Many of my patients feel powerless around sexuality.
In fact, psychological risk-taking is one of the greatest gifts sex has to offer.
Most of the judgements that we fear from others (“she’ll think I’m a pervert”) we actually fear from ourselves. Most of our fear about “failing” sexually is a response to arbitrary standards that we could actually break with impunity. And limiting sex to what’s “dignified” or “manly” or “feminist” or “anti-racist”…
Every week, people tell me exactly how they make sex way too complicated, and therefore difficult or impossible to enjoy. Here are some ways they do that.
I wish I could just say “Stop making sex more complicated than necessary…”
The idea of deriding something as “just like a woman” has gone out of fashion, and I daresay no modern woman would stand for it.
So why has “just like a man” become increasingly acceptable?
As a lifelong “liberal” it breaks my heart to say this, but “liberals” and “progressives” are making it harder and harder to write about things that matter. Here are examples of facts that I and others hesitate to write about:
Before the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, there was a joke popular in New York nightclubs. What do eggs benedict and a blowjob have in common? They’re two enjoyable things you don’t get at home. Yes, kids, there was a time when oral sex was exotic, primarily the province of prostitutes and gay people. Well, times have changed. In the 1994 “Sex in America” national study, Ed Laumann and colleagues 3,432 American adults. They found that about a quarter of their sample had had oral sex in the past year. Today, depending on the study, it appears that over half…
Rule 34: If it exists, or you can imagine it, there is porn of it. No exceptions. Rule 34 summarizes everything about sexuality. It says that human sexual fantasy is limitless. It says that anything can be eroticized, can be arousing, can be life-affirming. It reminds us that any ideas we have about what’s normal sex are about us, not about sex. I’m always telling patients “don’t blame sex for your ideas about sex.” Rule 34 reminds us exactly what pornography is: a library of human eroticism. Pornography is a celebration of how humans can stretch their erotic imagination—sometimes in ways…