your pleasure is productive

are you reaching your sexual potential?

Most of our problems about sex, have nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with the patriarchal world we’re having it in.

That’s what I was left thinking after reading Emily Morse’s new book Smart Sex How to Boost Your Sex IQ and Own Your Pleasure. I slurped it up in one sitting, cover to cover, positively stunned by how accessible and non-judgmental her approach was, to one of the touchiest topics on earth. If you love the infamous sex therapist’s podcast Sex with Emily, her new book is even more decadent.

the perfect beach snack.

You can’t talk about pleasure without talking about the political ecosystem it lives in. As a professional gender investigator, social media is one of my favorites research sites, and what I’ve noticed lately, is that the one thing that all genders seem to have in common, is a mutual disdain for each other. As I have written before, this dual friction is symptomatic of a society that hasn’t fully reckoned with the logistical nightmare of living in a sexist culture. It would be nice if political environments existed in a vacuum but misogyny is a lot like like glitter, no matter how hard you try to clean it up, it ends up everywhere. For me, misogyny has showed up in conventional ways, like prioritizing male pleasure and being estranged from my own desires.

But once I started to peel away the lawyers to discover who I really was, I started noticing a different kind of tragedy: the feminism that I had used to free myself from the claws of the patriarchy, was also keeping me trapped in a cage. I began to experience a new kind of embarrassment, not just about my body, but what my body wanted, and how it measured up to my feminist ideals. I began to notice that my desires weren’t as feminist as I would have expected them. The patriarchal judge quickly morphed into a feminist one. “Did Angela Davis really risk her life for this?” I found myself pondering in the middle of the butt plug aisle of a sex shop one day. Could it be true? Could my feminist beliefs be causing me more shame than the original wound they were trying to fix?

I knew it could be happening to me because it was happening to people of other political affiliations too. Based on our google searches alone, it’s clear that everybody is lying to each other about sex, and possibly to themselves. Just ask conservative values influencer Ted Cruz’s and his porn habits.

I looked for answers in Emily’s book and I found a sincere acknowledgment of the ways that misogyny and our earnest attempts at correcting it, can create hiccups in our pursuit of pleasure. In her chapter on oral sex for instance, she delves into the internalized shame that some women feel about going down on their male partners because it’s painted as submissive and derogatory. If I think about the first few times I was tormented by boys, the common denominator was oral sex. In other words, I knew blow jobs were bad before I knew what a blow job was. If you’re a girl in the world, your first encounters with sex are usually non-consensual, traumatic and often deeply humiliating. Like many other girls, I learned to protect my body, by gatekeeping it. But just because that kept us safe as kids, it doesn’t mean we need to keep doing it as adults.

As we’ve already discussed on Airplane Mode, everything feels very loaded right now, so publishing a book about sex while we’re in the midst of a moral panic about personal choices of gender identity and sexual expression is no piece of cake, but Emily managed to do it masterfully. The book is inclusive and radical while remaining relatable to even your straightest and most traditional reader. I recommend it for anyone who is looking to tap into the limitless possibility of their sexual potential. As a huge fan of our community, Emily has agreed to go deeper with us on the topic of sexual liberation. I was going to incorporate her answers in an essay, but I simply could not find a single bit I could cut. So here is our unedited exchange. I hope you get as much out of it as I did!

Photo by Malvestida on Unsplash

LP: Emily, you’ve been a total badass and leader in the sex space for 20 years. What’s the most surprising gender trend or change that you’ve noticed between men and women when it comes to sex?       

EM:              

• There are so many trends I’ve seen arise over the years, and you have to remember: I launched Sex With Emily in 2005, before smartphones! I talk about that in Smart Sex: the origin story of the show, and why I wanted to launch it in the first place. Spoiler…because I wanted to learn the secrets to great sex!

• Back to smartphones: once we all got access to porn in our pockets, several trends began to emerge.

• With men, I’ve definitely seen more openness and interest in anal play over the years, regardless of sexuality or orientation. That’s probably been influenced by porn, but here’s something that may surprise you: men, including straight men, are more open to receiving anal penetration. That’s something I didn’t see 18 years ago.

• With women, several trends come to mind. Much more interest in squirting, and that I think we can definitely attribute to porn. But as women become more sexually self-aware and outspoken, I think they also feel more empowered to ask for oral sex. Good, quality, oral sex!

• For everyone regardless of gender and sexuality: kink has gotten a lot more mainstream. And sure, we always reference 50 Shades of Grey, but I also think kinky power dynamics, role play, and even more gentle things like temperature play have gotten a lot more popular simply because we have more openness to sex overall, and more exposure to those possibilities. 

• Let’s not forget the popularity and acceptance around using dating apps which also made dates (and sex) more accessible.

LP: As you point out in your book, patriarchy doesn’t just limit men’s comfort with going down on women, it also limits women’s comfort about pleasuring men orally. While men are told cunnilingus makes them less of a man, women are taught that blow jobs are degrading and submissive. I definitely at one point bought into this. Do you think that feminism can stunt women in the bedroom if misapplied?

EM:

• First: let’s define feminism. For a lot of people, it’s a scary word, synonymous with man-hating. That is not what I embrace or promote at all.

• Feminism for me, specifically sex positive feminism, supports consensual practices with partners, acceptance of different sexual orientations and gender identities, prioritizing pleasure, destigmatizing casual sex and simply recognizing that power differentials exist in and out of the bedroom. I also understand how historically feminism might’ve inadvertently stunted women in the bedroom. 

• It can be really confusing for women who want to be dominated in the bedroom, but respected in the boardroom. They might feel that it’s degrading or goes against everything women have fought for all these years but the truth is, there’s nothing more powerful than a woman who knows what she requires for satisfying sex and knows how to  be her own best advocate for her pleasure.    

• You can support equal pay and still want to get spanked.

• Now, as for oral sex: let’s get into it!

• I don’t blame women (like you!) who find, or used to find, blow jobs degrading. It doesn’t help that blow jobs have the best PR machine ever, and the cunnilingus campaign is in need of  some serious damage control.  Let’s face it, there aren’t many strong examples of women receiving oral sex and women like us grew up with magazines teaching us how to give great blow jobs rather than how to accept and receive oral. And looking back, of course that feels degrading. Where was our pleasure?

• So in 2023, here’s what I say about feminism in the bedroom. 

• Choose partners who have a growth mindset around sex, who are interested in  your pleasure, who actively work on their sexual intelligence. 

• It’s also key to remember that you’re responsible for your pleasure and knowing what feels good to you. For monitoring your own wisdom around your sexuality and paying attention to what feels good to you and what gets you in the mood for sex and learn to communicate it clearly.  

• The ideal situation is both partners are equally enthusiastic about giving and receiving oral. If you aren’t enthusiastic about one or both, it’s a very healthy step to reflect on why.  I spend a lot of time in Smart Sex talking about not only learning to give, but to receive pleasure, orally and otherwise!

LP: As a fierce cunnilingus advocate, I believe that oral sex should be mandatory for men who want to sleep with women. I just do!! Given that data on heterosexual couples finds that women were twice as likely to give but not receive oral sex, I believe that the only way to guarantee the change we want to see in the world is for men to go down south as often as women do. Do you think that male attitudes are changing in this regard?     

EM:                          

• I sure hope so, I do know that when men receive accurate sex information about women being more likely to orgasm from oral sex and not penetration, they are more inspired to focus on her pleasure. I get asked by my male listeners all the time how to up their oral game.   However, I understand that the Sex With Emily community is not yet representative of the larger population.

• This is where I encourage women to be the change they want to see in the sex world.  Set an intention to hold off on initiating oral sex on their penis partners until they go down south on them first.  What if women everywhere decided that it was men’s turn to make the first oral move? This is how change happens.

• I love that you’re a fierce cunnilingus advocate! Me too. What I would say to any hesitant man is: most women do not orgasm from penetration alone. What does help them orgasm is clitoral stimulation, and your mouth and tongue are excellent tools for that. 

LP: We know about IQ and EQ, but you developed another paradigm about how to think about ourselves and it’s Sex IQ. What is it, and what obstacles tend to stand in women’s way versus men’s way when it comes to getting more knowledge about their sexual selves?     

EM:                                 

Sex IQ is a new paradigm based on the foundation that our sexual health and our overall health are inextricably linked. We often see sex as separate from our overall wellness, but Sex IQ allows you to understand yourself more holistically.  We can’t be fully healthy and well if we haven’t spent time understanding who we are as sexual beings.

The five pillars of Sex IQ I outline in Smart Sex are:

• Embodiment: do you live from the neck up? Or are you fully in tune with your body’s sensations, and how it likes to be touched?

• Health: how’s the state of your overall health? Mental, physical, hormonal?

• Collaboration: how well do you collaborate with your partner to get both of your sexual desires met?

• Self-Knowledge: do you know your turn-ons? Do you know what arouses you? 

• Self-Acceptance: do you accept your body, genitals, and overall self as-is? 

My hunch, based on 18 years of talking to people about their sex lives, is that everyone struggles with healthy communication around sex, or pillar 5, collaboration.  Having productive, meaningful and honest conversations around sex feels like taboo, shameful or just terrifying.

Also, we all equally struggle with being embodied during sex (pillar 1) and not disassociating, thinking about the laundry, our to-do list or our thighs.

We all struggle with self acceptance about our bodies - with men I observe  it more around their penis size (hint men are way more obsessed with their penis size than women) and for women it’s about how they feel in their bodies when naked with another person. 

Another area is self-knowledge,  we’ve been told for years that someone else “gives” us an orgasm. But here’s the idea I want to get out there: your orgasm is your responsibility, my orgasm is my responsibility. It’s up to us to explore our bodies and our minds, so we can effectively communicate to a partner what we like.  This is how we start the pleasure revolution by prioritizing our pleasure.

LP: What’s the number one bedroom question you get from women? And what's the number one you get from men?  

EM: Definitely depends on life stage, if they’re single they want to know how to be comfortable with a new partner and sometimes worry about their experience level. If someone has been married for 20 years they want to know how to keep their sex lives interesting. Usually with couples there is an inherent ‘desire discrepancy” one parter wants more sex than the other. This is so common by the way and I encourage couples to communicate around when they have sex and what works for them. Sex IQ will help everyone trouble shoot and figure out their own desire style, what they required to be turned on and ready for sex.

Lately, I’m getting a ton of questions about how to have an internal orgasm (or what many people call a G-spot orgasm). For men, they’re asking me how to last longer in bed. I love both of these questions! And I’ve got tips in Smart Sex for toning your pelvic floor muscles, which helps with both internal orgasms, and lasting longer. 

LP: Let’s talk about kinks, especially the ones that feel like they’re wrong, or that they go against our feminist values, like non-consent fantasies. You write that for some people, they feel troubled that they want bad things that have happened to them, but you discuss fantasies as being a way to reclaim or resolve a traumatic event. Can you explain what you mean? I think this will be so helpful to survivors who might be troubled by the nature of their desires resembling troubling events.        

EM: CNC (or consensual non-consensual) fantasy is much more common than you might think. But let’s get one thing very clear: if you are a trauma survivor, you deserve caring, compassionate therapy from a trauma informed therapist. It is one of my dearest wishes that therapy was accessible and affordable to all.  With therapy, many are able to turn their traumatic event into erotic play, and work for them rather than against them.

I put that out there because acting on a CNC fantasy alone isn’t enough to resolve a deeply traumatic experience. But whether you’re a trauma survivor or not, the appeal of CNC largely lies in bodily arousal and power dynamics:

• Bodily arousal, because being seized or restrained might be enough to get your heart pumping. The act of letting go and allowing a trusted partner to ravish you can be very stimulating

• Power dynamics, because consensually giving your power to someone else (specifically a trusting partner) is an act of play. And play can be very healing.

• When you can play with power with someone you trust: you’re ultimately in control. Maybe you weren’t before. But in this situation, you are. 

LP: How does patriarchy also inform sex positions? You describe the terminologies of certain positions inferring certain power dynamics and turning men or women off. How can we expand our view of positions and release them from the confines of gender stereotypes?                             

EM: I’ll start by saying I hate the term “doggy style,” and prefer to call it “rear entry.” That was an executive decision I made in Smart Sex, to rename that position! 

Gendered position names abound: Cowgirl, for example. Missionary definitely has a patriarchal past in its naming, and can we all agree that “Missionary” just doesn’t sound sexy? 

We can release positions from implied gender stereotypes by collectively recognizing that positions are here to give us options, and help us feel good. They don’t have to dictate a power dynamic. Start by asking yourself, “what positions give me a little charge?” You can also ask: “what positions am I literally comfortable in?” Your comfort and your turn ons should rule the day, not the name of any sex position.  

Also reminder that many positions can be used with same sex partners using strap ons, so I encourage people to get creative with their positions. I have an entire chapter in the book dedicated to how you can elevate all your favorite positions. 

LP: I was recently talking to a guy who said something that stuck with me, he said: “sex just doesn’t mean that much to me.” Do you think that women put more meaning into sex than men do or is that a myth?I              

EM: I genuinely think it’s a person-to-person thing, not a man versus woman thing, in terms of who puts more meaning into sex.  When I began almost 20 years ago, I was happy to learn that the stereotypes that all women attach emotions to sex, while men are these horny cavemen weren’t true. Just as many men want sex as women, and some men  get more attached during sex while many women  prefer a different lover every night. So it’s not about gender, but the individual.  We’re all a lot more alike than we’ve previously believed and were taught.

My hope is that the more women learn to understand their bodies, give themselves permission to be sexual and prioritize and advocate for their pleasure they will be more likely to have the kind of sex they deserve. 

So when it comes to the meaning we put into sex, we have to think about life stage, age, and how you genuinely, authentically connect with people. I hope that everyone prioritizes their pleasure, and that’s why I wrote Smart Sex. But if sex doesn’t mean that much to you, ok! That’s valid! Maybe you get personal fulfillment in other ways, like your family, your career, your art, your community. Culturally, we’re giving women more permission to be sexually assertive, and men more permission to express their feelings about sex. As time goes on, my hope is that this stereotype continues to fade!!

LP: Wow thanks Emily!

If you enjoyed this post you can buy Emily’s book from your local bookstore!

x

Liz