Pleasure Mechanics

Opening Up Conversations About Monogamy and Non-Monogamy

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

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

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

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

Podcast Transcript for Episode 341

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

Chris Rose: 00:00 Hi, welcome back to Speaking of Sex with The Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 12:00 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 12:01 With cheating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 27:46 No, I know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 37:58 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

Your Sexuality, Somewhere Over The Rainbow

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The queer liberation movement has impacted ALL of our lives in both obvious and subtle ways.

We are celebrating the 50 year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots by looking at how the queer liberation movement has generated waves of social change in just one generation. We look at the historical roots of homophobia and how the early gay rights movement began to confront the institutions of power that defined homosexuality as a sin, a crime and an illness.

Ready to explore more with us? Enroll in our FREE online course, The Erotic Essentials, and get started tonight!

Want to learn more about the gay liberation movement? Making Gay History is one of our favorite podcasts and features first person accounts from activists who were on the front lines of the movement.

Transcript for Podcast Episode : Your Sexuality, Somewhere Over The Rainbow

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are the Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we have explicit and soulful conversations about every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to PleasureMechanics.com where you will find our complete podcast archive awaiting your listening pleasure. And while you’re there, go to PleasureMechanics.com/free and enroll in the erotic essentials. It is our free online course. It is available for you whenever you wish to get started, it’s at PleasureMechanics.com/free. If you love this show and want to support our work in the world, go to PleasureMechanics.com/love to show us some love and support the show with a monthly donation.

Chris Rose: 00:55 All right, on this podcast episode, we are going to be celebrating Pride. It is June, 2019. It is Gay Pride month, all around the world and this year it is a special one because we are celebrating 50 years since Stonewall. Stonewall was in June, 1969, and it is remembered as the riot that sparked the modern gay rights movement. So we want to pay homage to Stonewall, celebrate the last 50 years of social and cultural change in the field of sexuality and gender and invite you into reflecting how this gay liberation movement has impacted your life, your gender expression, your sex life, no matter how you identify.

Chris Rose: 01:46 When we look at the past 50 years of sexual liberation, it has impacted us all and by locating ourselves in that perhaps we can envision what we want to create for the next 50 years.

Charlotte Rose: 01:58 That is such a beautiful invitation and there is so much there. It is so powerful to consider how dramatically life has changed for many in the last 50 years and how small actions have shifted culture but also how large social and political actions have shifted the landscape for us all.

Chris Rose: 02:20 And we’re using the Stonewall riots as a point of reflection on the past 50 years, but we’re also going to think about the greater arc of sexual liberation that’s been happening over the past many hundreds of years and situating ourselves in this landscape.

Chris Rose: 02:38 A few days ago, I recorded like an hour and 20 minute long global history of sexuality, that took you from cave paintings to Stonewall. I didn’t do as good of a job as I wanted to do, so I left that on the editing room floor. I want to make it a little more succinct and I want to just say that we need to remember that for thousands of years, since Hebrew law, since the rise of monotheistic religions, homosexuality has been not only a sin, but a crime. And a crime punishable by death. A crime punishable by public execution and extreme versions of this. And in my longer history, I took you into some of those grisly details. What we often think of as the witch burnings, in Europe, during the Middle Ages, also involved the rounding up of gender deviance and known homosexuals, and burning them in public executions.

Chris Rose: 03:48 Those public executions never stopped, right. There are still places in the world now where people are executed for being gay, for having homosexual sex, for participating in certain sex acts that are not condoned by their culture. So, let’s just take that in, that this is our legacy and that doesn’t only affect gay people because the persecution of gay people and gender deviance creates a cage, a box, a set of norms that everyone has to be inside of, everyone has to participate in for the system to work. So let’s just honor the thousands of years of gender deviance, of sexual rebels, of wayward women, of people who have been persecuted for stepping outside the very, very small sex norms and gender roles that were prescribed and allowed to exist.

Chris Rose: 04:51 Men had to be a very specific way. Women had to be a very specific way. Woman’s role was in reproduction only. And we need to remember that for thousands of years, under European monotheistic culture, the only sex that is allowed and celebrated is reproductive sex within marriage. And sodomy, gay sex, especially anal sex, is where a lot of this gaze is targeted, but it’s also on gender deviance. It’s on acting outside of your gender norms. Sodomy and gender deviance was so heavily policed that they had to create public style executions and even then it persisted, right. So even under the most heavily violent persecution conditions possible for thousands of years, queerness, homosexuality, same sex love, same sex desire, same sex fucking, same sex sex, has persisted. Even in a culture where it was sin and a crime punishable by death.

Chris Rose: 05:56 That brings us to the rise of medicine, where in addition to being a sin and a crime punishable by death, it becomes a mental illness. It becomes a defect, something that is wrong with you that must be fixed with aversion therapy, shock therapy, lobotomy. This culture of sin, crime, illness, persists for thousands of years and brings us into the 1950s and the 1960s. Where after the wars, and there’s a lot of great history about how the world wars and especially World War II, really shook up gender norms and sex culture in the 1950s and the 1960, we start to see the early gay rights movement coming together in America.

Chris Rose: 06:51 A group called the Mattachine Society first formed and in secret rooms with secret mailing lists, under FBI surveillance, these people met and started talking about the fact that they were gay and that they would always be gay, that they couldn’t be corrected. The first gay activist had an apologetic tone to them. They accepted this idea that they were sick and broken, but wanted kind of social pity instead of persecution and that’s where it began.

Chris Rose: 07:24 From there, as others were emboldened to start joining these meetings, the groups grew and started to fracture and we got the homophile movement. A group of early gay activists, again, we’re talking about 1950s, early 1960s, meeting in secret, saying that maybe even it’s okay to be gay. Maybe gay is good. Maybe this is something good about who we are and not … We don’t need to ask for permission, we can embrace it. Maybe we can change the social attitudes about homosexuality. They were bold enough to think about another culture that was possible where homosexuality would be made space for. I’m not sure they could imagine it would be celebrated, but made space for and made to be okay, and not persecuted as a sin, a crime, and an illness.

Chris Rose: 08:24 And I got this framework of sin, crime, and illness from an interview in the Making Gay History podcast, that I love, and I will link again to that in the show notes page, from an early gay activist, from an archived interview from an early lesbian activist, one of the first women to come out as a lesbian publicly declare her love for women, and say, “I am who I am, I think it’s okay, and we’re going to start changing your minds about us.” I want to focus on how powerful this idea is that we can change cultural attitudes and opinions even when they’re institutionalized for thousands of years. It’s powerful.

Chris Rose: 09:09 All right, so, the homophile movement starts meeting, a magazine forms called One Magazine, that starts a national publication talking about and starting to put to paper gay culture. And in cities like New York and San Francisco, and other big cities, gay culture was emerging. Gay bars were emerging. They were often raided by the police, people were rounded up and arrested, brutalized by police. And again, it was often the gender deviants that were on the frontlines. Because one of the things you could be arrested for was public indecency for wearing opposite sex clothing. So, women wearing men’s trousers were arrested. Men wearing any sign of effeminate clothing. So, trans women, especially trans women of color, were on the frontlines of this police enforcement of the social norms of homosexuals being a sin, a crime, an illness.

Chris Rose: 10:14 All right, so this takes us to the early gay culture, organizing in these cities and there’s a bar called the Stonewall Inn, in Greenwich Village in New York City, that is kind of a legendary homosexual bar. The police raided frequently, that is common. Being arrested is part of your life if you are an out gay person in the 1960s New York. Street harassment, police harassment, it’s just part of your daily life. So, what made this night in June 1969 different? It was a hot, sticky night. It was the day of Judy Garland’s funeral. Judy Garland was already an icon in the gay community, singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and the day of her funeral there was a lot of social tension in New York City at the time. It was the height of the civil rights era, 1969, New York City, hot, sticky night, the police come to raid Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn.

Chris Rose: 11:21 What made this night different than other nights is that the queers in the bar on that night fought back and they said no more. Led by trans women of color, Sylvia Rivera, and Marsha P. Johnson, they fought back against the police, threw rocks and bottles, and this escalated into a three-day riot involving hundreds or thousands of people, where for the first time there was a cacophony of voices, a critical mass of gays. and lesbians. and trans people. and queers of all kinds, saying we’re just not going to take this shit anymore. We are going to organize, we are going to lead ourselves in a movement towards full and equal rights as citizens. And what happened on that night in 1969 was also a lot of media coverage and in general, a public emboldening of gay people.

Chris Rose: 12:22 Again, I just want to pause here to recognize the ways in which the most radical amongst us, the queers, the gender deviants, the trans people of color, the sex workers, who had the least to lose, they started leading a movement and initiating a cultural change that would go on to change the world for all of us. And that is so fucking radical, and righteous, and awesome. So let’s think … That was 1969. We are now 50 years since then. What has happened since Stonewall? If we think about the gender role transformations and the sex culture transformations of the past 50 years, it is dazzling how many changes have occurred and how they impact all of us.

Charlotte Rose: 13:11 Yes, it is astounding to think about the shifts that this has created and the ripples this has created in the world. Of course, for those who are gay, gender variant humans, but also it extends further and straight people are impacted by this shift in culture. When there becomes more room for people to express their gender in a variety of ways that aren’t so constrained by man, woman, and the roles that come along with that, there becomes more space for you to be who you are, whatever that looks like.

Chris Rose: 13:49 I’m just curious as listeners, because I know the vast majority of our listeners are straight identified, but they’re straight identified with enough sexual savviness to have found us, to listen to two queer women talk about sex, and so, I kind of think of you as the most sophisticated and enlightened listeners out there, if I do say so myself. But, you have a certain level of sexual sophistication and so, as you think about the gay liberation movement, the queer liberation movement, where do you situate yourself in that? What are the ways you can identify your life has had more freedom because of the gay rights movement?

Chris Rose: 14:35 And I just want to take a moment. So, after Stonewall, right, there was the 70s disco culture, David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Elton John, right? Like, the 70s had a certain emergence of queer culture. Meanwhile there are all these fights going on. Gay activists were taking on the institutions to get churches to be more welcoming and challenged the dialog of homosexuality as a sin. They were also taking on institutions like the American Psychological Association, getting them to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental illness. That battle took many years. Were also working on the political front to decriminalize homosexuality and make it illegal to be fired from your job for being gay, for example.

Chris Rose: 15:28 So, we see all of these fronts of political action, and of activism. Meanwhile, what is happening is people are coming out. There is social activism. People are coming out, people are starting to challenge gender roles, women are moving into all parts of the workplace and shaking up gender roles there. As women go into the workplace, parenting becomes more collaborative and we invite men into the emotional experience of fatherhood more deeply. Fashion and music and pop culture start celebrating the diversity of gender and sexual expression.

Chris Rose: 16:10 All of this is happening and then AIDS hits concurrently. And AIDS, in the early 80s, took homosexuality from the sin, crime, illness, into a disease, into a cancer that would kill you. And again, the affirmation of what we were fighting against by this virus that entered the community, it organized the queer community like never before. It made us fight for our lives and solidified queer activism. It’s been named one of the most successful public health campaigns, organized at the grassroots level and it also brought homosexuality into mainstream news.

Chris Rose: 16:55 We saw all these gay men dying and some people looked at those images and thought they’re getting what they deserved. Those gays are getting gay cancer. A lot of other hearts were opened by those images and they saw families grieving their sons and a lot of people’s hearts were opened by AIDS. So, we have that legacy too.

Chris Rose: 17:20 And then that takes us into the 90s and the 2000s, 2010s, right? So, what has happened over the past 30 years? Gay marriage has been one big arm. And that arm of the queer movement says we are normal, we are just like you, and in that normalization of queerness, normal becomes a lot more queer. So that’s one arm of it. In the second arm of it, we have the radical edge. People challenging genders even existence. The radical queers who refuse the institutions of marriage and the don’t want to be normal. They’re questioning normal sanity. That also creates a lot of room for people. Radicals have a very important function in social movements and some of our most celebrated pop icons who just totally blow our minds with what is possible with erotic embodiment.

Chris Rose: 18:20 I’m thinking about people like David Bowie, who was this mainstream, gender-bending, out-of-this-world, icon. People who are brave enough to embody those spaces on the radical fringe and do something different that’s never been seen before, carve out so much space for all of us to be more of who we are, to show new possibilities, to break the molds. But then meanwhile, we’re seeing gay people come out in all different cultures and all different churches, gay people in all different segments of society, come out and be loved by their communities, and again, that normalization of gay people makes normal much more gay.

Chris Rose: 19:09 What do I mean by that? I mean things like as gay people started having families, the question of what makes a family had to be asked. What does a parent even mean? And then we’re forced to reflect on the idea that children have been raised in families of all different kinds forever, and that a family is not just a man and a woman in marriage with children. Sometimes those men go off to war and never come back. Families have always looked really different and humans have taken care of each other, and this idea of the institution of marriage is a construction that can be deconstructed and rebuilt and redesigned.

Chris Rose: 19:55 As queer people started having families and queer men became much more vocal about their non-monogamy, they led the way to say, “We can be in love for 40 years and yes, we have other lovers.” And so, queer men opened a space for us to talk about polyamory and non-monogamy and in the past 10 years, we are seeing so many people who are heterosexual identified, find some breathing room in that category. Find some more space to be more authentically who they are.

Chris Rose: 20:35 As butch lesbians, we’re brave enough to take up space as masculine females and walk through cities with short hair and looking like dykes, and really put their skin on the line to do that, we changed our understanding of what a woman was and what it meant to be a woman, and look like a woman. And now straight women have so many more options of how they can dress and present, and it is not expected that you will wear a dress, and pearls, and gloves, and heels every day. Our social expectations of one another have changed radically, and if we follow all of these trails, so many of them lead back to queer pioneers who threw these institutions of marriage, and family, and gender, and sexual orientation into question.

Chris Rose: 21:31 They forced the question, they force us to look at it and in that investigation, we find that all of us are pretty queer. The only normal is difference, and if we allow that human sexuality to emerge, if we allow ourselves to be who we are, what then? What gifts emerge? What new models are possible? And this is kind of where I want to lead us for the next 50 years. We’re at now the 50 year anniversary of Stonewall. Where will we be at the 100 year anniversary of Stonewall? Some of us will be dead, some of us will have children or grandchildren who will be sitting around and telling the story of the next 50 years of sex culture.

Chris Rose: 22:20 If we can accept the idea that the past 50 years have been shaped by both radicals and extraordinary individuals, but also by every day individuals and all of our daily actions, then we are motivated perhaps for the next 50 years to take our part in shaping sex culture, to find agency and power in the idea that how you embody your sexuality today, and tomorrow, is part of leaving a legacy. You are shaping the sex culture for the next generation. All of us. And for me, I find that thrilling. Because then for me, I’m like what do I want to live into, what possibilities do I want to embody, what do I want to create for the next generation, and then what are the ways I can do that in my daily life?

Charlotte Rose: 23:19 What are some of those ways? I just want to make that more practical. You see so much possibility in these moments. I think for a lot of people they may feel overwhelmed by that, of this question of how can we shape culture daily. What are some of the ways you think about that? What are some of the actions you think people can be taking daily to create and recreate sex culture for each other and for the younger ones that come up behind us?

Chris Rose: 23:52 Right. That’s a big question. I’ll do my best with it. So, there’s the big stuff, right? Like, what policies are you voting for? What representatives are you voting for? What are their sexual politics? What is the cultural position you occupy and how much social power do you have with that position? So, I think the answer is really dependent on who you are in this culture and what actions you can take. But, no matter who you are, and what social position you have, I think we can think about it through the lens of to what degree do I still relate to sexuality as a sin, a crime, an illness. My own sexuality and other people’s sexualities and expressions, to what degree do we still relate to difference as a sin, a crime, an illness? To what degree do we radically accept and have compassion for difference, especially those we don’t understand. And how are your actions aligned with your sexual values?

Chris Rose: 25:02 And so some of this is like how you take up space in public and how you … When I say how you embody. So, and part of this for me is I am visibly queer. I am visibly masculine female. I could choose to grow out my hair, and wear different clothes, and blend right in. I have chosen not to do that because part of my expression is a shaved head, masculine clothes, and I occupy this middle ground which all the new kids are calling non-binary and gender non-conforming. All the sweet, new generation have all this language for it. For me, I’ve always imagine myself straddling a lot of boundaries, being neither male nor female, neither straight nor gay. So for me, a lot of my daily action is just shamelessly embodying my body, showing that this body is capable of joy and love, that I don’t apologize for my body. And that might be a big place to start is to what extent are you apologizing for your sexuality? To what extent are you allowing your sexuality to be seen and honored?

Chris Rose: 26:09 Have you come out yet would be one question for all of our straight listeners. What is there that you could come out about that would break down some shame, break down some stigma, and create more permission and pleasure and opportunity for other people? So, depending on your context again, this might be coming out as having herpes. So when your friends start making herpes jokes, you get up the guts to interrupt them and be like, “Dude, I have herpes, and by the statistics, most of us at this table have herpes. You want to keep making those herpes jokes? Like, get over it dude.” Right? Some of it is interruption or interrupting toxic narratives about rape culture in the locker room. Or, interruption your corporation from continuing to hire straight white guys out of Stanford and saying maybe there’s other people that could do this job better and standing up for people who have different backgrounds than you, right?

Chris Rose: 27:17 A lot of it is standing up for difference, coming out as who you are. So, coming out can look like a lot of different things. You might want to come out as non-monogamous. If you and your wife have threesomes once a year and there’s conversation at your social circle about those dirty pervs, you might want to come out as like, “You know, we’ve been married 35 years and we have threesomes once in a while and there’s nothing wrong with it guys.” You might want to come out as gender deviant. Is there something you are hiding about your gender expression and not showing the world out of shame? Maybe there’s coming outs for all of us to do and in that coming out, we create more possibility for one another. We model this for one another.

Chris Rose: 28:07 I’ll tell a quick story that kind of shows these different social change trajectories in action. So, I was at Target the other day, and it’s situated in a mall near our house. A few years ago I was seeing a movie at this mall and I had parked at kind of a weird entrance, and after the movie, which was a Quentin Tarantino incredibly violent movie, I was walking to my car and a car full of teenage boys kind of cornered me in the parking lot and were starting to get violent. I escaped that moment. But it is one of the many moments of queer harassment and violence I carry in my body. Some of those have been actual attacks and assaults, some of them have been threats. This was a threat.

Chris Rose: 28:50 A few years later, I am at Target, I am shopping. A group of high school boys walks by me and in an attempt to impress his friends, one of them calls me a fat dyke, in kind of like a threatening, violent tone. In that moment, I could have felt shame and fear and I did feel those things, and it was shocking to me that it as a grown-ass woman, a young boy can harass me in Target and make me feel shame and fear, but that’s within the cultural context of having been attacked and assaulted for my queerness, right?

Chris Rose: 29:25 That’s internalized homophobia. That’s internalized violence that people in marginalized groups walk with. We have to honor that. So, I’m there activated in my shame and fear, but I also have enough confidence at this point in who I am, to be like, “Yeah, I’m a fat dyke.” And so, as they were walking away, I called out, “Do better. You got to do better than that, kid.” And I heard his friends shut him down. Like, “What a jerk you were.” They kind of hit him and laughed and went on. I saw them later in the store as I came around a corner, and the boy that had harassed me looked deeply bashful. And I walked out feeling kind of victorious, because I had confronted a moment of harassment, stood up for myself, and his peers backed me up. It was uncool to harass the dyke on Friday night at Target.

Chris Rose: 30:26 So, what do we see there? We see cultural change. These young boys, it’s no longer cool. They have family cultures perhaps. They’ve seen shows, some of their own friends have started to come out. Teenage culture is no longer, for that little cluster of boys, is not longer affirming homophobic violence. It’s saying not cool, we’re not going to do it anymore. What’s also happened for me is I have enough social confidence to stand up for who I am and take up space and if they had harassed me again, I would have gone and gotten a manager. And that manager would have backed me up.

Chris Rose: 31:05 The institutions of power are shifting and when we talk about power, this is like maybe a huge, nother conversation, but power lives in our day-to-day actions. Power exists between every two individuals that are talking. Part of the queer liberation movement is no longer allowing sexual norms and gender norms to occupy a position of so much power over us. That is what the thousands of years of sexual violence were trying to do. Assert power over sexuality and over gender expression as social control and there’s a whole body of queer theory looking at the use of sexuality as social control. But all you need to do to embrace that is to think about homosexuality and gender deviance, again, as a sin, a crime, and an illness and how those narratives control how all of us behave. Who we are allowed to be, and who we are allowed to love, who we are allowed to desire, what kinds of sexual desires men and women are allowed to have. This is still in all of us. This is all of the stuff we are unpacking week to week. All of the excavation of sexual shame. Like, all of this is related and all of this is what the queer liberation movement is for. It’s not just so gay people can get married. It’s to dismantle the power that uses sexuality and gender as social control.

Chris Rose: 32:46 And in doing so, it’s right alongside the liberation movements that are unpacking race, and wealth, and the hoarding of resources along certain strata. Everywhere you see categories getting made. That is for power. So, this liberation movement is inherently tied up in the liberation of all people.

Chris Rose: 33:09 Okay, so, 50 years since Stonewall. Where are you at? You are listening to this podcast. You are looking for more sexual freedom. You are looking to embrace a more pleasurable relationship with sexuality and I just wanted to place that quest, for all of us as individuals, within the social context of this liberation movement that has been happening for well over 50 years, that has been led by really brave people, willing to do the work to break down these social institutions and change social attitudes. You have benefited from it, so reap those benefits, take stock of where you are in your sexuality and gender expression, and let’s all be emboldened to keep coming out, to keep living more vibrantly, to keep creating possibilities and to keep sticking up for other people. So much of this is to stand up for the sexual rights and the expression and the safety of all bodies.

Chris Rose: 34:15 And so, if you’re looking for a way to get involved in this, if you want to start shaping the next 50 years, you can start with yourself and your own sexual liberation and then also start standing up for the sexual liberation of all bodies and there is plenty of work to be done on that front, especially now because these rights, reproductive rights, the rights of queer people, are under fire by our current administration. We know this, it is visible, it is tactical, and again, why? Again We can look at power and sex, and yet, why is Trump even bothering to attack sexual freedoms? Social control, fear, shame as social control.

Chris Rose: 34:54 Okay, so we continue to resist. We continue to lead the way into a better future for all of us. We continue this movement. We continue the liberation movements, plural, and we continue each of our daily investment in experiencing little tastes of sexual freedom, little moments of feeling safe, and feeling pleasure and feeling love, and using that pleasure as fuel to create the sex culture we want to see emerge over the next 50 years. How’s that for a mission?

Charlotte Rose: 35:37 It is full. It is a rich history. It informs everything that we do in these moments and it’s invisible sometimes to register and to really notice how much the history, and the bravery, and the courage of people in the past have influenced our every day actions today and give us freedoms and permissions that we are not aware of. It’s powerful to reflect on. So, happy Pride to everyone.

Chris Rose: 36:05 Woohoo.

Charlotte Rose: 36:06 If you have a parade in your town, feel free to go. If you have kids, feel free to bring them. And in doing that, you are becoming a family that is making a safe space for people to be gay, whether that is your kids and you don’t know yet, or it’s your kids’ friends that then they give permission to. Sometimes you don’t know the impact of being a permission giver and being somebody that is saying, “This is okay. This is great. Look how fun that is.” And that you are somebody that comes alone to celebrate and support other people’s experience. So that is an opportunity that you can go for or else just speak kindly about gays to your family, to your friends, as you’re going about in the world. You sometimes really just never know the impact and the ripple effect that being someone who is okay with sexuality in all forms. You sometimes just don’t know the positive effect that that can have on your community, people close to you or people further away. It’s amazing. It’s amazing.

Chris Rose: 37:12 It’s true, and in all of the feedback we get for this podcast, one of the recurring themes is how nice it is to have non-judgmental community about sex. And for most people that’s just a one-way listening relationship, but just having us talk about sex in a relaxed, non-judgemental way, has been really life-changing for a lot of people and it strikes me that we can all do that.

Charlotte Rose: 37:39 For each other?

Chris Rose: 37:40 Yeah.

Charlotte Rose: 37:40 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 37:41 The 10,000 listeners of this podcast can all be deputized. I hereby deputize you to just be a non-judgmental presence about sex and sexuality.

Charlotte Rose: 37:53 And that is a very, very, very, very, very powerful act.

Chris Rose: 37:57 And I already know, like, we have listener friends in Oklahoma who are starting a queer support group in their rural Oklahoma town. There are people in … There are people all over the world who are using what they have learned here to then share it with people in their community and we will continue to find ways to support you in doing that.

Chris Rose: 38:24 we are headed into some adventures. So, tomorrow I get in a car and drive to Philadelphia for the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists annual conference, ASECT. It’s the largest gathering of sex therapists and educators and I will be there in my Pleasure Mechanics uniform. We have stickers and resources going out in all 850 gift bags to encourage sex therapists to join our community, share our resources, contribute to our resources and I’ll be onsite for four days, talking to them. I’m so excited. And then I drive home and the next day our family goes to Canada. Those of you who have been with us for a few years know that we have a special little cabin in rural Canada where we go every year to rejuvenate, and reset, and just be in the lake and get offline for two solid weeks. We will not be on our computers much. So, we will take a break from the podcast for the rest of June, and we will be back with you in July with new episodes of Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics.

Chris Rose: 39:40 If you are hungry for more during this break, be sure to come over to PleasureMechanics.com and explore our full archive of episodes waiting for you or enroll in one of our online courses and uplevel your erotic skills with us. You can find it all at PleasureMechanics.com. I’m Chris …

Charlotte Rose: 40:00 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 40:01 We are the Pleasure Mechanics …

Charlotte Rose: 40:03 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Sexual Attitude Adjustments

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

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

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

Transcript of Podcast Episode: Sexual Attitude Adjustments

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 06:31 Jaws.

Chris Rose: 06:32 Jaws.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 36:47 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

Explore With Curiosity : Attitudes For Kinkier Sex

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 11:19 Oh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 21:11 Three.

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

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

Chris Rose: 21:49 Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Rose: 27:00 Exactly.

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

Chris Rose: 27:02 Thank you.

Charlotte Rose: 27:02 Yes. Beautiful.

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

Charlotte Rose: 28:15 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

Mindful Sex For Men With Performance Anxiety

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are the Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we have soulful and explicit conversations about every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to PleasureMechanics.com where you will find a complete podcast archive. While you are there go to Pleasure Mechanics.com/Free and enroll in the Erotic Essentials, our free online course, so you can get started right away with some of our best strategies and techniques for more pleasure in your life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 06:07 No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 24:03 And dangerous. Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 28:00 Awesome.

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 29:31 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

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