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It’s a very special episode this week because you are getting to hear exclusive, never before heard clips from nine of the Explore More Summit talks. You’ll hear from Tristan Taormino, Allison Moon, Virgie Tovar, Melissa Toler, Dirty Lola of Sex Ed a Go Go, Cyndi Darnell, Betty Martin, Aida Manduley, and Orpheus Black.
I also field listener questions on pussy slapping, pegging problems when your guy is 14 inches taller than you, foursomes where erections never happened, and ethical porn.
It’s a packed week of goodies and advice. Be sure to sign-up for the Explore More Summit. It starts March 8th and it’s FREE.
Follow Dawn on Instagram.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
- All about the Explore More Summit 2017 which starts March 8th, 2017 and runs for 10 days.
- Aida Manduley talking about how shifting identities does not invalidate prior identities. If you realize you’re queer, it doesn’t mean all the years you were in straight relationships were necessarily a lie. This is an exclusive, sneak peek from our hour long talk at the Explore More Summit.
- Listener MacKenzie’s question about why her boyfriend slaps his cock on her pussy before fucking her each time. He does it every single time and she doesn’t really care for it. I share my thoughts.
- An exclusive tidbit from Betty Martin’s talk about pleasure and why tend to rush sex and masturbation. The inner conflict we are avoiding can take us away from pleasure, even if we think that what we’re doing is pleasurable.
- Allison Moon talking about how sex can be like it is in porn, which is a rehearsed and choreographed experience, or it can be more like dancing in your living room. She also shares one of the most creative uses of a strap-on ever. Yay strap-on sex.
- Listener Peggy has a pegging problem – the new guy she’s seeing is 14 inches taller than she is, so finding positions to peg his bum are proving challenging. What can she try?
- Women who haven’t experienced orgasm can often feel broken or abnormal or like they’re missing out. So what can vulva-owners do if they’re inorgasmic? This exclusive clip from the Explore More Summit and Cyndi Darnell is a beautiful reframing and includes an important question we all need to ask ourselves about orgasm.
- Orpheus Black’s unique and revolutionary way of being a Dominant and setting boundaries for his subs that encourage them to be who they are instead of conforming to a performance of submission. This is from the Explore More Summit.
- Krystina wrote in about a foursome she tried to make happen with her friend and two guys they picked up. The problem? They could not get hard, and despite trying blowjobs and making out, erections just were not happening. Is this normal? Does this happen with group sex?
- Why it’s so critical that we have a huge variety of sexual experiences we enjoy so that we don’t put so much pressure on our genitals.
- Another sneak peek from the summit of Virgie Tovar comparing diet culture to casinos and how the entire system is rigged against us. Plus, you’ll hear from Melissa Toler (also a speaker at the summit) on how dehumanizing dieting is and then I tie that to our pleasure in bed. Why are we surprised when we can’t access pleasure during sex if we are constantly denying our bodies a chance to speak in every other moment of our day?
- Listener Gary wrote in asking about porn tube sites and ethical porn and why the tube sites are so terrible. So, I let Tristan Taormino actually answer that from her Explore More talk on the danger of PornHub and the future of the porn industry.
- One final tease is from Dirty Lola’s summit talk. She shares why she loves calling herself ‘slut’ with a capital S and why it’s SO important that we stop labeling others or assuming others’ identities.
About Dawn Serra
Dawn Serra is a therapeutic Body Trust coach and pleasure advocate. As a white, cis, middle class, queer, fat, survivor, Dawn’s work is a fiercely compassionate invitation for each of us to deepen our relationships with our bodies and our pleasure as an antidote to the trauma, disconnection, and isolation so many of us feel. Your pleasure matters. Your body is wise. Dawn’s work is all about creating spaces and places for you to explore what that means on your terms. To learn more, visit dawnserra.com or follow Dawn on Instagram.
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Episode Transcript
Dawn Serra: You’re listening to (You’re listening) (You’re listening) You’re listening to Sex Gets Real (Sex Get Real) (Sex Gets Real) Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra (with Dawn Serra). Thanks, bye!
Guess what? It’s time for another episode of Sex Gets Real. I am your host, Dawn Serra. In just a couple of days, the 2017 Explore More Summit is starting, and I am ridiculously excited and also exhausted because we have been working almost around the clock on doing everything we can to make this an incredible experience. It starts March 8th and runs for ten days. It’s totally free. I host it, and it’s 31-hour interviews with some of the most incredible experts from around the world on sex positivity and relationships. In fact, you lucky listeners are going to get a handful of sneak peeks from nine of the talks. This has not been heard anywhere else in the world yet. Even the experts in this interview haven’t heard these snippets. In addition to that, I’ve got a handful of listener emails that we are going to roll around in this week. So it’s going to be super fun. If you want to check out the Explore More Summit, you just go to exploremoresummit.com.
Dawn Serra: Of course, if you want to support the show, please go to patreon.com/sgrpodcast. Your support means so very much. As soon as the summit is wrapped up, I have some really fun things planned for all of the Patreon supporters. Of course, you can do as little as $1 a month, but please pop over and check out the goodies. Join in the fun. Your support means I can keep doing this, which I really, really, really want to keep doing with all of you.
All right. You’ve probably heard me answer a couple of questions in the past couple of months that have been from people who have recently discovered that maybe their identity isn’t quite what they thought. Maybe they’ve been in a heterosexual marriage for 20 years, and they’re just starting to realize that they actually identify as queer or gay – people who are feeling different in their bodies around their gender. There’s always so much distress around this change, which makes a lot of sense because it might impact the relationships that you have, the way you move through your life, the friends that you have. Often, I think there’s this fear that when we realize that this identity or label that we’ve had doesn’t actually fit us, it can make us wonder if maybe we’ve been living a lie all along.
Dawn Serra: There’s this beautiful conversation that Aida Manduley and I have at the summit, all about gender identity, and how the way that we experience our bodies and our gender and our lives can change. I will let Aida take it from here. But this is an exclusive clip from one of the talks at the summit. It’s all about what happens when our identity is changing.
I consistently encounter folks who are in major crises in their 40s, 50s because they’ve finally realized that maybe the story they’ve been telling themselves all along didn’t fit. It feels really awful to, “Do I have to dismantle all the things?” So to instead just leave some breathing room of, “This is where I am now. This might change. I’m going to stay open to it.” I think that’s a really beautiful way to invite dialogue and invite growth and to invite mistakes without it feeling catastrophic.
Aida Manduley: Yeah. I mean, one of the other things that happens too is that a lot of folks feel like, “If something changes, was everything else in the past a lie? Did I just mess it up?” For some people, it’s true that they’ve been living in a gender or in a body or in an experience that has not resonated for a long time, and they’ve kept doing it for a reason. For a lot of trans people, it’s because it wasn’t safe to be anything else. Maybe there wasn’t language. A lot of the language that I knew about transness growing up was the word transsexual, the word medical transition. You were trans, if you felt like you were born in the wrong body, and that was not my story. So clearly, I wasn’t trans. The more I learned, the more that that dialogue evolved. I was like, “Oh, wait. Wait, this resonates. Not the other one, but this one does.”
I think one of the things that I like to share with people is your identity now doesn’t have to invalidate your previous identity. It might, but it doesn’t have to. So identifying as a girl, previously identifying as a woman – exclusively, previously – that’s who I was and that fit at the time, and it made sense. Now, I’m at a different place. Maybe those seeds were there all along. Maybe they were just watered recently. Who knows? But it doesn’t invalidate who we were in the past to be at a different place right now.
Dawn Serra: I hope that tidbit made you hungry to hear the rest of it. Aida and I talk all about LGBTQ violence and relationships. We talk about trans inclusion and sex education. We have this really fun conversation also about incorporating ritual and magic and woo into our sex, and how ritualizing some of the ways that we experience sex and our bodies can actually be a really powerful way to connect with our history, our future, our community. And it’s really, really fun. So I hope you’ll check that out.
Now, it’s time for a listener question from McKenzie. The subject is, “Young boyfriend problems.” The email says, “Dawn, I really enjoy your show. I’ve been dating a man who is 23. I’m 31. He’s really good in bed, but he keeps doing something odd. Every time we fuck, just before he puts it in, he likes to slap his cock on my pussy. I don’t like the tease, and it sort of feels good. I’ve seen porn stars do it. So maybe he’s seen it in porn and wanted to try it. But is this a fetish? He started doing it every time we fuck. Just curious. McKenzie.”
The answer to your question Mackenzie is you need to ask him. There could be endless reasons for why he’s doing it. One of the reasons might be that he’s seen it porn, and so he thinks that’s a thing that people like because a lot of people get ideas from porn. So maybe he’s emulating what he thinks good sex looks like. Maybe he has seen performers act like they really like that, so he thinks it’s something that folks with a pussy would enjoy. He might also have done it one or two times, and whatever your response was, he might have received as you’ve actually enjoyed this. Unless you actually have a conversation with him, telling him how you feel about it and what your experience is, and asking him about his experience, he is probably going to keep doing it.
Most people aren’t going to do things that their partners don’t like because most of us want to be good in bed. Now, he could be just a total jackass. But assuming that he’s a nice person who wants you to enjoy yourself – you said he’s really good in bed – then I think the only thing that you can really do is ask him why he does it. What is enjoyable about it? Maybe it’s the visual. Maybe it’s the sound. Maybe he’s a very auditory person, so the sound of his cock hitting your pussy is something that just takes him over the edge and makes him really excited.
But the only way to know is to actually ask because maybe he’s doing it because of something he read once. Maybe a past partner super loved it, so he’s assuming that you will love it. There’s just so many different reasons, and the only way to actually answer your question is to have a conversation with him and find out.
Also, to share your experience. If this is something that’s not really enjoyable for you, I think you need to communicate that to him. Otherwise, you could find yourself years down the road, feeling resentful and frustrated with this thing that he does, and you finally break and say something really hurtful. It’s better to just say, “Hey, I’m not sure I actually like this. But I’d love to know what your experience is of it because if it’s something you really enjoy, then maybe we can talk about doing it some of the time.” It’s not a rejection of him or his beautiful, wonderful talents that you enjoy, but it does allow for a dialogue.
I won’t say whether or not it’s a fetish, because pretty much anything can be fetishized. But I think it’s probably more likely that he’s either using memory or interpreting your body language to mean that you enjoy it. So he probably will keep doing it unless you tell him otherwise. I hope that was helpful. I hope that the really good sex continues, and that you two find a way to navigate this one little thing.
Because we’re talking about pleasure and what we enjoy in bed, I want to now offer you this really yummy tidbit from Betty Martin. Dr. Betty Martin, who is a part of the Explore More Summit, is an expert at touch and pleasure. She’s a sacred intimate. She’s been doing hands on body work for over 30 years. She has some really profound, interesting, powerful ways of looking at touch, sex, pleasure, finding our voice, being able to communicate it. In this clip, she’s actually talking about pleasure and how so many of us are rushing our masturbation and rushing our sex because we’re uncomfortable with pleasure and with our desire and sex. I just thought it was a really powerful moment of her talking about pleasure, and how often we are jackrabbiting our sexual experiences because we’re trying to resolve an inner conflict.
Dr. Betty Martin: When you go to where the pleasure already is, there’s a physiological response. And that spreads and changes. If you go to where you think the pleasure is supposed to be and you’re tense and fighting it, then you don’t have that physiological response. Your guard system comes up, as it should, because that’s its job. So this idea that, “Well, I’m resisting, so I better push through it,” no! Fucking stop pushing yourself. Why would we brutalize ourselves? But we do.
Dawn Serra: We do. Yeah.
Dr. Betty Martin: Yeah. Because we saw a video somewhere.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I noticed this a lot around the escalation of activities where we think what’s supposed to happen for normal sex. It goes from kissing to touching to mouths to, “OK. Now, we get to do the thing.” At no point is the question, “What would feel really amazing? And let’s just do that.”
Dr. Betty Martin: Yeah.
Dawn Serra: I think there’s such a chronic state around folks with a penis feeling like their penises have to be hard in order for us to feel good. For folks with a vulva, having this very intense anxiety around not being able to orgasm.
Dr. Betty Martin: Yeah, yeah.
Dawn Serra: None of those things ever speak of–
Dr. Betty Martin: And not getting wet fast enough and soon enough.
Dawn Serra: Right.
Dr. Betty Martin: Yes. That is totally out there. I think one place that that comes from is when we feel aroused, we start getting turned on. That’s one sort of movement. Then, at the same time, we have this shame and self-doubt, and we’re not supposed to feel that. And sex is bad. Shame on you for being selfish and blah-da-blah-da-blah-da-blah. We have these two forces. We have an internal conflict – “I want to go this way, and I’m ashamed and afraid, so I want to go this way. That inner conflict or tension wants to get resolved. We can either do two things. We can be with the tension and feel the tension, which most of us are not very good at because it includes fear and self-doubt. Who the hell wants to deal with that? Or, we can just hurry up and get it over with, so that we’re no longer in inner conflict. I think that’s what drives a lot of, ”Got to get there. Got to get off. Got to get it over with because I can’t stand this inner tension.”
Dawn Serra: Betty’s talk actually really inspired me in a lot of ways. She’s given me so much to think about that is really going to change the way I do sex education. And even the way that I’m exploring touch and voice and wants in my personal relationships. Alex and I have been playing a little game that she talks about in the Explore More talk. It’s been really interesting realizing how hard it is to ask for certain things.
I have another listener email that’s actually about pegging. But before we do that, I think it’s going to be a perfect little introduction to share this really wonderful clip from Allison Moon’s Explore More talk. She shares one of the most creative uses of a strap on I’ve ever heard. I love so much of what she’s talking about in this clip, and how she got to this place of using this strap on in this way. I think it’s going to be a really wonderful introduction to this pegging question. So here is Allison Moon.
Allison Moon: Absolutely. I think it’s the difference between learning a routine that you perform on Dancing with the Stars to you turn on some good music in your bedroom, and you just rock out. And that’s the difference between real sex and porn sex. There are routines that you can memorize, and maybe you’ll get gold medals if you do something in a certain way. But ultimately, dance and sex are about how you feel in your body.
There are so many different ways to feel pleasure. There are so many different ways to feel embodied. If we start basing that on porn, we’re already losing. So we have to really pay more attention to listening to ourselves. And this is why masturbation is important. I don’t mean masturbation like getting yourself off. I mean, masturbation is being alone, touching yourself in different ways, and feeling what that feels like. That’s actually far more confronting to many people than buzzing off in three minutes before you have to run to your next appointment. I think what’s really revolutionary about that though is it gives you space to indulge. Which is again a shameful thing in our society. We’re not supposed to take time to feel good. So just indulge in sensuousness and feel nice things about ourselves. Then yes, of course, you can say, “Oh, I did this cool thing to myself. Hey, honey. Let’s do this next time.”
I love getting my back scratched. And it’s a huge thing for me. I was with a lover who was in a different place sexually than I was at the time. So we came up with this weird, crazy idea how to use each other’s bodies in the best possible way. And it was awesome. I mean, this is totally something that sounds pretty weird, but maybe it gives you ideas.
Dawn Serra: Yeah.
Allison Moon: We put a strap on on me backwards. I was wearing it like a tail. Basically a dildo like a tail. I was on my stomach on my bed. My partner rode me like a horse on the dildo while she was scratching my back.
Dawn Serra: Oh. I love that.
Allison Moon: It was awesome.
Dawn Serra: That’s amazing!
Allison Moon: Again, lesbian sex can sometimes be not very mutual. It’s hard to get both your needs met at the same time. That’s just how it works. But it was the most amazingly mutual lesbian experience I’ve ever had. We’re both getting exactly what we want right now. And it looks completely different.
Dawn Serra: Yes.
Allison Moon: Yeah. I think it’s great to really dig into that, to say, “What do you want tonight? What would feel good? Do you want to be penetrated? Do you want to listen to opera? Do you want to just do yoga?” Whatever that is. Then figure out the places where those things can meet, and try it and see what happens.
Dawn Serra: OK. How many of you are now curious to try a strap on backwards just to see what happens and what it’s like, and what positions you might get yourself into? I know it made me super extra curious. I think that’s just a wonderful introduction to thinking about creativity when it comes to pleasure and talking about what we need when we look at Peggy’s email.
Peggy wrote with a subject line of “Pegging shorty.” It says, “Hey, Dawn. I love the podcast. I listen to it all day because I’m catching up on all the episodes. Before I was listening from most recent to oldest, but then I wanted to find out who the hell Dylan was. At first, I hated her to be on because I love you so much. But I soon started loving your dynamic together. She has great insight and real honesty. And all of that is to say that I now miss her.
Dawn Serra: Now, for my question. I’m a cisgendered bisexual woman who loves to peg. I used to do it with my boyfriend all the time. Because I knew his body so well, I was able to position him easily in all sorts of ways. We broke up and I am out and about exploring new experiences with new lovers.
There is one guy I adore. The very first time we fucked it was great. He was topping me for most of it, but since I wanted him in all the ways possible, I asked him if he’d ever been pegged. He said no, but that he wanted me to do it. I put on my strap on and went for it like I used to with my ex. But I ran into a problem. He is six foot three, and I’m five foot one. His legs were so long and heavy, I was unable to maneuver properly. I thrusted slowly for a little bit, but I could tell he was uncomfortable, so I took it out and asked him to flip around to take it doggy style. I moved his hips down as far as possible, but he was still too tall. We gave up and continued with other yummy things, but I really want to try to peg him again. What positions do you recommend for someone my height to be able to peg someone so tall? Thank you so much for this podcast, Dawn. You’ve helped me feel so empowered sexually and emotionally.
Dawn Serra: Yay for pegging and trying new things, and for being awkward and finding things that don’t work and still wanting to keep going. That is so fantastic and exciting. I love that about you, Peggy. Yeah, height differences and body differences can force us to be really creative, which is why I thought that Allison Moon clip about the strap on and actually talking about where our pleasures overlap was such a wonderful thing for us to be thinking about as we dig into this question.
I am a little bit taller than Alex, and I also am fat. So my ass and my thighs are really big. And that can make for a little bit of a difference in our heights. One of the things that I’ve found really helpful for us is if I kneel on the ground, and then I lay from the waist up on the couch or on a soft chair, and I let my legs splay out, that gives Alex a lot of latitude from kneeling to standing up to crouching in finding a position that works. Also, me leaning over the arm of the couch with some pillows under my chest, and then I can scoot down or straighten my legs and scoot up and that changes the height. So that might be something to try having him rest his torso on the sofa with his legs bent and out to the side so that he can change his height. The farther apart his legs are, the shorter that he’s going to get. Then with you standing, that might actually be a really good position.
Dawn Serra: It also might be really helpful to get a doggy style strap so that you have more leverage. If you’re in a position where you’re on your tippy toes or where you’re partially squatting in order to meet that middle ground, having a doggy style strap that goes around his hips so that you have this long extension. You can also use a towel or a thick scarf just something that gives you more leverage so that you can lean your body back or forward and find angles that work a little bit better.
Something else that I think a lot of people don’t consider when it comes to strap on sex and pegging is having him ride you. Is there a way for you to sit on the couch and for him to either ride you facing forwards or facing away? Is there a way for you to lay on the bed with maybe a pillow under your hips on your back, and then he gets to squat over you? Maybe hold on to the headboard for balance and fuck himself on your strap on, which is also really hot visual, right? Then you can also be stroking him off if you want because your hands would be free.
Dawn Serra: I would encourage you to get really creative around– It doesn’t just have to be you standing and doing the fucking or kneeling and doing the fucking. What if you were side by side? If you’re both laying on your sides or if he’s on his side with one knee up, and then you’re kneeling and fitting your bodies together like that. Or, if you’re both side by side spooning, but you’re further down and cupped around his ass. Get really creative with the positioning of your body, where height doesn’t matter as much. I think there’s a lot of opportunities for that.
Then don’t be afraid to use things like doggy style straps or towels or pillows that he can rest himself on. Finding ways where he can take the pressure off of his knees and maybe rest his entire body on two or three pillows, so that he’s basically laying face down, which also is another way that you can peg him. If he leaves space down with his legs together, and then you straddle his thighs and fuck him from behind his head, it’s not going to matter very much that way. It’s just a matter of whether you can get a good rhythm. But try playing with lots of different pillows and positions. It doesn’t have to just be him on his back with his legs in the air, which would be really heavy for you or him in doggy style because clearly your heights don’t work.
Dawn Serra: So play with it and talk about what feels comfy, and feel free to practice the positions without the strap on. Take 20 minutes to wrestle around and play and try different things and hump each other so that it feels like a game, and it feels really playful. You’ll find different ways your bodies fit together. Then you can add the strap on, see where that goes. I think that you have clearly a really curious playful spirit. I think that that will give you a nice jumping off point. So thank you so much for listening, Peggy. Good luck with your height differential pegging.
One of the kinds of emails that I get very regularly and questions that I get when I do workshops is around folks with a vulva feeling concerned that they haven’t experienced orgasm. I hear a lot of distress from a lot of different people around never having had an orgasm, feeling worried that there’s something wrong, wondering why they can’t orgasm, going on these epic quests to try and find a way to do it often because a partner really wants to give it to them. I am frequently giving advice around how orgasm shouldn’t be the goal.
Now, I adore orgasms. For me, they can be easier to achieve; other times not. It depends on context, time, and sensations, but I’m certainly not anti-orgasm, which is something you’re about to hear Cyndi Darnell say. But when we put the pressure on ourselves around orgasm, it actually short circuits our ability to even experience that kind of release and surrender. I wanted to offer her this little clip from Cyndi’s very powerful talk.
Cyndi Darnell: I’m not anti-orgasm. I think orgasms are great. I think they’re fabulous. In a perfect world, yes, everybody should have them. But because they have become a symbol, like it’s the ultimate accessory of the new millennium – you’ve got your purse and you’ve got your orgasm, and you’re an empowered woman and you’re ready to go – if you don’t have the orgasm, the implication is that there’s something wrong with you. And the truth is, there is not. That’s the first thing. There is nothing wrong with you. We have to look at this orgasm problem in context.
Now, part of the context is because of the social messages we get around having to have an orgasm or having to have a perfect orgasm, there’s a lot of pressure on us to have them. What we know from a biologic logical point of view, from a physiological point of view is that if there is pressure on us, it’s less likely to happen. So we need to remove that pressure, first of all.
Cyndi Darnell: Second of all, my question that I ask women – because I get the same thing in my practice with women asking about orgasms – the question that I always ask them is, “Why do you want to have an orgasm?” Then they look at me like I’ve lost my mind. Because it’s assumed. It’s implied that everybody wants to have an orgasm. “Well, yeah, sure. But I’m asking you, why do you want to have an orgasm?“ You know what, Dawn? They very, very rarely say to me it’s because they want pleasure. In a lot of cases, it’s because they want to feel normal. It’s because they feel that they are missing out. It’s because they feel that everyone else is having them or like you mentioned, their partner expected of them. And that’s fine. They’re perfectly good reasons. But the thing is none of those reasons are motivated by pleasure. Those reasons are motivated by fear and by shame, which is fine. But if we are trying to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear… Do you guys say that in America?
Dawn Serra: No, but I love it.
Cyndi Darnell: Right. If we try to make shit from clay or clay from shit or whatever the expression is, you know what I mean?
Dawn Serra: Yes.
Cyndi Darnell: If our motivation for having an orgasm is coming from a place of fear and shame, and we try and turn that into pleasure, that’s a really, really difficult task. How do you do that? I don’t even know how to do that.
Dawn Serra: I love that so much from Cindy. There’s so much permission in some of the questions that she asks. She continues in our talk to go a little bit deeper even into ways we can start reframing some of the questions that we have around body performance and orgasm.
Something else that I really loved from the summit was my talk with Orpheus Black. Now, so many of you are into kink and/or kink-curious. You’re probably familiar with Orpheus Black, who is a very well-known and respected kink and BDSM expert. He does a lot of workshops around bondage and knife play and fire play. But he also has this really unique perspective on dominance and dom-sub dynamics and master-slave dynamics. A huge part of our Explore More talk is him sharing the ways that he dominates and why he wants to see some big changes in the DS community if we want to see healthy, long lasting relationships, instead of seeing DS fizzle and become something that’s very antiquated. He also has some really powerful definitions for master-slave dynamics.
Dawn Serra: In this clip, he’s talking about the way that he experiences being a dominant and what he wants to create for his sub. I think that it’s a really powerful shift in how so many people think about domination and submission. Let’s let Orpheus Black tantalize you with a little bit of dialogue around his dominance.
Orpheus Black: My job is not to take away permissions, it’s to give it. I create the environment. I create the space for a person to be who they are. If I put in boundaries and rules that restrict their ability to express themselves, then they never will. That makes me an extension of the society as a whole. My job is to say, “What are you into?” “Yes, you can do that.” “Come on!” “Yes, you can be there.” And there’s going to be full embrace of it.” “You can do it. We love it. That’s great. Enjoy yourself. Here’s maybe a couple ways to do it safely. Maybe here’s a couple ways to do it a little bit better. But yes, let me give you permission to express yourself because that enriches my life as well.”
I tell people in classes that there’s two ways to run a DS relationship. You can either have a zoo or a wild animal park. A zoo, the animals conformed because they know they’re being watched constantly. They’re structured and they’re tapered in. They can see their boundaries, so they are not who they would be in the wild. Whereas a wild animal park, they are who they are. The boundaries are so far away it doesn’t really affect them. You know what I mean? So I keep the boundaries free. Every time they push and they want to go further and they want to go further, I just move the boundary a little further. I just move the borders. When we hit something, I say, “Let’s bring it back. Maybe we need to put that right there.” And that’s how I run my life.
Orpheus Black: Again, some people may think I’m too lax. Some people think I’m too permissive, and that’s fine. It’s my relationship. It’s my ship. I drive it where I want to drive it. But also the people who want to be restricted are often not conscious enough of who they are. They’ve been told so much that they need to be someone else to become an archetype, to become a role that’s accepted. As long as they conform to whatever the stereotype of submission is, they know that they’re not going to be kicked out. That’s the type of self-negation. I’m not talking about how I identify. But if I put on a role, if I wear this role, then you’re never showing who you are. If Ben Affleck never stopped being Batman, we’d be like, “ I need to get to know you, Ben,” and he’d be like, “No!” That’s why I tell people, “I need you to be you. So I can know if I like you, so you can know that I accept you. So we can figure out who we are together.”
Dawn Serra: I’m sure you want to hear more after that. Be sure to check out his talk. He is on Day 9 of the summit, which is on March 16th. You can see the full schedule at exploremoresummit.com. There’s a little schedule tab. Of course, I’ll link to it in the show notes, so you can check that out too. But he had some really powerful ideas, and some really interesting things that made me think. I don’t agree with 100% of what all of the experts share, but I really like that because it gives us an opportunity to have these really intense dialogues. Also, to sit with ourselves and decide what we want to take away, what we want to think. There’s some really diverse, rich ideas this year. I just love, love Orpheus’ approach to dominance and that wild animal park/zoo analogy. I think it’s so inviting, and also very feminist and anti-oppressive in creating spaces for us to be our best selves instead of conforming to these weird ideals and kink.
Let’s do another listener question. It is from Christina R, and the subject is “Limp problems.” “Dawn, your show is great. Two weeks ago, on a road trip to Houston with one of my best friends, we met two really cute guys in a bar. My friend and I had discussed possibly having a foursome one day, but the opportunity never seemed right. Well, after some drinks and talking to the two guys for a while, we made sure they weren’t creepers. All of us went back to our hotel room with the idea of having a hot foursome.
Dawn Serra: Well, it wasn’t so hot. It was actually awful. When we all got naked, the boys could not get their dicks to work. They just couldn’t get hard. We blew them. We let them suck on our tits, and we have great tits. We let them watch us kiss. Then we gave them more blowjobs. Nothing was getting them hard. One would try to fuck us, and then nothing. When one of the guys suggested taking off his condom, that’s when I said, “It’s been a fun night.” And I told them that they needed to leave. They were cute guys, but they just couldn’t get hard. Maybe they were overexcited. Is this common in group situations? Have you ever heard of this happening to anyone else? Sincerely, Christina.”
I have lots of thoughts about this, which I’m sure all listeners that are listening to the show knew that I would. It’s actually really interesting Kelsey Obsession, who’s a fetish porn star, is part of that summit. We talked about how often our fantasies, when they become lived experiences, can be rather disappointing. Because the reality of being with other people and real bodies, real insecurities, real smells, real sounds, we don’t have 100% control in reality. We have to allow reality to just reveal itself, and then be flexible enough to enjoy what happens. Whereas in our fantasy, we can control 100% of what’s happening. So we create these ideal circumstances where everything works really well and where everybody is elegant, and everybody knows the right thing to say and the right place to touch. And that’s the beauty of our imagination.
Dawn Serra: But our lived experiences can often be a drastically different situation than the ones that we’ve imagined in our heads. I think that’s what happened for you here, Christina. Bodies are very susceptible to thoughts. If our head is full of stress and anxiety, it’s going to be nearly impossible and/or very difficult for arousal response to kick in. Whether that is an engorging of the tissues in our vulva and getting wet or that is having a penis and waiting for it to get hard, our nervous system controls so much of what happens with the ways that we experience arousal.
It is really, really, really common, like so common and normal, to be in a situation where something really exciting is happening, and your body just short circuits, especially if you have a penis. It is so common in group sex situations. Reid Mihalko talks about this. He’s had some really great videos on Facebook recently around shame and bodies. He’s talked about his own experiences with this. But when you have, one, so much excitement about what is happening and, two, this expectation of performance, often that’s exactly the perfect storm for a dick not working. That means it’s going to be really difficult for a penis to get hard when there’s all of this expectation that it has to be. That pressure is the antithesis, just like we were talking about with orgasms for vulvas. If you’re holding on to anxiety and fear and you have this heightened excitement response, your body is just going to be shutting down. So it’s super common for that to happen.
Dawn Serra: That’s why it’s also so important for all of us, when we’re talking about the types of sex that we have, to have a huge variety of ways that we experience sexual pleasure. Because when we put all that pressure on one body part, and then if it doesn’t happen, the entire thing fails. You get kicked out of a room. You don’t get to have this amazing scene that now you super want to have. Your friend is watching, so now your friend knows that your body didn’t work. That just spells disaster and awfulness for everybody, which is exactly what you said, it was actually awful.
But what if instead, in that situation where they weren’t able to get hard, they pulled out a glove and offered to finger fuck you until you were screaming or offered to use toys on you or offer to do something that was just deliciously sensual. In giving that time and that space to have all of this pleasure that wasn’t penis-centric, the likelihood that they would have gotten hard is probably a lot higher than the only way this is going to happen is if your cock gets hard and you put it in this hole. That’s so much pressure and so common for people to experience.
Dawn Serra: I think one of the things all of us need to get better at is when we’re in these situations where we want super sexy times to happen, we have to find ways to include pleasure that isn’t genital performance-focused. A friend of mine who’s in his 60s was talking about how he and his partner, who was a cis woman, and a couple friends of theirs, who were also a cis man and cis woman, decided that they were going to have this really hot orgy. I think there was a third cis woman in the mix. So it was two cis men who were older and three cis women. They all got in the room and they were all kissing and getting naked. The two guys could not get hard. It was just so much pressure and way too much. They just weren’t able to do it.
Instead, they all jumped into sensual touching and kissing. A couple of these women had these like huge orgasms, and they all ended up just touching and rubbing against each other. He said it was actually one of the most exciting, sensual, pleasure-filled nights he’s ever had. That would not have happened if they’re cocks had gotten hard.
Dawn Serra: So let’s leave room for that, too. When we remove the goals of genitals performing a certain way, and we can, in that space, pivot to do something else that’s really fun and pleasurable, sometimes we get to even better places, instead of a place where we feel actually awful about the fantasy that didn’t happen.
Christina ends her email by saying that they brought a vibrator along, so they ended up having a good time anyway, her and her friend, which I think is wonderful. I wish that the vibrator would have come out when those two guys were in the room too, because then the story might have had a very different ending. Thank you so much for writing in, Christina, and sharing your story and giving me a chance to give lots of permission to people who maybe have had performance anxiety and/or been disappointed in their body in the past. So common, so normal.
Dawn Serra: Speaking of bodies, a big theme of the summit this year is also all around body autonomy, diet culture, the pressure to be smaller, and how, with all of us focused on all the ways our bodies aren’t good enough, it’s actually making us a lot easier to control because we’re spending so much time being worried about what we’re eating and fitting into a certain dress size that we’re not participating fully in life. I have these two really awesome clips from two different talks. The first is going to be Virgie Tovar, who is talking all about how diet culture is like a casino. I think this is such a powerful, powerful analogy that all of us can sit in and think about the next time we see a Weight Watchers commercial or we see the cover of fitness magazines telling us to get bikini ready. So we’re going to jump in first with Virgie Tovar.
Then after Virgie’s talk, we’re going to move into a clip from Melissa Toler’s talk, where we’re also talking about how dieting is dehumanizing and an act of violence. That when we get into a place where we’re so disconnected from our bodies because we’re constantly ignoring the hunger pains, the soreness, the aching, and we think that that’s actually a good thing, it’s no wonder why we can’t experience pleasure in bed. So here’s Virgie Tovar.
Virgie Tovar: I’m at the point in my own process where I see diet culture as a hustle, as a game. In the same way, I think I see diet culture as… It’s metaphorical cousin in my head is a casino. When I look at a casino, I’m like, “I know what you are. You’re here to destroy people’s lives and exploit them.” The house always wins. If the house didn’t always win holistically, casinos wouldn’t exist. The entire model is based on exploitation and loss. Diet culture is the same way. The idea is that 1% or whoever that happens to get the jackpot is the person that you could be. Sometimes I think, at the end of the day, that individual who won the jackpot is going to go back and ultimately lose the jackpot.
I just think, for me, I’m very, very grounded in my understanding of what diet culture is. It is like a fantasy. It is exploitative. It ultimately sells people lies and dreams and it makes a bunch of money when those people ultimately fail because those people believe that failure is their fault. And that’s what diet culture is. Same thing as the casino.
Virgie Tovar: What’s complicated than the trap that I keep falling into is not that I believe that thinness is going to give me all these magical things. But I sometimes hit these moments when life gets so hard as a fat person, just because our culture is so fat hating. I mean, fat hatred doesn’t just manifest these interpersonal, aggressive exchanges. It manifests in all of the tiny ways that fat people are gently and sometimes aggressively pushed to the periphery of life. This manifests in our access to jobs or access to romance or access to meaningful friendships or access to where we can live, etc, etc, all the way down.
All that being said, I think that the trap that I keep getting stuck in is, “Oh. I should probably just play the hustle because I know what I need to do to make my life a little bit easier in a fat body.” I think that’s the trap that sometimes when I’m in this really dark place that I go to, where I’m like, “Well, I no longer believe fatness and thinness or one is superior to the other or one is more beautiful than the other or whatever.” I’ve let a lot of that go. But at the end of the day how much easier would my life be if I could just bow to bigotry?
Dawn Serra: Isn’t that something you’re going to be repeating and thinking about? I totally love that. It makes it so approachable and real. Like, “This is diet culture. It’s the same as a casino and the hustle and how the house is always going to win.” The industry of diet pills and dieting and smallness is always going to win, and we’re not. I think that’s just a perfect springboard into Melissa Toler talking about dieting is dehumanizing. Then I tie that into why having pleasure in the bedroom and feeling good in sex can be so hard for us. So here is a little snippet from Melissa Toler.
Melissa Toler: What I’ve been writing about and thinking about lately is how dehumanizing dieting really is. For the reasons I mentioned before about the violence, it is dehumanizing because it doesn’t leave room for you to be a human. It’s either of these idealized ways of eating and looking and working out and being. If you don’t meet up to those, then somehow you have failed as a person. And that does not leave room for all of the potential and the stuff that comes with being a human being. It is one of the most dehumanizing things ever.
I know that people who are listening to or watching this may think, “Melissa, that might be a little bit over the top.” But let me tell you, when you really start to think about your own personal experience with it, it may seem like, I think because we’ve normalized it, it doesn’t seem that bad. But it is really, really dehumanizing. I mean, to be asked to override your body’s natural desires and cues and signals, like what? No, no!
Dawn Serra: Yes. That you are rewarded for exercising when you feel really terrible, for not getting enough sleep so that you have time for exercising, and making your measured meals so that you ignore your hunger and you celebrate the growling tummy and the hunger pangs as signs of success.
Melissa Toler: Yes.
Dawn Serra: That you’re able to label certain foods good and certain foods bad so that you can very clearly be able to either celebrate yourself or deeply punish yourself when you eat from certain categories. I mean, all of these things, when you really think about what they’re asking you to do is a total disconnect, so that your head is running everything. It doesn’t matter if your body feels sore or hungry or angry or tired. You’re successful because you’re not lazy or settling.
Then we we wonder, as a culture, why so many of us, especially women, people socialized as women, don’t know what they want when it comes to sex, when it comes to bodies, when it comes to how to feel pleasure. We have this expectation that when we get into the bedroom and we’re naked, we’re going to suddenly understand all of the cues from our body and feel super attuned and sexy. We’re going to be able to feel all the things. But then in every other moment of our lives, we’re training ourselves to ignore all of the body cues because of what we’re trying to look like.
Dawn Serra: It’s fascinating to me that we have expectations of understanding desires and body sensations on one half of the equation, but on the other, that’s the enemy. We can’t have it both ways.
Melissa is a good friend of mine, and that whole talk is so freaking powerful. Both her and Virgie have really incredible things to say about bodies and pleasure and oppression. Virgie has this phenomenal analysis of thin fetishism and how all of us in our current culture are actually thin fetishists, and what that looks like, and how it impacts us. “Oh, my god. I could just go on forever about how amazing these two talks are. I felt so excited and angry and riled up after them.
Dawn Serra: But I got another listener email, so I want to read it to you really quickly. Then I actually am going to let one of the most incredible human beings in the entire sex education world answer it with a bit from her talk. The email says this, “Hey, Dawn. My name is Gary. I’m a new listener to the show. I’ve heard a couple of your episodes with people like Erika Lust and Madison Young. I’ve always been the kind of person that goes to one of the tube sites to get my porn. I’m starting to feel a little bit bad about that. But I’m still not sure I entirely understand the difference between ethical feminist porn and the porn tube sites, especially since some of the porn on these sites is from some of the ethical filmmakers that you’re talking about. Is their content not uploaded legally? Is there a better way I should be consuming my porn? Sorry if you’ve answered this before, but again, I’m pretty new. And I’d love to hear from you.”
Well, Tristan Taormino, who literally wrote the book, “The Feminist Porn Book” – she has a book called “The Feminist Porn Book” and who has been a porn producer, and in the porn industry and won feminist porn awards, and has her own amazing show, “Sex Out Loud” every Friday – talked about porn on the tube sites and Pornhub, and actually the super scary reality that most of us have no idea about in her talk for the Explore More Summit. I decided to pull out a little snippet of her talking about the super, super scary reality of Pornhub and all the tube sites. I’m going to let her take it away. So here is Tristan Taormino.
Tristan Taormino: Now, this news of Pornhub going to sex education, it makes me want to vomit for days, basically. There are so many things wrong with it. The first thing that I want to say is, the idea makes sense. OK, so the idea, – philosophically only, theoretically only – the idea that, “Listen, we have all these eyeballs. We have all these people here. Why not also give them the option not to just jerk off or not to just seek pleasure or watch a clip or get an idea, but actually, while they’re there, maybe one day they’ll click over here and get some solid education which is sorely lacking in the United States. So it’s a great idea.
But however, that execution is a major, major fumble. For one thing, there’s one article up now at least that talks about female anatomy and actually gets a bunch of key things wrong, including calling the clitoris a button, which we know now. We know way more about female sexual anatomy, and we know about the clitoral structure and the internal clitoris. This is actually caught on in an amazing way so that most sex educators today are always talking about the internal structures of the clitoris. This is like a game changer for people and their bodies, and how they experience pleasure, and what they know about their own bodies.
Tristan Taormino: For this article to say the clitoris is a button seems to me like you are so far behind the times, you’re practically not in them. So that’s a little outrageous.
I think the most problematic thing that most people have actually don’t know is that Pornhub is owned by a major shell company/corporation that used to be called Manwin and is now called MindGeek and may in fact change its name at some other point as it gets indicted for fraud and various reasons that it sort of disbands and comes back together. But it’s run by a company that has created a monopoly within the adult industry. They basically have bought up all these tube sites. They’ve bought up production companies. They’ve bought up other kinds of websites. So what’s beginning to happen is that when performers go out there to get work, they work for a particular site, which has a particular name or a particular brand, but actually you can trace that site back to this named corporation. So performers can’t speak out about this particular company at all, ever. Because they write all the paychecks in porn right now.
Tristan Taormino: That’s first of all unfair and unethical. There is a long history of this company having really shady dealings in the business world. If you want to Google it, folks, you can. I value my life. I’m not even going to go any farther than that because that’s how actually evil I think they are. But it’s not a good company. It’s really created a situation, I think, in porn, where everything is sort of eating itself. There’s no more resources and there’s so few opportunities. These tube sites we know have ruined the porn economy as we know it. They haven’t reinvented it. They haven’t shifted it. They’ve ruined it. They’ve ruined it. I can’t in good conscience support anyone who’s part of taking down what was built up, which was creative artists, creating things, people paying for them, then they could create more. That whole system has been busted, and Pornhub is part of the problem.
Dawn Serra: If that doesn’t change your mind about how you’re consuming your porn, I don’t know what will. But I’m sure so many of you are already invested in supporting ethical porn filmmakers and finding better places to consume your porn. But if you had any questions about why it was such a terrible, terrible thing for the world of porn that these tube sites and Pornhub even exist, I think that Tristan’s answer will take care of that. The rest of Tristan’s talk is really incredible. She talks about self-care in the current political climate and why sex education is still so important, changes that she’s seen in her 20 years of doing sex education. She also shares this really, really personal story about her very long term partnership recently ending, and how that has brought up a lot of shame for her. Also, what it’s done for her and how she’s experiencing sex, and the ways that she has changed drastically over the past couple of months. It’s a powerful talk that I hope you’ll check out.
The last little clip that I’m going to share today is from the incredible Dirty Lola. We were talking about how for some people, the words slut and whore can be really triggering. Some people super love them, and think they’re hot. Other people get really turned off by them. So Lola had just this delightful little rant that she went on around the word slut and how she uses it and how we need to stop using words like this for other people. So here is Dirty Lola.
Dirty Lola: Those words – slut and whore – I say all the time, I’m Slut, with a capital S. My phone autocorrects slut to Slut with capital S because that’s how I use it for myself. But I use it for myself, and I don’t call other people slut, unless it has been something we’ve talked about that they are comfortable with. And that’s usually only friends. I never mean it, even when talking about myself, in a derogatory way. I don’t allow other people I don’t know to call me slut. People get confused by that. They’re like, “Well, you call yourself a slut.” I’m like, “I know what I mean when I’m calling myself a slut.” It’s endearing and wonderful. It describes my adventurous sexual lifestyle. When the guy across the street does it, he doesn’t mean that, so he might get punched in the face. That’s the difference is I’m defining it for myself, and if you are not using it in the context to which I define it, and it’s not in that loving way in which I define it, then no. You don’t get to call me that.
I think that it’s– I totally understand that being uncomfortable, especially in a sexual situation because it’s like, “What? What do you mean? I’m a what? Oh yeah.
Dawn Serra: Oh, yeah.
Dirty Lola: Yes, I am.
Dawn Serra: We’re going there.
Dirty Lola: But it’s touchy. I like to tell people you don’t have to use the label. I’m not one of those people who are like, “We have to take it back and everybody needs to use it.” That’s never going to be the case for some people. You can still have the spirit of the slut and not the slut label. You can still live in that slutty spirit and embrace that and not embrace the label. I think we all just need to stop trying to label people without their permission.
Dawn Serra: Amen to that last part. I wish that we would stop labeling others. YI think one of the things that’s so hard, especially for queer-identified folks and bi-identified folks is this invisibility that comes with being bisexual or pansexual or queer. People will look at who you’re dating and assume that tells the entire story. Then we label people based on that. So if people were to see me with Alex, both of us are cis I’m a cis woman, he’s a cis man – they might make the assumption that I’m heterosexual. But in fact, I’m not. Longtime listeners of the show will know that I’ve had multiple relationships with women and trans folks and queer folks, and Alex identifies as queer. But when we label others, we strip them of the complexity of their identity. So I love so much that Lola has just claimed, capital S, Slut for herself, but at the same time, recognizes this is not a word that necessarily works for everybody, and we have to leave space for that. We can’t make assumptions.
I hope that hearing some of these super secret tidbits from my Explore More Summit talks got you really hungry to hear the rest because it starts on March 8th. Again, it’s totally free. You get three talks per day. They’re available for 24 hours, so you can rewatch them as many times as you want in that 24 hours. We do that for 10 days. There’s a Facebook community and all kinds of workbooks and questions and journaling prompts that I’m going to send out. So please be sure to sign up if you haven’t already. Until next week, which is going to feature an interview with the incredible Reid Mihalko. I hope that you will tune in. Check out the summit. Pop over to Patreon. Of course, I’m Dawn Serra. I will talk to you next week.