Pleasure Mechanics

Explore With Curiosity : Attitudes For Kinkier Sex

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If you want to have kinkier sex, you are going to want to build some foundational skills long before you ever pick up a toy. The skills of mindful sex – noticing your thoughts without judgment, staying present during the heights of arousal, paying attention to both the internal landscape and to another human’s subtle responses – are all crucial skills for stepping into new erotic terrain and having kinkier sex.

Kinky sex means different things to different people – but for most of us, it means stepping out of our comfort zones and exploring new erotic edges. To stay present and discover new pleasures at these edges, we must come with the right skills and attitudes to show up and explore with curiosity.

Join us in practicing the skills of Mindful Sex: enroll in the Mindful Sex Online Course

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Transcription for podcast episode Explore With Curiosity: Attitudes For Kinkier Sex

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:05 We are the Pleasure Mechanics. On this podcast, we have explicit and soulful conversations about every facet of sexuality. Come on over to PleasureMechanics.com where you will find our complete podcast archive. While you are there, hit up PleasureMechanics.com/Free to find the erotic essentials, our free online course. It is an offering of love waiting for you.

Chris Rose: 00:35 All right. Today, on the show, we are going to be talking about mindful kink. Mindful kink, meaning how we can bring the skills of mindful sex to the kinkier sex, the more adventurous sex, the more thrilling, wild sex that we want to be having because through some of your emails I’ve received this month and some of our conversations, I recognize that when we talk about mindful sex, we often talk about things like slowing down and breathing and paying attention, and the language we use to talk about mindful sex paints a picture of very slow, meditative, breathy, tender sex, love-making perhaps you might want to call it, which is a lovely experience. I love meditation sex. It’s one of my best meditations, but it is not the only option.

Chris Rose: 01:40 It got me thinking about how mindful sex skills are actually not only welcome at the table for kinky sex, they’re not only enhancers for kinky sex and wild sex, they’re actually a prerequisite for kinky sex, they are required for showing up for some of the more adventurous, wild sex you might want to be having. So, I want to explore that today.

Charlotte Rose: 02:10 When we are thinking about kinky sex, we just want to be clear, that can be an enormous range of play and sensation and experiences and role play, and it can go from very light to very intense and people can find where they want to explore in this huge constellation spectrum, however you want to think about it.

Chris Rose: 02:32 Well, it’s interesting. I get these emails all the time that say, “I want to explore kinky sex with my wife. How do I get started?” and I always have to ask them, “What do you mean by kinky?” So, as we start this conversation, notice for yourself what do you think about as kinky sex, where does that spectrum of normal sex, what we might call vanilla sex or every day sex, where does that realm start fading into the extra, the kinky, that range of activities that’s beyond the norm for you?

Chris Rose: 03:11 Again, I say, “For you,” because for some people, things like masturbating in front of each other, anal sex, sex in different positions, sex not in bed, things like that feel very like, “Yeah, that’s just within the normal thing of what we explore,” and for other people, those activities are on the kinky edge of what they are willing or interested in exploring. For other people, kink starts at the spectrum of sensation play or bondage or power play or role play and then goes out from there into the great beyond of fetishes, of very extreme role playing, of long-term power play dynamics, things like that.

Chris Rose: 03:58 So, as we talk about this, it is applicable to all of that realm of kink because what is kinky for you is what is kinky in your world, in your erotic reality, and so these things we talk about, about the vulnerability, the newness, the extra layers of skills you need to bring when something is new for you. That will be true whether you’re talking about masturbating in front of each other with the lights on and looking at each other in the eye or tying one another up for the first time or group sex, whatever your destination is, the emotional experience of, “This is new. This is scary. I don’t know what I think about this. I don’t know if I have the right skills. How will I know if I like this?” that emotional experience of kink because that is so much the hallmark of kink is the exploration, the newness, the living on that edge, the exploring the edges, those experiences will be true for you no matter what edge you are exploring.

Charlotte Rose: 05:09 I love that. That’s so important to honor where we are and what feels risky and anxiety-producing, but also exciting, and learning how to get comfortable with that experience in your body no matter what you’re doing. We can learn how to calm ourselves when we feel nervousness and turn that into excitement and allow ourselves to keep moving into new spaces sexually, and that is one element that can keep our sexuality alive and interesting over the years. So, learning how to emotionally navigate the space of newness and discomfort and excitement is a really profound sexual skill to gain master over no matter what you’re doing.

Chris Rose: 05:56 Okay. So, there’s two realms of this skillfulness I want to talk about, and you just named one. It’s the emotional skillfulness that mindful sex practices can bring to the exploration of new terrain to the navigation of new terrain to managing pitfalls in that new terrain. So, let’s talk about that, the navigating newness and vulnerability. Then, there’s the skillset of as you’re exploring new sexual experiences, paying attention, discernment of what feels good and what doesn’t feel good, what you want more of, what you don’t, and all of those physical skills of mindful sex and how they show up in kinky play. Okay.

Chris Rose: 06:42 So, going into the emotional skills, you named it very succinctly when you said, “How do we navigate newness with curiosity?” Did you say that? You said something like that. But “How do we navigate newness with a spirit of curiosity?” might be the heart of it, right? So, when your partner comes to you or when you start recognizing a desire welling up for a new kind of sexual experience, and again, whatever the range of that is for you, how do you meet those desires with curiosity, with interest, and not shut it down with judgment and fear? That’s the first mindful sex skill coming into play, practicing non-judgment over your own and your partner’s interest.

Chris Rose: 07:34 So, you could even engage the conversation of, “What would that look like? What interests you about that? What do you find exciting about that? What parts of that do you want to experience?” because that conversation is where all kinky adventures start and where most people never even get on the ride because newness, especially if it’s something that is loaded with any cultural baggage, power play, cross-dressing, all kink, really, has cultural baggage, and so we are immediately confronted with judgment, and that judgment and the fear and the shame is enough to prevent most of us from even daring to explore these interests.

Charlotte Rose: 08:20 So, if we can learn to recognize our own judgment and decide if we agree with that or not, then we can begin to take one step into being curious about it or not and deciding if that’s something we would like to explore or have a conversation about exploring before we step into it, but that first piece of letting yourself be okay with the judgment, but not necessarily thinking that it’s true.

Chris Rose: 08:47 Or following its path, right? So, your partner comes to you with a new desire or you’re reading erotica and you come up with something and you notice this experience, and because you have practiced, because you are part of this community, because you’re listening to this podcast, you have this skillfulness in that moment, to take a breath, to recognize, “Wow. I’m feeling a lot of things about this spanking scene or this request to be spanked. I’m having all of these different reactions. Let me just pay attention to my reactions for a moment. That’s where it starts, slowing it down.

Chris Rose: 09:24 All right. So, we’re getting to the place of non-judgment. That is a lifetime of work. Then, bringing a spirit instead of curiosity. So, instead of the fear and the judgment and the immediate, “Will I be good or bad? Will I get it wrong?” so, again, the binary thinking of, “Is this good or bad? Right or wrong?” and, “What is the morality I’m assigning to this?” just coming at it with curiosity and going into conversation in this open-ended way of, “We don’t know what this means yet. We don’t have a goal. We’re just exploring.” Again, we’re just seeing the surfacing of this skill, the skillset of exploring without a goal and without striving and without having this narrow, right, wrong, binary thinking. That’s a skillset that we are practicing, again, and we’re practicing together.

Charlotte Rose: 10:19 I think you said this, but I just want to highlight this, that any sex that is outside of what we have thought of as “Normal,” is really deemed by culture to be problematic, and the list goes on and on about, “Oh.” Fill in that for whatever you think, but that is intentional culturally, so we need to understand that there’s an enormous amount that we could be doing with our bodies with each other that is deemed unsavory, and so it makes sense that you do feel judgment. That judgment doesn’t come from you. You’ve been taught that. I think that’s useful for us to understand that framing, that we are taught to judge anything that is not vanilla sex, and so it makes sense that you will feel judgment. Now, you choose if you agree or not.

Chris Rose: 11:08 We will talk, I think, next week about attitudes, and one of the things here that is a curve ball is that judgment is both bad and good judgment.

Charlotte Rose: 11:19 Oh.

Chris Rose: 11:19 So, pretty is a judgment. Judging things either as positive or negative is what we want to reign in. So, it’s not just the negative judgments. Those are the easiest ones to target, and what I mean by this is we have all sorts of cultural assumptions about the meanings of kink and about the deeper layers of what a kink means about someone, and when you’re confronting your judgments, you might confront judgments on both sides of what you want from your partner and what you don’t want, what you want from yourself and what you don’t want. You might be judging yourself and creating struggle equally around the things that you are striving for.

Chris Rose: 12:09 So, a lot of us strive, like, you want to be a powerful, dominant man because that means you’re mainly, but there’s this other part of you that really is interested in wearing underwear that are lacy, but that might mean that you’re feminine, and you’re judging that while you’re also judging yourself for not being something that you’re striving for, and so you see how these, the positive judgments and the negative judgments, they both attack you. When we, again, approach this with curiosity and inquiry and exploration and presence, you might find out you feel the most powerful and mainly while you’re wearing the lacy panties, and both of the constructs just explode into sparkles of pleasure and desire around you, right? Because you have embodied your truth, you have put on the panties, you’re in … You might discover something about what those panties mean for you that you never expected.

Charlotte Rose: 13:11 Or the deep power of authenticity and that feeling incredibly erotic and livening all of your cells as you stride forward in your beautiful underwear.

Chris Rose: 13:22 Right. Or you might find that putting those panties on makes you feel super soft, super tender, and that you just want to be held and comforted and luxuriated and silky fabrics, and that’s a really different thing, but you’ll never know if you don’t put on the panties. If you’re stuck in the fear, if you’re stuck in the judgment and the assuming you know what things mean, and that’s, again, so much of this for ourselves and for conversations with our partners. This is the beginner’s mind attitude of mindful sex.

Chris Rose: 13:55 If we go into these conversations assuming we know what things mean, we set ourselves up for a world of struggle. If you think you know what it means that your husband wants to put on your underwear, you’ve just projected all sorts of non-truths, delusions into that space where instead you could be walking into that space with presence, curiosity, open-heartedness and be like, “Let’s find out what this means. Let’s discover what this means one step at a time.”

Chris Rose: 14:31 All right. So, we’re getting a little deep in this. So, the point here is these are the attitudes that mindful sex, that this whole reframe … Because when we talk about mindful sex, there are practices, there are physical practices, emotional practices you can do again and again because that’s what a practice is, it’s something we do on repeat in order to develop a skill. There are practices you can do to develop these skills, but it’s also a reframing, a new lens to think about sexuality, and we want to paint the picture here how this new reframe can help you when you want to explore things, like kinky sex.

Chris Rose: 15:13 Having these different attitudes to even start the conversation with your partner makes a huge difference when you’re wanting to open up new doors together. So, practicing these skills before you even get to that door can be really helpful. You can build these muscles, build these capacities before you get to the scary parts of sexuality, and it doesn’t have to be scary. Why do we think of newness as scary? Things aren’t as scary if we come at it with skills.

Charlotte Rose: 15:47 That’s awesome. That’s a good … I’ve never quite [crosstalk 00:15:50] that before, actually.

Chris Rose: 15:51 But it’s very true, right? Things feel scary when we show up at them not resourced and not ready, and so many of us don’t feel ready in sex, and that is, sometimes, about the physical techniques, and we have you covered there, but so much of that is the readiness of our ability to be yourselves sexually and be with someone else sexually. That’s also so much about what we’re talking about with this mindful sex lens that we’ve been focusing on.

Charlotte Rose: 16:23 And being with uncertainty, being with not knowing, being with, “I don’t know if I’m good at this,” and being able to calm your emotional state as you are feeling those things.

Chris Rose: 16:36 Isn’t that the emotional truth of all sex? “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what this is.” Part of why we love sex and we’re drawn to sex is the mystery of it and the surrender into the mystery of the sensations and the physical states we get into and that arousing state where we a little bit lose reality, and to be confident slipping into that mystery together I think is profoundly … It’s a skillful thing, but it’s also, like, a-

Charlotte Rose: 17:07 Well, it allows for more magic. It allows for your … You trust yourself and each other a little bit more or a lot more, and so you can let yourself move into an altered state because I think that’s what you’re saying about being … A certain kind of amazing sex allows both people to be slightly altered. You’re getting a little bit high from all of these hormones and chemicals that are zipping around your body and making you feel different than regular life.

Chris Rose: 17:35 Right. We’re building the skills to do that, not building the skills to have really clinical … I think sometimes when people hear skills, they think of really clinical, mechanical sex, but so many of these skills are the relational skills, the skills of paying attention, and the skills of the mysteries of sex so we can drop deeper into that erotic, ecstatic, expansive state.

Chris Rose: 18:03 So, let’s talk a little bit about this second set of skills. So, I think we’ve explored some of these positions, the relational skills, the attitudes. Let’s talk about the physical set of skills because when I became really aware of when I started exploring kinky sex in my early 20s was how much discernment you had to have, and discernment is different than judgment by the way, but discernment, meaning, “Oh. I like that. No, I don’t like that.” You need to be able … This is as a receiver. There’s a whole nother set of skills as a giver of kinky sex, being a top.

Chris Rose: 18:43 But as a receiver, what I became aware of is you need to be able to pay so much attention to what’s going on to the sensations, to the emotional experience, and be able to both be in that experience fully and receive it, but then subtly steer it, like communicate to your top, to the dominant, to the person giving to you what it is you want. Being a receiver is very active, right? You have to be able to communicate with your whole body, but then also to be able to communicate, whether it’s through safe-wording, which safe words are the agreed upon words to slow down or end a scene, whether it’s through safe-wording or through communicating, you have to be able to tell the difference between, “Oh, I want more,” and, “Ouch. No way. We have to stop.”

Chris Rose: 19:39 There were times I wasn’t able to do that. I didn’t have the skills or I didn’t exercise them enough, and that’s when scenes went bad and things went too far because I wasn’t either steering the action or stopping the action based on what my body was telling me. This is true, again, for all sex. If a person is touching you in any way, we want to be able to tell, “Oh, that feels good. I want more,” and the difference between, “Oh, more,” and, “No, thank you.” That is a skill to be able to tell that difference and then communicate that difference, and that is true during a handshake and that is definitely true when you’re being spanked or flogged or canned or fisted, but the skill is the same.

Charlotte Rose: 20:33 So, within that moment, there are two different things going on, right? There’s understanding and feeling what’s inside your own body. Are you feeling like a, “Yes,” or a, “No,” or a, “Slow down,” and hearing that and then there’s the communicating that and feeling safe enough to communicate, not worrying about what that says about you, how you are being perceived, if that person’s going to be mad at you or not, or if it’s going to be socially uncomfortable, whatever your concerns are, and prioritizing your own needs over that concerns, those sets of concerns, and just having the skill to communicate.

Chris Rose: 21:10 So, there’s, like … I think as you-

Charlotte Rose: 21:11 Three.

Chris Rose: 21:11 … break this down, there’s probably 12 skills that are … we’re drawing upon at the same time as those spanks are coming down, so our system is already heightened, we’re already activated. This is, again, why I talk about mindful sex as meditation during arousal. That is a skillset because if you are aroused during a spanking and you want to change the course of action, you need to find your presence, your communication, all that boundary work you talked about, and then be able to communicate in that moment, hopefully without ending it.

Charlotte Rose: 21:47 Uh-huh (affirmative). Just redirecting.

Chris Rose: 21:49 Right.

Charlotte Rose: 21:49 Requesting more of what you want.

Chris Rose: 21:52 Sometimes, and when these things are … when we have these skills practiced in our bodies, when they’re flowing right, when the conditions are right, they can be almost invisible, and your body feels how, if you just adjust your hips just like that and move your butt and then the spanks come down in that new place, it’ll feel so much better, and so you cock your hips and you sigh and your partner’s hands lands in a new place and you get the spank you want and you can relax into it, and then your partner notices, “Oh, that felt better,” and then they start paying attention and you’re in that flow together because meanwhile, as you’re doing that …

Chris Rose: 22:30 So, the paying attention inside is interoception, the communication, meanwhile your partner is practicing an extreme version of this placement of attention skill. If you are spanking someone, if you are flogging someone, if you are taking someone on any erotic journey, but especially an extreme one and they are trusting you with their body, you better be paying attention, and how do we pay attention, what are the skills of paying attention? Again, a whole skillset we can practice and develop and get better at. Again, paying attention while you’re aroused, paying attention while things are heating up, while your partner is both moaning and squirming. Did that moan mean it felt good or did that … We need to have these skills available to us in the heat of passion.

Charlotte Rose: 23:29 You can see how of course it makes sense, then, to have practiced these skills solo in non-aroused states and solo in aroused states so that you can understand what you’re feeling and give your full attention to those experiences so then you can practice them when you’re partnered in an aroused state doing interesting things.

Chris Rose: 23:51 Right. The solo practices and then the partnered practices that you can work into and build up to and, again, develop a language together and a set of practices and skills together so that you’re walking down the street, you’re holding hands, your partner takes their hand away, and you have the skillset to know and to adjust, “Was that the hand wasn’t holding in the right way or do they want to be alone or is my …” It’s like you have all of the skills to manage that intimate moment and find the just right then. Then, again, when you get to the restaurant and you’re sitting and you notice your partner wants to be on the bench and not on the chair and you offer it, and as soon as she relaxes into the bench, you’re like, “That’s just what she needed,” because you were paying attention.

Chris Rose: 24:38 You layer these practices into your life and into your sex life together, and so you have the skills and the vocabulary for those kinkier adventures and they don’t have to be as scary, again, because you’re arriving to them prepared and skilled. Again, this invitation into sexual skills is a new one for a lot of people. We do not live in a culture where there are places, organizations, communities’ support to develop, not only your sexual skills, but your relational skills, your love skills, your skills at being human and being in love and being in relationship with other people. We don’t get a lot of opportunities to practice these things and to talk about them, so we’re hoping that Pleasure Mechanics can be a resource for you to practice not only the sexual skills, but the skills of being in love and being in relationship and enjoying pleasure together as a human. Yes? All right.

Charlotte Rose: 25:49 Just those little skills. Just those little, teeny, teeny skills.

Chris Rose: 25:55 So, mindful kink. It was just really important for me to presence the idea that mindful sex skills take us on … or we take our mindful sex skills with us on the erotic adventures we choose, and that can be any range of erotic energies, erotic expressions, solo, partnered, groups, and these skills that we talk about are applicable in every erotic scenario I can imagine.

Charlotte Rose: 26:28 Which is part of the incredible magic of them. They also are very useful in the rest of life. I feel like I’ve been really paying attention to how all of these skills impact and influence the rest of life, and it’s also very powerful, but that’s another conversation. They’re really, really universal and beautiful skillsets to cultivate and develop individually and in partnership because it opens up a whole new depth to the experiences that you’re already having and opens doors-

Chris Rose: 27:00 Exactly.

Charlotte Rose: 27:01 … to the ones you want to have.

Chris Rose: 27:02 Thank you.

Charlotte Rose: 27:02 Yes. Beautiful.

Chris Rose: 27:04 So, come on over, PleasureMechanics.com/Mindful for a podcast-listener only pricing. For our mindful sex course, PleasureMechanics.com/Mindful where you will find our mindful sex course. There are more than enough practices already in the course to get you started and we will be adding new practices in the weeks and months to come. As we deepen and continue to explore these practices together in community, the course will be expanding and growing, and we would love to have you on board, exploring these practices with us. If you love this podcast and want to support this show, please come over to Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics, that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N, Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics, and support this show with a sustaining, monthly pledge. We really appreciate all of our supporters and invite you to become a patron of the erotic arts at Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics. All right. We will see you next week with another episode of Speaking of Sex. I am Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 28:15 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 28:16 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 28:18 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Mindful Sex For Men With Performance Anxiety

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Mindful Sex May continues with an exploration of what mindful sex practices can offer men struggling with performance anxiety. This is one of the most common sexual struggles for men – you finally have the opportunity to be sexual with a partner, you start to get aroused, and then… worry, anxiety, fear and/or panic start to set in! Anxiety is the enemy of arousal – so what can you do to interrupt the pattern of performance anxiety?

Join us in exploring the practices of Mindful Sex – enroll in our online course, join the community of pleasure explorers and start practicing these simple yet powerful practices with us.

For a complete online sex therapy program specifically about performance anxiety, we highly recommend Vanessa Marin’s Modern Man’s Guide To Conquering Performance Pressure

Podcast Transcription For Podcast Episode: Mindful Sex For Men With Performance Anxiety

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

Chris Rose: 00:00 Welcome to Speaking Of Sex With The Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are the Pleasure Mechanics and 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 a complete podcast archive. While you are there go to Pleasure Mechanics.com/Free and enroll in the Erotic Essentials, our free online course, so you can get started right away with some of our best strategies and techniques for more pleasure in your life.

Chris Rose: 00:42 Hello. Welcome to the second episode of our Mindful Sex May series. This month we’re exploring different facets of mindful sex, different applications of these techniques and these practices. Today we want to focus on mindful cock. The mindful cock.

Chris Rose: 01:04 How can we unify mindfulness and presence and paying attention with the experience of the beloved penis and bring that penis to sexual experiences with joy and freedom and excitement and reveling in all of the pleasure penises can bring and receive and get rid of some of this penis anxiety that hangs so heavy over so many of us? There’s so much cock anxiety when you think about it. It’s a lot for that tender little organ to bear. You know?

Charlotte Rose: 01:42 It is. I think there’s so much and I think that a lot of men don’t know that because it’s such an isolating experience.

Chris Rose: 01:49 [crosstalk 00:01:49].

Charlotte Rose: 01:49 They don’t realize that other men are having such a similar experience and so many of them.

Chris Rose: 01:55 Yeah. All of them.

Charlotte Rose: 01:57 I think there’s some comfort to knowing that that you’re not alone in having some stress and anxiety and possibly some depression around having an erect penis and having it do what you want when you want it to do it and if it doesn’t then you feel like a failure. All of that is a very common experience.

Chris Rose: 02:14 Again, we’re going to highlight that the experience of anxiety and the struggle and the angst about it is not really about the experience of the penis. It’s much more about the cultural meaning and the emotional significance of what the penis is doing or not doing.

Chris Rose: 02:37 Just notice that. Notice how much of your struggle with your penis or with your partners’ penises how much of that struggle is about the actual what happens versus the meaning you’re assigning to what happens. There might be a very big chasm there.

Chris Rose: 02:55 To paint the picture a little more of what we’re talking about some penises have medical issues. Right? Some men have medical issues that affect their penises, circulation issues, hormone issues. There is a subset of penis issues that are quite medical in nature and that need medical attention and attention to your whole system, your cardiovascular health, your hormonal health.

Chris Rose: 03:21 If your penis function feels like it’s changing across the board, like how your penis functions in the morning, during masturbation, during partnered sex, kind of during all different conditions, if the erectile function, if the ejaculation function, if the urinary function … Like if something the penis is supposed to do it doesn’t do helpfully or if there’s pain during those functions that’s when you go to a doctor.

Chris Rose: 03:51 Many, many, many more of the struggles around the penis are conditional struggles. Meaning you can get erect and have an ejaculation that is satisfying during masturbation but not with your partner or with some partners but not other partners or during certain conditions and not other conditions.

Chris Rose: 04:13 When the penis function is conditional then we look to the psychological, emotional, social underpinnings of … It’s not the penis hydraulics that aren’t functioning. Right? It’s not the ejaculatory function that’s not functioning. There’s something in the whole system, the sexual system, that is going a little haywire.

Chris Rose: 04:37 This is why mindfulness can be such an amazing intervention for men, such an amazing practice, a training ground to rewire and reprogram their sexual system to create different outcomes. We’re going to engineer this mofo, right?

Chris Rose: 04:55 Dr. Lori Brotto, who is the leading researcher on mindful sex from the clinical applications of mindful sex, has for the past decade plus been focusing primarily on women, almost exclusively on women and their sexual experience, and having phenomenal results in her clinic. I will link in the show notes page to an interview with her.

Chris Rose: 05:17 She is now doing research on the application of mindful sex techniques for men and for premature ejaculation, for erectile dysfunction, for sexual performance after prostate surgery are the three main categories she is looking at and we are so excited to talk to her in a few months about what she finds in her research.

Chris Rose: 05:40 Let’s talk about how this might show up for men.

Charlotte Rose: 05:44 They just did a very small study to prove that it was a good idea to keep studying it and they found that the results of using mindfulness with men was very effective in the same way that it has been with women. It’s probable that they will find that it is awesome for men and I’m going to assume that it is but we will look forward to those studies.

Chris Rose: 06:04 We’re not doing like scientific research prediction here.

Charlotte Rose: 06:07 No.

Chris Rose: 06:09 Well, we have many data sets, right? We have also the data from all of the men in our mindful sex course who are reporting awesome successes and the most important data set, the only research that really matters for you, dear listener, is your research. It’s figuring out if any of these strategies and practices can help you struggle less and enjoy your sex more.

Charlotte Rose: 06:34 Yes. That is what we’re looking for.

Chris Rose: 06:38 Maybe that’s a good way to think about what we’re doing here because we’re not just going for this mind blowing 10 hour orgasm overnight kind of promise. We are going for less struggle, more pleasure. Less isolation, more connection. Less fear, more confidence.

Chris Rose: 06:58 How might mindful sex be a really useful tool if you experience situational erectile dysfunction … I don’t even like the word dysfunction. If you can’t always … If your penis doesn’t always do what you want it to do. That’s not even … This is the whole thing. All of the setups for men like erectile dysfunction means if it’s not erect it’s dysfunctioning.

Charlotte Rose: 07:21 Yeah. It’s not really fair.

Chris Rose: 07:23 Premature ejaculation is like ejaculation before you wanted it. Since when do we order our bodies around to do what we want them to do when we want them to do it?

Charlotte Rose: 07:33 Often but it’s not a good idea.

Chris Rose: 07:34 It’s all a setup. Just notice this. Even the language around the penises, how we think about penises and penis function, is a complete setup. It’s like if you’re not erect you are wrong and you are therefore less of a man, therefore your worth is devalued, therefore go crawl in a hole and die.

Charlotte Rose: 07:52 Oh my God. It’s so dramatic but I think [crosstalk 00:07:55].

Chris Rose: 07:54 It’s so fucking true, though. These are the emails I get all the time from men and they are good husbands, they are good partners, they’re great dads, they’re great at work. They’re like showing up in their life, they’re trying their best, and then when they can’t get an erection when they are a little bit aroused we slap them down and tell them that they’re lesser than.

Chris Rose: 08:12 It’s so cruel. I get really worked up about this. There’s so much cruelty done onto men’s sexuality that hasn’t yet been named, that hasn’t yet been unpacked. We’ve been spending the past 50 years looking at and talking about the sexual oppression of women and it’s time we talk about how this is impacting men because men are struggling, they are hurting, and they need support and they also need solidarity. Right?

Chris Rose: 08:38 The main message here, guys, is you are not alone. If your penis doesn’t always pop to attention, if it gets erect when it’s not supposed to get erect, when it doesn’t get erect when you kind of want it to, when you have ejaculations too quickly or not at all.

Chris Rose: 08:55 One way we can think about all of this it’s a mismatch between what you might be feeling and experiencing and how your genitals are behaving. This is arousal nonconcordance because so much of how this shows up is you have a sexual partner or you’ve worked really hard to get the attention of a sexual partner. You do a lot of effort to create a sexual opportunity. A sexual opportunity comes and you balk. You freak out.

Chris Rose: 09:26 A lot of the guys I talk to it’s like they can anticipate sex, they get horny, they can masturbate while fantasizing about fucking someone, and then at the time where they have a possibility, they have a receptive partner, someone is hitting on them, their wife is finally in the mood, they freak the fuck out and that anxiety loop then completely hijacks their neurology, their body, their physiology, and the penis doesn’t play. The penis doesn’t join the play in a way that we have taught men is necessary for their sexual pleasure.

Chris Rose: 10:06 There’s so many things to break down here, right? We can start at the end and say your erection is not necessary for sexual pleasure. We did a great episode recently about soft penis pleasures and all the ways you can enjoy a soft penis. We can start there but we also need to start at how can you show up for an arousing situation, receive that arousal, build that arousal, and not freak out and not spin into anxiety.

Chris Rose: 10:34 This is the main intervention of mindful sex. That’s amazing for all of us. I think it’s going to be rocket fuel for so many men to learn how to build arousal without getting anxious.

Charlotte Rose: 10:46 Because that’s what happens. You’re in an experience with a partner and you start feeling aroused and you feel those sensations in your body and then you start feeling nervous and anxious about what’s going to happen in the future and how is your erection going to be and is it going to stay and then you’re focusing all your attention on those thoughts and your erection starts to disappear.

Charlotte Rose: 11:08 That is what we want to support you in shifting. What we want to do is learn how to be aroused and feel the experience of arousal in our body while calming our thoughts, calming our mind, and being able to focus all of our attention on the sensations in your body of arousal.

Charlotte Rose: 11:30 Eventually over time the experience of arousal is not anxiety-producing. You can genuinely spend all of your attention focusing on how good it feels to be aroused and not be worrying about your erection. That is a process. That is a practice. There are things that we can do to cultivate that experience.

Chris Rose: 11:50 Well, and that you can stay aroused, stay in high states of arousal, and your erection will come and go and that’s okay. Right? When we think about the model of staying relaxed and aroused … Blood will flow in and out of the penis and there will be the full mast, half mast, all sorts of situations, but as you move dynamically through the sexual experience it will become less and less important and you experience pleasure in your whole body and your attention isn’t just on, “How hard am I? How can I thrust fast enough to get an ejaculation before I lose this erection?”

Chris Rose: 12:30 That kind of sprint is what a lot of men get into. It’s like, “I’m hard. I have the opportunity. Let’s go. Let’s do this.” That is not a great formula for sexual partners always.

Charlotte Rose: 12:42 For connection because you’re so focused on reaching the finish line, the imaginary finish line.

Chris Rose: 12:47 Right. You might be rushing your partner who is there and excited but needs way more time to warm up and then can get to the fucking. It puts a lot of pressure on that erection and it creates this thing of like if the erection goes away or if I ejaculate this opportunity is over.

Chris Rose: 13:05 I’ve been reading an article by an Olympian silver medalist who is coming out with a book about performance anxiety and erectile dysfunctions. We’re hoping to bring him on the show and talk really deeply about this.

Chris Rose: 13:21 One of the things I noticed is the juxtaposition between performance and athletic performance and competition that is so built into masculinity and how then a sexual opportunity becomes an opportunity to win or lose and that you kind of are self-scoring before you’re even get started. You’re worried about that winning and losing, you’re worried about where you are on that ranking card. Men are so like, “How do I compare to your other partners? Was he better than I?” That competition that’s built into the male ego …

Charlotte Rose: 13:56 Which we’re trained to do. That is not …

Chris Rose: 13:59 Right. It’s not because you’re an egotistical bastard. It’s because this is like your programming. Then women are trained to evaluate themselves on sexiness and desirability and how their body looks. Right?

Chris Rose: 14:11 We drop into a moment with a couple whose into each other, they want to fuck. His erection goes down, he has lowered his score, he feels like a failure, she feels like that erection is some reflection on her, she feels like a failure, and now they have to reconcile that failed sexual moment.

Charlotte Rose: 14:29 Yeah. It’s a downward spiral.

Chris Rose: 14:31 How familiar does this feel to you? How familiar does this scenario feel? I think it’s really, really common. Then there’s versions of this. There are a lot of strategies here. How does mindful sex fit into this?

Chris Rose: 14:45 Mindful sex is going to give you the strategies and the techniques so that you can first notice the patterns in your sexual response system, you notice the anxiety scripts, you notice what starts happening, and in that noticing there is so much opportunity because then you can start intervening, interfering with that script, choosing a different script earlier and earlier.

Charlotte Rose: 15:11 Part of what you get to do is begin to pay attention to what your first early signs of feeling anxiety or feeling stress as you’re getting aroused are. You have to be your own detective and figure that out and really pay attention to what your body does, what your mind does, what your thoughts are that start putting you into an unsavory loop.

Chris Rose: 15:33 We have tools to help you do that in the mindful sex course so you’re not on your own being a detective and you’re learning together also in community about the common patterns so you can start being, “Oh, yeah. That makes sense to me.” Then what happens when you’ve established these scripts and patterns where does the opportunity come?

Charlotte Rose: 15:54 Then you can begin to interrupt those thoughts, you can notice those thoughts, and replace them with different thoughts, which can then have a different outcome. You begin to train your mind to shift your attention where you want it to go instead of where it goes on autopilot.

Charlotte Rose: 16:13 We tend to think of those thoughts as real, as real truth, and sometimes they aren’t real truth. They are just programmed thoughts. When we begin to shift them to something more desirable it has an impact on our body and our body’s experience.

Chris Rose: 16:31 Then you start creating the opportunities for yourself to have different experiential outcomes. That’s when the secret sauce happens when your body experiences a different option, when your body experiences the opportunities to have relaxed arousal without a focus on the outcome and gets to feel how pleasurable that is, how joyful that can feel. You start reprogramming your neurology.

Chris Rose: 17:00 One of the fancy words for this is positive neuroplasticity. There’s a neuroscientist Buddhist teacher I’ve been really learning a lot from recently and he talks about this as installing the good. We’ll talk more about this in a future episode.

Chris Rose: 17:16 The important thing here is that when we have positive experiences we have to focus on them and tell our body to take it in as an option. Our brains are threat tracking monsters. The human brain is really good at threat tracking, at looking for the potential problems to solve.

Chris Rose: 17:40 One of the skills of mindful sex we learn to bring here is paying attention to what is in a more neutral way so we don’t project all of our anxiety and fears into the current moment.

Chris Rose: 17:55 There’s an opportunity here for open dialog with your partner where you have a conversation ahead of time, “If I don’t get an erection that stays erect for the entire time we’re playing it’s not because I don’t find you desirable. It’s something my body is doing right now. I just want to let you know ahead of time.” You pregame it and you set expectations differently. That can be a strategy.

Chris Rose: 18:18 If we go back to the juxtaposition of athletic performance and sexual performance one of the strategies we can think about here is practicing for the big event. One of the things that gives us confidence and skills to enjoy … If we even take off winning and losing, right? I don’t want to continue that performance metaphor but what helps you enjoy game day? What helps you enjoy your hobbies? It’s practicing and developing skills so you can be in the flow.

Chris Rose: 18:52 Whether that’s soccer or woodworking, I always go back to woodworking, whatever your skill is, we all know that by putting in practice and developing skills individually it helps us enjoy a flow state, an experience of something else. You put in the practice to experience the thing. We can break down so many hobbies this way.

Chris Rose: 19:18 Mindful sex gives us a set of practices, a set of strategies, a set of skills to work out, to practice with, to literally develop skills. This word practice can start feeling woo woo. Like, “What’s your erotic practice?” We’re literally practicing skills. It’s no different than dribbling a basketball. You’re practicing embodied erotic skills so that when your wife is looking at you and wants to connect and your penis is soft and you don’t feel good about that you have a whole suite of skills to deploy that allow you to stay in that present moment, look your wife in the eye, and enjoy whatever erotic opportunity is available for you.

Chris Rose: 20:07 Cumulatively, if we can stay present for all of those erotic opportunities, whether it’s the tender kiss on the shoulder before you roll over and go to sleep but you can really feel that kiss and be present to it and what it meant to the wildest of sex you can imagine. Right? That whole range of staying present for erotic opportunities, paying attention to them, feeling them fully, letting them in, that’s what your lifetime of sex is made of. It’s not the one Olympic performance. Right?

Chris Rose: 20:40 How do we develop the skills to stay present and available for the cumulative experience of being an erotic human? That’s what we’re practicing for. When it comes to the cock it’s about realigning the cock with the full man behind it so your penis gets to play with your full presence behind it and your penis isn’t this separate thing. We often treat it, it’s like this dangling, “Oh, it’s got a head of its own.” It’s this like dangling thing.

Chris Rose: 21:15 We’ve disembodied men from their penises. We treat them like they’re this demon beast that needs satisfying. You know? I don’t know. We have such weird narratives about the penis and how do we just treat the penis as a beautiful organ of pleasure that can give and receive so much pleasure, that’s fascinating and mesmerizing in its ability to change.

Chris Rose: 21:38 We need whole new dialogs about the cock. We need men who are willing to embody their cocks as lovers fearlessly and without shame and from this place and then tell other men what is possible and tell men about the internal penis and the pleasures of the internal penis and the pleasures of being penetrated. You’ve gotten me started.

Chris Rose: 22:02 Yeah. I get really excited about this, I get really fiery about it, because a lot of men confide in me and I suspect have conversations with me they’re not having with a lot of other people and this has been over the past 20 years. I have this sense of what men are struggling with and how men are treated in bed and how men treat themselves sexually. Like what men give themselves permission for and how men feel about their penises.

Chris Rose: 22:34 I’ve also been in erotic community. I’ve been with men who were fearless sexual explorers, who have devoted their life to sexual adventure. I’ve been inside so many men. I’ve had so many cocks in my hands, we have together, that we also know what is possible for men.

Chris Rose: 22:51 We have seen men in fully unbridled sexual power and it’s fucking gorgeous. This world needs more. I think there’s this sense of we need less of men’s sexuality right now and we don’t. We need more of men’s authentic, empathetic, emotional embodied sexuality because it’s fucking gorgeous and sexy and hot and beautiful and powerful and motivates men to do great work in the world and show up for their communities.

Chris Rose: 23:23 We all need this sexual liberation healing we’re talking about. This is not just for pussies. What does the liberated cock look like? We need to start painting a picture of what men’s sexual liberation will look like and what that will bring to women.

Charlotte Rose: 23:42 Part of what that looks like is men being in relationship with their own cock. This narrative of the cock has a mind of its own and you just have to follow your cock because you have no control over it. That is where men’s sexuality gets so messy.

Chris Rose: 24:03 Or that the cock is used to prove a point.

Charlotte Rose: 24:03 And dangerous. Yes.

Chris Rose: 24:06 The cock is used to prove your power. I mean, we’re getting into a whole other conversation here about …

Charlotte Rose: 24:10 But a responsible and mindful cock is when a man has a relationship with his own cock where he can know what it needs and he’s responding to it and he’s also being kind to himself, not talking badly, poorly to himself or his cock, but has a generous spirit with himself and has practices where he is able to cultivate that power. He is not letting it run away or prove a point but is letting it respecting his sexuality and his desire and his eroticism and giving it space but also cultivating it and communing with it and …

Chris Rose: 24:59 We’ve officially gone off the deep end. You just got a big honking laugh. With that, we really want this to be an invitation to all of you. You know, again, we’ve been getting emails recently about gendered language and more and more listeners want us to strip all of this gendered language out and talk about … We do. We talk about bodies. All of this comes back to the human body, the human experience of sexuality, of showing up for one another.

Chris Rose: 25:31 In this episode we’ve really been talking about cocks and people who are socialized as men and this male masculinity script that you’ve been given and that have led so many of you to a specific set of sexual experiences and a specific relationship with your penis and what it means about your masculinity and the performative, competitive relationship you have with your sexuality.

Chris Rose: 26:01 We can highlight these specific experiences and we can talk about the different socializations of men and women but ultimately these practices serve us all and they are amazing practices for human bodies, whether or not you’re in a sexual relationship right now, whether you’re queer or straight, however you identify, the mindful sex practices can serve you.

Chris Rose: 26:25 We really want these practices to be available and accessible. We have put them all in our mindful sex online course. There is special podcast pricing going on now at Pleasure Mechanics dot com slash Mindful that will take you directly to enrollment.

Chris Rose: 26:41 Enrolling in an online course means you have access to this resource library but it also means an investment, a commitment, for you to practice, to try things out, to let us into your erotic life in a deeper way, to try our techniques, to try our strategies, and see what changes for you.

Chris Rose: 27:04 Stepping into an online course as much as it’s, yes, unlocking new resources, it is stepping into an experience and then we are there to guide you along. We are there for you to shoot an email to being like, “This is what happens. It felt weird. What do you think?” I will be there for you with personalized coaching.

Chris Rose: 27:24 It’s a way we can make these techniques available to people all around the world at a really affordable way. That is why we do all of this work online. Pleasure Mechanics dot com slash Mindful. Join our mindful sex online course.

Chris Rose: 27:40 Then we’re thinking about traveling so go to Pleasure Mechanics dot com slash Live to tell us if you could join us in Los Angeles this August or if not in Los Angeles where would you like to meet us? We have wonderful responses coming in. It looks like we have a very busy travel schedule for the next 20 years.

Charlotte Rose: 28:00 Awesome.

Chris Rose: 28:01 Let us know where you are. If you’d like to come out to a live workshop experience with us go to Pleasure Mechanics dot com slash Live. The truth is many, many more of you will meet us online, join our online courses, do these practices in the privacy of your own home, feel the results of them in your own body, in your own relationships, report back to us.

Chris Rose: 28:27 We will continue to deliver you amazing resources to take you deeper into your erotic experience and together we have thousands of people gathered together into this online school all asking the question, “How can I experience more sexual pleasure in my life? How can I feel less struggle and more joy around my sexuality? How can we do this through daily practice through making incremental changes that have huge profound results?”

Chris Rose: 29:00 After 10 years we now have a community of people who have been making these changes, couples who are in totally new places, and that is feeling so exciting for me to have been working with people now for over a decade.

Chris Rose: 29:15 Join us. Pleasure Mechanics dot com is our online home. You’ll find it all there. Pleasure Mechanics dot com slash Mindful to enroll in the mindful sex course and join us for this Mindful Sex May and beyond. Yes. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 29:31 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 29:32 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 29:33 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 29:37 Manifested through daily practices. We’ll see you next time on Speaking Of Sex With the Pleasure Mechanics. Cheers.

Mindful Masturbation

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Mindful Masturbation Podcast Episode. Image of black woman's face with eyes closed and serene smile

How much attention do you bring to your masturbation? How much creativity do you allow yourself in the time you spend with solo touch?

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In this episode we explore Mindful Masturbation – or as our mentor Annie Sprinkle calls it “medibation!” What happens when we treat masturbation as an important experience to pay more attention to – and perhaps even treat it as a meditation practice?

What happens when we bring the qualities of non-judgment and non-striving to masturbation, instead of rushing our way to orgasm?

This episodes pays homage to International Masturbation Month, created by the good folks at Good Vibrations over 20 years ago, and opens our theme for the month, Mindful Sex May.

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Podcast Transcription for Mindful Masturbation Episode

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 to Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:05 We are the Pleasure Mechanics, and on this podcast, we have explicit and soulful conversations about every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to PleasureMechanics.com, where you will find our complete podcast archive, as well as a tremendous wealth of resources just waiting for you to enjoy. Go to PleasureMechanics.com/Free, and enroll for our free online course to get started. That’s PleasueMechanics.com/Free.

Chris Rose: 00:38 All right. On today’s show, we are kicking off a new theme for the month of May. The month of May is traditionally International Masturbation Month. International Masturbation Month was started like, over 20 years ago by the good folks at Good Vibrations, and if today you’re kind of rolling your eyes, that why do we need a masturbation month, it kind of shows how much sex culture has changed over the past 20 years, because Good Vibrations started masturbation month and the masturbatathon as a promotion for the idea of masturbation, to de-stigmatize masturbation as a reason to talk about masturbation in the press. Because back then, there weren’t news articles about masturbation and normalizing, especially female masturbation, and things like vibrators. Good Vibrations, 20 years ago, was on the cutting edge of changing sex culture, and opening up the dialogue about masturbation.

Chris Rose: 01:44 And now, you can find vibrators in Walmart, and drug stores, and you can find lubricant at these places, and the conversation about masturbation is changed. So, thank you to Good Vibrations, and it just shows the power of dialogue and conversation in changing sex culture, and in changing how we feel about these acts like masturbation.

Chris Rose: 02:17 For us here at Pleasure Mechanics, we really want to celebrate May as Mindful Sex May. We want to spend this month highlighting some of the applications of mindful sex, some of the benefits of mindful sex, and invite you in to the practice of mindful sex with us. Because as much as we can talk about this, and you can listen about it, what really will start to change things in your life is practice, and we are going to share with you what we mean by practice and mindful sex practices. But we really want you to do it with us, we want these skills to develop in your body, in your life, and to do that, you need to practice with us, and we are very much in this practice with you.

Chris Rose: 03:06 So, Masturbation May and Mindful Sex May are coming together in this episode, and we’re going to talk about mindful masturbation. Yes?

Charlotte Rose: 03:19 Yes. So, what does mindful masturbation mean? What are we talking about? This is the act of paying attention to the sensations in our body as we are getting aroused, as we are naked, as we are touching our body, we are really paying full attention to the experience and the sensations within our body.

Chris Rose: 03:41 And when you hear that, paying attention as you build arousal during masturbation, take a moment to think about how much you actually do that. Where are you placing your attention during masturbation? How are you treating masturbation? Are you rushing through it? Is it a functional act? Is it just to set to a goal of an orgasm, a release and ejaculation, or is it an experience you are really giving to yourself and paying attention to?

Chris Rose: 04:10 And all of a sudden, when we look at it through this lens, we notice that we are not giving ourselves the kind of experience that we are capable of. We are not being the lover that we can be for ourselves, and we’re all in this. When we talk about mindful sex, when we talk about mindful masturbation, these are practices that we can all bring to our sex life in order to explore, and experience and experiment.

Charlotte Rose: 04:40 And expand our orgasms and the strength of them.

Chris Rose: 04:44 Explore, experience, experiment.

Charlotte Rose: 04:47 Expand.

Chris Rose: 04:48 Expand.

Charlotte Rose: 04:48 Because that is a side effect, as well as experiencing it more fully, that many people will experience stronger orgasms, as well, which is a fun side effect, though that isn’t entirely why we’re going for it.

Chris Rose: 05:02 So, I just want to say if this feels really far away from your experience, that is where most of us are at. We are not taught to pay attention to our sexuality. We are not taught to pay attention to our arousal, and to really drop in to our sensations, and savor all of those sensations, and focus exclusively on arousal building into our body to the point of orgasm and release. We’re not taught how to do that, so we have to learn and we have to practice together. And when we think about mindfulness, so Charlotte named the act of paying attention. So, paying attention. The other piece of mindfulness is paying attention without judgment.

Chris Rose: 05:45 So, paying attention, but then paying attention without judgment is the real invitation here, and we all carry so much judgment about our sexualities, about how we masturbate, about what we think about when we masturbate, about how little or how much sensation we’re feeling, about our orgasms. All of these things, right. So much judgment, so much shame, and so mindful masturbation is not only the invitation to pay more exquisite attention to your sensations, it’s also the invitation to pay attention to your thoughts, to your judgements, and to try to come to a more neutral place so that you open up all of that space to pay attention to the pleasure, to give yourself permission to feel more pleasure, and relaxation and release from your self touch.

Chris Rose: 06:39 So, the practice of mindful sex is the practice of paying attention without judgment during states of high arousal. So, this is in application of mindfulness mediation, which invites you to pay attention without judgment while doing a sitting meditation, or a walking meditation, or a body scan. How do we apply those skills to the heightened states of arousal, of desire, of sexual connection, of the vulnerability of being intimate with other people? So, this is kind of an arena we get to practice our mindfulness, and reap the befits of mindfulness, but also then expand our erotic experience.

Chris Rose: 07:24 And in the whole category of mindful sex, mindful masturbation, for a lot of people, is a good place to start. And so, we’re going to invite you in to some of the practices of mindful masturbation, paint the picture of what that might look like, and invite you just to experiment a little, get curious a little about what might happen for you if you change up how you masturbate.

Charlotte Rose: 07:49 And as you were saying, it makes so much sense to practice all of these skills solo, because you can pay attention to your own experience, you can pay attention to all the nuances that are going on in your mind, that are going on in your body, and try and tame your thoughts, and be present to the experiences in your body, and practice, and deepen in feeling, and being kind to yourself, and not being judgemental, and not stopping your pleasure because of the thoughts that are going on. It is just the most wonderful place to begin and practice these skills.

Chris Rose: 08:30 Well, certainly there are fewer distractions when you’re solo. It’s a smaller arena. It’s a one person arena, instead of a two or three, or more person arena. And so, there’s less to pay attention to, but it’s not simple. And for a lot of people, one of the reasons we speed through masturbation, and we make it so functional, is so we don’t have to be alone with ourselves. And so, we don’t have to confront our thoughts, so we don’t have to confront our own judgements. A lot of people short circuit themselves with porn, or erotica, or fantasy to get through it as fast as possible.

Chris Rose: 09:11 And so, you’re painting this picture of this wonderful laboratory where we get to savor and experiment with our arousal. But for many people, that feels really far away, or inaccessible. So, what are the first steps here? The first steps are to really inventory how you masturbate now. What is the level of attention and intention you’re bringing to your masturbation? And again, for most of us, if we’re honest about this, it is purely functional.

Chris Rose: 09:41 We reach for our vibrator, we reach for our favorite lube, we jerk off, we wack off, we clench a vibrator to our clit, and we cum. That is just the truth of it. Most people do not make an art out of masturbation, because they have not been invited to do so, they have not been given permission to do so, and when we slow this process down, we have to then confront all of the stuff that is in our way of savoring our self touch, and treating ourselves like the lover we know we deserve.

Chris Rose: 10:15 Right? And so, as you do an honest compassionate inventory of your current masturbation practices, start to notice where you learned how to masturbate. Did you learn how to masturbate under duress? Were you always rushing, were you always quiet? Were you worried or scared about getting caught? What would the repercussions be if you were caught in your masturbation? And know that, that is your programming around masturbation. You have been taught a specific set of things about masturbation, and you might be listening to this and never even masturbate. I hear all the time from people, or from partners of people who don’t masturbate. That is a practice, right, the absence of masturbation is also a practice.

Chris Rose: 11:02 So, notice for yourself how frequently, how much time do you give yourself, how much permission to play. Do you always do the same thing? Okay, and so, for most of us when we do that inventory, it’s kind of like, oh shit, we’re a lousy lover to ourselves. We are. We don’t give ourselves the kind of like, loving attention and time we would give to a new beloved. Right? That spaciousness, and the like, I’ll do anything for you, and how do you want to be please. Oh, you want your neck licked for 10 minutes, I’ll lick that neck like a lollipop. That attitude that we bring to a beloved of generosity and of giving, what piece of that can we bring to ourselves?

Chris Rose: 11:53 And so, mindful masturbation starts by treating masturbation as something that is worth taking the time for, and then setting some sort of intention. And this doesn’t have to get super woo-woo, right. The intention can just be like, every so often as I’m watching porn, I’m going to close my eyes, and focus on the sensations inside for a few minutes. Just every once in a while, I’m going to close my eyes, and focus elsewhere. And that is honoring the fact that your attention is mostly focused on the visual field of watching porn, and you’re going to experiment with dropping into your body and noticing how your hand feels on your penis, noticing how your pelvic muscles are feeling, noticing where your breath is. So, taking that focus of attention, and dropping it within. It can start that simply.

Charlotte Rose: 12:46 Dr. Laurie Mintz talks about mindfulness as the experience of your head and your body being in the same place, and I really love that because it’s so simple, and we have that visual of, oh, right, yeah, sometimes my mind is off all over the place, or as you’re saying, I’m paying attention to the visual of something on a screen, or words if you’re listening to erotica.

Chris Rose: 13:11 Well, this is where it gets interesting, because some people would say that if you’re watching porn or listening to erotica, or even fantasizing, you’re not practicing mindful sex. Some people would say fantasy is taking you out of your body. But for me, fantasy, like your brain is part of your body, and arousal that starts in your brain, there’s a very sexy word for it, psychogenic arousal. Fuck yeah. Psychogenic arousal creates very real arousal in the body. So, for me, if you’re masturbating, and you’re fantasizing, or you’re watching porn, you are using specific tools to create arousal, and it becomes mindful masturbation when you are doing that on purpose.

Charlotte Rose: 13:57 And with your full self.

Chris Rose: 13:59 Yeah, and you’re not just on autopilot.

Charlotte Rose: 14:01 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 14:01 And so, you’re saying, all right, I’m going to use the visual porn, but I’m also going to pay attention to how my body feels, and I’m going to notice how much I’m paying attention to the screen versus my body, and then maybe over time that field of attention starts to drift, because you noticed that paying attention to your body feels really good.

Chris Rose: 14:21 One of the skills, one of the practices we really want to invite you into is breathing, and mindful sex, the mindful sex course is where all of our erotic breathwork practices are hosted. And I’ve said so many times on this podcast, and I really want you to try it for yourself, the next time you are masturbating, start a deep relaxed breathwork. We teach you how to do that, we guide you through it. There’s audio guide, so you can practice it a few times, so that then when you’re masturbating, you can try it, and this is one of those things like, if I had a farm to bet, I would bet the farm on the premise that if you start taking deep relaxed breaths next time you masturbate, your experience will change.

Chris Rose: 15:11 And it will change for the more pleasurable. So much will change. I could go on right now about all of the things that will change, but just do it. Just do it. Notice what happens when next time you’re masturbating, you put your attention on taking deep relaxing breaths. Get as much oxygen in your body, and then pay attention to what happens to your arousal. What happens? What is your body capable of feeling? And this is the invitation we can just step into over and over again.

Chris Rose: 15:43 I was masturbating the other day, and I had like, all of this tension in my body. I was feeling really stressed out. And I got to the point where I was like, at this place, like I had already had an orgasm, but my sensation was just so big, and it felt stuck, and I felt like I couldn’t possibly go on, but I couldn’t possibly stop now, and so I heard my own voice in my head, and I was like, just breathe, baby, and I went into this big deep breathwork, and I not only got to have like, thunderous wonderful orgasms, but the space that it created for me was such a relief to all of that tension. And it just felt like the most cathartic orgasms of my … like, it just felt so right, and I got there because I focused my attention instead of in my head, in the like, oh my god, what am I feeling, how am I ever going to get out of this stuckness? This is scary. That anxiety that can come with arousal that is so familiar to so many of us. You’re aroused, you’re getting excited, and then anxiety kicks in. Fear. Worry. Panic. It’s right there. And what brings us back to excitement and arousal, is often the breath.

Chris Rose: 17:02 So, learn this with us. Practice this with us. And masturbation is the perfect place to start breathing and experimenting with that, and collecting data for yourself, so that next time with your partner, and anxiety kicks in, you’re like, oh, I know what to do. I have a tool. I have a strategy.

Chris Rose: 17:21 So, so much of this, when we talk about mindful masturbation, we can get into this like, use it as a laboratory so you can have better partnered sex, and that is true. But it is also just for you, and in and of itself is a full experience that doesn’t need to be justified.

Chris Rose: 17:40 And again, if I had another farm to bet, I would bet that farm on the premise that if you start masturbating with more attention and focus on giving yourself pleasure and joy, that your life will be nourished by that practice, that it will feel beneficial to the rest of your life, that those will be minutes well spent. There’s only one way to prove me wrong.

Charlotte Rose: 18:06 Part of what you can be paying attention to during mindful masturbation is really paying attention to the sensations, and not being concerned or striving for orgasm. Let it be a place where you’re not that concerned if you get there or not, but you’re really, really, honestly exploring the sensations as the arousal, ebbs and flows. As you try different techniques to create arousal, as you explore and experiment with different moves as it were than you would normally do, so that this can be a time and a space where you’re not trying to head straight for orgasm and doing what you know works for you, but you’re really playing and being curious about what new sensations you can physically create with your body, as well as what you are paying attention to internally. Does that make sense? That externally, you’re trying different things physically, and then you’re also internally paying attention to that really deeply with a spirit of curiosity, not worrying where it goes.

Chris Rose: 19:10 Right, and to highlight this, if we’re really goal oriented towards orgasm, we all have those strokes in those places that will get us there fastest. You know those strokes, you know those places. Your love might know those strokes and those places, and we can use those strokes and those places. We do not give up that knowledge when we open up a space to say I’m going to see what happens when I touch here, when I pinch here, when I push there. You can explore your genitals with, as Charlotte said, a spirit of curiosity, and discover new strokes and new places that also feel good, that unlock different kinds of sensations.

Chris Rose: 19:55 And it’s kind of amazing how much time we can spend touching our own genitals, but how limiting those routines can be. And so, one of the invitations of mindful sex is when we give up that goal orientation, and instead explore with this non-striving attitude, what knowledge, what wisdom becomes accessible to us?

Charlotte Rose: 20:21 I’m thinking of it as instead of taking the highway, you’re taking all of the side routes, and you’re exploring and checking it out, and looking at the view, and you know it’s going slower, and that’s fine, that’s part of that experience for the day.

Chris Rose: 20:34 You can turn off the GPS that will get you to the orgasm as fast as you can. The destination is turned off. What then becomes of the journey?

Charlotte Rose: 20:45 I think it’s a solid, solid, solid way to-

Chris Rose: 20:47 Solid metaphor.

Charlotte Rose: 20:54 So, we’re going to talk more about different attitudes we can hold in our mind as we are exploring masturbation and sex in another episode. But for now, it’s more than enough to start thinking about not judging ourselves, not striving, and trying to explore one’s body with what they call a beginners mind.

Chris Rose: 21:18 And that beginners mind, as a concept, is so powerful, but here in masturbation, let’s play with it and think about the joy and glee children have when they first discover masturbation, the kind of wonder and awe of being able to give yourself such pleasure. If we let go of all of the societal shaming and judgment about masturbation, and all of those messages, and we just get to this core truth of there are these ways I can stimulate my body that gives me tremendous pleasure and can lead to a really phenomenal experience called orgasm. Huh, that’s really cool. Like, what else can we do with our bodies? That’s a really neat super power we have. Let’s use it, and let’s use it with this spirit of glee.

Chris Rose: 22:15 When’s the last time you masturbated with a spirit of glee, and joy and wonder? So, trying bringing a little of that into your masturbation. And again, just notice, notice what happens when you change your attitude, and you change your intention. I’m going to spend 15 minutes just exploring how I can give my body pleasure. What then? It’s a different way of spending time with yourself than just rushing to give yourself a functional orgasm.

Charlotte Rose: 22:46 Which has merit, again, we will say. It is always a great thing to explore your pleasure, but this is a different thing, and worth doing, and worth giving yourself the chance to see what it’s like.

Chris Rose: 22:58 So, Charlotte, I want to kick this over to you, and I want to hear a little bit about your mindful masturbation practice, because I think part of what you do is you start before you ever get to your genitals, and you have kind of a whole ritual routine. Can you just walk people through that, and talk about why you do each part of it?

Charlotte Rose: 23:22 Sure. I normally start with a warm shower, and then-

Chris Rose: 23:27 Why?

Charlotte Rose: 23:27 Because it calms my body down. It tells me this is time to relax. That is a main tool I use for relaxation and for endings and beginnings, like you’ve completed the day, or now we’re moving into time that’s just for you.

Chris Rose: 23:43 Okay.

Charlotte Rose: 23:44 So, it’s an opening, it’s the beginning. I like to also have a clean body for any kind of sex stuff, because it takes a certain amount of my own anxiety away, so that’s a way of navigating things that distract me. I then massage my whole body, or as much of it as I feel like, because that helps my body relax, and calm, and brings all my attention into my muscles.

Chris Rose: 24:09 And at that point, are you putting on music, are you lighting candles? Do you do anything situationally?

Charlotte Rose: 24:15 I can do all of those things, and I can do none of them.

Chris Rose: 24:17 Okay.

Charlotte Rose: 24:18 It depends how much time I have, how much energy, what the space is like. I love to do all of that. The candles, the essential oils, the music. But getting the right music is always so mood dependent, so I definitely do, and sometimes if I’m just like, let’s get on with this, I can do it all without that.

Chris Rose: 24:36 Okay.

Charlotte Rose: 24:37 So, it depends how luxurious the event is. And then, I will dance. Sometimes I’ll reverse those two, and dance, and then massage myself. But I just will do some dancing, and there’s a lot of like, hip circles and thrusting, and just moving my body, and getting fluid in my bones and my muscles. It just feels good to me. It feels like I’m waking up my body, I am remember it’s there. I’m bringing attention to it. And then, I’ll move in to self touch that is all of my skin, my body before I get to breasts or genitals.

Charlotte Rose: 25:17 It’s about waking up everything, waking up the sensation, waking up the awareness, paying attention to the skin. The sensations, I just, I love it. And then, moving into genital touch, and breath, and clenching, and going through this whole process. It doesn’t actually have to take that much time. It might sound quite elaborate, and it can take ages, or it can be sort of more functional, and take less time. But I do really, really, really notice the difference in the amount of sensation I feel in my body. There are a few times where I’ve tried watching porn, or watching any kind of visual stuff, and it does feel like a short circuit for me, like I get turned on, but the amount I can feel in my genitals is so much less, and it’s quite dramatic.

Charlotte Rose: 26:08 And so, that’s been a really helpful thing to compare, and so I feel like I do end up having really lovely orgasms. I know that’s a long process.

Chris Rose: 26:17 Well, it’s your process.

Charlotte Rose: 26:19 It’s my process, yeah. It’s what I discovered over the years.

Chris Rose: 26:21 This is not a prescription. And in being your process, I want to highlight a few of the strategies you deploy, and then invite other people to find their strategies. So, you have found things like a preparatory shower, movement, dance, self touch, ritualizing it in some way with sensual details. All of these things contribute to a deeper experience of solo pleasure. Is that accurate?

Charlotte Rose: 26:51 Yeah, totally.

Chris Rose: 26:52 And so, for me, I can masturbate watching porn with a Hitachi Magic Wand and have big huge orgasms. No problem. Wonderful. Or I can devote more time, and in that devotion, there are things you discover, and I think that’s one of the points I want to make, is there’s nothing wrong with functional quick masturbation, and that too can be mindful. Like, jerking off to porn, using a vibrator, getting there quickly can be full of mindfulness, and you’re paying attention to sensations, and you’re countering any judgements that come up along the way, so we can honor the role of functional masturbation.

Chris Rose: 27:38 I feel like it’s often like, a sneeze, it just has to happen. But we can also honor the space, and give ourself permission to try other things too, to take this act of masturbation, and be like, you know what, I’m going to spend a little more time this evening. I’m going to devote a little bit more effort and attention into it, and see what opens up for me. Just see what you’re capable of, what your capacity is, what emotions want to be expressed. What does your body want to feel? Because sometimes I feel like masturbation is this time you’re giving to your body to feel what it needs to feel, to move what it needs to move, to express what it wants to express, but we need to open up that space for it. And that space involves these things, like relaxation, movement, stimulation. These ingredients.

Chris Rose: 28:35 So, for someone that might be a yoga class, a walk, then a shower, then masturbation. For someone else, lifting weights, and then masturbating. For someone else, going on a long run. Like, we all have our different ways of moving, we all have our different ways of relaxing, but if we think of this as kind of a template of relaxed transition out of your daily life, move your body a little bit, even if that means just wiggling in bed, and clenching your muscles, and un-clenching, or shaking your hips a little bit. Whatever level of movement is accessible, and joyful and pleasurable. And then, start layering in arousing sensation.

Chris Rose: 29:18 Notice what happens as you explore this template, as you bring your attention and your focus to the art of masturbation. What can you make possible for yourself? And then, start noticing the judgment and the shame that comes up. Because as soon as you say to yourself, I’m going to take more time to masturbate, I’m going to feel more feelings, I’m going to feel more of what my body is capable of, the voices will come. Like, who do you think you are? What do you … like, you think you’re some sex goddess? Like, who’s going to … Like, there’s going to be little judgey annoying voices that come up for you. What are they saying? What limiting factors are they putting on you, and what do you have to say to them?

Chris Rose: 30:01 Like, not today, Satan. Like, what do you respond to, and people, when these voices, when you’re programming tells you this is selfish, it’s hedonistic, it’s a waste of time? You’ll be insatiable, you’ll never be able to be pleased again. If you start using vibrators, you’ll get addicted. Your dick’s too small for you to feel anything anyway, no one’s going to want to ever be with you. Like, what do the judging voices say?

Charlotte Rose: 30:29 Those are so intense to hear out loud, but I know that so many of us say those things to ourselves often, and without even realizing that they are an external voice, they are how we talk to ourselves, and recognizing and seeing what we are communicating to ourself is so important, and then we can decide if we agree or not.

Chris Rose: 30:49 Right. Even the thing of like, dancing alone in your room. We can do that mindfully, so paying attention. What does it feel like to dance? But also, what judgments are coming up about that dancing? When you just do something as simple as put on a song you love, and try to move alone through space.

Charlotte Rose: 31:08 I love to do this with my eyes closed, and really focus just on how it feels, because it’s such a great moment to practice this, because there’s no one to perform for, there’s no one looking at you. You can’t even see yourself. It is literally just about how it feels to move in a way that feels good to you. That is the only intention.

Chris Rose: 31:28 And notice, another theme that we’ll just talk about more in depth on another episode, is this transition from going from sexual performance to being sexual. Huge, and that is a huge, huge intention of the mindful sex practices, of the mindful sex community, is how do we transition from performing sex, doing sex as we think it should be done, what we’re supposed to do? How do we transition from performing sex to being sexual beings on our own terms, in all of our glorious diversity, in all of the seasons of sexuality? How do we be sexual beings, and enjoy that more fully as we get out of the performativity?

Chris Rose: 32:15 All right, so mindful masturbation, I think we’ve covered a lot here. There’s way more to cover. It is in the course. One of the terms for this that I will just plant in your brain space, is medibation. Medibation, and medibation was coined by Annie Sprinkle, another one of our great mentors and friends, and she talked about medibation as the art of masturbating as meditation. And that’s so much about mindful sex, is what happens when we treat sex as a meditation? Something worth paying attention to and focusing on with our full being, and exploring what is there.

Chris Rose: 32:58 What wisdom? What benefits? What states can we open up when we start paying attention more fully to sexuality and during sexual arousal? If you’d like to join us in these practices, come on over to PleasureMechanics.com/Mindful. We have preloaded that with a listener only discount for the course. As always, if you need more financial assistance to make the course happen for you, just drop me an email. We are always happy to work with you. We want these practices to be available to everyone who is ready to experience them, and be in our community. Come on over to PleasureMechanics.com/Mindful to get started. We would love to have you, and if you love this show and want to support what we’re doing, Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N, Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics. The URL is in the show notes page, and join us with a sustaining monthly pledge.

Chris Rose: 34:01 I also just want to remind you that when you join the free course at PleasureMechanics.com/Free, you’ll also start getting our weekly newsletter, and this week in the newsletter, we are asking folks to let us know if you want to meet us in Los Angeles.

Charlotte Rose: 34:22 In August of 2019.

Chris Rose: 34:24 So, we have an opportunity to be in Los Angeles in August in 2019, and we discovered that there’s the opportunity to offer you an in person weekend experience. But we need to know if enough folks are interested in this, that we should move forward with planning it. I have been looking at taking over like, a beautiful Hollywood venue, so we can get together, do some mindful sex practices in person. We can guide you in some really wonderful experiential experiences. You can meet each other, and we can share a phenomenal weekend. Are you in to it? Are you interested? Is this something you can make happen? Got to PleasureMechanics.com/Live, L-I-V-E. PleasureMechanics.com/Live, and take the quick survey, and let us know if you are interested and could realistically join us in Los Angeles in August of this year.

Chris Rose: 35:27 And there will be a place to tell us if you can’t make it to Los Angeles, what city would work for you? We are starting to put feelers out and think about offering the in person experiences you are all asking for, and we will start gathering this data finding out where you are, what cities you would like to travel to, to join us for an incredible weekend.

Chris Rose: 35:50 Yeah? Come on over to PleasureMechanics.com/Live, and let us know if you can meet us in Los Angeles, or do we have to come to Australia? I mean, we will. All right. PleasureMechanics.com/Live, let us know if we can meet up with you in person. Yes? Cool.

Charlotte Rose: 36:11 Love it. Love it.

Chris Rose: 36:12 I am Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 36:13 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 36:14 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 36:16 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Body Positive Instagram

Ready to curate an Instagram feed that nourishes you and reminds you of the glory of your human body? Here are some of our favorite Instagram accounts to follow! Have others you love? Follow us on Instagram and send us posts, we love hearing from you in our DMs!

As you scroll this page, notice what it feels like to scroll through a collection of images created by people who are living in their bodies without apology. Does this feel familiar or new? Easy or challenging?

Fill your social media feeds with people who make you feel excited to be alive! Unfollow and unfriend accounts that shame you or make you feel lesser than. Notice what it feels like to engage with the app as you make this change!

Get permission to express yourself more fully and wonder what YOUR version of body expression would be without all the “shoulds”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BwckYYAHsvn/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BwE4kDYB_Kt/
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv1dFa-F6PJ/
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bug1TCfnkFx/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BwlZWlLhE1j/
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bwr9Wx9ljpG/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BwvBtAYA73j/
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu6k_B3AhGA/
https://www.instagram.com/p/B8WpgTbAhTf

Your Body Is Good Enough

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Your body is good enough, sexy enough and you are worthy of limitless pleasure. How easy is it for you to believe that simple statement?

For many of us, body shame, insecurities and judgment create a tremendous amount of stress and struggle. We are taught that our bodies will never be good enough, and that we have to sweat, struggle and strain to achieve a body that is more valuable and worthy of love.

To wrap up our month long theme focusing on Burnout and ending the stress cycles, we talk about BODIES. We look at how we can all transform our body shame and stress into acceptance and compassionate kindness towards our bodies, just as they are right now.

It is much easier to accept and be kind to our bodies when we receive social support and validation. Notice if your social media accounts make you feel energized or depleted, encouraged or frustrated, confident or insecure. You get to curate your own social media – so unfollow accounts that make you feel bad about yourself and follow more folks who are living in and loving their bodies, in all of their glory.

Check out our gallery of body positive accounts on Instagram for a much more nourishing feed!

What resources would be freed up for you if you accepted the idea that your body, as it is right now, is valuable and deserves to be loved and cherished? What if you were enough, just as you are, with no caveats? Can you accept the idea that you are someone’s hottest fantasy, as is?

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Transcript of Podcast Episode: Your Body Is Good Enough

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 to Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I am Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are the Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast, we offer you soulful yet explicit advice on every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to Pleasuremechanics.com where you will find our complete podcast archive. And while you’re there go to Pleasuremechanics.com/free to enroll in our free online course, the Erotic Essentials, so we can get you started with some of our tried and true advice and strategies for maximizing the pleasure in your life. That’s Pleasuremechanics.com/free to get started tonight. On today’s episode we are going to be wrapping up our month of talking about burnout and completing the stress cycle for a more sexy life by talking about body image and all of the energy we bleed into worrying about our bodies and judging our bodies rather than enjoying our bodies and celebrating our bodies.

Chris Rose: 01:12 Before we get started, I want to say thanks to our sponsor… Oh wait, nevermind. We are now sponsor free. We are now sponsor free. Hurray. After a few months, about six months of experimenting with bringing sponsors on board, we recently decided to drop the ads and go sponsor free. We realized that we were spending too much time and too much energy focusing on what our sponsors wanted from us and not on what we wanted to deliver to you. We want this show and this relationship with you to be as clean and direct as possible so we can be as honest with you as possible and just continue to deliver really high value, effective sex talk in education. And to do that, we decided to drop the sponsorships. So this podcast will now be ad free for everyone. What this means though is that we do need your support.

Chris Rose: 02:20 We need you to show us love, to show us your support for this show. Come on over to patreon.com/PleasureMechanics. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N, patreon.com/PleasureMechanics and show your love with a sustaining monthly donation. If just a small percentage of the listeners of this show whose lives we know we’re reaching, we know we’re touching your hearts. If you can find it in your heart to throw us five bucks a month, that will give us a sustainable monthly income so we don’t have to worry about our bills and we can get down to the business of producing this weekly show for you, bringing you amazing educational resources and our online courses and doing our job, being your Pleasure Mechanics. We are here for you. We are here to optimize your sex life and root you on every step of the way. We are not here to sell you vitamins. So be gone sponsorships. Hallelujah. We are ad free again and here for you. But please come over to Patreon.com/Pleasure Mechanics and show your love and support for the show and show us that we made a good choice. Don’t make me feel like a fool. Patreon.com/Pleasure Mechanics.

Chris Rose: 03:44 All right. Into today’s episode, bodies. Body image, how we think about our bodies, how we feel in our bodies, and where are we directing our energy and our time and our resources? One of the chapters in Burnout is called the Bikini Industrial Complex. And the Nagoskis’ explore how the capitalist model of telling us our bodies aren’t good enough, aren’t sexy enough, aren’t healthy enough in order to sell us shit, has become such an intense cultural force that it is distracting all of us from living in our bodies. It’s causing all of us to judge one another and ourselves especially, and it’s a really limiting factor on how much we get to enjoy living in our bodies if we are constantly burdened with a sense of not being good enough. So we want to explore this relationship we have with our bodies and how we can get to a more loving, compassionate, and nonjudgmental stance in order to then enjoy, savor, celebrate, eroticize and yeah, experience ecstasy in our bodies. How can we experience more pleasure if we’re constantly tearing ourselves apart?

Charlotte Rose: 05:13 Yeah. Take a minute as we all having this conversation to reflect on your own life, how much time and energy has gone into critiquing and judging your own body and just think about how you could redirect that time and energy and what that could create in your life. It really becomes an energetic debt that we have and we’re holding constantly that is not necessary.

Chris Rose: 05:45 At first when I was looking at this chapter, I struggle to think about how it fit into the rest of the book about burnout and stress and managing stress. And then I realized that for a lot of people, body image and body shame is a tremendous source of stress, a daily grinding stress that wears us down, but also that tells us our bodies are not okay as they are. This is the message the Bikini Industrial Complex gives us. You are not good enough, you are not thin enough, you’re not pretty enough, you’re not healthy enough, you are not muscular enough, you are not enough, enough, enough. You are not enough. And therefore, you are not worthy of love, of pleasure, of connection, of partnership.

Chris Rose: 06:39 This equation that is messaged to us constantly in order to sell us the solution. They give us that crisis you are not good enough, here are all of the solutions for a price. Entire industries are built on this. The diet industry, the beauty industry and the capitalism is one issue here. This industrial complex that is so invested in messaging to us that we are not good enough, but it’s also the culture we live in that values certain bodies over others. That tells us that certain body types and shapes and presentations are inherently more valuable than others. And by creating that hierarchy and assigning more power and privilege to certain bodies over others, it sets us against each other as enemies. It isolates us and it puts us all in competition with another rather than uniting us around our shared experience of being humans around our shared experience of caring for one another and living more harmoniously together.

Chris Rose: 07:53 So without getting too Shangri-La about this, what we want to point out is that the culture we live in does not affirm most bodies and the inherent value and dignity and worthiness of those bodies. And we are part of our mission, part of the sex positive mission we are on, part of the mission of changing our sex culture. This is one pillar of it. We need to build a culture that affirms the inherent worth and dignity and value and yes, beauty of all bodies, of a diverse range of bodies. We need to explode the idea of what bodies are valuable and what values those bodies bring so that black and brown bodies, fat bodies, disabled bodies, bodies that are different in so many ways are as revered and celebrated and protected as all other bodies. What will that mean for your sex life? So we’re going to set those politics aside. That’s what we’re working towards, a world where all of our bodies have inherent dignity and value and are therefore protected the same.

Chris Rose: 09:15 Let’s bring this to a really individual level. How has your body image, how has your perception of your body and the feeling of worthiness and value you have about your body impacted your sex life from day one? If we’re honest with this question, most of us will be amazed, dismayed, shocked. It is very humbling to realize that from the beginning, from as we were emerging as children, as we are developing into our adolescence, as we’re having some of our first sexual experiences, as we are figuring out who we are in the mating game and who we want to be attracted to and who we want to be attracted to us. Throughout your lifetime of that process, have you felt worthy and valuable just as you are? How many of us can be like, yeah, I had been worthy since day one. No problem. Probably almost none of us. So we are all in this together. We are all struggling with this question in different ways.

Charlotte Rose: 10:27 It’s so sobering when you put it that way. To really take in how we have related to our body and what we are worthy of and how much pleasure we are allowed to experience. So how does this show up in our life? This can influence and impact who we feel worthy of going after, who we feel worthy of being attracted to.

Chris Rose: 10:50 Are they in my league? These ideas of leagues and scores. Is she a 10, are you a seven? Bullshit.

Charlotte Rose: 10:59 Right. And judging how attractive you are and finding a match that is like about the same level of attractiveness. These have so many judgments and so much self worth attached to how we identify our own attractiveness.

Chris Rose: 11:15 This’ll impact what you choose to do with your body. I really wanted to act in high school. I would never have gone on that stage because I was the fat girl. And the message was like, no one wants to look at you. Why would you put yourself on stage? So the sports you chose, the kinds of embodied physical activities you felt permission to enjoy, the pleasures you had to shut down because they weren’t appropriate for your body. And some of this happened before you were even aware. A lot of this happened in your very early childhood. And we inherit this message and then carry it into our entire development of our sense of self. And this is why when we start talking about some of the solutions and antidotes, we’re going to have to dig really deep here. This is some of the deepest deprogramming we are going to have to do collectively and individually to liberate ourselves from this nonsense that judges and shames our bodies and puts our bodies on a hierarchy of worthiness.

Chris Rose: 12:20 This is some of the biggest work to be done culturally. So we’re going to tackle it together. Oh yeah. So go through your life and notice your relationship with your body, what it allowed and what it took permission away from. And as Charlotte was saying, who did you feel permission to be attracted to? Who did you assume would be attracted to you? That is one of the biggest assumptions we need to interrupt because so many of us carry this feeling of no one will love me. No one will find me desirable. No one will want to fuck me because X, Y, and Z. And you fill in those X, Y, and Zs with your personal insecurities. But the thing is you are somebody’s fantasy. You, just as you are, someone is masturbating to you are right now. Can you believe that? So as I say that, some of you will be like, yeah, I can see that. People will find me attractive.

Chris Rose: 13:19 There are people that would want to fantasize about me. Other people will not believe me when I say that. And yet when we look at the data, when we look at what people are searching in porn, when we look at what people find attractive, there’s a huge range of what people find attractive. There’s so many people who prefer bigger bodies, myself included. Charlotte included. There’s so many people who love more flesh to touch and the softness of curves and the aesthetic of curves. But those people sometimes feel ashamed about admitting their desire for bigger bodies and do it in secret. And some people just, even if someone is flirting with them, they would never register it because they don’t believe they are worthy of that flirtation. So we need to internalize this idea that all bodies are desirable by someone and that it’s not just how your body looks that people will find you desirable for.

Chris Rose: 14:23 When we talk about our bodies and our worthiness, it’s so easy just to talk about what it looks like. And skinniness versus fatness and the color of our skin and our hair and the gender archetypes. But we also need to remember that what attracts us to one another is our full selves, our personalities, our values, and if we allow it, those things can be expressed through the body. And this is another piece I just really want to focus on is that the obsession with normalization and the obsession with creating these aspirational ideas of what a man should look like and what a woman should look like. That obsession with all becoming the same aspirational norm limits our individual freakiness. It limits our individual expression. And when you allow who you are to come through your body and be expressed through your body, that is how you express your sexuality and your gender identity, who you are.

Chris Rose: 15:33 And by putting that out there, you then attract the people who are attracted to who you are. So both culturally, how we decorate our bodies, the clothes we wear, the way we move, the language we use, that’s a cultural expression and it sends signals that attract the people that are also interested in those cultures. If you finally get up the guts to shave half of your head, put an earring in your ear and wear different makeup, you might start being attractive to different people who are more into the same music and lifestyle you are. Do you know what I mean? The obsession with normalization prevents us from expressing who we are. And then that gets in the way of that natural flow of attraction that I believe is part of sexuality. It’s like this is who I am and it’s a calling card to bring in the people who will love you and cherish you and stand by you for exactly who you are.

Charlotte Rose: 16:37 That’s so beautiful. So you’re really talking about feeling worthy enough to have full self expression, to really wear and express what gives you pleasure. To decorate yourself through your own pleasure and have that be your compass and your why. Why you want to bring joy to the world by being your fullest self.

Chris Rose: 17:02 Right. And so for those women who love really high feminine expression and love decorating their bodies and would love to take the time to present in that way, great. But for a whole another subset of women who have no interest in makeup, who has no interest in playing that feminine role, what is being held back, what is not being expressed if they’re trying to fit into that box. As long as we’re all trying to conform, we’re not celebrating our differences and in not embracing all of our differences, we’re not then enjoying the full spectrum of who we can be together. And I really look to the gay subcultures for this. Within the gay male community, there are all of these different subcultures for all different body types and expressions. So there’s the hairy bears who the bear community celebrates big, hairy, chubby men. Within that community there the others who are skinnier, more athletic, hairy men.

Chris Rose: 18:07 And there’s all of this language to describe all of the different desires for different kinds of bodies and energies. And within that language, men find affirmation. And when you realize there’s bear camp in California every year and you can go be with a thousand other hairy chubby men who find you so hot, that is so permission giving. But a lot of straight people don’t have access to these multiple subcultures that tell them they are hot and desirable just as they are. And I will never forget the first time I got into a hot tub naked with all of these older lesbians and I was terrified to reveal my body. I thought they were going to kick me out of the party and I dropped my robe and I stepped in naked and they were like, mmm, fresh meat. They all wanted me.

Chris Rose: 19:04 And when I entered a community where I was desired and where I was a hot commodity for my fatness, for my butchness, it changes how you walk in the world because then it doesn’t matter of all the magazine covers. It doesn’t matter the gaze of other people. It’s all of a sudden like, I know who I am and I know that I am worthy of being desired, worthy of being loved. The people I want to fuck, want to fuck me, it’s a mindset that we all need to be able to step into in order to fully embody and enjoy our sexuality. But this takes work. It takes such deep deprogramming to realize we do not have to be at a war with our body. That it’s not about losing five pounds, that it’s not about gaining a little bit more muscle in definition in your pecs, and then you’ll be the guy of her dreams. That it’s not about your Dick size, that it’s not about how flushy your vulva is, that none of these things have any inherent value. It’s all cultural messaging.

Charlotte Rose: 20:17 The truth of it is that we all have inherent value no matter what, and that is a hard pill to swallow in this culture that we have value. We have inherent worth and value just as you are. So that’s such a surprising idea and it’s so strange that we have to do work to accept that. But it’s true-

Chris Rose: 20:42 [crosstalk 00:20:42] even in relationships, even after someone has married you and committed their life to you and signed legal documents, binding their fate with yours, we can still doubt our worthiness of their love through the lens of five pounds or through the lens of I’m getting older and my boobs are saggy or than they were when you married me, so you can possibly want me anymore. That’s not reflective usually of how your partner feels about you. Those are internalized messages that you’re projecting out onto your partner and refusing their love and denying their affection, justifying it through your body shame, justifying it through this withdrawal of like, Ugh, I am not good enough as I am. And we walk that way in the world.

Chris Rose: 21:32 Recently, I’ve been in email communication with a few supermodels, as one does. And it happened serendipitously, but within a week or two, I developed a relationship with a female model and a male model. Both of them are the archetypes, the specimens of perfection, of beauty, absolutely I’m almost intimidated to look at them. There are these people that are so beautiful, you almost forget they’re human. Then they write to me and their struggles are exactly the same as everyone else’s in my inbox. Exactly the same struggles, exactly the same confidence issues, exactly the same relational issues. And we start to realize that your sense of pleasure, your sense of sexual freedom, how much you can enjoy moving during sex, how much you can orgasm, how key you want to get, all of these factors that we might look at, how much can you enjoy sex? Have zero correlation with physical beauty and with pretty privilege in the world?

Chris Rose: 22:47 And I really want to pull this apart when we talk about physical standards and aspirational ideals, those are cultural messages of what is beautiful and we need to stop calling that beautiful. And one of the things that Nagoskis do is they could talk about the new hotness. We need to create a wide range of presentations that we call hot and sexy and beautiful and start assigning these words and decentralizing them. So when we say a pretty woman, we don’t all think of the same image. If I say to you, audience, visualize a beautiful woman standing next to a handsome man, and then we all mind map that together, what would be the rate of variability? Let’s work towards a point where when I say that you’re like, well, what kind of beauty? That could mean 25,000 different things.

Chris Rose: 23:46 One of the ways to do this, so let’s shift into some solutions. And we didn’t really talk about body shame and how it comes up in bed and how you might not want your partner to touch or look at your genitals because of genital shame. There’s so many layers of body shame we’re not going to excavate right now. We’re taking a bird’s eye view at this and just noting that we all struggle. So let’s look at solutions and I will link in the show notes page to a few other episodes about shame and body stuff so you can continue the conversation. And certainly this won’t be the last time we talk about these topics. But for now let’s think about what are the steps you can do to liberate this brain space to stop draining so much energy, worrying about your body, having anxiety that you are not good enough, you’re not x enough. What can we do to deprogram step-by-step?

Charlotte Rose: 24:47 I think it starts with noticing your thoughts about yourself and about other people. But if we start with ourself, notice how often you have thoughts about your body and about its worthiness. Begin to neutralize that. Begin to speak kindly to yourself.

Chris Rose: 25:07 Do you think it’s useful? So a lot of people would look in the mirror and in their head be like, Ugh, I hate how my body looks in this outfit. And that thought is clear as day. Do you think it’s useful to say that out loud and then scrutinize like, would I ever say that to someone I love? There’s something for me about saying it out loud that takes it out of this brain space where we feel almost like we can get away with anything and make it as real as it is. Because when we know that our thoughts have impacts on our biology, on our emotions, and we have to take responsibility for those thoughts, our thoughts are powerful and have very real effect. If we want to take responsibility for those thoughts, externalizing them and then looking at them in the light of day can be useful.

Chris Rose: 25:59 Or if you think really negative thoughts about yourself all the time, is there a trusted friend or perhaps your romantic partner that you would say, I cannot stop obsessing about how much gray hair is coming in. I’m only 35, I feel like I’m getting old. What do you think? And then let your partner be like, I love your gray hair. It’s sexy to me. And all of a sudden you’re like, hmm, there’s a different way to think about it. So something about externalizing it and naming these patterns of thoughts help us take accountability for them.

Charlotte Rose: 26:33 I think it also helps us realize that they are thoughts instead of it being the truth that is happening inside our head. There’s that piece of really witnessing our own thoughts and recognizing them as thoughts that we have choices around.

Chris Rose: 26:48 And scrutinizing, am I treating myself with the same respect that I would treat a friend? And if the answer to that is no, then there’s so much room there for more self compassion. Sometimes when, if Charlotte says something about herself, I’ll be like, stop being so mean to my wife. There’s something about remembering that we are our lovers beloved. We are our children’s parents, we are our sisters sister or whatever it is. Remembering who you are to the people you love and would you want them exposed to how you’re talking to yourself? Is that a good way to respect to the mother of your own child? Probably not. And so there’s so much room for more self compassion and self kindness here. And notice we’re not saying self love. Notice we are not jumping to you have to love your body, you have to cherish your body, you have to find your body’s sexy.

Chris Rose: 27:52 I don’t particularly find my body that sexy, but I feel sexy in it and I know what it can do for me. Especially as I age, and I have health conditions come up, my belly is full of bruises from my needles in my infusion sets. And I don’t look at those bruises and I’m like, Ooh, sexy bruise today. That one looks good. But it’s neutral, it’s neutral. I’ve come to a place of neutrality and then from that neutrality, all of the pleasure can be built on top of that. And we can start focusing on what our bodies can experience and feel and create in the world instead of just how they look and how they compare to some random standard that was set for us by the corporations.

Chris Rose: 28:39 That is a different perspective coming to this body neutral place of like, this is my body. It’s just what it is. It’s acceptance of the reality. Then some love and celebration might get layered into that because you might realize, oh actually really loved my hands, and the way they look. And oh actually, I have a really cute ass, and I can notice that, and I can wear pants that make my ass look good. And that makes me feel sexier, and I can walk with confidence from that place. You can start building some swagger on top of neutral, but for most of us, neutral is just right. Neutral is good enough because our bodies don’t have to be beautiful in order to experience limitless sexual pleasure, in order to experience boundless love and belonging. So if you think about what you really want, what is your body wanting, what do you want to experience, and you realize none of that is contingent on any way that it looks. You can start focusing on those experiences, on those sensations, on the connections you want to be having and put your energy there. Such a different thing.

Charlotte Rose: 29:55 That’s so profound. And this is fairly simple. We understand these are easy things to say and harder things to do to begin to notice all the thoughts in your mind and to calm them and tame them and redirect them. And to do this possibly hundreds of times a day depending on where you’re at with how you talk to yourself, this is an ongoing relationship that you were having with yourself around your body. But this is how it starts. This is so important and it will make an enormous difference in how much pleasure you feel like you’re worthy of having and how much joy you can experience in your body if you’re not constantly saying mean things to yourself.

Charlotte Rose: 30:43 So though this is simple, it is very profound and has an enormous impact. And another way that we can practice this is when we’re out in the world. Notice all the thoughts and judgments we have about other people’s bodies. Because those of us that are more judgmental about our own bodies will also surprise be judging other people’s bodies more critically. So begin also as you’re out in the world, to speak kindly inside your own head about other people’s bodies and look for beauty and have that be outside of the traditional ideal norm and really begin to appreciate and enjoy all these different variations of beauty and gorgeousness that we see in the world. Begin to be somebody that is seeing other people’s beauty.

Chris Rose: 31:29 And again, I want to stop using the word beauty, but I want to expand what that is. But when we look at other people out in the world and we look for their value and their worth and their attractiveness, we might not see beauty. I might look across the cafe and see someone who looks really calm and kind and smart. I want to keep talking about worthiness, and I don’t know, the word beauty, I think it just stops on the surface level for so many people and what we carry and what attracts other people to us is so much more than that.

Charlotte Rose: 32:09 Totally Fair. And I totally get what your point and that is what I’m speaking about, but I hear you that we have a very limited idea of the word beauty. So you were expanding that. We are looking for people’s energetic awesomeness in their own specific expression.

Chris Rose: 32:25 And in your judgments of other people, you will find your programming. So notice when you think, I cannot believe she is wearing leggings or those thighs, how dare she? How would she even leave the house? Oh my God, I would never do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of this might be running through your head and you have been taught something about what legs are valuable and what legs are sexy and what legs deserve to be seen and what needs to be covered up. This idea of how dare they show that in public, is really, really telling. And I think just over the past five, 10 years, there’s been this explosion of body positivity and permission. I’m seeing a lot of young people show more of their body than I ever would have in high school. So I think there is more and more possibilities for people. And in that, all of those people who are being daring and bold and courageous enough to express themselves and show their bodies will trigger other people’s judgment. So notice your judgments.

Chris Rose: 33:35 Another really common judgment is around people’s perceived sluttiness or how sexy they’re willing to dress, especially if they are older or we might assign the word cheap to it. So notice if that category comes out a lot for you of like, oh she looks like a whore. She looks slutty, she looks cheap. You have been trained that a woman is not supposed to dress too sexy. And then that means something about her morality.

Charlotte Rose: 34:05 She’s less worthy if she is overtly sexual.

Chris Rose: 34:07 And that a certain amount of cleavage means something about her sexual permissiveness or about her being slutty are cheap. So notice these categories of judgment. Notice what comes up. It’s also so interesting to notice in all of these examples. Examples about men’s bodies aren’t as quick to the tongue, but I think men are under tremendous pressure too, and a lot of that is around a certain performance of masculinity and yeah, we know this.

Chris Rose: 34:38 One of the things that we can now do that was not possible even five or 10 years ago is curate our own media. The media, magazines, TV, all of this stuff is one of the primary tools capitalism uses to sell us certain images and to indoctrinate us into certain ideologies. Mainstream media is dying. There used to be three channels on the TV and so it was chosen for you what you would watch. Now we can all curate our own media streams. Most of us watch TV through streaming platforms. We don’t even watch TV ads anymore. You can choose what magazines and books you read, and now on social media you can choose who you “follow.” So if you use social media, you can use this as a deliberate strategy. Start following bodies that look like yours, that celebrate your differences, that are culturally relevant to you. Start following people who are body positive, role models for you. People who embody the energy that feels really exciting and sexy and inspiring to you.

Chris Rose: 35:59 That might be what they look like in their personal style and fashion. But it also might be professional archetypes and role models and you look at how they embody themselves and how they find their sense of value and worth in their body. And that is a really different stream of media than just white, thin body after white thin body in the fashion magazines. You can choose not to look at that. We have the power to choose what we see. And so in the show notes page, I will do a big Instagram gallery with a lot of my favorite body positive accounts. So we will give you people to follow. And from there, the world is your oyster, but curate a feed of people who stretch your ideas of what is acceptable, who challenge your ideas of beauty, who push you into a zone of discomfort. So you can deprogram what you think is normal, what you believe is normal, what you believe is worthy of being celebrated and enjoyed.

Chris Rose: 37:10 And there’s something about the social affirmation of this that I think there’s one of the best uses of social media. Is gathering the people that when you pick up your phone, if you’re going to do that scrolling, you feel better about yourself than when you started. And the flip side of this is unfollow, unfollow and unfriend with abandon the people, and the accounts that make you feel like shit. You do not have to follow or pay attention to anyone who makes you feel bad about your body. Full Stop. Unfollow, get rid of it. And notice in its absence if you feel better. And this includes friends and people too. If you have a group of friends that’s diet obsessed and all they talk about is, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Body, body, body in negative ways, you have permission to either speak up in that group of friends and being like, I’m really bored about talking about our bodies. Let’s talk about something else or unfollow them. Don’t participate in those conversations anymore.

Chris Rose: 38:24 It will take a critical mass of us to stop playing this game until it becomes irrelevant. The game of all being on this hierarchy and one another and pulling one another apart, and the pleasure groups of friends take in shredding other people’s expression, that has to end. We can no longer make it permissible or normal to find social pleasure in critiquing and trashing and judging other people. It’s so normal now. Why is that okay? It’s not okay in the future land of sexy land, pleasure mechanics universe.

Chris Rose: 39:11 And just again, notice how much your internal monologue, your social dialogues, how much of these conversations about your body and other people’s bodies are affirming, celebrating, honoring versus degrading, judging, shaming? But what we are moving towards is a world where the range of bodies that are celebrated, honored, cherished, protected is so expansive, it doesn’t leave anybody behind. And that we have a culture of celebrating difference to the point where no one feels socially isolated or sexually isolated because of how their body is functioning in any given moment. And my illness really brought a lot of this to the surface. I had never felt as unworthy and as broken as when I was so sick. I was as skinny as I’ve ever been.

Chris Rose: 40:17 I had lost a hundred pounds. Some people were telling me how beautiful I looked and how skinny jeans looked good on me, but I felt so broken because of my disease, because of my new health crisis. I started questioning whether or not I was worthy of love. And this question of because my body has a disease, or my body is not cooperating in a certain way or a feeling of betrayal of your body. The idea that that would trigger thoughts of like, Charlotte should just divorce me and go find a well healthy person. I will never be a good wife for her. I am not worthy of her love. We were 10 years into an incredible loving relationship and still I questioned my worthiness because of what my body was doing. And this is just real. This is real deep programming of our worthiness, and our deservance of love and belonging based on how our body is performing or how it looks or factors we can never even control.

Charlotte Rose: 41:26 It’s funny because you are speaking about that, but I feel like when I first met you, one of the things that was so striking to me was how much confidence you had in your body. And I had actually never seen somebody who was outside of the normal idea of what is beautiful. Stand there naked with so much, so much calm about your body. So much like I deserve to be taking up space, and it doesn’t matter that my belly is here hanging out. And it was quite shocking and quite an amazing when I first saw you. Just so calmly take up space in your body when I feel like I had been so programmed that bodies that are fat should be ashamed of themselves and be holding themselves like quiet. It was so amazing the confidence that you are embodying. I was really struck by that.

Chris Rose: 42:28 And there were a lot of factors that got me there because certainly I did not grow up with body confidence. You met me probably five years into that really heavy lifting work. One of the things we should name his social nudity.

Charlotte Rose: 42:44 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 42:45 The class we met in was a sexological bodywork training and it was a naked class. And so we were naked in a circle together. That’s when we first met. It was like, day two, let’s get naked together. But other places that you can see bodies and see a wide range of bodies, places like nude beaches, hot tubs, even locker rooms. I wish there were way more spaces for social nudity. Nonsexual social nudity is a really great exercise and also to be naked and nonsexual social spaces and normalize the feeling of your skin exposed to the air and exposed to the gaze of others.

Charlotte Rose: 43:35 They get hot springs. Yeah, they’re hard to have access and many people may not feel comfortable or be able to find these spaces. But if you can and you feel willing, it is an amazing exercise in calming yourself down and be in a space, being naked with other people.

Chris Rose: 43:53 And this is another fringe benefit of going to a sex event, or a sex party where even if you don’t want to have sex or play publicly, just going and watching. One of the things that really was transformative for me of stepping into the queer community, and a BDSM community was going to sex parties and seeing bodies that looked like mine, and a whole range of bodies being desired, but also being pleasured. Seeing big fat disabled bodies moaning in ecstasy as a really beautiful person pleasure them was very affirming to me. It’s like, oh that’s an option. And there was.

Chris Rose: 44:40 There was a stage where I transformed my entire growing up. My understanding was I would have to find someone to love me despite what I looked like. And that was the game. And I remember lying in bed as a teenager being like, all right, I’m going to have to be so smart, so charming, so kind, so giving. I’m going to have to compensate and all of these ways for my lack of pretty privilege to find someone to love me. That was the game I was playing. And then in college and through becoming queer and starting to have, and also again starting to express who I actually was, shaving my head, masculinizing not trying to be a pretty girl. I was never a pretty girl. I never wanted to be a pretty girl. I wanted the benefits pretty girls had.

Chris Rose: 45:32 I wanted the attention and the validation, but I never really was one of them. I always felt outside of it. When I could step into really being who I am, a queer fat butch with a great ass, by the way. When I stepped into that, shaved my head, started being around the people who I actually wanted and who actually wanted me, that was part of it. And I realized that someone would love me inclusive of my body, not despite it. And so check in for yourself. Do you feel loved despite of your body or inclusive of your body?

Chris Rose: 46:14 We all deserve to be loved wholly and fully. And that doesn’t mean your body is the top reason someone’s loving you. I have no delusions that Charlotte picked me for my hot ass. We fell in love. We were not each other’s types. I had never dated a fem before with big boobs. We fell in love and this magical way. But I want to get past this idea that everyone is sexy and everyone is beautiful because not everyone has the same pretty privilege and we need to acknowledge that. But no matter how much pretty privilege you have, the fact that you are human and hopefully a really good kind, awesome human, because you’ve listened to this podcast, the fact that you are human, that is enough to mean that you belong and you are worthy and you deserve to be loved as you are. That’s the bottom line. There are no caveats to that.

Chris Rose: 47:20 And nothing your body can do, no disease, no surgery, no disfiguring accident will change that. What energy do you free up? What resources, what energy, what stress, what emotional investment is freed up if you can get to the point where you accept that your body deserves and is valuable and is worthy of pleasure and joy and sexual belonging and connection as anyone else’s?

Charlotte Rose: 47:52 And pleasure and ecstasy.

Chris Rose: 47:55 Yeah, and that that’s all available to you. And then the question is what are you want to experience? What does your body want to feel? We’ll leave you with one of the questions that Nagoski leaves us with in these book is, what does your body want right now? What do you need right now? And to turn to your body with the same affectionate sing songy voice as we would a little baby of like, oh, hi sweetie. What do you need right now? What do you need right now, my dear sweet body?

Charlotte Rose: 48:28 And what would it be like to ask yourself that for that to be a main lens that you are communicating to your body with, a constant curious nourishment. Like, how can I help you? What do you need now? And to have that be your inquiry and then listening with curiosity for the answer. It’s a really different relationship that you can cultivate with your own body. And what would that change? What would that look like over time?

Chris Rose: 48:56 Yeah. That’s experiment.

Charlotte Rose: 48:59 So thank you to the Nagoskis for all of their inspiration.

Chris Rose: 49:02 Yes, this has been a four part series this month about this book, Burnout, completing the stress cycle, things we can do to feel less stressed and more vital. And we will be moving on next month to a new theme, to some new explorations. And again, we have gone ad free. We dropped out of our Pleasure podcast collective, wished them all well, but we no longer want to take our time and our attention in selling you other people’s products. We don’t want to tell you what vitamins to buy. You can figure that out. We’re going to have great, complex, stimulating conversations about sexuality. We’re going to start practicing pleasure together. We’re going to start moving more as a communal pod spread all around the world, but we are going to start dropping in deeper through this podcast into the lived experience of pleasure and how we can all practice that more deeply together.

Chris Rose: 50:15 Yes, this is where we are moving towards. Thank you for listening. Come on over to Pleasuremechanics.com/free and enroll in our free online course. That gives us your email address to make sure we can stay in touch with you and you can be the first to know about our new offerings that are coming down the pipeline. We’re so excited. Come on over to Pleasuremechanics.com/free for our free online course and to stay in touch with us and to show your support for this show. Throw us some love at patreon.com/Pleasure Mechanics. P-A-T-R-E-O-N, Patreon.com/Pleasure Mechanics. Type it in because we’re unsearchable as an adult show and give us a monthly sustaining donation. Help us stay afloat while we do our soul work in the world. We are your pleasure mechanics. We work for you. Show us some love. Help us keep going and let’s level up our pleasure together. Yes, I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 51:24 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 51:25 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 51:26 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.