Pleasure Mechanics

What Are You Hungry For? Interview With Dawn Serra

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What are you hungry for? What do you crave? What do you want so much you can taste it?

The fabulous Dawn Serra joins us for a conversation about recovering a joyful relationship to pleasure, desire and hunger. We explore what food and sexuality have in common as arenas of experiencing and realms of both struggle and liberation.

If you are ready for a deep dive into your relationship to pleasure, power and desire, join Dawn for her Power In Pleasure online course*, a 5 week experience enrolling now and starting July 21 2019! If you have been wanting to rewrite your scripts around pleasure and come into a more joyful relationship to your desires, join Dawn for this supportive group experience.

Colorful mosaic of small images of fruit, flowers and other nature imagery. Words read Power In Pleasure: A New Course By Dawn Serra

For more from Dawn, tune into our previous podcast episode:

Body Confidence with Dawn Serra

*When you enroll in this course we receive a small portion of the sale to support the podcast and our work. We have been through this course and highly recommend it!

Transcript of Podcast Episode What Are You Hungry For? Interview With Dawn Serra

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. This is Chris from pleasuremechanics.com, and on today’s episode, we are speaking with the fabulous Dawn Serra about hunger, pleasure, and desire. Dawn is one of my favorite thinkers in the field about sexuality and bodies, and at the end of our conversation she will invite you into a new course she is offering, a five week exploration of your relationship to pleasure and power and desire and hunger in your body. It’s a beautiful course. It is one I have gone through myself, and I highly recommend the experience if you are looking for an in depth exploration of pleasure and your relationship to it. Really, these questions of desire and worthiness, and what you allow for yourself is what this course will help you address in a safe, supportive community.

Chris Rose: 01:02 Without further ado, here is my conversation with Dawn Serra about hunger and pleasure. I will link in the show notes page to my previous conversations with Dawn and the collaborations we have done in the past. Of course, I will link to her new course which is enrolling now to start on July 21st. If you are listening to this now, consider this invitation and enroll using the link in the show notes page. If it is not the right moment for you or if you hear this in the future but are curious what Dawn is doing, that link will take you to her website and all of the events and offerings. She always has something going on. Here is my conversation with Dawn Serra. Remember, you can find all of our podcast archives at pleasuremechanics.com. Cheers.

Chris Rose: 01:51 Dawn Serra, welcome back to Speaking of Sex.

Dawn Serra: 01:55 Thank you so much for having me back.

Chris Rose: 01:57 Mm-hmm (affirmative). We will link to our previous conversations in the show notes, but for newcomers to the delightful Dawn, will you introduce yourself and a little bit about the work you do?

Dawn Serra: 02:09 I am a sex and relationship coach. I am about to finish my certification for being a body trust provider through Be Nourished. I have a podcast called Sex Gets Real. I run an annual online free summit Explore More. My spheres are really around pleasure, bodies, connection, healing, and how all of that ties to the erotic and sex, and even just the ways that we move through our lives and our relationships. I’m really diving deep lately into the connection between hunger and desire and the ways that we approach food and the ways we approach sex, and how often those things are deeply linked. It’s been a really, really, really extraordinary space for me this past year and a half, to be able to go really deep into this. It feels really yummy.

Chris Rose: 03:10 Mm-hmm (affirmative), and this is exactly where I want to focus, is this question of hunger. Pleasure and hunger, hunger and desire. What does it mean to be hungry for something? You’ve been doing so much beautiful thinking about these intersections. Will you just take us gently into these waters? How do you think about the word hunger right now?

Dawn Serra: 03:38 I think that it can have so many different meanings, but often when we think about hunger we tend to go straight towards food, which is practical of us. But, I also really like thinking about hunger as the things that we feel we need in order to be nourished. When I think abut the things that I need in order to feel nourished, the things that I want that would give me a sense of satisfaction or that would give me a sense of aliveness, those things extend far beyond but do include food. I think about touch. I think about connection and community. I think about play. I think about people that I love and tapping into my senses.

Dawn Serra: 04:37 When I really thinking about hunger from this place of the things that would nourish me and there’s this kind of wanting, this craving or this need behind it, it’s so much bigger than food, but definitely, definitely includes it. We tend to have a really complicated relationship with food because of diet culture. I think something else for me when I think about hunger is also that it’s complicated for a lot of us. That, hunger starts out fairly straightforward for us as tiny humans, but becomes very complicated for us as we grow into adulthood, especially in this particular iteration of culture. Yeah, I think it’s an important thing and a complicated thing.

Chris Rose: 05:24 I’m noticing that you went to hunger for what we need to be nourished, rather than fed or in order to survive. You one upped this notion of just feeding our bodies as a functional thing, and went to this idea of nourishment.

Dawn Serra: 05:42 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 05:42 What does the word nourishment mean to you?

Dawn Serra: 05:48 That’s a really great question. When I think about nourishment, I think about kind of a tiered experience. At its foundation, nourishment is what keeps me alive. It’s the things that feed my cells, that keep me breathing, that keep my body safe. And, I want to do more than survive. I want to thrive. I want to know joy. I want to know curiosity and play. For me, nourishment is what sets the stage for all of those things that bring me that deepest sense of aliveness. What nourishes my creativity? What nourishes my curiosity? What nourishes my play?

Dawn Serra: 06:47 When I think about nourishment, I think about not only the mechanics of keeping this body going, but also all of those less tangible things that keep me connected to my life, invested in my life, able to do the things that I like to do in this body as it is right now. It’s very sensitive to what is rather than the dream of what I wish was.

Dawn Serra: 07:21 I also think about nourishment as something that gets me to a place of satisfaction. You know, it’s not just, as you said, functional. I think that there is a cultural story that we should be treating our bodies as if they’re machines, but we’re human beings, we’re not machines. We are so much more than just input/output, and what you see is what you get. Right?

Dawn Serra: 07:53 When I think about nourishment I also think about some of those things like spirituality. How can I be spiritually nourished? How can I be ritually nourished? I think some of the things that go into that are love and acceptance and witnessing and healing. I think all of those, for me, are inside of nourishment.

Chris Rose: 08:19 Mm-hmm (affirmative). I’m curious, in your journey, as you’ve expanded your understanding of pleasure and nourishment and embraced and kind of practiced it in your life, has the importance of sex changed? Has it gotten deprioritized? Has it been complicated in some way? Like, is there a way we over focus on sexuality sometimes as a placeholder for a bigger conversation we haven’t had yet? Does that question make sense?

Dawn Serra: 08:56 Totally makes sense, and 100% yes. You know, that’s another thing that I want to tread on very lightly and with a lot of nuance. I think sex is so important for so many reasons. I think sex has the potential to be deeply nourishing, to expand our awareness of body and self, to deepen into pleasure that we didn’t know is possible. I think sex can help us do those things. And, I also think that there are so many pathways to embodiment, pleasure, connection, nourishment, feeling love, feeling connected beyond sex.

Dawn Serra: 09:45 I think that we often struggle to recognize those things because there’s such a hierarchy of pleasure that we have in this culture, and we’re taught that sex is the epitome of manhood, that sex is what makes you free, to be engaged in sex is to be someone who is sex positive, is to be someone who is evolved. All of these labels that we’ve kind of piled on top of sex, and I think sex is just one piece of this massive, massive puzzle of all the ways that we can get so many of our needs met.

Dawn Serra: 10:30 As I’ve started doing this work, it hasn’t shifted my love of having really delicious, yummy sex, but I think that it’s really shown me that, often, we are using sex culturally speaking but there’s also a very gendered element to it as well, that is a stand in for being able to say, “I feel lonely and I’d like to connect. I’m feeling stressed out and I could use a way to relax. I am feeling distant from you and I’d like to feel closer. I don’t have enough play in my life, I wish I could be silly.”

Dawn Serra: 11:10 I think so many of us put so much pressure and importance on sex, and when we start doing this work to really examine what are all the things that we’re hungry for, what are all of the things that could potentially bring us a sense of nourishment and connection and being seen, and in these imperfect versions of ourselves that we are, we start to see all of these other opportunities for getting needs met and also for being able to connect with people who are at a variety of places in their lives and in our lives. Our options become so much greater when we can kind of blow it out and stop focusing just on this one thing as a means to get so many of our other needs met.

Chris Rose: 12:02 Brilliant, beautiful, bam. Love it.

Dawn Serra: 12:05 Bam.

Chris Rose: 12:07 I’m curious, because you have been in this immersion around pleasure for many years. In the past year, I’ve noticed you’ve been bringing a lot of work around mindfulness and embodiment practices into what you’re sharing with your community. Can you speak a little bit about the practices of pleasure in your life and what space you’ve created for them, and then what those practices have brought you?

Dawn Serra: 12:37 Yeah. I think the first thing I want to start with is I am just like everyone else in that, prioritizing pleasure is fraught and it’s hard and it’s really easy to forget to do or to deprioritize in service of other things that feel more pressing. My practice is woefully inconsistent sometimes. Part of the work is being okay with that. I don’t want this to turn into another weapon with which I beat myself. I think so much of the work for me has been in yes, planning for big delicious luscious events that I can really just sink into for a longer period of time.

Dawn Serra: 13:31 But also, what are all of those micro points throughout the day and throughout the week where I can just really touch in for a couple of minutes, maybe a half an hour, and just really kind of feel into something yummy at the pace that fits that day. I think so much of what I’ve found is that, whether it’s a five minute slow walk outside or standing out on my balcony and just letting the sun be on my face for a few minutes and the wind in my hair or savoring a really delicious bite of food, even those small things are really important to just helping me to be present and helping me to kind of feel into this body that’s sometimes really hard to be in.

Dawn Serra: 14:22 That’s also given me a way to be a little bit more resourced. I’ve also really been thinking about the ways that I have deeply internalized the stories and the messages of capitalism. I’m trying to really start untangling that messy knot of my productivity does not determine my value, but it is hard to break up with that story. By having these small pleasure practices, I’m finding that disrupts that a little bit. That’s also a really helpful way to start kind of shifting some of those stories.

Dawn Serra: 15:03 Some of my pleasure practices include smells that I really enjoy. I love the smell of lavender and so I have some lavender bunches around my office. Sometimes I’ll just take a few minutes to smell that and just really be in the smell and the scent of the pleasure of that for a few moments. I get so much pleasure from play, and so at least once a day, sometimes more, I will cajole Alex into playing a game with me. Then we’ll do something really fun and ridiculous. Sometimes the game lasts five or 10 minutes, sometimes it lasts an hour. But, at least once a day there needs to be some type of game playing. I also have taken a lot of pleasure, I realized recently that one of the things that brings me tremendous pleasure is experimenting in the kitchen. I’m sure part of that is, prior to being in sex education, I was a food blogger and I was teaching cooking classes.

Chris Rose: 16:05 I didn’t know that.

Dawn Serra: 16:09 Yeah, I know, right? Hidden secret. Being in the kitchen for me is also deeply pleasurable. It’s not even necessarily about eating the thing, although that is also really pleasurable, but spending multiple days making sourdough bread or spending a couple of hours, like last night I made Mama Funko’s Cereal Milk Ice Cream. Just doing those things of being really present and watching things develop for me is a big pleasure practice. For a while, I had stopped doing that because I was just too busy or too tired. I realized several months ago that, even though it does exhaust me sometimes being in the kitchen for multiple hours, I feel really happy and nourished at the end. Like, it’s a good kind of tired. I’ve been prioritizing that a lot more. Our kitchen right now looks like a great big experiment because I’m just trying so many different things and that feels fun.

Dawn Serra: 17:09 For me, a bit part of the pleasure practice is finding the micro moments and honoring them, like, noticing them. Noticing that I slowed down to take a picture of that flower I really liked, and being a little bit mindful. Then, also some of the bigger things. Can we take an afternoon to go lounge at the park and read books? Or can we go hang out with our friends and have a great big dinner party full of really rich discussion. That, for me, is one of my greatest life’s pleasures. Or, we just got back from three weeks away, and while we did work while we were away a little bit, I was only working at like 15% capacity because I was trying to really center pleasure.

Chris Rose: 17:54 When people hear this, they may feel a stirring of hunger. Right? I think often in our podcasts when we paint pictures of what is possible, I’m sometimes aware of this kind of dual thing of painting the picture of what’s possible, and also knowing that there’s this kind of gap between feeling the hunger for these pleasures, feeling the hunger of three weeks of vacation, and then the steps of creating that as your reality. What is your process between recognizing hungers, kind of discernment between hungers that are fantasies and hungers that are things that you might actually give yourself permission to reach for? Then like, bumping up into those places of like, how dare you ask for that? How dare you ask for an afternoon off reading in that park? The ways we’re taught not to be hungry.

Dawn Serra: 18:59 Yeah. I think that’s part of the work, and that’s one of the reasons why I mentioned nuance earlier around this is, our lives are all so different. The ways that we move through them are very different. We experience different levels of access to resources and support and all of that is real and true. I want to be very careful to never prescribe to someone the way to do pleasure, the way to do hunger. I can’t possibly know what it’s like to be an indigenous trans queer person who is poor. I could never know that experience.

Dawn Serra: 19:52 I think one of the parts of this work is really taking an honest look at our lives and taking a look at, what are some of the things that maybe I can change, maybe I can influence but they feel scary, and what are some of the things that it’s just the way they are right now and I might not be able to change them but maybe I can do something different within them? I think those are important. Maybe I have to work three jobs right now to keep a roof over my head, and not working three jobs isn’t an option. Then that’s true. How, inside of that, can maybe I find small moments to be able to feel into some of the things that I’m hungry for?

Dawn Serra: 20:36 I think inside of that too is some grief work, and that’s one of the things I have really found is important. I talked to Afro Sexology earlier this year and they were talking about how the deeper they went into their pleasure the deeper they also went into pain. I think that that’s also a really important thing to just name, that the more we open to any feeling, the more we open to all feelings.

Chris Rose: 21:02 All of them.

Dawn Serra: 21:04 All of the feelings, yeah. So much of this work around pleasure is deep grief work.

Chris Rose: 21:10 Yeah.

Dawn Serra: 21:11 Deep grief work. You know, what all of the things that I never allowed myself because I didn’t feel worthy? That’s probably a lot, and there’s probably a lot of grief and anger inside of that. What are all the things that I told myself I would do one day when, because I didn’t feel worthy of doing it then? How many decades maybe passed? How many years? How many missed opportunities and missed connections? There’s grief in that, or maybe because of choices that I made in the past, I ended up here, and I wish I could have chosen differently. That’s grief work that we have to do around our hungers.

Dawn Serra: 21:51 And, I think some of where the work is too is really starting to kind of confront some of the things that we don’t allow ourselves because we don’t feel worthy of the wanting. That, I think, is such an interesting place. We all are existing inside of capitalism and neoliberalism and white supremacy and sex negativity. I mean, all those things are true, and there are still ways to connect, to touch in with our lives. Really, really small ways even inside of those things if we want to or if we have the ability to.

Dawn Serra: 22:31 Even when we start to realize, well, maybe I could ask for something different. Maybe this thing that hasn’t been working for me in a really long time in my relationship is something I could ask for to change, but then the fear comes up because we’re afraid of being left. We’re afraid of being alone and abandoned. We’re afraid of being judged and shamed, especially if that’s happened in the past. We’re afraid of so many things that then, we limit ourselves on top of the limitations that exist in the world. I think so much of the work around pleasure is recognizing the actual limitations, and then realizing the ways we limit ourselves.

Dawn Serra: 23:15 Sometimes those limitations we place on ourselves are deeply protective. Sometimes we do have to go with the flow in order to keep that roof over of our head, in order to not be kicked out of the group, and those things are all whys, but at least being able to notice them and to speak truth to them, then gives us an opportunity to decide if we want to stay, can we leave, can we change something. That’s what I want for people, is more choice and more opportunity to see where there are choices. That brings in that element of awareness.

Dawn Serra: 23:51 You know, you and I have talked about this in the past and I just love it. I’ve brought it into so many of the things that I have done, which is just, our hungers are always going to be bigger than our lives can hold in so many ways. Our desires are going to be bigger than our lives can hold in so many ways. Inside of that, then, some of the work around pleasure is really kind of saying, what do I need to grieve and how can I honor that this is true? How can I honor that I really, really, really for my whole life have wanted to move to Iceland? Or, I’ve really, really, really for my whole life wanted to write a book. Or, whatever it is. Maybe because of the circumstances of my lief right now, those things just can’t happen, or it’s very unlikely that they will.

Dawn Serra: 24:42 How can I say, yes, those things are good and true and real and I am deserving of them, and they’re just not possible right now and so I’m allowed to feel sad about that and I’m allowed to feel disappointed. But, the life that I’m leading right now, there’s other things that I want to be putting my time and energy to, and so I have to let those things just be things that don’t get to get fulfilled. There’s so many moving pieces in this, of the feeling into the grief and the anger, feeling into the fear, finding ways to celebrate what is, working within the conditions of our lives and maybe working to change some of them, maybe not.

Dawn Serra: 25:29 Something that someone that I was working with a few months ago kind of realized was she was deeply unhappy with the sex that she was having in her marriage. She was feeling very pressured and dissatisfied. The stories she had been telling herself was, if I can just fix my low libido then everything else will be okay. She kind of got to a place of realizing, “I’m not broken. There’s nothing wrong with me.” But, what that then means is, the problem is with the relationship and that was too much for her. That was just not something she was able to face at that point in her life.

Dawn Serra: 26:15 She decided, “Okay, I’m just going to let this stay the way that it is and keep trying to work on myself a little bit more, because it’s too painful to think that maybe it’s this relationship and the way that we’re doing it.” That’s okay too. We get to take care of ourselves and do the things that we feel are most important that that juncture in our lives. I don’t have any judgment around that, but I think it’s the awareness that I want people to come into of just like, “Oh, maybe it’s not me. But, you know what? I can’t change this right now. I’ve got young kids. I can’t pay the mortgage on my own. This is just how it’s going to be and that might be uncomfortable, but now at least I can feel into, what are my options now that I’ve got this awareness.”

Chris Rose: 26:59 Right. Still making a choice, right, still having that agency around it.

Dawn Serra: 27:05 Right, right.

Chris Rose: 27:06 What are some of the things you’ve learned about food and eating and the body that have influenced how you think about sex, and some of the things you’ve learned about sex that influence how you talk about food? What are some of the surprising overlaps?

Dawn Serra: 27:23 You know, I think what’s kind of funny about it is, the more I reveal, the less surprised I am.

Chris Rose: 27:35 Yeah.

Dawn Serra: 27:35 It was kind of like that very first time that I finally made the connection I was like, “Holy crap.” The way we do food is the way that we do bodies and the way that we do sex, I mean, they’re all tied together and they’re all so adjacent. When we’re restricting the things that we enjoy around food, we’re often restricting the ways that we allow ourselves to access pleasure to be in our bodies. When we feel guilty about eating certain things, we often also feel guilty about fantasizing or wanting certain things. There’s just like, so much. The deeper I’ve gone into that, the less surprising and the more just kind of like, “Of course,” it’s become. Why didn’t I see this before? It just makes so much sense.

Dawn Serra: 28:23 I think one of the things that’s really hard for people, and I think maybe this is where not so much surprises come in, but kind of where some of the like, yeah, we really got to chew on this for a while, is often, people are ready to really start confronting their relationship with diet culture and fat phobia, and then they’re totally not ready to do the sex stuff. I find vice versa is often true. I find that there are so many people who will say, “I really want to change the way that I do sex. I want to feel more confident in my body. I want to be more present.” Then, as soon as we start talking about, what’s your relationship with food, with diets, all the things that go with that, there’s just this, “Whoa now, we’re supposed to be talking about sex.”

Dawn Serra: 29:23 There’s kind of this resistance of I just want to fix the sex part or, I just want to do food differently, not realizing that doing food differently then means you’re going to do everything differently in your life, and how deeply, deeply, deeply intertwined they are. Because, ultimately all of it: food, pleasure, sex, relationship, all of it comes down to, how much are we trusting our bodies? Can I really hear the things that my body is telling me? Is there a two way dialog happening? Can I communicate with my body and can I hear what my body is telling me, asking for? How am I with my boundaries? Pretty much everything when it comes to food and movement and sex has to do with boundaries. Am I able to really say here is what I want, here is what I don’t want, and to be able to tend to those boundaries, even if the people around me have really intense feelings about it?

Dawn Serra: 30:29 What’s interesting is what’s under the covers around food and around sex and the erotic, is body trust and boundaries. When we really start examining the ways that we interact with our body or we cut ourselves off from our body, and when we examine the ways that we do boundaries, especially with people that are really close to us in our lives like our family and our partners, we start finding all kinds of rubble and juicy, uncomfortable bits that start really revealing some of our patterns around the ways that we deny our hungers, twists our desires, distrust the signals of our bodies or we can’t speak up on behalf of them. Underneath it all, it’s all kind of standing on the same foundation. It’s just then, we’ve built on top of it kind of into these different silos and we don’t realize they’re all connected underneath.

Chris Rose: 31:35 Yeah, yeah. That, all of us are kind of standing together then in this culture that is breeding that distrust and teaching us that disconnection, and that interrupting it is a real process. I think that’s what surprises people again and again for in my email box, is like, how much work and process it is to start trusting the body, to start living into the body, sensing and the feelings, because it is counter-cultural.

Dawn Serra: 32:08 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 32:10 Can you talk a little bit about your upcoming offering? It’s starting soon. Talk to us about Power and Pleasure, please.

Dawn Serra: 32:20 Yes. I am completely in love with this experience, so if anyone’s listening and they’re getting that little, “Ooh, maybe I should check that out,” totally check it out because it’s awesome. I have a five week online course called Power and Pleasure. The course is really about us realizing that our power and our access to power is deeply tied to our pleasure. So much of the work that unfolds over the course is really about, what are these very small ways that we can just arrive with the body, with our hungers, our desires, how can we feel into our senses and just allow that to be a really gentle in road to the body? It’s this exploration of not only sex, certainly food, but all of the other things that we’re hungry for and our complicated relationships with our desire.

Dawn Serra: 33:32 Throughout the entire course, there’s this beautiful support that happens where people are witnessing each other’s really complicated stories, celebrating things that they do. We have group calls every week. They’re so intimate and so vulnerable, where we can really, really be in the ugly, complicated, messy, uncertain spaces and to not have to be there alone, and to find all of these ways by the end of the course to have lots of new questions to carry out into our lives, so that as the months unfold beyond the course, we start noticing all of these opportunities for pleasure, for honoring our hunger, for listening to our body, because we’ve started writing our way into some new stories over the course of the course.

Chris Rose: 34:30 The course starts July 22nd. Do you have to be in by July 22nd? How do you [crosstalk 00:34:36]

Dawn Serra: 34:36 You do have to be in by, actually I close it on July 21st because we have a pre-course call on that Sunday, and it’s all about safety. I think that’s something else that’s super important, and I will probably build it out in the years to come. But, something that I think gets missed in almost all of the conversations that I see specifically around sex and the erotic, is that safety has to come first. Safety has to come first. Our bodies literally can’t code things that might be pleasurable as pleasurable if we feel unsafe. It’s just not biologically possible. We’re wired for survival. Pleasure is nice to have once we’re sure we’re going to survive.

Dawn Serra: 35:23 We start the course with a pre-module, people get it a few days ahead of time or if they sign up on the very last day, which lots of people always do, then they get it that day and can work through it on their own time. But, we start with safety. July 21st is the cutoff. We have that pre-call where we talk about safety. Then it all kicks off on July 22nd. The thing that I really want people to walk away with is, this is not on us to do completely on our own. I don’t want to create something that contributes to this sense of, “I have to figure it out and pull myself up by my bootstraps and fix all the things myself.” That’s not how we heal.

Dawn Serra: 36:04 I want us to feel like we’re in this together, and that your pleasure is tied to my pleasure, is tied to everyone who’s listening’s pleasure. Let’s be in it together, a space to ask some new questions and practice some new things without having to feel like you’re doing it alone, to be able to say really, really scary things that maybe you can’t say other places, so that there’s just a little bit more space on the other side to feel into, “Oh, okay, maybe I am deserving. Maybe I am worthy. Maybe I can try these things, even if they feel scary.” Then, allow that to be something you curiously follow beyond the course.

Chris Rose: 36:48 Thank you for holding the space. This is an invitation for July 2019. If you’re listening to this down the road, hello future selves, use the links in the show notes page and you’ll come to all of Dawn’s beautiful work and offerings. There is always something going on at dawnserra.com.

Dawn Serra: 37:11 That’s very true.

Chris Rose: 37:13 The pleasure host with the most. We love you Dawn. It’s a pleasure to be in this field with you. Thank you for joining us once again on Speaking of Sex.

Dawn Serra: 37:21 Thank you so much for having me.

Chris Rose: 37:23 Thank you so much for listening. If you feel like this pleasure course is a good fit for you right now, I encourage you to use the link in the show notes page to explore Dawn’s course offering. It’s a super affordable course for the level of personal attention and group support you get on this five week journey of exploring your relationship to pleasure and your body. If this is a question that has been itching for you, I would definitely encourage you to check it out. As I said, I will be in that course with you exploring together and learning with you.

Chris Rose: 38:02 We will be back with you next week with another episode of Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. Meanwhile, find all of our archives and our online courses at pleasuremechanics.com. I am Chris from pleasuremechanics.com, wishing you a lifetime of pleasure. Cheers.

Opening Up Conversations About Monogamy and Non-Monogamy

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Ripe pomegranate split open with bright red seeds spilling out on background of dark wood table. Words read "Opening Up Conversations About Monogamy and Non-Monogamy Podcast Episode 341"

Have you ever talked about the boundaries of your relationship? What does monogamy mean to you? What commitments do you need in a relationship to feel safe and supported?

Here’s how to open up the vital conversations about monogamy, relationship boundaries and commitment. We guide you in engaging in thought experiments about non-monogamy as a safe way to explore the contours of your desires, boundaries and needs.

Be sure to listen to the episode on Explicit Monogamy Agreements and grab the interactive worksheet here.

Podcast Transcript for Episode 341

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

Chris Rose: 00:00 Hi, welcome back to Speaking of Sex with The Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are The Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we give honest, explicit and soulful advice about every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com, where you will find our complete podcast archive just waiting your listening enjoyment. Over 300 episodes are conveniently sorted for you in our sex index by topic, so you can immediately find the episodes you most crave. Welcome back. We are just home from a two week break. It has been a whirlwind of a month. Our daughter finished her first year of school. Meanwhile, I was in Philadelphia for the AASECT conference, the largest gathering of sexuality professionals, where I got to meet so many fabulous people and learn a ton with a great crowd and we will be bringing some of those voices to you on future episodes.

Chris Rose: 01:07 Then immediately after the conference I drove my rental car home and we loaded up our family vehicle and drove to Canada, where I have a tiny family cottage that has been in my family for five generations and it is an off-the-grid, rural slice of heaven. So we go up there every year as a family to unwind and unplug and get off the grid and really just soak in some deep relaxation and family time. And it was glorious.

Charlotte Rose: 01:42 There’s a lake, we didn’t mention the lake, so we just swim nonstop. It’s glorious. It’s my favorite place to be.

Chris Rose: 01:49 It’s in one of those regions of Canada that’s just full of glacial spring-fed Lakes. So the water is cold and clear and clean and there are loons at night and dragon flies and mosquitoes during the day. It’s not really heaven because there are still mosquitoes, but it is an amazing opportunity for us to really unplug and we did just that, and so we were gone for a couple of weeks. We are back. Happy summer. We hope you guys are doing well and we want to launch in today’s episode about non-monogamy thought experiments, about the conversations you can have either alone or with your friends or with your romantic partners, about what monogamy and exclusivity mean to you, what you value about them and why and how this might inform your relationship.

Chris Rose: 02:48 Part of this was informed … So as I was packing for the AASECT conference and packing my Pleasure Mechanics uniform and some sex toys for a conversation I was going to have with a partner, I kind of turned to Charlotte and I was like, “So, I know we haven’t talked about it in a long time, but if the opportunity arises and I get to play with someone, can I?” And we were, you know, packing for our family trip and dealing with our daughter’s end of school. And we were kind of like in this conversation all of a sudden. But it’s a conversation we have been in since the beginning of our relationship and it’s a conversation we have a lot of experience with, and so we want to open this conversation up with you all and encourage you to at least start thinking about the boundaries of your relationship. Why those boundaries are there, what they offer you, what they do for you, and if those boundaries are flexible or not.

Charlotte Rose: 03:47 My answer was yes, by the way. If it is enlivening and it’s not going to impact your connection to our family, then go for it.

Chris Rose: 03:57 That was really generous of you. I, of course, had no time or energy to think about such pleasures, but it was also fascinating to be in this crowd of sexuality professionals with so many queers and kinky folks and also just brilliant, intelligent minds, which is my biggest turn on. It was amazing to feel the permission to at least give myself the tantalizing taste of possibility. To pack my bags to go off on this solo trip, that was really a work trip. But to go off into the world alone for a couple of days, knowing I had erotic agency and also knowing that you trusted me, that you knew and you trusted any decision I make would be kind of filtered through the lens of my commitment to our family.

Chris Rose: 04:47 And so what are these conversations look like? Because for most of us, monogamy is an assumption and it’s the worst kind of assumption. It’s an implicit unspoken assumption in our culture. We get together in couples and all of a sudden if you have this idea of that you’re exclusive or monogamous or going steady or taking things seriously, and certainly once you’re engaged or married, we bring to that relationship a whole universe of assumptions and unspoken rules that we expect our partner to follow. But we get into trouble because it’s so unspoken, you might have a different set of rules assumed than your partner does. So these blurry lines of monogamy cause a lot of heartache and a lot of pain and also a lot of constriction and shutdown of potential in your life.

Chris Rose: 05:43 We did a great episode about this called explicit monogamy agreements where we really walk you through having an explicit spoken agreement that is present in an ongoing conversation together about the boundaries of your relationship. I will link to that in the show notes page and there is also a worksheet where we can guide you through that process in an interactive way. But the first part of this, and where I want to focus today, is on the thought experiment of non-monogamy. I love thought experiments. For me, thought experiments are all about using the power of the human mind to pregame, to pre-visualize potentials and possibilities for yourself and feel into how you feel about them. Notice your responses. Doing this can save us a whole lot of stress, heartache, and potentially loss of love in our lives because we can think through things ahead of time and we often don’t do this when it comes to our romantic relationships, our sex lives. It’s like the best use of fantasy for me. So what are your assumptions about monogamy?

Charlotte Rose: 07:02 This is such a huge question and everyone’s going to have a slightly different answer and you may never have fully examined what you assume monogamy means to you and your partner. For some people that will include or not include porn or flirting with strangers or sharing deep emotional things with exes or …

Chris Rose: 07:25 Or even friends. When we were looking at people’s definitions of monogamy, so often it came up the exclusive sharing of sexual and emotional connection with one person, and we need to examine this, right? What does sexual connection mean? As Charlotte said, is that flirting or with your barista? Is that sexual connection? Is that cheating? But the one that really trips me up is emotional connection because it is impossible to have emotional connection with one person. What a sad, limited life that would be, and also that’s just not how humans are built. We have human connections with …

Charlotte Rose: 08:04 The checkout person when you share a laugh, when you’re getting your groceries, like human connection, excuse me, emotional connection is everywhere. [crosstalk 00:08:14] is human. It’s everywhere. And to to stop having that with every human aside from your partner is seriously troubling.

Chris Rose: 08:22 For most people, we don’t worry about people’s like close friends from college or maybe their coworker friends and especially if you’re heterosexual, there’s this assumption that same sex friends are not as threatening, right? Like you can have all the emotional intimacy you want with your girlfriends, but if you get really close with one of your male coworkers, I’m going to flair because all of a sudden my position of exclusivity in your life is threatened. So we need to examine this. What do you mean when you say you’re in a monogamous relationship? What are the boundaries of that and what are the values you bring to that? Why are you in a monogamous relationship? What does that mean to you? What does it provide for you? What does it allow you to let go of?

Chris Rose: 09:12 For a lot of people, the idea of being in a devoted relationship creates a sense of security. It’s a sense of commitment. I have your back and you have mine. We are doing this life thing together for a lot of people that is then extended into the trust that because you are devoted to me, you will not give your energy or resources to others. You will not go too far with other people emotionally. You will not call other people before you call me. There’s this sense of being someone’s number one and only. Again, we need to examine that. We are not here to espouse non-monogamy or monogamy. We are in a 99.99% devoted exclusive relationship with one another. Charlotte and I, and we have been for 13 years but this has been flexible. We have experimented. We have opened up and then closed back down again. We have explored opening up our relationship to a third partner and opened our hearts and fell a little bit in love with someone together and then came up across the truth of what love and family meant for us wasn’t what it meant for this third person and we needed to close back down.

Chris Rose: 10:37 We have experimented with physical intimacy with other people in different ways over time, but always have come back to this, you and me, we’re doing life together. We’re building our life, we’re making our decisions together, we’ll building a family together.

Charlotte Rose: 10:52 For us, the family piece was really central and we felt like for how we wanted to parent, we wanted to keep our relationship closed during these early years of really tending to our child together. We’ve always been very clear that as things change, as she ages, perhaps we will open back up again as we have more energy and our child needs us less in a certain kind of time focused way. Also seasons are so important in relationships and being clear about when you’re shifting from one season to the next and having open communication with your partner and being honest with yourself is so important.

Chris Rose: 11:34 So we see in this how different values can emerge in these conversations. When Charlotte and I over the years started talking about … Because when we got together, so just to set the context, I was in a poly-kinky community in San Francisco, going to sex parties every other night and I had a kind of pod of lovers who were very important to me, and then Charlotte and I met. We fell in love. You had had more of a monogamous background.

Charlotte Rose: 12:00 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 12:01 With cheating.

Charlotte Rose: 12:02 Yes. I had not fully figured out how to use my sexual energy and I was a cheater.

Chris Rose: 12:08 I want to mention that because cheating is a form of non-monogamy we don’t name as non-monogamy. You can have a monogamy agreement and habitually break it and even enjoy breaking it for the thrill of breaking it, seeing what you can get away with until you get caught and that’s how a lot of people play this card. What is another option of being more transparent and open and honest and having these conversations even if you choose to stay monogamous. That’s what I really want to emphasize here is these conversations, these thought experiments aren’t just in preparation to open up. They are in … they’re essential for every relationship to get clear about how you are committed to each other, what your devotion means, what are your expectations, and so going back to the values piece, in my conversations with Charlotte, our primary value there was kind of family and keeping our life less chaotic.

Chris Rose: 13:09 I know from my experience when I have sex with people, I form emotional connections. I fall in love with people I touch and I know about myself that if I open myself up to sexual relationships, that is also opening myself up to emotional relationships. Right now, I want to focus my emotional energy on Charlotte, on our child, on this business, on myself, and my own physical healing I’m doing right now. But that doesn’t mean emotional exclusivity, right? I kind of have the intention of focus and devotion, but we have been able to do that while staying emotionally available and open and falling in love with new people in our community because we have this really explicit agreement that then doesn’t feel as scary, right? We can build relationships, we can explore that sense of attraction and desire and longing that can come up for people without it being threatening.

Charlotte Rose: 14:18 That’s a light falling in love, not like a super intense love falling in love, but more like a friend, I am so excited and interested in who you are. I want to spend time with you, like let’s connect. Just little falling in love. It’s a different set of things to address though on the same spectrum.

Chris Rose: 14:39 Right. So in these conversations about especially emotional intimacy, because sexual intimacy seems a little bit more cut and dry. Don’t kiss other people, don’t have your genitals stroked by other people and don’t penetrate other people. Those are rules that we can kind of be like, “Okay, that makes sense to me”. What does emotional intimacy look and feel like and where is your boundary? Because we all need boundaries. This isn’t about being boundary less-ness and just trusting your partner and being like, “Great, do whatever the fuck you want”. We all have to find our boundaries of what feels good and what starts to make me feel less safe, threatened, less stable.

Chris Rose: 15:20 A lot of this in the end comes back to time and attention and we’ve said this before, I’ll say it again. For us, love is so much the paying of attention, the focus of attention on one another and if you are in a relationship and you are starting to open it up and every time you look at the part your partner, they’re on their dating apps or answering texts with other people and they are not present with you anymore, that might start feeling really shitty.

Chris Rose: 15:51 If you are on a date and that’s like one breach of a monogamy boundary, right? If you’re on a date and you’re trying to focus your attention on one another and your partner’s just looking around the room and checking out all the hot bodies and commenting on everyone else’s hotness, you might hit a place where you’re like, “I want your eyes back on me. I want your attention back on me”, and we need to be able to find these boundaries, experience them in your body like, “Ooh, this isn’t feeling good anymore”. And then articulate, say out loud what you need to have that relationship feel secure again.

Chris Rose: 16:28 People are going to be so different in this realm and this is why conversations are so important to have, especially when it comes into fields like online porn, online chat, paying for custom porn, like there’s a brave new world of sexual exploration out there and you need to kind of make it clear. Are we doing this together? Do you have licensed to do it alone? Are we not doing it at all? Do we agree on these values? In these conversations, are your values aligning or is one of you like, “I don’t want you talking to other people. I don’t want you texting other people”, and you’re like, “But I love texting all my friends”. That might be a flag for you that you have some real excavation to do of do your values align in your relationship or what is one person’s fear or anxiety that is being triggered by these conversations? If you can address that other conversations become possible, right? Like if you can look at each other in the eye and say, “You are my priority, I want you to feel like my priority and if you ever don’t feel like my priority anymore, you let me know and we will recalibrate back. That is my commitment to you”. Right? What are your commitments to one another and are you on the same page there?

Charlotte Rose: 17:49 There’s a way having these open conversations can actually make you feel much, much safer because you can really be clear about what is true for both of you at this moment in time and where are you both and what is your commitment? That kind of clarifying conversation can be really enlivening because you’re truth telling and you’re making space for what you need and what you want and you’re agreeing to work together with what is. It can be just really exciting, instead of this sort of wandering and what are they doing and what are they really feeling? Are they feeling bored? Are they feeling like they want someone else when they’re out and about without me? I feel like anytime we’re really honest in relationship, it feels good. Even if it’s hard and uncomfortable, there’s still a really deep sense of satisfaction, I think, when we are telling the truth with each other.

Chris Rose: 18:45 So we need to consider the wide range of ways we can be in relationships with one another, ways we can be devoted and committed to one another. I personally would like to move away from the language of monogamy and non-monogamy because these are not two neat buckets we fit into. We all choose how we share physical intimacy, emotional intimacy, spiritual intimacy, intellectual connection with other people and how much space our primary relationship or our family relationships want to take up in our lives in different seasons.

Chris Rose: 19:25 With that permission to kind of do it your way in the way that makes sense for your life right now, we all have a lot of opportunity to get really clear about what we need and want from each other. We can consider possibilities like having occasional threesomes, so bringing in an occasional guest star into a relationship to heat it up a little bit. To add some newness, add some excitement. For some people that is a non-monogamous adaptation with a very monogamous core of a relationship. Other people go into polyamory, meaning loving multiple people, having multiple relationships at the same time and there are, again, countless ways of doing this and there’s a whole lexicon of vocabulary to describe all these different types of relationships.

Chris Rose: 20:21 Other people go into more like sexual exploration with an emotional exclusivity, so they’ll go together to sex parties or swingers events and have sexual excitation with other people. Maybe even share touch, maybe even have penetration with other people but then go home together and don’t continue those relationships. There is also the option of hiring sex workers and this is not something we are going to recommend or not recommend. Just again putting on the table as a possibility. Sex workers are professionals who can offer you specific sexual experiences and the transaction of money makes it really clear. You get a two hour experience and we do not have a relationship beyond that, in less than that has been negotiated too. For some people, if, say, you’re a bisexual in a relationship and every once in awhile you want a specific sexual experience that your partner can’t or won’t provide for you. It’s not even about being bisexual. That’s just an example.

Chris Rose: 21:29 We all have specific sexual experiences that our partner can’t or won’t provide for us. Queerness, fetishes, just very specific longings. Sex workers can be great for this. I recently … As I was packing for AASECT, I tapped into this truth for myself, like “I need a good flogging sometime soon”. Just like a really good powered out flogging just to kind of move some tension from my body, and Charlotte’s probably not the best person to give me that flogging.

Charlotte Rose: 21:59 I don’t have a lot of skills in that department. I have other skills. That one is not one I’m really proficient at.

Chris Rose: 22:05 Right, and if I’m looking at something of like stretching my limits, take me on this kind of endurance journey, I don’t want my sweet, caring wife to be the one to escort me on that journey. So for this, I might hire a pro dom who’s great at flogging and can push my boundaries with real safety and contain that relationship within that transaction so I don’t have to get on FetLife, start flirting with people, start sharing who I am, start building trust and intimacy with other people. I can skip that process by hiring someone. That doesn’t make it less intimate or less human or make that experience we’re sharing less real. It’s just very clearly defined. It has boundaries and this is the power of boundaries.

Chris Rose: 22:53 We often think of boundaries as something to keep away the things we don’t want, a fence to keep intruders out. But what boundaries also do is they contain a space. They create a zone where you know what is possible and you know what will and will not happen, and within that realm we can play more freely. This is the role of rules in sports. If you know what happens when you step on the soccer field, you can play as hard as you want because you know what will and will not happen. Everyone agrees to that and you go and you play the game. If we think of relationships as these living, breathing entities that need boundaries in order to thrive, we better get more deliberate about talking about what those boundaries are. What do you need for your relationship to be as vital and loving and supportive of you as possible? What do you need from yourself? What do you need from your partner? What do you need to stay out, what do you need to stay in and you can have this as an ongoing conversation. This happens over time and it will change.

Chris Rose: 24:07 I remember making some like kind of joke about another sexual partner at some point. We were just on a walk but we had like a year old baby and you were like, “Can you just not go there right now?” I said, “Honey, it’s just a joke. We joke about this all the time”, and you were like, “I am just so not in that zone. I have vomit and milk all over my shirt, like just love me here now”. I got that and we tabled the conversation for like a year and a half.

Charlotte Rose: 24:37 This new conversation about flogging, for instance. We have been exploring that in conversation and as a thought experiment because that is a departure from what we have been doing …

Chris Rose: 24:47 Right. For many months. It’s not one conversation.

Charlotte Rose: 24:50 Right. It’s several conversations of like, “How does that feel? What would feel okay? What wouldn’t feel okay?” Just really exploring it.

Chris Rose: 24:58 “Would you want to be there?”

Charlotte Rose: 24:59 “Would you not?” Yeah, it’s, it’s just really, really seeing where the boundaries are in conversation and in thought. It’s so helpful because some other things you’ve suggested, I’m like, “No, that feels terrible. I don’t know what to do that at all”. This one I was like, “I can see that, like that makes sense right now in our life”, without having an emotional connection, just a physical non-genital release. That makes sense.

Chris Rose: 25:24 I want to emphasize this power of the thought experiment. When you think about something in detail, when you take your brain into thinking about something, visualizing it, experiencing it as fully as possible in your brain, your brain doesn’t really know the difference between that and lived experience. This is one of the greatest tricks of the human brain I think I’ve ever discovered and what it allows for us is if we think through an experience, so say going to a sex club with your partner. Start thinking through that experience in detail as if it were real. What would you wear? Would you go to dinner first? What kind of sex club are you going to? Is it a special event or is it a general sex club? What do you do when you get there? Are you holding your partner’s hands? Do you stay together the whole time? What happens if he wanders off to go to the bathroom and doesn’t come back to you for 20 minutes? Do you start to worry?

Chris Rose: 26:28 Thinking it through as a fantasy, you will start feeling feelings in your body. If you have been working with us on the powers of interoception, of feeling that internal landscape of mindful sex, if you’re part of the mindful sex course, and have been playing with this with us, as you feel your feelings, you can start discerning your emotions and you get to that point in your fantasy and it’s all a yes up to that. You’re feeling good, you’re feeling excited, and then you get to that point where he wanders off for 15 minutes and doesn’t come back and you realize you’re panicking in your fantasy. You’re like, “Well, that doesn’t feel good. I’m starting to feel nervous. What if he’s found someone to play with that’s not me? What if something’s happened to him?” Right? You notice your fears come up in your thought experiment and then you can game them out. You can talk about them. “So if we go to the sex club, we’ve got to stay together and if one of us has to go to the bathroom, the other will be waiting right outside the bathroom for when you come back. At least for our first time, it would make me feel so much better if we really stuck together. Can you agree to that?” “Yeah, honey, that sounds awesome”.

Charlotte Rose: 27:36 Because these things can feel so much safer to do together at the beginning. You’re having an experience together. You’re seeing the same things. You’re hearing the same things. You can talk about them all afterwards.

Chris Rose: 27:45 Yeah, but that’s all not the point.

Charlotte Rose: 27:46 No, I know.

Chris Rose: 27:47 The point here is it’s so much easier to deal with that anxiety and fear in your thought experiment when you’re in your pajamas at home on your couch and realize that will be an issue for me. So let’s talk about it ahead of time. Then it is in the middle of your first experience. You think you’re having a great time. You find him half an hour later just chatting in the snack room, but you’re already freaked out and activated and want to go home. It derailed your experience. So going deep into the thought experiment of your relationship boundaries will give you so much information to then share with one another and even just information about yourself, you will realize who you are as an erotic being is very specific.

Chris Rose: 28:33 You might not care at all if your partner gives massages and cuddles with friends from college who they’ve been doing that for 20 years, but you might get really upset if he calls a friend in a crisis before he calls you, right? All of these things are very personal to who we are and who we are right now. To give yourself permission to be like, this is what I want a need. And then on those edges of comfort where your comfort’s a little bit gray and you’re a little bit hesitant or maybe those places where it feels really scary but exciting and thrilling as well, so scary, but in a way that opens you up. These are the places you can find growth, where you can find positive change, where you can find avenues to expand your capacity together.

Chris Rose: 29:24 Because the danger of unspoken monogamy, the danger of implicit boundaries are that they become an invisible cage and they cut off emotional connections, social connections, intellectual connections that are important to you in your life. We start doubting our attraction and questioning our desire rather than trusting it. And when your head turns and you see someone at a work event that feels really thrilling to you and your whole body wants to go talk to them, maybe we need to trust that and also trust our committed erotic agreement. For me, some of the most exciting, thrilling connection is the erotic connection without the sexual component. We’ll talk more about this on future episodes, but what happens when you allow yourself deep erotic connection with other humans without the distractions of sharing a sexual connection. There’s something there to explore.

Chris Rose: 30:31 All right, so we hope that this conversation has at least given you permission to think about the boundaries of your relationships, spoken and unspoken, to start carving out the rules and boundaries and requests that will make you feel more enlivened in your relationship and start getting rid of the boundaries that maybe don’t serve you. Start finding avenues of exploration together, so you don’t feel like exclusive devotion to one person is a cage, but rather the greatest choice you’re making in this moment. We love the word devotion for this. We don’t own one another. We don’t owe one another. Our relationship, we choose it. We choose it every day and we renew that choice even when it’s hard. That for me is thrilling. What a thrilling gift to receive someone else’s erotic devotion. Someone I love, someone I want to devote myself to.

Chris Rose: 31:29 That feels so much more bold and supportive than, you know, being locked in a monogamy cage because we’re married and that’s what it means to be married. It doesn’t mean anything anymore to be married really. It’s just a legal contract. Now more than ever, you have the permission and choice and cultural support. And again, let us remember that 50 years ago we did not have these choices. We did not have the cultural bandwidth to be in a non-monogamous marriage or to be in a polyamorous relationship or to be a swinger. These things were not permissible. They’re permissible now and there’s cultures to support you, there’s experts to support you. There’s entire communities organized around these choices. Now more than ever you get to do you. But the first part of that is exploring what that even means, what it looks like for you. What are your specific values around this question and what kind of relationship do you most want at this point in your life? And choosing that boldly. Yes, yes.

Charlotte Rose: 32:42 And just for the people who are thinking that this all sounds scary. It’s true that some of it can feel scary because it’s a little bit destabilizing to this idea that monogamy and that this like relationship will stay this way with these boundaries forever and ever. Of course, we like that idea, that feeling of stability, but the truth is that in our lives, attraction can happen, feelings can emerge and that can derail us and our relationship and take us by surprise. There’s something powerful about having these conversations ahead of time and giving ourselves possibilities to feel the full breadth of what it is to be human, to be desired, to long for others, to be excited and to feel a lot. There’s something powerful about choosing our relationships actively.

Chris Rose: 33:46 I’m reminded of the last thing we always say to each other in these conversations. After we open up a conversation about how our relationship is doing, “Are you feeling desire for anything else? Is the still working for you?” Because this is a conversation we’ll circle back to every six months or so. Like, “We still good? How are you feeling? Are you feeling tended to, what do we need? How do we make this better?” When we end these conversations of like, “Cool, so we’re going to kind of stay devoted. We’re not really feeling any changes are necessary. Let me know if that changes.” We all kind of always end these conversations with, “And if you feel anything new, please tell me”.

Chris Rose: 34:30 Having that open ended invitation of like, “If you’re feeling things that we need to talk about, please come to me”, is perhaps one of the most important relationship structures to have in place. An open invitation for conversation. If you’re feeling really attracted to someone at work, I love to hear about it and I want to hear about it as it’s developing, not when it’s at stage 108. If you’re feeling discontent and bored, I would love to know about that and maybe there’s some things we could change. If you’re feeling ignored, please tell me. This open ear is really important for me. Maybe it’s not for you. I don’t know. I don’t want to say anything’s important for everyone. For us it’s been really important because it’s allowed us to change and grow for 13 years. It’s allowed us to experiment and make mistakes and then be resilient and still have this foundation of devotion under us.

Chris Rose: 35:41 It also allows for me allowing myself to have thoughts. At the conference I met a pro dom, so we had had this whole conversation about flogging and then I was having a conversation and all of a sudden I was talking to someone who was a pro dom and offering me a flogging for a certain price. I was like, “Holy shit, how did this happen?” I checked in in that moment. I knew I had permission from Charlotte, so it wasn’t this taboo thing and I checked in. I was like, “Yeah, no thanks. I’m cool”. But having that permission made it not something scary for me to think about and for something to explore and we need to do everything we can so sexuality is less scary to explore. If you want to have a thriving sex life with each other, open conversation is the foundation.

Chris Rose: 36:33 Whatever you think your devotion style is, whether or not you’re ever interested in opening up your relationship, whether or not you’re ever interested in going to a sex party, have these conversations about boundaries, expectations and assumptions. It will only serve you. We would love to know your thoughts about this episode or anything else you’re thinking about in the realm of sexuality. Check out the show notes page of this episode for links to the monogamy agreement episode and for the option of downloading our worksheets so we can guide you through this conversation. If you love this show and want to support our work, please become a supporting member at patreon.com/pleasure mechanics. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N. patreon.com/pleasure mechanics. The link is in the show notes page and your sustaining donation helps us do this work in this world and spread the love, share awesome sex-positive resources, and make this world a more pleasurable place.

Chris Rose: 37:36 Join us in that mission at patreon.com/pleasure mechanics. Also to remind you all of our podcasts archives are at pleasuremechanics.com where you will also find our online courses when you are ready to up level your erotic skills. Come on over to our forever home, pleasuremechanics.com. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose: 37:58 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 37:59 We are The Pleasure Mechanics …

Charlotte Rose: 38:01 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Your Sexuality, Somewhere Over The Rainbow

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The queer liberation movement has impacted ALL of our lives in both obvious and subtle ways.

We are celebrating the 50 year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots by looking at how the queer liberation movement has generated waves of social change in just one generation. We look at the historical roots of homophobia and how the early gay rights movement began to confront the institutions of power that defined homosexuality as a sin, a crime and an illness.

Ready to explore more with us? Enroll in our FREE online course, The Erotic Essentials, and get started tonight!

Want to learn more about the gay liberation movement? Making Gay History is one of our favorite podcasts and features first person accounts from activists who were on the front lines of the movement.

Transcript for Podcast Episode : Your Sexuality, Somewhere Over The Rainbow

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

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

Charlotte Rose: 00:05 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 00:06 We are the Pleasure Mechanics and on this podcast we have explicit and soulful conversations about every facet of human sexuality. Come on over to PleasureMechanics.com where you will find our complete podcast archive awaiting your listening pleasure. And while you’re there, go to PleasureMechanics.com/free and enroll in the erotic essentials. It is our free online course. It is available for you whenever you wish to get started, it’s at PleasureMechanics.com/free. If you love this show and want to support our work in the world, go to PleasureMechanics.com/love to show us some love and support the show with a monthly donation.

Chris Rose: 00:55 All right, on this podcast episode, we are going to be celebrating Pride. It is June, 2019. It is Gay Pride month, all around the world and this year it is a special one because we are celebrating 50 years since Stonewall. Stonewall was in June, 1969, and it is remembered as the riot that sparked the modern gay rights movement. So we want to pay homage to Stonewall, celebrate the last 50 years of social and cultural change in the field of sexuality and gender and invite you into reflecting how this gay liberation movement has impacted your life, your gender expression, your sex life, no matter how you identify.

Chris Rose: 01:46 When we look at the past 50 years of sexual liberation, it has impacted us all and by locating ourselves in that perhaps we can envision what we want to create for the next 50 years.

Charlotte Rose: 01:58 That is such a beautiful invitation and there is so much there. It is so powerful to consider how dramatically life has changed for many in the last 50 years and how small actions have shifted culture but also how large social and political actions have shifted the landscape for us all.

Chris Rose: 02:20 And we’re using the Stonewall riots as a point of reflection on the past 50 years, but we’re also going to think about the greater arc of sexual liberation that’s been happening over the past many hundreds of years and situating ourselves in this landscape.

Chris Rose: 02:38 A few days ago, I recorded like an hour and 20 minute long global history of sexuality, that took you from cave paintings to Stonewall. I didn’t do as good of a job as I wanted to do, so I left that on the editing room floor. I want to make it a little more succinct and I want to just say that we need to remember that for thousands of years, since Hebrew law, since the rise of monotheistic religions, homosexuality has been not only a sin, but a crime. And a crime punishable by death. A crime punishable by public execution and extreme versions of this. And in my longer history, I took you into some of those grisly details. What we often think of as the witch burnings, in Europe, during the Middle Ages, also involved the rounding up of gender deviance and known homosexuals, and burning them in public executions.

Chris Rose: 03:48 Those public executions never stopped, right. There are still places in the world now where people are executed for being gay, for having homosexual sex, for participating in certain sex acts that are not condoned by their culture. So, let’s just take that in, that this is our legacy and that doesn’t only affect gay people because the persecution of gay people and gender deviance creates a cage, a box, a set of norms that everyone has to be inside of, everyone has to participate in for the system to work. So let’s just honor the thousands of years of gender deviance, of sexual rebels, of wayward women, of people who have been persecuted for stepping outside the very, very small sex norms and gender roles that were prescribed and allowed to exist.

Chris Rose: 04:51 Men had to be a very specific way. Women had to be a very specific way. Woman’s role was in reproduction only. And we need to remember that for thousands of years, under European monotheistic culture, the only sex that is allowed and celebrated is reproductive sex within marriage. And sodomy, gay sex, especially anal sex, is where a lot of this gaze is targeted, but it’s also on gender deviance. It’s on acting outside of your gender norms. Sodomy and gender deviance was so heavily policed that they had to create public style executions and even then it persisted, right. So even under the most heavily violent persecution conditions possible for thousands of years, queerness, homosexuality, same sex love, same sex desire, same sex fucking, same sex sex, has persisted. Even in a culture where it was sin and a crime punishable by death.

Chris Rose: 05:56 That brings us to the rise of medicine, where in addition to being a sin and a crime punishable by death, it becomes a mental illness. It becomes a defect, something that is wrong with you that must be fixed with aversion therapy, shock therapy, lobotomy. This culture of sin, crime, illness, persists for thousands of years and brings us into the 1950s and the 1960s. Where after the wars, and there’s a lot of great history about how the world wars and especially World War II, really shook up gender norms and sex culture in the 1950s and the 1960, we start to see the early gay rights movement coming together in America.

Chris Rose: 06:51 A group called the Mattachine Society first formed and in secret rooms with secret mailing lists, under FBI surveillance, these people met and started talking about the fact that they were gay and that they would always be gay, that they couldn’t be corrected. The first gay activist had an apologetic tone to them. They accepted this idea that they were sick and broken, but wanted kind of social pity instead of persecution and that’s where it began.

Chris Rose: 07:24 From there, as others were emboldened to start joining these meetings, the groups grew and started to fracture and we got the homophile movement. A group of early gay activists, again, we’re talking about 1950s, early 1960s, meeting in secret, saying that maybe even it’s okay to be gay. Maybe gay is good. Maybe this is something good about who we are and not … We don’t need to ask for permission, we can embrace it. Maybe we can change the social attitudes about homosexuality. They were bold enough to think about another culture that was possible where homosexuality would be made space for. I’m not sure they could imagine it would be celebrated, but made space for and made to be okay, and not persecuted as a sin, a crime, and an illness.

Chris Rose: 08:24 And I got this framework of sin, crime, and illness from an interview in the Making Gay History podcast, that I love, and I will link again to that in the show notes page, from an early gay activist, from an archived interview from an early lesbian activist, one of the first women to come out as a lesbian publicly declare her love for women, and say, “I am who I am, I think it’s okay, and we’re going to start changing your minds about us.” I want to focus on how powerful this idea is that we can change cultural attitudes and opinions even when they’re institutionalized for thousands of years. It’s powerful.

Chris Rose: 09:09 All right, so, the homophile movement starts meeting, a magazine forms called One Magazine, that starts a national publication talking about and starting to put to paper gay culture. And in cities like New York and San Francisco, and other big cities, gay culture was emerging. Gay bars were emerging. They were often raided by the police, people were rounded up and arrested, brutalized by police. And again, it was often the gender deviants that were on the frontlines. Because one of the things you could be arrested for was public indecency for wearing opposite sex clothing. So, women wearing men’s trousers were arrested. Men wearing any sign of effeminate clothing. So, trans women, especially trans women of color, were on the frontlines of this police enforcement of the social norms of homosexuals being a sin, a crime, an illness.

Chris Rose: 10:14 All right, so this takes us to the early gay culture, organizing in these cities and there’s a bar called the Stonewall Inn, in Greenwich Village in New York City, that is kind of a legendary homosexual bar. The police raided frequently, that is common. Being arrested is part of your life if you are an out gay person in the 1960s New York. Street harassment, police harassment, it’s just part of your daily life. So, what made this night in June 1969 different? It was a hot, sticky night. It was the day of Judy Garland’s funeral. Judy Garland was already an icon in the gay community, singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and the day of her funeral there was a lot of social tension in New York City at the time. It was the height of the civil rights era, 1969, New York City, hot, sticky night, the police come to raid Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn.

Chris Rose: 11:21 What made this night different than other nights is that the queers in the bar on that night fought back and they said no more. Led by trans women of color, Sylvia Rivera, and Marsha P. Johnson, they fought back against the police, threw rocks and bottles, and this escalated into a three-day riot involving hundreds or thousands of people, where for the first time there was a cacophony of voices, a critical mass of gays. and lesbians. and trans people. and queers of all kinds, saying we’re just not going to take this shit anymore. We are going to organize, we are going to lead ourselves in a movement towards full and equal rights as citizens. And what happened on that night in 1969 was also a lot of media coverage and in general, a public emboldening of gay people.

Chris Rose: 12:22 Again, I just want to pause here to recognize the ways in which the most radical amongst us, the queers, the gender deviants, the trans people of color, the sex workers, who had the least to lose, they started leading a movement and initiating a cultural change that would go on to change the world for all of us. And that is so fucking radical, and righteous, and awesome. So let’s think … That was 1969. We are now 50 years since then. What has happened since Stonewall? If we think about the gender role transformations and the sex culture transformations of the past 50 years, it is dazzling how many changes have occurred and how they impact all of us.

Charlotte Rose: 13:11 Yes, it is astounding to think about the shifts that this has created and the ripples this has created in the world. Of course, for those who are gay, gender variant humans, but also it extends further and straight people are impacted by this shift in culture. When there becomes more room for people to express their gender in a variety of ways that aren’t so constrained by man, woman, and the roles that come along with that, there becomes more space for you to be who you are, whatever that looks like.

Chris Rose: 13:49 I’m just curious as listeners, because I know the vast majority of our listeners are straight identified, but they’re straight identified with enough sexual savviness to have found us, to listen to two queer women talk about sex, and so, I kind of think of you as the most sophisticated and enlightened listeners out there, if I do say so myself. But, you have a certain level of sexual sophistication and so, as you think about the gay liberation movement, the queer liberation movement, where do you situate yourself in that? What are the ways you can identify your life has had more freedom because of the gay rights movement?

Chris Rose: 14:35 And I just want to take a moment. So, after Stonewall, right, there was the 70s disco culture, David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Elton John, right? Like, the 70s had a certain emergence of queer culture. Meanwhile there are all these fights going on. Gay activists were taking on the institutions to get churches to be more welcoming and challenged the dialog of homosexuality as a sin. They were also taking on institutions like the American Psychological Association, getting them to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental illness. That battle took many years. Were also working on the political front to decriminalize homosexuality and make it illegal to be fired from your job for being gay, for example.

Chris Rose: 15:28 So, we see all of these fronts of political action, and of activism. Meanwhile, what is happening is people are coming out. There is social activism. People are coming out, people are starting to challenge gender roles, women are moving into all parts of the workplace and shaking up gender roles there. As women go into the workplace, parenting becomes more collaborative and we invite men into the emotional experience of fatherhood more deeply. Fashion and music and pop culture start celebrating the diversity of gender and sexual expression.

Chris Rose: 16:10 All of this is happening and then AIDS hits concurrently. And AIDS, in the early 80s, took homosexuality from the sin, crime, illness, into a disease, into a cancer that would kill you. And again, the affirmation of what we were fighting against by this virus that entered the community, it organized the queer community like never before. It made us fight for our lives and solidified queer activism. It’s been named one of the most successful public health campaigns, organized at the grassroots level and it also brought homosexuality into mainstream news.

Chris Rose: 16:55 We saw all these gay men dying and some people looked at those images and thought they’re getting what they deserved. Those gays are getting gay cancer. A lot of other hearts were opened by those images and they saw families grieving their sons and a lot of people’s hearts were opened by AIDS. So, we have that legacy too.

Chris Rose: 17:20 And then that takes us into the 90s and the 2000s, 2010s, right? So, what has happened over the past 30 years? Gay marriage has been one big arm. And that arm of the queer movement says we are normal, we are just like you, and in that normalization of queerness, normal becomes a lot more queer. So that’s one arm of it. In the second arm of it, we have the radical edge. People challenging genders even existence. The radical queers who refuse the institutions of marriage and the don’t want to be normal. They’re questioning normal sanity. That also creates a lot of room for people. Radicals have a very important function in social movements and some of our most celebrated pop icons who just totally blow our minds with what is possible with erotic embodiment.

Chris Rose: 18:20 I’m thinking about people like David Bowie, who was this mainstream, gender-bending, out-of-this-world, icon. People who are brave enough to embody those spaces on the radical fringe and do something different that’s never been seen before, carve out so much space for all of us to be more of who we are, to show new possibilities, to break the molds. But then meanwhile, we’re seeing gay people come out in all different cultures and all different churches, gay people in all different segments of society, come out and be loved by their communities, and again, that normalization of gay people makes normal much more gay.

Chris Rose: 19:09 What do I mean by that? I mean things like as gay people started having families, the question of what makes a family had to be asked. What does a parent even mean? And then we’re forced to reflect on the idea that children have been raised in families of all different kinds forever, and that a family is not just a man and a woman in marriage with children. Sometimes those men go off to war and never come back. Families have always looked really different and humans have taken care of each other, and this idea of the institution of marriage is a construction that can be deconstructed and rebuilt and redesigned.

Chris Rose: 19:55 As queer people started having families and queer men became much more vocal about their non-monogamy, they led the way to say, “We can be in love for 40 years and yes, we have other lovers.” And so, queer men opened a space for us to talk about polyamory and non-monogamy and in the past 10 years, we are seeing so many people who are heterosexual identified, find some breathing room in that category. Find some more space to be more authentically who they are.

Chris Rose: 20:35 As butch lesbians, we’re brave enough to take up space as masculine females and walk through cities with short hair and looking like dykes, and really put their skin on the line to do that, we changed our understanding of what a woman was and what it meant to be a woman, and look like a woman. And now straight women have so many more options of how they can dress and present, and it is not expected that you will wear a dress, and pearls, and gloves, and heels every day. Our social expectations of one another have changed radically, and if we follow all of these trails, so many of them lead back to queer pioneers who threw these institutions of marriage, and family, and gender, and sexual orientation into question.

Chris Rose: 21:31 They forced the question, they force us to look at it and in that investigation, we find that all of us are pretty queer. The only normal is difference, and if we allow that human sexuality to emerge, if we allow ourselves to be who we are, what then? What gifts emerge? What new models are possible? And this is kind of where I want to lead us for the next 50 years. We’re at now the 50 year anniversary of Stonewall. Where will we be at the 100 year anniversary of Stonewall? Some of us will be dead, some of us will have children or grandchildren who will be sitting around and telling the story of the next 50 years of sex culture.

Chris Rose: 22:20 If we can accept the idea that the past 50 years have been shaped by both radicals and extraordinary individuals, but also by every day individuals and all of our daily actions, then we are motivated perhaps for the next 50 years to take our part in shaping sex culture, to find agency and power in the idea that how you embody your sexuality today, and tomorrow, is part of leaving a legacy. You are shaping the sex culture for the next generation. All of us. And for me, I find that thrilling. Because then for me, I’m like what do I want to live into, what possibilities do I want to embody, what do I want to create for the next generation, and then what are the ways I can do that in my daily life?

Charlotte Rose: 23:19 What are some of those ways? I just want to make that more practical. You see so much possibility in these moments. I think for a lot of people they may feel overwhelmed by that, of this question of how can we shape culture daily. What are some of the ways you think about that? What are some of the actions you think people can be taking daily to create and recreate sex culture for each other and for the younger ones that come up behind us?

Chris Rose: 23:52 Right. That’s a big question. I’ll do my best with it. So, there’s the big stuff, right? Like, what policies are you voting for? What representatives are you voting for? What are their sexual politics? What is the cultural position you occupy and how much social power do you have with that position? So, I think the answer is really dependent on who you are in this culture and what actions you can take. But, no matter who you are, and what social position you have, I think we can think about it through the lens of to what degree do I still relate to sexuality as a sin, a crime, an illness. My own sexuality and other people’s sexualities and expressions, to what degree do we still relate to difference as a sin, a crime, an illness? To what degree do we radically accept and have compassion for difference, especially those we don’t understand. And how are your actions aligned with your sexual values?

Chris Rose: 25:02 And so some of this is like how you take up space in public and how you … When I say how you embody. So, and part of this for me is I am visibly queer. I am visibly masculine female. I could choose to grow out my hair, and wear different clothes, and blend right in. I have chosen not to do that because part of my expression is a shaved head, masculine clothes, and I occupy this middle ground which all the new kids are calling non-binary and gender non-conforming. All the sweet, new generation have all this language for it. For me, I’ve always imagine myself straddling a lot of boundaries, being neither male nor female, neither straight nor gay. So for me, a lot of my daily action is just shamelessly embodying my body, showing that this body is capable of joy and love, that I don’t apologize for my body. And that might be a big place to start is to what extent are you apologizing for your sexuality? To what extent are you allowing your sexuality to be seen and honored?

Chris Rose: 26:09 Have you come out yet would be one question for all of our straight listeners. What is there that you could come out about that would break down some shame, break down some stigma, and create more permission and pleasure and opportunity for other people? So, depending on your context again, this might be coming out as having herpes. So when your friends start making herpes jokes, you get up the guts to interrupt them and be like, “Dude, I have herpes, and by the statistics, most of us at this table have herpes. You want to keep making those herpes jokes? Like, get over it dude.” Right? Some of it is interruption or interrupting toxic narratives about rape culture in the locker room. Or, interruption your corporation from continuing to hire straight white guys out of Stanford and saying maybe there’s other people that could do this job better and standing up for people who have different backgrounds than you, right?

Chris Rose: 27:17 A lot of it is standing up for difference, coming out as who you are. So, coming out can look like a lot of different things. You might want to come out as non-monogamous. If you and your wife have threesomes once a year and there’s conversation at your social circle about those dirty pervs, you might want to come out as like, “You know, we’ve been married 35 years and we have threesomes once in a while and there’s nothing wrong with it guys.” You might want to come out as gender deviant. Is there something you are hiding about your gender expression and not showing the world out of shame? Maybe there’s coming outs for all of us to do and in that coming out, we create more possibility for one another. We model this for one another.

Chris Rose: 28:07 I’ll tell a quick story that kind of shows these different social change trajectories in action. So, I was at Target the other day, and it’s situated in a mall near our house. A few years ago I was seeing a movie at this mall and I had parked at kind of a weird entrance, and after the movie, which was a Quentin Tarantino incredibly violent movie, I was walking to my car and a car full of teenage boys kind of cornered me in the parking lot and were starting to get violent. I escaped that moment. But it is one of the many moments of queer harassment and violence I carry in my body. Some of those have been actual attacks and assaults, some of them have been threats. This was a threat.

Chris Rose: 28:50 A few years later, I am at Target, I am shopping. A group of high school boys walks by me and in an attempt to impress his friends, one of them calls me a fat dyke, in kind of like a threatening, violent tone. In that moment, I could have felt shame and fear and I did feel those things, and it was shocking to me that it as a grown-ass woman, a young boy can harass me in Target and make me feel shame and fear, but that’s within the cultural context of having been attacked and assaulted for my queerness, right?

Chris Rose: 29:25 That’s internalized homophobia. That’s internalized violence that people in marginalized groups walk with. We have to honor that. So, I’m there activated in my shame and fear, but I also have enough confidence at this point in who I am, to be like, “Yeah, I’m a fat dyke.” And so, as they were walking away, I called out, “Do better. You got to do better than that, kid.” And I heard his friends shut him down. Like, “What a jerk you were.” They kind of hit him and laughed and went on. I saw them later in the store as I came around a corner, and the boy that had harassed me looked deeply bashful. And I walked out feeling kind of victorious, because I had confronted a moment of harassment, stood up for myself, and his peers backed me up. It was uncool to harass the dyke on Friday night at Target.

Chris Rose: 30:26 So, what do we see there? We see cultural change. These young boys, it’s no longer cool. They have family cultures perhaps. They’ve seen shows, some of their own friends have started to come out. Teenage culture is no longer, for that little cluster of boys, is not longer affirming homophobic violence. It’s saying not cool, we’re not going to do it anymore. What’s also happened for me is I have enough social confidence to stand up for who I am and take up space and if they had harassed me again, I would have gone and gotten a manager. And that manager would have backed me up.

Chris Rose: 31:05 The institutions of power are shifting and when we talk about power, this is like maybe a huge, nother conversation, but power lives in our day-to-day actions. Power exists between every two individuals that are talking. Part of the queer liberation movement is no longer allowing sexual norms and gender norms to occupy a position of so much power over us. That is what the thousands of years of sexual violence were trying to do. Assert power over sexuality and over gender expression as social control and there’s a whole body of queer theory looking at the use of sexuality as social control. But all you need to do to embrace that is to think about homosexuality and gender deviance, again, as a sin, a crime, and an illness and how those narratives control how all of us behave. Who we are allowed to be, and who we are allowed to love, who we are allowed to desire, what kinds of sexual desires men and women are allowed to have. This is still in all of us. This is all of the stuff we are unpacking week to week. All of the excavation of sexual shame. Like, all of this is related and all of this is what the queer liberation movement is for. It’s not just so gay people can get married. It’s to dismantle the power that uses sexuality and gender as social control.

Chris Rose: 32:46 And in doing so, it’s right alongside the liberation movements that are unpacking race, and wealth, and the hoarding of resources along certain strata. Everywhere you see categories getting made. That is for power. So, this liberation movement is inherently tied up in the liberation of all people.

Chris Rose: 33:09 Okay, so, 50 years since Stonewall. Where are you at? You are listening to this podcast. You are looking for more sexual freedom. You are looking to embrace a more pleasurable relationship with sexuality and I just wanted to place that quest, for all of us as individuals, within the social context of this liberation movement that has been happening for well over 50 years, that has been led by really brave people, willing to do the work to break down these social institutions and change social attitudes. You have benefited from it, so reap those benefits, take stock of where you are in your sexuality and gender expression, and let’s all be emboldened to keep coming out, to keep living more vibrantly, to keep creating possibilities and to keep sticking up for other people. So much of this is to stand up for the sexual rights and the expression and the safety of all bodies.

Chris Rose: 34:15 And so, if you’re looking for a way to get involved in this, if you want to start shaping the next 50 years, you can start with yourself and your own sexual liberation and then also start standing up for the sexual liberation of all bodies and there is plenty of work to be done on that front, especially now because these rights, reproductive rights, the rights of queer people, are under fire by our current administration. We know this, it is visible, it is tactical, and again, why? Again We can look at power and sex, and yet, why is Trump even bothering to attack sexual freedoms? Social control, fear, shame as social control.

Chris Rose: 34:54 Okay, so we continue to resist. We continue to lead the way into a better future for all of us. We continue this movement. We continue the liberation movements, plural, and we continue each of our daily investment in experiencing little tastes of sexual freedom, little moments of feeling safe, and feeling pleasure and feeling love, and using that pleasure as fuel to create the sex culture we want to see emerge over the next 50 years. How’s that for a mission?

Charlotte Rose: 35:37 It is full. It is a rich history. It informs everything that we do in these moments and it’s invisible sometimes to register and to really notice how much the history, and the bravery, and the courage of people in the past have influenced our every day actions today and give us freedoms and permissions that we are not aware of. It’s powerful to reflect on. So, happy Pride to everyone.

Chris Rose: 36:05 Woohoo.

Charlotte Rose: 36:06 If you have a parade in your town, feel free to go. If you have kids, feel free to bring them. And in doing that, you are becoming a family that is making a safe space for people to be gay, whether that is your kids and you don’t know yet, or it’s your kids’ friends that then they give permission to. Sometimes you don’t know the impact of being a permission giver and being somebody that is saying, “This is okay. This is great. Look how fun that is.” And that you are somebody that comes alone to celebrate and support other people’s experience. So that is an opportunity that you can go for or else just speak kindly about gays to your family, to your friends, as you’re going about in the world. You sometimes really just never know the impact and the ripple effect that being someone who is okay with sexuality in all forms. You sometimes just don’t know the positive effect that that can have on your community, people close to you or people further away. It’s amazing. It’s amazing.

Chris Rose: 37:12 It’s true, and in all of the feedback we get for this podcast, one of the recurring themes is how nice it is to have non-judgmental community about sex. And for most people that’s just a one-way listening relationship, but just having us talk about sex in a relaxed, non-judgemental way, has been really life-changing for a lot of people and it strikes me that we can all do that.

Charlotte Rose: 37:39 For each other?

Chris Rose: 37:40 Yeah.

Charlotte Rose: 37:40 Yeah.

Chris Rose: 37:41 The 10,000 listeners of this podcast can all be deputized. I hereby deputize you to just be a non-judgmental presence about sex and sexuality.

Charlotte Rose: 37:53 And that is a very, very, very, very, very powerful act.

Chris Rose: 37:57 And I already know, like, we have listener friends in Oklahoma who are starting a queer support group in their rural Oklahoma town. There are people in … There are people all over the world who are using what they have learned here to then share it with people in their community and we will continue to find ways to support you in doing that.

Chris Rose: 38:24 we are headed into some adventures. So, tomorrow I get in a car and drive to Philadelphia for the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists annual conference, ASECT. It’s the largest gathering of sex therapists and educators and I will be there in my Pleasure Mechanics uniform. We have stickers and resources going out in all 850 gift bags to encourage sex therapists to join our community, share our resources, contribute to our resources and I’ll be onsite for four days, talking to them. I’m so excited. And then I drive home and the next day our family goes to Canada. Those of you who have been with us for a few years know that we have a special little cabin in rural Canada where we go every year to rejuvenate, and reset, and just be in the lake and get offline for two solid weeks. We will not be on our computers much. So, we will take a break from the podcast for the rest of June, and we will be back with you in July with new episodes of Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics.

Chris Rose: 39:40 If you are hungry for more during this break, be sure to come over to PleasureMechanics.com and explore our full archive of episodes waiting for you or enroll in one of our online courses and uplevel your erotic skills with us. You can find it all at PleasureMechanics.com. I’m Chris …

Charlotte Rose: 40:00 I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose: 40:01 We are the Pleasure Mechanics …

Charlotte Rose: 40:03 Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Not Always In The Mood: Dismantling Myths About Male Sexuality with Sarah Hunter Murray

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In this episode, Canadian sex therapist and researcher Sarah Hunter Murray joins us to dismantle the myths about male sexuality that are at the root of so much sexual struggle. Her book Not Always In The Mood: The New Science of Men, Sex & Relationships draws from in depth interviews with men to expose the persistent mythology about male sexuality that most of the time goes unquestioned.

You can find more from Sarah Hunter Murray and her book Not Always In The Mood at SarahHunterMurray.com

Transcript of Podcast Episode: Not Always In The Mood, An Interview With Sarah Hunter Murray PhD

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. This is Chris from pleasuremechanics.com, and on today’s podcast, we have Sarah Hunter Murray, here to talk about the mythologies about male sexuality that are at the heart of so much sexual struggle for men and women alike. Sarah is the author of the new book, Not Always in the Mood: The New Science of Men, Sex, and Relationships.

Chris Rose: 00:30 I was so thrilled to find Sarah Hunter Murray’s book about the myths of male sexuality because I have long said on this podcast that we undersell men. We do men such a disservice when we talk about men’s sexuality as simple, easy, “They’re always in the mood, you just have to stroke them and they’ll get off.”, like “What’s the big deal? They’ll want to have sex with anything that moves.” We act like men are animals instead of the complex human beings we know them to be, and we have not brought ourselves culturally to having a nuanced, intelligent conversation about men’s sexuality, our assumptions about men’s sexuality, and the lived truths in men’s lives. And these are the truths that find themselves in my inbox day after day, year after year. The stories you all share with me reveal the nuanced, emotional, social nature of male sexuality, and it’s time we update our cultural narratives to reflect that nuance and that humanness, right?

Chris Rose: 01:45 So, let’s dive into this interview.

Chris Rose: 01:48 Sarah Hunter Murray is a fabulous sex therapist out of Canada, author of Not Always in the Mood: The New Science of Men, Sex, and Relationships. You’ll find all of the links to her work in the show notes page for this episode at pleasuremechanics.com.

Chris Rose: 02:06 Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com for our full podcast archive, to explore our online courses when you are ready to master new erotic skills, and subscribe to this podcast to join this weekly conversation about sex and sexuality here on Speaking of Sex with The Pleasure Mechanics.

Chris Rose: 02:26 Here is my interview with Sarah Hunter Murray.

S Hunter Murray: 02:30 Hi. I am Sarah Hunter Murray. I have a PhD in human sexuality, I work as a relationship therapist, I’m in private practice in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and I’m the author of Not Always in the Mood: The New Science of Men, Sex, and Relationships.

Chris Rose: 02:47 And so, why this book? Why this topic? Why did men deserve a book of their own?

S Hunter Murray: 02:53 Yeah, great question.

S Hunter Murray: 02:55 So, when I started my research as a sexuality researcher … I identify as a woman, I am so curious about women’s experiences, and in fact, that’s what I started doing: I started exploring how women experience sexual desire. I was fascinated by the complexities and the nuances. And there was so much that I learned about times that women are in the mood, and not so much, and societal messages, and psychological issues, and biological pieces. And really, what started to kind of stand out to me as I was going along the process is that we were really talking about women as being these really complex creature, perhaps to a fault, kind of maybe over-complicating women’s sexuality some argue, and I would put myself in that camp. And I realized that we were doing a lot of comparing to men’s desire, kind of talking about how … And making assumptions, I would say, about how men’s desire is quite surface-level, straightforward, high. There was kind of this language that suggested that men were always in the mood, and it just kind of hit me one day, “That can’t be true, can it?”

S Hunter Murray: 04:02 And so, I set forth to do some research by actually interviewing men, having in-depth conversations, asking about how they experience sexual desire in their relationships, and whether these assumptions were accurate or maybe not at all correct about how they truly experience their sexual interest.

Chris Rose: 04:23 So, your book came like an answer to my prayers.

S Hunter Murray: 04:28 Oh, wow!

Chris Rose: 04:29 Thank you for writing it, because I have been hungry for a more in-depth analysis about male sexuality. I feel like we do them such a disservice when we think about male sexuality as simple, and easy to please.

Chris Rose: 04:41 So, let’s dive into these myths, because you also do such a great job of showing how these myths hurt all of us, and how the myths about male sexuality are in dialogue with the myths about female sexuality, and we’re all kind of in this sexual culture together, which is a lot of what we talk about on this podcast, is the effect of the culture.

Chris Rose: 05:04 So, let’s dive into these myths, and let’s maybe start with your title, Not Always in the Mood, and this myth of kind of constant sexual interest and high libido. Why did you choose to center this myth in the title and in the book?

S Hunter Murray: 05:20 Yeah, so the reason that I chose the title and to kind of really highlight this idea of “not always in the mood” is because I think it really touches on this overarching idea that we do hold about men’s sexual interests: that it is high, constant, unwavering, that they’re always thinking about sex, it’s always on their mind, and that if sex is on offer, and particularly in a relationship … And the men in my research are largely identifying as heterosexual. So, particularly then when a female partner initiates sex, that there’s this idea that they should always take it, that that’s their top priority, if you will. And the more and more that I kind of talk about this stereotype, the more it even kind of makes me cringe even having to say the stereotype because I just know about how limiting it is.

S Hunter Murray: 06:06 But I really thought it was important to just start poking a hole in that and saying let’s at least talk about the times that men aren’t in the mood, that sometimes there’s men who have low desire, problematically low desire, or even men who have “normal”, quote, unquote, healthy, even high desire still are human beings and not robots who just might not be in the mood sometimes for various reasons that I don’t think we really typically acknowledge.

Chris Rose: 06:33 Can you say that again? It’s high, unwavering …

S Hunter Murray: 06:36 High, constant, unwavering. Just this idea that it’s … I kind of use that, the language that almost implies that it’s robotic, right? That there’s not feelings and emotions, that there’s not sickness, and illness, and just stress, right? Men are of course humans, but I think when we talk about their sexual desire, we default to this language that implies that they don’t experience a full range of human emotions that impact all of us, and impact of course our sexuality as well.

Chris Rose: 07:08 Exactly. And then that becomes bundled with, once that opportunity for sex presents itself, you will be erect, and ready, and able to have an orgasm easily, right? Oversimplification, this tremendous pressure it puts on men.

Chris Rose: 07:22 What did you see as some of the stories, some of the symptoms that started surfacing as you got to talk to these men about their truth of their sexual experiences? How do they experience this myth?

S Hunter Murray: 07:36 Yeah, so when I was interviewing men … My first set of my research was on … I did these in-depth interviews. And so, I started by asking men about how true is this? Do you feel sexual desire? Are there ever times where you don’t? And I have to admit, a lot of the men actually did start by describing their desire as high, saying, “You know what? I’m more often or not in the mood. It’s hard to imagine a time where I wouldn’t want sex.”

S Hunter Murray: 08:04 But it didn’t take long, as our interviews continued … Which is what I love about these in-depth conversations, is because you get to move past that first thing that you say that comes out of your mouth. And men would start to open up about, “Oh, well, you know, maybe my desire isn’t as high as it used to be.” You know, men in their 30s, 40s, 50s, starting to kind of reflect on some changes they’ve experienced over time. Men would say things like, “Oh, well, if I’m tired or really sick …” Very understandable experiences again, but just starting to kind of talk about that exception to the rule.

S Hunter Murray: 08:38 But the thing that really caught my attention the most is that when men were talking about times they wouldn’t be in the mood to have sex, this came up in the interviews and again on my online larger qualitative study, they were talking about times that they didn’t feel emotionally connected to their partner. And I think that really deserves some attention and some conversation because we often think about men as wanting sex no matter what, or being so excited that sex is on offer that they might be able to kind of turn off some of those other emotions. But it came out very clearly and repeatedly through my research that if men were feeling a disconnect, if they were even having a fight with their partner, or maybe there was kind of this distance that hadn’t really been resolved, that their interest in having sex wasn’t always there, that they wanted that connection, they wanted to feel close in order to be physically intimate.

S Hunter Murray: 09:30 So, it’s something that we don’t really talk about when it comes to men’s sexual desire.

Chris Rose: 09:36 And you did such a beautiful job zooming in on this idea that if we believe men just want sex to get off, what does that kind of say to the gatekeepers of sex, traditionally the women? That it’s kind of an opportunity that they’ll say “yes” to no matter what, and that no matter what kind of then depersonalizes it and doesn’t speak to the emotional hunger that men are initiating with.

S Hunter Murray: 10:02 Absolutely.

Chris Rose: 10:03 This myth is so damaging for all of us. Can you bring us to that moment?

S Hunter Murray: 10:08 Yeah, absolutely.

S Hunter Murray: 10:10 And so, that was kind of this pivotal moment for me, was realizing that, as men were sharing their experiences with me, that they’re saying that sex is not just this physical need to get off. Sex ideally feels good. There’s some level of pleasure that’s experienced. It’s not that that’s not an important component. But again, this idea that it’s just about getting off, and for a partner, and say particularly female partner in the case of my research, if they believe that their male partner is simply looking to get off, they may be in a relationship where the expectation is that it’s monogamous and they’re the only appropriate person that they can engage with, there’s nothing sexy, or romantic, or flattering about that, right? It’s this really limited idea that you just want to get off. It’s not about connecting with me. It’s not about that moment of intimacy. And when that’s missing, you can understand, if any person feels that way about their partner, they might be inclined to turn down that sexual bid. It doesn’t feel sexy or make anyone feel good to think that you just want to get off.

S Hunter Murray: 11:18 But what men were saying in my research is that sex is this experience of emotional connection, of this deeper level of intimacy, and what they really wanted was to connect with their partner through sex. Of course, they talked about the side of it that feels good, but they really wanted … It was a bid for emotional connection.

S Hunter Murray: 11:40 And I think what’s so important … And I’ll speak about my clinical work as a relationship therapist. When I’m working with couples, and heterosexual couples particularly, where the female partner kind of can hear her male partner speak through that, I’ve seen it over and over again where she’ll just kind of have this deep sigh and be like, “Oh, okay. I get it.” Like, “That makes me feel better. That makes me feel like I understand where you’re coming from, that I know you better.” It doesn’t mean she has to say “yes” to his sexual advance just because it’s a bid for connection. But I think at least acknowledging that sex can be that bid for connection from men I think allows, particularly heterosexual couples who are taught these really limiting roles about how men and women are supposed to be, it gives them a better understanding of their partner, and an ability to say, “Oh, maybe you feel disconnected. You’re reaching out through sex. I don’t particularly feel turned on right now, but maybe we can kind of sit and talk, maybe I can warm up to the idea, maybe we can find a different way of connecting now and try sex later.”

S Hunter Murray: 12:43 But it’s an idea that, if we kind of understand the underlying motivation for our partner initiating sex, it just helps us to understand their inner world a little better, and maybe even find a way to connect if that’s sometimes like the ultimate thing that’s being sought after.

Chris Rose: 13:01 My brain’s going in about 10 directions right now. But one of those places is that what is being sought, and if we can bring intention and name that intention more clearly, then as you said, the options open up, the many sexual experiences, erotic connections you can have, and the pressure to perform, which dovetails with this other myth of the ever-performing penis really [crosstalk 00:13:28]. And that again just puts so much pressure on men to have sex mean one thing-

S Hunter Murray: 13:33 Yep.

Chris Rose: 13:34 … and that one thing be something he has to control and manage.

Chris Rose: 13:39 I’ve been hearing so much from men about the, not only pressure to have the erection and the ejaculation, but the pressure to kind of manage the whole sexual experience and be in control all the time.

S Hunter Murray: 13:52 Yes. Yes. And that was another thing that came up, this idea that men are feeling a lot of the responsibility around sexual activity, and again, particularly in heterosexual relationships, is on their shoulders. And there’s a good reason for that, because our society continues to, from a young age, reinforce men for seeking out sexual stimulation, sexual partners, kind of pushing to that next level of sexual intimacy. So, a lot of men can kind of relate to feeling in high school that men who … Or boys at time, sometimes, are being rewarded through popularity, high-fives, if they have a partner, if they have sex. And so, there’s this idea that they are positively rewarded for pursuing sexual activity. Whereas women, most women would say that their experience was more around the shaming of their sexuality, that they were taught to be passive, that good girls make him wait, having multiple sexual partners can give you labels of being a slut or a whore. And some women in high school tend to avoid wanting those labels. I think we kind of can challenge them as we become adults, but I think those assumptions about what men and women should do and what they’re rewarded or criticized for doing impacts how we enter into relationships.

Chris Rose: 15:20 Yeah.

S Hunter Murray: 15:21 And so, what I’ve heard is that men are saying the expectation tends to be that they initiate sex, that they flirt with their female partner, that they desire her, they tell her she’s beautiful, they are responsible during sex for providing sexual pleasure, and kind of feeling that that level of responsibility is kind of damaging for them. It’s a bit exhausting, but also that they feel so excited when those roles get reversed.

S Hunter Murray: 15:52 So, one of the myths that I talk about in the book is this idea that men say that they want to feel desired in return, that they like when their female partner compliments them, when she reaches out to touch him, even romantically, when she initiates sex, when it feels like there’s this role reversal and this feeling of being desired and wanted.

S Hunter Murray: 16:14 So, men were talking about how good that feels. And again, it’s just something particularly with heterosexual relationships where men and women receive such different messages growing up about what they should do. Men were saying they’re really ready to kind of challenge some of those norms and kind of split the workload, if you will, when it comes to sex.

Chris Rose: 16:35 And as a therapist, how do you work with people? Because sometimes in the podcast when we encourage these massive reframings of expectations and cultural norms, the next question is like, “Well, great. Now how?” Like, “I see the benefit. I know I want to, but undoing these programing can feel so challenging.”

Chris Rose: 17:00 What are some of the first steps for men to recognize which myths are impacting them the most, and start unpacking some of this for themselves?

S Hunter Murray: 17:08 Yeah. Really great question.

S Hunter Murray: 17:10 So, it depends. I talk through a bunch of different myths. And so, I think some readers have reached out to me to let me know that the book in general really hits home for them, and that kind of all the myths really apply.

Chris Rose: 17:25 Yeah.

S Hunter Murray: 17:25 Some of those people will reach out saying, “This one myth in particularly really resonated.”

S Hunter Murray: 17:30 But part of it is kind of figuring out what really hits home for you. My goal with this book, or presenting this research, is in no way to suggest a new mold of men’s sexuality. It is to suggest that maybe we can have a different discourse and allow for more nuances within men and between men about their experiences.

S Hunter Murray: 17:52 So, if we’re talking about this idea of wanting to feel desired as an example, what I would suggest is the first thing is just acknowledging. I really do take this approach that it’s not on men’s shoulders to change it, it’s not on women’s shoulders to feel responsible: it’s really about opening up a dialogue.

S Hunter Murray: 18:11 One of the couples that comes to mind for me, that I was working with, talks about how even having the language around “I want to feel desired. Feeling desired is important to me.” was a critical step in terms of even being able to acknowledge to himself that it was important, that he liked when his female partner kind of reassured him of being wanted through physical touch, just a quick kiss on the cheek when she passed by, giving him a rub on the shoulders. When she initiated sex, it kind of put him at ease that she wanted it, and that she was an excited participant. Sometimes he worried that if he initiated at the wrong time that he would either be rejected, or he had his own insecurities around whether she was kind of, quote, unquote, “just going along with it”, like consenting but not really being that excited about it. So, all of these things, as he was able to vocalize what was important about feeling desired, ways that she made him feel wanted, it helped him with the language, and it helped her understand his needs.

S Hunter Murray: 19:13 Now, with this particular couple, they were in their 60s. They had years and years of learning certain rules about how men and women are supposed to be. And she struggled with the idea of initiating sex because she had been taught for decades that that’s not what women do.

S Hunter Murray: 19:31 So, again to your point, not an easy thing for some people to kind of switch. But she actually, as we continued our work together, started to play around with the idea that she’s never been able to fully embrace sex on her schedule. She was always taught to wait for a partner to indicate he was in the mood or not. Or I guess that he was in the mood, sorry, and then she could see if she was or not. And as we continued our exploration of the messages she received about women and sexuality, she really started to open up about, “Wow! This could be really exciting for me to say, ‘Hey, I’m interested.'”, and tap into the times where her desire was there, but she never actually turned the feeling into action because she was always taught “That’s not what you do.”

S Hunter Murray: 20:14 So, I guess that’s a kind of long-winded answer to your question. But I think it starts with naming what is important to us, why is it important to us, and asking are there ways in this relationship that feel comfortable for both of us to take some responsibility to kind of shift these dynamics. They don’t blame. There’s no expectation that things have to kind of shift on a dime. Some people find these things a little easier to incorporate sooner, and other people, like I said with this couple in their 60s that’s coming to mind for me now, there’s a lot of years to kind of unpack and reverse in order to kind of challenge some of these myths.

Chris Rose: 20:53 Yeah. And there seems to be this double burden of there’s the struggle itself of you’re not having the sex you want, or the kind of sexual expression you want, and then there’s the experience on top of that of the shame and what that means about you, and your worth, and your position in the relationship. And we should try to excavate for ourselves where is the struggle? Is it the actual experience I’m having with my soft penis, or is it the story I’m putting on what that means?

S Hunter Murray: 21:27 Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes, throughout my research, men would say things like if they weren’t in the mood, if they turned down sex, and whether or not that’s because they had an erection or not, or could or could not obtain erection, or they just weren’t kind of mentally there, sometimes they were worried about how their female partner respond. Would she judge, or would she say “no” next time? And there was kind of some men who talked about that concern.

S Hunter Murray: 21:55 But some men said, even if their female partner was understanding and reassuring that they actually felt there was something wrong with them on a personal level, that no amount of reassurance was really going to cut it for them, that they held such a high standard for themselves in terms of being in the mood, “That’s what men should do. That’s what I’ve been told men should do. I’m not meeting that norm.”, and talking about the struggle that they experienced internally, and the judgements they put on themselves in those moments, which I think what you’re speaking to is that only intensifies and amplifies those negative feelings, and makes enjoyable sex less likely. That pressure doesn’t really work in our favor.

Chris Rose: 22:43 A few moments ago you said something I’m so curious about. You said that you, in the book, don’t position a new model for male sexuality. I’m curious where you come down on, after these conversations, after your years of clinical practice, where are you seeing our sex culture right now? Where do you feel like we need to head? Do we have a broken system? Where are you falling on that?

S Hunter Murray: 23:08 Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great question.

S Hunter Murray: 23:12 I guess what I mean when I say I’m not trying to create a new mold of male sexuality is because I do find sometimes when I have written an article, whether it’s for Psychology Today, or I’ve given a quick interview, I do get a lot of really positive feedback and response, whether it’s from men, or women, or both, and couples, saying, “This really resonates. I finally feel seen. I finally feel like I understand my partner.”

S Hunter Murray: 23:40 Almost inevitably, I’ll get that one random comment from someone who says, “Well, I’m always in the mood. I always feel desire.” I’m like, “Okay, that’s fine.” I’m not trying to say that just because the men that have participated in my research and the themes and findings that I’ve found … If that doesn’t speak to you, that’s fine. Not all men are going to fit in this description. But what I really do want to suggest is that we know that other side, right? We’re used to that person, whether it’s a singer, or a rapper, or a music video, or a TV show, or a movie. We’re used to that archetype of that man who’s like, “I’m always in the mood, need lots of women, cheating because I can’t be satisfied in a monogamous relationship.” I was like, “We know that story.” What we don’t have as much knowledge of or space to talk about is all the nuances, the complexities, the time men aren’t in the mood, the things that would decrease their sexual interest, the emotional vulnerability involved in initiating sex, the deep feelings of rejection that can happen when sexual initiation and that bid for connection isn’t met.

S Hunter Murray: 24:58 We don’t talk about that emotional side of men’s sexuality and their sexual desire specifically, and I think that really is causing a disservice to us socially. I think it’s keeping men in these narrow boxes about what they should demonstrate. I think it’s making female partners feel disconnected from their male partners with those assumptions that we talked about before, that it’s just this physical need, and missing out on these emotional connections.

S Hunter Murray: 25:23 And so, while I definitely want to push a conversation around, “How true are these assumptions?”, and “Is there room for a more nuanced and more complicated idea of men’s sexuality?”, I never want to come across as saying that, for men who identify as having high sex drives, that there’s something inherently wrong with them, or that that’s a problem. But I just think that there’s too many men who have been kind of forced into a box, and not given the space to say, “Hey, my desire’s more complex than that. I don’t always feel desire. I sometimes want to say ‘no’. I find initiating a little exhausting sometimes. I want to feel desired.” I think it at least allows for a better conversation that allows men some variation, and I think it helps women better understand their male partners in a lot of situations.

S Hunter Murray: 26:18 Did I answer your question? Yeah?

Chris Rose: 26:21 Yeah, and it allows men some dignity, and feeling less isolated. I get so many emails that start, “I’ve never told anyone this before, dot, dot, dot.”, and then they reveal a pattern that I’ve seen thousands of times, right?

S Hunter Murray: 26:35 Yes. Yes.

Chris Rose: 26:37 And I’m sure you see this. And how do we deal with this: people feeling alone in what we know are very well-established patterns?

S Hunter Murray: 26:45 Exactly.

Chris Rose: 26:45 And that isolation is part of the struggle.

S Hunter Murray: 26:48 Exactly. That’s so bang on from my experiences as well. And I am a woman who’s writing about men’s sexual desire, but one of the reasons that I’m really passionate at least about presenting the research as a real … From the voices of men. I use a lot of quotes so that readers can hear it as if it was one of their buddies. It’s men’s words. It’s their descriptions. I’m not putting my own twist on it. I really want to show men what other men are saying, because so often what I get as feedback, when people read the book or if I kind of have given a tidbit like an interview such as this, they’ll say, “Oh, I thought it was just me.” And I think it’s so important to just hear that other side.

S Hunter Murray: 27:38 Men in my research will say they know that … They hear those conversations, and the stereotypical locker room of, “Hey, did you get laid last night?”, or making comments to a girl who walks by. Men that I speak with are actually quite critical of that, and yet there’s another part that kind of doubts, like, “Oh, wait, it’s not true. Or is it?”

S Hunter Murray: 28:00 That’s all I hear. We don’t have as many dialogues. We don’t hear that discourse around men talking about, “Yeah, work is really hard right now. I am stressed. When I get home, I just want to watch a show and go to bed early. And to be honest, sex is kind of the last thing on my mind right now.” We don’t have a lot of examples of hearing that, and men will say it’s so helpful to know, “Oh, okay. So, that’s a thing. Other men experience it. It’s not just me. There’s nothing wrong with me, I just haven’t heard this, and I haven’t heard my experience normalized like that before.”

Chris Rose: 28:40 Thank you so much for collecting these narratives, for bringing your wisdom to it.

Chris Rose: 28:46 Can you let folks know where to find more from you online?

S Hunter Murray: 28:50 Yeah, I’d love to. Thanks for the opportunity.

S Hunter Murray: 28:52 So, my research is all presented in the book that we’re talking about, Not Always in the Mood: The New Science of Men, Sex, and Relationships. And I also write a blog for Psychology Today where I touch on a lot of topics, but as much as possible also hit on these issues about men’s sexuality, and it’s called Myths of Desire. And again, that’s for Psychology Today.

Chris Rose: 29:16 And what are the questions you are thinking most about right now?

S Hunter Murray: 29:21 So, I think what I’m still most curious about is, at this stage, my research is really focused on heterosexual dynamics. And of course, that doesn’t apply to all men, as identifying as heterosexual or dating women. And so, I’m really curious. I think if we’re going to completely understand, if we can ever completely understand anything, but at least better understand men’s experiences, then of course it has to include men who identify as bisexual, as gay, as pansexual, as queer. We need to kind of include more experiences. Are there, say, slightly or maybe even very different experiences of men with different sexual orientations in different relationship structures?

S Hunter Murray: 30:09 I’m particularly interested as we get older as well. My research starts with men … My interviews were 30 to 65. My online study 18 to 65. The people that I work with in a clinical setting are always 18 and over. But I’m particularly curious about the nuances and complexities that hit our life the older that we get. So, I’m more and more interested in men’s experiences as they hit 30, 40, into their 50s and 60s, where there’s children, mortgages, changing perspectives on your life, and your future, and retirement.

S Hunter Murray: 30:48 I think that life just gets more and more interesting, and I think when we do find studies on men’s sexual desire, they tend to be more in that college-aged sample, which I think just continues to reinforce the chances that men describe their desire as higher, if they’re 18 to 21, 18 to 25. Again, not all men experience high pulsating sexual desire at that time either. But the chances are that life is a little more fun and carefree. Biology and diseases … Testosterone hasn’t decreased. There are certain things that kind of reinforce that stereotype if we continue to use college-aged samples in our research.

S Hunter Murray: 31:27 So, I’m really fascinated about focusing on men’s sexual orientations beyond that heterosexual dynamic, and particularly kind of that middle to later age in life.

Chris Rose: 31:37 Fabulous. I can’t wait to learn more with you.

Chris Rose: 31:40 Sarah, thank you so much for taking your time and sharing your wisdom with us today.

S Hunter Murray: 31:44 It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Chris Rose: 31:46 I hope you enjoyed that interview. Come on over to pleasuremechanics.com for our complete podcast archive, and I will link to a few other episodes about men’s sexuality in the show notes page for this episode so you can continue the conversation.

Chris Rose: 32:04 Be sure to sign up for our free online course, The Erotic Essentials, at pleasuremechanics.com/free. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/free.

Chris Rose: 32:16 We will be back with you next week with another episode of Speaking of Sex. Remember, we are 100% supported by our listening community. So, if you love this show and want to support the work we are doing, head on over to pleasuremechanics.com/love and show us some love to help keep this show going and growing.

Chris Rose: 32:40 We will see you next week. I am Chris from pleasuremechanics.com, wishing you a lifetime of pleasure.

Chris Rose: 32:47 Cheers.

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