Pleasure Mechanics

Savoring: A Foundational Pleasure Practice

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Savoring is the art of slowing down a moment enough to be fully in it, while it is happening, with presence and gratitude. Fully savoring pleasures of all kinds – from small sensual pleasures to the deepest joys of intimacy and connection – is a skill set that we humans can develop, on purpose, over time.

The Science of Well-Being course from Yale highlights savoring as an essential practice for overall well-being and happiness:

Savoring is the act of stepping outside of an experience to review and appreciate it. Often we fail to stay in the moment and really enjoy what we’re experiencing. Savoring intensifies and lengthens the positive emotions that come with doing something you love. ~ The Science of Well-Being

The practice of Savoring can bring a full body positive experience, create lasting benefits for our entire being, and create meaningful bridges between people through shared experiences of pleasure. Savoring, when practiced consistently over time, develops our ability to feel more pleasure and joy – these positive body states become easier to access and we are able to drop deeper into our experiences. In a very practical way, Savoring is the practice of expanding our capacity for feeling.

In this podcast episode, we share the why and how of Savoring – why it is such a powerful practice and how to put it into action in your life. For more pleasure practices and support in deepening your pleasure capacity, join us in the Mindful Sex online course.

Love the show? Show your love and support our work at PleasureMechanics.com/love

Resources Mentioned On This Episode:

Mindful Sex Online Course : Join us in exploring how to manage erotic distractions, stay present during sex and explore your erotic potential. This link is preloaded with a podcast listener only discount to the online course.

Rick Hanson, Ph.D. Explore the neuroscience of well-being and connection

Yale University’s Free Online Course The Science of Well-Being

Podcast Transcript:

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I am Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are The Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we have honest, soulful conversations about every facet of sexuality, love, relationships, fantasy, desire, how it shows up in your lives. We are 360 some episodes deep into this conversation, so thank you to all of those who have been listening for years perhaps and welcome to all of our new listeners. Because we have a lot of new listeners every week now, so we welcome you on board. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com ,where you will find our complete podcast archive or explore the podcast feed in your favorite podcast app. And definitely come over to pleasuremechanics.com/free where you can find ways of going deeper with us and joining our free online courses and being in touch via email so we can provide even more resources to you. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/free.

Chris Rose: 01:12 On today’s episode, we are going to be talking about a skill that is such a beautiful skill. It’s like almost a, I don’t know, it feels like less romantic to call it a skillset. But it was a skill I was reminded of both because… So last week we talked about micro pleasures and this idea of seizing 60 second pleasure points throughout our day, and that was a couples therapy exercise that we started the new year with. And we heard from some of you that said, “Oh, this structure is giving me so much life. I’m definitely noticing these little pleasures throughout my day. Thank you for this.” And then some of your emails said things like, “I noticed that I’m waiting for the 60 seconds to be up.” Or, “I’m finding myself noticing how excruciatingly slow 60 seconds can be. I’m not really finding things to enjoy.” Or, “Once I’m enjoying it, I don’t know how to stick with it and 60 seconds feels so long when you start to notice.”

Chris Rose: 02:18 So this brought me to this skillset called savoring. And then, synchronistically, I joined this year an online course from Yale University called the Science of Wellbeing. I will link to it in the show notes page. It’s actually a free offering from Yale as an online course. And I love these online courses because I try to stay up on how science is talking about things like wellbeing and happiness and connection and love and then map that into kind of our erotic wisdom as a community from the past 10 years plus.

Chris Rose: 02:58 And the first lesson of the year in their offering to the public about the science of wellbeing and happiness was practice number one, savoring. And so of course then I immediately forwarded that to Joe Kramer, who is our teacher of erotic massage because it struck me immediately that Charlotte and I have both been practicing this fine art of savoring, this skillset of savoring, for over a decade together because we were invited into the skillset through erotic massage from Joe Kramer. Who, part of his erotic practice, so you build up all this erotic energy, you build up this full body orgasm, you have this breath practice, you have a climax and then you savor. Built into our structure was this act of savoring and being in that afterglow after the climax. And Joe of course, wrote me back. He was like, “Yes, of course. I’ve been talking about this for decades.” And I was like, “I know. That’s why I forwarded this to you.”

Charlotte Rose: 04:13 I remember so clearly sitting in a classroom with him sharing this idea and saying that this is an erotic skill that we need to cultivate, the skill and art of savoring. And it’s such a beautiful word. It’s such a beautiful idea. And it’s something that can be practiced day by day, moment to moment, out in our regular life as a training ground for when we get into the bedroom and when we’re having erotic experiences, we can then have that skill more firmly locked into our body. It’s such a beautiful skill to practice, in and out of the bedroom.

Chris Rose: 04:55 So let’s talk about this skill. What does savoring mean? Because as you say, it’s not only something we can practice and build our capacity around, Yale University science says that it’s one of the most important skills for wellbeing. So why is this? What is savoring?

Chris Rose: 05:13 Savoring is the act of stepping even deeper into a pleasurable moment, noticing that it is happening as it is happening and installing that pleasurable moment into your physiology, into your neurology, into your lived experience, so your system learns from it. So it’s the act of capturing pleasurable moments. So instead of becoming very fleeting, they are deeply felt and remembered and lodged in your body. This turns out to be super important for our overall wellbeing is how well we are able to saver pleasures. And pleasures, very small sensory pleasures to very big pleasures of joy and connection with other human beings. The full range of pleasurable experience, how much we are able to pay attention to it as it is happening, how deeply we are able to feel it and how much we can remember and rejoice in it afterwards, turn out to be major factors in our lifelong wellbeing and happiness and access to joy.

Chris Rose: 06:35 We’re going to talk more about this, but it turns out the more you install joy and pleasure, the easier it is to feel those things. And the way we do this is we pay attention to it as it is happening. It is a practice. So wherever you are in your experience of being able to experience joy, you can build your capacity through practice. And this is science, babies. This is both ancient wisdom and knowledge, right? That we have to practice our capacity for these things. And this is backed by science that this has some of the most direct tangible results, not only in our overall well being in happiness, but in our overall wellbeing in health.

Chris Rose: 07:21 It does things like boost the immune system and protect heart health and give you deeper sleep. Surprise, it makes us more at ease humans, right? When we systematically, on purpose, practice pleasure and joy. So savoring. Why is it important? How do we practice it? What does it give us access to? How does it accumulate over time? I want to turn this over to the queen of savoring. Because when I think of savoring, Charlotte, you are so good at this skill.

Charlotte Rose: 07:57 I feel like it is a central organizing principle of my days.

Chris Rose: 08:03 Yes.

Charlotte Rose: 08:04 But there’s just so much joy to be soaked out of simple, mundane moments and I find myself really enjoying them. And I think as the science points out that the more you do it, the easier it becomes. So it becomes sort of a natural part of your vocabulary.

Chris Rose: 08:24 So you have mastery over this skill?

Charlotte Rose: 08:26 I do feel like I do. And it creates a lot of joy and pleasure and simple fulfillment.

Chris Rose: 08:33 Yeah. One of the ways this has shown up for us socially, is during a meal you are what I call a multi cheers-er. Like we’ll have a cheers at the beginning of a meal and draw attention to how grateful we are to be there together and how lovely this is and we’ll all clink glasses. And then like five or 10 minutes later, you’ll raise your glass again and then 10 minutes later. And I’ve teased you for this, but what you’re doing is drawing our attention back to this moment, how pleasurable it is, how wonderful it is, how grateful we should be to be there. And this is exactly the science of savoring.

Chris Rose: 09:13 So the science of savoring tells us that we need to either create a pleasurable experience, a joyful moment, or a moment of joyful social connection or seize upon it when it happens to us spontaneously. So we need to find ourselves or create a pleasurable moment, be in it as it is happening. So draw more of our attention and go deeper into the moment. Put it in context and find gratitude for the moment, recognize that it is a blessing, that this moment is even happening. And then you feel it deeply.

Chris Rose: 09:53 So you’re in the moment. You draw attention to the moment. You create context and gratitude for the moment and you feel it as deeply as you can. And it turns out what this does is it installs the good into your system. And this is the language of Dr. Rick Hanson, who’s a neuroscientist, PhD, Buddhist teacher. I love him. We really get a lot out of learning with him. But he talks about installing the good, letting the good in. And what this does is it takes pleasure from being a fleeting moment to a learned capacity. You install it into your system and get the benefits of that pleasurable moment and over time the accumulation of this does quite miraculous, wonderful things for our systems it turns out. So this is a central skill we want to invite you into, savoring. Savoring.

Charlotte Rose: 10:55 Also, just a note that even if there’s nothing that awesome going on in your life right this minute, you can also gain these benefits by paying attention to a memory. Your body doesn’t totally know the difference. And so if you take a moment to remember something that brings you joy or pleasure or connection and then really experience it, stay with it for a few seconds longer until you get some feeling states in your body that feel good, that has an impact on your biology as well. Which is great to remember, and a wonderful tool.

Chris Rose: 11:32 Well it’s kind of a super power that pleasure can bring us all of these benefits, not only in the moment it is experienced, it can connect us and weave us with other human beings by sharing it together. And it can be recalled later to offset, to trigger, a positive hormonal cascade in your body down the road. These become assets in your body, in your psyche, these pleasurable moments of feelings deeply felt and shared.

Chris Rose: 12:06 So this can happen alone. You can deeply savor. And I’ll often turn the corner and find Charlotte deep in a moment of pleasure, completely on her own. You can savor moments alone, because truly we’re never alone. We experience these moments with the entire universe. And for me it’s often, especially after I’ve shaven my head, a freshly shaved head, the wind on the back of my neck can feel like an orgasm with the universe.

Chris Rose: 12:34 So we can savor all of this pleasure just out in the world, but we can also share it together. And the science actually supports this, that by sharing these moments of pleasure, and this is what we were kind of talking about in the micro pleasures episode, creating bridges between people with shared pleasures. The act of sharing a pleasure actually helps you install it as well. It is a form of savoring. So feeling the experience deeply in your body, sharing it, feeling gratitude for it, all of this taps into our ability as humans to learn. And so what we are doing very deliberately is learning pleasure. And our Twitter handle for like 13 years, because back when Twitter started there was a character limit, so our Twitter handle instead of pleasure mechanics was learned pleasure was the phrase that we have been riding behind. We don’t even use Twitter anymore. I don’t know why I mentioned that.

Chris Rose: 13:34 But learned pleasure has been this phrase that for me has always been really important because… So for Charlotte she was a natural pleasure connoisseur, a bon vivant. She grew up saturated in pleasure and global travel and safety and learning how to feel joy and pleasure and connection very deeply. I did not. I came to this work, very stripped of pleasure and with a very low capacity to feel pleasure. I would hit pleasure anxiety very quickly. We all have these capacities for pleasure and our systems are literally wired and capable of feeling certain feelings. They have capacities for emotions and feeling states. And if you hit your capacity, you often trigger into anxiety or fear or numbness or shutdown or dissociation. And so this can show up for us in all different ways.

Chris Rose: 14:33 But I came into sex education from the wounded healer place. I was abused as a kid. I grew up in an abusive home. And I wanted to feel more, I wanted to feel more pleasure. And I had just enough touch with it honestly through masturbation that I knew what was available to me and I was kind of like a hungry seeker. Like, “Teach me how to learn pleasure.” And I found erotic massage and erotic breath work and all my work with Joe Kramer and Sexological Bodywork and then Pleasure Mechanics and this 10 years of practice as this community and all of the work we do together.

Chris Rose: 15:11 And I have learned over the past decade how to feel pleasure, how to run more pleasure, how to expand my pleasure capacity. And that has happened over time practicing this. And I think so much of it as being in partnership with you because we’ll be, for example, at a beautiful sunset, we’ll be driving, there’ll be this beautiful sunset, we’ll pull the car over, we’ll get out and we’ll start looking at it and I’ll be like, “Cool, let’s go.” And you’ll be like, “What? It’s still going on. Stay with it.” And I’ll be like, “Okay, so what do you want to talk about?” And you’ll be like, “We’re looking at the sunset.” Like you can just stay in the joy and pleasure, whether it’s the food or the sunset or the sex, right? The orgasmic state. You can stay in that for so long.

Chris Rose: 16:06 And I really want to draw our attention here that we can all learn this. We can slowly expand our capacity around this and how we learn it. So going back to the Yale science, the practice they recommended is once a day, one pleasure, really feel it as deeply as you can. Expand it a little bit in duration, if possible. Share it, if possible, and then log it. They have an app you can log it in, but you can also just log it down in a journal or really just in your memory. As you’re going to bed, what was the most pleasurable moment of your day? Feel it. Remember it.

Charlotte Rose: 16:47 One of the images that stuck with me from Rick Hanson was this, “Adding even just a few beads of joy changes the whole necklace of seconds that make up your day.” I feel like that’s a useful image that just taking a moment to savor something deeply throughout the day will shift your day.

Chris Rose: 17:07 So he’s talking about that even on mundane days, even on days filled with despair, right? Because he’s recognizing a lot of us have a lot of stress, anxiety, fear, despair, rage, in these moments. And even in those times, it is even more important to practice this and to turn on purpose towards joy. Because part of this too, and I think we should do a whole other episode on this because it’s important and it shows up in very interesting and unexpected ways around sex, is the negativity bias. In human psychology, in human physiology, we are to pay much more attention to the threats, to our survival than to the yummy treats in our days.

Chris Rose: 17:59 And this makes sense from the evolutionary perspective, when we are really literally just surviving as animal bodies, we need to pay attention to the threats to our survival. We need to learn the dangers and teach one another about the dangers, which mushrooms not to eat. And remember the alarm in our system around those things. But now in today’s modern world, we are now threat tracking machines and positive experience can wash over us. Rick Hanson, we’re quoting a lot of Rick Hanson today. We love him. Rick Hanson talks about it like our neurology is Velcro for the negative and Teflon for the positive.

Chris Rose: 18:47 And we know this in our bodies. Think about an average day. One bad thing can happen to you… On an average day full of joys, full of pleasures, full of sensory pleasure, waiting to be savored. One bad thing happens to you and what do you come home raging about? What do you go to bed thinking about? And all of that time you are cycling around on that negative thing, on that threat to your existence, on that annoying person at work, all of that negativity cycles in your brain are throwing off stress hormones, are throwing off cortisol are keeping you in that fight or flight mode and this is an anti-erotic.

Chris Rose: 19:30 This is one of those forces in our lives that when we think about like, “Why aren’t I more interested in sex? Why can’t I connect more deeply with my partner? Why aren’t I more available for orgasm? Why do I get distracted during sex?” All of these struggles for so many of us are informed by the fact that our systems are threat tracking all day long. Every day we’re saturated in it. A lot of people have trouble sleeping because our systems are not resetting from the stress cycles. Our systems are not getting practice, are not getting time, are not getting the opportunities to feel pleasure, joy, relaxation, connection, comfort, let alone ecstasy, euphoria, bliss, rapture. All of these positive states our human bodies our capable of and want to be in. Want to be in.

Chris Rose: 20:24 So what do we do? We practice it on purpose. We do it on purpose, we learn how to savor. We install the positive moments throughout our day. And low and behold, it gets easier. We learn how to expand those moments and drop deeper into them, right? These two vectors of duration and depth of engagement and we have more access to them in our systems. And we can all follow Charlotte into the lands of pleasure. Take us.

Charlotte Rose: 21:01 Come with me. Come with me. Yeah, and it’s this idea, I just love this idea that it’s a simple practice that we can be with and we can cultivate. And then it is laying the foundation within our bodies that for the moments where we’re having peak erotic experiences, we’re in a 45 minute athletic sex act, and we have trained ourselves to pay attention. We’ve trained ourselves to be with the sensations, to be really enjoying what’s happening and focusing on the enjoyment instead of all of the concerns and distractions that’s also very human.

Charlotte Rose: 21:40 So we are training ourselves to be able to enjoy life and sex more deeply. And that will change the course of your life slowly over time. These moments like savoring a sunset is not going to change your life in that moment, but cumulatively doing this again and again over every day is going to change the arc of your next decade. And so it is a very powerful, simple, easy skill to cultivate.

Chris Rose: 22:08 Well one of the big why’s that the science gives for why savoring is so important, why it creates so much positive uplift over time, why it is so cumulative, is because it thwarts what they call hedonic adaptation. Hedonic adaptation is, on a pure sensory level, it means you can’t really feel the clothes you are wearing in every moment. Your sensory nerve endings get kind of used to that stimuli and then adapt and await new stimuli, so you can feel the bug landing on your face. So we adapt to what is normal and we kind of normalize what is repeated. And on the bigger level of our lives, this accounts for things like why we always want to shop for new shit. We buy a new object, it gives us a moment of pleasure, we normalize its presence in our life and then we begin seeking something new.

Chris Rose: 23:07 We seek novelty, we seek new stimuli. That’s just part of who we are as sensory beings. And science points to hedonic adaptation as a source of suffering. It’s part of the reason we get restless in good situations and it’s part of the reason we can’t feel grateful for the abundance that we have available to us. So what do we do to thwart hedonic adaptation? We learn how to savor. When we talk about slowing things down. When we talk about really being deeply in the erotic moment.

Chris Rose: 23:42 Part of sexual suffering is we’re always for the next big thing, the next novel thing, the next big hit of the pleasure hormones of oxytocin, of dopamine, of those hormones in us that say, “Ooh, fun. Good. Yes. Delicious. Yummy.” New, novel experiences hit those buttons really well. Daily pleasures do not because of hedonic adaptation. The antidote to this is paying attention, is savoring. Because when you really slow down in your day to day life and bring your full attention to that house plant that is just right in bloom and bring your full attention to it and literally stop what you are doing to fully immerse yourself in that experience. And then maybe remember your friend who gave you that house plant, right? You give it context, you lean in for a sniff, you give yourself that full sensory immersion. You maybe stroke a nice glossy leaf, right? You’re having an erotic… If it sounds sensual and erotic, it’s because it is.

Chris Rose: 24:54 Savoring is a deeply erotic experience if we go to Audrey Lord’s definition of the erotic as feelings deeply felt and shared. So you’re having a moment of savoring with that house plant and that thwarts hedonic adaptation. It brings that moment of pleasure, of joy, of wonder, back into that moment of your life, of passing through your hallway.

Charlotte Rose: 25:21 And then that positive moment will affect your biology for two to four hours afterwards is what the science is saying. So these moments really do accumulate in our day and make a difference.

Chris Rose: 25:33 And so what the Yale studies don’t mention are the erotic benefits of this, right? We know the health benefits, the overall wellbeing benefits. Savoring, when you learn how to savor, and Charlotte hinted at this earlier, becomes an erotic super power. Because it allows you to drop in and deepen your experience of whatever is happening to your erotic body. And instead of this novelty seeking, like we need the new lingerie, we need the new position, we need the new kink, which is fine, novelty seeking is an important part of eroticism too, but so is depth of engagement. And depth of engagement…

Chris Rose: 26:14 Actually bringing it back to Joe Kramer. I remember him talking about how deep can we go, so if someone is just massaging your toe, you can feel it throughout your body, right? You bring your full attention to whatever is happening in your erotic touch. Someone is fucking you, licking you, kissing you, touching you, whatever is happening to you, or you’re playing by yourself or you’re out in nature and that wind is hitting you just right. Whatever is happening to your body, if you can feel that moment deeply, it just… I get what wordless. If you feel these moments deeply, the universe is available to you erotically. Meaning there’s no…

Charlotte Rose: 27:02 There’s no limit to the erotic stimulation that is out in the world.

Chris Rose: 27:06 There’s no limit to the pleasure we can feel, right? Yes.

Charlotte Rose: 27:08 Yeah, the universe can be your lover in each and every moment or many moments of the day.

Chris Rose: 27:14 Or you find the universe in your lovers touch, right? So like the universe is your lover. Yes, all of the stimuli can be deeply erotically felt, but what I was trying to say is like when your lover is touching you, if you are truly feeling it, your whole body yearns for this. And so when a lover touches you with love and care and reverence, or you get a kiss from a stranger that you want or whatever that moment is, when we start paying attention, the full body response is really fun to pay attention to because it’s not just that one part of your body being touched, your whole body lights up.

Chris Rose: 27:52 Even just thinking about one of your peak erotic experiences. Think about one of your peak erotic experiences and then start noticing those flicks of arousal and desire and want in your body. The more we can pay attention to this and come home to it and make space for it and learn pleasure, and in this case learn erotic pleasure, learn sexual pleasure, learn arousal, the bigger we can go, the deeper we can go with it. So this is literally what we’re talking about when we say learned pleasure, is installing the fuck out of these moments when things feel good and right.

Chris Rose: 28:32 This is a lot of the experience we welcome you into in the Mindful Sex course. So if you are saying yes to this, if your body is responding to this conversation with like a, “Mmm, this feels good, I want more”, notice that in your body and come over to pleasuremechanics.com/mindful where you will find the best deal currently on our Mindful Sex course. Enroll with us and start practicing with us. This course is full of practices where you can put your attention on purpose to different parts of your erotic experience to start learning some of these skills together.

Charlotte Rose: 29:12 Our culture is so focused on good sex being about what’s done to us, but the other piece of that equation is how deeply we can feel what is happening to us. And so when we cultivate both of those skillsets, we’re going to have a really dramatically different experience of sex because there’s so many more skills in that bedroom.

Chris Rose: 29:36 I just wanted to make like a cartoon like, “Pew, pew, superpowers engaged.” And that’s really what we’re doing. We are tuning into our human superpowers and why we called ourselves Pleasure Mechanics in the first place all of those years ago, my love, was to really draw attention to the mechanics of pleasure in the human body. What are we designed to do when it comes to pleasure, orgasms, fucking, loving, connecting, creating with one another. What are we designed to do? What does the body tell us is possible? Let’s play there together.

Chris Rose: 30:13 All right, I think enough for today. Let us know your experiences of this. We love hearing your stories about how this work lands for you. All we can do on this podcast and through our courses is invite you deeply into practices, kind of lay out the why and the how and let you know what other people are experiencing and then it’s kind of turned over to you to put this into practice in your life and our aim is to help you make that as easy as possible. To try to make it really simple to opt into exploring some of these things for yourself and then ask you to report back to us.

Chris Rose: 30:56 How do these things emerge for you? What shows up as you engage with these practices? And this year and beyond we’re going to start formalizing this a little bit and collecting these stories from you. So if at any point you have something to say to the Pleasure Mechanics community, we are over 10,000 strong around the globe listening and engaging with this podcast. If there’s something you want to share, either a question to be answered or a testimonial about how this is showing up for you and your life, record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at beintouch@pleasuremechanics.com or charlotte@pleasuremechanics.com or chris@pleasuremechanics.com. Get it to us at pleasuremechanics.com and share your experience with us because we are listening and integrating these 10,000 bodies and more into this body of erotic wisdom that we’re sharing back with you. That’s how we roll here. Thank you for being a part of it.

Chris Rose: 31:59 So we will have some links on the show notes page. So whatever podcast app you are using, if you click through to the show notes page, you will find links, ways of engaging more deeply with us and with the themes of the shows. You will also find full transcripts of every show, which we are providing to increase accessibility and searchability of this show. So if there’s something you heard and want to go back and find it, you can easily do that through the transcripts. Yes.

Charlotte Rose: 32:30 Thank you to everyone who supports this show and makes this community supported erotic education possible.

Chris Rose: 32:36 Mm-hmm (affirmative). It’s important to notice we have no sponsors, we have no ads. We do not interrupt our shows with minutes of ads selling you mattresses and prescription pills and all of those things because we are community supported erotic education and we want to just provide you the most efficient, effective resources for a more erotically engaged, happy life. Yes. Help us do that. Show your love for the show at pleasuremechanics.com/love where you will find ways of going deeper with us, showing your love, supporting the show, and keeping this work going for the coming decade.

Charlotte Rose: 33:17 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Rose: 33:18 Thank you for being here with us. Send us your voice memos. Send us your love. We are sending you our love. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 33:26 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 33:27 We are The Pleasure Mechanics.

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

The 60 Second Pleasure Point Challenge

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Feeling disconnected from your partner, and maybe even from yourself? Here is a powerful framework from an award winning couples therapist to help you cultivate more moments of micropleasures into your daily life and loving relationships. Micropleasures are those experiences that bring you pleasure, joy and connection in 60 seconds or less.

Love the show? Click here to show your love and support the show! Thanks!

The 60 Second Pleasure Point framework was originally developed by Peter Fraenkel PhD.

Couples therapists often use this exercise with partners who are on the brink of divorce, in sexless marriages, or struggling with intimacy. By committing to just 3 small acts of pleasure a day, couples are asked to form an “arc of connection” throughout the day. The cumulative results are profound, which is why this exercise has become a classic couples therapy practice.

Here at Pleasure Mechanics, we challenge us all to take on the 60 Second Pleasure Point framework as a way to first slow down and connect with our own pleasure – noticing at least three micropleasures every day – and then daring to share these pleasures with those we love. Small moments of joy and kindness can really add up to change your day, and your life.

Micropleasures can combine well with your understanding of Love Languages – click here for a podcast episode where we talk more about applying Love Languages to your erotic life.

Podcast Transcript:

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are the Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we have honest, soulful, explicit conversations about every facet of sexuality, love, relationships, and how it all fits into your busy ass life.

Chris Rose: 00:22 We’re mothers, we’re business owners, I’m chronically ill. We are all on this crazy spinning planet together and our big questions with sex and pleasure is how do we make it work? How do we make it fit into our lived lives? How do we reclaim a sense of pleasure admidst the anxiety of modern life? How do we reclaim our attention and choose to pay attention to one another’s bodies instead of these devices all the time?

Chris Rose: 00:52 This is the first episode of 2020 and these are the kinds of things that are on our minds. How does sex and pleasure actually show up in our lived lives at this moment in humanity?

Chris Rose: 01:08 Welcome. Welcome to Speaking of Sex. Welcome to 2020. If you are new to the show, come on over to Pleasure Mechanics.com you will find our complete podcast archive as well as many ways to engage with us. Go to Pleasure Mechanics.com/free and sign up for our free online course and you’ll be in touch with us and we welcome you to our community.

Chris Rose: 01:35 If you love this show, if we have already touched your lives in some beautiful way, please support this work. We are community-supported erotic education, so come on over to Pleasure Mechanics.com/love where you will find a few ways to show us the love and support the work we are doing. Whether you are new to the show or have been with us for 10 years, welcome to 2020 and a new year with the Speaking Of Sex podcast.

Charlotte Rose: 02:06 Woohoo.

Chris Rose: 02:07 I feel like I want to pop a bottle of champagne. On today’s episode, we are going to be sharing a really simple yet powerful tool, a framework that we can all use right away to create an astoundingly more pleasurable year. This is one of those small things that cumulatively makes a huge difference.

Charlotte Rose: 02:30 A lot of us are really stressed out in the world right now. There is a lot going on. It’s really helpful to have a simple framework where we can practice bringing microdoses of pleasure into our relationships. This is why we picked this topic because we wanted to find something that was simple and doable and had a cumulative effect on creating more love, pleasure and connection for all of us.

Chris Rose: 02:58 When we say microdoses of pleasure what we mean is this, a lot of people find it hard to go from a stressed, anxious, day to day life into this erotic zone of erotic possibility where they’re ready to get naked and roll around with their partner, where they’re even ready to masturbate. Like a lot of us run a lot of stress and anxiety throughout the day and then find it hard to connect with either ourselves or our potential erotic partners.

Chris Rose: 03:26 What this framework does for us is it gives us something to kind of scaffold the commitment to micro pleasures, pleasures that take a minute or less, pleasures that can be peppered in throughout our day and create what the developer of this exercise calls an arc of connection throughout the day. We want to put a little twist on this and say this can be an arc of connection with yourself, with your own damn self, with your own pleasures, your own erotic body, your own sensuality and eroticism and that feeling of pleasure and calm within you. Or it can be practiced with a partner or more partners and be an arc of connection between two people.

Chris Rose: 04:16 This exercise is called the 60 Second Pleasure Point and it is brought to us by Peter Fraenkel, PHD, an award-winning couples therapist, and one of the directors at the Ackerman Institute for the Family in New York city. I first met Peter at a day-long training with Esther Perel where we had all spent … You know, 400 therapists and educators spending the whole day talking about affairs and infidelity and erotic passion.

Chris Rose: 04:47 Peter got up at the end of the day and said, “You know, there’s one thing no one’s mentioned and that’s time and rhythm.” I’m a jazz musician and a therapist and he had spoken earlier in the day and is really well known in the field so we all kind of turn towards the back of the room and he talked about this idea that one of the elements that goes really ignored when we think about our own erotic lives or our erotic connection with another person is timing and rhythm and how we get in sync with one another.

Chris Rose: 05:22 There’s so much more to say about this and maybe we’ll reach out to him and see if he’ll join us for a whole conversation about the temporal rhythms of eroticism. But this exercise, what it asks us to do is find those moments, 60 seconds or less of pleasure and connection and then do them on purpose throughout the day. Peter Fraenkel suggests this exercise for couples who are on the brink of divorce. This is like an intervention for couples who are finding it impossible to connect, can’t get it up to schedule a date night, aren’t ready for like full blown intimacy.

Chris Rose: 06:01 He invites them in therapy to come up with a list of pleasures and connection points that can be accomplished in 60 seconds or less and then each member of the couple commits to doing three a day, one in the morning, one mid day, one in the evening, and so together, collectively, you have about six minutes of pleasure and connection and shared joy.

Chris Rose: 06:23 Over time, what does that make possible? Peter Fraenkel, a PhD, teaches this all around the world to couples therapists and we wanted to share it with you because it’s a really beautiful, simple structure to remind us that these small moments of pleasure, these small moments of connection, and we’ll give you some examples, matter. They accumulate, they matter. What they do is, what we call, they create a culture of pleasure within your relationship.

Chris Rose: 06:55 They are moments of reaching out or reaching into yourself. I really want to emphasize how important this is to just do for yourself. They are moments of saying, “I am going to pause, focus on this thing that brings me joy, pleasure, arousal, titillation, excitement, and I’m going to install it. I’m going to plant it into my nervous system and allow it to change my mood and focus my attention even just for a minute in my busy day.” The results of this are pretty amazing and profound.

Charlotte Rose: 07:27 I love the simplicity of it and I love the idea of two people coming up with a list of 60 second activities that would bring them pleasure.

Chris Rose: 07:37 Do you want to come up with a list right now with me? Popcorn back and forth?

Charlotte Rose: 07:40 Yes.

Chris Rose: 07:41 When we think about 60 second pleasures it’s not like you have a stopwatch out and you’re like, “60 seconds of snogging. Let’s go.” I’ve always wanted to say snogging.

Chris Rose: 07:53 It’s more of like finding these little things that you can do that can be accomplished in a minute or less that gives you a real jolt of pleasure. A simple one might be a really good hug.

Charlotte Rose: 08:04 A really good kiss.

Chris Rose: 08:06 Cupping someone’s face in your hands and just smiling at them while looking at them in the eye.

Charlotte Rose: 08:11 Stroking the head gently.

Chris Rose: 08:14 We’re very touch oriented so I’ll switch it up.

Charlotte Rose: 08:15 We can shift. Yeah.

Chris Rose: 08:18 You can bring one another a snack. You can arm wrestle, share a joke.

Charlotte Rose: 08:24 Do charades.

Chris Rose: 08:26 As a family, we’re really into charades right now. But making one another laugh even with like a little stupid charades moment is playful and funny and can really break tension. What are some other ideas? You can do a 60 second puzzle together and some people really get into like racing one another in Sudoku.

Charlotte Rose: 08:47 You can read a poem to one another.

Chris Rose: 08:50 Do a quick dance, a little dance move, a sway, a dip.

Charlotte Rose: 08:55 Taking a photo while you’re out in the world and texting it to them and sending a sweet note with it.

Chris Rose: 09:02 Sending a meme or something that will make your partner laugh.

Charlotte Rose: 09:06 Sending a menu from a restaurant and saying, “Would you like to try this this evening?”

Chris Rose: 09:12 Picking up a little thing in a store you see because you know your partner will be delighted.

Charlotte Rose: 09:17 Sharing a toast.

Chris Rose: 09:19 Bringing a cup of coffee. Making toast and jam. That just made me hungry for toast. I think you were talking about like a champagne or a wine toast over dinner.

Chris Rose: 09:29 You get the idea and you can also map these into the five love languages, so words of affirmation, gifts, touch, acts of service and quality time. Think about your partner’s love language and your own. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check the show notes page. We’ll link up a few episodes.

Chris Rose: 09:51 But if you can think about … And it’s a good exercise to sit down together at dinner or over a cup of coffee and just jot out what are quick things that make you happy. You can do this again for yourself or within your relationship.

Chris Rose: 10:07 As a couples therapy exercise, the classic 60 second pleasure point connection exercise is very relationally-focused, the pleasures you share and the pleasures you bring to one another, the pleasures you give and receive.

Chris Rose: 10:23 We believe here at Pleasure Mechanics it’s also really important to practice this with pleasures that you can share just with yourself, pleasures you can really sink into, feel completely, feel whatever the effect of them is, right? Because pleasure sometimes brings us warm, calm fuzzies and sometimes makes us thrilled and aroused and excited. Having a 60 second pleasure, feeling it fully, and then moving on with your day is super powerful.

Chris Rose: 10:56 Creating micro-pleasures on purpose, delighting in them, your day changes. Your days change, your weeks change, your months change, your years change, your life changes. It’s just cumulative and I’m coming at this as someone who was very tuned out of pleasure. I had a really hard time in my body. I was very dissociated. I was very numbed out. I had a lot of trauma and being invited into this kind of life over 13 years ago, learning massage, being asked to focus on the pleasure that my body was capable of experiencing in these tiny sips. Right? Please notice we are not throwing you into the depths of orgasm here. We are saying pay attention to a moment that delights you and then possibly share it with another human being. That’s all this is.

Chris Rose: 11:52 You’re walking down the street and you see a gorgeous flower. Like, stop, take a minute, enjoy it for yourself, and then maybe if you wish, snap a photo, send it to your lover and say, “The second favorite pink I’ll see today.” Right? Or like whatever your take on that is or, “Your face is just as lovely as this flower, my dear”, right? Like you can be raunchy with this. You can be silly. You can be really loving and tender. That will depend on who you are and where your relationship is at. The point is experiencing pleasure and then sharing it together in these micro moments.

Charlotte Rose: 12:31 It’s so doable and it’s this moment where you’re expressing care and that matters.

Chris Rose: 12:36 Care? Why? Why is this expressing care?

Charlotte Rose: 12:39 If you’re sending a note saying you’re thinking about them, you’re away from each other in the day and the text comes in that somebody is thinking about you and loving you and sending you words that uplift you in some way, it’s precious and this changes our chemistry and that’s why it’s so powerful because it shifts how we show up for the next 10 minutes or an hour of the day. That’s why it’s so powerful.

Charlotte Rose: 13:04 I also want to say that people who aren’t in relationships, yes, they can do it for themselves, but also to share these moments with friends and build your connections, your social connections, your kinship with people is powerful. In our culture we forget about those relationships or don’t name them as as important as a romantic relationship, but we really value and want to keep cultivating those connections deeply as well.

Chris Rose: 13:29 Shared feelings matter no matter who you’re sharing them with.

Charlotte Rose: 13:33 Lovely.

Chris Rose: 13:36 Shared feelings and when you say you feel cared for when you’re on the receiving end of this I think it’s important to remember that just that moment of realizing someone you care about has been thinking about you, remembering the things that you enjoy, and then sharing them with you … Like if you get a funny text from a friend in front of a movie poster with an actor they know you have a crush on it just creates that little thread of connection where you’re both delighting in something together.

Chris Rose: 14:08 This is like scientifically proven to uplift our mood, calm our nervous systems, make us sleep better, right? Like the science geeks would go off on all the clinical data behind something as simple as a shared moment of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 14:25 For us, what’s important is that it’s felt, it’s real and it’s doable. It’s doable. And so I want to challenge all of us to take on this 60 second pleasure point challenge, to all come up with lists of things that can be done in 60 seconds or less that make us feel joyful, that give us pleasure, that arouse us. You can even kind come up with some categories like what are the calm pleasures in 60 seconds or less and what are the arousing thrills? Then things that you can share with friends, with different people in your community, with your lover or lovers, and then to do this. That’s where it really kicks in is when you commit to doing it.

Chris Rose: 15:13 If you’re paying for couples therapy and you have a therapist saying you’re each going to do this three times a day and then come back next week, you’re more likely to take that seriously because you’re paying for that accountability. Here we’re going to invite you to just commit to doing this because you’re going to notice awesome effects in your life and you’re going to notice the uplift and then you’re going to tell us about it.

Charlotte Rose: 15:35 Many of us in a quiet moment during the day will pick up our phone and check email again or scroll and these are the moments where instead we can choose and challenge ourselves to intentionally create a moment of connection instead. I am sure that we have many of those moments in the day and this is where we can shift our habits and our behavior and it will create a much bigger outcome if we choose to take those simple moments and connect with one another instead of mindless scrolling.

Chris Rose: 16:07 Well, there’s the scrolling and we mentioned like sending texts, sending photos, so we’re not saying don’t use your devices for doing this, right? You can use your devices to connect really meaningfully. Or a lot of the time our devices leave us feeling lonely and isolated and isn’t that interesting? We need to look at that. How do we actually feel more connected through our devices?

Chris Rose: 16:32 You know, I also want to mention the timing and rhythm thing here because some people have jobs where they can receive sexy texts at work and other people do not. Part of this finding your rhythm and getting in sync is respecting your partners needs around the timing of your communication. Maybe you need to leave them alone all day and then at five o’clock you know they’re getting out of their job and you can send them a ping or maybe instead of texts you have a private email account where you can send each other sexy things knowing they will log on on their own time. For other people that thrill of having their phone ding all day long will be exciting and a welcome part their day.

Chris Rose: 17:16 You need to communicate about this. How do we want to connect? What is this arc of pleasure? Because this idea of the arc of pleasure what this does, it’s not just the isolated micro moments. It’s like you start the day with a moment of shared pleasure. You have another one as you’re heading out the door. You get a few throughout the day. You come home to one, you go to sleep with one and your day, no matter how stressful, now has five, six points of connection in it. That’s really meaningful. If we don’t do this on purpose, it is possible to go day after day without actually taking one minute to deeply connect and share pleasure.

Chris Rose: 18:01 That’s what’s kind of harrowing is is if we don’t do this on purpose, how easy is it to let it slip and just kind of move around your home if you’re cohabitating with someone or be like, “Yeah, we’ll see each other Friday night. Okay” and then you get there on Friday night, you’ve had no shared pleasure throughout the week. You’re barely connected, you’re not in sync, and you’re expecting to like connect and go into bliss space and fuck? Like that’s a lot of pressure.

Chris Rose: 18:25 What this does, that arc of connection, Peter Fraenkel talks about, it’s like dropping notes in and then a song appears. This is a self-motivating system, so because it feels good, because it affirms the social animals within us that want to feel things together, we tend to do more of them. As you do them, you tend to do more of them. They get longer than 60 seconds and lo and behold, you’re actually practicing these daily forms of pleasure just because, because it’s good, because it makes you feel better in your day and it doesn’t distract from your purpose. It doesn’t take away from your job, it doesn’t take away from your responsibilities. It’s just peppered in and it kind of brightens your day and you learn what works. You pay attention to like, “Oh, that was like a really fun thing” versus like, “Eh”, and you accumulate the wins.

Chris Rose: 19:21 All right. We would love to hear how this has been working for you. If we all commit to this for the next week and then if you are in touch with us, we would love to hear from you. This year in 2020 we would like to try something new with you. We would love to start gathering your voice memos. In the past you’ve emailed us a lot of questions. We would love to start hearing your voices and sharing your voices with one another. If you have a question for us or a testimonial about how one of our ideas or techniques have impacted you, record a short voice memo on the voice memo app on your phone and email it to us at Chris at Pleasure Mechanics or Charlotte at Pleasure Mechanics and we will gather these up and share them on future episodes.

Chris Rose: 20:14 Again, record a voice memo. Send it to us at Chris at Pleasure Mechanics or Charlotte at Pleasure Mechanics dot com or go to Pleasure Mechanics.com/hello and get in touch with us that way. We Would love to hear from you.

Chris Rose: 20:28 Welcome to 2020 it’s going to be an intense year, but we are in this together. All billions of us on this beautiful spinning planet earth we are in it together. We are here for you and you can reach us anytime. Come visit us at Pleasure Mechanics.com. We have our whole podcast archive waiting for you and lots of ways to be engaged at Pleasure Mechanics dot com/free. We love you. We’re here for you. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 21:00 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 21:01 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 21:02 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 21:05 Cheers.

What Do You Want?

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What do you want? This is such a simple question, yet one that can be so hard to answer, especially in the erotic realm.

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What do you want? This question emerges in all arenas of our life – from the biggest picture questions about family, career and lifestyle to the micro moments of everyday life.

How easy is it for you to answer the question “What Do You Want?” How do you take space from all the “musts” and “shoulds” in life in order to create enough space to even ask this question?

In this episode we explore how to play with this question “What do you want” in order to start feeling into your embodied truths about your life. We share a simple (but not easy) process of paying attention to your body while actively fantasizing in order to access your embodied wisdom and knowledge to help you understand what you really want.

The process of tuning into your embodied knowledge is a lifelong process and one that takes practice – but here’s a quick introduction to how we can bring our body into the conversation when we sit with the question “What Do You Want?”

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Other Speaking Of Sex Episodes To Explore:

Rethinking Libido Mini Series

Peak Erotic Experiences

What To Do With Desires Unfulfilled

Podcast Transcript:

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

Chris Rose: 00:01 Welcome to Speaking of Sex with The Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:05 We are the Pleasure Mechanics, and on this podcast, we have honest, soulful, explicit conversations about sex, love, relationships and connection. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com for our full podcast archive, and go to pleasuremechanics.com/free to get enrolled in our free online course and dive in a little deeper with us right away. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/free. This is going to be our last episode of 2019. We’re kind of skidding into December and hurdling towards the holiday season as a family, so we thought we’d give ourselves the gift of wrapping up the podcast season and looking forward to coming back in January.

Chris Rose: 00:55 We are going to California for the holidays, and I bring that up because we’re going to talk about what that trip has opened up in my head and heart a little later in the episode. Yeah, so we are moving towards … My birthday is coming up. We’re going to spend my birthday weekend at the Zen monastery as a family, which has become a beloved tradition of our family. Then, a few days later, we get on a plane to California, so this will be the last episode of 2019, and I just want to quickly say how grateful we are for you, our podcast audience. This year, we’ve almost doubled in size this year, so if you are new with us and just a few episodes deep, welcome and thank you, and have fun exploring the archives.

Chris Rose: 01:43 I just got an email from someone who just recently discovered the podcast and fell in love with it, and also has a new relationship, so they’ve been sending each other episodes back and forth and having long conversations about them, and I thought, “What a wonderful way to start a relationship.” Like you’ll get to know each other really well right out of the gate. Welcome to all of our new listeners and big love to all of you who have been with us for two, three, five years. Some of you have been with us as Pleasure Mechanics for 10 years now on your erotic journey, so as we move towards 2020 and this new decade together, thank you and love to all of you, and I’ll almost miss you this holiday season. I will be thinking about you, and we will be in touch with those of you on our Patreon community.

Chris Rose: 02:35 We’re doing a live call next week for our patrons. You can join that at pleasuremechanics.com/love. Find all the ways to go deeper with us, and yeah, we will be back in January with new episodes of Speaking of Sex.

Charlotte Rose: 02:52 We are so grateful for you all in our world and that we get to have these conversations with you and share ideas, and then hear how they land with you. It is really such a joy to be in community with you all, so thank you, thank you, thank you.

Chris Rose: 03:08 It really does feel like this conversation, when we broadcast out to the group, and then we hear back from waves of you at a time about how the episodes land, how these themes show up in your life, and then we roll that wisdom back out into the future episodes and courses as we build them, and over the 10 years, this is how really the Pleasure Mechanics body of knowledge has been woven, and it’s been so deeply in dialogue with all of you, so love to you guys. Welcome. All right. This episode, one more episode for 2019, and I thought we would talk about this question, “What do you want? What do you want?”

Chris Rose: 03:54 “What do you want?” is a question that comes up for a lot of people at the holiday season. “What do you want for the holidays? What do you want on your gift list? What do you want from Santa? What do you want for the New Year? What do you want to do for the holidays?”

Chris Rose: 04:09 It’s a season of want, which gets turned into all sorts of toxic mimics, but we won’t go into that. A season of want, but also, this question shows up for us in so many different arenas of our life, right? It’s a very internal question of, “What do I want? What do I want with my life? What do I want with my career?”

Chris Rose: 04:33 “What do I want out of a family? What do I value?” It’s a deeply relational question. It’s a lover’s question, “Tell me what you want.” It can be the beginning of a beautiful, erotic exchange.

Chris Rose: 04:50 “What do you want? How can I serve you? Tell me what you want. Tell me what you desire.” Then, it can also be kind of a demanding question.

Chris Rose: 05:02 Sometimes when we receive this question, it feels more of like a demand like, “What do you want? What do you want from me?” It can be a question on, that comes in a waves of desperation sometimes, so I thought this question would be an interesting one to explore, what is being asked of us when we hear this question, “What do you want?”, and how do we answer it? What is the process of answering it?

Charlotte Rose: 05:25 It’s such an interesting question because it’s relevant in a huge range of time. It’s relevant when you look at your entire life, when you look at the decade ahead, when you look at the rest of your life, or when you look at an afternoon or an hour, or 20 minutes after your kid is in bed. This question of what you want is so relevant at every scale.

Chris Rose: 05:49 And being able to answer it, having a process, having a trust in a process that you can ask yourself that question and get reliable information back, what a gift that would be because I think we all know this question and how it has shown up in our life in the big and the small moments, and we know how shitty it feels when we’re asked this question, and the answer is like, “I don’t know what I want.” We hear this from people all the time in different iterations, but not knowing what you want does not feel good, and it doesn’t serve you, and it doesn’t serve the people you love. How do we know how to live? How do we know how to fill our time, how to make love if we don’t know what we want, what we desire, what would be pleasurable, what would bring us more joy, and spark, and vitality, and pleasure into our lives? What do you want is such a generous question, but it demands specificity.

Charlotte Rose: 06:57 And self-knowing. It demands being able to feel inside your body and know what might feel good, and fulfilling, and satisfying, and that is a whole skill set.

Chris Rose: 07:09 Why make that connection? I totally agree, but tell me more about why do you have to be able to feel inside?

Charlotte Rose: 07:17 We have to be able to think of an idea and feel for a response inside our body, or we think of a feeling state that we want to experience, and then we can verbalize it. I think different people will have different ways to respond to this question. Some, it will be a body longing first, and then we articulate it, and others, it will be an idea, and then we listen for a body response.

Chris Rose: 07:45 Okay. We’re going to dive more into this. I want to say a good episode to listen to if you haven’t already is the one about desire, the pleasure of wanting, and that was part of our libido series, so if you go to pleasuremechanics.com/libido, you’ll find our entire libido series. In this episode, we talk about how sex is not a drive. We are not driven towards sex, we are pulled by desire.

Chris Rose: 08:12 It is a motivational system. Another way to think about this question, “What do you want?” is, “What are the motivational systems that are pulling you into your wanting? What is motivating you? What would motivate you into action?”, because, “What do you want?” also is a question that demands action. To go from fantasy, to desire, to action and lived experience, what do you want, you have to translate from a feeling or an idea into lived experience. That’s, I think one of the reasons that we’re a little bit afraid of this question because it demands something of us.

Chris Rose: 08:53 It asks something of us. This connection between, “What do you want?” and deep feeling, let’s go there for a second. “What do you want?” is a question that goes beyond needs, because as human beings, we all need food, we all need shelter, we all need relationality, and it also goes beyond shoulds. What do you want, sources, a certain kind of agency, a certain kind of sovereignty within the question? Like what do you, there’s a you within that question.

Chris Rose: 09:27 Want is a desire, so what do you as a specific person want specifically? I was thinking a lot about how specific this has to get recently because in our planning for our holiday trip, we’re all going as a family out to California, we’re spending some time with Charlotte’s extended family, so excited to see the uncles, and then there’s this period of time where I as an individual get to peel off and have four or five days alone in California. The certain plan was made that would take me up to San Francisco, and I’d be connecting with old friends, and my exes from before Charlotte, and I was maybe going to go to a sex party on New Year’s Eve, and this whole series of events started being scheduled, and I started noticing my body and how my body felt as I was making these plans. The more I paid attention to it, the more I was like, “Whoa, no, no, no.” Like, “This is not right. This is not actually what I want to do.”

Chris Rose: 10:31 I gave myself permission to cancel those plans and open up this wide open space of like, “You are alone in California for four or five days. What do you want? What do you want to do? What do you want to experience? What do you want to feel? How do you want to use that time?”

Chris Rose: 10:49 Like, “What would be most nourishing, most exciting, most pleasurable? Are we going for comforting and calm, or are we going for exciting and thrilling, or maybe a mix?” It’s like in the fantasy, like I, as in our day-to-day life, four days in California, I’d be like, “Yeah, I want that,” and then as soon as it’s a reality, it has to get specific. The specificity of your wants matter, and when you give yourself the opportunity to answer this question in the macro, “What do I want from my life? What are my values?”, are in the moment-to-moment. Like I literally have 20 minutes before I get in bed.

Chris Rose: 11:31 “What do I want right now?” If we really start dropping into this question, and as Charlotte said, and we’re going to explore this, that deep felt sense in the body when we start thinking about these options, when we start thinking about this question, when we start feeling into our desire, and we’re going to give you some tools to do this, so it’s not just abstract, but when you start feeling what your body is telling you, all of a sudden, these very specific things can start emerging, and we can start asking for what we want and we can start getting more of what we want. This is another big secret of this, is the more we ask for what we want out loud, the more likely we are to receive it, and it’s a snowball effect and it can be really beautiful and magical if we start allowing ourselves to have very specific wants, and then say them out loud to people who love us, and support us, and care about us.

Charlotte Rose: 12:34 Though this may sound simple, it is of course not so easy. There are so many factors that get in the way for many of us to be able to easily ask for what we want and know what we want, so let’s look at the context. Let’s look at some of the pieces that get in the way. The idea of feeling into our body and feeling what feels like a yes, what feels like a no, how do we do this practically? We need to slow down enough so that we can actually feel what we’re feeling.

Charlotte Rose: 13:08 Our culture encourages us to move so quickly and at such a pace, and we are inundated all the time with the shoulds, what we should be wanting, what we should be buying in order to feel happier. To be able to actually distinguish and separate that from what we actually specifically want as individuals is a skill set, and it is a practice and a skill to cultivate intentionally.

Chris Rose: 13:36 A lot of this depends on a trust of the brain in your gut, so a lot of traditional knowledge systems have known this for thousands of years. Modern science is just confirming and mapping this, but your gut, your viscera, your digestive system is full of neurons and is intimately connected to your heart, and to your brain, and to the hormonal system. We’re one big organism, but the neurology of the gut, the vagus nerve, we can geek out on this, but the short of it is our body has feelings, and when we listen to those feelings, there’s really good knowledge and information and wisdom within those feelings. If you can get onboard with that idea that our body has feelings that are valuable parts of our knowledge system as individuals and as a species, as humans, a lot of this relates to the mammalian neurology. Yeah. This is a whole [crosstalk 00:14:45]-

Charlotte Rose: 14:45 Save this for another time.

Chris Rose: 14:46 Yeah. This is a whole … I’ll drop some links again in the show notes page if you want to geek out on this, but this idea of the brain in your gut, your gut feelings, how you feel about a situation versus what you think about it. I’ll give you an example as we go into the holidays. Think about going home for the holidays, whatever that means to you, and if you paint that picture in your head and you feel into your body, perhaps there are people in your life that when you think about seeing them, you feel open, and warm, and cozy inside. You feel a yes. You feel an openness and a receptivity to that idea, that anticipated experience brings you pleasure and joy and a desire.

Chris Rose: 15:37 Perhaps there are people in your natal family or in your community that if you think about going to a holiday party with them, there’s a sense of constriction, contraction, a disgust or of a repelling feeling, and you’re like, “Ugh, I have to do that?” Notice those sensations. These are the feelings underneath the rational thoughts. These are our feelings in our body, our wisdom in our body, and we can tap into this in all sorts of ways for our erotic advantage. We’ll talk about this way more next year.

Chris Rose: 16:12 It comes a lot out of our study of mindful sex and our framing of what we do with massage, but this idea that we have wisdom and knowledge in our body beyond our brain is really important for this next piece. When we have to answer the question, “What do you want?”, you can think about that question and come up with things like a gift list on Amazon. Like I can think about what I want. If you start feeling into the question, “What do you want?”, a whole other galaxy of ideas and options become available to us, to feel into what do you want, because this is beyond the material. This is, “What do you want to feel? How do you want to live?”

Chris Rose: 16:58 “What kind of experiences you want to have, what kind of relationships you want to have, what kind of sex you want to be having?” We have to remember more and more to bring this back to sex, my dear. What kind of sex you want to be having, how you want to be touched, how you want to be fucked. Do you want to have rough sex? Do you want to have gentle sex?

Chris Rose: 17:17 Do you want lots and lots of full body touch? Do you want to have your hair grabbed and be spanked? The whole range is available to you, but to get what you want, you have to be specific and identify it. Here’s my process for identifying what I want in my body, and I started taking myself into this with this California trip, and in doing that, kind of recognize like, “Oh, I have this system I use when I think into potential options for things,” so the system is going into fantasy, unlocking the realm of fantasy, while paying attention to how your body feels. That’s the simple version of it.

Chris Rose: 17:59 We’ll be rolling some of this into the work we do next year, but the simple version is you’re going to really think through ideas, options, you’re going to fantasize, and then pay attention to how your body responds, and start identifying for yourself what feels like a yes, what feels like a pleasure, what feels like a desire, and what feels like a no, of repulsion, contraction, and you’ll learn for yourself how these things feel in your body, and you can access this quickly by starting with things that have already happened in your life. Get in a safe space, try to be relaxed, take a shower, go for a walk, and then lie down and spend a few minutes thinking about a peak erotic experience. We did a whole episode about this. Again, it’ll be in the show notes, but a peak erotic experience, one of the best erotic sexual experiences of your life. Think about it.

Chris Rose: 19:03 Go into deep sensual detail, the more specific you can be, and remember those details and the context of it, and how you felt in that moment. Think really deeply about it so you’re activating your brain, those neural networks in your brain, and then feel into your body. Notice how your heart feels, your breath, your stomach, your loins, your pelvis. Feel into all of that, and then notice. Notice, map it out. You might take notes for yourself or make a picture if you’re more of a visual person.

Chris Rose: 19:40 Feel it, install it. Okay. Shake that out, and then another day, do this same exercise and you want to be feeling like safe and resourced for this, but do this same exercise, thinking about a time where something didn’t go well, that it was a no, but you did it anyway, or a no and something was done to you, and I’m not recommending you relive your deepest trauma here. I’m inviting you here, just like we went to a peak erotic experience, go to a valley in your life. Like go to something that felt awful and shitty, and then start noticing how that feels in your body, and even talking about it right now, like going from that first peak erotic experience with you into this valley, I’m feeling my body change as we talk about this.

Chris Rose: 20:23 I’m looking in Charlotte’s eyes and watching her body change, feeling her breath contract. You might have heard that in the podcast. This is the secret sauce. Like this is the wisdom of your body speaking. When we pay attention to how we feel, we know how we feel about things. Again, the simplicity of this, but when you know how you feel about something, you start knowing what you want, what you want more of.

Chris Rose: 20:52 Before we move on, just to wrap up my story about California, like as I started feeling into like, “What do I really want? Do I want to be at a sex party on New Year’s Eve, 2020 alone?”, like, “Do I want to be in San Francisco?”, like I started calibrating my thoughts towards what I want, and I got a really clear picture of what I want. It turns out, it’s not at all San Francisco and it’s not at all a sex party alone, and I’m going to cultivate and shape a new experience, guided by this embodied feeling of yes, this embodied feeling of, “That’s what I want right now. That’s what would be most pleasurable.” I invite you into exploring this, and notice what you notice along the way.

Charlotte Rose: 21:41 Can I just go back to the piece where we’re encouraging people to really think about what their no feels like?

Chris Rose: 21:48 Yeah.

Charlotte Rose: 21:49 As a survivor, do you have recommendations for how to complete that for people if they have been really feeling into that, and then they are registering and learning what that shows up in their body as, and then what do you recommend after that?

Chris Rose: 22:07 Right. I mean, you can be gentle with this. You can titrate it, and this is why I say feel safe and resourced going into this, and you can choose your valley. Like you can choose just to think about how it feels when your mom demands something of you on Thanksgiving that you don’t want to be demanded of. You don’t have to go to your assaults, so thank you for that reminder, but within the realm of fantasy and playing with fantasy, one of the things I’ve done is if I get triggered or if I start thinking about a violation, or an assault, or some of my childhood abuse, or my family abuse, or I talk to a family member and that stuff is stirred up or whatever, I can change the narrative in my head and like recalibrate and come to a more embodied sense of power, so instead of leaving myself in that valley, I can imagine.

Chris Rose: 23:00 I can use my fantasy and my imagination to like write a different ending to the story, or to be like, “What would I have said to stand up for myself in that moment?”, and sometimes even having those words like saying out loud like, “No, I don’t want to do that,” or, “No, I’m not available for that.” This is also the opportunity to start pre-loading some of that language into your psyche, and this is, especially with like ongoing stuff, with like family members or relationships, feeling that no and feeling into the pattern of how a no feels, it might feel like you’re taking yourself into the ringer, but by having that aware, having that conscious in your mind of like, “Oh, that’s what I feel like when I’m being violated, when my boundaries are being crossed, when I’m doing something I don’t want to do,” then I can feel the first flickers of that feeling when I’m being asked to do something I don’t want to do, and I can preempt it. When you’re being asked to join a committee at your kid’s school and you feel that flicker in your belly, that’s like, “Ugh, really?”, you get to say, “No, I’m not available for that right now. I’m sorry. This is what I am available for,” or if your lover is pressuring you to do that sex act that they really want that you just do not want to do, you can finally come up with the language of, “No, that really, it doesn’t feel like something I’m into, so no thank you.”

Chris Rose: 24:31 “We’re going to explore where the yeses are.” What it does, it gets us out of that vague feeling of feeling the no, because we feel it whether or not we’re identifying it anyway. We feel it whether or not we are identifying it as a no, that sensation in the gut, the difference in the circulation and the respiratory system. Our bodies feel these feelings and they’re there, being circulated through our systems, and if we come into like dialogue with them and we can start identifying what we’re feeling and why, and in the mindful sex course, we call this like embodied emotions and having practices to access that and to notice how we’re feeling, it gives us such a huge range of intelligence about what we’re wanting, what we don’t want, what our motivations are, what we’re driven towards, what we’re repelled by, what we’re repulsed by, and it’s just such this well of intelligence so we can start changing our experience and saying yes to the things we want, asking for the things we want, receiving the things we want and saying no thank you to that, which will not serve us at this time. To bring it back to this question of, “What do you want?”, what do you want?

Chris Rose: 25:50 What do you want to experience this holiday season? Like a lot of us go into this holiday season with a ton of shoulds, and a lot of stress, and to-do lists, and it’s just crazy that as a culture, we’re like, “We’re going to give everyone time off so you can really stress out.” Like how do we calibrate a holiday season towards one that’s actually nourishing, and nurturing, and connecting, and replenishing, and resources us to go back into the New Year? What would that look like for you, and is there any way to bring some of those feelings into action to give yourself more of that experience? What do you want in your erotic life? You’re listening to this podcast.

Chris Rose: 26:35 You are here with us. We are grateful for that, and we want to know, we want you to feel into, “What do you want from your erotic life? What do you want to experience more of? How do you want to play? What do you want to feel and experience sexually, and in connection with another human being perhaps?

Chris Rose: 26:58 I’d love to know some of the answers to that question that come up for you, and then maybe what do you want out of some solo time? If you had five days in California, what would you do? Like how would you get specific with that, because I’m amazed at the options, you know. Do I want five days in the museums, or five days in the meditation hall, or five days in the dungeon? Like, “What do I want?”, or some mix of it all. Asking ourselves these questions, “What do you want for an afternoon?”, take one hour and fill it with your deepest wants, and nourish yourself by giving yourself what you want, instead of just defaulting to your shoulds, or your to-do lists, like the demands on you, and notice what it feels like to be in dialogue with this question, “What do you want?”

Charlotte Rose: 27:49 It requires separating from the obligations and the shoulds, and sometimes it is hard to carve out that time to really intentionally push up away the things that you should be doing, because that list is endless.

Chris Rose: 28:06 She says as a tired mother.

Charlotte Rose: 28:10 Yeah, and this, I knew so much what I wanted before having a kid. That was a very easy question for me to answer. With the new context of being a mother, I do find this question much more challenging and I’m really having to push against my own internal shoulds. I have a lot of ideas about what it means to be a good mother, it turns out, and I am challenged to make more space and time for myself, and I know I’m not alone in this. There are a lot of ideas that we integrate from culture about what is good, and what is correct, and we do this in the bedroom all the time, so we all have different areas where this shows up.

Charlotte Rose: 28:56 I feel that less in the bedroom and more in relationship to my time in mothering, so it’s a valuable question to explore no matter what phase you’re in, no matter what is available to you right now. Looking at reality, and then how can you make small or big adjustments with what is available for you, because not everyone is going to be able to take five days in California, we know that, but can you take two hours to yourself where you are saying no to obligations and you’re carving out just time to nourish you and what you want? It’s all about taking micro moments. Recently, I was remembering that before I had a kid, I would have like candlelit showers on my own often. I was like, “Why did I put that? Why did I stop that?”

Charlotte Rose: 29:50 Like I’m not going to a spa for three days and these moments where I’m taking a long, luxurious shower, feel really indulgent, and delicious, and nourishing to me.

Chris Rose: 30:00 Well, this is important. You stopped it because with an infant, candles aren’t safe.

Charlotte Rose: 30:05 Yeah, that’s right.

Chris Rose: 30:06 This is the thing, context changes.

Charlotte Rose: 30:08 And our bathroom was really small and there was no room for her in that bathroom when she was a baby, and then I forgot.

Chris Rose: 30:13 Totally. Context changes, and then it changes again, and sometimes we have to kind of shake ourselves awake enough to even look around and understand what our context is, what we have agency over, what we can change, and then take those opportunities, and sometimes little changes in our life make huge watershed differences in our life experience, and even the mental freedom.

Charlotte Rose: 30:39 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 30:39 This is the thing, we did a whole episode about what to do with desires unfulfilled. Again, I’ll link in the show notes page. This is going to be a long show notes page, but there’s so many related conversations here, but we all have way more desires than we can make happen in our lives, and that’s just so important to know as you’re going into asking yourself this question, “What do you want?” As soon as you start dropping into it, you might be flooded with what you want, and then how to understand how to shape that into your day-to-day life is a big process and it’s a process of imagination and translation. When you identify the themes, you want to feel a spa-like experience, great, that experience for yourself. Candles are really easy to buy.

Charlotte Rose: 31:27 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 31:27 I would buy you a candle the next time at the grocery store.

Charlotte Rose: 31:29 No, but I did this. I had a longing. I was having a longing for more nourishment, more of that kind of delicious, “I have all the space for myself,” and so I rearranged the bathroom and brought a candle in, and put more of my massage lotion back in there, all these things that were not, because they were like kids’ toys there. I rearranged it, and it was such a simple thing. It was such a small thing, and now the experience of having a candlelit shower, and then with a massage, and then I massage my feet after, I massage my body, and it feels really freaking good, and it didn’t take a lot of shift in my material reality, and it is a bit of time, but the output is so nourishing.

Chris Rose: 32:14 But that process you’re describing started with paying attention to yourself long enough to notice the longing, identify the longing, get specific with it, shift what we already had in our home apparently, and then you created a context to give yourself that experience over and over again. I think that’s also good to remember, is some of this work is upfront and some of the harder conversations with your partner about, “What do I want?”, well, let me really tell you, will create watershed changes that over many years, you will benefit from, and will create the skills to ask yourself this over and over again because we noticed that both our desires change and context changes. I think your example of like the context of early motherhood, being really important, because you have now shifted out of that we’re in a different stage of parenthood, but we have to pay attention enough to change our behavior with that.

Charlotte Rose: 33:13 Remember that the context has changed, and then shift ourselves to get bigger again or just different, instead of those limitations being perceived.

Chris Rose: 33:26 Then, how to be honest with ourselves and real with ourselves about what is available to us, because more is available to us than most of us ask for. We are not trained to ask for things out loud. We’re even trained as you blow out your birthday candles to keep your wishes a secret, but how does anyone know what you want? How can people give you what you want if you don’t say it? Just notice that. If you say your wishes out loud, if you hand people your wishlist, it is so much easier for them to give you that gift, and I’m not talking about the stuff under the tree.

Chris Rose: 34:03 I’m talking about what we want from our life. “I want deep friendship with you. Can you show up for this with me? I want a sense of adventure in our relationship. What will that look like for us? I want a little more freedom to explore my interest in music.”

Chris Rose: 34:22 “Can I go out once a week or once a month? What is realistic for us?” When we identify our wants, we can start changing our behaviors, and therefore, our lived experiences.

Charlotte Rose: 34:33 Right.

Chris Rose: 34:34 This is true in bed, out of bed, micro, macro. Just start playing with this, giving yourself permission to want and trusting what comes up there, and knowing you are wise enough to adapt that to your life circumstance, and that acknowledging wants is not going to take you off the deep end. As we practice answering this question, as we practice asking out loud for what we want, as we practice shifting the context, as you were beautifully saying about making that translation from fantasy to desire, from what is possible to what I actually want in my real life, that’s fantasy to desire, and then from desire to action, what can I do? What can I do in my real life because I can spin off in California and be like, “Well, I’ll go hiking for five days. Maybe not the best, most possible option for my body right now, but what does that desire speak to, time outside, long walks? We don’t have the budget to like go to a retreat center for five days, but maybe I can get a small room somewhere and create that space for myself.”

Chris Rose: 35:45 That translation, I think is so important, and in our conversations about fantasy, again, we’ll link to some other conversations about this. We talk about how important it is to go from the realm of pure imagination where anything is possible. Feel into that. Like feel into your fantasies. Translate that into desires, what you actually want, and now we’re translating that into actions. What can you do given your current context, given your current agency in your specific situation right now? That’s where the rubber hits the road, as they say or the latex hits the lube.

Chris Rose: 36:26 I just made that up. Think that’s going to stick, but that’s where it gets real because that’s where if your lover’s saying, “What do you want?”, and in your belly you’re saying like, “I want to be tossed around and roughed up and spanked, and dah, dah, dah,” like getting from that feeling and identifying that desire, which can be hard enough to translating that into the context of you and your husband on a Tuesday night, like that is where a lot of the hard work is and where the baby steps are, and where you can start asking for small pieces perhaps, and building capacity and building trust together, but it starts all from this honesty of, “What do I want?” I’ll tell you what I want, so tell me what you want what you really, really want.

Charlotte Rose: 37:16 What you really, really want.

Chris Rose: 37:16 Oh, wow. I wish we had the license to that song. I would fade out into glory. Tell us what you want. Be in dialogue with this question. Ask yourself, “What do you want?”

Chris Rose: 37:29 “What do I want to feel? What do I want to experience? What do I want to … What values do I want to live my life through? How do I want to be fucked?” All of these variations of the question of what do you want, and then let us know.

Chris Rose: 37:45 Go to pleasuremechanics.com/love, pleasuremechanics.com/free. Drop in deeper with us, be in community with us, and be in dialogue with us. As soon as you join our free course or our newsletter, you’ll start getting emails from us and you can reply to any of those emails and reach us directly. Be in dialogue with us. Share your stories.

Chris Rose: 38:08 We’ve gotten so many amazing emails recently. Thank you so much for sharing with us your experience, how you’re using this podcast, how you’re using the courses in your relationships. It is thrilling to hear how this work lands for you. If this work has made a difference in your life, if our presence in your life week-to-week is a good thing, if you want more of us, show us the love at pleasuremechanics.com/love so you can drop in deeper with us and support us in this work so we can keep going.

Charlotte Rose: 38:45 Yes, and thank you again for those emails that you send us. It is so nourishing to hear how our work is supporting you. Thank you so much for being a part of our world, for listening to this podcast, and we hope that this has given you a little inspiration to really think and feel into what you’d like more of. What do you want more of, in big ways and in small ways, and then give yourself permission to just have a little bit more of that, whatever that is, and see if it makes you feel fulfilled and satisfied, because that’s the other piece is then noticing how it makes you feel once you experience it. There’s so many parts to this, but playing and stretching yourself in any part of it is valuable and useful for all the other areas of your life, and we hope that over this holiday season, that there are some delicious moments where you get to ask for and receive what you most want, and that you get to carve out a little bit more space for that, and then it feels good.

Chris Rose: 39:56 Happy holidays, dear ones. We will be back in January of 2020, and we look forward to another decade with you. Another decade.

Charlotte Rose: 40:09 No. That one doesn’t have to stick.

Chris Rose: 40:12 We look forward to another decade with you here at pleasuremechanics.com. Thank you so much for listening to Speaking of Sex with The Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 40:22 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 40:23 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 40:24 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure. Decades and decades of pleasure. No.

Are There Different Types of Orgasms? G-Spot, A-Spot, P-Spot Orgasms?

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How many types of orgasms are there? Are some orgasms more powerful than other orgasms? Do different types of orgasms feel different? How do I have all the different kinds of orgasms? What’s the deal with the g-spot? the a-spot? the p-spot? Do all people have all the spots? Help!

We get emails with these questions ALL the time, so we know there is still a lot of confusion about different types of orgasms, the elusive spots to create different kinds of orgasms, and what the best kind of orgasm is.

If you’ve been wondering about any of these questions, tune in to find out all you need to know about your sexual system to unlock the most pleasure, arousal, orgasmic release and ecstasy you want – on your own terms.

All of the strategies and skills discussed in this episode are part of our Erotic Touch Mastery online courses – click through here to explore the courses and get a pre-loaded discount!

Podcast Transcript:

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are the Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we have soulful, explicit conversations about sex, love, relationships, everything you need to know to have a more fulfilling, satisfying, erotic relationship with yourself and the world. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com where you will find our complete podcast archive and while you are there, go to pleasuremechanics.com/free and sign up for our free online course. The Erotic Essentials so we can get you started right away with some of our favorite strategies and techniques for more pleasure. On today’s episode we are going to be talking about orgasms, types of orgasms, kinds of orgasms, the orgasm hierarchy that seems to put a lot of pressure on people to kind of achieve different kinds of orgasms. Where did this idea come from? Is it true? Are there different kinds of orgasms? Are there different kinds of orgasms only for people with vulvas but penis owners only get one? What’s the dealio?

Charlotte Rose: 01:18 Yeah, in our culture we tend to think about people with penises having a simpler kind of experience of pleasure. That they have one kind of orgasm and people with vulvas have a more mysterious and complicated relationship to their pleasure, to orgasms, and we want to just talk about that and take some of the pressure off for everyone.

Chris Rose: 01:41 It’s so interesting because throughout history, female orgasm was never even a topic of conversation, the clitoris was removed from medical textbooks hundreds of years ago, and through the lens of reproductive intercourse being the only valid kind of sex, the only orgasm that was really discussed or researched was the male ejaculatory orgasm. The experience of someone with a penis reaching a certain level of arousal and then having an ejaculatory orgasm. Then along came Freud in the early 20th century and Freud started talking about female sexual neurosis, and invented this category of clitoral orgasms and vaginal orgasms. And vaginal orgasms were the much more sophisticated and mature type of orgasms. Enter the orgasm hierarchy.

Chris Rose: 02:38 Since then we have this proliferation of kinds of orgasms. The list has gotten longer, so now we have an idea of there’s clitoral orgasms, vaginal orgasms, blended orgasms, coregasms, then we get into the G-spot, the A-spot, the P-spot. Where did all of this from? What we want to say, first and foremost, is that pleasure, sexual pleasure and erotic pleasure, is a much more expansive category than orgasm. So here at Pleasure Mechanics and in your erotic life, we encourage you to focus on pleasure. Pleasure is the measure of how you are enjoying sex. Orgasm is a specific physiological event that can happen with or without physical stimulation. It can happen in your sleep, it can happen in a coma. And an orgasm is a particular up-leveling of the nervous system. It’s an excitation, an arousal, and that reaches a certain point that it then cascades into a pleasurable release of that tension usually marked by involuntary contractions of the pelvic muscles and the release of a pleasurable cascade of hormones, oxytocin being the main one.

Chris Rose: 04:08 Orgasm is a measurable event in the body, pleasure is not. Orgasm is a particular moment in time, and this moment can be achieved through all sorts of different stimulation. People who are paralyzed from the neck down can still achieve orgasm. It’s really important for us to remember this and not get caught up in this sense of,” Oh, there’s all different kinds of orgasms, and some are better than others, and some are more fulfilling. Some are more enlightened than others.” This is all generated by kind of a media hype around sexuality. And we can track this back to the invention of the G-spot.

Charlotte Rose: 04:56 The term the G-spot was coined in 1982. Dr. Beverly Whipple was part of the team that discovered this area in the body, and she really wanted to name it a region of the body, but the media at the time really wanted something a little bit more exciting. So they pressured her to call it a spot, so it is now been called the G-spot.

Chris Rose: 05:19 And Beverly Whipple named the G-spot after Dr. Grafenberg who was a German researcher who first recognized this region as an erotic region. And the region he was talking about, we now call the paraurethral sponge. It’s an area that surrounds the urethra, you access it through the vagina, and you put pressure on the top wall towards the belly. And within the vagina there is a region there that feels different. It feels different to touch and it feels different when it is touched, but when this book came out, The G-spot and Other Sexual Discoveries, I think it was called, the G-spot took a life of its own and all of a sudden in the media it was, “Does the G-spot exist?” And, “Where’s the G-spot?” And, “How to find the G-spot.” And, “G-spot, G-spot” and we still have that to this day.

Chris Rose: 06:12 People are obsessed with the idea of a spot. Then, other researchers, and as we have identified other erotic areas, other areas that respond to different kinds of touch, new terms were coined. The A-spot to talk about the anterior fornix area around the cervix. The P-spot, which sometimes refers to an area around the cervix and sometimes people are referring to the prostate as the P-spot. This obsession with spots and different orgasms triggered by different spots, for a lot of people is interpreted as the body has buttons and levers that you need to find, and seek out, and press in the right way-

Charlotte Rose: 06:56 And then your hair is going to stand up and it’ll be super exciting, but the body doesn’t really work that way. Each time we approach the body, it is different. Sometimes some kind of touch will feel really good in some moments and other moments it won’t feel good at all. For instance, if you’re exploring the cervical area, the days right before a period will not feel… Well, may not feel as good for some people because the uterus can sit lower in the body and so deep penetration might feel too intense, but other days of the month that might feel really wonderful. So the body is always changing, always different. So something that might feel really good for one person, one time, might not the next time.

Chris Rose: 07:40 Or even within the same event. Arousal changes our body and it changes how we perceive and experience stimulation. We all know this from different kinds of touch that would feel very weird or unpleasurable, if you’re totally not aroused. Someone’s scratching their nails down your back, for example, at the height of arousal can feel really great. The genitals are no different. When we start stimulating the genitals, and start bringing blood flow to the area, and bring our attention to the area, it’s an ever shifting landscape. And so we can think about spots to hunt out. We need to think about regions to bring our attention to, to bring touch to, to bring different kinds of technique to, in order to see what is there for you right now as is.

Chris Rose: 08:35 And I want to just say here, we’re talking a lot about the vulva and the cervix, but the penis, and the prostate, and the anus the, what we traditionally think of as the male sexual system, is no less complicated or nuanced. And the vulva, the clitoris, the vagina is no more mysterious. Our bodies are basically the same, we have different architecture of parts. In the fetus we are all… we all start from the same parts and then they differentiate, and they differentiate along a spectrum in response to different hormones in utero. And so the working theory is that we all kind of start female and then male parts are differentiated through sex hormones. And what we now know is that this is a spectrum. There’s all different presentations of genitals. There is not two sexes innies and outies. And so if we just embrace this idea that the human body is made of all of these different parts and they’re situated in slightly different ways, kind of like our faces. Right?

Charlotte Rose: 09:48 Exactly like our faces.

Chris Rose: 09:50 Most of us have two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. And we all have different configurations of our facial anatomy. We all have different configuration of our genital anatomy. And there are patterns there that we can talk about, and yet, the only thing that really matters is your beautiful face, your beautiful genitals and how they are responding right now. And I cannot emphasize this enough, this idea of changeability, because some people go searching for their G-spot, and there’s a lot of pressure behind that search, and they’re like hunting for it and they don’t feel much of anything, or they feel like discomfort, or maybe even nausea. And they’re like, “Fuck that, the G-spot’s not for me.”

Chris Rose: 10:32 And then in a different context, and different circumstances, some touch lights up this area and they have a tremendous experience of quote, unquote, “G-spot touch.” Right? So what does this tell us? This tells us that the sexual anatomy, the pelvic anatomy, is a Wonderland to explore, with curiosity, with an open mind, with an inquiry of, “What can I stimulate right now? What feels good right now? What are you responding to right now?” And that changes everything.

Charlotte Rose: 11:08 Thinking of the area more as a map to explore with curiosity and interest, instead of something to get right, to tick off all the areas on the checklist, and like do it really well, right? There is no failure. If certain areas do not feel good to you right now, try it another time. Or if your body isn’t responding with fireworks immediately, that’s okay. As Chris was saying, some areas do have feelings of numbness, and after some gentle exploration, eventually over many sessions or times you can start to feel some feelings, and sometimes they might be really intense feelings, and then that will pass and you’ll feel something else. Then perhaps you’ll get to more pleasure. It is really an exploration and we just really want to encourage you to bring that spirit to your body and to a lover’s body instead of something to do right and well.

Chris Rose: 12:09 Let’s talk about the experience of orgasm. So if we think about orgasm and arousal as things that can be stimulated through all of these different kinds of touch on different parts of the body, why is it that some people report some orgasms are more powerful than other orgasms? What creates a powerful orgasm versus an orgasm that feels more like a sneeze? Is that about what buttons we’re pushing on different parts of the body, or is it about something else?

Charlotte Rose: 12:41 It’s about so many things. One of the main pieces is context. Your experience of the moment, how your mind is doing, the environment, the feelings you’re having about the being that you are with, how relaxed or tense your body is. I mean, there are so many factors that contribute to the amount of pleasure that you can feel in a particular moment.

Chris Rose: 13:04 And I think it’s important to say here, orgasm actually requires a fairly low level of arousal. It is not the climax, it is not the peak, it is not the ceiling of the pleasure you can feel, it is just a specific event. And there’s so much more beyond orgasm. And I think we should talk about that more in future episodes, but this idea that all sex leads up to this climax and that orgasm is the mountain top, I think also needs to fall away. Because as you said, the experience of sex, your experience of how fulfilling, exciting, enlivening a certain sex act will feel is not about the orgasm, it’s about the full context, the full experience. And how much you’re paying attention to that orgasm, how much you’re allowing within that moment. Because we know orgasms can happen in your sleep and sometimes we wake up in the middle of them, sometimes we sleep right through them.

Chris Rose: 14:08 So if we can sleep through an orgasm, we can also be awake through an orgasm and not feel much of anything. And for some people an orgasm feels kind of like a sneeze or a hiccup, and it’s just kind of like, “beh.” And it’s over. Other orgasms are these world shaking, earth trembling, full body experiences that seem to open your heart and they can be these huge, life changing events. But that’s not really about the orgasm. It’s about everything else that is happening in that moment and the experience of that climax. You know? And, and the experience of the orgasm is also partly felt through how much of your body is being activated, and touched, and stimulated. And the more we know about our full body anatomy really, but about the genital anatomy and the pelvic anatomy, it gives us clues about how to make things feel bigger, how to make things feel more intense, how to allow sensation to travel through your entire body and be experienced through your entire body.

Chris Rose: 15:29 And this is the gift that all of these spots reveal. If we let go of them as a checklist, if we let go of them as a hierarchy of orgasms, if we let go of the pressure to achieve and perform different kinds of orgasms, instead we can look at these spots as regions to be explored. Because the truth is, most of us explore a very superficial level of our sexual anatomy. We stroke the penis, maybe we put the penis in the vagina, and if you’re lucky, you discover the clitoris and how to stimulate it. That is just scratching the surface of what is possible for our bodies and the ways we can touch our sexual anatomy.

Charlotte Rose: 16:17 We know that stimulating the penis or the clitoris feels good because we’re stimulating nerve endings, but the whole pelvis is rich with nerve endings. There are different nerve pathways that attach the brain to the prostate, to the cervix, to the uterus. So there is so much sensation available through different nerve pathways and that’s partly why you may want to explore stimulating the cervical area as well as the clitoris, because you’re lighting up new and different pathways that can, for some people in some moments, create more intense, deeper sensations.

Chris Rose: 16:54 Right, because you’re literally lighting up more of the network. The nerves look a lot like branches of the trees, and I want to get this tattooed all over my body because it’s beautiful, right? Nerve fibers travel from the brain down into the body and then branch out in these ever expanding webs of feeling. And different nerve endings are specialized to feel different things. And many of us have become very accustomed to stimulating a very limited number of these nerve endings in order to experience sexual pleasure, arousal, orgasm, and ejaculation. We have learned to hot wire our sexual response system by touching ourselves in the same way again and again.

Chris Rose: 17:42 Most of us masturbate in the same way we learned to as a child and we get stuck in that pattern or we use specific toy in a specific way and then kind of get stuck in that pattern of stimulating certain nerve endings to create the sexual response we’re looking for. Some people even have one side of their clitoris is more sensitive to the other, and there is a question there. Is one side of the clitoris better enervated, or has it just been touched more because that’s how your hand falls when you’re masturbating? The nerve endings in the penis, for example, are there whether or not a penis is soft or hard, erection pushes the nerve endings closer to the skin, and touch on a hard penis stimulates them in a certain way. These nerve endings are still available to you when your penis is soft, you just might not be familiar with how it feels when you touch them.

Chris Rose: 18:40 So a lot of this is giving yourself permission, and space, and time and having the techniques to discover your entire pelvis as a sexual system. To light up all of these different areas and see what is there. Because most of us don’t know what is there because it has never been touched, and it is certainly never been touched with repetition, and with the right arousal in place to start wiring this as sexually relevant stimuli.

Charlotte Rose: 19:11 I do want to add that if you are interested in exploring deep in the body, I really want to encourage you to be at high states of arousal first. That it’s really important to feel turned on, to feel arousal, before you start entering into the body to start exploring certain areas. Because those areas, especially if they’re new to you, will not feel that great if you are not already aroused. So that goes for anal touch, that goes for in the G-spot region, that goes for cervical touch. Just start with high levels of arousal before you explore.

Chris Rose: 19:47 Well, yes, this is true for internal touch, but it’s also true when we want to explore things like our labia. For a lot of people, they think the labia are just like curtains to be pulled back. The labia have a lot of nerve endings and can be stimulated in a lot of great ways to promote blood flow to the area, to wake up the nerve endings, and just to see what’s there. They shouldn’t be ignored. The entire sexual system can be touched, and stimulated, and explored, but as Charlotte was saying, if you just go cold to new nerve endings, it probably won’t register as very sexually relevant. If you start with the things that arouse you already, you start with that hot wiring you have down, bring up the arousal a little bit and then start exploring and adding new things, the sensation will already be more sexually relevant.

Chris Rose: 20:45 Think about your nipples, they’re a world away from your genitals in a lot of ways, but if you just touch your nipples on a Tuesday, they probably won’t feel super arousing. If you are already aroused and then graze your nipples, for a lot of people that send sparks, that creates arousal, it is wired into your sexual response. So adding new sensations to what already works for you is one really great way to start exploring what more is possible. And then, as Charlotte was saying, especially the internal terrain changes with arousal, the external terrain does too. Watch a vulva be aroused and you will see female erection in motion. And just like penises, there are growers and showers, some vulvas and clitoris get really engorged, and the clitoris is really prominent, and others, it’s a more subtle change.

Chris Rose: 21:43 But watch your own genitals change with arousal sometime. Look at yourself with a mirror before arousal, look at yourself mid arousal, and then after and notice how much the tissues change. They’re changing because they’re getting engorged with blood. They’re changing because the sweat response is kicking in, and the lubrication response, but internally the muscles are firing, blood flow is coming to the area, and in people with vulvas, there’s a phenomenon called vaginal tenting where the vaginal canal blossoms, it opens up and creates a lot more space. And one of the great things of exploring with your hands is you can feel all of this in motion. And so when we’re looking at these regions, we’re looking at the region of the paraurethral sponge, which is the homolog to the prostate.

Chris Rose: 22:42 If we’re looking at their region of the anal area or of the cervical area, deep inside the vagina the difference of sensation is like the difference between getting a pap smear cold at the doctor’s office, versus somebody touching you just right at high states of arousal. The whole spectrum is available to us when we touch the same nerve endings, and that is context dependent arousal. Context is everything. It’s like the sexiest word we know now. Context is everything. And so if you’re exploring this with a partner, and you’re feeling a lot of pressure, and you’re like, “Oh, I’m trying to have a G-spot orgasm. Where’s my G spot? I should be feeling more now.” Like if that is the thought going through your head, you’re probably not going to feel much pleasure. Let alone arousal, let alone enough arousal to bring you to orgasm.

Chris Rose: 23:41 If instead your attitude is like, “Oh, I have all time in the world to luxuriate in this touch, my partner’s in no rush, everything feels so good. Ooh, what’s that spot right there?” And then you have the skills to communicate, both verbally and non-verbally, and you have the skills in your hands to feel what feels good as you are doing it. Then these regions start talking to us. And you have your fingers in the vagina, you’re stimulating the clitoris, her whole body is turned on, and you start feeling these regions asking for different kinds of touch. And the different kinds of touch we offer these regions have a lot to do with the anatomy. Again, how do we use anatomy as a map to pleasure?

Chris Rose: 24:27 The vaginal wall has almost no sensory nerve endings. It doesn’t feel much of anything. It has a lot of pressure receptors and you can push through the vaginal wall, apply pressure on the vaginal wall, to access the clitoral body from the inside. And then you can start massaging all of these beautiful muscles and attachments and rocking all of these nerve endings around the bony structures of the pelvis, and this is when you get that fully activated sexual system where you feel like all of your parts are engaged. You feel like your whole sexual system is onboard and responding, and every movement, and this doesn’t have to be with your hands, hands are the best way to explore it, that’s how we teach all of these techniques because you can feel so much more with your fingers than you can with a penis or a toy.

Chris Rose: 25:21 But once you have the map, once you understand your body, putting a toy in and rocking it in a specific way, you will know like, “Oh, if I rock my toy in that specific way around my cervix as I’m really excited, it adds this whole other layer of sensation.” And this is how a lot of people experience it. It’s layers of sensation, so touching your clitoris feels good, it’s like a muffin, a good muffin. But then you add in some external vulva touch and it’s like, “Ooh, I have a muffin with icing.” And now you add anal touch and it’s like, “Oh, a layer cake.” And then when you go really deep inside, it’s like a birthday cake with fucking candles. I don’t know, I just made that up.

Charlotte Rose: 26:10 You get the idea.

Chris Rose: 26:11 Insert your own metaphor here, but the layers of sensation. It’s not like clitoral touch on it’s own was bad, it’s still a muffin, but it’s not the whole layer cake. All right, I’m sorry. I’ll never use that muffin again. And you talk a lot about this, because you can get off just with clitoral touch, but often when we add light, external, anal touch, if we add deep internal pressure, you talk about a sense of expansion and a sense of it deepens, it has more layers, it’s more nuanced. And more parts of you are being touched and stimulated, so of course that makes sense.

Charlotte Rose: 26:53 Yeah, it’s just more intense and I love that feeling of it feeling like it’s deep in the body as well as on the outside of the body. It’s like you’re really feeling all of your body from the inside out.

Chris Rose: 27:04 So we hope that we have reframed this idea of different types of orgasms. Different parts of our body can create arousal. When we touch different regions it lights up different nerve pathways. When we touch different regions it moves all of the musculature and nerve endings around in different ways, and therefore it will lights up different kinds of stimulation, sensations, awareness. And so much of this goes back to awareness. Like when you touch someone somewhere, part of that touch is saying “Here, pay attention to this.” Good, skillful, generous, loving touch draws the person you’re touching into awareness of that part of the body. And with awareness, we then experience that part of the body as awake, as part of us, as available for pleasure.

Chris Rose: 28:04 So if you’re just diddling the clitoris or just stroking off the penis, you are lighting up and bringing awareness to one part of the sexual system. How do we use touch, how do we use erotic stimulation, to light up our entire sexual systems, to become aware of our entire sexual systems, to become aware of what it feels like when someone is touching you deep inside around your cervix? With the whole awareness of your clitoris, and your pelvic muscles, and they have all of that in your hands, and they’re saying “Here, pay attention here.” That awareness, and that attention, is the experience in and of itself.

Chris Rose: 28:48 And then what you make of that experience, how much arousal you build, how much joy you allow yourself to feel, how much freedom, how much emotional release, how much emotional connection you have with your partner or yourself in that moment, that’s kind of up to you. But all of these regions, what they allow us is access to different parts of our body and access to different kinds of awareness. And exploring those regions with a spirit of curiosity, and delight, and just this question of like, “How can we play with one another? How can we pleasure one another?” That is a really different starting point than a checklist of orgasms to achieve.

Charlotte Rose: 29:30 Yeah, absolutely. And we take this approach because of our love and training of massage, using our hands to explore and light up all of the different parts of the body, all of the different systems, and bringing our awareness, and our presence, and reverence to the body pots and allowing yourself or your partner to really feel their own body through our care and touch.

Chris Rose: 29:57 It’s a totally different approach to touching the genitals than most people have been taught, which is really just like a surface level kind of gratifying friction model. The erotic massage lineage that we come from teaches us that the sexual system is this beautiful, nuanced system of nerve endings, muscles, blood flow, bones, glands and fluid. And we can touch that entire sexual system with knowledge, and skill, and confidence.

Chris Rose: 30:35 And sometimes techniques get a bad name. People think like, “Oh, great sex isn’t about technique.” It’s certainly not about technique that just tells you that this stroke will always feel good, because that is never true, our approach to techniques, to skillfulness, to becoming a skilled lover, is about learning the strategies and learning the techniques that train you to pay attention and activate the entire erotic system.

Charlotte Rose: 31:06 And learning the skills of how to be responsive to what you feel, because each time you approached the body, it will be different as we were talking about. So how do you know that? Our fingers are designed to read braille, they can be that sensitive. And so when you gain the skills of how to really feel, you can be so responsive with your fingers, with your touch, with your presence.

Chris Rose: 31:28 And massage the entire erotic system inside and out, that is the invitation. And then from there, you learn how to build all sorts of other activities onto that. With that deep understanding that you’ve gained through this kind of touch, you know how to fuck different, you know how to use toys differently. You know how to change your position to make certain anatomical structures more available to your partner. If you discover that, “Oh, I really love deep cervix pounding, thumping penetration at this specific time of my cycle.” You can discover the sex positions that get his penis closer, right? This gives you a map to your body and it opens up that terrain, and so it’s not just this one kind of stroke to bring you to this one kind of orgasm, right? You’re unfolding that roadmap and discovering all of the terrain that’s possible to you, and learning how to approach it, learning how to activate it, learning how to embody it, and be aware of it. And then your whole sexual system lights up and you have access to more parts of yourself and to more kinds of erotic experiences.

Chris Rose: 32:46 Your experience of your sexuality, your experience of sexual touch, and your experience of your arousal system of your response cycle starts getting way bigger. You start understanding what you’re capable of, and then you can explore within that. You still might have orgasms that feel like sneezes sometimes, but you have more access to the whole range of experiences, and certainly more access to the whole sexual system that we are all sitting on. We are designed for this and we have not been given the tools to access it. We have not been given the tools to access it, nor the strategies to pay attention to it. This is a primary part of our offering to you. We, as Charlotte said, learned all of these skills through our erotic massage training, and lineage, and thousands of hours touching bodies on the massage table as erotic masseuses, and 13 years ago we realized that these peak experiences people were experiencing under our hands, these transformative, mind blowing, arousing experiences that we were offering people as professional, erotic touchers, had to be available to people at home.

Chris Rose: 34:07 We were getting really frustrated with this idea that a professional erotic massage is like an amusement park ride, and you go and you have this thrilling experience, but then you’re kicked out of the amusement park. Your body is the amusement park and you have access to it on your own terms. And so we translated all of the skills we had learned and all of the strategies of paying attention that massage has taught us. We translated that all into our erotic touch education, into online courses that are available for you in the privacy of your own home. You can go at your own pace and see what is possible here. Discover new ways of touching yourself and your lover, and activate the power of your hands as discovery engines, as tools of curiosity, and as one of the best ways of stimulating the sexual system. We know your hands are like the best sex toys ever designed, and they never need a replacement of batteries.

Chris Rose: 35:09 They’re amazing. Hands are amazing. They can unlock so much sensation when we learn how to touch with the skills of massage. It’s like a super power we activate and we want to bring that to the entire sexual system. You can find all of our online courses and erotic touch education at pleasuremechanics.com, the show notes page for this podcast episode will link directly to our bestselling courses on erotic touch. And we’ll throw in a discount code right into that link because we want these tools accessible to everyone. This should not be gated knowledge for the erotic elite. This is available to all of us and we all have so much more to discover about what our sexual systems are capable of, if they are touched with knowledge, and reverence, and confidence. Yeah, we want you to experience this, so come on over to pleasuremechanics.com, check the show notes page for a link to the courses.

Chris Rose: 36:13 We want them to be available and accessible to you. We are really working on a model here of community supported erotic education. I was just on a consulting call the other day and he kind of asked me about our pricing structure, and why aren’t we charging thousands of dollars for our courses like other people in our field are, especially when we have been around the longest, we have trained some of the people that are charging 10X our price. And my only response is that this knowledge is for everyone. We want this available and accessible for everyone. That’s why we do free podcasts every week. That’s why we have such a huge, robust website, a free online course, and we keep our prices low, and accessible, and available to everyone who wants them. And if they’re not accessible to you at our current low price point, let me know and we’ll make it work.

Charlotte Rose: 37:13 We get so excited about the idea of beautiful orgasms and pleasure happening in bedrooms around the globe and then what is possible from that state? What are we all doing in this world when we are lit up with pleasure, and joy, and connection with one another and ourselves? There is such a beautiful future that we can create from that place together. And this value, and this hope, and this dream is so much of how we… so much of why we’ve created our business and that we’ve made the choices that we have around pricing, around creating free content, like it is about sharing these messages and getting this into your bedroom.

Chris Rose: 37:53 Yes, we are living a life of devotion. We are here for you and with you as you explore what is possible for you when we get rid of the shame, when we get rid of the myths, what is possible for us as sexual beings. I don’t even feel like we’ve begun to explore that as humanity yet. So join us, join us, come over to pleasuremechanics.com. At pleasuremechanics.com/free you will find our free online course. You will find all of our other erotic education available to you. And if you love this show, and you believe in our work, and you want to support us, go to pleasuremechanics.com/love and get on board with a monthly sustaining donation and show your love for this work.

Charlotte Rose: 38:44 We really appreciate your support. It is what allows us to continue to create this robust, free sex education for the globe, that we hope is really making a difference for people, so thank you for your support.

Chris Rose: 38:57 And if we have made a difference in your life already, show us some love, pleasuremechanics.com/love, or enroll in one of our online courses so we can guide you stroke by stroke, step-by-step, along the path of your erotic freedom.

Charlotte Rose: 39:14 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Rose: 39:14 Fuck yeah. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 39:16 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 39:16 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 39:18 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 39:21 Cheers.

A New Approach To Anal Play

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

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

Podcast Transcript:

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

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

Charlotte Rose: 01:20 The awesome anus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 43:22 With presence.

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 46:48 All right.

Chris Rose: 46:50 I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 46:51 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

Chris Rose: 46:56 Cheers.