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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.

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.

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.

Too Stressed Out For Sex?

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If you find yourself too stressed out for sex, or know that sex gets in the way of your sex life, this episode is for you. Part of our podcast mini series inspired by the book Burnout, this episode explores the crucial step of completing the stress cycle so it doesn’t interfere with your life and relationships.

We all know what it feels like to be stressed out – but far too few of us know how to actively participate in completing the stress cycle. This framework, one of the many gems from the Burnout book, helps us take more initiative in completing the stress cycle so we can return home to a place of safety, relaxation, joy, comfort, pleasure – and yes, arousal and orgasmic release.

Here’s what you need to know about completing the stress cycle – so you can begin the arousal cycle!

Speaking of Sex Episode #058:
The Missing Link In Your Sex Life

Thanks to #LubeLife for sponsoring this episode! Go to LubeLife.com and use the code 20Mechanics for 20% off your order of top quality lube.

Transcript for podcast episode Too Stressed For Sex? Here’s How To Complete The Stress Cycle

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:05 We are the Pleasure Mechanics. And on this podcast, we have explicit yet soulful conversations about every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to PleasureMechanics.com where you will find our complete podcast archive. And while you are there, go to PleasureMechanics.com/free and sign up for our free online course, the Erotic Essentials. It is a treasure chest of free resources and strategies for you to get started with tonight. That’s at PleasureMechanics.com/free. On today’s episode, we are going to be continuing or conversation about burnout, and how stress can interfere with your erotic experience.

Chris Rose: 00:52 Before we get started, I want to thank our sponsor for this episode, LubeLife. LubeLife creates Amazon.com’s best selling line of personal lubricants. They have water-based lube and silicone – based lube. Go to LubeLife.com or use the link in the show notes page and use the code 20Mechanics, that’s 20Mechanics, for 20% off your entire order. And if you are doing some spring cleaning this time of year, it’s a great time to refresh your lube bottle. Get a new bottle of lube at LubeLife.com. Use the code 20Mechanics for 20% off your order.

Chris Rose: 01:31 All right, my dear, my darling. So, many listeners of the show will notice we missed last week’s episode, which we very rarely do, because we were in the middle of some stressors. So this week, we’re going to be talking about … We’re going to continue the conversation that started two weeks ago with the conversation with Emily Nagoski about her new book, Burnout. And I know a lot of you have bought the book and are reading along with us. And even if you don’t even know what we’re talking about, we are going to be talking about stress and sex this week, and what you need to know about completing the stress cycle so you can have a more enjoyable life in general.

Chris Rose: 02:18 But mostly so stress does not interfere with your sex life, so your sex life is not hijacked by stress. This is a theme we have been talking about for 12 years. As soon as we started our business and we started researching sexuality and arousal and pleasure, the theme of stress came right up. And it was so clear to us that the number one enemy of sexuality is stress. We gave a talk about it in North Carolina 12 years ago, about what you need to know about stress and sex. So this is something that we’ve been aware of and we’ve been talking about. But this book and the framework of completing the stress cycle gives us some new language to really talk about how important a step this is. And if we’re missing this step as individuals or couples it might be one of the main reasons our sex life is not where we want it. Yes?

Charlotte Rose: 03:21 That’s so profound.

Chris Rose: 03:23 Do we want to talk a little bit about the past couple … why we?

Charlotte Rose: 03:26 Well we can. We were just all sick. Our kid was really ill, really ill. And we were in full on care taking mode for weeks, it was crazy.

Chris Rose: 03:34 Yeah, it was like weeks of a family stomach bug, and we were just passing it back and forth.

Charlotte Rose: 03:39 It was amazing.

Chris Rose: 03:41 It was a couple weeks of vomit and laundry. Yeah, and we tried. We tried really hard to produce a podcast for you. And between our care taking duties and then both of us being sick …

Charlotte Rose: 03:53 We thought you’d understand.

Chris Rose: 03:54 Yeah, and we had to really humble ourselves, and cancel a ton of appointments and just surrender to the illness. And it was a really good reminder of how important rest is when your body needs it. You cannot push through things sometimes, you just need to rest. So that’s what we did, and it’s been like two weeks, and we’re just emerging out of it. And now our daughter’s on spring break. She got better just in time to be on vacation, yay. But I also bring this up, so that’s partly why we missed an episode, thank you for your patience, thank you to our patrons over at Patreon for your support and love. We are back, and we’re just going to continue onwards.

Chris Rose: 04:40 So how this relates, though, is I was so aware within our relationship of the ways that we had to navigate and be in this really stressful situation together. There was nothing that was going to change the fact that all of the sheets had vomit on them.

Charlotte Rose: 05:01 In the middle of the night.

Chris Rose: 05:02 Right. And we’re all losing sleep. The situation was what it was, and our choice was how we navigated it together and as individuals, and that is what created the outcome of the two weeks. Which ended up being a very loving, sweet, restful, quiet two weeks. We did a ton of art, and painted a ton of canvases together and read a ton of books. But we managed to get through it without really fighting too much. And I think that’s a lot because we’ve been talking and reading about managing the stress cycle. So I felt like it was this kind of marathon test of what we had been learning in so many ways. Except we didn’t get to the sexy times, yet. All right.

Chris Rose: 05:50 So in her book, Burnout, the Nagoski’s … I keep saying Emily Nagoski, but it’s Emily and her twin Amelia. I don’t mean to cut Amelia out of the conversation. So in this book, the Nagoski twins, Emily and Amelia Nagoski, talk about completing the stress cycle. So I just want to lay this out really clearly, whether or not you’re read the book, on why this matters in your sex life. So completing the stress cycle is this idea that stressors, so the things that cause us stress, the lion attacking us, your job, health stuff, financial stuff, we all know what causes us stress. Those are your stressors.

Chris Rose: 06:35 Stressors exist in all of our lives. Some of them are chronic, some of them are temporary, some of theme are extreme, some of them are mild. Stressors exist. The stress it puts on our bodies … stress is the physiological reaction to a stressor. And it’s a full body, full system reaction. It’s an event. I think the Nagoski’s do a really good job laying out how much of an event … This is something that happens to your body. And it affects your cardiovascular system, your immune system, your emotional state, your ability to sleep, your personality, right? It’s a full, global event, stress is, in the body.

Chris Rose: 07:21 Wellness, happiness, joy, eroticism, depends on our ability to complete the stress cycle and return to a state of relaxation and enjoyment and relaxed awareness. And that state where the body can heal and relax and heal and complete the cycle and go back to its restful state. That is the piece that so many of us are missing. There’s plenty of stressors in the world, got that. We all experience the stress. But very few of us are as aware and active in completing the stress cycle as we need to be.

Chris Rose: 08:07 If you’re stressed out at work, and you’re stressed out because of traffic, and you’re stressed out because your job isn’t paying enough to cover the bills and all of these things, and then you come home and you just walk in the door and bring all of that with you, and then you meet your partner, and they’ve got all of their stress from the work, bouncing of each other for the whole evening. How do you get to the point where you’re ready to luxuriate in one another’s touch and take a long bath and nibble one another’s earlobes and kiss one another’s necks, and all of these techniques that we can flood you with, right? We can give you all of these ways of loving and cherishing and enjoying one another’s bodies.

Chris Rose: 08:47 But how do you get from fists clenched at the kitchen table, feeling enraged about your day, to wanting to nibble your partner’s earlobes? So that is the missing link for some people. And we have another podcast episode that’s called the missing link and we’ll put that in the show notes. But this is what we call that missing step in between your day to day activity, that stressful day you’ve had, and being able to relax enough to even want to have sex. There’s a missing step here, and this is the completing the stress cycle. And it’s different for different people. So we’re going to tell you some things that work for different people, and as you hear this, notice for yourself what you feel has worked in the past. If you’ve had a really stressful event, what helps you get out of that state? What helps you ratchet down your system and just be like, all right, things are chill now, things are okay?

Chris Rose: 09:47 So for many people, it’s movement. Movement. And we’re going to talk more about movement in future episodes. But movement can be a hard workout, it can be dancing, it can be yoga, it can be walking or running. It can be clenching and releasing your muscles rhythmically, right? Anything that moves your muscles and releases them, ideally in rhythm. But anything, and ideally to the point that you’re out of breath. Those are kind of some of the ingredients where movement can become a stress cycle completer. All right, we will be talking more about strategies for completing the stress cycle.

Chris Rose: 10:30 Before we do, I want to thank our sponsor for this episode, Lube Life. Lube is a super important ingredient in just about any erotic activity. Anytime you want a little more slip, slide, and glide in your touch, grab some lube. There is no shame in it, we all use it for all different things. So everyone should have a bottle of lube in their bedside table. Lube Life creates Amazon.com’s best selling lube. It’s a great value, and you can use the code 20Mechanics for 20% off your order. Go to LubeLife.com, use the code 20Mechanics, or use the link in our show notes page. Thank you to Lube Life for sponsoring this episode of Speaking of Sex.

Chris Rose: 11:19 All right, back to the show.

Charlotte Rose: 11:22 So this is where you get to figure out what works best for you, and everyone will have a different kind of movement that feels most cathartic or releasing or pleasurable. They named 20 minutes being an important chunk of time that most people can use to complete the cycle, but whatever works for you. Even a few minutes can feel really valuable to just let your body return to that state of calm.

Chris Rose: 11:49 And notice what happens when we talk about it as movement versus exercise. We’ve all been told we need to exercise three times a week for 20 minutes at a time. For a lot of people, that’s annoying, or just feels like another to do list, or is about what your body should look like or is about losing weight. What if you frame it as what movement can I do to help my body release stress, complete the stress cycle, and feel more relaxed afterwards? What movement would that be? Fuck the calories burned, don’t worry about it as exercise. Is that a walk where you talk to your best friend on the phone? Just think about that for yourself, where can movement fit in?

Chris Rose: 12:32 For some people, this is already a big part of their life. For other people, it feels really far away. Especially for those of us who exercise has been kind of a shameful thing. Or where movement feels activating and feels scary. For that group of us, because hello, I’m part of you. What helped for me was I did Wii Dance. I had a Wii video game system, and I started doing the dance video games, and that was really fun for me. Because I could engage, and I had biometrics, and I had a score. And video games were a more comfortable yes than dancing. So I kind of combined them.

Chris Rose: 13:13 And then discovered how much I loved to dance, and that I couldn’t be angry after I danced. I always ended up feeling better after dancing. And I’m not someone who dancing has ever been a socially approved activity as a fat butch. It’s never been given a gold star. But I discovered it, and it’s now been a super important ally for me. If I am feeling stuck, like my anger and my stress, I can always dance. So finding the movement at works for you. Social connection is another huge piece for a lot of people that completes the stress cycle.

Chris Rose: 13:54 Some people bring this home from a stressful week and want that social connection with their partner. For some couples, that can be too big of a burden. For some couples that works, and it’s like build that into your days. Some time to talk and decompress and download. But also notice, are you socially connecting? Are you looking at one another in the eye? Are you attuning with one another? Are you feeling happier as you talk? Or are you just complaining at one another? Because if you come home from work and you’re both talking at each other but you’re just complaining, you’re not completing the stress cycle, you’re just continuing it.

Chris Rose: 14:36 So notice if that is a pattern in your relationship, where you both come home stressed and then you’re like, “Bah bah bah bah, can you believe this? And blah blah blah.” And do you feel better afterwards? Usually, the answer is no. You feel just as stressed out rather than less stressed out, because you’ve reactivated rather than completed. So what social connection might be more completing, not releasing? Maybe it’s telling each other jokes, maybe it’s watching standup on Netflix for 20 minutes as you eat a bowl of popcorn and take off your work shoes. Maybe it’s the calling your best friend who you don’t want to complain to about work, but you do want to hear about her cute kids. Or maybe it’s talking to a friend at a coffee shop before you get home so you can decompress, and you bitch about with your coworker, and then you both go home with that steam released, right?

Chris Rose: 15:32 So what are the ways you can build social connection into your life as a stress cycle completer?

Charlotte Rose: 15:42 What is the role there, though, of having to release those feelings and having to communicate about the hard things, but then not getting stuck in it? I feel like that’s a complicated … because sometimes your partner is the only person you can talk about it. Is it like, okay I’m just going to vent about this for a few minutes and then we’re going to move on to a different topic, and then I’m going to shake or dance for five minutes, and then it’s like, have another conversation. I feel like there are ways to strategize around letting yourself shift out of that.

Chris Rose: 16:13 Right, and this is a bigger conversation. We’ll do other podcasts about communication styles and how we can support one another. If it’s a problem that can’t be fixed, if your stressor is a coworker whose personality you don’t get along with, who whatever. If there’s a stressor that can’t be fixed, how much venting will help. And you know it’s like, you can get into loops there. So I just think it’s like each individual has to evaluate, are these loops helpful? Do you feel vented? Or do you feel re-agitated? And to be able to determine that for yourself, and for your partner, and just be able to be like, “Babe, I don’t think this is helping, maybe this might help instead.”

Chris Rose: 16:56 That’s why having this framework, especially if you listen to these podcasts together, and both of you are aware of this, and again, one of our listeners just wrote to us with an example of now that I had this framework, I had a really shitty day at work. And when I parked the car in my driveway, instead of coming right in, I texted my partner and said, “I’ve got some stress to release, I’m walking around the block.” And he took care of a few things inside while I went for a walk. And I came in much happier. So to be able to say to one another, “You seem really stressed out, how do you need to complete that?”

Charlotte Rose: 17:36 It’s been so helpful. I feel like we’ve noticed there are times where we’re getting activated and it’s like, “I need to go complete my stress cycle, and I’ll be right back.” It’s so helpful to just see, I’m activated, I’m pissed off about whatever, or I’m hurt, let me go manage it and then return. Just having that framework is so powerful, because there’s something that we can do with it.

Chris Rose: 17:59 Well, there’s something you can do. And this is so important because a lot of us experience stress as this thing that happens to us. We are the victims of it, and there’s nothing we can do about it. This is what you can do. You can learn how your body can complete the stress cycle and then do more of it. But what this also does within a relationship is it makes really clear what the stressor is. And it asks that question, like why are you so worked up right now? Is it because of me? Or is it what happened at work the other day? Is it because of me, or is it because you got stuck in traffic for an extra hour and that fucked with your day?

Chris Rose: 18:39 Because a lot of times, we bring stress home and then we’re in the domestic space and we look at our partner and we think, if I’m feeling this pissed off, it must be you. And if we don’t name our stressors accurately, it can become really easy to think, “I’m so fucking pissed off because that towel’s on the floor again, and how many times? And bah bah bah.” And you get into your loop. Whereas if you can say, “oh my God, I had this really stressful day, I’m carrying all these stressors, I’m going to complete the cycle.” Then when I come home feeling the relief of that intense workout, feeling the relief of laughing with my friends for 20 minutes, and I walk in, and I see that towel’s on the floor again, I just pick it up, put it on the hook, and come give you a hug. Right?

Chris Rose: 19:29 What would get you to the state where you can accurately feel what you feel for your partner? Because that’s the key of this, is we’re not projecting a bunch of stressors onto our partner and then thinking it’s them. And then, it creates the space when it is them, wheen there is a behavior or an attitude or a pattern that your partner is bringing into the relationship that is a stressor, you can name it as a stressor. When this thing happens between us, it activates me, it causes me so much stress. How do we deal with that together? How do we either eliminate the stressor or recognize its impact and then build in the management of it? It’s just a much more humane way of thinking about stress and how it then influences our day to day life.

Chris Rose: 20:25 And it reveals that for so many of us, the problem sexually isn’t how much we like our partner or how their armpits smell or how they touch our clitoris, like we don’t even get the chance to feel their touch because we’re so activated and stressed out. We can’t even get to that state of do me, baby. When was the last time you were just in that relaxed state, sprawled on the sheets, ready to be done? That state feels really far away for a lot of people in your day to day life, because it’s like, as soon as you lie down, you think of the 10 other things that have to be happening. That, by that way, that hyper to do list syndrome, is part of this.

Chris Rose: 21:10 It’s not that our to do lists are too long, or there’s always more to do, that will always be true. It’s that our attention, when we’re in that stressed out state, and we haven’t completed our stress cycles, we’re searching. Our brains are searching for what needs to be fixed? What do I need to do? What needs to be accomplished? Da da da. It’s looking for the threat and the thing to complete to get back to relaxed. And so you have to do it on purpose. So the movement. Let’s get back to the things that work. So movement, social engagement.

Charlotte Rose: 21:45 Laughter.

Chris Rose: 21:46 laughter and humor are huge. And laughter, by the way, that’s social engagement, because humor is so interpersonal. And then that creates that spasm of the diaphragm, when you have a really good belly laugh. It’s kind of like running a marathon. You get all that breath and movement of all the muscles, so it’s kind of a great hybrid touch for a lot of people, it really works. It kind of taps into your hormonal system and releases an anti-stress cascade of relaxation in the body. So if you can look your partner in the eye, there’s that social connection. Take their hand or their foot and give them some loving, affectionate touch while you connect. It’s hard to complain while you’re getting a foot massage. It’s like, “And then my boss said … that feels good, just keep doing more of that.” Right?

Chris Rose: 22:43 So if you build in affectionate touch on top of the social check in, how does that work? Then sex. For some people, sex can be the stress reliever. Right? A lot of this conversation has been talking about how to relieve your stress so that you can get in the mood to even think about sex. Some people, when they’re stressed out, fucking is … that’s their movement. It’s like, screw the run, I want to fuck. And some people in some relationships can go there. And if you know that works for both of you, and you can both come home from having a stressful week, take a shower, and do your marathon in bed together, and fuck it out. And you’re moving and you’re breathing and you’re touching, and you’re socially connecting, great.

Chris Rose: 23:32 That works for like 20, 30% of people, it turns out, where that activation of stress puts you in the mood. But you have to have a partner who’s also ready to go there. Or if you’re in the mood through your stress, and your partner needs her relaxation and to go through her release cycles to meet you, then you know that, right? So so much of this is about knowing this framework and then building your own architecture of what will work for you. What is a more workable framework for your life to complete your stress cycles, manage your stressors, and be ready to enjoy more pleasure, touch, arousal, orgasm, whatever you want to build on top of that. But this is that foundational work to create the space for pleasure, to create the space for, “Yeah, let’s give each other a massage and then have sex.”

Chris Rose: 24:27 How do you say yes when you’re super stressed out? First, you have to say yes to whatever will complete your stress cycle.

Charlotte Rose: 24:34 I feel like it creates so much responsibility and independence, emotionally, because you’re able to say, “This is mine, I’m feeling this, I have to be responsible for completing this.” And then I’m in a more calm, relaxed, available state to have fun and to connect and to enjoy life with you again. It feels like such a powerful framework. We’ve just been working with it for a few weeks, since we got the book, and it is kind of life changing.

Chris Rose: 25:09 And is it just because … We’ve known this for years, but somehow about how we’ve framed it, it’s been more about do that thing that relaxes you first, and it makes it less urgent somehow.

Charlotte Rose: 25:23 Yeah, totally.

Chris Rose: 25:24 These few weeks, when I’ve been able to be like, “You need to complete the stress cycle, go to the gym.” And it’s not like, “The gym will feel nice to you honey, so go do that.” It takes the burden off of choosing a pleasure when you’re in that activated stress thing.

Charlotte Rose: 25:39 Right.

Chris Rose: 25:40 And it becomes more like, “All right, I’m in this activated stress experience, I’m noticing how it’s affecting my body, I want to get out, here’s my exit strategy.” It’s not like, “I want to go feel pleasure.” It’s like, “I want this to end.” I don’t know what subtle reframing, because we’ve known this information for years.

Charlotte Rose: 26:02 I think it is a time-based thing. Because it’s like, your body is stressed, you need to go complete this right now. Instead of, in general, it’s good to include these things in your life, where you have to prioritize it and time management becomes a piece. Whereas, you’re stressed right now, you have to do this right now to complete it. It just takes top priority in this way that it hasn’t been with a different framework. That’s how I’ve been relating to it. It’s a right now thing in my body.

Chris Rose: 26:32 Well and I think what the book does so beautifully is, it points out that once the stress has happened, the physiological impact has begun. So as soon as the stressor happens, and your blood rate goes up, and the cortisol releases, the physical event has started. And it only completes when it completes. And if it doesn’t complete, you can grind out that cycle of stress in your body for years.

Charlotte Rose: 27:00 That’s really sobering.

Chris Rose: 27:01 It kind of just reminds you that the less I complete, the more I carry. And it doesn’t go away on its own. Which can be intimidating. And especially, it intersects with a conversation around trauma, and I just want to acknowledge that. And we’re just going to set that aside. And there’s so many parallel conversations about how trauma is carried in the body, and it is similar. It’s the same, really. But we will try to stay focused on daily stressors. What do you do to release your stress at the end of the day so you don’t feel like you’re in that daily grind? That’s what we want, is just to create more space in our daily lives to recognize the stressors that are true. All of the pressures that are on us, the pressures of the world, the capitalist patriarchy, that’s all out there. And it will always be out there as we’re dismantling it. Those stressors aren’t going away.

Chris Rose: 28:03 But within that, we have to live these lives and love the people we love, and when we notice that the stress is interfering with our ability to love and be loved, it’s interfering with our ability to come home and feel like we have a safe haven in the world, and that the people who are supposed to love us can wrap their arms around us and hold us. When that is interfered with, we need to take action. That action, it turns out, can be quite simple. This movement, this social connection, the finding ways of moving our body in rhythm and breathing more. Finding ways of completing the stress cycle and managing stress can be really accessible once we know what we’re doing.

Chris Rose: 28:55 I hope that this conversation has motivated you and kind of framed up ways of taking more action in your day to day life so you can complete your stress cycles and then show up for … even if it’s just for yourself. Not even if, this isn’t second best. If it’s for yourself, for all of the relationships in your life, for the people you want to be having sex with, to be able to show up from a state that’s not activated, threat-seeking, stressed out, stress ball of hell. We all deserve better than that, and our bodies need to learn how to reset. The more we do this, the easier it gets. That pleasure/stress switch … Someone actually asked recently, they wrote in an email and asked for the medical references for that. And I’ll try to dig them out for you.

Chris Rose: 29:45 But what we know is that the more we practice flipping between these states of pleasure and relaxation, and maybe completing the stress cycle is a better language for that, right? It is cyclical. It’s like digestion, in and out, in and out. You’re never done digesting, it’s just a cycle. The more we complete the stress cycle, the more the body knows how to do that. And in the Nagoski’s book, they talk about it as wellness is a state of action. So if it’s a state of action, let’s learn how to take those actions. And what actions are most meaningful for you, as an individual. Because we all have different affinities for these things. Is it walking, running, swimming, dancing, martial arts, fucking? What is your methodology to complete the stress cycle and do more of that, and see what happens and report back.

Charlotte Rose: 30:41 Yes, let us know. Just about the action and the wellness, I love this idea that wellness is basically being able to deal with the stressors, be able to be stressed, and then return to a place of calm and rest and relaxation and that you’re able to move through these cycles with grace or completion. And that that is what keeps you well. I feel like that’s so powerful in this world, where sometimes we think we need to never be around negativity. Or things are so …

Chris Rose: 31:17 Positive vibes only.

Charlotte Rose: 31:18 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 31:19 Fuck that, yeah.

Charlotte Rose: 31:21 That’s not wellness, that’s like separation between, separation of things. It just feels very powerful to train ourselves to become more aware of our own bodies. To train ourselves, to be able to deal with life. And then return to a place of rest.

Chris Rose: 31:40 Totally.

Charlotte Rose: 31:41 Within our own bodies, and our own body’s ecosystem. And that we are responsible of that, and we can orchestrate that for ourselves. I just find that so powerful and exciting in a bigger way that we don’t have to go into now. But I feel like it’s inspiring, and I want us all to have that capacity with our own bodies, because what it makes available for the people around us is really profound. They get more of us, more of the good parts of us, and we are able to deal with the hard parts individually. And that’s awesome, and in connection with community, but really be able to ask for what we need. I think it’s so exciting.

Chris Rose: 32:19 Yeah, yeah. And I think this completing the stress cycle is one of those … It’s a chapter out of the how to be human handbook that we never got. For me, this is one of those just foundational frameworks that changes how I walk in the world, how I interact with other humans. A friend just posted on Facebook, “oh my God I was just at a stop light and someone was waving a gun around at the intersection and I’m totally freaked out, and I’m on the way to this really important meeting.” And I’m like … blah blah blah. And I just posted really quickly, “Walk around the block, and run and shake and move.” And she wrote me later how useful that was. And I was able just to remind her of this human thing.

Chris Rose: 33:07 This stressful thing just happened, finish it. Move. And just notice what happens when you start deploying this in your life. We’re excited for you, we’re excited for the people in your life. We’re grateful to the Nagoski’s for bringing so much of this knowledge together in this book. If you have not yet joined us in reading Burnout, there is still time. Grab a copy of Burnout, I’ll put the link in the show notes page. Or just join us this month for conversations about the stress cycle and sexuality. We’re going to be talking about how to create those erotic havens in our lives. More strategies for making sure stress does not interfere with your sex life. And how to tune into pleasure. How do we pay attention to pleasure? All of that is coming up on future episodes of Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics.

Chris Rose: 33:58 Be sure to subscribe on your platform of choice so you never miss an episode. Rate and review us on iTunes if you wish. And if you’d like to be part of our inner circle, come on over to Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N, Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics. And join us with a monthly pledge, and become part of our inner circle for ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, bonus resources, direct access to us, and more. We’d love to see you there. Come on over to Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics. And of course, our home on the web will always be PleasureMechanics.com. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 34:44 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 34:45 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 34:47 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 34:50 Cheers.

Expanding Erotic Communication with Stella Harris

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We all know communication is essential for healthy relationships and great sex – but how do we begin to level up our erotic communication skills? How do we break through the fear and shame to start talking openly about what we want in bed?

Sex coach and author Stella Harris joins us to explore the tricky terrain of erotic communication. Stella guides us in activating more authentic communication – before, during and after sex.

Find out more about Stella’s classes and coaching at StellaHarris.net

Check out Stella’s book: Tongue Tied: Untangling Communication in Sex, Kink and Relationships

More Speaking of Sex Podcast Episodes On Erotic Communication:

Transcript for Podcast Episode: Expanding Erotic Communication with Stella Harris

Chris Rose: 00:00 Hi, welcome to Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. This is Chris from pleasuremechanics.com and on today’s episode, we are joined by the fabulous Stella Harris to talk all about erotic communication and how to get more of what you want in and out of bed.

Chris Rose: 00:21 Before we get started, I want to remind you to come on over to pleasuremechanics.com, where you will find our complete podcast archive and while you were there, go to pleasuremechanics.com/free and sign up for the erotic essentials our free online course. So you can get started implementing some of our favorite strategies and techniques tonight. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/free. All right, so let’s dive into our conversation with Stella Harris.

Chris Rose: 00:56 After last week’s conversation about Desires Unfulfilled, I wanted to bring it back around and share some strategies for getting more of what you need and want out of your sex life, and ultimately a lot of that comes back to communication and getting specific about what you want, so you are more likely to receive it. So I called up Stella Harris. She is a fabulous sex coach and author, and her book Tongue Tied is one of the best books I have found about erotic communication.

Chris Rose: 01:32 This is an area where we all have a lot of work to do, and freeing up our voice and learning how to communicate with compassion and love and specificity so we can all get more of what we want out of our sex lives. All right, here is my conversation with Stella Harris. Stella Harris, welcome to speaking of sex.

Stella Harris: 01:57 Thank you for having me.

Chris Rose: 01:59 Can you just introduce yourself in the work that you do?

Stella Harris: 02:02 Absolutely. So I’m Stella Harris, a sex educator and intimacy coach based out of Portland, Oregon. I teach classes for venues and universities, I do coaching with couples and individuals and I write for a variety of venues including a sex column for one of my local papers. And I just had a book come out from Cleis Press called Tongue Tied: Untangling Communication in Sex, Kink, and Relationships.

Chris Rose: 02:29 And your book is so amazing, we will definitely link to it in the show notes page. It is one of my favorite books about erotic communication because it is so thorough, it covers so much beyond the, just kind of open your mouth and say what you want and it acknowledges how hard that can be for people and troubleshoots so much erotic communication. So this week we really wanted to talk about how to get your desires met in and out of bed. And I could think of no one better to join me for this conversation than you, so thank you so much for jumping on the line with us.

Stella Harris: 03:06 I really appreciate that. Thanks.

Chris Rose: 03:08 Ah, I love this book. So let’s dive in. So from what I understand of your history, you got kinky at a pretty early age and you’ve been kind of in the sex community for a long time. So why is your first book about erotic communication? Why this subject and not all the others that you could have covered?

Stella Harris: 03:29 So it turns out this is maybe what I’m the biggest nerd about. When I did get involved in the kink and queer and poly scenes from when I was 17. And then later in college I was busy and sort of not involved with that as much and I realized what I missed the most was the way those people communicated, the way everything was so upfront, so well negotiated and I liked that as much if not more than you know, all the kinky sex things.

Stella Harris: 04:04 And then when I got into this line of work, after a long break got into this line of work full time, I really at first did think that the bulk of what I would deal with was teaching anatomy and teaching touch techniques and sort of the logistics of sex. And what was just happening again and again as the individuals and couples that end up in my office. There was just so much more, it was about the feelings pieces, it was about the communications pieces, you know, it’s about communication even when it’s not about communication. People come in with a sex difficulty and we ended up having to talk about the talking.

Stella Harris: 04:46 And every class that I teach, even classes that are very much focused on anatomy and technique I end up with a really big chunk about how do you talk about those things, because anatomy is different for everybody. When I’m teaching, just a couple of days ago, I did my class mapping the vulva and there is not one kind of vulva. I can show people and be like, “Great, now you’re going to know how everybody works. I can show you a handful of pictures of how it works for some people, but then what I really have to show you is how to talk about it, how to ask somebody what they like.” Here, you can try this touch technique and then modify it with these questions. And so that just kept being at the core of everything I was trying to do.

Chris Rose: 05:37 Yeah, and communication has almost become a cliché in the sex field because it is so important. And yet, most of us do not know how to communicate even about nonsexual things, let alone the charge subject of sexuality. Like these relational skills are so important in our lives and very few people have ever focused on building these skills and received coaching about building these skills and they’re total game changer. It’s something that as you introduce even little pieces of, can really propel you towards a more joyful life, getting your needs met and being able to love one another better. So I love your book so much.

Stella Harris: 06:25 Thank you.

Chris Rose: 06:27 Let’s dive in. What do you think are some of the biggest things that get in the way of people’s desires being met?

Stella Harris: 06:34 Well, I think fear is a huge one, fear of vulnerability, fear of rejection. Even though I do this for a living, I still feel those things, I can write about it and it doesn’t mean that every moment in my personal life those things feel easy to do. So I absolutely get that, so I think the fear is a huge piece with anything to do with sex, especially, we’re expected to know how to do it already.

Stella Harris: 07:04 And so there’s this double edge sword of, it’s frowned upon to be too experienced, that’s also frowned upon to be inexperienced. So basically anything you open up your mouth to say in the bedroom can feel fraud.

Chris Rose: 07:21 Let’s linger there for a moment because I feel like this erotic ego is one of the things that really blocks us from exploring new things and even with a trusted partner and that partner can be a casual partner or a lifelong relationship. We can have that trust, we can have good communication, but if our partner asks us to do something we don’t feel confident in doing, it can cause a total shutdown. How do you see that kind of erotic ego showing up and what are some of the ways we can care for that ego but push past it maybe?

Stella Harris: 07:58 Well, one of the things that I like to do is expand someone’s idea of what sex is. When I have people in my office who are terrified that they’re not going to have sort of a physical skillset, we always end up talking about all of the other young age who see important things, the connection pieces, the empathy, the care, sometimes the love, whatever those things are. And showing people how far those pieces go, and if those are really in place, some of the rest of it can flow from that a bit.

Stella Harris: 08:35 As can sort of the asking and telling what somebody wants, trying to make sure that people have other things that their confidence is based in and those don’t even need to be sexual or relational. If somebody is amazing at a sport or really good at their job, just making sure they have a really solid base of ways that they feel validated. What are your friends turn to you for? What do people ask you for advice on? Because it can start to feel like how good we are in bed is sort of this core element of our worth. And while I certainly think our relational skills are very important, sort of how “good” in bed you are does not define your value as a person.

Chris Rose: 09:28 And yet, sometimes it feels like our entire relationship is threatened if we can’t do that varsity level thing we’ve been asked to do.

Stella Harris: 09:38 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 09:39 And there’s so much of that reciprocal communication and these moments of vulnerability, what are some of the things the person asking for something new? So part of this conversation, we’re coming out of a few weeks of exploring desires. And last week we talked all about desires unfulfilled and kind of reckoning with these things that might never be met in our lifetimes.

Chris Rose: 10:04 And then as couples establish like mutual interest in something, but they’re both totally new added. So let’s take, let’s say rope bondage. Rope bondage is not something anyone has ever expected to know. So how can a couple kind of baby step into that with mutual vulnerability? So one partner doesn’t feel like they have to be the big bad top and know it.

Stella Harris: 10:28 Right. Well, I think that’s actually one of the things that can help is if, A) it’s something neither person knows already and B) it’s not something you are supposed to know how to do already. I often use rope bond there as an example because most of us didn’t learn that in high school. And so it feels more okay not to know that already. So hopefully that levels the playing fields such that both people can be vulnerable and can learn it together.

Stella Harris: 10:58 And it really helps if the thing that you’re learning can also be a little silly so that you can giggle about it when something goes wrong. And again, having it be something that is a little bit outside of a usual sexual skillset, it can feel less, less fraud, less intimidating, lower stakes. And even if it’s not a king skill, even if you go and learn, you know, a board game together, anything like that but skill building together can be a really great experience for bringing folks together. And learning those collaboration skills do end up carrying back over into the bedroom into different kinds of sex.

Stella Harris: 11:41 So teaching folks a new skill together is something I absolutely love, I get to do a lot of that and you can really see the way people work together when they are practicing something new like that. And it’s also really helpful. You know, you were saying, someone has to be the big bad top. I always tell people, even if you’re ultimately probably only going to bottom to a certain activity, you should still at least learn the basics because that helps you look out for safety. Know something isn’t going quite right, something is going to harm your body. So even if people don’t expect to switch, I always encourage them to learn both roles, to learn things from every perspective.

Chris Rose: 12:24 And when you’re teaching couple something like rope bondage, what do you notice between different couples? Like are there patterns of communication that couples use that feel really mutually empowering and healthy versus patterns you see that feel kind of destructive?

Stella Harris: 12:44 Yeah. You can see when people are coming in, having had sort of a long run of frustration with each other. You can see whether people, it takes our partners learning curve sort of in stride and are being supportive or when something goes a little wrong they’re laughing about it, or if someone already seems sort of exasperated and fed up before we’ve even started. So sometimes there are other things to unpack first. Sometimes people have come to me to learn some sort of a kink skill and as soon as they sit down, they’re on opposite ends of the couch, they’re not really looking at each other. And that’s sort of my cue that like, “Oh, we probably have something else to talk about first,” because just learning new kink or bedroom skills is not necessarily a bonded, for everything that’s going on in your relationship. I do think one carries into the other.

Stella Harris: 13:48 I really like seeing when people are able to help each other and give and take that feedback well. So with rope an example, I sometimes see the person who’s being tied up even if they can’t move their hands, sort of gesturing with their face and saying like, “Oh, you need to twist this loop here.” And the other person, smiling and thanking them for the help. So that’s what I really like to see and what I know people are sort of on the right track if both people can offer guidance, make requests, ask questions. And no one’s ever sort of side or rolling their eyes about it.

Chris Rose: 14:26 And I think in these moments of being asked for something new, of feeling that vulnerability, the biggest fear that comes up for people is feeling foolish but also then being rejected. Like, if I don’t do this well, I don’t do this perfectly I might lose this relationship. But how do we negotiate? How do we navigate moments where something isn’t going well? We need to pivot or recalibrate with our partner, but we don’t want to make it so personal. What are your go-to strategies then?

Stella Harris: 15:05 Yeah. Well part of why stopping an activity or saying no, I think feel so scary is because as you said, people don’t want to miss the opportunity to do something with that person. So having a backup plan of some sort of ready to go is really valuable. So if you’re playing with rope bondage and it just feels impossibly itchy on your skin and you’re just not liking it, if you can say, “Hey, this isn’t really working for me, how about we do this other thing instead?” And pivot to another activity immediately, then that can feel like it flows a little bit easier, that can make you feel like you’re showing your partner, you still like them and like doing things with them. It’s the activity that’s not working for you, so that can be a really big one.

Chris Rose: 15:56 In the book you talk about the yes and, that comes from Improv and then you add no but.

Stella Harris: 16:02 Yes.

Chris Rose: 16:02 They’re four really powerful words. Can you expand on yes and, no but?

Stella Harris: 16:08 Absolutely. So, I have a background in theater and if anybody is trying to work on their public speaking skills, I highly recommend you go take an Improv class. I hated every minute of it, but now I’m not afraid of making a fool of myself in front of people, which is a very valuable life skill. And one of the theater exercises is called yes and. There’s this idea that in Improv theater, you never want to say no because that brings us scene to a screeching halt.

Stella Harris: 16:43 So you always agreed to what the other performer has suggested and then you add something to build the scene. So that is absolutely a game that you can play with a partner where you ask for everything and you’re each building on things. But of course in sex, unlike in the theater, you absolutely can and should say no to things. But you can use that same principle of not bringing things to a halt, like I said before, having a backup plan.

Stella Harris: 17:12 So if somebody says, “Hey, can I kiss your neck?” And you can say, “No, but would you stroke my hair?” So whatever it is, you just immediately are pivoting to the next activity. So there’s always something to do, you don’t just come to that screeching halt where you both sort of feel awkward and don’t know what to do next. Of course no, is always a complete sentence, you don’t have to offer another activity. But in the instance where you actually do want things to keep going with this person, that can be a really great way to just keep things moving kind of smoothly.

Chris Rose: 17:51 And what do you do when you’re communicating in bed and one of you just kind of starts spinning out emotionally? Like a lot of times these things can trigger past experiences or past times you’ve been shamed, and we can kind of get out of the moment and into our own personal insecurities or personal trauma histories. Like how do you know when to keep going and when you need to kind of really step back and check in with each other?

Stella Harris: 18:22 Yeah, so part of that takes first a lot of self-awareness and then second, a lot of empathy and awareness of your partner. So if you are someone who knows you have emotional and physical triggers or this is something that could happen for you. It’s really great if you know for yourself some of the early warning signs of that happening, where do you feel it in your body when things are getting away from you a little bit, when anxiety is creeping in.

Stella Harris: 18:51 So if you can catch that a little bit early, that’s really fantastic. It’s also really helpful to communicate to your partner in advance what you would like them to do in a variety of eventuality. So what happens if you start crying, and some kink scenes, maybe that’s good and you keep going. And maybe it means you really need things to stop and you need them to check in.

Stella Harris: 19:17 Are you the kind of person who likes to be held and comforted or are you going to want space or to be left alone? So as much as possible, if you can negotiate that in advanced and let your partner know what you’re going to need, that’s always great.

Stella Harris: 19:31 Some people in those moments go a little bit nonverbal and so that’s also really important that your partner knows what you’re going to need in advanced if you’re not going to be able to tell them in the moment. And if none of this was a negotiated in advanced, anytime a partner seems anxious, not present, they’re not making eye contact, they’re not speaking anything like that, I would say, especially if this is not something you have negotiated for in advanced, that’s when you want to take a pause, check-in, let them calm down, see what they’re going to need.

Chris Rose: 20:08 And then debrief after things have simmered down.

Stella Harris: 20:13 Yeah, I actually suggest that regardless of how things went, having a conversation well after, don’t cut into your aftercare or your afterglow but a day or two later, what are the things that you liked the most? What are the things that you would like to change? That’s how we learn things, it’s from looking at how it went and adjusting it next time.

Chris Rose: 20:37 So it’s clear erotic communication happens in and out of the bedroom before, during and after sex. How do you approach the idea of communicating beforehand? Like how does this become part of the seduction, the flirtation and make it feel less clinical? A lot of people are like, “Well, if I ask for what I want, it doesn’t make it as exciting.” How do you counter that kind of cultural refusal to communicate and ask for what we want? How do we make it thrilling to talk about it?

Stella Harris: 21:14 Yeah, I mean there’s a few pieces there. People do act like if they’ve had to ask for something that receiving it as somehow less sincere or less genuine. So I do think there’s an element of needing to trust our partners that they’re doing things because they want to and because they enjoy them. For the first one to suggest a restaurant or a movie and our partner agrees enthusiastically, we probably don’t spend all of dinner guessing whether or not they really want to be there but we do second guessed that if it’s a sex thing.

Stella Harris: 21:50 So communication, people are worried that it will feel out of the blue or clinical, like you said or awkward. And I think that that’s mostly true if it starts out of nowhere, if it starts out of the blue, if you haven’t set that precedent. So if you’re starting off with somebody new, set that precedent for communication really early. Everything from negotiating what you’re going to do on a date to whether or not you’re kissing at the end, going home at the end, sort of set that precedent that everything is going to be talked about and checked in about. And then when you are in bed and you’re trying to direct how you like your genitals to be touched, that’s not going to be the first time you’ve opened up and given guidance or made a suggestion or a request. So it can help slow with that a lot easier.

Stella Harris: 22:42 It doesn’t have to sound like you were saying, sort of clinical, unless that’s your kink. It can be worked into sort of more dirty talk or sultry talk. Dirty talk doesn’t have to be putting on a particular kind of role, it can just be asking in a low tone of voice, “May I take your shirt off?” Anything like that. If the other person is excited about you doing that, hearing it is usually a turn on because then there’s anticipation, there’s the excitement to know this person that they like wants to do this thing with them.

Stella Harris: 23:28 So you can really work your requests, work your ongoing consent, all of that into something kind of sexy.

Chris Rose: 23:38 Well, for some people who can bring themselves to say it out loud, things like sending texts or writing letters or writing customer erotica can work. Do you think it’s ultimately important really to be able to use your voice and have this communication be verbal communication?

Stella Harris: 23:57 I think that verbal communication is a really great idea. I think verbal face-to-face is the most, it’s the safest way to get consent and ongoing consent in the least likely to be misinterpreted. And also, you’re right, it is really hard for a lot of people. I think doing a lot of the preliminaries by text is just fine. In kink we sometimes say don’t negotiate naked. The closer you are to an activity, the harder it can be to talk about thoroughly. So I think text is a great way to say, “Hey, would you be interested in trying such and such?” Sending links to pictures or stories, text is also a really great way to talk through things like your safer sex talk. So if you’re not right in front of the person, it can be easier to ask and answer questions that might feel a little sensitive or embarrassing.

Stella Harris: 24:58 And if you have some time and distance from when you can do the things, you’re less likely to fudge on any of your personal boundaries because you still want to play. And erotica is really great, sometimes people don’t even know exactly what they want. So if you pick up a book of erotic on a topic, you can just read through for yourself as though it’s a narrative yes no, maybe list and see, well what does turn me on? What sounds sexy to me? And if you find something then share that story with your partner so that you don’t have to use all the words for it yourself, but you can share it with them, you can put the little sticky pointers on a couple of parts you really like, or you can say, “What I like here is you know, the position that they used, or the particular romantic dynamic between the people.”

Stella Harris: 25:55 Something like that, so you can use a lot of these external tools to get on the same page and then hopefully also tweak the details verbally in person when it comes time.

Chris Rose: 26:09 At one point you mentioned the body and I’m curious how you think about the relationship between our body sensations, our internal wisdom and communication. Like, how do we let these things inform one another and pay attention to our bodies enough to know what we even want to say? What are some of the strategies you use to tap into the body’s wisdom?

Stella Harris: 26:38 So this is so tricky because our culture does not value checking in with our bodies about anything, it’s not a skill that we learn. I think some of this is changing a little bit, but at least, back in my day we were telling kids they had to hug people they didn’t like, they had to finish all the food on their plate. We were basically doing anything and everything we could to make it so that people didn’t know how to listen to what their body needed.

Stella Harris: 27:06 And now we’re supposed to turn around and trust our gut. So most of us have a lot of unpacking and reworking to do around all of that. So what it does take is a lot of checking in. There are a few ways you can do it. If you’re someone who goes to the gym or does any sort of sports or workouts, you might be used to sort of the difference between doing one more pull up because your personal trainer is standing there telling you to, and it kind of sucks but you can do it anyway versus maybe twisting your body in a particular way and feeling that little zing of pain, that’s your body saying like there’s going to be harm caused if you can continue.

Stella Harris: 27:55 So that is sort of a physical way of knowing the difference between discomfort, that it’s okay to push through and discomfort that you really need to listen to as a warning. And many of us have those same warnings for the more emotional stuff too. And what it takes really is just trying to check again with your body when those moments are happening and seeing what comes up for you. I really like journaling about these things you can track moods in an app. So for me, something that I’ve learned is that if somebody proposes something to me that I’m excited about, but it’s also like nervous and scary, but the kind of scary that I find exciting and I want to do. Usually my stomach is sort of not about it a little bit.

Stella Harris: 28:44 I have the butterflies in my stomach feeling and if somebody is asking for something and maybe a more unwelcome boundary, pushy kind of way, it’s a little higher for me then I feel it sort of in my chest and sort of a tight chest or heart palpitations you kind of way. So basically, flutters, six to eight inches apart in my body I now know is sort of my body warning me what my response is to something. But it took, you know, a couple of decades of making sometimes not the best decisions to learn what my body was saying and when I was ignoring it and doing something anyway.

Chris Rose: 29:27 And how do you find that process during arousal? Is it more clear to you or less clear what your body is wanting?

Stella Harris: 29:36 That really depends on the person. Arousal changes so much about what’s going on in our brains. Arousal diminishes our pain response, it diminishes our disgust response, which I find so fascinating. So sometimes in the moment things will feel good or sound good that in another non-sexy moment, don’t sound good at all. And so that’s another one where you need to decide when is it okay to go with what your body wants in the moment and are there some hard and fast boundaries or limits that you want to hold for yourself even if your body changes its mind in the moment.

Stella Harris: 30:20 Part of that listening in, if you’ve ever done maybe yoga or meditation, they teach the idea of this body scan. So either starting from the tip of your head or the tip of your toes and just sort of checking in with yourself all the way from top to bottom, seeing if there’s something going on there that you should listen to. And sometimes you can think something out, “Well, what would it feel like if my partner touched me here? What would some gentle touch feel like? What would some rough cuts feel like?”

Stella Harris: 30:53 And sort of thinking it through a couple of steps. The same way you might look at an item on a menu at a restaurant and like, “Oh I don’t know, does the hamburger or the solid sound good?” And think about what it would feel like to eat those things. You can do that with sex stuff as well. Of course, a lot of this necessitates slowing down a little bit. If your whole encounter is going to be a 10 minute quickie, which I am all for now and then, you’re probably not going to have a ton of time to slow down and check in with your body. So making sure that you do have play times that are more expansive and less goal-oriented, so that you have a moment to check in however you check-in.

Stella Harris: 31:36 Do you close your eyes for a minute? Whatever that’s going to be, and making sure your partner helps you create space to do those check-ins and ideally maybe they even want to do them for themselves as well.

Chris Rose: 31:50 I love it. We’ve been talking a lot about interoception, this skill of feeling the internal landscape and really thinking it’s the new sexual superpower we all need to develop. Can we talk a little bit about boundaries? Because I think often we talk about boundaries as what we’re saying no to, but often those boundaries make big yeses possible as well. How do you think about the relationship between desire and boundaries?

Stella Harris: 32:19 Absolutely. Well, if you don’t have any boundaries or you think you don’t or you’re not communicating any, that can actually really limit what you can do. So for most folks who are not intentionally just taking what they want from other people, most folks don’t want to cross somebody’s boundaries. And so if they don’t know where those boundaries are, they’re probably pulling way back from what could be happening. So for example, if you know how hard you like to be spanked and you can sort of communicate to somebody, you check in on a pain scale and you’re like, “Okay, I don’t want anything to go over in eight.”

Stella Harris: 33:03 Well then maybe the person is playing up to sevens. But if you haven’t communicated anything about how hard you like to play or your pain tolerance, maybe they’re doing threes and fours just to play it safe. And that sort of idea carries across to anything sexy, if someone isn’t sure how much is going to be okay, they’re probably taking it very easy and not at all exploring up to those edges.

Stella Harris: 33:32 So it can be really helpful to know, well how far can you go? I mean it’s an emotional guide rail. If you’re ever hiking to some sort of a lookout peak and they have that rail that’s going to keep you from falling off the cliff. If that railing isn’t there, I don’t know if you’re anything like me, you’re probably waiting 20-feet away from the edge because you don’t want to go tipping over and maybe the view isn’t as nice from there. But if the guard rail was saying, “Okay, it’s safe to walk up to this line,” then you can walk right up to it and look over and get that amazing view. So knowing where you have to stop can actually help you do more.

Chris Rose: 34:17 This conversation is really making clear like why I got along so well with your book, because I’m also a pretty risk adverse adventurer. And in the kink scene I really noticed that I’m like a rule follower, but I also really like to push boundaries and I think we’re kindred spirits there. One of the things in your book you really were really generous with is the importance of reliable pleasures.

Chris Rose: 34:46 And I think you talk about in terms of pizza. How do we think about finding and naming our reliable pleasures and having those and honoring them, but then also challenging ourselves to keep expanding our repertoires and discovering new pleasures? What’s that kind of dynamic balance for you?

Stella Harris: 35:09 What’s really nice to have something that is your go-to, so as we’ve talked about, it can feel safe or to try something new if you know that you still have something else you can do to still have intimacy or pleasure if the first thing doesn’t work out. And you discover those over time, either from what your masturbation routine looks like or from the kind of sex you and your partner have already been having. Sort of think back on, when have things float the most easily, when have I felt the most pleasure? And sort of use those to guide you to what’s your go-to activities are.

Stella Harris: 35:53 And having that, again, as sort of a safety net, can make it feel easier to get out of that comfort zone. So for some folks, if experimenting does feel scary, it can be easier just to add a little something to what they already are usually doing. So if your pizza of sex is missionary position sex, well, what would happen if you were going to have missionary position sex but with a blindfold on, or in different outfits that you would normally wear, or maybe with wrists tied to the bed, or maybe with a little sensation life first. So starting from your comfort zone and just enhancing it a little bit at first. And that also makes it really easy if whatever the enhancement is, it turns out not to be pleasurable to just remove that element and continue and absolutely adding new things entirely is so important.

Stella Harris: 37:01 Plenty of people have talked about and shown research about how much we require novelty, and it can help to make sure you have something like that on the schedule if it’s not something that comes naturally to you, planning for it in advance. So for some people that kind of thing is a lot easier when they’re out of their normal space. So I hear from clients all the time that they’re rekindling their best sacks or experimenting with new things when they’re on vacation. So being in a different city, being in a hotel room that can really help people push beyond their norms a little bit. So changing up your space entirely like that can be a huge help.

Stella Harris: 37:46 Having time for it on the calendar, I know people can be a little ambivalent about scheduling but we’re all very busy and sometimes that is what makes things happen. You can keep a little running list of things that you might like to try, and then when it comes time to set a date night, you sort of have some go-to ideas. So you don’t always need to think of things right in the moment, that works for regular date night ideas as well, because I dunno, what do you want to do? That struggle is real and it can get people in sort of a permanent loop of not having an idea of what to try next.

Chris Rose: 38:22 And as we try these things, as we expand our erotic repertoires, I think it’s really important to be very specific, both in what we’re asking for and in recalibrating things that might not quite work. So your example about rope bondage and you might say, no thank you to rope bondage, not because you didn’t like bondage, but because you didn’t like the itchiness of the rope.

Chris Rose: 38:48 And we don’t want to like throw the baby out with the bath water as we’re exploring new things and they don’t quite work. So what are some of the strategies have kind of evaluating both your desires and then your experiences and pulling apart? Like how do we know that it was the rope versus the bondage?

Stella Harris: 39:10 Yeah, well, there’s a couple of things there. So one is I’m always telling people to define their terms. So if one person says, “Here, you went to bondage,” and the other person’s mind immediately flashes to something like an intense suspension or a vacbed or something else that they think is really extreme and that’s what they think bondages, they might say no. But if you can ask, “Well tell me what you mean by bondage?” And then they find out, it’s like, “Well I’d like to tie your hands together with a scarf.” Then like, “Oh well maybe that’s fine.”

Stella Harris: 39:43 So making sure you both mean the same thing by the words because people often do not. And another thing that is certainly a conversation you want to have delicately because we never want it to look like we are pushing against someone’s no, but asking somebody why not and then you can get a lot of valuable information. So you really want to make sure somebody opts into this conversation first, and understands the intention of the conversation. So anything from going through a yes, no, maybe list and then having a conversation about the no’s, to having a conversation about the no, if you just propose something in the bedroom or if someone’s says, “Hey, I don’t want to do that again.”

Stella Harris: 40:27 So finding out the why’s, something that comes up a lot with my clients, maybe one person and a couple is interested in trying anal play and the other person is dead against it, and if you can get to the why conversation, you’ll hear about that one drunken college experience they had with no lube and no warmup and they hated it. And now that’s what they think anal sex is. So then you can find like, “Oh well you certainly don’t have to try again, but here are some things that might make that better.”

Stella Harris: 41:01 And so like you were saying what the rope, if you try some bondage and then you’re having your debrief a couple days later and what did you think of that? Would you like to try a bondage again? And if they’re like, “Yeah, I wasn’t into the bondage.” And then you ask the why, like what about it didn’t work for you? Did you not like the physical sensation? Did you not like feeling vulnerable and dig into that a little bit? Because then if you hear like, “Oh I love feeling vulnerable, it just hurt my wrists,” we’ll venue have options to address what the actual issue is.

Stella Harris: 41:36 And I like using those feelings questions both after the fact to decide what worked and didn’t work and ahead of time to find out what you would even like to do. Because if you can identify that, “Oh I would like to feel vulnerable,” and there are going to be dozens if not hundreds of ways to get to vulnerability and bonded, it’s just going to be a one thing on that list. But there’s going to be so many other you can explore to get to that feeling.

Chris Rose: 42:06 So shifting the question from kind of what do you want to do into how do you want to feel or what do you want to experience. Beautiful, beautiful. And what does that stake here? What do you see shift or change for your clients, for your coaching clients as communication starts opening up? Like how important is this in our overall erotic wellbeing?

Stella Harris: 42:32 I mean I think it is central, I think it’s kind of the most important thing when this hasn’t been working for folks for a while, I think it takes its toll on the whole relationship. I think we’d get to a place where we think maybe sex isn’t that important and the other life building things are what matters. And also humans and most animals can acclimate to a lot of different conditions. And you get used to what your day to day is to the point that you can actually not realize that you’re not happy or not satisfied until you get a glimpse of what’s possible. And then you realize sort of how far you’ve moved away from your pleasure or your happiness.

Stella Harris: 43:19 So seeing some of this start to snap back into place, I mean that’s at the core of why I keep doing this work. Seeing people have that like eye-opening, like, “Oh, this can work, I can feel this thing. We can do that together,” is absolutely amazing and sometimes it is sort of showing a different physical technique, a way to touch or a position to have their bodies in but more often it is the talking piece. It is finding sort of the sticking point or the frustration point with one couple that I got to work with. One partner hadn’t had an orgasm from the other person touching them and this was one of the few occasions where I got to be in the room while they were playing with each other and I’m standing off to the side and I’m sort of offering advice and it was very much like a personal coaching moment because they reached the point where they would normally get frustrated and stop.

Stella Harris: 44:27 And yes, I did suggest, here’s a little ways you could alter what you’re doing. Here are the tools you can use to say, you know, left or right, harder or softer. But the biggest thing was because I was providing accountability and saying like, “Hey, what happens if you keep going?” They ended up having an orgasm for the first time with their partner touching them. And I would love to say it’s because I’m some sort of sex coach superhero, but the biggest piece of it was just not giving up. And that was what I was really providing in that moment was that they didn’t give up.

Stella Harris: 45:08 And so that is a huge piece and sometimes I think we do give up because we’re really concerned about how long something takes were concerned whether or not a partner is really enjoying themselves. And so some of those communication pieces both expressing and trusting that our partners enjoying themselves, that they want to be there, that they want to try the things that can really be where some shifts take place.

Chris Rose: 45:39 And that’s so important for people to hear that asking for you one isn’t selfish, it’s an act of love for yourself and for your partner to externalize these things and give your partner more of a sense of how to please you. Most people want to please their lovers. People are far less selfish than we think of overs.

Stella Harris: 46:04 Well usually really relieved when we know what somebody else wants. We all have to make so many decisions in our day to day life that again, even something as simple as someone saying like, “Hey, I’m going to like pick up this kind of takeout for dinner. Is that okay?” Like just anytime someone else can take the initiative and make a decision ideally with a check in as well, that’s usually a relief where we want to know what people like and we don’t want to have to do all the coming up with ideas. That’s actually a really big one that comes up in my office is people feel burned out by coming up with the ideas of what things should we try.

Stella Harris: 46:42 And that is something I often see in partnerships is that one person is responsible for more of the suggestions than the other, and that can wear people out or take its toll. So yeah, I see that being a problem way more than I see too many requests or suggestions being a problem.

Chris Rose: 47:05 And I know just from being friends on social media that you are dating, is that right?

Stella Harris: 47:11 I am.

Chris Rose: 47:12 So as you explore with new people, as you date, I’m assuming that a lot of the time you are kind of the communication lead that you bring so many skills to your new relationships and flirtations. What are some of the things you do early on to kind of vet someone or feel like if there, are they up for being in that communication game with you? Are there questions you ask or topics you bring up or strategies you use to find people who can meet you more fully?

Stella Harris: 47:48 Yeah, there are few things, I mean you can get a really strong sense for somebody about how they’re presenting themselves, how they’re operating in early conversations. I’m such a word nerd, so I really do like getting to know people by writing. I really pay attention to how people respond to know, it doesn’t always come up super early, but if possible, have a negotiation about something, how do they feel about schlepping across town to meet you at your favorite restaurant? How are they taking requests? Are they taking no for an answer? Again, about stuff that’s really low stakes. Because if even that ends up being contentious, that doesn’t vote well. I always ask people about their previous relationships because how people talk about former partners or if it’s an open relationship, how they’re talking about their other partners now.

Stella Harris: 48:45 You can learn an awful lot about somebody that way, if someone’s willing to tell you why our relationship ended, that’s going to give you a lot of clues. Are people still friends with their exes? I usually have safer sex talks fairly early on, not necessarily because I want to have sex right away, but because I want to know what is somebody stance around safety because that’s going to be a real way I find out if they’re my kind of person or not. And how they have that conversation is just as important as what the answers are.

Stella Harris: 49:22 So if I ask somebody about STI testing and they’re offended or I’ve clearly never had this conversation before, like that, that gives me a lot of clues that, “Okay, they’re not used to having this conversation. So that’s probably not going to work for me.” There she is!

Chris Rose: 49:47 There’s your puppy.

Stella Harris: 49:50 And I also do a lot of the asking early, the things that I suggest I really do, I actually just had a really cute date last night and towards the end we were sitting on the couch and I just said like, “How would you feel about a little bit of kissing?” And I know that most people might think of that sounds ridiculous, but it got me sort of smiles and giggles and a really hot make out. And so yeah, it works. And if the person hated hearing that question, well maybe they weren’t going to like the kissing either.

Stella Harris: 50:28 So again, I would still rather no with my words then sort of lunging it and going for it.

Chris Rose: 50:36 I love that. You talked earlier that you were not maybe a sex coach superhero, but I want to say that you are. And as a sex coach superhero, like what is your mission? What are your hopes and goals for sex culture as we move forward from this point in time?

Stella Harris: 51:03 I would like to completely eliminate shame to do with sex, sexuality, gender, bodies. I don’t know if we’re going to get there in my lifetime, but that is what I would like to see. I would like to normalize people talking about their desires. I would like to normalize all of the different imaginable kinds of sex that people can have, including not wanting to have any at all.

Stella Harris: 51:38 I want people to understand that pleasure is important and to feel empowered to seek that out in their lives as a thing that is just as valid as anything else in our lives. Just as valid as professional growth or anything else that our culture does, sort of say, yes, this thing is good, this thing is not good. Sexual health and wellbeing is just as important as every other kind of health and wellbeing. I’m also really hoping that we can bring other professions along, I do some work with therapists and therapists and training a little bit with doctors and I would like to do more. Because I can’t talk to everybody about everything, I really need other professionals to be giving people good, safe, healthy, complete information about their bodies and about sex.

Chris Rose: 52:36 Stella Harris, thank you so much for all the work you do and thank you for joining us.

Stella Harris: 52:40 Thank you so much for having me.

Chris Rose: 52:42 So we have a couple quick questions from our patrons. Are you willing to stick around and answer a couple questions?

Stella Harris: 52:48 Absolutely.

Chris Rose: 52:49 Awesome. All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. And if you are ready for more from Stella, go to patreon.com/pleasuremechanics. She was gracious enough to stick around after the interview and answer a few questions submitted by our patrons over at patreon.com/pleasuremechanics. Join us with a monthly supporting pledge of a dollar a month or $5 a month and join our inner circle, show your love and support for this show and unlock ad free episodes, bonus episodes, bonus resources, direct communication with us, and much more over at patreon.com/pleasuremechanics. And I will be posting that bonus episode where Stella tackles some very sticky situations for our dear patrons. That’s patreon.com/pleasuremechanics. All right, I am Chris from pleasuremechanics.com wishing you a lifetime of pleasure. Cheers.