podcast — Page 4 — Pleasure Mechanics

Taking Turns In Bed : How To Practice The Skills of Giving and Receiving Pleasure

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

Taking turns in bed is one of the most powerful reframes you can make to gain access to way more pleasure and connection.

Taking turns is yet another gift from our erotic massage lineage – on a massage table it is clear how we can take turns giving and receiving touch, centering the needs and desires of one body at a time so we can lavish it with as much presence and pleasure as possible.

Taking turns is not about “you do me and then I’ll do you” – it is about dropping into a shared erotic experience with focused attention. Listen in to find out how this simple idea of taking turns can emerge in sex, love and life.

To practice the skills of giving and receiving pleasure, we highly encourage you to explore the Three Minute Game. Get our recorded walkthrough by signing up for our newsletter below!

Resources

Betty Martin’s Wheel Of Consent : Free Training Videos, Courses and More

Podcast Transcript:

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I am Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are the Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we have explicit, soulful conversations. Some have called it passionate and compassionate conversations about everything you need to know about sex, love, relationships and surviving this world.

Chris Rose: 00:23 Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com where you will find all of our free resources waiting for you. Go to pleasure mechanics.com/free and enroll in our free online course, The Erotic Essentials so we can get started with you right away. Let us get started with you.

Chris Rose: 00:44 On today’s podcast. We’re talking about taking turns in bed. Yet another one of these gifts that comes to us through our erotic massage lineage. We’ve been talking a lot about these perspectives and strategies that we learned because Charlotte and I were both trained in erotic massage and how that perspective changed everything for us I think. How we think about sex and fucking and loving and living. We keep coming across these gifts as we explore our work and so we just want to articulate them and share them with you. Because sometimes when I get your emails and I start digging into your struggles, it becomes clear to me that shifts of perspectives and as I’m saying shifts a lot, it’s a hard word to say, changing your perspective can make dramatic changes in your lived experience.

Chris Rose: 01:46 In the academic world we have a word called “praxis,” and praxis is one of my favorite words that I geeked out on in college that I kind of want to get tattooed on my body. Because praxis talks about the relationship between theory, the ideas we have about something, action, the behaviors we take, and knowledge. And knowledge is another word for experience. Your erotic knowledge is a sum of your experiences. And so sometimes we want to intervene on the actions and sometimes we want to intervene on the theories.

Chris Rose: 02:20 So today is a theory intervention where we’re going to talk about taking turns in bed. Taking turns in bed, taking turns at pleasure, taking turns in the role of giver and receiver and what that means for your entire sex life and your perspective on sex itself.

Charlotte Rose: 02:42 I love this so much because when we’re having “regular sex,” whatever that looks like for you, there is sometimes so much going on. There’s so much to pay attention to. There’s your body, the other person’s body, how they’re connecting, how our thoughts are running wild perhaps. All of the feelings that we’re having. There is a lot going on. And slowing things way down and identifying that one of you is giving and one of you is receiving really allows each one of you to drop into that experience and just do that. And when we do that, we are able to slow down and really feel our feelings, feel our body, feel the sensations that we’re experiencing. It simplifies matters.

Chris Rose: 03:34 And taking turns doesn’t mean you do me and I’ll do you. It’s not waiting in line for a ride. It doesn’t mean checking out of the experience when it’s not your turn. As Charlotte says, it means going even more deep into the roles of giving and receiving so you both can be even more present, more aware and feel more.

Chris Rose: 03:54 This dynamic is so clear to us on the massage table. When you have a massage table set up, one person lies down and one person works at the table walking around at all angles, massaging and touching and being with the receiver’s body. And that entire session, from the first conversation about it, to the conversation afterwards and the drink of water as you’re sitting up and coming to after your hour session, is all for the benefit and experience of the receiver. The giver is there in service to that experience, which doesn’t mean you can check out. The giver goes deep into their role of giving, brings all of their skills, all of their presence, all of their attention to usher in the desired experience into the recipient’s body.

Charlotte Rose: 04:47 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Rose: 04:48 What a gift. What a gift. And that’s true for all massage when done well, because certainly you can go to a massage and the giver is not present and they’re just going through a routine. And you don’t feel that they are here for me in every way kind of feeling. But when you have that feeling it is special, you can feel it, it is palpable. And then when we go to a erotic massage we’re bringing that attention, that full presence and attention and skillfulness into the eroticism, into arousal. And then we take that skill off the massage table and bring it with us into bed.

Chris Rose: 05:30 And this is what I noticed. So just to take you back to our early twenties, Charlotte and I were both living in San Francisco and without having met one another yet, we’re both getting trained in massage. And I was being trained directly in the Body Electric lineage. Charlotte got another training and then entered the Body Electric lineage. But as I learned erotic massage, I’d come home on the weekends and have sex with my friends. I was living in an apartment with two gay men and we were in this play party community and so I was having lots of sex with lots of people. And as soon as I learned massage, everything about my sex changed. And I started bringing that focus of attention and that taking turns mentality into sex. And meanwhile I was in a kinky community, and we see this same dynamic in the kink community where often there is a top and a bottom, a giver and a receiver, and you orchestrate the scene around one person’s desires.

Chris Rose: 06:29 So this combination of educations for me allowed me to create these sex scenes with people where I was like, “Tell me what you want. What would feel best for you right now? I am totally at your service. Ask and you shall receive.”

Chris Rose: 06:45 And that was delightful for me. But then when those same people, my same lovers turned that attention on me and was like, “Well, what do you want?”

Chris Rose: 06:54 I was like, “Uh! I don’t know! I’m a survivor. I don’t know.” And that question is really scary.

Chris Rose: 06:59 And so this is part of the dynamic we want to talk about is, the fantasy of just giving and receiving with full attention and presence and one person can just lie back and luxuriate and receive. That’s a fantasy. How does the reality play out in your life when it comes to giving and receiving? Which one of these roles is easier for you? What emotions come up? And this is where the magic starts to happen within a relationship, where you can start working with this dynamic, giving one another deeper presence and attention, and going through all of the emotions and stuff that will come up during that process.

Chris Rose: 07:40 What was the transition like for you when you learned massage and then erotic massage skills? How did it change your sex life?

Charlotte Rose: 07:47 Hmm. I feel like I really got to see from the people I was giving massage to that there was a breadth of skillset to receiving. It was really interesting to guide people through a massage and then an erotic experience for eight hours a day and see people one after the other and see how… I was doing fairly similar things with each body, and different people could take that pleasure in to different extents. And that was really fascinating to observe and see the skill set of receiving. And also to be able to go deep into my role of giving, because the more that I meditated or danced beforehand to really get myself in my own body and in my own awareness, in my own presence, I was able to give from a deeper place, from a place where I could listen more with my hands. And then I was able to take people to higher levels of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 08:55 Right. So I just want to paint the training grounds of our erotic skills a little bit. Charlotte was doing erotic massage primarily on men for six to eight sessions a day, a few days a week. Meanwhile, I was doing all these sessions with survivors, with women, with couples and I’m teaching workshops where I got to see 20 people at a time, sometimes on massage tables. And when you see all of these bodies you get to see the patterns. And this piece of depth of role of giver and receiver was so apparent. And it’s one of these things that we can just bring right home to how we love one another. Because in each of these roles, giver and receiver, you can be distracted and barely there and going through the motions, or you can be so present that you feel the quiver of your lovers pleasure at the fingertips. It’s right there at every breath and you are riding that together.

Chris Rose: 09:56 And when you’re both dropped into your role, when you’re both dropped in, that’s where you meet, right? So it’s not this thing of we’re on separate experiences, you’re the giver, I’m the receiver, you’re doing something, I’m not. You’re meeting right there at the point of touch, at the point of breath where they arousal is growing and you’re right there sharing that experience. And I think if you think through your sex life, you’ve had these moments, whether you’ve done it purposefully or not, with skill or not. A lot of us have found these moments sometimes by accident and you find yourself right there and engaged with someone, and at that moment you’re like right in the pleasurable experience with full presence together and it feels fucking amazing. And we crave it and we try to recreate it and sometimes when it doesn’t happen, it can feel deeply frustrating or isolating or alienating. So this is a way of doing that on purpose by, as Charlotte said, splitting up these roles so you have one thing to focus on.

Chris Rose: 11:02 My favorite example of this is the ultimate distracting position is the 69 position, right? Where someone’s genitals are right in your face, your genitals are right in someone’s face. Sensation is really high. You’re trying to manage body positions, you’re trying to support your weight. You’re worried about, “Am I going to come too soon? Not soon enough?” All of those things streaming through you. And for most of us, most sex is that giving and receiving at the same time. Like pay attention to it all, a cacophony of sensations and feelings and emotions and distractions. It’s a lot to pay attention to. When we slow it down, when we say, “What do you want tonight? What can I give you tonight?” it allows you to focus on one thing at a time and therefore go deeper.

Chris Rose: 11:49 So there’s two ways to think about this giving and receiving. And when we paint the picture of the massage table, giving and receiving looks a lot like who is giving the touch and who is receiving the touch. Who is giving the touch and who is receiving the touch. And this was the basis of the Body Electric lineage. And out of that, this game that we’re going to share with you, the 3-Minute Game, came as an exercise of saying, “For three minutes, how do you want to be touched?”

Chris Rose: 12:23 And then you ask your partner that, they make a very specific request, “Please massage my arms with moderate to deep pressure. I have a sore elbow.” Right? So you lay out your request and then you spend three minutes just doing that touch. And we do this in massage classes, we do this as part of sex coaching. It’s a fabulous exercise because with three minutes on the timer, most people can focus on something for one to three minutes. And sometimes I even drop this to like one minute or 90 seconds.

Chris Rose: 12:55 But when you’re asked what do you want for three minutes, you then have to go into yourself and say, “I have a talented masseur asking me what I want for three minutes. What is my body craving?” So there’s that skill of articulating what you want and asking for it out loud.

Chris Rose: 13:14 A woman named Betty Martin, who was part of one of the very early sexological bodywork trainings that I was teaching with Joe Kramer, founder of Body Electric School, during that training started complicating this and saying, “Wait, wait, wait. Giver and receiver isn’t nuanced enough because you don’t always give for the receiver’s pleasure. Who is it for? Who is the touch serving? We have to start asking that question.” And thus she opened up kind of a new axis and what she now calls the Wheel of Consent. And for the past 13 years since I first met her, she’s been really developing this area and offers trainings on the Wheel of Consent.

Chris Rose: 13:57 And that asks both, in a 3-Minute Game, “How do you want to be touched, and how do you want to touch me?”

Chris Rose: 14:07 We start activating that access of, “Who is this for,” and, “What is it like to touch for my pleasure, to give touch for my own gratification?”

Chris Rose: 14:21 And I love this access. I love how she’s opened this up because it really opens up that conversation of, “Who is this for? Who’s pleasure are we centering?” And I think of this as whose desires are we centering for this erotic event? And I think this is what the kink community asks us, right? Because in the kink community there’s the top and the bottom, but whose desires are being centered is really important. Is the bottom, the submissive, on their knees because they like it, or because the top wants them on their knees? Or both, right? Because you can’t make that assumption, who is it for? So who’s doing what and who is it for, become the questions of giving and receiving.

Charlotte Rose: 15:05 And hearing that it’s possible to give touch so that you can take your own pleasure can be really challenging to hear because we live in a world where there is sexual violence and we’re really trying hard to not do that. And that’s why Betty Martin talks about the Wheel of Consent, that it’s so important to really have these explicit conversations and agreements made before you start any kind of touch so you both have agreed to whatever you’re doing and that there’s clarity around that. Because once you have clarity, then you can really say yes to something. Otherwise it can be really murky and not clear and it can start feeling a little crummy.

Chris Rose: 15:49 A classic example of this to me is when someone’s like, “Hey, do you want a shoulder rub?”

Chris Rose: 15:54 And you’re like, “Yeah, that sounds nice. I’ll take a shoulder rub.”

Chris Rose: 15:58 And you start getting the shoulder rub and then the hands start drifting to the breasts. They are changing the agreement and taking touch that they want for their hands, for their pleasure, without your agreement, right? And making that dynamic consensual turns out to be really important, and I think it’s so important we’re going to do a whole episode on it. Because this is that place of take, of “take and allow” is what Betty Martin calls it and so many of us want to be taken. The idea that someone finds our body so desirable that they want to touch it and eat it and fuck it for their own pleasure can feel really good if you want that person too. But being taken without consent and without mutual desire feels awful. So that’s a really important dynamic to get right, to do consensually for it to feel awesome.

Chris Rose: 16:57 Right now we’re focusing on this give and receive, where the touch is being done for and centering the pleasure of the person receiving. This dynamic is boundless in the pleasure it can bring you, because when we each start tuning in, “What does my body want right now? What would feel good to it right now?”

Chris Rose: 17:21 Given the current context, given where I’m just… As the right now appears moment to moment and we have a partner who has skilled hands and full presence and saying, “How can I serve you? What do you want?” the pleasure is endless.

Chris Rose: 17:37 Because you can start saying, “Oh, I just need to be held and listened to. Ooh, a shoulder massage would feel really good right now. I’ve had a long day at the office. My butt could use a lot of work. I want to be fucked really deeply and rough tonight. I just want tender, loving touch and maybe go down on me while I weep.”

Chris Rose: 17:56 Your vocabulary of once opens up because you’re invited into this experience in something as simple as the 3-Minute Game. And the 3-Minute Game, so we’ll set it up for you, and I think maybe we’ll record a practice of it and people can then try it on their own. And we’ll have that available in the show notes page of this episode. I’m just like, I throw these things in as we’re recording. Charlotte’s looking at me like, “Oh will we?” Yes we will. We will record a practice of this game because I think it’s a really important one.

Chris Rose: 18:29 And the 3-Minute Game often starts at the kitchen table. This is not in bed, this is just in a relaxed or on the couch. And you set a timer, which is an important tool. It’s not arbitrary. Having a timer allows you to focus and then allows that boundary of time. So you say, “For three minutes, how can I serve you? What do you want? What kind of touch would you like?”

Chris Rose: 18:54 And then the range of opportunity is there for the person to go inside and think about what would feel good and say it out loud, to ask for it. And then built into the exercise is a negotiation. So the person giving can have boundaries too. “Is that a touch you can show up for willingly? Are you available for that? Can you do that right now?”

Chris Rose: 19:18 And then you negotiate and you say, “Well I would love to stroke your hair. What position would feel good for us?” And you do it. You set the timer and you notice what three minutes can bring you. That is another gift of that is you notice in your body how three minutes of intentional, affectionate touch can completely shift your neurochemistry. And this is why, for example, in our couples massage course we have five minute follow-along guides because we’ve noticed over the years, five minutes can completely change how you feel in your body and open up whole new yeses.

Chris Rose: 19:55 So the 3-Minute Game, lest it sound clinical, right? Because some people can hear this and be like, “I don’t want to play a 3-Minute Game. I want to fuck,” right?

Chris Rose: 20:05 The 3-Minute Game as a practice to activate these skills, to show you the power of the giving and receiving role, then builds into things like, “Honey, what are you up for tonight? What are you into?” And that is such a different invitation than, “Can I get sex tonight?” This is a primary thing for so many couples and we’ve talked about it before so I won’t go on a huge rant, I promise. But for so many couples, any sort of affectionate touch is an assumption of intercourse. We’re going to start on this ride. It finishes with intercourse and if you’re not up for intercourse, you don’t get on the ride.

Chris Rose: 20:45 If instead, affectionate touch is just affectionate touch, which then may lead to more affectionate touch. It might lead to one of you getting off. It might lead to both of you getting off. It becomes just a starter. It becomes an invitation just to be in that moment together, just to touch for the pleasure and connection of that touch. It really changes everything. And it’s not clinical. You start this as a practice to build skills to become a more skillful lover.

Charlotte Rose: 21:15 Yeah. It’s such a wonderful opportunity to have this little game where you can practice and activate your communication. Asking for what you want, setting boundaries, making requests. They’re just such a wonderful skills that we can all use, developing. And it’s a short amount of time. It is powerful and it’s interesting just to see what comes up, to see what you discover about yourself, your partner and what feels good. No major sexual expectations, just an exploration. So I’m so excited for you guys to explore this.

Chris Rose: 21:51 And beyond the game. So as we build the skills through the game, through these experiments, through short little experiments, you then build these skills as lovers. And I want to paint the picture a little bit of what this looks like as lovers. Because the giving and receiving, it’s not just about the game for skills, it’s about a whole model of having sex together. Where it’s not, “We’re just going to fall together and collide and roll around and pay attention to everything at once,” and hope both people’s needs are being met.

Chris Rose: 22:24 Giving and receiving, when you break down the roles and you go into sex, and this can all be done very passionately, you’re kissing, you’re touching one another, and there opens this conversation of like, “What are you into right now? What do you want right now? Show me, guide me.”

Chris Rose: 22:42 And there’s this skill you develop where you trust one another, that taking turns is not waiting for your turn. I really want to say that again. It’s not like, “Let me get you off and then you get me off.” It’s not one for one. There’s no scoreboard. It’s just this open opportunity to be like, “I am here for you. Let me serve you right now.” And this can be… So session by session, you can devote a whole session, a whole evening, a whole weekend to centering one person’s desires and pleasure. What a gift that would be, where you arrange a whole arc of time centering and lavishing one person and your attention, getting their favorite takeout, making sure they feel loved and pampered and paid attention to, and then you arrange the whole sex around just pleasuring them. Whether or not you as a giver find pleasure in that, have an orgasm or not, all of those things are negotiable of where you fit into that, but you have centered their needs and desires.

Chris Rose: 23:50 This spirit of giving and receiving can also happen within the arc of one night. It’s like, “Let me take care of you first. We’re going to pamper you. We’re going to lavish you with touch. You are going to be in your afterglow. And then from that place you’re going to turn to me with all of your hunger and take care of me.”

Chris Rose: 24:09 And this is a model that works really well for partners where one person has a vulva and one person has a penis, and if that vulva needs longer, warm up and turn on and really likes all of that play in the beginning of the session, she receives first. And this is the premise of Ian Kerner’s timeless bestselling book, She Comes First. Focus on her pleasure first, unroll that, and then from that place of the person with the vulva being fully aroused, fully turned on, fully activated, ready, then you turn the attention to the penis. It’s a really useful template. Like this is not a script. It’s just a suggestion of an arc of events that rely on this skill of giving and receiving. Because when you’re turning your attention to the person that goes first or the person who’s a focus of attention for the entire night, you’re dropping into that role of giver. And I just want to give a shout out for that because it’s not like this clinical “I’m doing you,” distracted, like, “Blah, I’m not a part of this. I’m feeling bad about that,” kind of nonsense.”

Chris Rose: 25:27 This is a deeply erotic role of turning all of your life force attention, all of your skills, all of your energy, all of your force, all of your power perhaps, onto the desires and needs of your beloved. Even if it’s casual, right? This person you are choosing to share this erotic experience with and you’re like, “I am here for it. I am here for this.” Can you tell I love giving, and receiving is a little harder for me? Giving for me is like the purest form of eroticism, where you’re bringing your entire humanity in the service of pleasure. And it’s through that place, endless pleasure can stream through your body and you can get incredibly aroused and feel so powerful. So when I say being of service, that’s not necessarily submissive, this can be an incredibly powerful role too.

Chris Rose: 26:24 And I hear from a lot of guys that they love to do this. They love to turn their attention onto a pussy, onto a vulva or onto a cock because gay men are just like this too. But a lot of us love to do this, turn all of our attention onto our lover. For a lot of people, the bottleneck in this is people’s ability to receive.

Chris Rose: 26:45 And so I just want to circle back to what you were saying about your massage table and what our capacities are. Because all of those guys were in the presence of one of the most skilled, erotic masseuses in the San Francisco Bay area, probably the world and other galaxies too. And how much pleasure they could receive was up to them. And this is true for so many of us at home where our partner is willing. And this is not true for everyone, like shout out to the people whose partners aren’t willing. There is a different set of things there. But so many people’s partners are willing and we cannot show up and receive. And I know this so intimately because for me when I entered this erotic massage world and I found myself not one erotic masseuse, but surrounded by a room full of them who loved me and were ready to give me any kind of touch.

Chris Rose: 27:36 And on my Friday night I was in a kinky community where I could ask to be strung from the ceiling, my nipples set on fire while I was fucked by three men if I wanted to. That was available for the taking. And all of a sudden I hit this point of like, “Uh, I don’t know how to receive.”

Chris Rose: 27:56 There’s so much to say here about survivors and trauma and if that is true for you, we will have a resource on the show notes page, our free survivor’s toolkit that addresses a ton of this. But it’s also just true for so many of us because we’ve never been asked by a passionate, generous lover with full presence. And we haven’t had the practice of centering our own needs and desires. How often in life do you get to say from this deep place of what’s inside you “This is what I want.” It’s a really advanced skill and so that’s why we start small in the 3-Minute Game, right?

Chris Rose: 28:35 We don’t say, “What do you want? All your sexual fantasies?” That is too big a question for most of us. If we roll it way back, and this is, “I learned this playing the 3-Minute Game in massage classes,” all of a sudden you can get specific. You’re like, “Yeah, my shoulders feel hella tight. Just rub them out.” And you trust them to stay boundaried and so within that boundary, all of this abundance is possible. Within that boundary you can get met fully because you don’t have to be guarded within yourself of what else might happen. What are they going to try? Because they’re not taking, they are giving.

Chris Rose: 29:11 And so if you can say to your lover, “Oh, all I need right now is a long back rub. And then I’m going to clamp my vibrator to my clitoris and have an orgasm and fall asleep. Is that okay?”

Chris Rose: 29:19 And they’re like, “Hell yeah baby. I’m here for it. Let me get the massage oil. Get your vibrator plugged in, let’s go!” You have a clear boundary and you can give yourself fully to that experience. And then tomorrow night there’s a new boundary and a new experience and you talk about it and you open it up and you play together. Woo!

Chris Rose: 29:43 So there’s more to say about giving and receiving. We’ll link to some relevant podcast episodes and resources on the show notes page. We’re going to record the 3-Minute Game practice for you so you have us guiding you. And we hope this conversation has been helpful to you as you integrate this, whether you play the 3-Minute Game or just try it in your bedroom and try to center your lover’s pleasure for a little while, you will notice emotions come up. Emotions about giving, emotions about receiving. And those can be really complicated to unpack. Resentment can rear its head, like, “Why would I give to him? What does he give to me?” And it will reveal shit about your relationship. And this is also why we do these practices, because they give us opportunities to pay attention to things, right?

Chris Rose: 30:32 This practice of centering one person’s desires at a time, of dropping into the role of giving and receiving will reveal stuff not only about yourself. Like I said, as a survivor, it was very hard for me to receive and say what I wanted and trust that I was safe in that. There’s also all of these emotional, relational issues that come up as you do this. And you’ll notice, giving and receiving happens not only in the bedroom but in the relationship, in the family home. What energy, what is being given and what is being received within the relationship, your life? What is your role to giving and receiving in your profession? If you’re a giver all day long, if you’re a social worker, you might want to come home and just be taken, right? And that’s, so many of us, we balance our social life with our sexual fantasies and desires.

Chris Rose: 31:34 But then there’s all these other questions that might come up. And as you are thinking through this, there’s some useful questions to ask about the touch, about the roles of giving and receiving. Questions like, “What is the intention of this touch? Do you want to be relaxed or do you want to be aroused?” Great question to ask.

Charlotte Rose: 31:55 While you’re receiving, a great question to ask yourself is, “What are you paying attention to? Are you paying attention to the sensations in your body? Are you paying attention to your lover’s hands on your body? Are you paying attention to your thoughts?” And you want to redirect your attention back to the sensations in your body or to where the fingertips are touching the contours of your skin.

Chris Rose: 32:21 And as a survivor, sometimes my intention going in was, “I’m just going to pay attention to my breath and stay calm while someone gives me a back massage.” And that was enough to pay attention to and I felt some vague sense of pleasure happening behind that. But my main job was just staying calm and present.

Chris Rose: 32:41 So if you find yourself often distracted during sex, checking out during sex, playing the 3-Minute Game and saying, “Stroke my hair and all I’m going to pay attention to as a receiver is staying calm and present,” that is enough. And that is a noble goal.

Chris Rose: 32:57 And then those things change and all of a sudden you be like, “I want your hands inside me and I want to pay attention to my cervix and what sensations we can find there.” And that takes us back to the erotic massage episode. And you can see how these skills layer upon themselves and start serving you.

Chris Rose: 33:15 When we learn how to pay attention to our lovers hands as they’re massaging our feet, and our foot massage tutorial by the way, is available for free in our Erotic Essentials course. When you can learn how to pay attention to your lover massaging your feet for three minutes, you are developing a really powerful skill that will serve you not only in sex but in your whole life. Because then, as they’re going down on you, if you’ve consented to that and they’re giving all of their attention with their mouth and their breath and their hands to your pussy, you can pay attention to that for three minutes, five minutes, ten minutes, stay with it and notice how much pleasure is available to you.

Chris Rose: 33:57 Because this is the thing and this is that secret, back to the massage table and then we should sign off. But on our massage table, boundless pleasure was available to these bodies. And some were only available to a certain amount. They had a certain capacity. And then they hit their pleasure ceiling and they checked out or they ejaculated. They found a way to distract themselves. We often use distraction when we hit our pleasure capacity. Or we just ejaculate, we orgasm and we end it. We can learn to stretch that pleasure capacity and that is a full body act of paying attention and letting in more pleasure, learning how to build more arousal. And that is all a skill of paying attention to your body in increasing states of arousal and pleasure until you can hold more and more pleasure and ride more and more arousal and you build this skill. And you can build it alone with masturbation. You can build it relationally with your partner.

Chris Rose: 35:06 All right, so the 3-Minute Game, do not undersell it. Because it comes from a lineage that has explored the outer bounds of human erotic capacity and we’re reporting back. So this is not a little clinical exercise that should be taken lightly. It’s easy, it’s simple. You step into it wherever you’re at. With hands at the kitchen table, with feed on the couch, with stroking hair and back and shoulders, and then build up your trust and capacity with one another until you are taking one another on epic, erotic rides.

Chris Rose: 35:42 All right. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com, all of our resources are there; pleasuremechanics.com/love to support this show. Show your love for what we do in the world and help us keep going. And pleasuremechanics.com/free to get started with our free online course.

Charlotte Rose: 36:01 And all of our other courses are available at pleasuremechanics.com.

Chris Rose: 36:04 Yes, and you can use the code, “speaking of sex” for 20% off the online course of your choice. Get on our newsletter, all the things at pleasuremechanics.com. We are here for and with you. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 36:17 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 36:18 We are the Pleasure Mechanics-

Charlotte Rose: 36:20 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

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

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

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

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

Podcast Transcript:

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 09:48 Exactly like our faces.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 26:10 You get the idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 39:16 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

Chris Rose: 39:21 Cheers.

A New Approach To Anal Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

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

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

Podcast Transcript:

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

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

Charlotte Rose: 01:20 The awesome anus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 43:22 With presence.

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 46:48 All right.

Chris Rose: 46:50 I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 46:51 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

Chris Rose: 46:56 Cheers.

Passionate Transitions Interview with Lucie Fielding

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

We are all in constant states of change, growth and transition – so how can we learn to embrace change with a spirit of curiosity and perhaps even passion?

On this episode, Lucie Fielding joins us to share her brilliant frameworks about coming into passionate relationship with our embodied sexual selves. Lucie joins us to generously share their ideas as they are being developed for the book Trans Sex: Clinical Approaches to Trans Sexualities and Erotic Embodiments – Update! The book is now available: Trans Sex by Lucie Fielding

Free Printable Zine from Meg-John Barker

Podcast Episodes About Gender, History of Queerness & Full Spectrum Sexuality

About Lucie Fielding

Lucie Fielding is a resident in counseling at Creating Change, PLLC. Lucie completed their MA in Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2018. In addition to their counseling education they hold a PhD in French with a specialty in erotic literature.

About their work, Lucie writes: “My background in literature and history attunes me to the powerful ways that myth, image, metaphor, and cultural scripts shape and inform the narratives we carry with us as we move through the world as well as how these narratives can write themselves on our bodies.” Lucie identifies as a queer nonbinary femme, and uses she/they pronouns.

Resources About Gender

Trans101, a lovely series to spend some time with to discover the basics of gender, transgender people and the range of trans experiences and identities
The Gender Spectrum, a glossary of language used to talk about gender and gender identities

Transcript for Podcast Episode Passionate Transitions: Interview With Lucie Fielding

Chris Rose: 00:01 Welcome to Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris from pleasuremechanics.com, and on today’s episode I am joined by the fabulous Lucie Fielding to talk about change and becoming and transitions in all of our erotic lives, and how we can approach change with more curiosity and passion. I first met Lucie at the AASECT, The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists, and when we met, it was very clear that we had met kindred spirits. She’s brilliant and wise and lovingly invites you into new perspectives on your erotic body and experience. So, I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Lucie.

Chris Rose: 00:52 I thought it was a great one to close out, to transition, as it were, out of our libido series. We have spent the past four episodes looking at libido and sex drive with fresh perspectives. How can we reevaluate some of the most fundamental assumptions about our sexualities that we have been taught from myth and disinformation, out of even like a harmful sex culture? How do we reevaluate what sexuality is, how it lives in our bodies, what this for is that moves through us and seems to move us in, sometimes, very unexpected directions in life? What is eroticism and sexuality?

Chris Rose: 01:42 I love that we, as a community, can go into these conversations and ask these really big questions together. I continue to get really amazing emails from you all, as you unpack these themes. Keep them coming, chris@pleasuremechanics.com, and if you want to support this show, and the work that we’re doing, and be part of our inner circle, and in closer dialogue with me and Charlotte, come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/love, pleasuremechanics.com/love, where you will find some options to throw us some love, support the show, and step into our inner circle of supporters.

Chris Rose: 02:25 All right. I am so excited to introduce you to Lucie Fielding. As I said, when I walked into their workshop session at AASECT, I was blown away by their wisdom and soulfulness. It turns out Lucie has been a listener of our podcast for a while, so a friendship was born. It was a really wonderful to meet and share our thoughts. This, I think, will be the first of many conversations we share with you. Let us know what you think, and how this applies to your life. I’m waiting to hear from you over at pleasuremechanics.com. All right. Here’s my conversation with Lucie Fielding. Cheers.

Chris Rose: 03:10 Lucie, welcome to Speaking of Sex.

Lucie Fielding: 03:13 Thank you, so much, for having me.

Chris Rose: 03:15 Can you, please, start us out by introducing yourself, and the work that you do?

Lucie Fielding: 03:19 My name is Lucie Fielding, and I am a non-binary femme. My pronouns are she, they. I am a resident in counseling, which basically means I’m a therapist under supervision, working towards licensure. I’m also a sex educator and a writer, and I’m currently working on a book entitled Trans-Sex Clinical Approaches to Trans-sexualities and Erotic Embodiments. That will come out in late 2020.

Chris Rose: 03:57 I’m already excited for part two, when we bring you back to talk about the book. Based on our workshop together, at AASECT, when I just was dazzled by your wisdom, I really want to set a very specific scope for this conversation and talk about this idea of transitions in all of our lives, change in all of our lives, and how we can come into a more passionate relationship with change and transitions in our erotic lives. So, that’s where we’re headed, today. Can you start by defining some of this language on your terms? What [crosstalk 00:04:38] by erotic embodiment?

Lucie Fielding: 04:41 Sure. Erotic embodiment. Embodiment… So the root verb is to embody, and there’s two senses to that. One is that corporeal sense, “I am in my body. I’m aware of… I have an internal sense and external sense of my body. My body in space, my viscera. Then, the second sense is the social and cultural sense, the fact that we embody things. We embody norms. It’s the idea that cultural scripts, narratives are constantly, and images, are constantly intersecting with our bodies, bombarding our bodies, forming our bodies in space. They have a lot to say about what our bodies are for, what they can do and what they can’t do, or what they should do, more properly, and what they shouldn’t do. It often comes with a moral aspect to it, or a normative aspect. So, embodiment is about, in some ways, the ways that our bodies are moving, not just as corporeal things of blood and guts and viscera and fluids, but also formed by, through, and in culture.

Chris Rose: 06:32 Mm-hmm (affirmative). I really appreciate this dual lens for embodiment, because we talk so often, on the show, about erotic embodiment, but we have to remember that that doesn’t happen in individual beds.

Lucie Fielding: 06:46 No.

Chris Rose: 06:47 It doesn’t happen in individual genitals. It happens in this social web of culture, and your writing really points to that so beautifully.

Lucie Fielding: 06:54 Thank you. Yeah, I really try to… I see both in my work as a therapist and in the book and in my teaching. I really want us to be cognizant of the fact that we don’t come in, simply as individuals with our subjective feels that so much of it is conditioned or in response to and conserved some troubling or, a term to talk about perhaps later, could use some mystifying.

Chris Rose: 07:38 How is your sense of your understanding of erotic embodiment been informed by this other term you talk a lot about, transition and change.

Lucie Fielding: 07:48 Yeah. The book, itself, is written for providers working with… And I mean providers very broadly. I mean mental health providers, medical providers, I mean body workers, I mean surrogate partners, I mean, pelvic floor therapists, the whole gamut. So, when I talk about… And the population I’m talking about is, of course, trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming folks and how we, as providers, can better host conversations about sexual expression, erotic embodiment, for trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming folks, but my sense is that these conceptual frameworks, in the book and in my teaching are really applicable to all bodies.

Lucie Fielding: 08:54 It’s just that my starting point… Instead of starting with cis heterosexual bodies, white able-bodied cis heterosexual bodies, I want to start with trans and non-binary and queer bodies, and start from there because so much… My observation has been that so much of the research, the great sexological research that we depend on and that we draw from, and many of the great sex education books that we love… I adore Emily Nagoski’s Come as You Are, or Laurie Mintz’ Becoming Cliterate or Girl Sex 101. They are all starting from this position of cis women’s bodies and cis women’s sexualities. That’s great, but what happens is that trans and non-binary folks have to often extrapolate from cis experiencing. So, I want to flip the script on that because I think that there’s a lot that trans and non-binary folks, and queer folks, generally, have to teach cishet folks about embodiment and erotic embodiment, specifically.

Lucie Fielding: 10:32 This notion of transition, to come back to that question… I’m sorry to wind back to it… is the sense that our bodies, that transition is not just for trans and non-binary folks. It’s not just about these very prescribed pounds of social transition and legal transition and medical transition, with all of the steps that go into that. Our bodies are constantly in transition. Our sexual bodies are constantly in transition. We are aging. Our hormones are constantly shifting. We’re acquiring illnesses. We are acquiring disabilities. We are recovering from illnesses. We are recovering from injuries, and all of that is a transition. It’s a passage. It’s a process that we are always engaging in, if we really think about, because stuff is happening to us in our lives and to our bodies, and it’s impacting the way that we are relating to one another and, particularly, relating to one another sexually and relating to our own bodies as sexual bodies.

Chris Rose: 12:04 When we think about how we relate to these transitions, these passages, these changes, it’s so clear that we often have a relationship of loss, of grieving, of yearning, of thinking of what we’re leaving behind, as we age or as we change, and we forget sometimes that change is the great vehicle of discovery, of excitement, of curiosity, and you invite us into this more balanced… I don’t want to say positive because I feel like you hold the whole spectrum of the emotional experience of change, but you remind us of the joy and excitement in change, as well.

Lucie Fielding: 12:51 Yeah. I hope so. At least I think we often put it in terms of change involves or implies gains and losses, and that’s, I think, once in binary thinking that I want to eschew whenever possible, but also I think we need to talk more about variation and difference, and that’s the framework from which I talk about change, that our bodies vary and that, yes, that passages do imply some grieving process because you are moving from one state to another, but it’s a constant thing. There are, instead of looking at nearly in terms of what is lost or what is gained, I want to think about, what is the difference? What opportunities open up that this change allows me to consider?

Chris Rose: 14:19 That’s such a more generous question.

Lucie Fielding: 14:21 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 14:23 What is the role of passion in this? You talk about quote “coming into passionate relationship with the embodied sexual self,” which is just a sentence I could read over and over again. This word, passion, talk to me about, because I tend to think of passion as overrated, kind of, this external lustiness we feel with another person. How do you think of passion?

Lucie Fielding: 14:45 When we talk about sexuality, we often talk about intimacy. We talk about sexual intimacy. What I want to talk about is, in some sense, two relational energies. There is intimacy, which is often about coziness and comfort and feelings of safety, and it feels yummy. It’s about knowing. Passion, for me, and this comes a lot from relational psychotherapists like [Stephen 00:15:26] Mitchell and folks like Esther Perel, who really talks about the intimacy passion energies.

Lucie Fielding: 15:35 Passion often marks the beginning of our relationships, and it’s an energy that is steeped in not knowing, in mystery, in fantasy, in, just like, raw desire, sometimes even lust. It’s from that period where we sincerely are gobsmacked by another person, by partners, and I think that, that’s really an exciting space to inhabit. The observation that folks like Esther Perel talks about is that, often, what happens in relationships is that, and I talk about it in terms of that pina colada song. What that tells is the story of, you’re with a partner, and he describes as, the partnership as a favorite song, but it’s a worn-out recording of that favorite song. The relationship has gotten stale, predictable, definable. You get into this illusion, and it is an illusion that you know the other person.

Lucie Fielding: 17:02 Do you know all there is to know about another person? That’s a trap, and the guy in Escape, of course, answers the personal ad and then shows up at the bar, O’Malley’s, and lo and behold, who should walk in and who wrote the original ad that he responded to, but his current partner? Then, he says, “I never knew.” That is the space that passion can create. It’s that place of, “Huh. That was an illusion that I knew everything about the other person.” In fact, we are infinitely expandable because we are always transitioning. We are always in the midst of change and variation.

Lucie Fielding: 18:08 What I do, in my work, is I take that interpersonal lens that Esther Perel talks about, that escape really highlights, and I make it intrapersonal. I’m talking about our relationship to our own bodies and how we get a little bit too cozy and comfortable with how our bodies work and how our bodies are supposed to be interacted with, and what they’re for. You’ve talked about this in previous episode, the episode on what you can do with soft penises, which just such a great episode, because it’s all about this, that we have this cultural script that says that the only thing penises are good for is being hard and penetrating, and they intersect with mouths or with anuses or vaginas, but that’s their function, and if they don’t interact with bodies in the particular way, then, they’re disordered or, God forbid, dysfunctional.

Lucie Fielding: 19:35 So, to come into passionate relationship is to deconstruct that script and say, “Huh, I don’t have to use a penis like that. I don’t even have to call it a penis. I don’t have to interact with it in particular ways.” A sex educator that I met at Philly Trans Wellness, a big conference for both community members and providers in Philadelphia every year, put on by the Mazzoni Center, there was a workshop for community on making love to a trans body. There was this really incredible discussion of swirling versus bobbing. We have this idea… This is in reference to oral sex. …that usually… and it’s very gendered …that bobbing is about blow jobs. You bob a penis. Then you swirl a vulva. That’s what you do when you’re engaging in oral sex with holders of a particular genital configuration, but what if you swirl with a penis? What does that do? A lot of… One thing that’s really important to place here is the idea that trans and non-binary folks, we have a complicated relationship to our bodies, a very nuanced relationship to our bodies.

Lucie Fielding: 21:30 Sometimes, we… and especially toward genitals. I know, for me, when I am having sex with a partner, it is really dysphoria, body dysphoria, gender dysphoria, comes up for me when I feel like my parts are being treated as what society might say that they are, might assign a particular gender to, or connect a particular gender to, and how I interact with them and want them to be interacted with. So, I call my genitals, my clit, and we have so many creative and fabulous ways to describe our parts. One participant yelled out, in this same workshop, that they referred to their… a trans masculine person referred to their vulva as their man cave, and I just loved that, just rethinking that.

Chris Rose: 22:56 In the trans community, we have no choice but to articulate our own realities, to come up with our own language, to define who we are again, and again, and again. So much of this is an invitation for everyone to be in this inquiry and self-naming process so that we can be more authentic and more present with one another and ourselves.

Lucie Fielding: 23:26 And with ourselves. Yeah.

Chris Rose: 23:28 Do you want to talk anything, more, about this turning the passionate gays inward. I feel like so many people have a sense of what that might mean, feels scary. It feel inaccessible. What happens if we turn our gays inward and what do we discover there? Do we give ourselves permission to know ourselves?

Lucie Fielding: 23:52 Oh, it is scary. Change is scary. What I would invite folks to consider, and I can talk a little bit to this, is to consider as my dear friend and colleague, Ray McDaniel, whose practice in Chicago, [Tactical 00:24:18] Audacity, is amazing, they and I were talking about my work in the book. They introduced this lovely distinction between feeling safe and being safe and that, so often, we are safe, but we don’t feel safe. So, part of it is making… Part of this moves ability to lean into the fear that attends this process of coming into passionate relationship, because it is the unknown. You don’t know what you’re going to find.

Lucie Fielding: 24:59 There’s something really exciting about that, but there’s something really scary about that, and it’s important to acknowledge that. The first step is getting to a place where you are, in fact, safe. You are being safe, and you may not feel safe, but it’s about making an accurate assessment of your safety. Part of that, from a therapeutic perspective, we talked about often, one of my favorite therapeutic metaphors, is the metaphor of the container.

Lucie Fielding: 25:40 We talk about that therapy is about creating a safety container in which sensations, images, feelings, thoughts, that might be too scary, too overwhelming to face alone or outside of that space, that the container provides that sense of containment that I feel bounded by this really ethically drawn space. I can go to certain places because I am safe, even if this is a little scary.

Chris Rose: 26:27 So, therapy might be one of those containers. I think we can work on creating that container in our friendships and in our love relationships.

Lucie Fielding: 26:35 Totally.

Chris Rose: 26:36 On the individual level, I think, some people use journaling or art practice or even movement practice to create those containers for yourself of, how do you just carve out a little bit of time to go inward and see what’s there, get to know yourself?

Lucie Fielding: 26:52 Yeah, and kink practices are modeled on the same kind of idea. I talk about expanding the container metaphor to think about bounded chaos. I think about therapy and kink sayings as very much within that framework, that, as long as there is that container you’ve negotiated, you know that somebody is going to recognize that if you are getting overwhelmed and that you need a safe word out, that, that’s going to be respected and, indeed, welcomed and not shamed, and you’re going to be thanked for articulating that need to move out of the sink space. With that knowledge, so much can happen within that, once you have that negotiated frame. That can happen within friendships. It can happen within romantic relationships and, as you know, it can happen just with ourselves and through intentional practices. Any kind of mindfulness practice is, in a sense, establishing that container.

Chris Rose: 28:25 What do you say to people who are afraid of the flames? We often use fire as this metaphor for passion. So often, I hear from people who feel like if they open themselves up to their eroticism, if they start actually articulating their passions, their desires, they’ll be overwhelmed, they’ll be consumed by it. How do we maintain a sense of self while also allowing ourselves to take the plunge?

Lucie Fielding: 28:57 I think that, that’s where the container comes in because you know that you’re going to be held back from going too far. So, I think it individually in terms of mindfulness practice. We talk about one of the prompts that I give for visualizations is this idea of, your mind may wander. That’s okay. That’s what minds do, so honor that and then try to see if you can bring your awareness back to the present moment, to your embodied awareness. That’s baked in. I can’t say that it is a totally safe move to come into passionate relationship. I think, if we felt safe, and we were safe, there would be no incentive for us to move towards something different to change. That just wouldn’t happen. We’d just keep doing what we’re doing, but we have to get to a place that almost…

Lucie Fielding: 30:30 A friend of mine who is a Health at Every Size nutritionist in D.C. talks about, with respect to disordered eating that, at some point, you have to decide that, and really understand that, the disordered eating patterns are not serving the goals that you have for yourself, that they’re, in fact, hindering you. Being in that place of, “Oh, I feel totally safe,” that may not be serving you, but that you need some of that distance that separatedness and that sense of not knowing, in order to move away from that desire to just stand pat.

Lucie Fielding: 31:30 A dear friend and sex therapist that I adore, Doug Braun-Harvey, talks about ambivalence is essential to the change process, that we need to have that sense of, “Oh, I don’t know if this is good or bad.” There are costs and benefits to all of this that I need to weigh. Hopefully, we get to the place where, ultimately, where we have been is not serving us as much as where we could go, even if that implies a sense of not knowing and charting a new course, remapping, revising, revisioning our relationship to our bodies.

Chris Rose: 32:26 I’m struck that, sometimes, these are incremental changes and small changes and, then, other times, they truly are swan dives into an unknown, and that sometimes the suffering is left behind, once you take the leap. I’m thinking, so much, about so many of my trans friends who, kind of, swirled in a stuckness for so long, and as soon as they articulated something for themselves, as soon as they named a change that was coming, whether that be, “I want to explore hormone therapy,” or “I’m changing a pronoun,” or, “I’m changing a name,” or any big step into their transition could feel, both, like a liberation and the first step into a gauntlet.

Lucie Fielding: 33:16 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 33:18 I think we need to remember that, with erotic change, that it’s like those feelings will co-exist. There will be excitation and terror, freedom and fear, the exciting of running forward and wanting to be held back at the same time, and to feel those feelings in you, at the same time and have them both be okay, is one of the skills, here, to develop.

Lucie Fielding: 33:39 Yeah. There’s a great Hélène Cixous quote [inaudible 00:33:44]. She’s a novelist and critical theorist. She talks in her book, The Book of Promethea… It’s, I think, the beginning of the book. “Once one is in the fire, one is bathed in sweetness. Here I am, in it. Once one is in the fire, one is bathed is sweetness.” It seems scary, like, “Why the heck would I want to jump into the fire?”

Lucie Fielding: 34:21 I’m not saying you jump into actual fires. Please do not, but it can feel that way, that we’re going to be burned by this, that it feels unsafe. It’s not what one is supposed to do, but that place of, “Here I am, in it.” I think about, to talk about my own transition because I’m much more comfortable, I think, talking about myself than I am talking about my clients, at this point, and their stories, because I’d have to do too much amalgamating of their stories to anonymize it.

Lucie Fielding: 35:16 I think about the ways that I was having sex prior to coming into relationship with my embodied sexual self, coming into a passionate relationship, it felt good, but where I am now is fricking amazing, multiple orgasms, full-body orgasms, and I’m not saying that… Your mileage may vary. I’ve made particular choices with my life, so I don’t want to name my experience and say, “Everyone will do this, will feel this way,” but I just know, and I know what it is… Going back to… You mentioned the word swirl just a few seconds ago, so it brought me back to swirling.

Lucie Fielding: 36:19 The distinction between when somebody bobs and when somebody swirls my clit, when somebody interacts with my clit as a clit, instead of as a penis, I can feel it and it’s amazing. It’s not that I didn’t feel great when somebody would bob, but it’s that swirling just feels yummy, and it feels like I’m deeply, deeply seen in my body and in myself, and I’m being affirmed, and I’m being held, and then I can go to places with my pleasure and in my pleasure, both with myself and in relationship to my partners, and experience forms of transcendence that I really couldn’t before, when I was so stuck in my head. It was like, “This is okay.”

Chris Rose: 37:28 Yeah, I really want to draw that out for a second because we can just look at the friction of the stimulation and leads to full-body orgasms, but that is not the story here. The story is your entire process over many years of coming into relationship with yourself, honoring your truths, revealing yourself, choosing a partner who will see you and hold you fully, like holding a certain standard for yourself, and that’s part of what Audrey Lorde talks about with the Erotic, raise the bar for what we expect in these meetings with one another.

Lucie Fielding: 38:06 And with ourselves.

Chris Rose: 38:07 Yes.

Lucie Fielding: 38:08 And our meetings… Solo sex is one of the starting places for this, and I can’t emphasize that enough. It’s like… We say that it’s hard to tell people what we like unless we know what we like. So, like playing around and figuring out what toys work and, what do you want to call your parts? What feels good? What kinds of movements feel good? What kinds of frictions feel good? Start with yourself and maybe genitals aren’t involved at all for you, and that is totally cool, and you can have mind blowing sex without ever engaging the genitals. So, I also want to make space for that.

Chris Rose: 39:06 Truth. So true. But you must engage the mind.

Lucie Fielding: 39:11 Yeah, and the mind as part of the body, not just this separate… We talk about the dualism, which is another piece of binary thinking. I talk about the embodied psyche that the mind is seated within the body. You can’t distinguish one from the other.

Chris Rose: 39:36 And we talk about this as a super power, because when you fantasize and wake up the mind, you are waking up the body, and you will feel the thrum inside, and this is the perfect chance to explore, through fantasy, what your body is viscerally responding to.

Lucie Fielding: 39:55 So much, yes.

Chris Rose: 39:57 Lucie, thank you, so much for stimulating our minds, today. I’m sure there’s more to come. Where can people find you online to get more of this delicious stimulation?

Lucie Fielding: 40:07 Sure. I have a website at luciefielding… Lucie spelled with an I-E., luciefielding.com, and also you can find me on Facebook. Again, I have a professional Instagram feed, @luciefielding.

Chris Rose: 40:30 Mm-hmm (affirmative), and we will link that all up, in the show notes page. Lucie, thank you, so much, for your time [inaudible 00:40:35] today.

Lucie Fielding: 40:36 God. Thank you. It is such pleasure talking to you. I love the pod, and it is just… It’s an honor, and a privilege to talk to you and start to share my work with your listeners. So, thank you.

Chris Rose: 40:52 All right. I hope you’ve enjoyed that conversation with Lucie. You might want to listen to it again to let these ideas sink in a little deeper. If you have any questions about this episode or anything you hear on the podcast, come on over to pleasuremechanics.com. We’d love to hear from you, and if you want to show us your love and support this show and the work we do in the world, come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/love, where you will find ways to support our work and step in, to our inner circle of supporters.

Chris Rose: 41:28 Thank you, so much, to all of our patrons and supporters, and members of our online courses. We love you and love supporting you in your erotic transformations. It is an honor to serve you, and we hope to work with more podcast listeners in these intimate ways, in the coming years. We will be back with you next week with another full episode of Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris, from pleasuremechanics.com, wishing you a lifetime of pleasure. Cheers.

Sexual Frustration

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

Sexually frustrated? You are SO not alone. Sexual frustration can be a deeply painful experience, especially when you feel like there is no end in sight! If you feel like you are pent up, shut down, or itching with unmet sexual needs and desires, this episode is for you.

Where does sexual frustration come from? What do we do with sexual frustration so it doesn’t cause so much suffering?

In this episode, we explore the roots of sexual frustration, what we can learn about frustration to help us out of it, and strategies to take the edge off when sexual frustration is tormenting you.

Check out the complete podcast mini series on libido and desire: Pleasure Mechanics Rethinking Libido Series.

Big thanks to Emily Nagoski for her brilliant books that help us understand the science of sexuality. Come As You Are and Burnout are must-reads to understand your human erotic experience!

The Science of Sexual Frustration by Emily Nagoski.

Transcript for Podcast Episode: Sexual Frustration

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:05 We are the Pleasure Mechanics. And on this podcast we have honest, soulful, explicit conversations about every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com, our forever online home. Where you will find our complete podcast archive. All of our resources waiting for you. And when you are ready, our online courses so you can take a deeper dive with us and master new erotic skills in the privacy of your own home. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com to get started and go to pleasuremechanics.com/free to sign up for our free online course and dive right in. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/free.

Chris Rose: 00:48 On today’s episode, we continue with our rethinking libido mini series. We are taking a deep dive into the question of libido and trying to create some pathways out of the suffering that this question of libido creates for so many of us. You can find the complete podcast series at pleasuremechanics.com/libido where all of our episodes and resources are gathered conveniently for you.

Chris Rose: 01:16 On today’s episode, I wanted to talk about sexual urgency and the frustration that can come when you know exactly what you want. You know what you want and you’re just not getting it. A lot of our libido talks, we’ve been focusing on the folks who have lost their libido or feel very low desire, or don’t know what they want. And I want to acknowledge those of us who know what we want and aren’t getting it. And that’s where the suffering is. What do we do with sexual frustration? Where does it come from? What do we do with it? And how do we live well, whether or not our sexual needs and desires are being met?

Charlotte Rose: 02:00 Yeah. We want to talk to those of you who are feeling like you are sexually frustrated and in either the frustration stage, or the anger stage, or the despair stage of your experience of your own sex life. And try and give you some understanding and some context for your experience and a few ideas. Though I don’t know if we’re going to solve that whole issue in this podcast.

Chris Rose: 02:25 We try you guys. But we want you to hear that this experience of sexual frustration is really common. It’s really common and there’s a range of it. You can experience sexual frustration in moments when you’re turned on, and horny, and aroused, and can’t seem to go anywhere with it. Or you don’t have access to relieving that feeling. Or you can experience sexual frustration over decades when you are in a relationship where sex is no longer an option, or you’re not in a relationship and don’t feel like you have access to sexual partners. This is true for so many people for so many different reasons. And the feelings that arise when our sexuality is not meeting our expectations can be deeply painful.

Chris Rose: 03:16 So, we want to talk about this. Sexual frustration. Where does it come from? So the old model would suggest that sex drive is something that lives in us, builds up this pressure. Needs to be released or else it wreaks havoc in our system. And as we talked about on previous episodes, this is an old model that relies upon this idea of sex drive like hunger is a physical need that if it’s not met, causes physical damage. So we’ve debunked that myth, and we have turned our understanding of sexual desire as a motivational system. We’re motivated by the good stuff sex brings us, and that is the system that drives our interest in sex. So we’re motivated by physical pleasure. We’re motivated by touch, by orgasms, by physical intimacy, by emotional intimacy, by the social status and belonging that sex brings us. By so many different rewards. It’s a reward system.

Chris Rose: 04:22 So what happens when you don’t get the reward? What happens when your body is activated? You feel desire, you feel horny, you feel sexual wanting and longing. And it doesn’t get met.

Charlotte Rose: 04:38 There can be such deep frustration, anger, and despair. And it’s a really uncomfortable feeling. As well as feeling distracted by sex or the desire for some kind of sexual activity. A lot of the time. This is what we hear from a lot of men specifically, but I think a lot of people can experience this as well.

Chris Rose: 05:00 So we got a flood of emails from you all, and I wanted to pull just a few experts so we could hear the experience of sexual frustration from your words. So thank you to everyone who wrote in. These are just a few excerpts from some of the emails. Charlotte will get us started by reading one testimony of sexual frustration.

Charlotte Rose: 05:22 I was sexually frustrated when I believed that the only good sex was penis and vagina sex with my wife. I would wait patiently day after day for her to take care of her wifely duties, and try my best to be a loving and affectionate husband in the interim. I was in pain and internalizing the sexual frustration. Then she went through menopause and any hope for sex went out the window. She just didn’t want it anymore, and she hoped I would outgrow my longstanding sexual desire. That didn’t happen. I couldn’t see myself going to my grave without the joy of sex again.

Charlotte Rose: 06:00 I went to counseling, and the counselor suggested masturbation as a reasonable alternative. This was a frustrating solution for me because I was taught at a young age that masturbation was a sin. It was an act of desperation by a guy who couldn’t find a willing sexual partner, a pussy to fuck. It was a sign of social failure. And to make matters worse, my wife refused to have anything to do with it. She didn’t want to participate in my act of masturbation. She just wanted me to go off somewhere and take care of my sexual needs, and leave her the hell alone. To her, it was a shameful act. Her repulsion coupled with early learning caused me to find that with masturbation came guilt and shame. Time for more counseling.

Charlotte Rose: 06:47 After a lot of soul searching and reaching out to others to share my dead bedroom story and after doing tons of research on the benefits of masturbation, I came to realize that I was bamboozled and brainwashed at a very young age. Not only was it unrealistic for me to think that my wife could take care of all my sexual needs. It was simply wrong to think that masturbation was some form of adultery, a serious sin. I needed a way out, and I found it.

Chris Rose: 07:16 Thank you. So that was just one excerpt from a story of a longterm marriage and one man’s quest to navigate his sexual frustration within it. Here is another story from a totally different guy. Notice what comes up here.

Charlotte Rose: 07:31 For a long time after I stopped having sex with my wife, I thought I could just do this. Just have this be my life. But I had a heart attack three years ago, and I realized this half life I have been living just makes me feel too sad, too lost, too empty. I can’t accept a life like this anymore. A life devoid of intimate, sexual, animalistic pleasures. My life without this kind of sexual giving and taking seems so arid to me. So empty, so painfully absent of that mutual animal gratification and exploration. And becoming more than you are by engaging in something bigger than yourself.

Chris Rose: 08:13 Okay. And one more.

Charlotte Rose: 08:15 Your connection between having a high libido and feeling undesirable or undeserving rang painfully true. Perhaps also a feeling of being immoral, insatiable, corrupt, and ultimately empty and alone. But for the torment of this high libido. Yet start untangling it from this ill understood notion of just more sex, as if a culinary craving could be satisfied with just more food. And specifics start to emerge. Something spicy, something salty, something specific that can be had and can be satisfying if we can manage to name it and ask for it.

Chris Rose: 08:55 I love you all.

Charlotte Rose: 08:56 I know. Such high caliber, beautiful people, you all listening to this.

Chris Rose: 09:02 Thank you for flooding our inbox with your testimonies, your stories, your struggles, your success stories. So notice as you listen to those stories, what parts resonated for you? What words, what parts of their story do you feel yourself in?

Chris Rose: 09:22 So one of the things we notice here, and it brings us into this question of where does sexual frustration come from. Is that there is a mismatch between the sex life we want and perhaps expect, and the sex life we’re having. A mismatch between what we expect and what we’re experiencing. And the truth is our sexual expectations for most of us are way out of whack. We live in a world of sexual myth and fable, that is not grounded in the lived reality of how our sexualities function. And we’re in a sexually broken culture where so many of us have experienced such deep levels of trauma and shame and guilt, that many of us are not available for one another.

Chris Rose: 10:09 So in a lot of your stories, and I’ve come to call it the hotel room in the sky. We have this sense of what is possible, what is the ideal sex life. If we could meet a willing partner that wanted us just as much as we wanted them and there were no limitations. And our cultural context was a sex positive, rejoicing, celebratory culture where all bodies were safe and we all had sexual development that was wonderful. What would be possible in the hotel room in the sky? In that hotel room in heaven where your sexual fantasies could come true.

Chris Rose: 10:52 For most of, us that is not our sexual reality. So the gap it turns out in psychology, in the human animal. Frustration, the experience of frustration comes in the gap between expectations and experience and our inability to feel like we can control this situation.

Chris Rose: 11:14 So Emily Nagoski does a great job talking about this part of the brain where frustration is born, called the monitor. And the monitor is our part of the brain that is very useful. It kind of monitors, it keeps track of external circumstances. Maps our expectations onto those circumstances and tells us how much effort and resources we should have to invest to fulfill our goal. And it kind of keeps track of those time and resources, and investments in our goals. And then either rewards us when we fulfill goals more easily than expected. That feeling of woo Yahtzee. And then it creates frustration and pain in the brain when our goals feel out of reach or it’s taking more time or resources than expected. And I’m going to bring you right into the beautiful example Emily Nagoski gives us that we can all relate to. Road rage.

Charlotte Rose: 12:19 So you do the same drive every day. It takes you about 15 minutes. This one day you get in the car, you hit every green light, you get there in 12 minutes, and you park and you feel good. You’re like, “Yes, it’s going to be a good day. Everything is flowing, it’s all working. Awesome. Here I go.”

Charlotte Rose: 12:40 The next day you get in the car and you hit every red light, and then you hit a construction zone, and maybe even a car accident. And this drive takes you 30 minutes. And along the way you are going from frustrated and annoyed to anger. You just keep getting enraged that this is taking so long, and it’s not supposed to take this long, and why is it taking so long, and I should have taken this other road. I’m such an idiot. I clearly should have taken that other path. And on and on, right? I think we all feel-

Chris Rose: 13:13 And if it goes on long enough, you hit despair. I will never get there. I should just get out of this car and start walking. I’ve said that before. So just notice that range from frustration, to anger, to despair. And notice, you’re sitting in the car. There’s nothing you can do about it. But our brain starts playing this trick on us and it starts activating a very physical state. Road rage is not an idea. It’s not an emotion. It’s a full body experience that can have lasting effects on your day, on other people’s days. It can even turn violent. Right? So what is the experience of sexual frustration compared to road rage?

Chris Rose: 14:01 So what I find fascinating about frustration is that we don’t have this universal sense of sexual expectations. It’s not like an inborn human thing where we expect sex to be a certain way. It’s very culturally trained. And it very much depends on your cultural position and how you were raised, and how you were raised to think about sex. What expectations were you told to have?

Chris Rose: 14:29 This emerges so clearly in some of these stories we share that talk about marriage. Because for so many of us, marriage is a social goal that part of the package deal is a sexual partner for life. Part of the marriage package deal we have been told is sexual access to our partners. And not only sexual access, but that they will want you. They will want to have sex with you. They will continue to choose you and make you feel like the one. Over, and over, and over.

Chris Rose: 15:02 So that expectation when it is not met becomes incredibly frustrating. Incredibly frustrating. Because within the dead marriage bed that this guy spoke of, it’s not just the lack of sex that’s frustrating him. It’s the lack of emotional connection. It’s the lack of feeling like we’re in this together. It’s not feeling wanted, it’s not feeling desired. We take all of these different unpleasant experiences, all of these unmet expectations, both physical and social needs that we’ve bundled up into this relationship. We notice our frustration about them and we wrap it up all in a package called sexual frustration.

Chris Rose: 15:44 So some of this is relational. The expectations we bring into our relationships, and then the reality of those relationships. And we’ve talked about this on previous episodes, how sex is so contextual. So we cannot expect to people’s interest in sex to always line up. And sometimes this mismatch goes on for a few months or a few years. Sometimes it then goes on for decades. So in that mismatch of sexual interests and expectations, is the suffering within that relationship.

Chris Rose: 16:17 But I also want to acknowledge the sexual frustration that I almost think is a baseline for so many of us. Because we have sexual desires, sexualities that want to be expressed. Physical needs and emotional needs that are just unmet in general. Whether or not you’re in a relationship, whether or not you feel like you have access to dating. You have that confidence to find sexual partners. I kind of think so many of us have a baseline of sexual frustration that makes it easier to go into anger and despair because so few of our sexual social needs are met as a culture.

Chris Rose: 17:01 Let’s break some of these down. Touch. Touch is one of the biggest needs bundled up into sexuality. Our need to be touched, and held, and feel our sensations in our bodies. So many of us relegate that to sex. So when sex disappears, our opportunity to be touched disappears, and we’re left touchless. I am shocked sometimes when I ask people, how many people in your life can you receive affectionate touch from? Very few people can name more than five. Two of those people might be your parents that live in another state that you get a hug from a couple times a year. And the truth is even when you’re getting touched from another affectionate source, a friend or a child. The touch that comes in sex is different. It’s different. It’s full body. It is not just affectionate, it is passionate touch. And it is touch on all parts of your body. Your genitals get touched, your naked body gets touched, and your naked body gets to press up against another naked body, right?

Chris Rose: 18:12 So when we talk about the touch of a hug, or a handshake, or even a really affectionate friend who’s going to cuddle with you on the couch and throw their arm around you, it’s not the same as being in naked, pressed up against another body, sweaty perhaps, moving, breathing, feeling all of those feelings together. Feeling like you’re being touched in the ways you want to be touched. All of that is so good. That is a huge reward for the human brain. So if you’re not getting that, the frustration just of not getting touch and then not getting that level, that intensity, that potency of touch can be deeply frustrating. So what is another human need, human desire that we roll up into this package?

Charlotte Rose: 19:00 Intensity, like a need for cathartic intensity release. Yeah, I think we want high peak moments in life, and sex can be that. Where there’s breathless interest and excitement. And when we think about that, we think we’re craving orgasms. But perhaps we’re also craving just intense release.

Chris Rose: 19:22 Right. So physiologically, an orgasm is the build up of muscular tension and arousal. And then it cascades into involuntary contractions of the pelvic muscles. When we talk about wanting to come, when we talk about wanting … I get all of these emails from guys about I want to blow a huge load, and there’s always something about the visual of a lot of it. And I think in that is they want intensity, they want a really good orgasm. And some men talk about this rising up from within them and then something coming out. Think a lot of it feels like this open expansion after having an orgasm. However you feel that post orgasmic bliss, the best of that, part of that is like a hormonal cascade that happens after orgasmic release. That can chill us the fuck out. Sometimes we just need to build up intensity and then relax into contentment.

Chris Rose: 20:27 So sex gives us access to these two parts of our nervous system. Excitation and relaxation. Building up of arousal and cascading into enjoyment, joy. Both of those states are states our body craves, and we do not get enough of in our modern life. Frustration sets in.

Chris Rose: 20:50 What’s another need that we bundle up into this package deal? Social fucking belonging. Social belonging and acceptance. So much I have come to believe of the magic of sex is feeling accepted, feeling a sense of belonging with another human being, feeling safe in that connection.

Chris Rose: 21:12 Turns out it’s a vital human need. We are a social species reliant on one another for survival. This is the emotional experience of attachment. It first happens with our caretakers. Infant children cannot survive on their own. A baby, a human baby left untended to will perish. All of us know this deeply in our bones.

Chris Rose: 21:39 As children this comes up, I am hungry. And if an adult doesn’t come and feed me, I will die. I am alone and if an adult doesn’t come and hold me and protect me, I will die.

Chris Rose: 21:51 As adults, this emerges as this feeling of wanting another human to see you, accept you, and maybe even attune to how you are feeling. That alchemy of someone else showing up for you and being present and being like, “How you’re feeling, I’m feeling it too.”

Chris Rose: 22:14 And this comes up in these dialogues about sexual frustration when it’s like I just want someone to want me as much as I want them. I just want someone to want me so badly, that I can smell it on their body. Right? We have this sense of when someone wants you, that feels so good. And that’s not just about feeling pretty. We tend to think of this idea of feeling desirable as this very a skin deep thing of I just want to feel pretty and feel desirable. That’s capitalism speaking. That’s the commodification of beauty. What we all want is to feel loved, accepted, and belonging. And this isn’t about longterm relationships. You can feel that sense of belonging when you’re fucking a stranger, and you both look at each other in the eye, and you’re just in that moment together. You are feeling something mutual, and you’re feeling it together. So feeling our feelings together and having someone give a shit about how you feel, really important human need. And that gets bundled up into sex.

Chris Rose: 23:24 I remember, and it has been so long, but it was 10 years ago we did a survey about blow jobs. And I was expecting guys to say, “I just want to deep throat. I want her to make eye contact.” All of the tropes about blowjobs that we thought would come up in this survey. And I remember being stunned that so many guys reported, “What I love most about getting a blow job is feeling accepted, feeling like my penis is going in her mouth and that she wants it there.” That feeling of being home in someone else’s body is about acceptance and belonging.

Chris Rose: 24:03 So you can see. So we’ve named touch, intensity, excitement and enjoyment, feeling our feelings together, feeling accepted and belonging.

Charlotte Rose: 24:16 I think intimacy is one other huge one.

Chris Rose: 24:19 Intimacy different than belonging?

Charlotte Rose: 24:21 Is it more that I though partnered you and me are one. We are important to each other. It is related to belonging, I guess, but I think a lot of people get emotional intimacy and connection in sex if they’re not having deep emotional intimacy anywhere else in their life with anyone else. It does become a concentrated moment during sex.

Chris Rose: 24:46 Yeah, and I would like to interrogate what that means. What is that emotional intimacy you’re feeling? Are you being allowed to feel your feelings? Are you feeling safe to feel your feelings? Or is it that you feel seen and accepted? Therefore, you’re alleviating your shame. Because another core piece of sexual frustration we all walk around with is feeling shame. Feeling like part of our sexuality is not good. It is a sin, and therefore we carry this sin within us. We carry this poison within us. And in those moments where a lover sees you and accepts you for all of who you are, something within you is healed. I can be seen for all of who I am and still be loved, still be held, still be safe, still be accepted, still have a home, still have kin. These are deep emotional experiences, and we have lost our language for all of this, right? Part of why we’re breaking this down and really talking about all of the different components of the sexual experience is so we can get more specific. And we all just don’t walk around feeling frustrated, and angry, and in despair around our sexuality without being specific about where that suffering is coming from.

Chris Rose: 26:08 Okay, so all of your expectations about sex. All of the needs you are bundling into sex, that lives in you as a certain expectation. When that is met by a sexual experience that is really different, that is really a far gap from that expectation. That’s when frustration kicks in. The monitor in the brain starts going crazy and flagging you, and creating mental discomfort that can then become very physical discomfort. Remember that road rage feeling. That pain and discomfort is a signal to you.

Chris Rose: 26:45 So when we feel this frustration rise, when we are in anger or despair about an unmet goal, that frustration. We have a few choices. One, we can change the goal. Two, we can change the kind of effort or resources we’re investing in that goal. Or three, we can investigate that ratio between the goal and the effort. Right? At one of these points, you can intervene and change your experience.

Chris Rose: 27:13 So back to road rage. Charlotte and I did a lot of traveling in our car at the beginning of our relationship, and I was very susceptible to road rage. It was a learned response in my body. And if we would be stuck in traffic, I would just fly into anger. And Charlotte would say something like, “Well, we’d just be hanging out anyway and now we’re just hanging out in the car. What’s the big deal?”

Chris Rose: 27:37 So she changed the goal. Instead of the goal being get to our destination, the goal was to enjoy one another. So she changed the goal and that changed my mental frame. And now we can get stuck in traffic, and I kind of just turn her and I’m like, “So we’re going to hang out for a while. What do you want to talk about?” Or sometimes when we were stuck in traffic, we would play a little bit. I have some very fond memories of being stuck in traffic and having an orgasm in the road.

Chris Rose: 28:08 So changing the goal. Changing the goal is one major place that we have a lot of control and that can look a lot of different ways. And we’ll talk about that. Two, changing the resources or investment you’re putting in towards the goal. I can’t really think of a road rage example. If you’re stuck in traffic, you can’t really change the resources. Maybe you can get off at a next exit, and that would be changing the goal though.

Charlotte Rose: 28:35 No, I think that would, because your goal is still to get there. It would be changing the routes. You’re changing the effort. Instead of just sitting there, you’re taking a different I think.

Chris Rose: 28:43 Right. So maybe it takes longer mileage-wise, but you’re recalibrating your effort and your resources, and then have a different experience. So even if it takes you longer to get there, you won’t be stuck in traffic. And then the third thing is to intervene with what we call the criterion velocity. A big word for your brain sense of that effort to outcome ratio.

Charlotte Rose: 29:07 So changing the idea that it should take 15 minutes to get from A to B and it’s not, so you’re frustrated. Instead, it’s taking as long as it’s taking because I’m in traffic. And that’s annoying, but that’s okay. I am safe. I am okay.

Chris Rose: 29:20 Right. You’re acknowledging the different reality to your brain, and then saying recalibrate your expectations. We are not getting there any time soon. Chill out. So how does this all relate to sexual frustrations?

Chris Rose: 29:34 So a lot of us need to change our goals. A lot of us need to change our expectations when it comes to sex. We do not live in a culture where you will have a buffet of pussy in front of you all the time. We don’t live in that culture. We don’t live in a world where you can have a harem. Right? A lot of guys write to me and they’re like, “I just wish I could have” … and it’s like, great. Wish for it, fantasize about it. Your goal in this lifetime, in this body, in this sexuality right now is what? Is what? What are our expectations that are realistic and grounded in our current context? Because your expectations can change over the years, and they’ll change with different contexts.

Chris Rose: 30:23 But if you’re experiencing frustration, you need to ask yourself what is your expectation in this moment? And I think this is the strategy that got us through our really long stretch of being without sexual intimacy when I was sick. Because our expectation was not that I was going to be in my sexual prime. We totally recalibrated expectations and we stated new goals. And I looked at Charlotte in the eye and I was like, “I need you to believe that I can get better.” And I think we even had some really tearful, I’m tearing up just talking about it. But I said to you what I want is that when we get through this, that we still love each other, that we don’t have resentment, that you’re not angry at me for this period. I want to get through this, that you still want to be my lover on the other side.

Charlotte Rose: 31:14 Totally. That you still want to have sex with me when we get through the other side, I think was one of the quotes. And it was about, the goal was to stay connected. The goal was to be kind to each other. The goal was to do the long haul and make it as joyful and pleasurable as we could, knowing that sex was not a priority. We were in survival. And that was okay. That is part of what you sometimes get in a life package. Somebody gets sick and-

Chris Rose: 31:43 Sometimes I said to you, “Baby, how are you doing? You’re not getting”-

Charlotte Rose: 31:47 What I’m used to.

Chris Rose: 31:48 Yeah, Charlotte, I mean talk about it. She had a high sexual needs, and she was being tended to for years beautifully by my masterful hands. I disappeared. I was gone, and I would be very fearful in these moments of aren’t you frustrated? Aren’t you freaking out? And she’d be like, “Honey, we’re in this. I know what I’m expecting.”

Charlotte Rose: 32:09 You’re alive. Yeah.

Chris Rose: 32:11 So we recalibrated our sexual expectations. And then what’s really important is we’ve recalibrated them again.

Charlotte Rose: 32:19 That is really important.

Chris Rose: 32:20 We noticed the context was changing and we recalibrated again. And now we have to live into our new expectations.

Charlotte Rose: 32:27 Yeah. A new stage, a new era. Because it is easy to get stuck in what you have been doing because that becomes your normal of course, even when context then change slowly over time. Yeah, this is such an important piece. I think also especially for people after they get through those first early years of having kids, because that is also a time where I think expectations should change around how much sex and how much loud noise you’re going to be making. But then at some point, that does shift and getting used to a new reality, and really putting effort in to shift that.

Chris Rose: 33:03 And reminding each other of the new reality and coming, if you’re in a relationship. Talking about your expectations actively. That in of itself will relieve frustration.

Charlotte Rose: 33:15 Then you can just be honest and tell the truth to each other. It makes you feel so close. You get that feeling of love and belonging when you’re like this is the truth that we’re both in.

Chris Rose: 33:24 And in those expectations, naming the why’s. We’ve just laid out all of these motivations, all of these rewards. And it is really different as a partner to hear we never have sex anymore. I just want to have sex. I need sex, sex, sex. Versus I feel like we’re not connecting anymore. I just really want to have fun with you. I want to be playful.

Charlotte Rose: 33:47 I miss you in this way.

Chris Rose: 33:49 I miss the way your body smells after you come. Making it specific will help that conversation. And we’re going to talk in a moment about what taking the edge off your neediness does. And one of the main things it does is it makes you less desperate. And there’s nothing desirable about desperate.

Chris Rose: 34:13 Okay. So changing expectations, changing the amount of investment and resources you’re putting into those expectations. So this is when you’re chasing a feudal goal, and you’re just getting more and more frustrated. Doing the same thing and expecting different results. So if you’re stuck in this with your partner, and you think you’re doing all the right things, and you’re still not getting sex, and if you’re in this loop, you got to shift up your resources and your investment towards the goal.

Charlotte Rose: 34:42 You may want to think about changing the amount of effort you put into your sex life, and think about if spontaneous sex is not as realistic right now, what kind of effort can we put into creating a different context, creating a different structure for our relationship? Can we get a babysitter? Can we plan time where we’re going to touch, but there isn’t necessarily the goal of sex. We focus on massage. You have different conversations. You create a different context.

Chris Rose: 35:12 And this is especially important if you have a shared goal. If you and your partner are both in the same expectations and you’re not seeming to get there and you’re both frustrated. Yes, we both want an active sex life. We both want each other. Why do we keep missing the boat? It might be that you’re putting in the wrong kind of effort, and you’re trying to bike somewhere, you need a boat to go. Or something like that. So recalibrating the resources you’re investing towards your goal, and that can look a lot of different ways.

Chris Rose: 35:42 And then the third is admitting to your brain out loud that it might take a little more work to get to your goal or that your goal is a little further off, or we need a longer path to get there. This really emerges for me when sexual frustration is coming because one partner is blocked for some reason. One partner is dealing with trauma. One partner is dealing with an illness. If there’s kind of a mismatch of desire. Sometimes, and I hear this all the time. “I love my wife so much, I would never leave her, but I am going crazy.” So then in those situations, we need to think about yes, maybe setting different goals. Maybe putting in different kinds of resources. But also thinking about the long haul that if your goal is ultimately to reconnect with your wife, you might need couples therapy, you might need 10 dates where you don’t have sex, but you do a lot of full body massage. You might need a lot of different steps to get there. But you will be frustrated if you think after that first massage date, she’s going to be ready to have sex, right? We need to have a realistic calibration of what things will take to reach our goals.

Chris Rose: 37:05 So, we have unpacked sexual frustration. I kind of feel like most of us live in some baseline of sexual frustration in a culture that is not reverent and celebratory of our sexuality. That doesn’t allow full range expression of eroticism. That cordons off intimacy and affection into romantic relationships. So what do we do with the sexual frustration? I feel like the first thing is really acknowledging it, and getting specific about the contours of your frustration. Why are you frustrated? Is it the goal? Is it the effort to goal ratio? What parts of sex are you so hungry for that it’s turning into frustration and anger? What are your unmet needs? And then on top of that, what are your unmet desires?

Chris Rose: 37:59 Where else in your life can you start getting those needs fed? And in this, and we’ve talked about this. If you’re really hungry for touch, try to get a professional massage. If you want intensity, you can take up an intense sport or that martial art could be a two for one. You get touch and intensity, and social belonging. It’s a three for one.

Chris Rose: 38:21 It’s these moments in our life we can make choices to feed parts of ourselves that are not being nourished. And I am not saying this is a substitute for sex. I really want to make that clear. When I suggest these things, it is to take the edge off. It’s to fill your bucket a little bit so you don’t feel so empty.

Chris Rose: 38:43 And what that does, when we take actions that then meet our needs that bring us pleasurable rewards, that feels good as an organism. You are taking some agency. You’re taking active steps towards your goals, and your brain will feel better. Your monitor will chill out a little bit.

Chris Rose: 39:06 What it also does socially is it takes the edge off and you become less desperate. And I really want folks to hear this. Whether or not you’re in a relationship or you’re trying to date in order to have a sex partner, however you’re seeking out your sex partner, there is nothing desirable about desperation. Because sexual desperation tells us that anyone will do. There’s nothing special about you. I just want to get my rocks off so much, and you’re the one that’s available right now. Think about the contrast between feeling desperate and feeling calm and confident. When we’re calm and confident, we can make good choices. We have something to offer in return for our ask. And it’s not coming from a totally empty bucket of fill me up.

Charlotte Rose: 39:56 So the other thing you can do to handle your sexual frustration is to turn your attention to yourself, and to create a really enlivening, beautiful masturbation practice. Yes, it is not sex with another being. We get that it is not the same. But you can bring some level of interest, curiosity, novelty, and excitement to yourself. You can make it more than just a release. A quick jerk off, the same way you’ve been doing it for ages. Bring some energy that you would want to bring to another partner, and make it good. See what more you can explore. Use your body as a laboratory and play. And also, don’t hold it as a sexual failure that you are spending your time masturbating. Think of it as a pleasure that you’re offering yourself. You’re filling the bucket, as Chris was saying, in some way. You’re serving yourself. You’re allowing your eroticism to live within the context that you’re in right now. It may change over time. But just let it be a good thing in your life and something that is nourishing. And this piece about not holding it as a sexual failure I think is really important because sometimes that become so pronounced that masturbation just doesn’t feel like it is what you want to be doing.

Chris Rose: 41:18 Well that’s the discharge model that is saying I have to masturbate because I don’t have access to the real thing, and I have to get this thing out of my body. Most of us still masturbate in the discharge model. We are not giving ourselves the opportunity to experience masturbation as sexually fulfilling. Our attitude blocks that possibility from even being there. If in your attitudes you think masturbation is second rate, it’s just a quick release. That’s what it will be. If in your attitude you can think about it as a pleasure lab, as a training ground, as a way you honor your own body, and take care of yourself, and run the excitement, or intensity, or tenderness that you want. Maybe it will be incrementally more satisfying. And again, take the edge off your sexual frustration. Yeah.

Chris Rose: 42:14 We’re talking about taking the edge off. I am not promising that any of these strategies will ameliorate your sexual frustration altogether. What we can learn to do is not suffer from that sexual frustration. We can acknowledge it and be like right, there is something I am wanting and not getting. I can either look at the effort I’m putting into that goal, I can recalibrate that goal, or I can just come into a better relationship with the effort. Right? A better sense of okay, there’s something I want. There are rewards I’m seeking. A lot of us treat sex like something that should just be magically appearing from the sky of pussy. Right? It’s just like rain down upon us. And it’s interesting that some of those perspectives come from straight men. And then I get a lot from straight women of their expectations are so low, that they don’t even know what to hope for. Right?

Chris Rose: 43:15 So where are our expectations set socially has a lot to do with our sexual culture. And the people that report this sense of frustration, and I will dare say even entitlement. There is a sense of being entitled to something that you’re not getting and therefore your worth and value is being questioned. We need to recalibrate socially, our expectations of one another as sexual beings, and come into a better sense of those expectations together and what it takes to get there, right? If we all want to get to the hotel room in the sky, it’s going to take massive social cultural changes in our sex culture. If you want to experience that kind of sexual freedom in your life, what will it take? It’s not just going to appear. Like any other goal, like any other thing you’re working towards, these things don’t just happen. And a lot of the frustration comes from either not having the right goal or not having the right effort towards that goal that will get you there.

Chris Rose: 44:26 So examine that for yourself, and I hope this conversation has been useful to people. I know it won’t take the edge off for you. Maybe it will. I think maybe in unpacking this, some of the suffering could be relieved. But it’s going to take action in your life and body to shift how you’re feeling. So think about what action steps you’ll take, and how to reel ourselves in from this pit of despair, right? If we think about frustration, anger, despair. So many of us are kind of at that pit of despair. How do we walk it back? How do we walk it back, get back into the anger zone, then to the frustration zone, and then on the right side of that where we’re feeling like our goals are being met, our expectations are reasonable. We’re kind of in that flow that we want to be in.

Charlotte Rose: 45:14 We found ways of having a sexually fulfilling life, perhaps just with ourself, which is totally possible. And that not having the sex that you think you should be having makes you a failure. That piece is so important that we can’t connect those too. That not having the sex you want makes you a failure as a man. That is such a thought out there in culture.

Chris Rose: 45:37 Or a woman.

Charlotte Rose: 45:38 Or a woman. Right. But we have to dismantle that, and know that that is not the truth.

Chris Rose: 45:42 Yeah. And a lot of this episode we have been talking about the high libido, the high desire, the sexually frustrated as masculine. That is just a convenience here. We all experience this. So many women I talk to are sexually frustrated too. So many women are sexually frustrated. We’re all sexually frustrated, I think. To one degree or another at one point of our lives or another. So this is not a gendered experience. And that idea of the urgency, and the blue balls, and the nut that needs to be released. That is all old model discharge talk. We all have sexual goals. We all have sexual over awards we’re seeking. We all want to feel touched, we all want to feel loved, we all want to feel belonging. And sex is a vehicle to feel all of those things, but it’s not the only vehicle. It just happens to be a potent one, a power train, a turbo charger. I’m out of metaphors.

Chris Rose: 46:46 We hope this has been useful to you. And remember, the whole libido mini series is at pleasuremechanics.com/libido. So you can listen to the full arc of our conversation about rethinking libido.

Charlotte Rose: 47:01 And when you’re ready to master new erotic skills, come over to pleasuremechanics.com and discover our suite of online courses that can teach you beautiful erotic skills that you can share in the bedroom this evening.

Chris Rose: 47:16 All right, so come on over to pleasuremechanics.com. Check out our online courses. Use the code speaking of sex for 20% off. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 47:25 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 47:26 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 47:27 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 47:30 And an alleviation of your sexual frustration.

Charlotte Rose: 47:33 Yes.

Chris Rose: 47:34 Right cheers.