podcast — Page 7 — Pleasure Mechanics

Sexual Attitude Adjustments

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

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

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

Transcript of Podcast Episode: Sexual Attitude Adjustments

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 06:31 Jaws.

Chris Rose: 06:32 Jaws.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 36:47 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

Explore With Curiosity : Attitudes For Kinkier Sex

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 11:19 Oh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 21:11 Three.

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

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

Chris Rose: 21:49 Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Rose: 27:00 Exactly.

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

Chris Rose: 27:02 Thank you.

Charlotte Rose: 27:02 Yes. Beautiful.

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

Charlotte Rose: 28:15 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

Mindful Sex For Men With Performance Anxiety

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:04 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 06:07 No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 24:03 And dangerous. Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 28:00 Awesome.

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 29:31 I’m Charlotte.

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

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

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

Your Body Is Good Enough

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Your body is good enough, sexy enough and you are worthy of limitless pleasure. How easy is it for you to believe that simple statement?

For many of us, body shame, insecurities and judgment create a tremendous amount of stress and struggle. We are taught that our bodies will never be good enough, and that we have to sweat, struggle and strain to achieve a body that is more valuable and worthy of love.

To wrap up our month long theme focusing on Burnout and ending the stress cycles, we talk about BODIES. We look at how we can all transform our body shame and stress into acceptance and compassionate kindness towards our bodies, just as they are right now.

It is much easier to accept and be kind to our bodies when we receive social support and validation. Notice if your social media accounts make you feel energized or depleted, encouraged or frustrated, confident or insecure. You get to curate your own social media – so unfollow accounts that make you feel bad about yourself and follow more folks who are living in and loving their bodies, in all of their glory.

Check out our gallery of body positive accounts on Instagram for a much more nourishing feed!

What resources would be freed up for you if you accepted the idea that your body, as it is right now, is valuable and deserves to be loved and cherished? What if you were enough, just as you are, with no caveats? Can you accept the idea that you are someone’s hottest fantasy, as is?

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Transcript of Podcast Episode: Your Body Is Good Enough

Chris Rose: 00:00 Hi, 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 offer you soulful yet explicit advice on every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to Pleasuremechanics.com where you will find our complete podcast archive. And while you’re there go to Pleasuremechanics.com/free to enroll in our free online course, the Erotic Essentials, so we can get you started with some of our tried and true advice and strategies for maximizing the pleasure in your life. That’s Pleasuremechanics.com/free to get started tonight. On today’s episode we are going to be wrapping up our month of talking about burnout and completing the stress cycle for a more sexy life by talking about body image and all of the energy we bleed into worrying about our bodies and judging our bodies rather than enjoying our bodies and celebrating our bodies.

Chris Rose: 01:12 Before we get started, I want to say thanks to our sponsor… Oh wait, nevermind. We are now sponsor free. We are now sponsor free. Hurray. After a few months, about six months of experimenting with bringing sponsors on board, we recently decided to drop the ads and go sponsor free. We realized that we were spending too much time and too much energy focusing on what our sponsors wanted from us and not on what we wanted to deliver to you. We want this show and this relationship with you to be as clean and direct as possible so we can be as honest with you as possible and just continue to deliver really high value, effective sex talk in education. And to do that, we decided to drop the sponsorships. So this podcast will now be ad free for everyone. What this means though is that we do need your support.

Chris Rose: 02:20 We need you to show us love, to show us your support for this show. Come on over to patreon.com/PleasureMechanics. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N, patreon.com/PleasureMechanics and show your love with a sustaining monthly donation. If just a small percentage of the listeners of this show whose lives we know we’re reaching, we know we’re touching your hearts. If you can find it in your heart to throw us five bucks a month, that will give us a sustainable monthly income so we don’t have to worry about our bills and we can get down to the business of producing this weekly show for you, bringing you amazing educational resources and our online courses and doing our job, being your Pleasure Mechanics. We are here for you. We are here to optimize your sex life and root you on every step of the way. We are not here to sell you vitamins. So be gone sponsorships. Hallelujah. We are ad free again and here for you. But please come over to Patreon.com/Pleasure Mechanics and show your love and support for the show and show us that we made a good choice. Don’t make me feel like a fool. Patreon.com/Pleasure Mechanics.

Chris Rose: 03:44 All right. Into today’s episode, bodies. Body image, how we think about our bodies, how we feel in our bodies, and where are we directing our energy and our time and our resources? One of the chapters in Burnout is called the Bikini Industrial Complex. And the Nagoskis’ explore how the capitalist model of telling us our bodies aren’t good enough, aren’t sexy enough, aren’t healthy enough in order to sell us shit, has become such an intense cultural force that it is distracting all of us from living in our bodies. It’s causing all of us to judge one another and ourselves especially, and it’s a really limiting factor on how much we get to enjoy living in our bodies if we are constantly burdened with a sense of not being good enough. So we want to explore this relationship we have with our bodies and how we can get to a more loving, compassionate, and nonjudgmental stance in order to then enjoy, savor, celebrate, eroticize and yeah, experience ecstasy in our bodies. How can we experience more pleasure if we’re constantly tearing ourselves apart?

Charlotte Rose: 05:13 Yeah. Take a minute as we all having this conversation to reflect on your own life, how much time and energy has gone into critiquing and judging your own body and just think about how you could redirect that time and energy and what that could create in your life. It really becomes an energetic debt that we have and we’re holding constantly that is not necessary.

Chris Rose: 05:45 At first when I was looking at this chapter, I struggle to think about how it fit into the rest of the book about burnout and stress and managing stress. And then I realized that for a lot of people, body image and body shame is a tremendous source of stress, a daily grinding stress that wears us down, but also that tells us our bodies are not okay as they are. This is the message the Bikini Industrial Complex gives us. You are not good enough, you are not thin enough, you’re not pretty enough, you’re not healthy enough, you are not muscular enough, you are not enough, enough, enough. You are not enough. And therefore, you are not worthy of love, of pleasure, of connection, of partnership.

Chris Rose: 06:39 This equation that is messaged to us constantly in order to sell us the solution. They give us that crisis you are not good enough, here are all of the solutions for a price. Entire industries are built on this. The diet industry, the beauty industry and the capitalism is one issue here. This industrial complex that is so invested in messaging to us that we are not good enough, but it’s also the culture we live in that values certain bodies over others. That tells us that certain body types and shapes and presentations are inherently more valuable than others. And by creating that hierarchy and assigning more power and privilege to certain bodies over others, it sets us against each other as enemies. It isolates us and it puts us all in competition with another rather than uniting us around our shared experience of being humans around our shared experience of caring for one another and living more harmoniously together.

Chris Rose: 07:53 So without getting too Shangri-La about this, what we want to point out is that the culture we live in does not affirm most bodies and the inherent value and dignity and worthiness of those bodies. And we are part of our mission, part of the sex positive mission we are on, part of the mission of changing our sex culture. This is one pillar of it. We need to build a culture that affirms the inherent worth and dignity and value and yes, beauty of all bodies, of a diverse range of bodies. We need to explode the idea of what bodies are valuable and what values those bodies bring so that black and brown bodies, fat bodies, disabled bodies, bodies that are different in so many ways are as revered and celebrated and protected as all other bodies. What will that mean for your sex life? So we’re going to set those politics aside. That’s what we’re working towards, a world where all of our bodies have inherent dignity and value and are therefore protected the same.

Chris Rose: 09:15 Let’s bring this to a really individual level. How has your body image, how has your perception of your body and the feeling of worthiness and value you have about your body impacted your sex life from day one? If we’re honest with this question, most of us will be amazed, dismayed, shocked. It is very humbling to realize that from the beginning, from as we were emerging as children, as we are developing into our adolescence, as we’re having some of our first sexual experiences, as we are figuring out who we are in the mating game and who we want to be attracted to and who we want to be attracted to us. Throughout your lifetime of that process, have you felt worthy and valuable just as you are? How many of us can be like, yeah, I had been worthy since day one. No problem. Probably almost none of us. So we are all in this together. We are all struggling with this question in different ways.

Charlotte Rose: 10:27 It’s so sobering when you put it that way. To really take in how we have related to our body and what we are worthy of and how much pleasure we are allowed to experience. So how does this show up in our life? This can influence and impact who we feel worthy of going after, who we feel worthy of being attracted to.

Chris Rose: 10:50 Are they in my league? These ideas of leagues and scores. Is she a 10, are you a seven? Bullshit.

Charlotte Rose: 10:59 Right. And judging how attractive you are and finding a match that is like about the same level of attractiveness. These have so many judgments and so much self worth attached to how we identify our own attractiveness.

Chris Rose: 11:15 This’ll impact what you choose to do with your body. I really wanted to act in high school. I would never have gone on that stage because I was the fat girl. And the message was like, no one wants to look at you. Why would you put yourself on stage? So the sports you chose, the kinds of embodied physical activities you felt permission to enjoy, the pleasures you had to shut down because they weren’t appropriate for your body. And some of this happened before you were even aware. A lot of this happened in your very early childhood. And we inherit this message and then carry it into our entire development of our sense of self. And this is why when we start talking about some of the solutions and antidotes, we’re going to have to dig really deep here. This is some of the deepest deprogramming we are going to have to do collectively and individually to liberate ourselves from this nonsense that judges and shames our bodies and puts our bodies on a hierarchy of worthiness.

Chris Rose: 12:20 This is some of the biggest work to be done culturally. So we’re going to tackle it together. Oh yeah. So go through your life and notice your relationship with your body, what it allowed and what it took permission away from. And as Charlotte was saying, who did you feel permission to be attracted to? Who did you assume would be attracted to you? That is one of the biggest assumptions we need to interrupt because so many of us carry this feeling of no one will love me. No one will find me desirable. No one will want to fuck me because X, Y, and Z. And you fill in those X, Y, and Zs with your personal insecurities. But the thing is you are somebody’s fantasy. You, just as you are, someone is masturbating to you are right now. Can you believe that? So as I say that, some of you will be like, yeah, I can see that. People will find me attractive.

Chris Rose: 13:19 There are people that would want to fantasize about me. Other people will not believe me when I say that. And yet when we look at the data, when we look at what people are searching in porn, when we look at what people find attractive, there’s a huge range of what people find attractive. There’s so many people who prefer bigger bodies, myself included. Charlotte included. There’s so many people who love more flesh to touch and the softness of curves and the aesthetic of curves. But those people sometimes feel ashamed about admitting their desire for bigger bodies and do it in secret. And some people just, even if someone is flirting with them, they would never register it because they don’t believe they are worthy of that flirtation. So we need to internalize this idea that all bodies are desirable by someone and that it’s not just how your body looks that people will find you desirable for.

Chris Rose: 14:23 When we talk about our bodies and our worthiness, it’s so easy just to talk about what it looks like. And skinniness versus fatness and the color of our skin and our hair and the gender archetypes. But we also need to remember that what attracts us to one another is our full selves, our personalities, our values, and if we allow it, those things can be expressed through the body. And this is another piece I just really want to focus on is that the obsession with normalization and the obsession with creating these aspirational ideas of what a man should look like and what a woman should look like. That obsession with all becoming the same aspirational norm limits our individual freakiness. It limits our individual expression. And when you allow who you are to come through your body and be expressed through your body, that is how you express your sexuality and your gender identity, who you are.

Chris Rose: 15:33 And by putting that out there, you then attract the people who are attracted to who you are. So both culturally, how we decorate our bodies, the clothes we wear, the way we move, the language we use, that’s a cultural expression and it sends signals that attract the people that are also interested in those cultures. If you finally get up the guts to shave half of your head, put an earring in your ear and wear different makeup, you might start being attractive to different people who are more into the same music and lifestyle you are. Do you know what I mean? The obsession with normalization prevents us from expressing who we are. And then that gets in the way of that natural flow of attraction that I believe is part of sexuality. It’s like this is who I am and it’s a calling card to bring in the people who will love you and cherish you and stand by you for exactly who you are.

Charlotte Rose: 16:37 That’s so beautiful. So you’re really talking about feeling worthy enough to have full self expression, to really wear and express what gives you pleasure. To decorate yourself through your own pleasure and have that be your compass and your why. Why you want to bring joy to the world by being your fullest self.

Chris Rose: 17:02 Right. And so for those women who love really high feminine expression and love decorating their bodies and would love to take the time to present in that way, great. But for a whole another subset of women who have no interest in makeup, who has no interest in playing that feminine role, what is being held back, what is not being expressed if they’re trying to fit into that box. As long as we’re all trying to conform, we’re not celebrating our differences and in not embracing all of our differences, we’re not then enjoying the full spectrum of who we can be together. And I really look to the gay subcultures for this. Within the gay male community, there are all of these different subcultures for all different body types and expressions. So there’s the hairy bears who the bear community celebrates big, hairy, chubby men. Within that community there the others who are skinnier, more athletic, hairy men.

Chris Rose: 18:07 And there’s all of this language to describe all of the different desires for different kinds of bodies and energies. And within that language, men find affirmation. And when you realize there’s bear camp in California every year and you can go be with a thousand other hairy chubby men who find you so hot, that is so permission giving. But a lot of straight people don’t have access to these multiple subcultures that tell them they are hot and desirable just as they are. And I will never forget the first time I got into a hot tub naked with all of these older lesbians and I was terrified to reveal my body. I thought they were going to kick me out of the party and I dropped my robe and I stepped in naked and they were like, mmm, fresh meat. They all wanted me.

Chris Rose: 19:04 And when I entered a community where I was desired and where I was a hot commodity for my fatness, for my butchness, it changes how you walk in the world because then it doesn’t matter of all the magazine covers. It doesn’t matter the gaze of other people. It’s all of a sudden like, I know who I am and I know that I am worthy of being desired, worthy of being loved. The people I want to fuck, want to fuck me, it’s a mindset that we all need to be able to step into in order to fully embody and enjoy our sexuality. But this takes work. It takes such deep deprogramming to realize we do not have to be at a war with our body. That it’s not about losing five pounds, that it’s not about gaining a little bit more muscle in definition in your pecs, and then you’ll be the guy of her dreams. That it’s not about your Dick size, that it’s not about how flushy your vulva is, that none of these things have any inherent value. It’s all cultural messaging.

Charlotte Rose: 20:17 The truth of it is that we all have inherent value no matter what, and that is a hard pill to swallow in this culture that we have value. We have inherent worth and value just as you are. So that’s such a surprising idea and it’s so strange that we have to do work to accept that. But it’s true-

Chris Rose: 20:42 [crosstalk 00:20:42] even in relationships, even after someone has married you and committed their life to you and signed legal documents, binding their fate with yours, we can still doubt our worthiness of their love through the lens of five pounds or through the lens of I’m getting older and my boobs are saggy or than they were when you married me, so you can possibly want me anymore. That’s not reflective usually of how your partner feels about you. Those are internalized messages that you’re projecting out onto your partner and refusing their love and denying their affection, justifying it through your body shame, justifying it through this withdrawal of like, Ugh, I am not good enough as I am. And we walk that way in the world.

Chris Rose: 21:32 Recently, I’ve been in email communication with a few supermodels, as one does. And it happened serendipitously, but within a week or two, I developed a relationship with a female model and a male model. Both of them are the archetypes, the specimens of perfection, of beauty, absolutely I’m almost intimidated to look at them. There are these people that are so beautiful, you almost forget they’re human. Then they write to me and their struggles are exactly the same as everyone else’s in my inbox. Exactly the same struggles, exactly the same confidence issues, exactly the same relational issues. And we start to realize that your sense of pleasure, your sense of sexual freedom, how much you can enjoy moving during sex, how much you can orgasm, how key you want to get, all of these factors that we might look at, how much can you enjoy sex? Have zero correlation with physical beauty and with pretty privilege in the world?

Chris Rose: 22:47 And I really want to pull this apart when we talk about physical standards and aspirational ideals, those are cultural messages of what is beautiful and we need to stop calling that beautiful. And one of the things that Nagoskis do is they could talk about the new hotness. We need to create a wide range of presentations that we call hot and sexy and beautiful and start assigning these words and decentralizing them. So when we say a pretty woman, we don’t all think of the same image. If I say to you, audience, visualize a beautiful woman standing next to a handsome man, and then we all mind map that together, what would be the rate of variability? Let’s work towards a point where when I say that you’re like, well, what kind of beauty? That could mean 25,000 different things.

Chris Rose: 23:46 One of the ways to do this, so let’s shift into some solutions. And we didn’t really talk about body shame and how it comes up in bed and how you might not want your partner to touch or look at your genitals because of genital shame. There’s so many layers of body shame we’re not going to excavate right now. We’re taking a bird’s eye view at this and just noting that we all struggle. So let’s look at solutions and I will link in the show notes page to a few other episodes about shame and body stuff so you can continue the conversation. And certainly this won’t be the last time we talk about these topics. But for now let’s think about what are the steps you can do to liberate this brain space to stop draining so much energy, worrying about your body, having anxiety that you are not good enough, you’re not x enough. What can we do to deprogram step-by-step?

Charlotte Rose: 24:47 I think it starts with noticing your thoughts about yourself and about other people. But if we start with ourself, notice how often you have thoughts about your body and about its worthiness. Begin to neutralize that. Begin to speak kindly to yourself.

Chris Rose: 25:07 Do you think it’s useful? So a lot of people would look in the mirror and in their head be like, Ugh, I hate how my body looks in this outfit. And that thought is clear as day. Do you think it’s useful to say that out loud and then scrutinize like, would I ever say that to someone I love? There’s something for me about saying it out loud that takes it out of this brain space where we feel almost like we can get away with anything and make it as real as it is. Because when we know that our thoughts have impacts on our biology, on our emotions, and we have to take responsibility for those thoughts, our thoughts are powerful and have very real effect. If we want to take responsibility for those thoughts, externalizing them and then looking at them in the light of day can be useful.

Chris Rose: 25:59 Or if you think really negative thoughts about yourself all the time, is there a trusted friend or perhaps your romantic partner that you would say, I cannot stop obsessing about how much gray hair is coming in. I’m only 35, I feel like I’m getting old. What do you think? And then let your partner be like, I love your gray hair. It’s sexy to me. And all of a sudden you’re like, hmm, there’s a different way to think about it. So something about externalizing it and naming these patterns of thoughts help us take accountability for them.

Charlotte Rose: 26:33 I think it also helps us realize that they are thoughts instead of it being the truth that is happening inside our head. There’s that piece of really witnessing our own thoughts and recognizing them as thoughts that we have choices around.

Chris Rose: 26:48 And scrutinizing, am I treating myself with the same respect that I would treat a friend? And if the answer to that is no, then there’s so much room there for more self compassion. Sometimes when, if Charlotte says something about herself, I’ll be like, stop being so mean to my wife. There’s something about remembering that we are our lovers beloved. We are our children’s parents, we are our sisters sister or whatever it is. Remembering who you are to the people you love and would you want them exposed to how you’re talking to yourself? Is that a good way to respect to the mother of your own child? Probably not. And so there’s so much room for more self compassion and self kindness here. And notice we’re not saying self love. Notice we are not jumping to you have to love your body, you have to cherish your body, you have to find your body’s sexy.

Chris Rose: 27:52 I don’t particularly find my body that sexy, but I feel sexy in it and I know what it can do for me. Especially as I age, and I have health conditions come up, my belly is full of bruises from my needles in my infusion sets. And I don’t look at those bruises and I’m like, Ooh, sexy bruise today. That one looks good. But it’s neutral, it’s neutral. I’ve come to a place of neutrality and then from that neutrality, all of the pleasure can be built on top of that. And we can start focusing on what our bodies can experience and feel and create in the world instead of just how they look and how they compare to some random standard that was set for us by the corporations.

Chris Rose: 28:39 That is a different perspective coming to this body neutral place of like, this is my body. It’s just what it is. It’s acceptance of the reality. Then some love and celebration might get layered into that because you might realize, oh actually really loved my hands, and the way they look. And oh actually, I have a really cute ass, and I can notice that, and I can wear pants that make my ass look good. And that makes me feel sexier, and I can walk with confidence from that place. You can start building some swagger on top of neutral, but for most of us, neutral is just right. Neutral is good enough because our bodies don’t have to be beautiful in order to experience limitless sexual pleasure, in order to experience boundless love and belonging. So if you think about what you really want, what is your body wanting, what do you want to experience, and you realize none of that is contingent on any way that it looks. You can start focusing on those experiences, on those sensations, on the connections you want to be having and put your energy there. Such a different thing.

Charlotte Rose: 29:55 That’s so profound. And this is fairly simple. We understand these are easy things to say and harder things to do to begin to notice all the thoughts in your mind and to calm them and tame them and redirect them. And to do this possibly hundreds of times a day depending on where you’re at with how you talk to yourself, this is an ongoing relationship that you were having with yourself around your body. But this is how it starts. This is so important and it will make an enormous difference in how much pleasure you feel like you’re worthy of having and how much joy you can experience in your body if you’re not constantly saying mean things to yourself.

Charlotte Rose: 30:43 So though this is simple, it is very profound and has an enormous impact. And another way that we can practice this is when we’re out in the world. Notice all the thoughts and judgments we have about other people’s bodies. Because those of us that are more judgmental about our own bodies will also surprise be judging other people’s bodies more critically. So begin also as you’re out in the world, to speak kindly inside your own head about other people’s bodies and look for beauty and have that be outside of the traditional ideal norm and really begin to appreciate and enjoy all these different variations of beauty and gorgeousness that we see in the world. Begin to be somebody that is seeing other people’s beauty.

Chris Rose: 31:29 And again, I want to stop using the word beauty, but I want to expand what that is. But when we look at other people out in the world and we look for their value and their worth and their attractiveness, we might not see beauty. I might look across the cafe and see someone who looks really calm and kind and smart. I want to keep talking about worthiness, and I don’t know, the word beauty, I think it just stops on the surface level for so many people and what we carry and what attracts other people to us is so much more than that.

Charlotte Rose: 32:09 Totally Fair. And I totally get what your point and that is what I’m speaking about, but I hear you that we have a very limited idea of the word beauty. So you were expanding that. We are looking for people’s energetic awesomeness in their own specific expression.

Chris Rose: 32:25 And in your judgments of other people, you will find your programming. So notice when you think, I cannot believe she is wearing leggings or those thighs, how dare she? How would she even leave the house? Oh my God, I would never do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of this might be running through your head and you have been taught something about what legs are valuable and what legs are sexy and what legs deserve to be seen and what needs to be covered up. This idea of how dare they show that in public, is really, really telling. And I think just over the past five, 10 years, there’s been this explosion of body positivity and permission. I’m seeing a lot of young people show more of their body than I ever would have in high school. So I think there is more and more possibilities for people. And in that, all of those people who are being daring and bold and courageous enough to express themselves and show their bodies will trigger other people’s judgment. So notice your judgments.

Chris Rose: 33:35 Another really common judgment is around people’s perceived sluttiness or how sexy they’re willing to dress, especially if they are older or we might assign the word cheap to it. So notice if that category comes out a lot for you of like, oh she looks like a whore. She looks slutty, she looks cheap. You have been trained that a woman is not supposed to dress too sexy. And then that means something about her morality.

Charlotte Rose: 34:05 She’s less worthy if she is overtly sexual.

Chris Rose: 34:07 And that a certain amount of cleavage means something about her sexual permissiveness or about her being slutty are cheap. So notice these categories of judgment. Notice what comes up. It’s also so interesting to notice in all of these examples. Examples about men’s bodies aren’t as quick to the tongue, but I think men are under tremendous pressure too, and a lot of that is around a certain performance of masculinity and yeah, we know this.

Chris Rose: 34:38 One of the things that we can now do that was not possible even five or 10 years ago is curate our own media. The media, magazines, TV, all of this stuff is one of the primary tools capitalism uses to sell us certain images and to indoctrinate us into certain ideologies. Mainstream media is dying. There used to be three channels on the TV and so it was chosen for you what you would watch. Now we can all curate our own media streams. Most of us watch TV through streaming platforms. We don’t even watch TV ads anymore. You can choose what magazines and books you read, and now on social media you can choose who you “follow.” So if you use social media, you can use this as a deliberate strategy. Start following bodies that look like yours, that celebrate your differences, that are culturally relevant to you. Start following people who are body positive, role models for you. People who embody the energy that feels really exciting and sexy and inspiring to you.

Chris Rose: 35:59 That might be what they look like in their personal style and fashion. But it also might be professional archetypes and role models and you look at how they embody themselves and how they find their sense of value and worth in their body. And that is a really different stream of media than just white, thin body after white thin body in the fashion magazines. You can choose not to look at that. We have the power to choose what we see. And so in the show notes page, I will do a big Instagram gallery with a lot of my favorite body positive accounts. So we will give you people to follow. And from there, the world is your oyster, but curate a feed of people who stretch your ideas of what is acceptable, who challenge your ideas of beauty, who push you into a zone of discomfort. So you can deprogram what you think is normal, what you believe is normal, what you believe is worthy of being celebrated and enjoyed.

Chris Rose: 37:10 And there’s something about the social affirmation of this that I think there’s one of the best uses of social media. Is gathering the people that when you pick up your phone, if you’re going to do that scrolling, you feel better about yourself than when you started. And the flip side of this is unfollow, unfollow and unfriend with abandon the people, and the accounts that make you feel like shit. You do not have to follow or pay attention to anyone who makes you feel bad about your body. Full Stop. Unfollow, get rid of it. And notice in its absence if you feel better. And this includes friends and people too. If you have a group of friends that’s diet obsessed and all they talk about is, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Body, body, body in negative ways, you have permission to either speak up in that group of friends and being like, I’m really bored about talking about our bodies. Let’s talk about something else or unfollow them. Don’t participate in those conversations anymore.

Chris Rose: 38:24 It will take a critical mass of us to stop playing this game until it becomes irrelevant. The game of all being on this hierarchy and one another and pulling one another apart, and the pleasure groups of friends take in shredding other people’s expression, that has to end. We can no longer make it permissible or normal to find social pleasure in critiquing and trashing and judging other people. It’s so normal now. Why is that okay? It’s not okay in the future land of sexy land, pleasure mechanics universe.

Chris Rose: 39:11 And just again, notice how much your internal monologue, your social dialogues, how much of these conversations about your body and other people’s bodies are affirming, celebrating, honoring versus degrading, judging, shaming? But what we are moving towards is a world where the range of bodies that are celebrated, honored, cherished, protected is so expansive, it doesn’t leave anybody behind. And that we have a culture of celebrating difference to the point where no one feels socially isolated or sexually isolated because of how their body is functioning in any given moment. And my illness really brought a lot of this to the surface. I had never felt as unworthy and as broken as when I was so sick. I was as skinny as I’ve ever been.

Chris Rose: 40:17 I had lost a hundred pounds. Some people were telling me how beautiful I looked and how skinny jeans looked good on me, but I felt so broken because of my disease, because of my new health crisis. I started questioning whether or not I was worthy of love. And this question of because my body has a disease, or my body is not cooperating in a certain way or a feeling of betrayal of your body. The idea that that would trigger thoughts of like, Charlotte should just divorce me and go find a well healthy person. I will never be a good wife for her. I am not worthy of her love. We were 10 years into an incredible loving relationship and still I questioned my worthiness because of what my body was doing. And this is just real. This is real deep programming of our worthiness, and our deservance of love and belonging based on how our body is performing or how it looks or factors we can never even control.

Charlotte Rose: 41:26 It’s funny because you are speaking about that, but I feel like when I first met you, one of the things that was so striking to me was how much confidence you had in your body. And I had actually never seen somebody who was outside of the normal idea of what is beautiful. Stand there naked with so much, so much calm about your body. So much like I deserve to be taking up space, and it doesn’t matter that my belly is here hanging out. And it was quite shocking and quite an amazing when I first saw you. Just so calmly take up space in your body when I feel like I had been so programmed that bodies that are fat should be ashamed of themselves and be holding themselves like quiet. It was so amazing the confidence that you are embodying. I was really struck by that.

Chris Rose: 42:28 And there were a lot of factors that got me there because certainly I did not grow up with body confidence. You met me probably five years into that really heavy lifting work. One of the things we should name his social nudity.

Charlotte Rose: 42:44 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 42:45 The class we met in was a sexological bodywork training and it was a naked class. And so we were naked in a circle together. That’s when we first met. It was like, day two, let’s get naked together. But other places that you can see bodies and see a wide range of bodies, places like nude beaches, hot tubs, even locker rooms. I wish there were way more spaces for social nudity. Nonsexual social nudity is a really great exercise and also to be naked and nonsexual social spaces and normalize the feeling of your skin exposed to the air and exposed to the gaze of others.

Charlotte Rose: 43:35 They get hot springs. Yeah, they’re hard to have access and many people may not feel comfortable or be able to find these spaces. But if you can and you feel willing, it is an amazing exercise in calming yourself down and be in a space, being naked with other people.

Chris Rose: 43:53 And this is another fringe benefit of going to a sex event, or a sex party where even if you don’t want to have sex or play publicly, just going and watching. One of the things that really was transformative for me of stepping into the queer community, and a BDSM community was going to sex parties and seeing bodies that looked like mine, and a whole range of bodies being desired, but also being pleasured. Seeing big fat disabled bodies moaning in ecstasy as a really beautiful person pleasure them was very affirming to me. It’s like, oh that’s an option. And there was.

Chris Rose: 44:40 There was a stage where I transformed my entire growing up. My understanding was I would have to find someone to love me despite what I looked like. And that was the game. And I remember lying in bed as a teenager being like, all right, I’m going to have to be so smart, so charming, so kind, so giving. I’m going to have to compensate and all of these ways for my lack of pretty privilege to find someone to love me. That was the game I was playing. And then in college and through becoming queer and starting to have, and also again starting to express who I actually was, shaving my head, masculinizing not trying to be a pretty girl. I was never a pretty girl. I never wanted to be a pretty girl. I wanted the benefits pretty girls had.

Chris Rose: 45:32 I wanted the attention and the validation, but I never really was one of them. I always felt outside of it. When I could step into really being who I am, a queer fat butch with a great ass, by the way. When I stepped into that, shaved my head, started being around the people who I actually wanted and who actually wanted me, that was part of it. And I realized that someone would love me inclusive of my body, not despite it. And so check in for yourself. Do you feel loved despite of your body or inclusive of your body?

Chris Rose: 46:14 We all deserve to be loved wholly and fully. And that doesn’t mean your body is the top reason someone’s loving you. I have no delusions that Charlotte picked me for my hot ass. We fell in love. We were not each other’s types. I had never dated a fem before with big boobs. We fell in love and this magical way. But I want to get past this idea that everyone is sexy and everyone is beautiful because not everyone has the same pretty privilege and we need to acknowledge that. But no matter how much pretty privilege you have, the fact that you are human and hopefully a really good kind, awesome human, because you’ve listened to this podcast, the fact that you are human, that is enough to mean that you belong and you are worthy and you deserve to be loved as you are. That’s the bottom line. There are no caveats to that.

Chris Rose: 47:20 And nothing your body can do, no disease, no surgery, no disfiguring accident will change that. What energy do you free up? What resources, what energy, what stress, what emotional investment is freed up if you can get to the point where you accept that your body deserves and is valuable and is worthy of pleasure and joy and sexual belonging and connection as anyone else’s?

Charlotte Rose: 47:52 And pleasure and ecstasy.

Chris Rose: 47:55 Yeah, and that that’s all available to you. And then the question is what are you want to experience? What does your body want to feel? We’ll leave you with one of the questions that Nagoski leaves us with in these book is, what does your body want right now? What do you need right now? And to turn to your body with the same affectionate sing songy voice as we would a little baby of like, oh, hi sweetie. What do you need right now? What do you need right now, my dear sweet body?

Charlotte Rose: 48:28 And what would it be like to ask yourself that for that to be a main lens that you are communicating to your body with, a constant curious nourishment. Like, how can I help you? What do you need now? And to have that be your inquiry and then listening with curiosity for the answer. It’s a really different relationship that you can cultivate with your own body. And what would that change? What would that look like over time?

Chris Rose: 48:56 Yeah. That’s experiment.

Charlotte Rose: 48:59 So thank you to the Nagoskis for all of their inspiration.

Chris Rose: 49:02 Yes, this has been a four part series this month about this book, Burnout, completing the stress cycle, things we can do to feel less stressed and more vital. And we will be moving on next month to a new theme, to some new explorations. And again, we have gone ad free. We dropped out of our Pleasure podcast collective, wished them all well, but we no longer want to take our time and our attention in selling you other people’s products. We don’t want to tell you what vitamins to buy. You can figure that out. We’re going to have great, complex, stimulating conversations about sexuality. We’re going to start practicing pleasure together. We’re going to start moving more as a communal pod spread all around the world, but we are going to start dropping in deeper through this podcast into the lived experience of pleasure and how we can all practice that more deeply together.

Chris Rose: 50:15 Yes, this is where we are moving towards. Thank you for listening. Come on over to Pleasuremechanics.com/free and enroll in our free online course. That gives us your email address to make sure we can stay in touch with you and you can be the first to know about our new offerings that are coming down the pipeline. We’re so excited. Come on over to Pleasuremechanics.com/free for our free online course and to stay in touch with us and to show your support for this show. Throw us some love at patreon.com/Pleasure Mechanics. P-A-T-R-E-O-N, Patreon.com/Pleasure Mechanics. Type it in because we’re unsearchable as an adult show and give us a monthly sustaining donation. Help us stay afloat while we do our soul work in the world. We are your pleasure mechanics. We work for you. Show us some love. Help us keep going and let’s level up our pleasure together. Yes, I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 51:24 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 51:25 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 51:26 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Create Your Bedroom Haven

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You spend a third of your life in bed. Two of the most important activities for your wellbeing – sleep and sex – happen there. So when is the last time you thought about your bedroom and if it is meeting your needs?

In this episode, we explore ideas to make your bedroom into a haven of safety and comfort so you can get better rest, enjoy more time connecting with your lover and have a bubble of love to rest, restore and revive.

We cover:

how to make simple upgrades to make your bedroom more restful
inexpensive ways to bring beauty and art into your bedroom
how to deal with the paradox of using your bedroom for both relaxation and arousal
why to think about the gender and erotic mood of your space
using scent as a memory bridge to shift the mood
communicating about what you need to sleep better when sharing a bed with your partner

Big thanks to #LubeLife for sponsoring this episode – use the code 20Mechanics for 20% off your order at LubeLife.com

Podcast Transcript for Create Your Bedroom Haven episode

Chris Rose: 00:01 Hi. 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 offer soulful and explicit advice about all facets of human sexuality. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com for our online home, where you will find our complete podcast archive, all of our online courses that are ready for you when you are ready to uplevel your erotic experience, and while you are there, go to pleasuremechanics.com/free and enroll in the Erotic Essentials, our free online course, which is packed with some of our favorite techniques and strategies, and even a free foot massage demonstration. Get started. What are you waiting for? Pleasuremechanics.com/free.

Chris Rose: 00:50 All right, today on the podcast, we are going to be talking about your bedroom, and little changes, maybe some big changes, you can make to your bedroom to have a more restful and erotic experience while you’re in that room of your home. Before we get started, I want to thank our sponsor for this episode, Lube Life. Lube Life offers amazon.com’s bestselling line of personal lubricants. There’s a whole range of water based, and silicone based, and even flavored lubes, if you’re into that kind of thing. Use the link in the show notes page for 20% off your entire order at Lube Life, and thanks so much to Lube Life for sponsoring this episode.

Chris Rose: 01:34 All right, on to your bedroom. It’s an important room, when you think about it, in terms of your life, but how often do we really think about our bedrooms, and think about what we could do to make them not only more of a haven, so we can get more rest and better sleep, but also to make them an erotic sanctuary? Is your bedroom supporting your sex life, or is it maybe blocking your sex life in some way, or causing discord in your sex life that you haven’t actually named yet? So we’re just going to be exploring all things boudoir today on the podcast.

Charlotte Rose: 02:15 Yeah. It’s so valuable, sometimes, to just take a step back and look at spaces in our life and see if they are supporting what we want them to be doing in our life, in this case sleep and sex. So this is just an opportunity to really reflect on what we’re creating in our life.

Chris Rose: 02:33 And we’re going to hope to offer you a wide range of points of reflection, and options. We know it is not possible to just like redo your bedroom, and buy all new furniture, and make it the sensual sanctuary of your dreams for everyone, but maybe there are little tweaks you can make. Maybe there are little things you haven’t thought about, in how this room impacts your life. If you think about it, you probably spend about a third of your life in your bedroom, and it’s easy to think, well most of that is while we’re asleep and unconscious. Therefore, it doesn’t really matter. But it does matter, and it matters in terms of sleep, and it matters in terms of sex.

Chris Rose: 03:12 And as we approached this conversation, I was thinking about is it a paradox that we’re trying to design a space for both restfulness, and this sense of a haven, where we can really sink into our deepest sense of safety and rest, to sleep well, but also trying to create a space for excitement, and arousal, and seduction? So how do we straddle these two functions for one room?

Charlotte Rose: 03:42 And that’s going to be so personal, between you and your partner, and your aesthetics, and your desires, for the feeling you want to create in this room, and I think the answer to that is going to be different for each person and each couple. What we find calming, what we find erotic, are going to be so, so different, but it’s valuable just to reflect on.

Chris Rose: 04:02 So, let’s walk through the bedroom and think about how we can optimize these spaces to be more supportive of our overall wellbeing and our sexual wellbeing. Before we get started, I want to acknowledge this is part of our series on burnout and on completing the stress cycle, and it turns out sleep is really, really important for our health. And this is not news to anyone, but something about the way the Nagoskis wrote about it in the Burnout book really reminded me that sleep is not something we can catch up on later. It’s not something we can compromise on. Our bodies need it, and if we are not getting the kind of sleep we need, we are doing ourself a disservice. And there’s no, like, debate around this in the medical community.

Chris Rose: 04:52 We could do a whole episode about the benefits of sleep, but I don’t think anyone really needs to hear that. We all know the importance of sleep, and I think we could, you know, extrapolate on if you are under-slept, and therefore fatigued, how that would then create downward spirals in your relationship. You might get more moody. You don’t have enough energy for dates. You don’t have enough energy for physical activity, let alone sex, right? So it’s like sleep is this one thing we can give ourselves to uplevel all of our life, and just support ourselves as an organism. Sometimes, when we think about having better sex, we forget how we are having sex as a holistic organism, so something as simple as sleep can really impact how much you want sex.

Chris Rose: 05:44 Like, your body has to be pretty well resourced to be interested in fucking. It’s kind of an extra bonus when your body is, like, in a pretty good state, and it’s like, “All right, let’s play.” If it’s in crisis, and is under-slept, undernourished, under-resourced, it takes a lot more to get those gears grinding. So don’t discount the importance of something like a good night of sleep on fulfilling your wildest fantasies. There’s a very direct connection.

Charlotte Rose: 06:14 We live in a culture that is so obsessed with moving fast, and achieving, and productivity that to carve time out, significant time out, to really rest is quite countercultural, and we’re doing this episode because it’s probable that some of you really need to be reminded of this. Maybe not all of you. We want to remind us all that sleep matters, and is medicine for the body, and supports your sex life, because you are resourced.

Chris Rose: 06:46 The Nagoskis talk about how we are not complete without sleep. Learning is not complete without sleep. Exercise, movement, is not complete without sleep. Social interaction is not complete without sleep. And that was a really good reminder for me of all these things we do bring our time and energy to during the day, learning, physical exercise, social engagement, like loving people, all of those things need the sleep to complete. It’s a great chapter of the book. It really just was a very sobering reminder for us, especially as new parents, recovering from health crisis, like giving ourself the gift of sleep is a beautiful thing.

Chris Rose: 07:32 So, let’s go to the bedroom. Let’s go to the bedroom. When you walk into your bedroom, how do you feel? How do you feel? Is it just an extension of your house, or is it a special room in some way? We want to shoot for when you walk through the door of your bedroom, you feel a little different. You feel invited into an inner sanctum, an inner sanctuary within your own home, would be one way to think about it. What do you want to feel when you go to your bedroom? Do you want to feel calm? Do you want to feel serene? Do you want to feel supported, comfortable and cozy? Some people like a really sparse bedroom. Other people like a lot of mementos. What is the vibe you are going for, and have you talked to your partner about it if you share a bedroom?

Chris Rose: 08:24 Because sometimes, not always, but sometimes it kind of falls on the woman in a relationship to decorate, and I’ve heard from men who have said to me, “I can’t get horny in my bedroom, because it looks like a Laura Ashley store, or it looks like a little girl’s room. My wife’s stuffed animals are on our bed, from her childhood, and it just turns me off.” Things like that, or like, do you have a big picture of your family next to the bed, so you’re trying to fuck your wife, and your eyes fall on the gaze of your child, and maybe that’s a turnoff. What are the little things in your room that can be tweaked, and can that be a really active collaboration, so both of you feel good? So look at the gender of the space, and do both of you feel like reflected and supportive, and does it feel like a collaboration? Is this bedroom a place where you both belong?

Charlotte Rose: 09:20 Beautiful, yeah. I think family photos are great to put all the rest … put everywhere else in the bedroom, and-

Chris Rose: 09:27 So you as an artist, how do you feel about art in the bedroom, and … Go to the walls, Charlotte? What should be on the walls of a bedroom?

Charlotte Rose: 09:33 I mean, I think ideally things that feel evocative of the kind of sexuality and sensuality that you want to create for yourself and in your relationship. We can use art on our walls as placeholders for ideas, experiences, sensations, what we want to evoke for ourselves, and we can be intentional about that together, and it can be a fun experience to pick things out together, potentially.

Chris Rose: 09:59 And think about hotel rooms you have been in. We’ve all been in those frumpy hotel rooms, where they have like pictures of little girls in floral dresses with baskets of flowers on the walls, and that will evoke a different feeling than going to a hotel room with beautiful modern art, or crashing waves, or … You know, what images evoke the feeling state you are going for? And give yourself permission to change things up and try it out. Art doesn’t have to be expensive. You can frame images out of like old books, go to art fairs, by art from students. Charlotte has beautiful paintings.

Charlotte Rose: 10:40 I haven’t really come out to our audience about that yet. I guess I am now.

Chris Rose: 10:44 The artist within you is stirring again, after our child is growing up-

Charlotte Rose: 10:47 Yes.

Chris Rose: 10:47 … but let’s use art, and again, some people will really resonate with this and other people won’t, but continuing from the walls, think about your curtains, and your sheets, and the colors in your room. What colors are you bringing into your bedroom, and do these evoke what you want to evoke? And again, we have to think about this paradox, because what we want to do in order to calm our bodies down and sleep is different than what we want to do to amp our bodies up and get aroused and excited.

Chris Rose: 11:19 I had an amazing art history teacher in Barcelona, who was this amazing old guy. He had lived through the Spanish Civil War, and was friends with Picasso, and slept with Dali’s wife, and was just a wonderful man. And he, in his apartment, had two bedrooms, as a lifelong bachelor. He had the bedroom for rest and the bedroom for entertaining the ladies, he told me, and the entertainment room was like a full-on sensual boudoir. You know, it was a four-post bed, and it was like red velvet, and like lush.

Chris Rose: 11:53 Most of us don’t have the luxury of two rooms, but can we create kind of a dual feeling? Can we create a serene platform for our rest, and for that sweetness, and cuddling, and coming together at the end of the day, that feeling of sanctuary together, and then have things that can transform the space, and create a secondary feel, so kind of like an overlay? And that might just be a change of lighting. That could be some candles you light, some scent you bring in, a change of sheets, or you know, you pull off the blanket and the bed is a different color, something. Like, is there a way you can create a mental cue that this room has two different purposes and functions?

Chris Rose: 12:44 And again, this will depend on your home situation. If you live alone with your partner and can fuck in any room of the house, maybe your bedroom is really serene, and you have a corner of your living room that has your sex furniture. I don’t know. If you have kids coming in and out of your bedroom, you might not want to hang up paintings of nudes. That’s kind of up to you. So this all has to fit within your lifestyle. Just saying that again. There is no one-size-fits-all advice for how your bedroom should look. We just want you to walk in and feel that sense of, “Ah, I’m home. I’m here. This feels good.”

Chris Rose: 13:22 This also means things like keeping it clean, clearing out clutter, and laundry baskets. What are you looking at when you lie down in bed at night? Does your eye wander to chores? Does it wander to a cluttered desk, with your checkbooks and the bills stacked up? Could that go in another room? A lot of this is just making changes on purpose and seeing what happens.

Chris Rose: 13:46 Another experiment you might try, we’ve been doing recently, is we got a cell phone caddy. I went to Michael’s art store, and I got a little wooden box, and we have it on a bookshelf at the front of our home, and we are now trying to be in the practice of leaving our cell phones there while we’re in our home together. And just having a $3 box has changed our behavior, and therefore, it changes our experience of being together, around the table, without our phones, of coming to bed without our phones. So how do you change kind of the architecture of your lifestyle to support the experience you want to have?

Charlotte Rose: 14:26 The Nagoskis talk about, in your relationship, wanting to create a love bubble, and we want to bring that idea into our bedroom. When you enter, can it feel like a bubble of love between you and your partner? What would that feel like for you? It’s kind of an exciting idea.

Chris Rose: 14:43 Do you want to talk about scent at all? We’ve talked about the visual. We’ve talked about the kind of energetics of the space. How do the other senses fit in, so smell, the physical feeling of sheets? What would your thoughts there be?

Charlotte Rose: 15:00 I feel like scent and plants are so valuable to bring in, if you’re into that kind of thing. Scent is a beautiful tool to bring into the bedroom, both for relaxation and for sensuality. Different people react differently to scents. Some people love them. Some people don’t like them. There are a lot of artificial scented candles on the market, and they can really affect people’s bodies, so there are essential oils, there are more natural ways you can bring scent into the room, that can have a really beautiful effect on the body, and can act as a bridge to certain states of being. So that’s something to explore. You can make room sprays with essential oils. You can use diffusers. There are some cheap and effective diffusers out there, and you can just get one bottle of essential oil, and that can be like your room’s love bubble zone, that you kind of begin associating.

Chris Rose: 16:02 When you say a bridge, I think it’s important just to say what that means. Scent is very associated in the brain with memory. If you smell a certain smell, you can immediately have this whole-body memory of a kitchen when you were a kid, and a specific dish someone used to cook. These parts of the brain are very, very linked, so if you have a specific smell that you diffuse into the room every time you have sex, and then you’re getting ready for a date night, and you put a drop of that in the diffuser, it starts reminding your body of the feeling state of sex nights, versus if you put a drop of a different essential oil, maybe a lavender, or something really relaxing, and that is what you put on when you’re trying to relax and go to sleep at night, this can be a way of cuing your body for these different states we want to feel in our bedroom.

Chris Rose: 16:57 So Charlotte is our essential oil queen around here. I am the really sensitive one when it comes to artificial smells, like certain bathrooms at restaurants I can’t go in, because of all the chemicals, so we had to work together, again, to find which essential oils worked well for both of us, and there were certain smells she loved. They triggered me, so they were not a good fit for both of us, and that’s something to always kind of go back to, is again, the Venn diagram. We talk about the Venn diagram of your pleasures, and your kinks, and your fantasies, but what about the Venn diagram of your comforts, and your joys, and what makes you feel safe and at home? Because that’s the feeling we’re mostly going for in the bedroom, and then you kind of layer eroticism on top of that.

Chris Rose: 17:46 Plants are kind of my domain in the house. I love house plants, and they can actually be very cheap, and a way to totally transform the space. I recently had to go to Walmart for another reason, so I ended up buying a few orchids from Walmart, and they were like $12 orchids, and I found some decorative bowls in our kitchen that we hadn’t been using it, and for $24, we now have beautiful orchids on both side of our bed. And this is like an accessible way … And orchids, by the way, will last for six months in bloom, so for $10, you have half of a year of beauty in your house, that will go so much further than a cheap bouquet of carnations, right? So how do we leverage our resources? How do we make beauty and indulgences that last?

Chris Rose: 18:40 One thing you taught me about was investing in really good sheets and towels, and how our sheets are this thing that we lie on for eight hours a night, and we want to make sure that feels good to our skin. So I have learned having a winter set of sheets, and like warm, cozy flannel, and then transitioning into spring and summer sheets, nice cool cotton or bamboo. These are ways we take care of ourselves, and we honor the sensuality of our lives. If you are using an old, torn towel with poop stains on it from your kid to get out of the shower, like that does not signal pampering, and you know, like what are you telling yourself with the objects and the textures around you?

Chris Rose: 19:26 It’s great to think about, and then again, I know everyone can’t just go and buy new sheets, or a new bed, or a new mattress, but what can you do? What little upgrades are accessible, and affordable, and available to you right now, because little changes then can like spark big feelings, and motivate bigger changes and bigger upgrades when they’re accessible to you, and you can figure out what those upgrades might even be.

Charlotte Rose: 19:52 Yeah, I’m always amazed at how the simple act of bringing plants into the bedroom, or any room, can just completely change the feeling. It’s kind of amazing.

Chris Rose: 20:04 Another huge factor to consider is lighting. This is another piece I am crazy about. I get really light sensitive at night, and a bright, glaring light in a room puts me in a bad mood. I can really just, like … So noticing that lighting is really important to me, I take whatever steps I can, which usually means turning the lights out, but candles, low lights, dimmer switches, all of these things can make a huge difference, and I was recently talking about this with one of our patrons over at patreon.com/pleasuremechanics, where you can support the show with a monthly donation.

Chris Rose: 20:46 I was talking to one of our patrons, who is an ex-pro cinematographer, and talking about lighting, and asking for some of his thoughts on it, and he actually developed an entire guide called Turn on Your Love Light, that we’re going to make available to our other patrons. There’ll be a link in the show notes page. But he really walks us through factors to consider, and gets kind of geeky and technical with us, thinking about the warmth of lighting, and what kind of bulbs create different warmth feels, and flatter the body, and make you feel more relaxed and sensual, versus more energetic. So big thanks to Allen for putting together this lighting guide for us. That will be posted on patreon.com/pleasuremechanics, for all of our lovely patrons.

Chris Rose: 21:40 One tip I really loved, especially as light bulbs are moving towards LEDs, is how to choose LEDs that feel warm, and he gives us the exact bulbs, and wattages, and temperatures to go for, and I think I’m going to be switching out some of our light bulbs after this, and really consider the lighting in your bedroom. If the only lighting option is a bright overhead chandelier, maybe invest in some side lights, some fairy lights, some string lights, some rope lights, like whatever works for you, and get creative with it, and notice how lighting affects your experience.

Chris Rose: 22:24 All right, so we have walked into your bedroom. We have considered the clutter, the mess we could clean up, the office desk we might be able to move to another room. We’ve talked about the objects in your room creating kind of an energetic feel, so we’ve given kind of a physical makeover to the space. I do want to switch now and talk about what happens in bed, and how to negotiate some of the actual mechanics of sleeping.

Chris Rose: 22:53 Before we do, I want to take a moment and thank our sponsor for this episode. Big thanks to lubelife.com for sponsoring this episode. Lube Life offers amazon.com’s bestselling line of personal lubricants. They have water-based lube, which is compatible with condoms and toys, silicone-based lube, which offers a long-lasting glide. A lot of people love it for butt play. And flavored lube, which some people love for oral sex. All of their products are made in their USDA-certified organic facility in California, with top-quality ingredients, so you can trust what you are reaching for when you need extra slip, slide, and glide in your erotic touch. Go to lubelife.com and use the code 20mechanics for 20% off your entire order. That’s 20mechanics at lubelife.com, or use the link in the show notes page, and big thanks to lubelife.com for sponsoring this episode.

Chris Rose: 24:00 All right, so back in your bedroom, I want to talk briefly about the things that happen in your bed. And of course, we talk about many things that happen in your bed in all of the episodes. I want to talk specifically here about sleep, and having a conversation with your partner about anything you can do to make your two bodies sleep better next to each other, because I think a lot of us have this Hollywood image that, “If we’re in love, we’ll just cuddle up, and spoon one another, and sleep entangled and blissfully all night long,” but that image doesn’t always work for people, and our bodies need different things to sleep well.

Chris Rose: 24:43 Some people love sleeping entangled in their lover’s arm, and are kind of like a puppy that doesn’t want to lose contact, and if you roll over, they’ll roll right into you. Other people, myself included, benefit from space around my body, and I don’t like having extra wrinkles. I can’t wear, like clothes and have sheets, right? I need, like, bare skin, no wrinkles in the sheets. I sound really high maintenance in this episode. I just know what works for me, whereas Charlotte wears a lot of clothes to bed, and really likes to stay warm, so we have different temperature needs.

Chris Rose: 25:20 And after a while of sleeping together, we realized that we need two duvets, two blankets, so she has a heavier duvet in the winter, I have a lighter duvet. Why are you laughing? Charlotte is cracking up over our duvets.

Charlotte Rose: 25:34 I just like the idea of like I’m wearing a lot of clothes. I’m not wearing like [inaudible 00:25:47] Sorry. I’m not wearing so many [inaudible 00:25:48]

Chris Rose: 25:54 Charlotte. All right, Charlotte is now-

Charlotte Rose: 25:55 I just [crosstalk 00:25:55]

Chris Rose: 25:55 … having a total breakdown about the idea of wearing so many clothes to bed. She wears-

Charlotte Rose: 25:59 I just don’t want you to think I was wearing like 15 layers. [inaudible 00:26:04]

Chris Rose: 26:04 It’s really sexy. She wears snow pants, and gloves, all meaning … All right, we are breaking your ear holes with all this laughing.

Charlotte Rose: 26:12 Okay.

Chris Rose: 26:15 All is to say we have different temperature needs, and temperature is one of those things, like our body just has different needs, and you can’t really love your way through that, you know? So it came a point where I was, “Charlotte, I love holding you. I love cuddling with you. I will hold you as long as you want, until you’re snoring, and then I am gone,” so now you’re snoring in all your clothes. Then I’m going to roll over and sleep by myself. I think especially the permission to have two blankets, two duvets, and take care of my own temperature, made sleeping together sustainable.

Chris Rose: 26:55 So, how do you sleep together? Do your bodies like a lot of contact? Do you want more space? How is your temperature? Make sure you are both accounted for and taken care of, and that one person’s needs aren’t dominating the sleep situation, and you’re not martyring yourself. Like, giving up sleep every night to make your partner feel comforted will not serve the relationship in the long term. So just have a really honest conversation about that. Talk about what you need, in terms of intimacy and connection, and what are those bedtime rituals? I always try to make sure, for 12 years, that the last words I say are, “I love you,” and that was a really intentional choice early on, and I really wanted to do that, and I now do that, I and just try to like mutter, “I love you,” before I go to bed every night. So what are little things like that that make you feel safe, and comforted, and that you can share this bed fully?

Charlotte Rose: 27:57 That’s so beautiful. Couples can figure out just little rituals that you can do before sleep, before getting in bed, that really make you feel loved, and connected, and cared for, and having a conversation, being intentional about it, can really make a difference in the long-term relationship, if you get into beautiful habits that make you feel good.

Chris Rose: 28:20 And part of this conversation might be you don’t go to bed at the same time. One of you stays up way later. Does the other person want to be kind of tucked in, and hang out with a little bit, and cuddled, and then kissed goodnight, and then the other person slips away for their late-night stuff? What would make you feel kind of you’ve completed the day together, and you have a point of connection and intimacy, even if it’s not sex, to complete the day and transition into sleep? While you’re in this conversation, talk about things like, “Am I allowed to wake you up in the middle of the night if I’m horny? Is that ever okay? How do you feel about morning sex? Am I allowed to initiate sex in the morning while you are asleep?” Right?

Charlotte Rose: 29:07 That’s a great one to have consent around.

Chris Rose: 29:09 Yeah.

Charlotte Rose: 29:09 Before experimenting with.

Chris Rose: 29:11 Like, is morning blowjobs on your morning wood okay, or is that like really irritating, because it makes you have to pee, and then you get awkward? Like, people have different requests around this, so have a conversation. Talk about how to optimize your bedroom, your sleep, and know that any steps you take towards getting better sleep will pay dividends in your overall wellbeing, and your relational wellbeing, and your sexual wellbeing. We need to be well rested to be the fucking goddesses and gods we are. We need to be well rested to be in good working order. We need good sleep to function well, to heal deeply, to integrate our learning, and our social learning. It is so important on all levels, and sleeping well as a couple, if you can get this down and find the ways that support both of you, it can be a really, like, nourishing part of your relationship.

Chris Rose: 30:15 I really love sleeping with Charlotte, and during the baby years, when she spent more time sleeping with our child, in our child’s room, I really missed sleeping with another body. For me, it’s like curling up in the cave at the end of a day with like my animal kin. That’s kind of really how it feels to me. It’s like the smells, the sensations, and this breathing body that I feel safe next to, and that I can slip into sleep and dreams, and know she’s there for me, and we’re loving each other, like even in the unconscious. That, for me, is very romantic. Like, sleeping well next to each other, and the sound of Charlotte’s snoring, and her breath, you know, like these things are very, very comforting in long-term relationships, and we only got there because we worked on it, and we figured out what works best for us. And now, it works, and we have a beautiful bed.

Charlotte Rose: 31:15 But it took a while, sometimes, figuring out like the evening rituals of going to bed, and one person going to sleep, one person staying up. Those things, there can be like some hurt feelings, some unexpressed needs, like some uncomfortable conversations-

Chris Rose: 31:28 “I’m lying here in bed waiting for you, and you’re watching porn.” “I didn’t know you were waiting for me. I thought you had gone to bed.” “Well, why don’t you come and check on me?” Like, that would have been avoided with a conversation, right? How-

Charlotte Rose: 31:41 That wasn’t the specific conversation we had, by the way. Not that there’s any shame in that conversation, but yes, having those conversations, so you can get to a more unified place, whatever that looks like for you, is valuable. Also, just in terms of creating your room as the love bubble that you want to be in. I think it’s like valuable to make a space that you want to hang out in kind of casually before bed, that it’s a place that you guys both want to go to, and just be together for a while before sleep, because that is a space that can lead into sex for some people some evenings. It creates more opportunities and more moments of potential intimacy if that is right for you that day, but just making it a space that you move from a living room or a dining room to like be in together as you wind down from the day can be a great invitation or gateway into other states, either of sleep or sex.

Chris Rose: 32:42 The gateway to sleep and sex are open. All right, we hope this has been useful to you. We hope that you walk into your bedroom the next time you’re in your home, and look around, and think about how you might optimize it for yourself and your partner, and be in touch with us. Let us know. If you love this show and want to support our work, come on over to patreon.com/pleasuremechanics. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N, patreon.com/pleasuremechanics, and you have to type it all in, because we’re an adult show. We are unsearchable on Patreon, so type it all in, or click the link in the show notes page, and join us with a sustaining monthly pledge. Five bucks a month makes a huge difference in our ability to do this work and put out this show for free, week after week, so please join us at patreon.com/pleasuremechanics, and this week, you will find our lighting guide from our patron. Thank you so much, Allen, and we will be back with you next week with another episode of Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 33:54 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 33:55 We are the Pleasure Mechanics.

Charlotte Rose: 33:57 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 34:00 Cheers.

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