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Emily Nagoski Interview

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Emily Nagoski is one of the most important thinkers in the field of sexuality. She does a remarkable job translating scientific and social knowledge into deeply personal stories and actionable strategies.

This interview originally aired in two parts as two episodes:

Episode #079: The Surprising Science of Sex With Emily Nagoski, Part 1

Episode #080: The Surprising Science of Sex With Emily Nagoski, Part 2

In this encore presentation, we bring the two episodes together for a deep dive interview with Emily Nagoski, author of Come As You Are.

Check out Emily’s book, Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life and Emily’s blog, The Dirty Normal.

Emily Nagoski also has two brilliant Ted Talks:

The Truth About Unwanted Arousal

Confidence and Joy Are The Keys To A Great Sex Life

Better Sex Through Mindfulness with Lori Brotto

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Better Sex Through Mindfulness with Lori Brotto : Free Podcast Episode

Twenty years after Viagra was approved to treat erectile issues in men, we still don’t have any quick fixes for the primary sexual struggle of women: low sexual desire. In this podcast interview, Dr. Lori Brotto shares what has been the most promising treatment for women who struggle with sexual desire – mindfulness.

Mindfulness based sex therapy is not a quick fix, but instead is an ongoing practice and lifestyle that offers profound and lasting benefits for a wide range of sexual struggles.

In her new book Better Sex Through Mindfulness: How Women Can Cultivate Desire, Lori Brotto gives an illuminating overview of the past fifteen years of research on applying mindfulness based interventions for sexual concerns. Along the way, she challenges many of the cultural narratives that drive so many of these struggles: a misunderstanding of the nature of sexual desire, the scripts and routines that drive so many sexual encounters, and the culture of distraction and stress we all live in. Meanwhile, Lori Brotto outlines several of the mindfulness practices that she uses in her clinic so readers can immediately begin applying these concepts to their own sexual experience.

The take-home message is this: mindfulness teaches women to become more aware of their internal bodily sensations, including sexual sensations, and this may improve their motivations for sex and increase their tendency to notice sexual arousal and have that arousal trigger sexual desire.

Could it really be this simple – that teaching women to tune into their body, to the signs that their body is already producing, and making them aware of these sensations can be enough to trigger sexual desire? I offer a tentative “yes” to this question. Why tentative? Because awareness of internal bodily sensations is only one of potentially many different ways that mindfulness exerts its beneficial effects on sexual desire. Without a doubt, when we pay attention to the body in a kind, compassionate, nonjudgemental and present-oriented way, it offers us a new way of being in the world. And that new way of being might just be critical for the sexual satisfaction that so many women crave. ~ Lori Brotto, Ph.D.

Find out more about Dr. Lori Brotto’s research here, and follow her on twitter here.

A full transcript of the podcast interview with Lori Brotto is below.

If you are ready to begin exploring the frontiers of Mindful Sex, join our online course on Mindful Sex! Our Mindful Sex course is the perfect complement to Lori’s brilliant book, and we will be discussing the book in depth within the course community.

Full Transcript of Pleasure Mechanics Interview With Lori Brotto:

[00:00:00] – Chris Rose
Lori Brotto, welcome to Speaking of Sex.

[00:00:04] – Lori Brotto
Thanks so much for having me today Chris.

[00:00:06] – Chris Rose
Can you introduce yourself and the work that you do.

[00:00:09] – Lori Brotto
Sure. So I’m Lori Brotto. I am a registered psychologist by training, a researcher in the Department of Gynecology at the University of British Columbia and the executive director of Women’s Health Research Institute in the province of B.C. and my research has been focusing mostly over the last decade or so on the development and treatment of sexual concerns in women using mindfulness meditation based approaches

[00:00:39] – Chris Rose
In the book you lay out this beautiful story, but how did you come to focus on mindfulness after the development of viagra, what is that link?

[00:00:48] – Lori Brotto
So this was really a pivotal moment not only in my own career but I think for the field of sexuality and sex research more broadly and that was the year 1998 when Viagra was approved for men and suddenly men had an effective easy to use low risk, low adverse event, very accessible medication to treat their sexual concerns- so erectile dysfunction in men which affects probably between 10 to 15 percent of men. And shortly after that in the same year there was a large study based on several thousand American men and women and it found that actually the prevalence of sexual difficulties in women was far greater than the prevalence of sexual concerns in men. And it reached somewhere around the neighborhood of about 40 percent. So around 40 percent of women over the last year reported that they had some type of sexual difficulty. The most common of which was low sexual desire. So that sort of got me started down the path of looking into – well we’ve got this effective and easily accessible treatment for men’s sexual concerns.- What is there for women.? And I quickly discovered that my literature search took all of about one minute and discovered that there were very very few treatments available. There were no medications approved. There were a handful of more psychological types of interventions but really very little research looking at effective ways of improving women’s sex response and sexual satisfaction.

[00:02:23]
And that really led to the path that I took after that point I was an animal researcher focused on animal models of sexual dysfunction and very soon after reading that paper I made the switch over to studying women’s sexual response in the laboratory. Then I was introduced to mindfulness a few years after that when I was living and working as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle and learned about mindfulness because it was a very effective part of treatment for individuals who engaged in cutting behaviour or parasuicidal behaviors and mindfulness essentially helped those patients cope. It helped them cope with the ups and downs of their emotions, their tendency to want to hurt themself and basically it taught them – if they could remain in the present and really focus on what it felt like, including all of the distressing emotions they were feeling, that they could ride it out almost like as if they were on a surfboard. So that again another pivotal turn in my career that introduced me to mindfulness. I began my own personal practice and rather intensive training and learning about mindfulness and really the rest is history so to speak.

[00:03:52] – Chris Rose
And here we are 15 years later and this treatment has proven to not only effectively help women with low sexual desire and other sexual struggles but create lasting changes. And again 15 years later we don’t have the pink Viagra. So what is it – your book is called Better Sex Through Mindfulness. So let’s start with the basics, what is it about mindfulness that can lead to a better sexual experience?

[00:04:24] – Lori Brotto
So mindfulness is essentially a way of being. It includes paying attention in the present moment moment by moment and doing so non-judgemental and compassionately. So it’s more than just paying attention or concentration training but rather it’s about how we pay attention. And one of the things we know is that individuals who have sexual concerns and in particular women who have low desire are often struck by myriad negative thoughts about their own performance, concerns about whether or not they will respond, worries and fears about how a partner may respond or or not approve about their sexual activities or outcomes, and there’s compelling data that shows that this sort of onslaught of negative thoughts and negative self judgements and essentially women be very very hard on themselves can directly and negatively affect their ability to become sexually aroused and have sexual desire. And so one of the ways that we believe mindfulness is helpful for women with sexual concerns is it teaches them to just be in the moment, to notice sensations without that tendency to jump into the future and worry about “Am I responding enough? Is this going to upset my partner? is this going to lead to disaster? Am I not going to reach an orgasm?”

[00:05:57]
And so mindfulness really allows them to really tune into sensations and really stay with the sensations so that they might still have those negative thoughts but they’re not dominating the field of their awareness. And our research has shown that that’s probably one of the important ways. There are certainly other ways as well that mindfulness is helpful but that’s really one of the key ways is really targeting that negative self judgment.

[00:06:26] – Chris Rose
The work of a lifetime.

[00:06:28] – Lori Brotto
Yeah sure is

[00:06:30] – Chris Rose
So when we think about so many women having low sexual desire do you feel like we need to rethink how we culturally talk about desire? What are your thoughts about how we reframe the human the notion of desire in the first place?

[00:06:47] – Lori Brotto
Yeah absolutely and this has been an area of work that I’ve been pretty actively involved with as along with several others and that is how do we define sexual desire? And I think that there are many cultural stereotypes around what sexual desire is and one of them being this notion that you either have desire or you don’t. And when you have it it’s something that just exists within you it lives somewhere within your body you feel it physically and it always compels you towards sexual activities. So you know you feel horny, you feel butterflies, you feel some kind of internal physical trigger that moves you towards sex. And one of the things we know is yeah that might that might express sexual desire for some people or maybe for some people some of the time depending on their context, their age, what kind of relationship there and how long that relationship is, a host of other factors. But we also know that there are other ways that desire is expressed and one of the more helpful ways of thinking about desire is as if it were an emotion just like sadness or happiness. Now we feel happy when positive things happen to us when things in our environment or people we interact with say or do things that make us feel happy so happiness happens in response to something and it can be really helpful to think about sexual desire in the same way. So we feel desire when there are triggers for desire. And the research suggests that that’s probably a much more common manifestation of desire than this idea that desire something just is or is not within you. And when we think about desire in that way, as something that can be triggered or elicited, then suddenly we feel far more empowered to explore – well what are those cultivators of desire? And if I don’t have desire or my desire is less than it used to be maybe this is an opportunity to explore the triggers and the context that would be more likely to elicit desire for me.

[00:09:11] – Chris Rose
And part of that exploration is paying attention. So how does mindfulness help us pay attention to what’s already going on in our body and tuning in rather than tuning out?

[00:09:24]
So in our own work and of course our work is heavily influenced by the much larger field of work exploring mindfulness based interventions for other issues like stress and anxiety and depression and chronic pain.

[00:09:40]
And so the way that we do that with sexual concerns is we start with introducing a formal practice. So in our groups this means that we bring groups of about eight to 10 women together we have a facilitator who is well versed in both mindfulness space practice as well as in sex therapy and we spend really the first hour of our two hour group engaged in a mindfulness practice where the facilitator will provide instructions for the participants something along the lines of – pay attention to the breath, notice where in the body the breath is experienced, notice what sensations are associated with breathing, notice any sounds or smells or thoughts or other sensations that go along with breathing. That’s just a really really quick short snippet of a much longer exercise that we do called mindfulness of breath – but essentially we encourage women to adopt a regular formal mindfulness practice in their lives where they might practice a formal meditation every day for you know 20 to 30 minutes and then we gradually tailor these exercises to more sexual contexts. So in that sense we might first encourage the women to engage in some self touch and while they’re touching themselves alone they can practice mindfulness at the same time. So what does it actually feel like these sensations as I’m touching myself head to toe including the more erogenous parts of her body – the nipples, the breasts, the vulva, the labia, et cetera. And then we also talk quite specifically about how they might incorporate these new found skills when they’re sexual together with a partner.

[00:11:41] – Chris Rose
I love that. So we released our mindful sex course about four months ago. And one of the things we include is the aroused body scan, because I think there’s different information to be gained from paying attention in a state of arousal. And I love that in your book you include all these exercises of mapping the mindful practice into the sexual encounter either alone or with a partner. What are some of the issues. So a lot of women report this disconnect between the body and the brain. Right. And in the book you talk about arousal concordance and interoception – these are big words, so how do we explain these concepts and think about this unification of the mental and physical experience of sex?

[00:12:27] – Lori Brotto
Right. So I’ll maybe just start with a bit of a real example of one of the first groups that I I worked with when I was a fellow at the University of Washington Seattle to adapt and test mindfulness and this was at a time when I was working quite closely in research with cancer survivors. And these specifically were women survivors of gynecologic cancer where their treatment involved rather radical removal of some of the the internal reproductive structures, so with a radical hysterectomy they had their uterus or cervix and the upper part of the vagina removed and many of these women described a complete lack of any any pleasure any sensation with genital contact. They often talked about it as feeling as though my partner’s touching my elbow. So rather than having that specific sexual pleasure related quality they could feel touch but it was not pleasurable for them whatsoever and it was really a potent example of this kind of disconnect because what we learned was when we taught women to really pay attention, to really notice the sensations that were there while they were engaged in erotic touch or sexual contact, that they realized that there were still sensations of pleasure that they could by focusing on them and really tuning into them could then amplify. So that’s one example of how and why paying attention can really amplify a response that maybe women are not noticing or that has been greatly reduced. Now there’s also been quite a large body of research led by Meredith Chivers, a fantastic Canadian sex researcher as well as others, that shows when you bring women into a right into a sexual psychophysiology research lab and you show them a series of erotic videos and you measure their physical response, typically by the use of a vaginal probe that measures their genital blood flow. And then you also ask them how turned on or how sexually aroused they are, that far more often than not what those studies will find is that there might be a strong physical sexual arousal response. And yet at the same time women are self reporting either minimal sexual arousal or not being sexually aroused or frankly being turned off and we often find that in our samples of women with sexual dysfunction. So the body is responding in the mind is simply not. And that’s what we mean by either low concordance or frankly discordance. And that what that means is that when exposed to a sexual trigger the body’s responding and the mind is not and sometimes you can have the opposite you might have the mind that sexually excited and turned on and the body that’s not responding. So one of the things that we’ve been very interested in in our research is how does mindfulness impact this concordance or this mind body agreement in sexual response. And we’ve now found in a few studies that essentially what mindfulness does is it increases the amount of communication between the brain’s arousal pathways and the body’s sexual response such that as women are becoming aroused in their body they’re far more likely to be tuned in also in their mind and therefore state that they feel sexually excited.

[00:16:13] – Chris Rose
And is this a function of strengthening neural pathways? Do we know yet how this functions?

[00:16:21] – Lori Brotto
Yeah. So this is really where the research needs to go next and we speculate on how and why that is and one of the kind of leading explanations that I believe is going on is we’re strengthening women’s ability to become interoceptive aware. So interception or interoceptive awareness, this is just our general ability to know what’s going on in our body.

[00:16:50]
So you might know folks who are acutely aware of their own heart rate and accurately aware of their own heart rate or those women who can actually sense when they are they ovulate or sense other internal physical sensations. That is interception and we measure interoception in our studies, both through self report questionnaires as well as through a heart rate accuracy test that women do before the mindfulness groups and after. And what we’ve found is that as women become more interoceptively aware this is also associated with their increased ability to tune into those sexual sensations as well.

[00:17:32] – Chris Rose
So in the moment of receiving sensation you are aware of how you’re feeling, then you can map the emotional response onto it and then comes the piece of nonjudgment, right. So we live in a culture that has nothing but judgment, especially around female sexual desire. How does this piece of practicing non-judgment and self compassion play out in your groups? What kind of transformations are possible there?

[00:18:04] – Lori Brotto
Yeah so this this has been really in my mind probably one of the most critical ingredients in our mindfulness based intervention. So I mentioned the awareness of the breath practice. We also have body awareness practice, awareness of thoughts, awareness of sounds and then we also have specific practices that are designed to cultivate compassion towards one’s self. And typically in the group what that looks like is there’s a lot of emotion that goes along with realizing and recognizing that we can be really hard on ourselves. And when you do a formal practice with women where your instructions invite them to cultivate a sense of love and compassion to them self and they realize just how challenging that is – so you have no difficulties at all cultivating love towards other people that they know, even other people that they don’t know. But when it comes to really channeling that love and compassion towards them self there is great great difficulty in doing that. And immediately the women realize what role that this plays in perhaps perpetuating some of their sexual concerns so because they’re constantly faced with a fear of disapproval and concerns about not being good enough sexually as well as otherwise. And when we start to really confront that in the group and send women home with practices that are designed to cultivate compassion they immediately feel transformed in fact many of the women when we follow up with women and engage them in some interviews after they do the group they’ll often tell us how that was one of the most challenging parts of of the eight week intervention is really cultivating that love towards themself.

[00:20:03] – Chris Rose
Especially when we live in the world we do right now.

[00:20:06] – Lori Brotto
That’s right.

[00:20:07] – Chris Rose
I know you you mentioned you worked with cancer survivors. You’ve also worked with trauma survivors. What has working with this population taught you?

[00:20:17] – Lori Brotto
Yeah. Wow what an opportunity that has been to offer to these women, who have in some cases really quite tragic and horrific histories of sexual abuse and assault, many of them as children. And one of my motivations in working with that group using mindfulness specifically are that these the women that we worked with had already undergone fairly extensive psychotherapy to deal with the aftermath the psychological aftermath of their abuse histories and most of them felt like they were resilient and they got past that until they found themselves in consensual sexual relationships again where engaging in sex or feeling sexual arousal triggered many of the past intrusive thoughts and nightmares and distress and dissociation as it had done in their past and their abusive situations. So very very distressing because these were women who were now in happy and consensual relationships. They wanted to be sexual. And yet they had this kind of recurrence of their their past PTSD and trauma symptoms. And so we believed that a mindfulness approach teaching women to really tune into the arousal and notice that the building sensations of arousal and staying with it, without getting pulled away into dissociation, was really quite key and we found in one study that we did where we compared this approach to another effective psychological approach Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, that the women who received the mindfulness training were able to have far less distressed sex related distress and moreover they were really able to tune into their body and experience both their body getting aroused as well as their mind getting aroused. So for me it was really after working with those women who who had experienced histories of sexual abuse that it convinced me that wow, this was really a tool and a practice that finally could make a lasting impact on women’s sexuality.

[00:22:43] – Chris Rose
And while most of your work has been around women’s sexuality, what are your thoughts on how this research translates to the male sexual experience?

[00:22:52] – Lori Brotto
Yeah I’ve been often asked that question particularly since the book has women in the title. And yet our research over the last two to three years has also adapted these same strategies, our same groups to different populations of men with some really fantastic outcomes. So for example one of the studies we did involved men who have situational premature ejaculation which essentially means that these are guys who had no difficulty with their ejaculation or their erection when they were on their own but when they’re with a partner they might ejaculate too early or the men with situational erectile dysfunction have no difficulty getting erection on their own but when they’re with a partner because of concerns and fears and worries and and concern about performance failure they might lose their erection. And so we found mindfulness to be really a powerful tool, a powerful strategy for helping them gain better control over their erections and for dealing specifically with the premature ejaculation. We’ve much more recently been delivering mindfulness based strategies also to prostate cancer survivors together with their partners.

[00:24:15]
Now this is a bit of a different population because one of the things we know is that prostate cancer treatment whether it’s the surgery or the chemotherapy or the radiation produces lasting and permanent sexual difficulties for the vast majority of men who survive their prostate cancer. So our use of mindfulness with this population is not so much focused on getting their sexual function back but rather on expanding their repertoire. Their – what we call “a buffet menu” of different ways of being sexual that don’t focus on having an erect penis.

[00:24:55]
So that work’s been very interesting because typically this is a population who’s really really distressed and very focused on getting their erection back and that also probably speaks to bigger societal notions of what it means to be a masculine man and to be a masculine man means to have a rock hard erection when one wants it, when one wants to need it. So mindfulness and in particular the compassion practice of mindfulness has been very useful for that population of men in expanding the different ways that they might be sexual.

[00:25:32] – Chris Rose
So important, I love that. Recently on the podcast we were talking about performance anxiety and the idea that excitation and anxiety are both arousal responses. How does mindfulness allow us to grow our capacity for arousal and excitation without flipping into anxiety?

[00:26:00] – Lori Brotto
That is a great question and I’m going to write that down because that would be a great future research study. And you know one of the things we know is that among women with low desire, individuals with low desire more generally, that there may be different kind of patterns for sort of their reasons for their low desire.

[00:26:23]
So it may be the case that one woman has a low capacity for becoming sexually excited so a low excitation ability and for other women they might be much higher on the inhibition domain. So they might have kind of internal structures in their brain that constantly put the brakes on and prevent them from becoming sexually excited. So in our own research we have measures of this inhibition and excitation tendency and we’re now starting to look at how mindfulness might specifically impact those two different systems the excitation and inhibition system. So we don’t quite know exactly how that happens yet but we can speculate that one of the things that mindfulness does is by tuning in and reducing avoidance tendencies that it probably does have an impact on lessening some of those inhibitory barriers that are preventing women from getting sexually excited. Now how it impacts the excitatory pathways we don’t know quite yet what the answer to that is.

[00:27:33] – Chris Rose
I look forward to it. Thank you. And when we released our mindful sex course and when we talk about mindfulness on the podcast, sometimes the response we get is “I’m all ready to self conscious during sex. I’m already too much in my head” and there’s this confusion that mindfulness means overthinking. How do you talk about the specific qualities of mindful attention that are different from everyday cognitive function?

[00:28:03] – Lori Brotto
Yeah that’s also a very common concern expressed by women in our group which is “I’m already hyper vigilant to my own function and I actually think that that’s actually getting in the way of my sexual arousal.” And so there are different ways of paying attention and in the woman who’s hyper vigilant. There can be a tendency to misinterpret what’s happening as signaling some kind of negative or disastrous or catastrophic outcome. So by hyper focusing on “am I getting aroused, am I wet yet, am I excited, what’s happening in my body, what’s happening in my vulva, what’s happening with my nipples” It’s not a hypervigilance that we’re cultivating but rather it’s an awareness and an observing. One of the other really important things that we practice with mindfulness is something that mindfulness experts call “open monitoring” and that is our ability to just kind of notice everything that is happening without attaching to any one particular experience. And so in our groups when we lead the mindfulness practice there’s really two things that we focus on. One is notice what’s happening. Notice the sensations. And then secondly notice if you have a tendency to become overfocused on those so to attach to experience attachment and simultaneously notice if there’s a tendency to want to move away from or experience some aversive reaction to those sensations. So we fold in this practicing practice of noticing attachment and aversion while we’re also noticing sensations and that can be a really useful concept for those women who tend to be hyper vigilant about their sensations.

[00:30:00] – Chris Rose
Oh yeah I know that well from being mindful during chronic pain. And to map that onto how we move away from or towards pleasure that is really powerful. So of all of your research findings over the past decade plus what has been most surprising to you?

[00:30:19] – Lori Brotto
I think one of the pleasantly surprising outcomes has been that when we invite women back six months and one year later that they continue to experience the benefits. They’re continuing to practice the mindfulness maybe not in the same kind of intensive way that they did when they participated in our groups but because they’ve experienced lasting improvements not only in their sexual response unsatisfaction but on those other important parts of quality of life like mood and ability to cope with stress ability to just engage more in life and enjoy their meals and pay attention to their conversations that they actually want to continue to do these practices in their in their life. So it’s been a really positive observation is to see that we are planting a seed but then that seed continues to be cultivated and it grows into women’s ongoing practice long after they leave our our center. So that’s been a great finding. I think one of the other maybe somewhat surprising findings is that the benefits of mindfulness were not specific to those women who already bought into the idea of Mindfulness being useful.

[00:31:44]
So basically what I mean by that is that we include baseline measures for women engaged in the groups around “how much do you think that this is going to help you” and “how much do you really agree with this kind of a mindfulness based approach” and “how skeptical are you of these strategies and whether they will work for you?” And what we found is that women’s baseline level of confidence in the mindfulness treatment and in their level of skepticism had no bearing whatsoever on whether they benefited from the mindfulness or not. So this is great news because one of the the concerns that I’ve certainly read about in the larger mindfulness literature is you know maybe this is only for a small segment of the population who practice yoga and are open to integrative and contemplative practices. Maybe these are folks who you know are have an openness to Buddhist meditation more generally. And our research finds that actually it’s not specific to that population that really cuts across different segments of the population regardless of their baseline level of belief or not.

[00:32:58] – Chris Rose
Thanks so much to your work, we have a developing new field of mindfulness based sex therapy. What do you see coming down the road for the future? What questions are you excited to ask next?

[00:33:14] – Lori Brotto
So we know that sexual difficulties are common. They cut across different ages, different demographics, different cultural groups, different relationship status, sexual orientations, and although my work has focused mostly on women and on the most common concerns being low desire and lack of sexual satisfaction, what I would love to see is kind of an exporting of these approaches for much broader groups. So perhaps individuals who are grappling with sexual identity or who are experiencing stigma or face prejudice as they’re contemplating coming out of the closet and revealing their sexual orientation. So I would love to see kind of an adaptation of these strategies for much broader populations of individuals who are again kind of confronting with different aspects in that broad field of sexuality.

[00:34:17] – Chris Rose
Thank you so much for this conversation and thank you so much for this book.

[00:34:22] – Lori Brotto
Thank you so much for the opportunity. It’s been a real treat to talk to you today.

Rethinking Sexual Performance Anxiety

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Rethinking Sexual Performance Anxiety : Free Podcast Episode

Sexual performance anxiety is the most common sexual struggle for men. Almost all men experience sexual performance anxiety at one time or another, and many men suffer with it for years on end.

So what exactly is sexual performance anxiety, and why does it impact so many men? In this episode we open up the conversation about performance anxiety, performance pressure and how we can switch tracks and experience freedom from performance anxiety.

If you are struggling with Performance Anxiety, we highly recommend the comprehensive and compassionate online course from sex therapist Vanessa Marin: The Modern Man’s Guide To Conquering Performance Pressure

What is sexual performance anxiety?

Anxiety is overwhelming fear or worry that hijacks your experience of life. It usually involves ruminating on negative thoughts, fears and perceived negative outcomes. For example, someone who has anxiety about flying will experience constant worry and fear about their plane crashing. Someone who has anxiety about heights will imagine themselves falling to their demise.

Sexual performance anxiety is the experience of anxiety about perceived failure to live up to an expectation of sexual performance.

Most often, sexual performance anxiety is triggered by lack or loss of an erection, early ejaculation, or delayed ejaculation. The anxiety is about perceived loss of masculinity, sexual status, humiliation or embarrassment in front of a loved partner, or a general sense of being not good enough to be worthy as a sexual being.

All of this anxiety can be traced back to the unrealistic expectations our culture puts on male sexuality.

Furthermore, stress and anxiety have the effect of shutting down erections. So the pressure to have an erection can in and of itself create the loss of an erection.

It is time to rethink the conversation about sexual performance anxiety, and liberate men from the overwhelming pressure to have an erection at all times.

The cultural myth is that men’s sexuality is simple, and given the opportunity to have sex guys should just be hard and ready at all times. Failure to perform causes deep shame and humiliation, female partners feel rejected and lash out, and a downward spiral sets in.

Performance anxiety is very much about attachment to a specific outcome and identifying with that outcome. The story goes something like this:

To be a real man, I must be able to get and stay hard. If I fail to do so, I myself am a failure and therefore not a real man.

Meanwhile, the female partner is thinking: to be a real woman, I must be desirable. If my partner finds me desirable, he will be erect. If he is not erect, I fail at being desirable.

This sexual script limits the erotic experience of men and women alike. It is time to understand that erection and arousal are not the same thing, and that the human sexual experience is so much bigger than penetrative intercourse.

In this podcast we introduce several key concepts that will help liberate you from the paradigm of sexual performance anxiety.

You will discover strategies to put into place both before and during sex, and how to change the culture of sexuality in your relationship, so you can have more satisfying sex more frequently.

Ending Performance Anxiety with Vanessa Marin

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Performance Anxiety is the primary sexual struggle of far too many men. What does performance anxiety even mean? What causes performance anxiety? How can guys overcome performance anxiety? What can partners do to help?

In this episode we speak with Vanessa Marin, leading sex therapist and creator of an amazing online course, The Modern Man’s Guide To Conquering Performance Pressure

We cover:

What is performance anxiety?
What causes performance anxiety?
Why is performance anxiety getting more common?
How can partners help or hurt the situation?
What role does porn have in creating performance anxiety?
How does performance anxiety relate to erectile dysfunction?
Is Viagra a cure for performance anxiety?
What role does sexual trauma play in men’s performance anxiety?

Next week, we’ll keep unpacking the cultural roots of performance anxiety and how we can shift our experience of sexuality from a performance to an experience. This shift is crucial in creating the conditions for fun, playful, joyous and highly orgasmic sex for both partners.

Be sure to check out Vanessa Marin’s awesome course: The Modern Man’s Guide To Conquering Performance Pressure

Join our Patreon to get bonus episodes, be part of the Pleasure Mechanics community and have a direct line to our inbox: https://www.patreon.com/pleasuremechanics

Note: We 100% recommend Vanessa’s course, and when you enroll Pleasure Mechanics earns a small referral payment to support the podcast and keep us going. Thanks!

Transcript of Interview With Vanessa Marin

Chris Rose: Hi, this is Chris from PleasureMechanics.com. Welcome to Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. On today’s episode, we have a special guest, Vanessa Marin, a leading sex therapist, and she and I take a deep dive into exploring performance anxiety and what underlies performance anxiety, and how to start overcoming it. You can find a complete podcast archive over at PleasureMechanics.com, where you will also find the opportunity to sign up for The Erotic Essentials. This is our free offering to you.

Chris Rose: It is a free online course that includes our foundational sex advice, so you can start building the sex life you crave on your own terms. The Erotic Essentials is completely free and you can find the signup at PleasureMechanics.com. Just go to the Start Here page. If you like our work and want to support what we do, please come over to Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics. P-A-T-R-E-O-N, Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics and sign up for a monthly pledge – $1 a month, $5 a month, and at $25 a month, and we are sending you pleasure packages.

Chris Rose: Our first shipment of custom Pleasure Mechanics stickers are arriving any day now, and so we will be getting our May pleasure packages out in the mail to you soon, so come on over to Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics and sign up for a monthly pledge to keep us going so we can create this free podcast for hungry ears all around the world. Before we dive into the interview, I want to acknowledge that we got a lot of feedback on last week’s episode about the history of masturbation, and we will explore some of that feedback and share some of your letters on next week’s episode, but I want to say we have heard you. Thank you for your feedback, both positive and the pushback. We welcome it all, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that next week when we bring you our next episode of Speaking of Sex With the Pleasure Mechanics. Here is my interview with Vanessa Marin. I found Vanessa because I was specifically looking for great information and resources about performance anxiety.

Chris Rose: I hear from guys all the time, whose primary sexual struggle is what they name performance anxiety, and this is such a common experience, but people feel really isolated with it and really ashamed of it, and so I want to start peeling back the layers on performance anxiety. This is part one of a two-part episode series. Next week, Charlotte and I will talk about performance anxiety and some of our takes on this topic, and Vanessa is the creator of a beautiful online course called The Modern Man’s Guide To Conquering Performance Pressure, and I do not recommend courses lightly. I only recommend courses that I think are great compliments to what we do here at Pleasure Mechanics and the tools that can be great resources for you, and I love her course. It is a very comprehensive look at performance anxiety and gives you a ton of techniques to start implementing right away, so I highly recommend diving into that resource.

Chris Rose: You will find a link in the show notes page, and please dive into that, and then ask us questions that we can continue to answer for you. Together, I think as a culture we can conquer performance anxiety. This does not have to be the main sexual experience of so many people with penises, so join us in the quest to culturally conquer performance anxiety. All right. Here is my interview with Vanessa Marin, and next week, we will continue the conversation here on Speaking of Sex With the Pleasure Mechanics.

Chris Rose: Cheers. Can you get us started by introducing yourself and the work that you do?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. My name is Vanessa Marin, and I am a sex therapist and author, and I work with people for a wide variety of issues and in a wide variety of formats. I offer video chat coaching, email consultation, and I have a little suite of online programs as well.

Chris Rose: What brought you to do sex therapy specifically?

Vanessa Marin: My story of getting started with sex therapy starts with my parents trying to have the talk with me, and I very, very vividly remember that conversation sitting in the back of my parents’ minivan, and my mom telling me, “If you have any questions about sex, you can always ask us”, and I remember it being really obvious in that moment that I was not supposed to ask any questions. It was very, very clear to me. I remember even at, I think I was about 11 or 12 years old, even at that young age thinking, “Why are my parents so embarrassed by this?” I did have questions. I was really curious, just kind of naturally curious like children are, and I really wanted to have that conversation, and I remember feeling, it was so strange that my parents who I was very close with and we’re very open and communicative and pretty much every other way, really didn’t want to have this conversation with me, so that memory really, really stuck with me.

Vanessa Marin: I of course had no idea that sex therapy was a career at age 11, but once I got a little bit older, realized that it was something that I really wanted to continue devoting my life towards.

Chris Rose: Did you become like me? Were you in the self-help section of bookstores and doing your own research?

Vanessa Marin: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I definitely loved just trying to find books, squirrel things away. Actually, my very first sex education, this is pretty bad, but when I was about 15, we lived next to a group of college girls, and one of them got rid of all of their Cosmo Magazines, and so I came home from school and I see this huge stack of Cosmos sitting right next to the recycling bins waiting to get taken out, and that just looked like a treasure trove to me as a teenager, so I squirreled them all back into my room and remember just kind of combing through every page, trying to soak up as much information as I could.

Chris Rose: I found you … Primarily, I was doing research because we just hear from so many men whose primary sexual struggle is what they name performance anxiety, and I found your work and I really love your course, so it’s called The Modern Man’s Guide To Conquering Performance Pressure. Let’s start with what is performance anxiety and why did you choose to use the word performance pressure rather than anxiety?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. I actually hate the term performance anxiety and performance pressure, because I think that they reinforce this idea that sex is about performance.

Chris Rose: Yeah. Yeah.

Vanessa Marin: I’m kind of constantly going back and forth on the name of that course. I might try to change it in the future, but there’s really not a great way to describe what these issues are without creating that idea that sex is about performance, that we need to perform like robots absolutely perfectly every second of the time. I go back and forth on that a lot, but the main concerns that the course addresses are erectile and orgasmic challenges, so having difficulty getting hard or staying hard, orgasming faster than you want, feeling like you’re not in control of your orgasm, or the other end of the spectrum, which is taking a really long time to orgasm or not being able to have an orgasm with a partner at all.

Chris Rose: Why do you think this is so common, because for a lot of guys, it’s not … The first thing we do is rule out medical concerns around circulation. Why is this so common when the sexual functioning is there, but then in the act of sex, it seems to go haywire? What are some of the things that trigger this, and how does it show up?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. I think that it’s actually over, maybe the last 10 years or so. I think that performance anxiety is something that’s really been greatly on the rise for, not just men, for all people. I think there’s a really increasing sense of anxiety that most of us feel about making sure that we’re doing this right and having our bodies perform exactly the way that we want them to do, do exactly the things that we want them to do in the moments that we want them to do them, and so that’s what I’ve really noticed has been contributing to this issue. I think the reality is that all men are going to experience occasional performance issues.

Vanessa Marin: I say this over and over and over again in the course, but our bodies aren’t robots. We’re not machines. We’re not perfectly calibrated to do the exact things that we want to do, and so I think a lot of men understand rationally, “Okay, this is something that happens.” It’s common, but I think that level of perfectionism and the pressure on this idea of performance has really increased that anxiety that a lot of men feel, and so something that maybe in a different world, they might have been able to recognize, “Hey, I was really tired that time, or I just wasn’t feeling at that time. It’s okay. We’ll try again next time.”

Vanessa Marin: I think it’s instead, causing that anxiety to snowball, getting worse and worse and worse and more and more intense, and then creating much more serious issues than it really needed to have been in the first place.

Chris Rose: Yeah. Do you see this as a cultural issue and kind of how we construct the idea of what the sexual experience is supposed to look like and what the male’s role in that experience is supposed to be? Like how much of this is a cultural myth versus a personal issue?

Vanessa Marin: I think a huge, huge portion of it is just a cultural myth that we’ve all internalized, so sex has always been something that’s been difficult for people to talk about. As a society, we really, really struggled with it, and we’ve paid the consequences for the ways that we talk about it, that we approach it on a personal level, and so there are a lot of different factors that get involved. There’s porn, there’s general perfectionism that we’re dealing with the ways that we live our lives and more public ways, so there are a lot of different factors that all buy into it, but I think the vast majority of it is really a cultural issue.

Chris Rose: Yeah. It’s so interesting because it’s so much of this is around the idea of getting erect to have intercourse on demand, and yet, we know that vaginal intercourse is not the way most women reach orgasm, nor find the most pleasurable, so both people are kind of lost in this myth and struggle. One of the things I love in your course is you have a section for the partners, and I love you to talk about what role the partners play in creating the anxiety or in creating the pressure, and how we can change our reactions to something like a soft penis, because so many of the partners I talk to internalize that as they are not desirable enough, and therefore the pain of rejection sets in. What is the partner’s role in starting to work through this?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. These are great questions. I am really upfront in the course itself. I kind of talk about the fact that I don’t have a penis, so I don’t know the firsthand experience of having performance issues, but as a woman who has slept with men, I have had the experience of having plenty of partners that had performance issues, and I have done absolutely every single horrible thing that a partner can do in those kinds of circumstances. I’ve taken it incredibly personally.

Vanessa Marin: I have cried, I have pouted, I have questioned whether my partner was attracted to me or whether they desired me, I was cold or kind of shut someone out, so I have done all of those things and I really get it from the perspective of the partner. I’ve learned my lesson and I behave a lot better now, but I like to share that perspective with the guys who are going through the course and also in that section of the course, that’s meant to be shown to the partner, just sort of acknowledging, “Look, this is stuff that we all mess up.” I messed it up really, really, really badly and I caused a lot of hurt to a lot of my partners that I deeply regret now, and I think it really comes down to recognizing that we all feel pressure around our sex lives. We all want to know that we’re doing a good job. We all want to know that we’re desired by our partners, that we’re desirable, and that anxiety that we all feel often leads us to doing hurtful things or acting in ways that just don’t serve us or our partners.

Vanessa Marin: That leads to one of those, the exact kind of situation that you’re mentioning with a soft penis, that a lot of men are so focused on being able to get hard to power into intercourse, when the reality is that that’s not the most pleasurable activity for a woman, and so it just we set ourselves up for these situations or we’re sabotaging ourselves, or we’re pressuring ourselves to do these things that actually aren’t going to bring us the most pleasure, or where there are other options that we could pursue, other avenues that we could go down, when I think it, yeah, just kind of comes back to recognizing we’re all kind of in this together. We’re all struggling with this in our own unique and individual ways, but it’s something that we can have healthier conversations about and try to get out of those patterns.

Chris Rose: As you mentioned, this is, you call it a near universal human experience, so we only talk about it really in terms of people who have penises. What is the equivalent term used in sex therapy for the female experience of this? Is there one?

Vanessa Marin: I don’t think there is one. I do use performance anxiety or performance pressure or sometimes perfectionism with my female clients. The ways that I see my female clients experience this is around orgasm, where a lot of women just feel an immense amount of pressure to be able to orgasm and to be able to kind of control their orgasm in the same sorts of ways that men want to, where it’s happening in the exact same moment and the exact right way. A lot of women feel pressured to have orgasms from intercourse, which like we just talked about is not the most pleasurable activity for a woman, so women feel that anxiety too. It’s just in different contexts in different ways, but it’s the same basic anxiety there.

Chris Rose: In the course, you talk about cognitive distortions. Can you talk about what some of the common cognitive distortions are and why they’re important to identify?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. I think it’s really important for us to pay attention to the specific thoughts that are going through our heads.

Chris Rose: Yeah.

Vanessa Marin: One of the concerns that a lot of my clients tell me is that they get really lost in their own thoughts, especially in the moment where they’ll start just getting very anxious about what is happening or what they think might happen, and there’s this feeling that their thoughts kind of take control, take over them, their thoughts become powerful, and so I work with cognitive distortions as a way to recognize these are just thought patterns that you’re having, but we can take a look at those specific thoughts, sort of dismantle them and try to help you think in more reasonable, more practical and more helpful ways that aren’t going to sabotage your abilities in the moment. A big one that comes up for a lot of men is catastrophizing, where they think that the absolute worst case scenario is going to happen that he’s not going to be able to get hard. He’s going to be completely soft, his partner’s going to laugh in his face, she’s going to go tell all of her friends about it, and he’s going to be the social outcast for the rest of his life. That’s an example of one where again, we can get in with that thought and dismantle. Okay.

Vanessa Marin: Yes. Going soft is not a desirable outcome, but it certainly doesn’t mean that all of these other chain of events that are going to unfold from that.

Chris Rose: Or that sex is over, right?

Vanessa Marin: Absolutely.

Chris Rose: One of your strategies you talk about is stay with her. In the moment of sexual connection, when it’s not going the way you want to, you urge people to stay connected and stay present with one another. What does that do? What does that change for the relationship?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. That technique … A lot of the techniques that I share, they’re really inspired by actual sessions that I’ve had with clients, and so I had a session that I very vividly remember with a couple where the man was talking about losing his erection in the moment and was going on and on about what a horrible thing this was and how he was so ashamed of it, and so upset, and he knew this isn’t what his partner wanted, and she must think he’s not a man, and really, just all these thoughts kind of spiraling and snowballing in the session. I remember his partner just having this look on her face, and I was very curious about what that look meant, and finally, she just sort of blurted out, “That’s what you think I want? That’s what you think I care about?” She told him, “I don’t care about you having this perfectly timed erection or this perfectly hard erection. That’s not what bothers me about the performance issues that we’ve been experiencing. What bothers me is that it feels like you completely check out mentally and emotionally in that moment, and I feel like I’m left alone. I feel like you’re in your own head, lost in your own thoughts, doing your own thing, and I’m just there alone when sex is supposed to be about connection, about two people coming together and being able to share a moment with each other.” That’s what I was getting at with that technique is this idea that I think a lot of men have these ideas of what their partners expect, and again, the idea is perfectionism, and the reality is that it’s not what most partners care about. Most partners want to feel like there’s some sort of connection between the two of you in the moment, so sex is about connection, not about perfection. That’s what that technique is all about, is trying to help you realize that even if things aren’t going exactly how you want them to go, even if your body isn’t cooperating exactly with what your brain wants to do, that you can still be connected to your partner and feel intimacy, feel pleasure, have fun, and just be there together.

Chris Rose: And change it up, change up sexual activities, and I think relieving that pressure on intercourse, we talk about this so often of creating a wider repertoire. This can include things like men receiving prostate play, going to hand jobs and oral sex rather than intercourse, having a wider playbook and taking the pressure off of intercourse can be game-changing for people. What role do you see porn having in this? I know this is a sticky conversation and there’s a lot of debate about porn addiction. Do you feel like there’s a link between either the psychological implications of seeing constantly erect penises on demand like bringing that entertainment into an expectation, or is there something going on physiologically with how men are masturbating to porn? Where do you weigh in on that?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. There’s definitely a lot of stuff that gets wrapped up in that. I mean, overall, I do think that porn can be a perfectly healthy, normal part of any individual or any couple’s sex life, but I think it’s just important like with anything else, for us to be thoughtful about the specific ways that we let it into our lives, so I think that a lot of performance anxiety can come from the ways we see sex depicted in porn. I try to be really clear when I’m talking to my clients that porn is meant to be entertainment. Porn is not meant to be a realistic depiction of what sex actually looks like.

Vanessa Marin: It’s the same way as the way we see love and romance in the movies. It’s meant to be entertainment. It’s not really how it actually works in real life. I think that if you’re watching a lot of porn, it can be easy to forget that, and you kind of start to think, “This is what sex is supposed to look like. This is what I’m supposed to do.”

Vanessa Marin: I do think that porn, we’re lucky that we have much more varied porn these days, so you are seeing more activities, a wider range of things happening. There’s a really exciting sub-genre of like indie porn, filmmakers who are trying to make much more realistic porn, which I really love, but I do think most of your mainstream porn is pretty focused on a rock-hard penis and moving straight along into intercourse as quickly as possible, so I do think there’s risk of a feeling like that’s what’s expected of you, that’s how you need to perform, is like this porn star who has the benefit of camera angles and multiple takes, and all sorts of other tricks and techniques for making the film look good. Then, yeah, in terms of the way that you masturbate, I do think that that can be a big issue for a lot of men, is that porn is fun to watch. It’s fun to watch two beautiful people doing really sexy things with each other, and I think one of the risks of that though is it can be very easy to get so focused on what we’re watching on the screen that we lose touch with our own bodies, what’s going on in our own bodies, and so a lot of men will tell me, “Yeah, when I’m watching porn, I’m kind of lost in that scene. I’m not really even paying attention that much to what I’m doing”, so that can lead to a lot of issues that develop when you’re trying to be with a partner, anywhere from not feeling turned on because you don’t have that really intense, explicit visual stimulation to just not understanding what happens in your body as you start to build up arousal and near orgasm, so it can cost a lot of different issues.

Chris Rose: A lot of the guys we talk to, some of them are experiencing lack of erection when they wanted. Others are experiencing the loss of erection when they get to certain levels of arousal. They almost find that there’s like a ceiling on how much arousal they can feel, and then the anxiety kicks in. What is the nuance there in the difference between being able to get erect in the first place versus losing it midstream?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. I mean, they both really just come down to anxiety, just anxiety surfacing in different ways. A lot of times, I’ll have men tell me that they will lose their erection, sometimes trying to switch sexual positions. Just having some sort of change can retrigger that anxiety of, “Oh, great. I got here, but what happens if I try to switch positions or try to do something a little bit different?”

Vanessa Marin: Sometimes it can happen when the man notices his arousal really starting to increase, that he just starts getting that anxiety kicking in of, “Oh, am I going to be able to maintain this throughout the entire time?”, or he might be feeling anxiety about, “Am I going to orgasm too quickly?”, so I think it just really all comes back to anxiety experienced in different ways.

Chris Rose: What is the word anxiety mean specifically? Like we think about social anxiety, anxiety around flying. How do you define anxiety here?

Vanessa Marin: Oh, that’s a really good question. I actually remember a teacher of mine when I was in grad school describing anxiety as excitement without breath.

Chris Rose: Yes.

Vanessa Marin: I really loved that description. It definitely felt like it fit a lot of different circumstances in my own life, but, yeah, I think anxiety is definitely a sense of there’s a heightened experience that you’re having, there can be a discomfort with it, and I think going along with it, a lot of us lose our contact to ourselves. We lose the sense of grounding, which breath can definitely play a huge role in just helping us feel that connection and feel that grounding, but it can feel extremely uncomfortable for a lot of people. A lot of people can feel like they have to do something. They want to try to get rid of it or fix it or address it, but there’s also this feeling of paralysis or confusion that goes along with it.

Chris Rose: It’s so interesting to really unpack the idea that excitement and anxiety are adjacent and that the excitement we rely on for arousal can quickly flip into an anxiety that shuts it down.

Vanessa Marin: Absolutely. Yeah. I thought it was such a great description, and also a reminder that breath is just one of the best things that we can do whenever we’re feeling anxiety, really just to improve our sexual experience or our life experience. I mean, breathing sounds like, I mean, it is the most fundamental activity that we do as humans, but far too often, we lose our contact to it and we can really experience a lot of different kind of side effects as a result, but breathing is one of the best ways. If you’re in the moment, you’re starting to feel anxious, you’re starting to worry about your performance, all of that. Being able to come back in your body and just take slow, deep, measured breaths is one of the most effective ways to really decrease any sort of issues from going on.

Chris Rose: You are talking to a breath evangelical here.

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. It’s really funny, a lot of times, I’ll have a session with a client and I’ll start talking about breath, and I can kind of see their eyes start to glaze over, or sometimes people will tell me, “It’s just not the sexiest suggestion.”

Chris Rose: Yeah.

Vanessa Marin: A lot of times, people are looking for me to give them some magical technique like, “Okay. Well, here’s what you do. You tap your right knee with your middle finger three times, and then all your problems are solved.” I know that breathing doesn’t sound very exciting or very sexy, but far too often, it ends up being really the most successful technique that you can employ.

Chris Rose: Then, when people try it, they realize how magical it is.

Vanessa Marin: Yup.

Chris Rose: It’s so deceptive and how simple it is.

Vanessa Marin: Yeah.

Chris Rose: We teach erotic breathwork in our Mindful Sex course, and I know you include Mindfulness in your course. What do you see as the correlation between mindfulness and sexuality?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. I think mindfulness is just a really great way for us to practice coming more into our bodies and just getting more grounded and more connected to ourselves. I think pretty much every single person that you talk to has had the experience of their brain feeling like it’s racing, their thoughts feeling kind of out of control, and not knowing how to sort of settle that all back down and come back into themselves and feel more grounded, more present in the moment. Mindfulness to me is a way to practice, practice that slowing down, and to really be conscious and purposeful about trying to train yourself to be that way, recognizing that we’re basically training ourselves all day every day to be very distracted, and scattered, and multitasking, and all of this stuff, and that it’s really important for us to balance that out with making a conscious effort to come back into ourselves, into our bodies and into our breath.

Chris Rose: Then, the piece of bringing non-judgment to our sexualities is the work of a lifetime.

Vanessa Marin: Oh, yeah.

Chris Rose: I think one of the things that we don’t talk about a lot with male sexuality is histories of sexual trauma, and I’m wondering how often this surfaces in your sessions where when you start unpacking the root causes of performance pressure, you start uncovering traumatic experiences that men have not had the opportunity to work through. Is this something you see?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. It is something that I see, and I think it’s not something that we talk about very often as a society, so that can lead to a lot of stress and anxiety for men who have had those kinds of experiences, that when we talk about sexual trauma and sexual abuse, we talk about women, and so a lot of men feel very left out of this conversation and like their experiences aren’t validated or aren’t real even in a sense.

Chris Rose: Yeah.

Vanessa Marin: I’ve definitely worked with a good number of sexual abuse survivors who are male, and they all talk about that same sort of feeling like, “I feel like I’m the only person who’s experienced this. I feel like such an outcast or such a freak in a way”, so I think it’s just so harmful and really unfortunate that we don’t give that more attention and more awareness because sexual abuse, we know regardless of the gender of the person that it’s perpetrated against is incredibly harmful, so it’s definitely something that we need to talk more about, that we need to have more resources about and more awareness about.

Chris Rose: Yeah. Yeah, I just am constantly fighting this idea that men sexuality is simple and easy for men, because those of us kind of behind the curtain see such complexity and such depth of emotion behind sex, that we don’t often give men the benefit of the doubt that they have. What do you want people to know from all of your years of working with men, with women, with couples?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah.

Chris Rose: What do you want men to know about their sexuality?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. I think you started talking about it right there, is that it’s just as complex and nuanced as female sexuality is, that it’s okay for men to have their own struggles, their own challenges, their own insecurities and anxieties, and it’s important to recognize those things and to give yourself the time and the space to work through them, because the more that you pressure yourself to have this performance perfectionism and to behave in these ways that you think are expected of you, the more you cut out the entirety of your experience, and cutting off parts of yourself, not allowing certain parts of yourself to be expressed, and there’s really so much to explore. There’s so much to sexuality beyond having a rock-hard penis or a perfectly timed orgasm.

Chris Rose: That kind of is the question like, why not just take Viagra? Wouldn’t that solve everything? Like how do you relate to Viagra as a tool rather than a solution?

Vanessa Marin: I think that Viagra is fantastic for men who have purely physiological reasons why they’re not able to get hard, so it’s a great drug and I know there are a lot of men whose lives have been changed by it. The problem is that we are prescribing it to men who don’t have purely physiological reasons for their erectile issues, and Viagra doesn’t work in those circumstances. Not only that, but I’ve worked with a fair number of men who have taken Viagra, thinking it’s this sure thing. It’s a guaranteed erection, and then when it doesn’t work for them, it creates even more anxiety and more fear, so I think it’s just it’s really important for us to recognize when it’s actually supposed to be used and recognizing that it doesn’t apply to probably a vast majority of the situations of erectile issues, that there are lots of other reasons that men might experience problems with that, with his his erection, and Viagra is not going to be the cure for all of those.

Chris Rose: Doing this deeper work, from the people you’ve worked with that have done this journey who have worked through the course and made these kind of attitudinal shifts, what are some of the outcomes you’re seeing beyond, “I’m able to get erect more frequently?” What are the reports from the field?

Vanessa Marin: Yeah. The reports are really talking about a widening experience of what sexuality can really be, of what sex can really be. A lot of men will come back to me and say, “I had such a narrow view of what sex could be for me and of what I was capable of. I was so focused on these very specific aspects of it”, so really, this just kind of the whole horizon opens up of recognizing that there’s so much more, and not only are these other expressions of sexuality. These are not second best, like if you can’t get hard, you can do this stuff.

Vanessa Marin: If you can’t orgasm at the right time, you can do this stuff, but that it’s actually much more meaningful, much more pleasurable. That always excites me to hear that, and I think a lot of men also tell me that they developed a different kind of relationship with their body, that they felt like previously, it felt like they were always fighting with their body. On totally different teams, they were opponents, and now that they felt like they had more connection to their own bodies, a deeper understanding of their own bodies, and that really permeated through a lot of different parts of their lives. I’ve had a lot of clients talk to me about even physical pain issues, that once they learned this different way of relating to their body, they were also able to address the pain in a different way, so it goes beyond sex, which is really awesome and exciting to hear.

Chris Rose: Thank you so much for putting together this course. It’s so nice to have a resource to recommend to our community who are struggling with these issues, and it’s just beautifully comprehensive and I really highly recommend it, and I am excited to talk to you about your other offerings down the road.

Vanessa Marin: Great. Yeah, thank you so much.

Chris Rose: We will link up to the course in the show notes page and over at PleasureMechanics.com. Vanessa Marin, thank you so much for being with us.

Vanessa Marin: Thank you for having me.

Chris Rose: All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Vanessa. Please remember to check out her course. The link is on the show notes page over at PleasureMechanics.com. If you have any questions about performance anxiety or want to share your story of how it shows up for you and your experience of it, please get in touch with us.

Chris Rose: We will be recording a follow-up episode next week where Charlotte and I will continue this conversation, so get us your questions about performance anxiety, and the best way to do that is to join the community at Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics. P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/PleasureMechanics. This is where we are kind of creating the Pleasure Mechanics online community, and you can be in touch with us and ask questions, and get kind of first dibs at our email box because the truth is as the show has grown, I get hundreds and hundreds of emails a day, and so sometimes, it can take me months to respond to them if I ever get around to them at all, and I’m sorry if I have not responded to your email, but those of you who show your support for this show, even with a dollar a month, we appreciate it. Join our Patreon community and you have direct access to us, and we can respond to those questions and comments and ideas right away. Come on over to Patreon.com/PleasureMechanics, and join us there.

Chris Rose: We will be back with you next week to continue this conversation about conquering performance anxiety, which I think is a cultural project and a personal one. It has to operate on both levels. I hope today’s episode shed some light on your experience, and I would love to hear from you. We’ll be back with you next week with another episode of the Speaking Of Sex with Pleasure Mechanics Podcast. I’m Chris from PleasureMechanics.com. Cheers.

Why You Masturbate The Way You Do : A History Lesson

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Why do so many people struggle with masturbation? Why do so many of us feel a little bit ashamed of solo sex, treating it like a dirty chore rather than a self-love practice that can bring tremendous pleasure and health benefits?

How you masturbate – how much pleasure you give yourself, how creative you are in your solo sex, what parts of your body you allow yourself to touch, how you feel emotionally about masturbation – has everything to do with the past 3000 years of punitive sex culture. We are just barely emerging out of a culture that punished masturbation and forbade sexual pleasure of any kind. We have to take this history seriously before we can fully embrace the sex-positive idea of May as Masturbation Month!

For more about the history of sex culture and how it has influenced your sex life, check out one of my favorite books: Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz

One of the best selling books in the 1720s: Onania; The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, And All its Frightful Consequences, in both Sexes

Hear more about how corn flakes and graham crackers were invented as part of the anti-masturbation crusade

Check out a gallery of anti-masturbation devices here

The “Jugum Penis” anti-masturbation device. Designed to prevent nocturnal erections and masturbation.

Chastity belts for both sexes were marketed as anti-masturbation devices