Pleasure Mechanics

  • Start Here
  • Podcast
  • Sessions
  • Online Courses
  • Index

Sexual Attitude Adjustments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

What attitudes do you bring to your sex life? What are your attitudes about gender roles, power dynamics, desire, body parts, hygiene, physical acts, desire, love, pleasure and all of the other factors that influence your sexuality?

All of us need some serious attitude adjustments when it comes to sexuality- to move away from the attitudes that create struggle and suffering and towards new attitudes that allow a more sane relationship to the force of sexuality in our lives.

If you want resources and support around building a new relationship with your sexuality, join us in the Mindful Sex Online Course. Discover how to slay distractions so you can pay attention to all of the pleasure available to you.


Transcript of Podcast Episode: Sexual Attitude Adjustments

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:05 We are the Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we bring you soulful and explicit conversations about every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com where you will find all of our online resources including our complete podcast archive, our online courses and our free offering to you the Erotic Essentials, our free online course you can get started with tonight at pleasuremechanics.com/free. If you love this show and want to support the work we do, remember that we are 100% supported by our listeners and community. We are a sponsor free show, which means we rely on you to show us the love at pleasuremechanics.com/love. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/love where you will find ways to show your support for this show.

Chris Rose: 01:04 On today’s episode, we are wrapping up Mindful Sex May, our little miniseries where we explored some of the themes and applications of this framework we call mindful sex, bringing the skills of mindfulness into the tricky terrain of our erotic experience.

Chris Rose: 01:25 And on this episode we want to talk about the attitudes we bring to sex. Attitudes are so important for our human experience, but they often go unexamined. And in the classic mindfulness literature, Jon Kabat-Zinn talks about the attitudes of mindfulness being the soil in which your meditation grows. It’s the conditions and the environment for our experiences. It turns out our attitudes are so much about what we bring to life that then drives our behaviors and our experiences. Attitudes are so important, but when it comes to sexuality, so few of us have ever had the opportunity to really examine the attitudes that are driving our sexual behaviors and experiences. So we want to take this time to talk about attitudes, where our attitudes come from, how we can change our attitudes if we want to and as we go into this territory, I really just want to say we are doing this as your friends at the table with you.

Chris Rose: 02:37 As we talk about kind of the more value based things or even some would say spiritual elements of sexuality. It’s very important for me to stay practical and recognize that we are all in this conversation together. We’ve been studying sex for a lot of years. We are dedicating our lives to this conversation, but you are the expert on you, your attitudes are your own and we’re not going to tell you how to think or feel. We’re just going to open up a conversation and ask a whole lot of questions.

Charlotte Rose: 03:13 And then leave it to you to decide what is best for you and what you choose to shift and change or what you notice. It is just so exciting to have the potential to shift our experiences, our sexual experiences by exploring this terrain and that’s why we’re having this conversation. The potential of being able to shift our sexual experiences by just taking a little bit of time and exploring and examining this for ourselves and seeing if there’s anything we want to shift can be so powerful and effective and efficient because we’re interested in you having an amazing time in bed and we hope this little conversation will be able to open something up for you.

Chris Rose: 03:55 We’re interested in you having an amazing time in bed, but also having an amazing relationship with your sexuality as you walk around in the world. And throughout this conversation, as we talk about sexual attitudes, we’re going to be talking both about what we bring to the sex act and our attitudes about the nitty gritty of sex, body fluids, sex acts, but also about sexuality, about gender roles, about desire, about power dynamics. And so let’s start with a conversation. What is an attitude in the first place? What do we mean when we say attitude. As I like to do, I started at the dictionary, and the dictionary reminds us that an attitude is a settled way of feeling or thinking that drives your behavior. A settled way. When we look at that, we think about the fact that attitudes are perspectives and beliefs about the world that we take for granted.

Chris Rose: 04:59 They’re kind of installed beliefs that we are no longer questioning and attitudes are influenced by both our temperament, which we can’t change. Kind of who you are, your personality, your basic makeup. But attitudes are also largely driven by values, beliefs and experiences. Values, beliefs, experiences and information. Right? Our perceived information. And so let’s take an example that doesn’t have anything to do with sex and look at attitudes. Where they come from, how they influence our experience. What is your attitude towards the beach? Charlotte. The beach.

Charlotte Rose: 05:41 Mine is a deep love and so much … I’ve had so many delicious times at the beach, so much family time over the history of my life. Joyful times of connections. So much play.

Chris Rose: 05:53 So you want to go to the beach?

Charlotte Rose: 05:55 I love the beach. I long for the beach. I crave the beach.

Chris Rose: 05:58 Okay. Ask me how I feel about the beach.

Charlotte Rose: 06:01 How do you feel about the beach?

Chris Rose: 06:02 I like the beach, but I also struggle on the beach. I don’t really love being hot. I get really overheated in the sun. I don’t love swimming as much as you do, so I like the beach, but I don’t really want to spend a week at the beach. Someone else might hate the beach. I hate it. I hate being in the sun. I hate the sand. I don’t like swimming. Why would I ever go to the beach? That’s a different attitude. Someone else might be afraid of the beach because all they know of the beach is-

Charlotte Rose: 06:31 Jaws.

Chris Rose: 06:32 Jaws.

Charlotte Rose: 06:33 Do you know how many people I’ve talked to that have seen that film and are terrified to be in deep water because of what they saw in that film and how it affected their psychology and experience?

Chris Rose: 06:46 Right. Okay, so this is a perfect example because some of this is temperament. Some of this is you like being hot more than I like being hot. Cool. [inaudible 00:06:56]. Great. Some of this is experience. You had great family times at the beaches, full of fun and laughter. My family fought at the beach. My family got in violent fights at the beach. Okay, so we have our childhood experience, our learned experience, our associations. What emotional associations do we have with this environment with those sensory cues. And then some of it is misinformation. If I step foot in the water, a shark is going to bite my foot off. You might believe that with such conviction, you’re not even going to look at the ocean, let alone ever put your toe in.

Charlotte Rose: 07:35 Or even if you know that’s not true, you still feel it to be true and still feel terrified,

Chris Rose: 07:40 Right. You might feel terrified and from that terror you could either choose to say, I don’t have any need to go to the beach, or you might choose to learn about the ocean. Visit the ocean. Have a friend hold your hand while you step your toe in. Watch the other people swimming. Gather some more information that gives you new evidence and that might help you start shifting your attitude towards the beach, towards the ocean, to the point where you might discover you love to swim and overcoming this fear was the best thing you ever did for yourself.

Chris Rose: 08:16 Okay, so as we have this conversation, think about how you feel about the beach, dear listener, and what factors might influence your set of attitudes towards the beach. And even when we say the beach walking by the beach is different than sitting in the sand. And that’s different than swimming in the ocean. That’s different than surfing. That’s different than scuba diving. So as we approach this and recognize that with all of these different things, our attitudes drive our relationship, our experience, our behaviors.

Chris Rose: 08:50 You don’t become a surfer if you’re afraid of the water. All right, let’s bring this into the sexual realm. What are your attitudes about sex? That’s a huge question, but we can start there. What are your like meta level attitudes towards sex?

Charlotte Rose: 09:09 And then how do you feel about your body, your genitals, fluids, receiving oral sex, giving oral sex?

Chris Rose: 09:20 What are your attitudes towards kink and fetishes? What are your attitudes towards gay people? What are your attitudes towards loyalty and fidelity and monogamy? What are your attitudes towards how frequently sex should happen in a relationship and sex out of obligation?

Charlotte Rose: 09:41 What are your attitudes about initiating sex and whether that should or should not come from a woman or a man or …

Chris Rose: 09:49 And you’ve cracked the gender thing. So what are your attitudes about what a man should be and what a woman should be in bed? What are your attitudes about what is natural when it comes to sex? All of these questions, each one of them can open a whole universe of attitudes. And let’s zoom in for a moment and make this really practical and notice again how our attitudes about any one of these facets about sexuality might drive our behaviors might drive our experiences and may influence our struggles. Because that’s a piece of this too, is I get all of these e-mails from you guys articulating your sexual struggles and you go right to the behaviors, to the lived experience. And that makes total sense.

Chris Rose: 10:36 When I initiate sex and my wife rolls over without a word, I feel heartbroken. That’s the experience of initiation and rejection. And sometimes we need to swim upstream a bit and go to the behaviors. How did you initiate sex? Sometimes we need to go upstream even more and look at the attitudes. What are your attitudes about initiation? What are your attitudes about frequency of sex and what is your wife’s attitudes and how are they interacting? When we look at these struggles, we notice that so many of them are driven by attitudes, and then we start looking at our sexual attitudes collectively and we realize that our culture has a really bad attitude when it comes to sex.

Chris Rose: 11:23 So we’ll zoom out in a second, but I want to do a specific example. Let’s think about oral sex because it’s a charged one for a lot of people. What is your attitude about giving oral sex? What is your attitude about receiving oral sex? Are they different? Are they the same?

Chris Rose: 11:43 When you think about your attitude, is it influenced by factors like, what is your attitude about genitals? Right? So we zoom out. Do you think are beautiful and precious and this amazing holy part of the body that deserve to be worshiped? Or do you think genitals are kind of gross, stinky, smelly, and really don’t really want to be looked at and they should just be wiped clean and left in the dark?

Chris Rose: 12:10 Are you somewhere in between or do you actually kind of feel both of those ways? A lot of times in our sexual culture we’re confronted with this paradox of feeling two very different ways about the same thing and we’ll talk a little bit more about where that comes from. What are your attitudes about sexual fluids? We did a episode a really long time ago about oral sex and we were talking about how facials are seen as degrading because semen is seen as gross. And so to put semen on someone’s face is an insult, a degrading insult. How dare you. You would only do that to a woman you disrespect. An attitude about semen drives that conversation. And we kind of said in the podcast, we believe semen is holy and sacred. It’s a fluid that comes from our body. It creates life. It is an expression of pleasure and joy.

Chris Rose: 13:13 And if you love the person who semen is going on your face, maybe it can be seen as an act of honoring and celebration and it could be really hot for people. Have we considered that option?

Charlotte Rose: 13:25 But that would only be the case if both people were holding it in that way. If one person is holding it in one way and the other one is seeing it as a hot act of degradation, then that’s …

Chris Rose: 13:37 You’ll have a different experience in that moment. And couples get in fights because of this, and this is what we want to show is that your attitudes will drive your behaviors and when you have attitudes that are implicit, meaning unspoken, unnamed, unseen, that can be really dangerous because your husband thinks you’re having a great time, you’re having fun, you’re getting the best blowjob of your life.

Chris Rose: 14:01 He’s really into it. He ejaculates. It lands on your cheek and you feel degraded, debased. Like you’re bringing all of your attitudes towards that moment and he’s bringing his attitudes of like, this is fun. This is hot. Oh, like I’m going to blow my load. This is going to be great. She’s going to love it. I get the porn star moment. And that disconnect in that moment of your attitudes and all of the unspoken values is what causes that fight, that struggle, and that e-mail to Pleasure Mechanics, right? So what do we do with this? So have we talked about oral sex enough? So we talked about how do you feel about the genitals? How do you feel about the fluids? How do you … what is your attitude about giving and receiving? If you have the attitude that other people’s pleasure comes first, I should be serving others, there’s far too many things to do to focus on my own pleasure; lying back, spreading your legs and relaxing for 15 minutes while someone licks your clitoris might be really challenging.

Chris Rose: 15:02 If you have the attitude of like, I deserve pleasure, it’s good for me, I’m going to feel better afterwards. This is going to help me sleep better. I’m going to feel great tomorrow. My husband loves it. Look how fun this is. That’s a different attitude when you spread your legs, right? So our attitudes about things like giving and receiving, that is an attitude that affects our entire life. How we feel at the holidays. How we feel on our birthday. How we feel at the PTA meetings, at our jobs. What are you worthy of giving and receiving and like that conversation can be a life changer.

Charlotte Rose: 15:42 I just want to name again that they are invisible. And so to make this visible and to have conversations and really think about it, is really powerful because I think we don’t even know how much our own attitudes influence and drive so much of our life.

Chris Rose: 16:00 Well, I’m getting specific. Because if it’s hard for you to receive oral sex, is it because you fundamentally aren’t feeling worthy of receiving that time and attention? Or is it because you think your vulva is disgusting? Or is it because you’re worried you’re going to ejaculate on your husband’s face? Like what is the why? What is the driving attitude behind the behavior of saying no to oral sex?

Charlotte Rose: 16:24 Because for you at the beach, if you bring a structure to keep you cooler, like we got ourselves a fancy tent and you can sit under the tent, you enjoy it so much more. And if somebody can know that they would just like to take a shower before receiving oral sex and then they can really relax into it because their concern about hygiene is dissolved so they can be present for it. That is a really great piece of information. Like we can make adjustments to our behavior once we look at and understand our experience.

Chris Rose: 16:57 Totally. And I used to have the story that I hated playing in the sand and once we got that sunshade I realized I like playing in the sand. I don’t like the hot sand but cool me down, bring me a bucket of water and I will play all day. So what are the attitudes that are driving the behaviors that are creating both your peak sexual experiences and your sexual struggles? And let’s look at these attitudes and behaviors both through an individual lens, like your temperament, your lived experiences, your accumulated experiences that have reinforced your attitudes over and over again. But let’s also look at it through a cultural lens because when we talk about the meta level attitudes that drive our experience of sexuality, we need to look culturally at our attitudes about sex and how sex is presented to us.

Chris Rose: 17:57 And the fundamental way sex has been presented to us for the past few thousand years in Western culture, at least, is sex as sin. Sex as danger. Sex as the road to ruin. But also within the bounds of marriage. It can be the most sacred, holy, precious thing that should be guarded at all costs. So again, that built-in paradox of sex as sin and danger, but also something holy and precious that needs to be protected.

Chris Rose: 18:32 We have a schism built into our attitudes about sex. And so how does that drive your attitude as a woman of like, do you want sex or do you not want sex? What makes you a good girl? Is it good to want sex or is it good to not want sex? Can you want sex but not too much sex? Is it about the kind of sex you want? If you want a certain kind of sex, what does that mean about you as a person? We have all of these moral crises built into our attitudes about sex primarily because of these cultural attitudes about sex and because of the misinformation. The lack of clear information about sexuality can drive these negative attitudes and this fear.

Chris Rose: 19:18 If the only movies you saw about the beach showed sharks, jellyfish, pollution, sand bugs, storms, and tsunamis, beach real estate wouldn’t be worth much and this is how it is with sexuality. The myths of gender roles, the myths of things like virginity. Virginity is a myth. It’s a culturally constructed myth. How much struggle has been created by the attitudes around your first time? Was it good enough? What did your … Instead of thinking about a sexual debut season where you have a coming of age and you have many sexual experiences that define your sexual debut. That’s a totally different attitude towards sexual coming of age.

Charlotte Rose: 20:15 And in films we have seen so little depictions of female pleasure, it’s as if our culture doesn’t value it.

Chris Rose: 20:23 I called you in the other day because I was watching Netflix and there was a hot scene of like a woman getting oral sex and having pleasure and I was like come see this. It’s amazing. Right? And it wasn’t even that amazing of a scene, but just to see two characters in a show having oral sex where her pleasure is centered, was mind blowing. And it makes you realize what you see a lot of. So what attitudes are reinforced by our sexual narratives? Men want sex all the time. Women aren’t really that into sex. Men are the ones that initiate sex.

Chris Rose: 20:56 Sex means intercourse with a male ejaculation finishing it. We have built so much mythology around misinformation.

Charlotte Rose: 21:06 That we think it’s true.

Chris Rose: 21:08 Right. And so much of this podcast is breaking down these myths. Revealing deeper truths. But here’s the thing about attitudes. It’s very hard to change someone else’s attitude. It’s easier to change your own. And so by listening to this podcast, you are already in the process of debunking myths, gathering new information, being in the conversation, being an inquiry about your sex life. And I bow to you, I congratulate you because most people, it’s too scary to ever even start thinking about their sex life. And so they just struggle in silence.

Chris Rose: 21:46 That’s kind of the default mode is I am broken. I am too harmed to ever enjoy this again. I’ll do the best I can. I’ll struggle in silence. So by listening to this podcast, by being part of this community, you are taking a step to change sex culture and to change your own sexual attitudes. And I’d love to hear from you. If you have stories about how something you heard on this podcast or something this podcast inspired you to do, then changed your attitudes about sex and created watershed change in your life, I would love to hear some of those stories and I do hear some of those stories. I love those aha moment testimonials. So keep them coming. chris@pleasuremechanics.com. You can always reach us. Or charlotte@pleasuremechanics.com, if you want to reach her directly.

Chris Rose: 22:37 So knowing that it’s so much easier to change your own attitudes then someone else’s. As you look through your sexual attitudes and notice how many of your attitudes are based in misinformation, in myths, in cultural values that may not be your own, those are the attitudes you might want to recalibrate and you might discover you have attitudes when it comes to sex that are firmly based in your own values that feel supportive and you’re like, yeah, I like that attitude. That’s a good attitude about sex and it brings me the behaviors and experiences I want.

Chris Rose: 23:17 There are attitudes you might want to recalibrate. So how do we do that? The biggest piece I think is naming them out loud and recognizing where this was acquired from. Where did you learn this attitude? And the more specific you can be, the better. Because sometimes you learned it in a very specific moment and that moment was so installed in your neurology that it became part of your operating system in an invisible way. It’s like you got software installed. It’s like a virus. Really. It’s like software installed that then is operating in the background and you don’t even know it’s running. So a dialogue about your boobs being ugly. You might have acquired that in a very specific moment of cruelty in your teenage years where someone was trying to hurt you and it hurt you so deeply. You’ve spent your life covering up your breasts and thinking that they were not worthy of anyone’s attention, let alone your own pleasure.

Chris Rose: 24:22 Is that how you really feel about your boobs? Like is that attitude accurate? Is that based in the values of how you feel about your body? We can look at these things. We can ask these hard questions and then be like, fuck that. No. And as queer people, we’ve had to do this. This is part of coming out as queer forces you to articulate parts of your identity and parts of your life that for other people are implicit. The assumptions about your sexuality no longer apply. So you have to do some work to articulate it for yourself. And we can all do this work and this would make a great bridge into June, which is pride month, and it’s the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots that really set into motion the modern Gay Liberation Movement and what The Gay Liberation Movement has brought all of us is a vast freedom of expression.

Chris Rose: 25:17 There’s more opportunity now than ever to be who you want to be and to express your sexuality authentically. And the more of us that do that, the more we can revel in the beautiful diversity and fascinating strangeness of human sexuality. I’m on a tangent. Oh, so are these attitudes yours? Let’s start by asking that. Do you believe this? Is it true? Is it in alignment with the rest of your values? If not, let’s recalibrate.

Charlotte Rose: 25:51 Right. Do you want to choose the ones that you already have? Knowing they may be from your family. From culture. From myth and misinformation. Do you choose them? Or do you want to shift them and potentially shift the trajectory of your life? Because that’s what’s at stake or that’s what’s possible.

Chris Rose: 26:12 So how do you shift an attitude? Part of it is naming it, being very specific about it and then gathering alternative evidence and experiences. So some of this is gathering new data, right? Like learning the facts about your sexuality can be incredibly liberating. The fact that there is no hymen to break changes what we think about virginity. The fact that the male libido is no higher than the … The fact that men aren’t more interested in sex as a default is really interesting for people to know and might be really, really important for your attitudes about sex and how you feel about your attitudes, right?

Chris Rose: 27:06 Because there’s the attitudes and then there’s our judgment of our attitudes. So gathering new information, gathering more accurate information and gathering social proof. So for me, at some point I recognized that I had a lot of internalized fat phobia. I was already standing naked in front of groups of people. I was already going to sex parties. I was already being loved in my body. It was like that jaws moment where I was like, I know that my body is okay. I know that I’m beautiful, I know I’m worthy of pleasure, I know my body’s capable of pleasure and yet still I have this attitude. It’s still there. I still feel it flaring. I still feel it causing me discomfort. And so one of the things I did is I chose to look at a lot of fat bodies. I filled my social feed with fat bodies. I did a lot of reading about fat liberation, where fat phobia comes from and I got social proof. I looked at other people’s fat bodies and thought you are beautiful. And by looking to someone else I could then feel it more accurately for myself.

Chris Rose: 28:18 So gaining experiences and new knowledge and then installing them as your new truth. And that takes time. Like we have to reinforce, right? We have lots of experiences that reinforce our attitudes and it’s really easy to say like, I knew it would be this way. I knew this would happen. The experiences that interrupt your attitudes can be harder to pay attention to, because they feel like an anomaly. But if that anomaly keeps happening over and over, then you get new evidence and that experience can then reinforce the behavior driven by the attitude and your attitude starts to shift, because your reality has shifted. What is true for you has shifted. So the example I gave about a woman so ashamed and afraid of her own vulva and thinking it’s disgusting, not wanting her husband to go down on her, that’s a real example from my inbox and I’ve been in e-mail dialogue with this woman as she has gone through the process of changing her attitude.

Chris Rose: 29:22 And this was the process. It started by listening to this podcast, recognizing that her husband has been wanting to pleasure her, has been wanting to touch her and look at her vulva, and she has been saying no for a decade because of her attitude about her vulva. It wasn’t his attitude. It was her own attitude. She recognized that. She recognized where it came from. Wrote me very beautiful stories about where it came from and where she learned this. [inaudible 00:29:55] that she disagreed. She went on Instagram and started following the Vulva Gallery, which is like watercolor images of vulvas. So rather than going right to photographs, she went to watercolors and started appreciating the beauty and reading other women’s stories about their vulvas.

Chris Rose: 30:12 And she is baby stepping her way up towards that moment where she can receive and that might still be a year away. That might still be two years away. I don’t know. But she’s in the process. She’s taking the steps to change her attitude by gathering new experiences and information and aligning her attitudes with her values. She was able to say, “I value the human body. I value for the female body. I value my children who were born through my vagina. I value what it can bring me. So if I value it, why am I hating it? Like that doesn’t make sense to me. I’m going to fix my attitude .” And these things are a process. It takes time, but it’s so worth it.

Charlotte Rose: 31:01 Yeah. It takes energy, intention, believing that something else is possible and knowing that you can take step-by-step to shift your internal landscape to create a different reality and that’s exciting. It is a bit of work, but even that work can be pleasurable or interesting or illuminating.

Chris Rose: 31:23 And it can feel liberating. A lot of people talk about feeling like weight dropping off of them or shackles or scales or a lot of people use imagery of kind of an exfoliation that happens when you look at your sexual attitudes, because we realize how limiting our sexual attitudes have been. How we’re taught, how we’re trained to fear sex. To be scared of it. To mistrust it. To question people’s motivations for wanting it. To think of it as something like lesser than. And even us, even us listeners of this podcast, even us producers of this podcast, fighting so hard to change the sexual culture, we still live in a sexual culture that’s going to reinforce certain attitudes.

Chris Rose: 32:16 And so it’s going out there kind of like an attitude warrior. Like being willing to confront other people’s shitty attitudes over and over again. Like you’re going to confront your friends who are complaining about their belly fat and you have to be the one to say, “I love my belly and give it a nice rub.” You have to interrupt other people’s attitudes too. But that’s next level.

Chris Rose: 32:40 Let’s all start with our own because yes, as I said, it’s much easier to change your own attitudes. We have all been given a lot of shitty attitudes by our sex culture. A lot of attitudes that create internal struggle, that creates shame and doubt and fear, and that is the sexual experience these attitudes create for us, right? They create behaviors that create experiences that leave us wanting more. That leave us longing for something different. And if we want a different experience, we have to swim upstream and start recalibrating our attitudes.

Chris Rose: 33:14 Yes, let’s do it together. Let’s do it over time. Be in touch with me. I’d love to hear about your responses to this episode and what are some of the attitude shifts that have taken place for you over time?

Charlotte Rose: 33:28 Or that you want to shift? Where are you now? Where do you want to be? And know that each time any one of us does any of this work, it shifts things for the people around us because when somebody becomes okay with their belly fat or chooses to feel like their vulva is a beautiful place, beautiful space, that that does impact and influence the people that we speak with, the people around us, so it makes a difference for all of us as we slowly undo this tangle that culture has given us.

Chris Rose: 34:05 You become living evidence, right? And we need more living evidence of new sexual realities, of new sexual options and models, and of sexual values.

Charlotte Rose: 34:18 Where there’s more permission and pleasure possible for each of us. That that is what we want for ourselves and our communities.

Chris Rose: 34:27 Right. If you think of the sexual values, if you could build an ideal sex culture from the ground up, and this is a question I love asking people, what would an ideal sex culture look like? If you could build an ideal sex culture, what would the values of that sex culture be? What would you teach the children about their sexuality and then you can look at how aligned are those values with my attitudes about my sexuality. It’s much easier to think other people’s sexualities are sacred and beautiful and worthy. Is yours? Is your body? Are your desires okay? What are your attitudes about your sexuality and your lived experience? Are those attitudes accurate? What are they based in? Let’s all do this inventory and notice how much liberation is possible and how efficient this can be. I really believe this. It can be one of the most efficient interventions to change your attitude, change the behaviors, and notice a new experience.

Chris Rose: 35:29 All right. If you are interested in practicing mindful sex and deepening in these practices with us over time, become part of our Mindful Sex course. You’ll find it at pleasuremechanics.com/mindful. And the Mindful Sex course really invites you in to the practices and mindsets of a new relationship with your sexuality. A nonjudgmental relationship with sexuality that opens the space for a lot more presence, enjoyment, and paying attention to the pleasure that is available to you.

Chris Rose: 36:04 If you ever feel distracted during sex, if you feel like you can’t stay present during arousal, you are so not alone. These are struggles all of us have and there are practices we can do to build these skills and develop our capacity to stay present and pay attention to the pleasure that is available to us. You’ll find the Mindful Sex course at pleasuremechanics.com/mindful. You can support this show and show your love for us at pleasuremechanics.com/love, and our forever home, as you’ve guessed is pleasuremechanics.com. Come and visit us anytime. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 36:47 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 36:47 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 36:49 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Male Orgasm and Arousal

A collection of our most popular podcast episodes about male orgasm and arousal. These episodes focus on the erotic experience of bodies with penises who have been socialized as male. We honor and cherish all human bodies, and strive to create inclusive and accessible resources.

Female Orgasm and Arousal

A collection of our most popular episodes about female orgasm and arousal. These episodes focus on the erotic experience of people with vulvas who have been socialized as women. We honor and cherish all human bodies, and strive to create inclusive affirming resources for all.

Interview Episodes

From sex therapists to legendary artists, we have had the honor of interviewing amazing individuals about their work in the field of sexuality. We are grateful for every human who has joined us for conversation on the Speaking of Sex podcast.

  • Better Sex Through Mindfulness with Lori Brotto : Free Podcast Episode

Ready to dive into The Pleasure Mechanics resources? Find all of our best resources, curated and organized by topic, in our Members-Only Resource Pods – just ONE benefit of joining The Pleasure Pod! Join Us!


Some of our most popular Speaking of Sex interview episodes:

Episode #052: Elle Chase (a.k.a. Lady Cheeky) Interview

Episode #079: The Surprising Science of Sex With Emily Nagoski, Part 1

Episode #080: The Surprising Science of Sex With Emily Nagoski, Part 2

Episode #220: Sex and Disability with Andrew Gurza

Episode #269: Esther Perel Interview on Sex, Power & Desire

Episode #265: Vibrator Nation Interview with Lynn Comella, Ph.D.

Episode #275: Karen Duffy on Pleasure, Pain and Purpose

Episode #278: Sex Positive Families with Melissa Carnagey

Episode #296: Tell Me What You Want: Exploring Sexual Fantasy with Justin Lehmiller, Ph.D.

Episode 301: Sex Love Liberation with Ev’yan Whitney

Episode 305: The Path To Female Orgasm with Vanessa Marin

Episode 306: Remaking Manhood Interview with Mark Greene

Episode 307: Joey Soloway on Desire, Freedom and Play

Episode 339: Not Always In The Mood – Interview With Sarah Hunter Murray

Episode 345: Joseph Kramer Interview Part 1 – The Origin Of Erotic Massage

Episode 346: Joseph Kramer Interview Part 2 – Sharing Erotic Massage With The World

Episode 353: Passionate Transitions with Lucie Fielding

Episode 366: Taking Sexy Back : An Interview with Alexandra Solomon

Learning To Orgasm With Vanessa Marin

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

Sex Therapist Vanessa Marin joins us to continue our conversation about female orgasm. This episode continues our conversation about female orgasm with Vanessa Marin, started on Episode 303, The Path To Female Orgasm.

The struggle for female orgasm is a cultural issue, not a personal failure. It is essential to locate the conversation about female orgasm in a historical context and recognize that we are just getting started. Just starting to undo the misinformation, myths and violence that have kept people disconnected from their bodies and orgasmic potential. Just starting to map our true erotic potential. Just starting to create a culture that honors and celebrates ALL bodies.

In the mean time, many of us have a lot of learning – and unlearning – to do in order to learn how to orgasm, enjoy orgasms more and explore what our bodies are capable of!

Go to VMTherapy.com/PleasureMechanics and sign up to receive Vanessa’s upcoming video series about female orgasm – if this is an area of struggle in your sex life, join Vanessa to clear up the myths and get set on the path to enjoying your orgasmic abilities.

Vanessa Marin’s Finishing School is a comprehensive online course designed for women who are struggling to have their first orgasm or to have orgasms consistently. If you are ready to explore your relationship to pleasure and orgasm, we highly recommend this course. Check it out to see if it feels right for you.

The men in our community have also had great success with Vanessa’s course for men: The Modern Man’s Guide To Ending Performance Pressure


Transcript for Podcast Episode: Learning Orgasm with Vanessa Marin

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 today’s episode I am thrilled to welcome back Vanessa Marin. Vanessa is a licensed psychotherapist out of Los Angeles, California and she runs some of the best online trainings in sexuality. I have found. Her Finishing School is a comprehensive course about female orgasm and she also offers an amazing course for men about performance pressure, so we are thrilled to welcome Vanessa back. She is getting ready to open up her Finishing School live experience once more for 2019 and we want to invite you on board to that. If female orgasm is something you struggle with, this might be a great course for you right now. For everyone else, this conversation about orgasm and our struggles with orgasm is going to be useful because this is a conversation we are all in. The topic of female orgasm is really a microcosm of so many of the issues of sexual culture and sexual norms and gender and bodies that we are untangling together on this show.

Chris Rose: 01:20 So no matter what your relationship to female orgasm is, there will be something for you here in this episode as I dive in with Vanessa about the hows and whys of female orgasm and we talk about pleasure and orgasm as a learned skill. This metaphor of learning pleasure like we would learn an instrument or a sport or a game or a language is so important for us all to embrace and get behind, and stop talking about sex as something that should just be coming naturally. And if we’re struggling then we’re broken. That’s simply not true. It is a set of skills we can all practice together and that’s why we are all here on this podcast, in this community, in this conversation, globally about how we can do better with our sexuality and our relationship to pleasure, and Vanessa is a true ally in this conversation.

Chris Rose: 02:23 She is such a kindred spirit. I look forward to receiving her emails every week. And once you are introduced to her warmth and wisdom, you will love her too. So here is the continuation of my conversation with Vanessa Marin about female orgasm. In the show notes page, you’ll find a link to the first part of our conversation about female orgasm, our other conversations with Vanessa, and all of her courses and online work so you can embrace Vanessa as one of your erotic educators. Yes. Here we go with my conversation with Vanessa about learning how to orgasm and what we can all discover there. Enjoy and I’ll be back with you next week with another episode of Speaking of Sex. Cheers.

Chris Rose: 03:13 Vanessa Marin, thank you so much for joining us again.

Vanessa Marin: 03:16 Thank you so much for having me. I always have such a great time whenever I come on and speak with you, so it’s always a pleasure.

Chris Rose: 03:23 We’re definitely going to treat this as part two of our conversation about orgasm, and having your first orgasm or orgasming more reliably, because we talked a few months ago and I will put that interview right in the show notes page so folks can start with that and then continue the conversation with us.

Vanessa Marin: 03:41 Awesome. Yeah, that was a super fun interview. So I’m glad to be doing part two.

Chris Rose: 03:47 So, speaking of conversation, one of the things you talk about is how important it is for women to start talking about orgasm. What truths, what is emerging as this conversation about female orgasm is really heating up over the past few years?

Vanessa Marin: 04:03 It sounds so simple, this idea of just having conversations about it, but it’s been this recurring theme that I keep seeing my clients, that every woman that I’ve ever worked with has really untruly felt like she is the one woman in the entire world that is struggling with her orgasm and just can’t figure this out. So I mean, you know, rationally we understand. Yeah, I can’t be the only person in the entire world that the emotional experience is really feeling so deeply alone in this. And I’ve started sharing a lot more about my own personal orgasms struggles and the fact that I really understand what that felt, like to feel like, you know, everyone else must have this figured out. Everyone else must be, you know, just having these amazing, great orgasms and what’s wrong with me?

Vanessa Marin: 04:49 So that was what we really wanted to focus on is to just help people start having more of these conversations, more honesty and openness about female orgasm so that we can recognize that we really are not alone in this. That it’s something that so many women are struggling with. That it’s a much bigger conversation about the ways that we treat female pleasure and female orgasm, and female bodies and just, yeah, help women recognize that they are definitely not alone.

Chris Rose: 05:19 It’s so interesting to me because it’s such a cultural issue that then needs this deeply personal intervention, body by body. How do you bring people into this? I was thinking the other day of the emotional baggage we bring to this conversation about orgasm and how broken women feel when they’re unable to have an orgasm or have an orgasm consistently and that emotional brokenness and yet we’re not taught the skills of pleasure and so we don’t like pick up an instrument and then curse ourselves for not being able to make music right away.

Vanessa Marin: 05:58 Oh, exactly. It’s one of my favorite comparisons.

Chris Rose: 06:02 Awesome, our minds are in the same. Okay. So where is this dialogue between the physical skills and the emotional context and the social context?

Vanessa Marin: 06:12 Oh yeah, it’s such a great, interesting question and there’s so many different layers of it. So I think that it can be really useful to, you know, to kind of examine that broader context of it. Because again, I think the experience for so many women is that we feel like we’re alone and it’s just something that’s wrong with us. And so if we can recognize that this is part of a much, much bigger issue that can, I think free up a lot of space inside of us to develop more curiosity about our own bodies. So rather than approaching our body as if it’s something that’s broken, approaching our body with the sense of curiosity and you know, “oh, okay, I wonder what I, my body can experience, what can bring my body pleasure?” And so, you know, especially I really encourage women to kind of think about the ways that we treat female bodies and pleasure on this larger global scale, because I think it’s really important for us to get fired up about it.

Vanessa Marin: 07:09 Sometimes it can be very easy for us to be cruel to ourselves and to our own bodies. But if we take ourselves outside of ourselves and think about what are the lessons that my friends have been taught, what are the lessons that my mom was taught? What are the lessons that my daughter or this next generation of women or women who aren’t even on this planet yet, what are they going to be taught about their body is in their pleasure? And sometimes if we step outside of ourselves like that, we can get really fired up and recognize, oh, you know, this is, this goes so much bigger, so much further beyond myself.

Chris Rose: 07:43 Yeah. Yeah. And I just want a name that even with a trauma in your past or even with violence in your past, more than likely you are not broken. Right? Like our bodies have capacity for pleasure, kind of no matter what. But it’s finding the ability to access it and then focus on it and receive it.

Vanessa Marin: 08:05 Yeah. I, I deeply and truly believes that no body is broken. We all of course have our own, you know, stories and histories and challenges that we go through. But especially when it comes to pleasure, there really is no such thing as your body being broken. Our bodies are hardwired to experience pleasure and even people who have had really intense traumas, injuries, illnesses, the brain can still rewire itself to experience pleasure in new ways. So there is no reason why your body would be incapable of experiencing pleasure.

Chris Rose: 08:39 So if we approach the idea of our bodies being capable of pleasure, and yet so many of us feel stuck in not being able to have an orgasm and an orgasm then become symbolic of kind of the ultimate pleasure or surrendering into pleasure or releasing or trusting. We tend to layer all these metaphors into orgasm itself. Do you start women with focusing on pleasure and then bring them into orgasm or what is this relationship between pleasure as a whole and kind of the crown of orgasm?

Vanessa Marin: 09:18 That’s a great question and I think it’s definitely one that gets lost a lot of the times. So when you are struggling to orgasm, it is very easy to get fixated on the orgasm itself. And I can definitely say this from tons of personal experiences as well, is that you really start to focus on just the orgasm. You really want it to happen. You’re very anxious and afraid and upset about it not happening and you kind of get this tunnel vision around it. And the really important thing for all of us to recognize is that pleasure is the pathway to orgasm. You’re not going to have an orgasm just out of nowhere. It’s going to totally surprise you and catch you off guard. You’re going to have an orgasm because you are feeling pleasure and you are building up to that orgasm.

Vanessa Marin: 10:06 So I know that it kind of sounds like lip service to say, you know, “just focus on the pleasure.” A lot of women say, “okay, yeah, but I want the orgasm.” So, I don’t mean it in this dismissive way, but it is really important to recognize that pleasure is the way that you get to the orgasm. So if we can focus on that first, and I like to combat that by also being really specific and nitty gritty about different techniques to explore. So it’s not just this big, you know, feel pleasure, explore pleasure. Like there are actual specific techniques that go along with it. But yes, recognizing that that is the pathway that you need to go down to reach the orgasm.

Chris Rose: 10:46 And I love that because it’s not just handing someone the violin and saying, “okay, figure out how to make music. You can do it.”

Vanessa Marin: 10:52 Exactly.

Chris Rose: 10:54 Yeah. We learn how to make the music, we learn by doing the scales, by relaxing into it, by feeling the finger over and over again. The muscle memory of that.

Vanessa Marin: 11:05 Yeah. I think I see this advice so often online and in magazines, this idea of, you know, just explore your body, and the idea of it is great, but when that’s all that you’re giving it’s very frustrating and it’s not particularly useful advice. So, yeah, just like you’re saying with an instrument. Another example that I was thinking about is, you know, if you were to go to Yosemite and you see a ranger at the beginning and they say, “just go explore the park”, like that’s not really very helpful when there’s so much there. So instead, what if you could get, you know, “hey, here’s a map to some of the best trails, or here’s where you should start.” And then, you know, “here are a bunch of different pathways that you can go down there.” So just giving more of a framework rather than this really broad and vague and unhelpful advice.

Chris Rose: 11:53 So a few months ago, I should say, I did this Finishing School course and I entered it as a woman who is very, I know how to orgasm. I’ve always had a lifetime of orgasm, even through other sexual struggles, and so I was curious what I would learn with you, and I learned so much. It was such a pleasure.

Vanessa Marin: 12:14 Oh no, that’s great.

Chris Rose: 12:15 One of the things that really resonated for me that I had kind of forgotten, was that orgasms don’t necessarily feel amazing and overwhelming and breathtaking right away.

Vanessa Marin: 12:30 Yes. Yeah.

Chris Rose: 12:31 That was really important. Can you talk about some of those first orgasms and what to do if you’re kind of like, is that it?

Vanessa Marin: 12:40 Yeah. Let me just first say, I’m so glad that you went through the course. I’m really excited and honored to learn that it taught you new things as well. You know, me personally, I go through the course myself all the time and it’s just sort of a way for me to refresh myself and have new experiences and keep updating it. But I think it’s so important for us to recognize that orgasm is something that we are, you know, can constantly be learning new things about our bodies. It’s not something that we just learned once and that’s it. There’s this whole lifetime of exploration.

Vanessa Marin: 13:13 Yeah. Going back to that idea of initial orgasms. So one of the huge things that comes up for women is that we have this idea that orgasms are just crazily explosive and intense. And so overwhelming and it can sound, sometimes it sounds really good and sometimes it’s actually sounds scary. Like a lot of women will tell me, “I’m really afraid of what’s going to happen when I orgasm. Will I completely lose control? And you know, something embarrassing or crazy is going to happen in the moment.” And so I like to be really clear that when you’re first learning how to orgasm, your first orgasms are going to be pretty small and probably not that much more pleasurable than what you were experiencing leading up to that.

Vanessa Marin: 13:58 So I sort of think of orgasm as two stages. It’s like learning how to orgasm and then learning how to make the orgasms pleasurable. So this is such an important thing when you’re first exploring because you know, not only is it important, just reset your expectations, but it can also help bring some anxiety down. So if you’ve been really afraid of, “Oh God, what’s going to happen when I have an orgasm?” Reminding yourself that it’s not going to be a super crazy wild experience initially can relieve a lot of that anxiety. And then even going forward from there, orgasms really are like snowflakes. I know that sounds cheesy, but you know, the experience is just so different from orgasm. Don’t work. Ask Them. So I, you know, I can speak for myself sometimes I have orgasms that are crazy explosive and intense and amazing and sometimes I have orgasms that are like, “okay, it got the job done.” So yeah, it can just be a very different experience from orgasm to orgasm. And that’s part of what makes them fun.

Chris Rose: 14:58 And somewhat mysterious.

Vanessa Marin: 14:59 Yes.

Chris Rose: 15:02 I’m really obsessed right now with this idea of sexual practice and bringing the mentality of practice into our erotic life, both as a motivation to carve out time for it and to prioritize it, but also to recognize that there’s all these layers of skills, physical skills, relational skills, spiritual skills, some might say, to navigating our erotic lives. So you said you go back through your course. You’ve been focusing on orgasm now for many years. What are some of the ways you work with orgasm and masturbation as practice, as something you do, repetitively in order to build specific skills? Do you engage with it in that way?

Vanessa Marin: 15:47 Yeah, that’s such a great question too and I love that idea because I think we take so many different aspects of our sexuality for granted. You know, one of my least favorite words is this word, natural. You know, I think a lot of us think sex is just supposed to be natural, an orgasm’s supposed to be natural, which is sort of a code word for saying “I shouldn’t have to put any effort into it.” And I just believed the exact opposite. That it’s something that if it’s important to us, that it’s something that we should be willing to carve the time out for, to practice different things, explore new techniques, try things out, you know, just really, yeah, create that space for it and to engage in it regularly. And it is, that it the example of the instrument that you gave earlier, it’s just, you know, so perfect here as well.

Vanessa Marin: 16:32 It’s not like we just expect that we should be able to play the violin perfectly and then we never have to practice it ever again. We’ll always maintain that level of skill. I’m actually thinking about, I’m a classically trained pianist, but I haven’t touched the piano in about 15 years. And so, you know, I wouldn’t go expect to sit down at a piano and be able to play all of the stuff that I used to play when I was really devoted to it and that was years ago. So yeah, with my own experience around orgasm, I play a lot with how I show up around masturbation.

Vanessa Marin: 17:07 So I use masturbation in a lot of different ways. Sometimes I just want to be able to experience quick pleasure, you know, and I can kind of be a little bit of a lazy masturbator like I know what my body needs at this point. I can get the job done pretty quickly. And sometimes it’s nice just to have a physical release. Sometimes if I want to get to sleep faster or I’m feeling a little bit stressed, I kind of use it as a tool in that way.

Vanessa Marin: 17:30 But I also challenged myself to try to show up in other ways around masturbation and particularly to treat it as a form of self care and as a way that I can really like treat my body and take care of my body. So there will be times where I try to get myself to slow and turn it more into an experience rather than, you know, just going for the goal really quickly. I love exploring different techniques. So I do a lot of surveys of the women in Finishing School and I’m always trying to figure out what are the ways that they are able to bring themselves pleasure, and then I try and post techniques out myself as well.

Vanessa Marin: 18:09 So it’s sort of a fun way to see, you know, how many different ways can I bring my pleasure, how does my body respond to those particular techniques? And like playing with different toys as well. Both of the vibrating and non vibrating kind. And just seeing, you know, what it’s like to explore bringing some sort of object into the bedroom with myself. But yeah, just trying to create different experiences, showing up with myself in different ways and trying to make it feel like a kind of luxurious self care type of experience.

Chris Rose: 18:39 Mm-hmm, and creating this time it can feel really luxurious. It can feel really expansive, and then sometimes it can also bring up unexpected emotions. Even things like anger or grief can show up in masturbation and that can really surprise some people. What do you think the role of emotional expression during masturbation is and how do we create more space to allow that or normalize it?

Vanessa Marin: 19:08 Yeah, I think that we definitely can have a lot of different experiences emerge through masturbation. And I think particularly if we don’t have other forms of self care. So this is something that comes up a lot with the women in Finishing School and they’ll say, “you know, Oh, I’m doing these exercises and so much is coming up for me and I’m realizing, you know, I don’t create this kind of space for myself in any other way. Like I’m doing it because I’m in this course. I’ve made this commitment to myself and I’m creating it because they want to, you know, achieve this goal. But I’m realizing that I don’t do this for myself in any other way.” So yeah, it can definitely struck a lot in that way. And I’ve had a lot of, of women who have realized through the Finishing School process, “oh, you know, this is something that I want to create more space for myself, so I want to do, you know, just have other forms of self care, self expression.”

Vanessa Marin: 20:02 So that can be really useful. But yeah, I think anytime that you take the time to slow down and connect with your body, your body is gonna bring different things to your attention. It’s sort of, you know, your body sees that you’re paying attention to it. And it’s kind of like, oh well I’ve got, I’ve got this thing too, to take a look at, or this thing is needing a little bit of love and attention as well. So for me, I think it really all boils down to curiosity and openness. You know, can we be curious with ourselves about what wants to emerge in this moment and can we be open to whatever does happen to emerge even if it is something that surprises us or is something that is maybe a little bit challenging.

Chris Rose: 20:43 And do you bring that same mentality to fantasy and what pops up in our heads? How do we kind of stay with the fantasy, the mental images that are bringing us more arousal during masturbation rather than judge them or shut them down or we respond with fear or sometimes we get afraid of our own fantasies.

Vanessa Marin: 21:05 Yeah. Fantasy is such an interesting, interesting topic. I think a lot of us struggle with our own fantasies and I think that the area where we tend to get in trouble with, with this is when we try to make meaning of our fantasies. So I think a lot of us can really judge ourselves or, you know, why am I turned on by this thing and what does it say about me? What does it mean? We don’t need to go into that place of self judgment around them.

Vanessa Marin: 21:29 So sometimes we might have fantasies because of clear and specific reasons. So maybe, you know, it was something that you stumbled upon as a child and it, you know, it was something that was erotic even from an early age. But we often have fantasies that are really quite random and there isn’t really any particular meaning behind them. So I think it’s important for us to be open to all of our fantasies and, and not, you know, not quick to judge them. It’s definitely something that you can be curious about and explore, what is this? What turns me on about it? What is the effect that it’s having on me? Is it something that I enjoy fantasizing about? But to try to create that same atmosphere of curiosity rather than judgment.

Chris Rose: 22:15 I’m thinking about some of the why’s, because enrolling in any online course is a commitment. We both offer online courses. We both get emails from people who have had major breakthroughs with these courses, but I also know that staying with online courses can be challenging, they take time and attention. So what are the why’s that can motivate us to really give ourselves the gift of this time and attention to our own pleasure and bodies?

Vanessa Marin: 22:46 Yeah, that’s a question that I ask women to consider right in the very first week of Finishing School because I know that it is a challenge for a lot of us. It can be such a great first step to sign up for an online course and you can feel very excited and motivated and then time goes on and it can be hard sometimes to keep that motivation going. And I think it’s important to recognize that it’s the same with any skill. So you know, there might be times where you’re having to play the violin, it’s really such a good example for everything we’re talking about, where you really don’t want to practice or times when you’re learning Spanish, where you just don’t want to go to your class or you don’t want to have your tutor come over. So it just is something that’s inherent to any new skill that we learn.

Vanessa Marin: 23:29 It’s not particular to, you know, improving our sexual skills. So the why is so personal for each of us. And I think it’s important for us to really dig deep into it. So when I ask women in Finishing School, you know “why you sign up for Finishing School?” The obvious and past answer is, “well, I want to learn how to orgasm. Duh.”

Vanessa Marin: 23:52 But, then I’ll say, “okay, but what else? What else is there for you?” And I think if we take that time to really try to dig deeper and uncover other reasons, other motivation, that can actually be much more powerful than just wanting to learn how to orgasm. So for you, it might be something like, “I want to have a better relationship with my body so I can touch my body with love and appreciation, or rather than criticism or even hatred”, it might be, “I want to finally understand and know that I’m worthy of my own time and energy and attention.” It may be “I want to explore all the pleasure that I’m capable of feeling and have fun with my sex life and be playful and exploratory.” So it can have completely different reasons, completely different tones for every woman. But that process of, of exploring what that answer is for you is so important.

Chris Rose: 24:46 And what do you say if we dig in and play that game? I kind of think of it as the three year old game. Why, why, why?

Vanessa Marin: 24:54 Yes, yes.

Chris Rose: 24:57 When we dig in, we realize that one of our why’s, perhaps our biggest why is the performative aspect of it. We want to feel like the sexy woman who can come. What do we do with that? Because we know that performativity isn’t a great motivator and yet there’s something really honest and true about wanting to embody that. You know?

Vanessa Marin: 25:21 Yeah. I think any woman in really any situation, you know, you’re going to have some why’s that are maybe not the greatest things. You know, some reasons why you want to do some things that it, you know, it doesn’t really feel super great for you. But so I think, part of that’s just normalizing. “Yes, that’s totally understandable. It is hard to grow up in this society and not feel a performance pressure because it’s being blasted on an almost daily basis.” And at the same time I think we can also keep playing the why game and dig a little bit deeper than that and see, might there be any personal reasons around that. So yes, you have this idea that you are supposed to be this woman who loves sex and is wildly orgasmic and you know, just so into it. So, okay.

Vanessa Marin: 26:10 Why? What else might that mean to you? What else could it be like for you to be that woman? So if you keep digging a little bit deeper, you know, maybe you do realize, yeah, some of that is performative, but some of that is also, man, that would be so cool to just, you know, really enjoy sex and to go into an experience and just know that I can get what I want out of it. I can experience all of the pleasure that I want to experience. You know? So there might be some little nugget of a better you, more positive kind of motivation that you can find for yourself there.

Chris Rose: 26:47 Hmm. I love that. You’re so positive.

Vanessa Marin: 26:52 Yeah. This is just one of my favorite, favorite topics to work with. And again, like I know from personal experience what a challenge it can be.

Chris Rose: 26:59 Yeah.

Vanessa Marin: 26:59 There was a very long time where it was one of my least favorite topics ever. But now that I’ve gone through my own personal challenges around it and I’ve recognized the ways that it’s changed so many aspects of my life, I’m just, I’m so enthusiastic about helping other women go through their own journey around it.

Chris Rose: 27:19 So after focusing on orgasm and working with so many women on the skills of orgasm, what do you think is the function of orgasm for us humans? And you can answer this either kind of biologically or philosophically. How do you think of like the why, we have orgasms as humans?

Vanessa Marin: 27:36 Oh my goodness. My brain is going in about a thousand different directions all at the same time right now. Oh Man. I think yeah, orgasms serve so many different purposes and I think that, that’s what makes them so awesome and amazing. That sometimes they can be just a pure physical release, that sometimes they can help other parts of our body or our experience like you know, helping us get to sleep faster, helping decrease menstrual pain, they can be very useful in that sense. I think they can be great with helping us tap into our emotions and our own inner experiences or helping us explore new things. Helping us connect with our partners, there are just so many different reasons to have them. And maybe that’s part of why it’s a topic that’s been so fascinating to me for so long because there’s always some new layer to uncover and explore.

Chris Rose: 28:32 An instrument worth learning.

Vanessa Marin: 28:34 Oh my God. Right? This is really was the perfect example.

Chris Rose: 28:40 Can you tell us a little bit about Finishing School and the unique opportunity of Finishing School live that is kicking off right now?

Vanessa Marin: 28:49 Yes. I’m so excited to tell you about it. So Finishing School is my online course that teaches women to have their very first orgasms on their own and with their partners. So it’s a really comprehensive and detailed step by step course because I know how frustrating it is to keep getting all of that really vague and unhelpful advice. I really wanted to make it super structured and instructional. And then what we do about once a year is I run a special version of Finishing School called Finishing School live. So we have a community of women who all start the course at the same time. We go through it together and then we meet every other week for coaching calls. So these calls are your opportunity to ask questions and get personalized answers and to really feel like you’re part of a community of other women who are going through the same journey with you.

Vanessa Marin: 29:42 So those calls are just great at really keeping you accountable and motivated. So I know we talked earlier about the fact that sometimes online courses can be a little bit challenging to keep yourself motivated and going through it. So I have found that doing these live versions of the course really helps women feel more engaged in it and keep your progress and your momentum going. So we are going to be kicking off our next live version of Finishing School and this will be the last one for all of 2019 and we’ll be kicking it off, registration opens on June 5th and closes on June 9th and then the course starts the very next day on the 10th

Chris Rose: 30:20 So spend your summer in Finishing School. What a beautiful way to spend your summer holiday.

Vanessa Marin: 30:27 I know, you know, I’m a huge nerd. I loved school, I loved learning. So to me that sounds amazing. But if the idea of school in the summer, has you sounding a little bit, you know, worry, don’t worry. This is the most fun school ever. You’re gonna have so much fun. It’s a total blast, I promise.

Chris Rose: 30:44 I want to say this course is designed for women who are struggling to have their first orgasm or orgasm consistently, but if you really want to embrace orgasm as a practice, if you really want to deepen your relationship with orgasms, there may be things for you here too. I just did this course with you last year after a lifetime of being an orgasmic woman and I got so much out of it. Both the accountability of showing up for this time with myself and also benefiting from your particular perspective and wisdom and as you said, the comprehensive nature of it. Really inviting yourself into studying your own relationship to pleasure and orgasm this intimately. I think no matter what the outcome is, it’s a really beautiful invitation for people. And when you hear this, you’ll know I think in your body. If this feels right for you right now.

Chris Rose: 31:41 And if you’re curious, use the links in the show notes page and Vanessa, you offer also these free video series, that is a great way to feel even further in your body, is this the right moment? And are you the right teacher? Cause that’s-

Vanessa Marin: 31:57 Yes, yes.

Chris Rose: 31:57 Different personalities and I love learning from you. That’s one of the reasons we recommend you. But it’s really interesting to like be with different online teachers and feel in in your body, can I learn with this person? And Vanessa, you are so warm and wise that I think you’re a great person to for a lot of people to learn with. So sign up for this.

Vanessa Marin: 32:03 Oh, thank you so much.

Chris Rose: 32:03 I’m fan girling out a bit, I guess.

Vanessa Marin: 32:25 Oh, thank you. I’m blushing over here too, no, I really appreciate it. Yeah, and I think that you’re so right. I really believe that every woman will have an intuitive sense of whether or not this feels like a journey that she is ready and excited for. And I definitely agree with you that you know, we are all so individual. One approach, one teacher does not work for everyone. So I am definitely not the right fit for everyone and that’s perfectly okay, but if you want to get a better sense of just who I am and what I’m like as a teacher and what that experience is like, then I am releasing this free video series called The Female Orgasm Revolution because everything you’ve been taught about orgasm is wrong. So it’s a free video series that goes through a ton of amazing stuff. Actually, I pulled a lot of the content directly from Finishing School itself because it was really my mission in this video series to kind of pull back the curtains and give women the accurate information and details and methods and processes that they really need to learn how to orgasm.

Vanessa Marin: 33:30 So it’s just a great sneak peek at what it’s like to be in Finishing School. Again, so much of the material is just taken directly from the course, so we’ll go over the truth about how female orgasm really works. The key to mastering orgasmic control and the four-step female orgasm method that I’ve developed over the course of about 15 years of working with this and having my own orgasm struggles as well and that’s taken directly from Finishing School. So we set up a special link just for your listeners because we just love your community so much. We seem to have really great overlap and people who are into pleasure mechanics seem to work really well with me so we created a special link at VMtherapy.com/pleasure mechanics. If you want to check that out.

Chris Rose: 34:14 we will have all of the information about your courses in the show notes page. Vanessa Marin, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom and for your work in this world.

Vanessa Marin: 34:24 Thank you so much. It’s always such a joy to be here.

Chris Rose: 34:28 All right. I hope you enjoyed that episode. All of the links are in the show notes page. You will find links to her online courses and to the free video series that is coming up at the beginning of June, 2019, but there are evergreen links there as well. If you find yourself listening to this episode down the line. We will be back with you next week with another episode of Speaking of Sex. Thank you so much for listening. If you love this show and want to support our work, please come over to patreon.com/pleasuremechanics. That’s patreon.com/pleasuremechanics, where you can show your support with a monthly pledge and join our inner circle community on Patreon. We’d love to have you onboard. Thank you so much for listening. I am Chris from pleasuremechanics.com wishing you a lifetime of pleasure. Cheers.

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 49
  • 50
  • 51
  • 52
  • 53
  • …
  • 161
  • Next Page »
  • Start Here
  • Podcast
  • Sessions
  • Online Courses
  • Index
  • About Us
  • Speaking of Sex Podcast
  • Online Courses
  • Affiliate Program

Return to top of page