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…”
Last week I gave a weekend retreat for a dozen couples in Chicago. They wanted bedroom tricks; instead, I focused on self-acceptance, relaxation, being present, and communication. Why is this more important?
People rarely discuss what porn leaves out.
Today’s internet porn is a visual medium (as compared with, say, the ancient Greek poems of Sappho or the 18th-century novels of the Marquis de Sade). That means it leaves out anything that isn’t visually compelling. And as it happens, a lot of what makes sex satisfying in real life is boring to watch on film.
I started publishing Sexual Intelligence monthly in 2000, which included an annual Awards issue. The following year my pal Betty Dodson introduced me to an enormous, vibrant, and very talented blues singer named Candye Kane. I loved her music, she loved my books, and we became friends. I went to many of her Bay Area shows; when I did, she’d invariably introduce me to the crowd as her favorite sex therapist, always as a preamble to one of her many songs about sexuality. In 2005 Candye Kane was honored with a Sexual Intelligence Award. Last week she died of cancer,…
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…