Let’s look at some words in our sexual vocabulary that we should define, change, or eliminate altogether. Lay people aren’t the only ones to use these unhelpful words. They’re also used by doctors, journalists, and therapists. Together, they add up to a narrative of sex as problematic, even dangerous.
Change or eliminate these words, and you’ll make your sexual communication clearer–and your sex more enjoyable.
With all the current media attention to drag queens, pronouns, polyamory, and a few felons with penises demanding to be jailed in women’s cellblocks, it’s easy to forget that these aren’t the central concerns of most people.
While issues like these can be fascinating (and legitimately important to a very small number of people), most people’s sexual concerns are far more pedestrian.
It’s easy to forget that the central sexual concerns of most people do NOT involve orientation or identity.
Today is National Psychotherapy Day. Every year, it comes seven weeks after National Psychic Day (yes, really).
Psychotherapy involves a wonderful set of tools. Every year, skillful therapists save marriages, facilitate divorces, educate parents, ease trauma, and help people overcome depression or anxiety.
But one of American psychotherapy’s main weaknesses is in the area of sexuality. Most therapists…
Most therapists get almost no training in sexuality. This means they may not know more about sex than you do, and may not know how to talk about it.
Their questions about sex are often the same as yours. Here’s how I change the questions before answering them.
Why does anyone look at porn? For tens of millions of American men and women, there’s only one answer: To get more sexually excited. The goal of getting excited, of course, is to enhance the process by which people eventually get not-excited—also called satisfaction. Lather, rinse, repeat three times per week for 75 years. How someone feels about that—deliberately doing something to get more aroused—is an excellent predictor of how they will feel about pornography. For those suspicious of sexual arousal, porn is bad. For those who think that tinkering with our own arousal is selfish or creepy, porn is…
It’s National Psychotherapy Day. I’ve been a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist for 34 years—over 35,000 hours of therapy with men, women, and couples. I make a living from it. Most of my friends are therapists. Like most therapists, I’ve been in therapy more than once. I really, really believe in it. Nevertheless, it’s time, once again, to critique the institution of therapy. Today’s criticism: If the public knew how little most therapists learn about sexuality, they’d be stunned. While there are exceptions, here’s what most therapists (and social workers) in America learn about sex as they’re being trained: *…