were talking about how the deeper they went into their pleasure the deeper they also went into pain. I think that that’s also a really important thing to just name, that the more we open to any feeling, the more we open to all feelings.

Chris Rose: 21:02 All of them.

Dawn Serra: 21:04 All of the feelings, yeah. So much of this work around pleasure is deep grief work.

Chris Rose: 21:10 Yeah.

Dawn Serra: 21:11 Deep grief work. You know, what all of the things that I never allowed myself because I didn’t feel worthy? That’s probably a lot, and there’s probably a lot of grief and anger inside of that. What are all the things that I told myself I would do one day when, because I didn’t feel worthy of doing it then? How many decades maybe passed? How many years? How many missed opportunities and missed connections? There’s grief in that, or maybe because of choices that I made in the past, I ended up here, and I wish I could have chosen differently. That’s grief work that we have to do around our hungers.

Dawn Serra: 21:51 And, I think some of where the work is too is really starting to kind of confront some of the things that we don’t allow ourselves because we don’t feel worthy of the wanting. That, I think, is such an interesting place. We all are existing inside of capitalism and neoliberalism and white supremacy and sex negativity. I mean, all those things are true, and there are still ways to connect, to touch in with our lives. Really, really small ways even inside of those things if we want to or if we have the ability to.

Dawn Serra: 22:31 Even when we start to realize, well, maybe I could ask for something different. Maybe this thing that hasn’t been working for me in a really long time in my relationship is something I could ask for to change, but then the fear comes up because we’re afraid of being left. We’re afraid of being alone and abandoned. We’re afraid of being judged and shamed, especially if that’s happened in the past. We’re afraid of so many things that then, we limit ourselves on top of the limitations that exist in the world. I think so much of the work around pleasure is recognizing the actual limitations, and then realizing the ways we limit ourselves.

Dawn Serra: 23:15 Sometimes those limitations we place on ourselves are deeply protective. Sometimes we do have to go with the flow in order to keep that roof over of our head, in order to not be kicked out of the group, and those things are all whys, but at least being able to notice them and to speak truth to them, then gives us an opportunity to decide if we want to stay, can we leave, can we change something. That’s what I want for people, is more choice and more opportunity to see where there are choices. That brings in that element of awareness.

Dawn Serra: 23:51 You know, you and I have talked about this in the past and I just love it. I’ve brought it into so many of the things that I have done, which is just, our hungers are always going to be bigger than our lives can hold in so many ways. Our desires are going to be bigger than our lives can hold in so many ways. Inside of that, then, some of the work around pleasure is really kind of saying, what do I need to grieve and how can I honor that this is true? How can I honor that I really, really, really for my whole life have wanted to move to Iceland? Or, I’ve really, really, really for my whole life wanted to write a book. Or, whatever it is. Maybe because of the circumstances of my lief right now, those things just can’t happen, or it’s very unlikely that they will.

Dawn Serra: 24:42 How can I say, yes, those things are good and true and real and I am deserving of them, and they’re just not possible right now and so I’m allowed to feel sad about that and I’m allowed to feel disappointed. But, the life that I’m leading right now, there’s other things that I want to be putting my time and energy to, and so I have to let those things just be things that don’t get to get fulfilled. There’s so many moving pieces in this, of the feeling into the grief and the anger, feeling into the fear, finding ways to celebrate what is, working within the conditions of our lives and maybe working to change some of them, maybe not.

Dawn Serra: 25:29 Something that someone that I was working with a few months ago kind of realized was she was deeply unhappy with the sex that she was having in her marriage. She was feeling very pressured and dissatisfied. The stories she had been telling herself was, if I can just fix my low libido then everything else will be okay. She kind of got to a place of realizing, “I’m not broken. There’s nothing wrong with me.” But, what that then means is, the problem is with the relationship and that was too much for her. That was just not something she was able to face at that point in her life.

Dawn Serra: 26:15 She decided, “Okay, I’m just going to let this stay the way that it is and keep trying to work on myself a little bit more, because it’s too painful to think that maybe it’s this relationship and the way that we’re doing it.” That’s okay too. We get to take care of ourselves and do the things that we feel are most important that that juncture in our lives. I don’t have any judgment around that, but I think it’s the awareness that I want people to come into of just like, “Oh, maybe it’s not me. But, you know what? I can’t change this right now. I’ve got young kids. I can’t pay the mortgage on my own. This is just how it’s going to be and that might be uncomfortable, but now at least I can feel into, what are my options now that I’ve got this awareness.”

Chris Rose: 26:59 Right. Still making a choice, right, still having that agency around it.

Dawn Serra: 27:05 Right, right.

Chris Rose: 27:06 What are some of the things you’ve learned about food and eating and the body that have influenced how you think about sex, and some of the things you’ve learned about sex that influence how you talk about food? What are some of the surprising overlaps?

Dawn Serra: 27:23 You know, I think what’s kind of funny about it is, the more I reveal, the less surprised I am.

Chris Rose: 27:35 Yeah.

Dawn Serra: 27:35 It was kind of like that very first time that I finally made the connection I was like, “Holy crap.” The way we do food is the way that we do bodies and the way that we do sex, I mean, they’re all tied together and they’re all so adjacent. When we’re restricting the things that we enjoy around food, we’re often restricting the ways that we allow ourselves to access pleasure to be in our bodies. When we feel guilty about eating certain things, we often also feel guilty about fantasizing or wanting certain things. There’s just like, so much. The deeper I’ve gone into that, the less surprising and the more just kind of like, “Of course,” it’s become. Why didn’t I see this before? It just makes so much sense.

Dawn Serra: 28:23 I think one of the things that’s really hard for people, and I think maybe this is where not so much surprises come in, but kind of where some of the like, yeah, we really got to chew on this for a while, is often, people are ready to really start confronting their relationship with diet culture and fat phobia, and then they’re totally not ready to do the sex stuff. I find vice versa is often true. I find that there are so many people who will say, “I really want to change the way that I do sex. I want to feel more confident in my body. I want to be more present.” Then, as soon as we start talking about, what’s your relationship with food, with diets, all the things that go with that, there’s just this, “Whoa now, we’re supposed to be talking about sex.”

Dawn Serra: 29:23 There’s kind of this resistance of I just want to fix the sex part or, I just want to do food differently, not realizing that doing food differently then means you’re going to do everything differently in your life, and how deeply, deeply, deeply intertwined they are. Because, ultimately all of it: food, pleasure, sex, relationship, all of it comes down to, how much are we trusting our bodies? Can I really hear the things that my body is telling me? Is there a two way dialog happening? Can I communicate with my body and can I hear what my body is telling me, asking for? How am I with my boundaries? Pretty much everything when it comes to food and movement and sex has to do with boundaries. Am I able to really say here is what I want, here is what I don’t want, and to be able to tend to those boundaries, even if the people around me have really intense feelings about it?

Dawn Serra: 30:29 What’s interesting is what’s under the covers around food and around sex and the erotic, is body trust and boundaries. When we really start examining the ways that we interact with our body or we cut ourselves off from our body, and when we examine the ways that we do boundaries, especially with people that are really close to us in our lives like our family and our partners, we start finding all kinds of rubble and juicy, uncomfortable bits that start really revealing some of our patterns around the ways that we deny our hungers, twists our desires, distrust the signals of our bodies or we can’t speak up on behalf of them. Underneath it all, it’s all kind of standing on the same foundation. It’s just then, we’ve built on top of it kind of into these different silos and we don’t realize they’re all connected underneath.

Chris Rose: 31:35 Yeah, yeah. That, all of us are kind of standing together then in this culture that is breeding that distrust and teaching us that disconnection, and that interrupting it is a real process. I think that’s what surprises people again and again for in my email box, is like, how much work and process it is to start trusting the body, to start living into the body, sensing and the feelings, because it is counter-cultural.

Dawn Serra: 32:08 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 32:10 Can you talk a little bit about your upcoming offering? It’s starting soon. Talk to us about Power and Pleasure, please.

Dawn Serra: 32:20 Yes. I am completely in love with this experience, so if anyone’s listening and they’re getting that little, “Ooh, maybe I should check that out,” totally check it out because it’s awesome. I have a five week online course called Power and Pleasure. The course is really about us realizing that our power and our access to power is deeply tied to our pleasure. So much of the work that unfolds over the course is really about, what are these very small ways that we can just arrive with the body, with our hungers, our desires, how can we feel into our senses and just allow that to be a really gentle in road to the body? It’s this exploration of not only sex, certainly food, but all of the other things that we’re hungry for and our complicated relationships with our desire.

Dawn Serra: 33:32 Throughout the entire course, there’s this beautiful support that happens where people are witnessing each other’s really complicated stories, celebrating things that they do. We have group calls every week. They’re so intimate and so vulnerable, where we can really, really be in the ugly, complicated, messy, uncertain spaces and to not have to be there alone, and to find all of these ways by the end of the course to have lots of new questions to carry out into our lives, so that as the months unfold beyond the course, we start noticing all of these opportunities for pleasure, for honoring our hunger, for listening to our body, because we’ve started writing our way into some new stories over the course of the course.

Chris Rose: 34:30 The course starts July 22nd. Do you have to be in by July 22nd? How do you [crosstalk 00:34:36]

Dawn Serra: 34:36 You do have to be in by, actually I close it on July 21st because we have a pre-course call on that Sunday, and it’s all about safety. I think that’s something else that’s super important, and I will probably build it out in the years to come. But, something that I think gets missed in almost all of the conversations that I see specifically around sex and the erotic, is that safety has to come first. Safety has to come first. Our bodies literally can’t code things that might be pleasurable as pleasurable if we feel unsafe. It’s just not biologically possible. We’re wired for survival. Pleasure is nice to have once we’re sure we’re going to survive.

Dawn Serra: 35:23 We start the course with a pre-module, people get it a few days ahead of time or if they sign up on the very last day, which lots of people always do, then they get it that day and can work through it on their own time. But, we start with safety. July 21st is the cutoff. We have that pre-call where we talk about safety. Then it all kicks off on July 22nd. The thing that I really want people to walk away with is, this is not on us to do completely on our own. I don’t want to create something that contributes to this sense of, “I have to figure it out and pull myself up by my bootstraps and fix all the things myself.” That’s not how we heal.

Dawn Serra: 36:04 I want us to feel like we’re in this together, and that your pleasure is tied to my pleasure, is tied to everyone who’s listening’s pleasure. Let’s be in it together, a space to ask some new questions and practice some new things without having to feel like you’re doing it alone, to be able to say really, really scary things that maybe you can’t say other places, so that there’s just a little bit more space on the other side to feel into, “Oh, okay, maybe I am deserving. Maybe I am worthy. Maybe I can try these things, even if they feel scary.” Then, allow that to be something you curiously follow beyond the course.

Chris Rose: 36:48 Thank you for holding the space. This is an invitation for July 2019. If you’re listening to this down the road, hello future selves, use the links in the show notes page and you’ll come to all of Dawn’s beautiful work and offerings. There is always something going on at dawnserra.com.

Dawn Serra: 37:11 That’s very true.

Chris Rose: 37:13 The pleasure host with the most. We love you Dawn. It’s a pleasure to be in this field with you. Thank you for joining us once again on Speaking of Sex.

Dawn Serra: 37:21 Thank you so much for having me.

Chris Rose: 37:23 Thank you so much for listening. If you feel like this pleasure course is a good fit for you right now, I encourage you to use the link in the show notes page to explore Dawn’s course offering. It’s a super affordable course for the level of personal attention and group support you get on this five week journey of exploring your relationship to pleasure and your body. If this is a question that has been itching for you, I would definitely encourage you to check it out. As I said, I will be in that course with you exploring together and learning with you.

Chris Rose: 38:02 We will be back with you next week with another episode of Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. Meanwhile, find all of our archives and our online courses at pleasuremechanics.com. I am Chris from pleasuremechanics.com, wishing you a lifetime of pleasure. Cheers.

Opening Up Conversations About Monogamy and Non-Monogamy

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Ripe pomegranate split open with bright red seeds spilling out on background of dark wood table. Words read "Opening Up Conversations About Monogamy and Non-Monogamy Podcast Episode 341"

Have you ever talked about the boundaries of your relationship? What does monogamy mean to you? What commitments do you need in a relationship to feel safe and supported?

Here’s how to open up the vital conversations about monogamy, relationship boundaries and commitment. We guide you in engaging in thought experiments about non-monogamy as a safe way to explore the contours of your desires, boundaries and needs.

Be sure to listen to the episode on Explicit Monogamy Agreements and grab the interactive worksheet here.

Podcast Transcript for Episode 341

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 Hi, welcome back to Speaking of Sex with The Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are The Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we give honest, explicit and soulful advice about every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com, where you will find our complete podcast archive just waiting your listening enjoyment. Over 300 episodes are conveniently sorted for you in our sex index by topic, so you can immediately find the episodes you most crave. Welcome back. We are just home from a two week break. It has been a whirlwind of a month. Our daughter finished her first year of school. Meanwhile, I was in Philadelphia for the AASECT conference, the largest gathering of sexuality professionals, where I got to meet so many fabulous people and learn a ton with a great crowd and we will be bringing some of those voices to you on future episodes.

Chris Rose: 01:07 Then immediately after the conference I drove my rental car home and we loaded up our family vehicle and drove to Canada, where I have a tiny family cottage that has been in my family for five generations and it is an off-the-grid, rural slice of heaven. So we go up there every year as a family to unwind and unplug and get off the grid and really just soak in some deep relaxation and family time. And it was glorious.

Charlotte Rose: 01:42 There’s a lake, we didn’t mention the lake, so we just swim nonstop. It’s glorious. It’s my favorite place to be.

Chris Rose: 01:49 It’s in one of those regions of Canada that’s just full of glacial spring-fed Lakes. So the water is cold and clear and clean and there are loons at night and dragon flies and mosquitoes during the day. It’s not really heaven because there are still mosquitoes, but it is an amazing opportunity for us to really unplug and we did just that, and so we were gone for a couple of weeks. We are back. Happy summer. We hope you guys are doing well and we want to launch in today’s episode about non-monogamy thought experiments, about the conversations you can have either alone or with your friends or with your romantic partners, about what monogamy and exclusivity mean to you, what you value about them and why and how this might inform your relationship.

Chris Rose: 02:48 Part of this was informed … So as I was packing for the AASECT conference and packing my Pleasure Mechanics uniform and some sex toys for a conversation I was going to have with a partner, I kind of turned to Charlotte and I was like, “So, I know we haven’t talked about it in a long time, but if the opportunity arises and I get to play with someone, can I?” And we were, you know, packing for our family trip and dealing with our daughter’s end of school. And we were kind of like in this conversation all of a sudden. But it’s a conversation we have been in since the beginning of our relationship and it’s a conversation we have a lot of experience with, and so we want to open this conversation up with you all and encourage you to at least start thinking about the boundaries of your relationship. Why those boundaries are there, what they offer you, what they do for you, and if those boundaries are flexible or not.

Charlotte Rose: 03:47 My answer was yes, by the way. If it is enlivening and it’s not going to impact your connection to our family, then go for it.

Chris Rose: 03:57 That was really generous of you. I, of course, had no time or energy to think about such pleasures, but it was also fascinating to be in this crowd of sexuality professionals with so many queers and kinky folks and also just brilliant, intelligent minds, which is my biggest turn on. It was amazing to feel the permission to at least give myself the tantalizing taste of possibility. To pack my bags to go off on this solo trip, that was really a work trip. But to go off into the world alone for a couple of days, knowing I had erotic agency and also knowing that you trusted me, that you knew and you trusted any decision I make would be kind of filtered through the lens of my commitment to our family.

Chris Rose: 04:47 And so what are these conversations look like? Because for most of us, monogamy is an assumption and it’s the worst kind of assumption. It’s an implicit unspoken assumption in our culture. We get together in couples and all of a sudden if you have this idea of that you’re exclusive or monogamous or going steady or taking things seriously, and certainly once you’re engaged or married, we bring to that relationship a whole universe of assumptions and unspoken rules that we expect our partner to follow. But we get into trouble because it’s so unspoken, you might have a different set of rules assumed than your partner does. So these blurry lines of monogamy cause a lot of heartache and a lot of pain and also a lot of constriction and shutdown of potential in your life.

Chris Rose: 05:43 We did a great episode about this called explicit monogamy agreements where we really walk you through having an explicit spoken agreement that is present in an ongoing conversation together about the boundaries of your relationship. I will link to that in the show notes page and there is also a worksheet where we can guide you through that process in an interactive way. But the first part of this, and where I want to focus today, is on the thought experiment of non-monogamy. I love thought experiments. For me, thought experiments are all about using the power of the human mind to pregame, to pre-visualize potentials and possibilities for yourself and feel into how you feel about them. Notice your responses. Doing this can save us a whole lot of stress, heartache, and potentially loss of love in our lives because we can think through things ahead of time and we often don’t do this when it comes to our romantic relationships, our sex lives. It’s like the best use of fantasy for me. So what are your assumptions about monogamy?

Charlotte Rose: 07:02 This is such a huge question and everyone’s going to have a slightly different answer and you may never have fully examined what you assume monogamy means to you and your partner. For some people that will include or not include porn or flirting with strangers or sharing deep emotional things with exes or …

Chris Rose: 07:25 Or even friends. When we were looking at people’s definitions of monogamy, so often it came up the exclusive sharing of sexual and emotional connection with one person, and we need to examine this, right? What does sexual connection mean? As Charlotte said, is that flirting or with your barista? Is that sexual connection? Is that cheating? But the one that really trips me up is emotional connection because it is impossible to have emotional connection with one person. What a sad, limited life that would be, and also that’s just not how humans are built. We have human connections with …

Charlotte Rose: 08:04 The checkout person when you share a laugh, when you’re getting your groceries, like human connection, excuse me, emotional connection is everywhere. [crosstalk 00:08:14] is human. It’s everywhere. And to to stop having that with every human aside from your partner is seriously troubling.

Chris Rose: 08:22 For most people, we don’t worry about people’s like close friends from college or maybe their coworker friends and especially if you’re heterosexual, there’s this assumption that same sex friends are not as threatening, right? Like you can have all the emotional intimacy you want with your girlfriends, but if you get really close with one of your male coworkers, I’m going to flair because all of a sudden my position of exclusivity in your life is threatened. So we need to examine this. What do you mean when you say you’re in a monogamous relationship? What are the boundaries of that and what are the values you bring to that? Why are you in a monogamous relationship? What does that mean to you? What does it provide for you? What does it allow you to let go of?

Chris Rose: 09:12 For a lot of people, the idea of being in a devoted relationship creates a sense of security. It’s a sense of commitment. I have your back and you have mine. We are doing this life thing together for a lot of people that is then extended into the trust that because you are devoted to me, you will not give your energy or resources to others. You will not go too far with other people emotionally. You will not call other people before you call me. There’s this sense of being someone’s number one and only. Again, we need to examine that. We are not here to espouse non-monogamy or monogamy. We are in a 99.99% devoted exclusive relationship with one another. Charlotte and I, and we have been for 13 years but this has been flexible. We have experimented. We have opened up and then closed back down again. We have explored opening up our relationship to a third partner and opened our hearts and fell a little bit in love with someone together and then came up across the truth of what love and family meant for us wasn’t what it meant for this third person and we needed to close back down.

Chris Rose: 10:37 We have experimented with physical intimacy with other people in different ways over time, but always have come back to this, you and me, we’re doing life together. We’re building our life, we’re making our decisions together, we’ll building a family together.

Charlotte Rose: 10:52 For us, the family piece was really central and we felt like for how we wanted to parent, we wanted to keep our relationship closed during these early years of really tending to our child together. We’ve always been very clear that as things change, as she ages, perhaps we will open back up again as we have more energy and our child needs us less in a certain kind of time focused way. Also seasons are so important in relationships and being clear about when you’re shifting from one season to the next and having open communication with your partner and being honest with yourself is so important.

Chris Rose: 11:34 So we see in this how different values can emerge in these conversations. When Charlotte and I over the years started talking about … Because when we got together, so just to set the context, I was in a poly-kinky community in San Francisco, going to sex parties every other night and I had a kind of pod of lovers who were very important to me, and then Charlotte and I met. We fell in love. You had had more of a monogamous background.

Charlotte Rose: 12:00 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 12:01 With cheating.

Charlotte Rose: 12:02 Yes. I had not fully figured out how to use my sexual energy and I was a cheater.

Chris Rose: 12:08 I want to mention that because cheating is a form of non-monogamy we don’t name as non-monogamy. You can have a monogamy agreement and habitually break it and even enjoy breaking it for the thrill of breaking it, seeing what you can get away with until you get caught and that’s how a lot of people play this card. What is another option of being more transparent and open and honest and having these conversations even if you choose to stay monogamous. That’s what I really want to emphasize here is these conversations, these thought experiments aren’t just in preparation to open up. They are in … they’re essential for every relationship to get clear about how you are committed to each other, what your devotion means, what are your expectations, and so going back to the values piece, in my conversations with Charlotte, our primary value there was kind of family and keeping our life less chaotic.

Chris Rose: 13:09 I know from my experience when I have sex with people, I form emotional connections. I fall in love with people I touch and I know about myself that if I open myself up to sexual relationships, that is also opening myself up to emotional relationships. Right now, I want to focus my emotional energy on Charlotte, on our child, on this business, on myself, and my own physical healing I’m doing right now. But that doesn’t mean emotional exclusivity, right? I kind of have the intention of focus and devotion, but we have been able to do that while staying emotionally available and open and falling in love with new people in our community because we have this really explicit agreement that then doesn’t feel as scary, right? We can build relationships, we can explore that sense of attraction and desire and longing that can come up for people without it being threatening.

Charlotte Rose: 14:18 That’s a light falling in love, not like a super intense love falling in love, but more like a friend, I am so excited and interested in who you are. I want to spend time with you, like let’s connect. Just little falling in love. It’s a different set of things to address though on the same spectrum.

Chris Rose: 14:39 Right. So in these conversations about especially emotional intimacy, because sexual intimacy seems a little bit more cut and dry. Don’t kiss other people, don’t have your genitals stroked by other people and don’t penetrate other people. Those are rules that we can kind of be like, “Okay, that makes sense to me”. What does emotional intimacy look and feel like and where is your boundary? Because we all need boundaries. This isn’t about being boundary less-ness and just trusting your partner and being like, “Great, do whatever the fuck you want”. We all have to find our boundaries of what feels good and what starts to make me feel less safe, threatened, less stable.

Chris Rose: 15:20 A lot of this in the end comes back to time and attention and we’ve said this before, I’ll say it again. For us, love is so much the paying of attention, the focus of attention on one another and if you are in a relationship and you are starting to open it up and every time you look at the part your partner, they’re on their dating apps or answering texts with other people and they are not present with you anymore, that might start feeling really shitty.

Chris Rose: 15:51 If you are on a date and that’s like one breach of a monogamy boundary, right? If you’re on a date and you’re trying to focus your attention on one another and your partner’s just looking around the room and checking out all the hot bodies and commenting on everyone else’s hotness, you might hit a place where you’re like, “I want your eyes back on me. I want your attention back on me”, and we need to be able to find these boundaries, experience them in your body like, “Ooh, this isn’t feeling good anymore”. And then articulate, say out loud what you need to have that relationship feel secure again.

Chris Rose: 16:28 People are going to be so different in this realm and this is why conversations are so important to have, especially when it comes into fields like online porn, online chat, paying for custom porn, like there’s a brave new world of sexual exploration out there and you need to kind of make it clear. Are we doing this together? Do you have licensed to do it alone? Are we not doing it at all? Do we agree on these values? In these conversations, are your values aligning or is one of you like, “I don’t want you talking to other people. I don’t want you texting other people”, and you’re like, “But I love texting all my friends”. That might be a flag for you that you have some real excavation to do of do your values align in your relationship or what is one person’s fear or anxiety that is being triggered by these conversations? If you can address that other conversations become possible, right? Like if you can look at each other in the eye and say, “You are my priority, I want you to feel like my priority and if you ever don’t feel like my priority anymore, you let me know and we will recalibrate back. That is my commitment to you”. Right? What are your commitments to one another and are you on the same page there?

Charlotte Rose: 17:49 There’s a way having these open conversations can actually make you feel much, much safer because you can really be clear about what is true for both of you at this moment in time and where are you both and what is your commitment? That kind of clarifying conversation can be really enlivening because you’re truth telling and you’re making space for what you need and what you want and you’re agreeing to work together with what is. It can be just really exciting, instead of this sort of wandering and what are they doing and what are they really feeling? Are they feeling bored? Are they feeling like they want someone else when they’re out and about without me? I feel like anytime we’re really honest in relationship, it feels good. Even if it’s hard and uncomfortable, there’s still a really deep sense of satisfaction, I think, when we are telling the truth with each other.

Chris Rose: 18:45 So we need to consider the wide range of ways we can be in relationships with one another, ways we can be devoted and committed to one another. I personally would like to move away from the language of monogamy and non-monogamy because these are not two neat buckets we fit into. We all choose how we share physical intimacy, emotional intimacy, spiritual intimacy, intellectual connection with other people and how much space our primary relationship or our family relationships want to take up in our lives in different seasons.

Chris Rose: 19:25 With that permission to kind of do it your way in the way that makes sense for your life right now, we all have a lot of opportunity to get really clear about what we need and want from each other. We can consider possibilities like having occasional threesomes, so bringing in an occasional guest star into a relationship to heat it up a little bit. To add some newness, add some excitement. For some people that is a non-monogamous adaptation with a very monogamous core of a relationship. Other people go into polyamory, meaning loving multiple people, having multiple relationships at the same time and there are, again, countless ways of doing this and there’s a whole lexicon of vocabulary to describe all these different types of relationships.

Chris Rose: 20:21 Other people go into more like sexual exploration with an emotional exclusivity, so they’ll go together to sex parties or swingers events and have sexual excitation with other people. Maybe even share touch, maybe even have penetration with other people but then go home together and don’t continue those relationships. There is also the option of hiring sex workers and this is not something we are going to recommend or not recommend. Just again putting on the table as a possibility. Sex workers are professionals who can offer you specific sexual experiences and the transaction of money makes it really clear. You get a two hour experience and we do not have a relationship beyond that, in less than that has been negotiated too. For some people, if, say, you’re a bisexual in a relationship and every once in awhile you want a specific sexual experience that your partner can’t or won’t provide for you. It’s not even about being bisexual. That’s just an example.

Chris Rose: 21:29 We all have specific sexual experiences that our partner can’t or won’t provide for us. Queerness, fetishes, just very specific longings. Sex workers can be great for this. I recently … As I was packing for AASECT, I tapped into this truth for myself, like “I need a good flogging sometime soon”. Just like a really good powered out flogging just to kind of move some tension from my body, and Charlotte’s probably not the best person to give me that flogging.

Charlotte Rose: 21:59 I don’t have a lot of skills in that department. I have other skills. That one is not one I’m really proficient at.

Chris Rose: 22:05 Right, and if I’m looking at something of like stretching my limits, take me on this kind of endurance journey, I don’t want my sweet, caring wife to be the one to escort me on that journey. So for this, I might hire a pro dom who’s great at flogging and can push my boundaries with real safety and contain that relationship within that transaction so I don’t have to get on FetLife, start flirting with people, start sharing who I am, start building trust and intimacy with other people. I can skip that process by hiring someone. That doesn’t make it less intimate or less human or make that experience we’re sharing less real. It’s just very clearly defined. It has boundaries and this is the power of boundaries.

Chris Rose: 22:53 We often think of boundaries as something to keep away the things we don’t want, a fence to keep intruders out. But what boundaries also do is they contain a space. They create a zone where you know what is possible and you know what will and will not happen, and within that realm we can play more freely. This is the role of rules in sports. If you know what happens when you step on the soccer field, you can play as hard as you want because you know what will and will not happen. Everyone agrees to that and you go and you play the game. If we think of relationships as these living, breathing entities that need boundaries in order to thrive, we better get more deliberate about talking about what those boundaries are. What do you need for your relationship to be as vital and loving and supportive of you as possible? What do you need from yourself? What do you need from your partner? What do you need to stay out, what do you need to stay in and you can have this as an ongoing conversation. This happens over time and it will change.

Chris Rose: 24:07 I remember making some like kind of joke about another sexual partner at some point. We were just on a walk but we had like a year old baby and you were like, “Can you just not go there right now?” I said, “Honey, it’s just a joke. We joke about this all the time”, and you were like, “I am just so not in that zone. I have vomit and milk all over my shirt, like just love me here now”. I got that and we tabled the conversation for like a year and a half.

Charlotte Rose: 24:37 This new conversation about flogging, for instance. We have been exploring that in conversation and as a thought experiment because that is a departure from what we have been doing …

Chris Rose: 24:47 Right. For many months. It’s not one conversation.

Charlotte Rose: 24:50 Right. It’s several conversations of like, “How does that feel? What would feel okay? What wouldn’t feel okay?” Just really exploring it.

Chris Rose: 24:58 “Would you want to be there?”

Charlotte Rose: 24:59 “Would you not?” Yeah, it’s, it’s just really, really seeing where the boundaries are in conversation and in thought. It’s so helpful because some other things you’ve suggested, I’m like, “No, that feels terrible. I don’t know what to do that at all”. This one I was like, “I can see that, like that makes sense right now in our life”, without having an emotional connection, just a physical non-genital release. That makes sense.

Chris Rose: 25:24 I want to emphasize this power of the thought experiment. When you think about something in detail, when you take your brain into thinking about something, visualizing it, experiencing it as fully as possible in your brain, your brain doesn’t really know the difference between that and lived experience. This is one of the greatest tricks of the human brain I think I’ve ever discovered and what it allows for us is if we think through an experience, so say going to a sex club with your partner. Start thinking through that experience in detail as if it were real. What would you wear? Would you go to dinner first? What kind of sex club are you going to? Is it a special event or is it a general sex club? What do you do when you get there? Are you holding your partner’s hands? Do you stay together the whole time? What happens if he wanders off to go to the bathroom and doesn’t come back to you for 20 minutes? Do you start to worry?

Chris Rose: 26:28 Thinking it through as a fantasy, you will start feeling feelings in your body. If you have been working with us on the powers of interoception, of feeling that internal landscape of mindful sex, if you’re part of the mindful sex course, and have been playing with this with us, as you feel your feelings, you can start discerning your emotions and you get to that point in your fantasy and it’s all a yes up to that. You’re feeling good, you’re feeling excited, and then you get to that point where he wanders off for 15 minutes and doesn’t come back and you realize you’re panicking in your fantasy. You’re like, “Well, that doesn’t feel good. I’m starting to feel nervous. What if he’s found someone to play with that’s not me? What if something’s happened to him?” Right? You notice your fears come up in your thought experiment and then you can game them out. You can talk about them. “So if we go to the sex club, we’ve got to stay together and if one of us has to go to the bathroom, the other will be waiting right outside the bathroom for when you come back. At least for our first time, it would make me feel so much better if we really stuck together. Can you agree to that?” “Yeah, honey, that sounds awesome”.

Charlotte Rose: 27:36 Because these things can feel so much safer to do together at the beginning. You’re having an experience together. You’re seeing the same things. You’re hearing the same things. You can talk about them all afterwards.

Chris Rose: 27:45 Yeah, but that’s all not the point.

Charlotte Rose: 27:46 No, I know.

Chris Rose: 27:47 The point here is it’s so much easier to deal with that anxiety and fear in your thought experiment when you’re in your pajamas at home on your couch and realize that will be an issue for me. So let’s talk about it ahead of time. Then it is in the middle of your first experience. You think you’re having a great time. You find him half an hour later just chatting in the snack room, but you’re already freaked out and activated and want to go home. It derailed your experience. So going deep into the thought experiment of your relationship boundaries will give you so much information to then share with one another and even just information about yourself, you will realize who you are as an erotic being is very specific.

Chris Rose: 28:33 You might not care at all if your partner gives massages and cuddles with friends from college who they’ve been doing that for 20 years, but you might get really upset if he calls a friend in a crisis before he calls you, right? All of these things are very personal to who we are and who we are right now. To give yourself permission to be like, this is what I want a need. And then on those edges of comfort where your comfort’s a little bit gray and you’re a little bit hesitant or maybe those places where it feels really scary but exciting and thrilling as well, so scary, but in a way that opens you up. These are the places you can find growth, where you can find positive change, where you can find avenues to expand your capacity together.

Chris Rose: 29:24 Because the danger of unspoken monogamy, the danger of implicit boundaries are that they become an invisible cage and they cut off emotional connections, social connections, intellectual connections that are important to you in your life. We start doubting our attraction and questioning our desire rather than trusting it. And when your head turns and you see someone at a work event that feels really thrilling to you and your whole body wants to go talk to them, maybe we need to trust that and also trust our committed erotic agreement. For me, some of the most exciting, thrilling connection is the erotic connection without the sexual component. We’ll talk more about this on future episodes, but what happens when you allow yourself deep erotic connection with other humans without the distractions of sharing a sexual connection. There’s something there to explore.

Chris Rose: 30:31 All right, so we hope that this conversation has at least given you permission to think about the boundaries of your relationships, spoken and unspoken, to start carving out the rules and boundaries and requests that will make you feel more enlivened in your relationship and start getting rid of the boundaries that maybe don’t serve you. Start finding avenues of exploration together, so you don’t feel like exclusive devotion to one person is a cage, but rather the greatest choice you’re making in this moment. We love the word devotion for this. We don’t own one another. We don’t owe one another. Our relationship, we choose it. We choose it every day and we renew that choice even when it’s hard. That for me is thrilling. What a thrilling gift to receive someone else’s erotic devotion. Someone I love, someone I want to devote myself to.

Chris Rose: 31:29 That feels so much more bold and supportive than, you know, being locked in a monogamy cage because we’re married and that’s what it means to be married. It doesn’t mean anything anymore to be married really. It’s just a legal contract. Now more than ever, you have the permission and choice and cultural support. And again, let us remember that 50 years ago we did not have these choices. We did not have the cultural bandwidth to be in a non-monogamous marriage or to be in a polyamorous relationship or to be a swinger. These things were not permissible. They’re permissible now and there’s cultures to support you, there’s experts to support you. There’s entire communities organized around these choices. Now more than ever you get to do you. But the first part of that is exploring what that even means, what it looks like for you. What are your specific values around this question and what kind of relationship do you most want at this point in your life? And choosing that boldly. Yes, yes.

Charlotte Rose: 32:42 And just for the people who are thinking that this all sounds scary. It’s true that some of it can feel scary because it’s a little bit destabilizing to this idea that monogamy and that this like relationship will stay this way with these boundaries forever and ever. Of course, we like that idea, that feeling of stability, but the truth is that in our lives, attraction can happen, feelings can emerge and that can derail us and our relationship and take us by surprise. There’s something powerful about having these conversations ahead of time and giving ourselves possibilities to feel the full breadth of what it is to be human, to be desired, to long for others, to be excited and to feel a lot. There’s something powerful about choosing our relationships actively.

Chris Rose: 33:46 I’m reminded of the last thing we always say to each other in these conversations. After we open up a conversation about how our relationship is doing, “Are you feeling desire for anything else? Is the still working for you?” Because this is a conversation we’ll circle back to every six months or so. Like, “We still good? How are you feeling? Are you feeling tended to, what do we need? How do we make this better?” When we end these conversations of like, “Cool, so we’re going to kind of stay devoted. We’re not really feeling any changes are necessary. Let me know if that changes.” We all kind of always end these conversations with, “And if you feel anything new, please tell me”.

Chris Rose: 34:30 Having that open ended invitation of like, “If you’re feeling things that we need to talk about, please come to me”, is perhaps one of the most important relationship structures to have in place. An open invitation for conversation. If you’re feeling really attracted to someone at work, I love to hear about it and I want to hear about it as it’s developing, not when it’s at stage 108. If you’re feeling discontent and bored, I would love to know about that and maybe there’s some things we could change. If you’re feeling ignored, please tell me. This open ear is really important for me. Maybe it’s not for you. I don’t know. I don’t want to say anything’s important for everyone. For us it’s been really important because it’s allowed us to change and grow for 13 years. It’s allowed us to experiment and make mistakes and then be resilient and still have this foundation of devotion under us.

Chris Rose: 35:41 It also allows for me allowing myself to have thoughts. At the conference I met a pro dom, so we had had this whole conversation about flogging and then I was having a conversation and all of a sudden I was talking to someone who was a pro dom and offering me a flogging for a certain price. I was like, “Holy shit, how did this happen?” I checked in in that moment. I knew I had permission from Charlotte, so it wasn’t this taboo thing and I checked in. I was like, “Yeah, no thanks. I’m cool”. But having that permission made it not something scary for me to think about and for something to explore and we need to do everything we can so sexuality is less scary to explore. If you want to have a thriving sex life with each other, open conversation is the foundation.

Chris Rose: 36:33 Whatever you think your devotion style is, whether or not you’re ever interested in opening up your relationship, whether or not you’re ever interested in going to a sex party, have these conversations about boundaries, expectations and assumptions. It will only serve you. We would love to know your thoughts about this episode or anything else you’re thinking about in the realm of sexuality. Check out the show notes page of this episode for links to the monogamy agreement episode and for the option of downloading our worksheets so we can guide you through this conversation. If you love this show and want to support our work, please become a supporting member at patreon.com/pleasure mechanics. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N. patreon.com/pleasure mechanics. The link is in the show notes page and your sustaining donation helps us do this work in this world and spread the love, share awesome sex-positive resources, and make this world a more pleasurable place.

Chris Rose: 37:36 Join us in that mission at patreon.com/pleasure mechanics. Also to remind you all of our podcasts archives are at pleasuremechanics.com where you will also find our online courses when you are ready to up level your erotic skills. Come on over to our forever home, pleasuremechanics.com. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 37:58 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 37:59 We are The Pleasure Mechanics …

Charlotte Rose: 38:01 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.