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Cultivate Your Erotic Context

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Black background with pile of dirt and small seedling emerging upwards. From corner of image a watering can showers the seedling with sprinkles of water. Text reads Cultivate Your Erotic Context Speaking of Sex Podcast Episode 372

Context is perhaps the most important factor in how you experience your sexuality. Context is all of the factors in the external environment AND in your internal landscape that create the story of each moment. Human sexuality is incredibly context dependent – meaning even small changes in the context of an erotic encounter can create huge differences in how that moment is perceived, felt and experienced.

Understanding the impact of context on your erotic experience will help you manage the factors you can control and learn to work with those you can not to cultivate more optimal grounds for the erotic experiences you yearn for. Meanwhile, we can all work towards creating a healthier global context for all bodies to experience more erotic freedom.

Thanks to Emily Nagoski’s teaching about erotic context in her landmark book Come As You Are.

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Transcript for Speaking of Sex Podcast Episode #372

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

Charlotte Rose (00:05):
I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose (00:06):
We are the Pleasure Mechanics. And on this podcast, we have honest, vulnerable, explicit conversations about love, bodies, relationships, pleasure, all of the facets that combine to create the human experience of sexuality. It’s a good thing we have 370 episodes and counting because this stuff is complicated. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com where you will find our complete podcast archive, and to get started with us right away, go to pleasuremechanics.com/free where you can enroll in our free online course and check out our other resources we have waiting and ready for you. We have been doing online sex education for 13 years.

Chris Rose (00:54):
The beauty of that, somehow I’m kind of just waking up to is that we have so much to offer you because we’ve been working on these resources and building them and building out these courses that are now just ready and waiting for you. We have courses on everything from couples massage, where you get to see Charlotte pleasure the human body head to toe. We have courses on foreplay where you get all of our erotic massage techniques, and then our newer courses like kink and erotic spanking and mindful sex. So, we are ready to guide you. It’s like we drop into your home through the beauty of the internet and are there with you stroke by stroke.

Chris Rose (01:37):
When you have questions, you can jump on and ask us. We are there for you in this kind of beautiful way, and it allows us to have over 10,000 students in our school now. It’s a school of 10,000 global pleasure seekers all there to learn how to love and share more pleasure and give the ones in their life that they love the most more joy. It’s a really beautiful community. I don’t know. Why am I talking about this? You’re invited. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com where you find everything we have to offer. It’s just a real joy being in this work, especially now. So, to timestamp this episode a little bit, it’s May 2020. We are again in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic, and it is really more important to me than ever to be here for you all and share techniques to come home to our bodies and to one another, if you have access to touch, but also just to be here in this conversation about how we can love one another better and resource one another in our bodies and share the love because we all need it right now.

Chris Rose (02:54):
All right, deep breaths. We are going into today’s episode. We were looking again for another episode that we could talk to about one of these tools that will be always relevant for you, always here for you to help you understand your sexuality and your sexual experience a little better, but also helps us understand this moment we’re in. This crisis, emergency moment of social change and fallout, and perhaps even revolution. We are in it. We are in it with you, and we’re going to be talking about sexual context.

Chris Rose (03:32):
Context is a word we use a lot, and it’s come up a lot for me recently in the emails from you as you’re describing the sudden changes in your sexual responses. Like I used to really love cunnilingus, and now I feel nothing but tickly and anxious. What’s going on? Why did my body change so suddenly? Or my husband and I were in this great rhythm of sex and all of a sudden I have zero interest. Should I divorce him? We’re all experiencing these tremendous changes.

Chris Rose (04:01):
What I want to remind us all to do is slow down and remember and honor how context dependent human sexuality is, how context dependent human sexuality is. So, human sexuality meaning our sexual responses, how our bodies respond to touch, our desires and our wants that someone called libido, what we’re up for, what we’re craving that, but also our orientation, who we’re attracted to, but also our identity, who we feel ourselves to be. All of these facets of human sexuality from our identity to our sensation responses and our arousability and our orgasmic response, that entire spectrum changes dependent on your context.

Chris Rose (04:55):
Okay. What is context? That’s the big question.

Charlotte Rose (05:00):
When we say context, we mean all of the external circumstances that impact and affect us, and the state of our mind and our brain in the present moment.

Chris Rose (05:12):
So, it’s like the entire story of the present moment.

Charlotte Rose (05:16):
Exactly.

Chris Rose (05:17):
Right?

Charlotte Rose (05:17):
Everything outside, everything inside our bodies. It is enormous. It is a huge experience.

Chris Rose (05:24):
But, we start breaking that down. Right? So, everything from the temperature of the room to what is visually in the room to the sense in the room and the memories of those sense.

Charlotte Rose (05:35):
If you’re feeling safe, if something is new and novel.

Chris Rose (05:39):
What kind of day you had at work, what kind of week you had, month you’ve had, year you’ve had. Right? So, the temporal context. We can just keep going, right? If you’re building a scene and it’s almost … I have what I call like a white box fantasy, right? So, if we think of … You know that scene in The Matrix where you have a white box and you just drop a human being in it? Everything we need to know about that moment is context. Where are they? Who are they with? What kind of day in life have they had? And then the social context, right? Then we get relational and we start looking at the relational context of a sexual moment. Then we start looking at the context of your emotional state and your body state. Whew. This is a lot of details to attend to, and we can see if we start factoring all of that in and we start grouping it under this word context, we see why human sexuality is context dependent. So, if it is so big, how is this useful?

Charlotte Rose (06:45):
Without the understanding that context affects literally everything, we think that there’s something wrong with us when our libido tanks, when we have no desire, when things that normally have felt good, don’t feel that good anymore and we think there’s something wrong with us. So, it’s so important to understand that something that has changed in the context could be deeply affecting your experience of your own body and pleasure.

Chris Rose (07:12):
Context is one of those factors that’s so important to be reminded of again and again. When you feel a change, when you’re confused, when you’re feeling a longing like looking around and feeling your context can really help us understand our current expression as an individual sexual creature amongst this sexual culture we are living in. Emily Nagoski writes a lot about this in her landmark book Come As You Are, which is her offering, looking at tons of science of sexuality. When we say science, everything from biology to social sciences to neuro-psychology. Nagoski gathered all of that up under her wise arms and then wrote this book, Come As You Are, that offers us so many really important frameworks to understand sexuality, so we reference it a lot, but she talks a lot about context.

Chris Rose (08:08):
One of the way she teaches about this is to think about tickling. Tickling is another one of those sensory inputs that often has a social context, and we can understand right away how the experience of being tickled is completely context dependent on whether that is delightful and perhaps even arousing or annoying or perhaps even violent and intrusive. Right? All of that experience of being tickled at the same part of your arm with the same pressure, your experience of that tickle is context.

Charlotte Rose (08:48):
This is perception, how we experience the sensation is different depending on the context. We physically experience the same sensation as different in different contexts.

Chris Rose (09:03):
So, I want to think like context beyond, right? Because we can look around our own homes and think context. We did a episode that actually got way more response than we were planning on it getting about remaking your bedroom and creating a sexier context in your bedroom. Getting rid of the things that cause you stress. Again, Emily Nagoski reminds us of that gas breaks model. So, in thinking about context, you can think of what are the things that put gas on my arousal and what are the things that put the brakes on my arousal or even my willingness or wanting this.

Chris Rose (09:38):
Again, the tickling, you’re doing dishes and thinking about what a shitty day you’ve had and the water is splashed on you and your belly is wet and you already feel gross and you can’t wait to get in the shower and your lover comes up and tickles you, you might snap into a fight versus you’ve had a great day and you’ve been walking around. You’re feeling totally relaxed and you’re having a drink together. A butterfly goes by and you’re both just in it. Your lover reaches over and tickles you like a butterfly. You might think that’s like the most romantic, delightful thing ever. The context there is not only that sensual atmosphere, it’s also the emotional atmosphere. This is a word we use a lot when we say safety.

Chris Rose (10:22):
When I say safety, I’m talking about social safety, the state in the body. I can’t wait to geek out on the neuroscience of this with you all some time, but the state in the body that tells us we are socially safe, we belong. We can relax and just be, that is a very specific state of the human nervous system. It allows pleasure. It allows connection. It’s what makes that tickle feel delightful instead of intrusive. I really invite you all to explore this context of safety, because you can feel unsafe with your own spouse, in your own home. Your body state is one of threat and hypervigilance and not safety. If that is your context, almost nothing can get through that or you discover that’s your context and you start working with it and you start doing some trauma recovery and you start working with your nervous system and you start learning what works for you. For a lot of those people, you can find entry points.

Chris Rose (11:30):
If you’re a hypervigilant anxious person and your nervous system is always cranked up, you need to know that about yourself to create a context where you’re going to want to have sex. That needs to be done on purpose. Versus if your nervous system is one of hypoarousal, hypo meaning low, again, needs to be dealt with if you want the context of building arousal and sharing arousal. We all need to know our bodies and what context they come with preloaded. That’s a lot based on your personal history, your social history, your sexual history, and this context, this inner story, the story of your nervous system, how you respond to stimuli, how you feel safe and socially connected and when you don’t. Frankly, some of us have never felt socially safe and connected while having sex. Our culture doesn’t set us up for that.

Chris Rose (12:30):
Our cultural context and, again, I could go in for this for hours. Our cultural context is not one that facilitates, how do I say this in the gentlest way possible, our cultural context is one of sexual violence and it does not facilitate feeling safe in our erotic bodies and feeling safe getting naked with one another and vulnerable and being ready to share sexual pleasure. It just doesn’t. So, we need to create that context on purpose. This inner context, the state of your nervous system and how you respond to things is the work of a lifetime. We can focus on that context of our home, our bedroom, but frankly, it’s all too easy to redecorate the bedroom when you haven’t worked on the inner landscape of your mind and your body.

Chris Rose (13:24):
One more thing and then I’m going to throw it back over to Char, but I want to also get out the context really tells us a lot about triggers. This is a word we will do a whole episode about some time, but triggers are you can think of them as fireworks preloaded with context. Those fireworks in our bodies are preloaded with stories and trauma that has been stuck and things we have not resolved. It explains why one person being pushed up against a brick wall in an alley being kissed that will be the hottest thing ever. For another person that could be a trigger that sends them into a panic response, a trauma response. Triggers also … and the positive side of triggers, so triggers are the things that set off a fear or a trauma response in the body. What we call glimmers are the things that set off a pleasure response, a safety response.

Chris Rose (14:24):
So, we can start kind of mapping our triggers. What are the things that make you feel totally turned off right away? They’re like the emergency brake being pulled on your arousal, on your interest in sex. We all have them. Some of them are preloaded from trauma. Some of them are like, “Oh, that reminds me of my …” Whatever makes that like that … the repulsion, those are breaks in your context. Then the gas, the glimmers are the things that make you feel like you want to be erotic, that you want to feel sexual. What are the things in your environment and the mindsets and attitudes that can help you build a context for more eroticism within the context of the moment that you maybe can’t control. We’re all experiencing a big context that we have more or less control about. Then there’s context you can control and start shaping. Thank you for letting me get that all out.

Charlotte Rose (15:28):
Why this is so important to understand is because as humans, if we don’t have this larger understanding of the significance and impact of context, we will immediately make our lack of desire or lack of interest in sex our own fault. We will think that we are broken. There is something wrong with us, and that is perhaps why we’re not as interested in sex right now when we are at this moment of global stress.

Chris Rose (15:58):
But, that is all just within our one being and then we think about the context and the relationality of a moment, and that is another realm of control we can start attending to. This is where intention comes in, but we also have to recognize that intention isn’t the same as what Charlotte was saying as perception. So, we can start attending to the context where we’re trying to initiate sex, for example, where we’re trying to connect with our lover. Is this a good context for what I’m trying to experience together or does the context need some shaping before the experience I am seeking, right? This is the response that comes out of me when I get emails, like I really want to spank my wife, but we have never even talked about sex. It’s like you don’t get to jump to step 15 without starting to get comfortable talking about sex, right? We need to start where we are and start shaping the context towards the experiences we are longing for.

Charlotte Rose (17:06):
So, there’s so much unlearning and unpacking and unraveling of the things we’ve been taught from our family, from our culture that we’ve integrated, that influences all of our actions and behaviors. Then there’s the rebuilding and re-imagining different ways of being. This is an enormous job. It can feel overwhelming to think about how much context influences and impacts our lived experience of sexuality, but it’s important to remember that it can go both ways. While it can make for a challenging experience of our sexuality, it can also be something that is cultivated and can create more of the sexuality that we want to be experiencing.

Chris Rose (17:58):
Context is bisexual. It goes both ways. It goes all ways, right? It can be supportive. It can be draining. When you look at context again in these circles of what can you control and what do you not control, you start realizing there’s gas and brakes all around us. Some of those levers are inaccessible to us and others are right at our fingertips. We will link in the show notes page to the manage your turn ons and turn offs, where we talk about this gas and breaks model. It is essential if you haven’t listened to it yet, but do not despair because context can be cultivated to support you.

Charlotte Rose (18:37):
What that means is that you can take small actions that you can control to influence an impact for the better, your own experience of your body, your relationships with others, your circle of influence with your community, where you can be creating more context that is sexually supportive. So, we can take actions. There is so much we can’t control, but there is a lot we can control to try and create an experience of a more joyful sexuality-

Chris Rose (19:12):
Or at least take steps towards creating that social safety, to start opening up to relaxing into pleasure. That might be where you’re at. I use a lot of woodworking metaphors. Shout out to all the home hobbyists and send me pictures of your woodworking, but here’s a gardening metaphor for you. When we talk about cultivating the context, for all the gardeners out there, we understand soil remediation. We’ve all inherited a polluted plot of land with paltry soil where not much can grow very well and to the extent you have access to more or less sunlight, better or worse soil, more or less minerals is a lot about your cultural context within the systems of power in our culture, and that needs to be remediated, but when we’re looking at the conditions around the plant that is you, right? Your vine, your flower, will you bloom if you don’t work on the soil on the context?

Chris Rose (20:14):
Hells no, you’re going to wither, right? You’re going to struggle and all life wants to grow. We’ve been spending time in the garden. It’s beautiful how persistent life is, how much it wants to grow, how much it reaches towards the light, how much it wants to fricking bloom and be pollinated and [rah 00:20:30] We are like those flowers. We want to thrive. We are looking all the time for the conditions to do so. The little acts, it’s listening to this podcast, it’s having conversations with less shame, it’s giving yourself permission to buy that toy at last, it’s reading the books, doing the inner work to remediate the soil of your sexual context. Sometimes that means taking things out. Sometimes that means putting things in, right?

Chris Rose (21:01):
So, we root out, we excavate that which does not serve. The body shame, the attitudes about pleasure, the voices that are telling you, what right do you have to this? How dare you? Who do you think you are? All of that bullshit needs to come out of your context. What needs to go in is a lot of permission, a lot of gratitude, a lot of sense of, “Oh, pleasure is actually good for me. When I do this, I feel good. My relationship feels better. I can choose the pleasures and kinds of connections I want, so I don’t have to do the things I don’t want to do.” Right? We have to instill new attitudes, and that’s what we’re doing here.

Chris Rose (21:40):
Week by week on this podcast, we are here with you. We are here with you as we do this work of changing the context so we can have more sexual joy, pleasure, and connection. I keep coming back to these three words, by the way. Joy, pleasure, connection has these kinds of big whys behind sex, right? It’s about the fucking, but it’s also about so much more. Yeah, we’re in it with you and we hope these resources help you create a context for yourself that supports you more while we also all work to create a global context to support this one organism of human sexuality that thrums around the earth. Right? All right.

Charlotte Rose (22:30):
So, please be kind to yourself as you explore your context. Most of it is ideas and beliefs that you did not choose that has been handed down to you. A work that you do to pull it out will influence you, the people around you and the next generation truly, truly. So, it is incredibly powerful work. It matters. It affects your lived experience of your own life and it’s powerful and valuable. So-

Chris Rose (23:01):
Just starting with the big attitudes feels overwhelming. Start with the small stuff. We did this whole episode on creating a bedroom haven. Start with the small stuff, give yourself permission to clear off your bedside table and only bring back things that support your erotic context. What needs to be there, what doesn’t need to be there, what is wanting to be there, right? If you could slide open your bedroom drawer and reach in and there was an object that supported your sexual pleasure, what would that object be? Is it massage oil? Is it lube? Is it a sex toy? Is it a book of erotica? Is it a sleeping mask so you can get better sleep?

Chris Rose (23:45):
What one thing could you tuck in the drawer that would support your erotic context tonight? What is one thing you can remove immediately? That pillow that you got when you were a kid that for some reason you’ve been holding onto, but every time you see it, it makes you feel like a child. Put it in the attic, give it away. What is one thing that’s a little drain or a break? Start with the small stuff and start noticing. As we shift our contexts, and this has to be deeper than kind of [inaudible 00:24:25] our sex life, right? This isn’t about just objects. That is one place to start, but it has to be about our interior lives and, again, our nervous system. The context of how you respond to touch, to flirtation, to initiation, to social connection at all, is so much a story that lives in our nervous systems and we need to remember that too can change. Positive neuroplasticity tells us and guides us and shows us how to start changing the context of our nervous systems. That to me, feels like magic.

Chris Rose (25:05):
We have so much more to share around this. We will be back with you with further episodes of the Speaking Of Sex podcast. Please remember, you can always take a deeper dive with us at pleasuremechanics.com where you will find not only our complete podcast archive, but also our suite of online courses, where you can learn new erotic skills, go deeper with us and get our personal support. You will find it all at pleasuremechanics.com. Join us. We love you. We are here for you, and if you love the show and want to support our work, pleasuremechanics.com/love. Send us the love, show your support, and we will be back with you with another episode of the Speaking Of Sex podcast. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose (25:52):
I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose (25:53):
We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose (25:54):
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.