Sex Gets Real 270: Chris Maxwell Rose on touch and the erotic

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Touch. The erotic. And healing.

Chris Maxwell Rose is here from The Pleasure Mechanics and we geek out about touch, changing bodies and how our relationship with the erotic changes over time, touch hunger, and much much more.

The Pleasure Mechanics have a bunch of fantastic online courses.

A few of the things we discuss include:

• The many touch stones that we have in our life that help us stay grounded and connected to ourselves, our body,  and to the people we care about.
• What does saying yes to connection and touch mean? How do we explore our erotic selves with tenderness, longing, and hunger instead of fear, vulnerability, and terror?
• Chris shares their experience with mindfulness and being present, and how this practice can help us be more present during sex.
• Bringing erotic awareness into our daily lives and how skills based practice plays an important role in it. 
• Reverence and how we can turn our attention to the small and minute things of everyday and savour in those moments.  
• The different stories around touch, what touch hunger means, receiving touch, and to what degree is affectionate touch tied up to sex.
• What happens if touch is something that you’re not hungry for? How can we still practice this skill?
• The violence and harm that can come in how we touch one another and how do we practice the pleasure, love, radical empathy that can also happen through touch?
• Massage as the yes point for couples and the practice of massage as part of a culture within a relationship.
• The practice of sharing each other’s desires in a relationship and not taking no as a rejection.
• Creating micro-experiments as a couple to build foundational skills within the relationship.
• Honoring where you’re at and being present with yourself and/or relationship knowing that everything is a process and that there is no guarantee of the destination.
• Harnassing the erotic and how it grows your capacity to the experiences you want and the experiences that you have been practicing towards.

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Podcast Transcript

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra, that’s me. This is a place where we explore, sex, bodies, and relationships from a place of curiosity and inclusion, tying the personal to the cultural, where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love, as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics, and liberation. 

This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here in service to joy, connection, healing and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.

Dawn Serra: Hey, you. Welcome to this episode’s Sex Gets Real by Chris Maxwell Rose from Pleasure Mechanics today. Our conversation is such a beautiful exploration of touch, the erotic, the things that impact our life, that change the way we relate to our bodies and our partners, the ebbs and flows that we can experience through sickness and aging.

We talk about touch-hunger and massage,and micro-expirements that we can do to build skills in relationship, as well as how we can increase our capacity for joy and pleasure, and also around rejection. It’s such a wonderful conversation. I love geeking out with Chris.

Dawn Serra: Patreon supporters, Chris and I recorded a bonus conversation just for you. If you support the show on patreon.com/SGR podcast at $3 a month and above, you get weekly bonuns content. This week, it’s an extra chat with Chris, including a couple of questions that we really want to hear your answers to.

So on Patreon, while listening to our chat, you can comment and share your answers to our questions because we’d really want to hear from you. If you support at $5 a month and above, you can help me field listener questions. There’s a new listener question that just went up yesterday for you to check out.

Dawn Serra: Before I tell you more about Chris, today, July 21st 2019 is the final day you can register for the July cohort of my Power in Pleasure course. 28 beautiful souls have already signed up and I would love for you to join us. I won’t be running it again until October, so this is your chance. If you want to explore the stories you carry around food, around body, around libido and desire. If you feel constriction or shame around anything like that, we’d love to have you join us. It’s such a tender, gentle beautiful exploration of the stories we carry, the legacy of pleasure that we’ve inherited, how we relate to both food and movement, and how that impacts our experience of pleasure.

We dive into embodiment and trusting our bodies, as well as the erotic, sex, and boundaries. It’s such a wonderful, wonderful experience. Five weeks – entirely online, weekly group calls that are some of my most favorite, favorite things in the world. We get so vulnerable and personal, and deep there. It costs the same as a single coaching session with me. We spend weeks getting to know each other and chatting in a private forum.

Dawn Serra: So if prioritizing your pleasure is complicated, if prioritizing your pleasure is something you’d really like to do, if you’d like to really explore the ways that you might express yourself more erotically, then you can go to dawnserra.com/pleasurecourse to learn more about the course, how it works, to enroll, and to check out some beautiful testimonials from people that were in the Apirl cohort. I would love to see you there We would love to see you there.  The first call is actually tonight. It kicks off July 22nd and runs for five weeks. So please join us if you’ve been thinking about it, ’cause it won’t be available again for a few more months. Last day!

Let me tell you a little bit about Chris and we’ll jump in to this awesome conversation. Chris Maxwell Rose is a sex educator with over 15 years experience teaching individuals and groups about sexual health and pleasure. Together with partner, Charlotte, they founded Pleasure Mechanics at pleasuremechanics.com back in 2006, which is dedicated to sharing practical, down to earth information and techniques for more sexual pleasure. Chris crossed the nation to teach workshops on sex to audiences to three thousand. Their work has reached individuals in over 60 countries.

Dawn Serra: As the Pleasure Mechanics, they have combined their body-based expertise with game-changing cultural insights that provide a unique path to a happier, healthier, and more pleasurable sexuality. Their online courses, which I have an affiliate link to, they have some amazing online courses about mindful sex, touch, and massage. So check out the show notes or go to sexgetsreal.com/ep270 for episode 270. Just click that link so they’ll know you came from me.

Their online courses teach the techniques of sexual pleasure to people around the world. Their podcast offers hundreds of hours of free erotic education to anyone ready to expand their capactiy for pleasure, love, arousal, and connection. In fact, you can hear me on last week’s episode of their podcast talking about the Pleasure Course and about pleasure, and how pleasure and a relationship with food is so deeply tied together. So if you’re thinking about the course, go check out my conversatinon with Chris on their podcast. You’ll get to hear me be interviewed for a change.

Chris has a committment to helping create a world where all people and couples have the information and tools to become sexually fullfilled. Here is my conversation with Chris Maxwell Rose from The Pleasure Mechanics. Enjoy.

Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Chris. I am so excited for our conversation today. 

Chris Maxwell Rose: Hi, Dawn. It’s a pleasure to be here. 

Dawn Serra: Yes. People who are familiar with Explore More will definitely know you from the conversation– the rad conversation we had for that. And, of course, I am constantly talking about the cool stuff that you and Charlotte are doing over at the Pleasure Mechanics. But for people who maybe aren’t familiar, can you tell everyone just a little bit about who you are and the work that you do before we dive in?

Chris Maxwell Rose: Thank you. Yes. We are such kindred spirits in this field. I feel like our audiences are probably a big overlapping family. So hello, everyone. I am Chris Maxwell Rose from pleasuremechanics.com. Together with my wife, Charlotte, we have for the past 13 years been focused on creating online resources to guide people in a relationship with their body, with sexuality and with pleasure. We call ourselves the pleasure mechanics ‘cause we focus on the strategies and techniques and kind of lift up the hood of sexuality and pleasure and really roll up our sleeves and get practical with it. But then on our weekly podcast we also have broad sweeping conversations about sex culture and our relationship to sexuality. 

We have a weekly podcast called Speaking of Sex and you can find all of what we do at pleasuremechanics.com. But what’s most important for me is really holding a conversation about sex that honors the social complexity of it, and the personal complexity and changing nature of sexuality. Especially recently in my life, I’ve been diagnosed with chronic illness. We have a young child. So within my relationship with Charlotte, even, we’ve lived many erotic lifetimes; and it’s really important for me to talk about sex in a way that honors change and growth. But also loss and death, and just honor it as real human experience that it is in its ever mysterious ways.

Dawn Serra: Yes. Ever mysterious and changing. 

Chris Maxwell Rose: How I’m describing my work is getting less linear over the many years. It used to be like, “We teach massage and erotic touch.” End of sentence. And now it’s like, “I explore death through the erotic lens.” But people are here for it ‘cause I think that’s how we experience sexuality as in this very complex way. And I know you hold those conversations, too, and what we love about each other, I think.

Dawn Serra: Yes. Yeah. I have… The deeper that I get, the more I fall in love with it. Like the farther away that I get from where I started, which I have so much appreciation for. I love teaching blowjob 101 classes and sex toy 101, and all those things. But there is just something that scratches my soul when I get to have these really rich, messy, meaty conversations about the ways that sex and the erotic interact with death and grief and food and all of things. So I’m so excited you’re here and that we can go to those yummy places together.

Dawn Serra: I’m really curious. As things have changed, as your life has become what it is today with your chronic illness and with being a parent of a small child and running a business, and doing all kinds of things out in the world. What’s something that has been a touchstone for you lately as a way to really reconnect with Charlotte and also to really reconnect with yourself when there’s so many competing resources pulling for your attention?

Chris Maxwell Rose: Well, you used the word touchstone, so we’ll go right to touch. Touch has always been the lifeline between Charlotte and I. It’s how we met through somatic sex education and our mutual background in massage. It’s very much how we fell in love. And touch, for me, has also been this pathway into the embodiment practices that I now teach. I was an academic and an intellectual before I stepped foot into the massage classroom in San Francisco in 2003. Touch was the skill that brought me into my body that helped me heal all of my sexual trauma. That was my gateway. So it’s really the practice I organize most of the other parts of my pleasure practices around is the experience of touch, both giving and receiving. And recently, a lot of that has been self touch through this arc of getting ill and then healing and recovering.

I am in a totally different place in my sexual body, in my energy levels, in my pain experience. But the constant that I have is touch and returning to laying on hands on my body, and then going inside and feeling what that experience feels like. So within self touch we get that microcosm of giving and receiving, the exploration of the contours of my body through touch, but then also the entire ception: dropping in and feeling feelings from the inside has been the practice of staying alive for the past few years for me. And then bringing that into my erotic partnership with Charlotte again has been… We have actually talked about this publicly. So, we’re getting a little vulnerable with you, as we do, Dawn. 

Chris Maxwell Rose: Our erotic life deeply changed over the few years where we had a baby. I got sick, we had sick mothers. And there feels like a before and after for us. We haven’t spoken publicly about our process of reconnection. But it was terrifying, especially as sex educators, as erotic partners of 10 years who we’re supposed to know one another’s bodies, who were supposed to know how to connect. What we were left with was, our raw basic skills of loving one another. And I feel like there will be some teaching coming out of this because I feel like so many of us have been at that place of like, “I want to love you. I want to reach out and connect with you. But there feels like so much in between me in that place of being able to say yes.” So what can we say yes to? Can we say yes to holding hands exhausted in bed, but bringing all of our focus onto how our hands are fitting together right now? Can we say yes to five minutes of back massage? And this is all this stuff we had been teaching for a decade. But that had to re-emerge for us as a daily practice in order to rediscover ourselves as sexual beings and then one another as sexual partners. 

We’re still in that process in what feels like the beginning stages and looking forward to the next 10 years. Something like, “What is our erotic life going to look like?” In the way near dying does, I feel like very much my near death experience has brought me to an erotic beginning that I’m finding actually very precious because there’s so much not knowing. There’s so much vulnerability and tenderness, terror, fear. But also those longings, the desires, the hungers waking up. And I get to feel that as if for the first time, too, with the wife and mother of the child that I’ve been with for 13 years. It’s a trip. It’s a trip. And we’re trying to stay present with it amongst all the other stuff. Even just the practice of paying attention to it is a practice, right? Not focusing on the schedule and the to do’s and the bills and all of the people that are asking for our attention, but to turn towards each other and be like, “You are still important. What are we building next?” Yeah. Practices. 

Dawn Serra: Practices. I think that’s one of the things that the more I do, not only this work, but just the work of being a human being that’s aging and feeling into new ways of being and new experiences and body and all the things. I think if you had asked 25 year old me about practices versus now me about practices, for me, I understand the practice is usually really messy and often uncomfortable. It’s not this very clean, “I’m going to do one, two, three. And that’s the practice.” Sometimes it is. But often the practice is grief and, “Oh, shit. This used to be easier,” and “Oh, god, I forgot to do the thing I committed to doing because it’s good for me.” And all the feelings that come with that. 

There’s messiness inside the practice that I just want to honor ‘cause I think sometimes we sterilize it, especially in education and with the self help movement that so many of us are familiar with, of the one, two, three steps to happiness. I don’t want to sterilize the fact that this practice of self touch and reconnecting with self can be really uncomfortable.

Chris Maxwell Rose: I totally hear you. And there’s also something about operationalizing it that I’m finding a lot of excitement around in really thinking about practice. So in being sick, I returned to my mindfulness based stress reduction training that I had 10 years ago ‘cause I spent a year and a half lying in bed and thunderstorms of pain. My whole diagnosis story is a longer story. But that year and a half of wild pain coming at me from nowhere, I was calling it “BDSM with God” ‘cause it’s like it was irrational pain. It was invisible pain. And so I had to learn how to stay present with it and breathe with it. I called upon my mindfulness training and it really laid up for me how this was how I approached sex already, was through this kind of mindfulness lens. This idea of staying present moment by moment with a nonjudgmental awareness. Practice of a lifetime when it comes to sexuality.

So I put together this Mindful Sex course and I had a lot of self consciousness and doing it because of the trendiness of mindfulness. Is this just another kind of extraction of framework we’re putting on something? But what became really important to me was breaking things down into practices and not just like, “Oh, I have a yoga practice, but I practice…” You mentioned grief. So what does practicing grief look like? It means identifying the skills of grieving and then breaking each down of those skills and like, “I’m going to actually take time to develop that skill.” And recognizing how much of that is relational and social. 

Chris Maxwell Rose: Grieving is a great– I have been practicing the art of grieving with my friends. Like a friend whose mother just had a stroke. What can I bring from my erotic awareness that will help me be a better friend to her right now? And that that is a practice we’re doing together and it’s uncomfortable. Our social containers of how we’re supposed to be emotionally with one another are quite limited often. And so, as we bring kind of this erotic awareness into the rest of our lives, and let ourselves feel bigger and feel more acutely that which it is to be human, um, we need skill based practice. Because a lot of this is so new for us. I think this is kind of our brand: The Pleasure mMechanics.

I like making things a little bit clinical in order to install them in our body so that we can do the art of loving, right? It’s doing the basketball practices so you can step on the field and have the game. A lot of us haven’t been trained in the skills of loving very well, both the physical, how to give the hand job and the blow job, but then also the relational, how are we showing up for each other and that that needs practice, too. So this is my current obsession right now. The practice of love and pleasure. 

Dawn Serra: I think I might use slightly different language. But similarly, I’ve been so interested in our rituals. Our rituals of love and connection, our rituals of healing and pleasure. What are the things that we do or can do consistently that help us to remind ourselves of our humanity and of the things that our bodies are capable of? There’s so much richness in being able to have those things that we do moderately, consistently. I don’t want us to fall into the perfectionism trap. But what are the things that we can do that our lives can accommodate. No matter how small or minute they may seem. But that we can do over and over and over again. 

The word that I really took away from my conversation with you and Charlotte this Spring was reverence. How can I find just a little bit of reverence in this food that I’m eating or in the smell that I’m smelling or in this small little touch when we bumped elbows or rub buts passing each other in the kitchen? How can we just bring up a little bit more attention and depth to those moments? ‘Cause I think they’re so important. 

Chris Maxwell Rose: I love the word reverence because it’s both deeply focused and holy but also joyful and free.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. Yeah. I know so much of the work you do, as you mentioned, is around touch. We definitely live inside of a culture right now that has very rigid stories around touch, who we get to touch, what touch means. I think one of the things I can thank Betty Martin for is all of her work around the ways that we conflate touch with sex and how they’re not the same. But for so many of us, we think they are the same because the only place we ever get touch is through sex. 

I’d love to know, you have been exploring and thinking about things like touch hunger and places that we can and/or do get touch, and what has been emerging for you around the ways that we do touch and the ways that you wish we could kind of examine that and blow it out a little bit.

Chris Maxwell Rose: So much here. I mean, just thinking about how you feel, dear audience, dear listeners, like as you hear the words touch hunger or skin hunger, does that feel resonant for you? Does that feel right for you? So many people, if you do an inventory of touch in your life, there might be one to five people in your entire life that touch you with anything more than a handshake or an elbow pat. This is a deeply cultural question because for some people I have this conversation and there’s dozens and dozens of people that are like, “Well, all my cousins and all my aunts and uncles…”  Some people live in communities and families where there is a lot of affectionate touch. Many of us do not. I’m kind of exploring why this is. When did affectionate touch leave the family home? And to what degree is touched hide up to sex?

Betty Martin’s an old friend of mine and this question of, to what degree do you conflate all of your touch needs to sexual needs, is a great place to explore for people. For me, I really recognize touch as a conduit of love as a physical communication of love. And so I try to be really intentional with that touch and offer it to people I love. That includes family and friends. But to do so deliberately and on my own terms. At a recent vacation my mom was like, “Give me one of your back massages.” I was like, “No, thank you. I’m no longer available for that.” And that felt really, really good to have a boundary with that. 

Chris Maxwell Rose: Touch as a physical act of love. But then in receiving touch, who can we receive touch from? And if the answer is not all of my friends, all of my family, then you might be experiencing some level of touch hunger. Different scientists have studied this. There seems to be a deeply human biological need for meaningful touch. Sometimes the reporting on this goes to affectionate touch or sexual touch, even. And it doesn’t have to be the touch of your one and only true love that actually just has to be meaningful social touch that you feel safe receiving. I think we’re both in this conversation around safety. 

Your body has to be in a state of physiological safety and receptiveness. And when it is, human to human contact has these magical properties that we can tell all sorts of stories about. But it seems to be a biological imperative that we are touched and held and nourished by one another’s skin. And I say all of this, and I’ve been talking about touch and the importance of touch and massage, and teaching touch techniques for over a decade; and recently people have been pushing back with, “Well, I don’t feel safe being touched. I don’t like being touched by other humans.” And if that is feeling true for you, if touch is not something that you want, that you do not feel hungry for, in fact might even feel a little repelled by. I still go to what is the skin hunger, then? Is there a sensory experience? Is it your favorite blanket? Is it your pet? Is it physical activity? Is there a sensory experience that does nourish your skin? How can we support more of that? 

Chris Maxwell Rose: I think science is going to explode with a lot more… Science always has that mix of like big obvious insights. It took $1 million of funding to prove that. But also some really beautiful connections that give us insight to things that humans have known to be true for many years. Right? Like interpersonal MRIs right now are showing that humans attune to one another with their heartbeat, with their hormonal functions just by being in the same room together. We don’t need eye gazing and touch exercises to start influencing how we feel just by being around one another. And so really looking at this field of attunement and how we can influence how one another is feeling when I apply that into our most loving relationships. 

We are super humans, we have super powers in how we can love one another through a caress, through an embrace. Think about a time you have felt despair and despondent and alone and have you ever had that met with a full body embrace from someone you love and it just changes the moment?  There’s so much of this is about not feeling alone. And as infants, we need touch to remind us that we’re not alone.

Chris Maxwell Rose: Being a mother has taught me so much of that because I got to see this biological need for touch in action. When a baby flails and all four limbs go up and they are in panic, you can lay a fingertip on the sole of their foot and their whole body will relax. Because it’s telling them like, “I’m here, sweetie. You’re not alone. You’re safe. You will survive.” And I feel like as adults, so many of us are in kind of moments like that where we just need to be reminded, we’re not alone. There is someone who loves us. We will be held even in our messiness, even in our grief, we will be held and loved.

All of that is so far away from the sexual superpowers of touch like the ability to bring each other to high states of arousal to orgasm, to erotic trance. The far expressions of pleasure. But it’s all connected for me. This like ability to reach out. I hate that this phrase got co-opted by a corporation, but to reach out and touch one another, and all of what that can mean. The power of that. And all too often I think recently, we’re being reminded of the violence and the harm that can come with how we touch one another as humans. So again, how do we practice the pleasure, the love, the radical empathy that can also happen  through touch and human connection? Love practices. 

Chris Maxwell Rose: So if you feel touch starvation, if you feel touch hunger, I think yes, within primary love relationships, there’s so much room for more touch. But where I go with this is how do we ask for, how do we offer, how do we build more physical touch and love into all of our relationships, including with ourself? That can start in a moment of stress like I have now, just put your hands on your chest and listen to your heart, feel your breath moving; and through the touch I’m reminding myself of who I am underneath that stress. So self touch as the first intervention and then friends, family, loved ones, and eventually those ecstatic temples of erotic touch that we will create, right? Those are coming someday perhaps. But it’s too important to outsource, right? So many of us wait to pay for a massage. It’s not a luxury. So how do we build it into our community practices, to our relational practices. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. And I think what’s so interesting is that, and there’s cultural reasons for this, but so many of us, when we think about touch we jump to, “How can I do sex better? How can I make sex more pleasurable? How can I want sex more? Because a partner is telling me that we don’t do it enough,” or whatever the reasons.There’s so many things that come before that that can make sexual touch so much more extensive and accessible.  So few people really lay hands on themselves in a really meaningful way. And there’s lots of people who don’t feel comfortable masturbating and engaging in solo sex. But even just what you mentioned of, “If I’m feeling stressed, can I put my hands on myself over my heart and really connect with that deeper part of myself?” 

One of the things that I do when I’m feeling anxious that help me feel more grounded as I will rub my thighs. And that rubbing of my thighs just helps to remind me I’m connected to the ground and I’m here and I’m not somewhere else and I’m safe. So just having those little self touch and then really being able to find other ways to engage in touch in our lives beyond sex, then I think takes the pressure off of sex to be the only way we experienced touch, which is also a pretty gendered thing. But also teaches us so many other ways of feeling pleasure, knowing body, being able to, like you said earlier, even to connect around what we can say yes to. If we’re both really stressed out, we’ve had really long days, maybe sex just isn’t an option right now. So what can we do?  I think it’s culturally ingrained for us to kind of skip all those things.

Chris Maxwell Rose: Yeah and this is the game changer. If I had to pick out five game changers from the decade of our career, massage as the yes point is what I hear from so many couples that just completely reorganizes their erotic life. So in that moment, as you said, where they’re tired, they’re stressed out,  people will usually go into the coping behaviors that they know. Like they go to their computers, they go to their devices, they watch TV. When the practice of massage is introduced as an option, and you have a question like, “I’m really tired, but I’d love to offer you five minutes of hand massage as we sit at the kitchen table at the end of our day.” And you just rub one another’s sore hands and forearms and look each other in the eye. Something changes. You have another practice, another skill. And you then get a different outcome. 

I think this is what’s so interesting to people is they recognize that there are alternatives and that these interventions create different outcomes for themselves. And so even if the outcome is they feel a little bit more relaxed, they feel a little bit more connected and then they go watch Game of Thrones reruns and they just feel like a little bit more like tended to. That is a win. But sometimes that foot massage will then feel really good and you’ve relaxed, your body chemistry has totally changed because a few minutes of touch will release a different hormonal cascade in your body. Start changing your circulation, start changing how you breathe. The more you pay attention to that, the better. Then from that state, there’s another yes, that’s possible. Something you could not have said yes to five minutes before, “Do you want the other foot rubbed? Yeah. Do you want to flip over and let me do your back and shoulders? Sure. 

Chris Maxwell Rose: This isn’t a prescription of massage as foreplay. It’s a prescription of massage as an option, as one of the things, one of the languages you speak between you. So it’s like, do you want to watch TV? Go for a walk? Give each other a few minutes of massage or just do our own thing tonight? And as soon as it becomes an option and people start saying yes to it and feel skilled in giving it and know how to give it in a way that doesn’t deplete them, for a lot of couples, it just becomes part of the culture of your relationship. It’s one of the things I get a lot of thank you letters for because it reminds us of a native language that we have forgotten. Just reaching out and loving one another with our hands. When a child is hurt, it’s the first thing we do. We reach out and touch where it hurts. How can we do that with one another’s hearts a little more? I think. 

Dawn Serra: One of the things that I’m noticing as I listened to this is just deep gratitude for the simplicity of what you’re offering. Even though it might feel really foreign to a lot of us to be able to ask, “Hey, can we just rub each other’s hands and kind of inquire about how it’s feeling over dinner and let that be enough? Let that be what it is.” There’s such power in the simplicity of that. And it also makes me think about how many people, and I know that you have encountered this too, have come to me and because their partners expect that all touch eventually leads to sex, no touch, feel safe anymore. 

I just had someone in my pleasure course recently and so many of my clients who were like, “I don’t even want to hug my partner. I don’t want to kiss them. I don’t want to let them rub my back because then they assume that it’s the escalator to sex because I’m letting them touch me. And now touch has become something that feels unsafe because it’s always loaded with this unspoken expectation that the touch will then escalate to something that maybe I don’t want.” What’s something that you’ve experienced that can help to heal some of that or disrupt some of that– those expectations because we’ve been taught to conflate touch with sex, and that access to someone’s body around the backrub. Then if I start feeling really good and aroused should then mean it becomes sex because we’re also so uncomfortable being aroused and not taking action.

Chris Maxwell Rose: These are the ultimate toxic bundles, right? It’s like touch has to lead to sex. Sex has to then lead probably to penetration. And so then, if you want to touch my hand in a loving way, I have to agree to have my pussy penetrated? That’s a huge leap. It’s a huge leap. And when we say it out loud, it sounds kind of rekonkulous. But when we practice it, that’s often how it feels and it’s often how it is assumed within relationships. So this is just one of those arenas we need to do some deep unraveling out loud to ourselves and then in any and all relationships we’re in where we’re going to be affectionate and touching. And I now do this with my friends even though I’m in a devoted long term relationship. I say, “I love to offer you some touch right now, but I just want to be clear, we’re friends. Do you feel comfortable? You can say no at any time. Redirect me.” 

It takes people by surprise, this out loud consent thing. But again, the practice we all need right now in our culture is a lot more out loud consent, out loud asking specifically for what we’re wanting. So again, Betty Martin’s beautiful in this arena and offers a lot of great free resources about what consent even looks like and means. So within relationships, these unspoken assumptions have to be interrupted out loud. This takes conversation. This takes courage. But for most people, what they agree on is they want more opportunities to connect, they want more frequency. And when people say they want more frequent sex, what they’re often wanting is more frequent inner connection, touch, playfulness, joy, stress relief, all of these things we bundle up. As you get explicit and out loud about this, you can make those needs more explicit and specific and deliberate. 

Chris Maxwell Rose: So if your partner comes home and they’re all revved up and they’re obviously needing something, it can be a loving teasing conversation to be like, “What are you wanting tonight honey? ‘Cause I know what I’m up for. We might have to talk, I’m feeling pretty tired but you seem to have a lot going on.” And then the answer might be like, I’d love to go work out at the gym, come home and will you give me an assisted… Will you ]lie with me in bed and hang out with me while I jerk off? Is that something you can say yes to?” That might feel like a huge leap for couples. For a lot of couples, the yes has to be like, “I would love to offer you a few minutes of back rubs. I don’t know if I can give you more than five minutes ‘cause my hands might be tired. Can we start there?” And then literally put on a timer. 

The amazing thing about setting a timer or a little sand timer is you get to feel the luxuriousness of that five minutes, and the spaciousness of it. It always blows my mind. Sometimes I raise my head and I’m like, “How long has that been?” And Charlotte’s like, “That was two and a half minutes, darling.” Why don’t we do this more often? ‘Cause that’s my main takeaway is how much can change and how I can say yes more within my busy life. But this idea of all sex leading to penetration, again, for men who have never been penetrated, they don’t understand what a huge event physical penetration is. I think we need to honor that and bring more reverence to penetration so that when it is done, it is done with a lot more intention and the body that is penetrated wanting to be penetrated every single time. But this is also where I go to great hand skills because sometimes you don’t want to just lie there and masturbate. You want to be done. You want an experience given to you. A lot of people love oral sex for this reason because you get to just lie back and receive. But oral sex has its own intensity. 

Chris Maxwell Rose: The ability to pamper and love your partner with your hands and give them a full body massage and then bring all of those massage skills right to the genitals, give them like a great hand job that is better than what they would do to themselves that comes with eye contact and excitement and that feeling of like someone is playing with me. That can be a great, fabulous experience that some people prefer to intercourse and is a great option if your vagina is not feeling invited to the party or… 

A lot of the image I give for this and it’s the food image so fits well here is, if you had to eat every dish at the buffet, how often would you go? Sex is a virtual endless buffet, a Vegas buffet. You could never even hit all the dishes. And we need to treat sex like a, choose your own adventure. You go to the buffet, some days you’re going to eat strawberries dipped in yogurt and that is perfect and other days you want all the ribs. you know. To be able to be in dialogue with that ‘cause you might want things your partner cannot give you in that moment and that’s not a rejection. 

Chris Maxwell Rose: We all too often take a no as a personal deep rejection that then just spirals right into shame. I shouldn’t have wanted it in the first place. I’m too greedy to ask. I won’t ask next time because then I’ll get hurt again. And these downward spirals begin. How can the request for sex, how can the sharing of desires be a joyful visit to the buffet where you might have very different appetites that day? 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. And if you’ve been in a situation where, because of your dynamic and how things have been, till recently or maybe even today, you’re like, “Maybe I need to change that.” If the dynamic has been, “Every time I touch you, I expect sex.” And there’s this kind of like low level pressure that we’re not having sex enough. There’s just been this lack of safety that’s been built in. Maybe every time you went to the buffet, your friend dragged you and made you eat all these things you didn’t want to eat. So it just got to the point where you didn’t even want to go anymore because even though you used to love it, it’s going to take some time to rebuild that trust and to rebuild a space where the wanting feels safe again. So I think that’s important. 

I also loved what you said about setting the timer. I love this practice for so many things. Like my sex maps game that people can grab. That’s one of the things that I stress is like set a timer for three minutes or five minutes or ten minutes. You each get to just ask one question. That way if it is a little uncomfortable or it’s a little intense, you know that there’s an end point that you’ve agreed to ahead of time. You can really sink into that knowing it’s not going to be forever. I don’t have to keep doing this past the point of discomfort, but maybe let’s put on this…

Dawn Serra: Alex and I have this guy on YouTube we love that does massage and we follow his videos. And we’ll pick that night, like do we want this six minute video? Do we want this 22 minute video? It’s time bound. At the end of that, we either switch or we check in and it just offers so much more space to really sink into the experience because we’ve agreed to the parameters of that sandbox we’re going to play inside of.

Chris Maxwell Rose: Exactly. Yes. And timer is a boundary. We forget that sometimes that boundaries create spaces where we can play more fully. You know what’s going to happen on the soccer field so you can agree to it. Totally. And I think the other thing that it does is it brings you wins. It’s again, this practice where you have a skill of saying, “I can agree to this under these conditions.” So when your partner says, “I really want to explore kinky sex,” it’s not this big, vast scary thing. You have some practice being like, “Alright. What is a little tiny thing we could agree to once and then check in and have the communication skills that we’ve developed during massage to talk about how that felt.” Right? It’s learning how to set these kind of micro experiments of physicality as a couple can be a great skill set that then can take you…

Sometimes when we talk about this, people are like, “I don’t want a bunch of foot massage. I want spanking and prostate play.” All of these skills are mappable. They’re all these foundational skills that if you can’t talk about the kind of foot massage you like, maybe you shouldn’t be talking about really intense things. It’s not a linear path of course. But what are the foundational skills that you are maybe wanting to practice before this big scary thing that you say you’re wanting? We probably both get a lot of those emails where it’s like, there’s this out there goal. 

Dawn Serra: How do I get there as quickly as possible? 

Chris Maxwell Rose: Yes. Let’s start with your attitudes. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. I think there’s something so important around all of us developing some resilience and some tolerance around like– We’re allowed to want things maybe aren’t going to happen right now and we’re allowed to feel aroused without needing to do anything about it. We can kind of have these spaces that are kind of in between. And I think where many of us are so uncomfortable with that like, “I really want this and if I don’t get it, it’s going to feel really terrible.” But what if the wanting is part of the beauty? Can we honor that wanting, even if it causes a little bit of discomfort or friction? Can I appreciate my partner’s naked body and how aroused I feel while also honoring that sex probably isn’t going to happen tonight? Maybe just allowing myself to say, “Wow, I feel so aroused by you and that can be enough even if I want more.” 

I think there’s so much beauty and possibility inside of allowing ourselves to be aroused, to have the wanting to have the desire and not turning it into something that has to happen or we are going to feel super disappointed. And I think part of that goes back to other conversations we’ve had where, when sex is the only way that we can feel seen and validated as a human, we can be vulnerable, we can get our touch needs met. It creates this pressure cooker that doesn’t really feel good for anyone. But when we can allow kind of these precursor experiences to be enriching, we suddenly have so many more opportunities for feeling enriched. 

Chris Maxwell Rose: Totally. Totally. And the truth is, and this is a hard one for a lot of us to own, but the truth is most of us are not paying attention to all of the pleasure and eroticism that’s already available to us. So we’re walking around feeling scarce, feeling denied, but also not paying the fuck attention to what’s going on. And I feel like there’s an art to satiation and to also feeling enoughness even in times of great drought and scarcity knowing that season will end. 

I got an email recently though about like– the title was male sexual urgency and it was kinda calling me out on this idea of being okay with whatever outcome and being okay if you don’t get off, and reporting that there is at some point in certain bodies this sense of pent upness to the point of pain. And we can say, “Well, just masturbate.” But for a lot of people, they use that masturbation as like a release valve and then it feels like a disappointing like… And so I think what we need to bring to that is if you are feeling so much sexual energy in your body, if you’re feeling the want for sex so intensely, that is great information about your system and we will need to learn together how to put it towards a purpose; how to devote that erotic energy, how to masturbate again with such reverence that it doesn’t feel like a second best. But it feels like maybe you’re devoting that to your partner’s wellbeing or you’re finding an outlet where your partner’s cool with you putting on exhibition shows on video chat online. What are the agreements of your monogamy that will allow for the full contours of your sexuality? Because this mismatched libido… I mean everyone’s naming it as if it’s a simple problem. But, I don’t even know what that means anymore. What I do know is that within any relationship, our appetites for sex, our interest in sex or interest in different sex acts are going to be vastly different at different times and very rarely will they align. 

Chris Maxwell Rose: We have to have more conversations about how will our relationship hold that complicated truth. There are so many creative ways to run erotic energy now more than ever. We can’t just think of this one solution as like the frustrating goal we are never hitting. So much of the struggle is in that narrative of like, “I’m not getting enough of this one thing.” It’s like, “Wow, well. Let’s pay attention to the enoughness you’re wanting and honor your animal bodies for all of the feelings they’re having, including feelings of not interested in sex for long periods of time, which I’m just coming out of like with my health stuff. 

It was amazing to feel a complete disinterest after being like, “I’ve always feel like a very sexual person.” I’m in this field. To feel that embodied truth of like, “No, thank you,” for a long period of time and have to live into that truth was its own education and the range of sexual truths we hold as humans and the changeability of it. So just to honor where you’re at and if you are in relationship, coming out with a lot of love and tenderness of like, “Where are we at right now?” And if there’s something we want to experience or something where we want to go together, knowing that that will be a process and there’s no guarantee of the destination. 

Dawn Serra: Right. That there’s no guarantee of the destination. Can stay present with what’s true and allow ourselves to maybe long for things, to hope for things and then to come back to what’s true now? I think this is so important. I’m also so interested, too, in all of us having more options  so that we have lots of choices and we know there’s many different ways to experience many different things. I think one of the things, too, that’s so interesting is so often when I’ve worked with people who feel this intensity and this distress around the sex they’re not having. Often the response is to, what are other ways that you’re erotically or creatively expressed? Where are the other places in your life where you have big satisfying releases. Where are the other places in your life where you can be really vulnerable and people can see you?

So often the answers to those questions have been met with, “I don’t know. I don’t have that. That’s not what I do. I don’t even know what these questions mean.” And that’s what I want so many of us to be able to start investigating like, yes, let’s celebrate sex. Let’s have a reverence for these beautiful things our bodies can do. What if there were all of these other ways that we could feel a great big juicy release in our life or we could have that, as Barbara Corella says, gasm.What if there are all these other ways that we could be touched and feel really satisfied around it? What if there was all these other ways that I could feel just utterly connected to my humanity and my body and to others? I want that for us. My hope is that we can ask different questions that start to reveal some of the ways we deny ourselves so many things because we’re so focused on this one outcome.

Chris Maxwell Rose: Totally, totally. It’s stunning to me sometimes. What should I say here? It’s stunning to me sometimes how unimportant sex has become to me in the human experience and that it hasn’t lost any of its luster, any of its mystery, any of it’s power as a portal. I’m just also seeing what I think we would both call the erotic potential in so many other facets of life that can be shared in a little bit less of a complicated way with more people, especially as a parent. I’m wanting to keep my sex life and my emotional life a little bit tighter right now, but I feel very erotically expansive with the world. And so, it’s a form of like an open relationship where I’m free to make intellectual connections and explore them. I’m free to have deep friendships that include touch but also just to be moved and inspired and lit up by other people and by other forces that are not within the container of my primary family relationship. The power of the erotic for sure. 

Dawn Serra: I can’t even wrap my head around it. Just when I really think about the erotic, it’s so… I don’t know. It’s just so much bigger than I think I’m capable of ever actually fully embracing. But the exploration into all of this potential is so exciting and scary, and new and freeing. I love so much of what you just said around sex is delicious and beautiful, and pleasurable and fun and all these things. But because it’s not the only way of having all of these amazing experiences, it feels less acute. The playing field’s been leveled a little bit, right? It’s not like there’s this one thing over here and then kind of all these other experiences that are nice, but they’re not as magical. They’re not as ecstatic or beautiful.

Chris Maxwell Rose: I think it’s the unpackaging of it all right. ‘Cause I just was at a conference and I was alone. I was in a new city and all of that novelty was running. And I met someone who I had this amazing intellectual connection with. I went home and I was thinking about them and then I thought about them the next day. The previous me might have been confused by this and been even scared of it or shut it down on purpose. But with the recognition of, “Oh, this is a deep erotic spark.” How precious, tend to it, follow it, love it. This beautiful friendship is opening up and it doesn’t feel like this package deal of like, “Oh, I’m now going to be obsessed with this person and want to have their babies and move in and change my whole world.” I don’t know.

There’s something about the harnessing of the erotic that comes again with practice because I felt these feelings before and I’ve sat with them and I’ve grown my capacity for them. I’ve worked in communicating my feelings with my partner before and I’ve grown the ability to do that. So again, when we talk about skills and practice over time it grows your capacity for the experiences you want and the experiences that you are practicing towards. I’ve been thinking a lot about the discipline of all of this. Some of my new friends are Zen monks and I’m kind of envious of the discipline of their practice. And so what is the discipline of this work around love and pleasure we want to do. Living into that potential together and it is a social practice, and I think that’s why what you do, Dawn, is so important as you really hold these spaces for people to practice it together. It’s beautiful. 

Dawn Serra: I love all the questions you’re asking and the things that you’re creating around these rich discussions and questions that you hold and I honestly could just keep talking to you for hours, but I want to respect your time and everyone’s time who’s listening. So I’m sure we will continue this conversation in future episodes because there’s so much to explore. But you and I have to go have our little Patreon bonus chat. So before we wrap up, can you let people know how they can stay in touch with you and find you online?

Chris Maxwell Rose: Absolutely. Our forever home is pleasuremechanics.com where you will find our podcast. It’s all indexed by topics so you can quickly find what you’re looking for. And if you go to pleasuremechanics.com/free you can sign up for our free online course and that includes a complete lesson in foot massage because we wanted to make this experience accessible for everyone, get started, see how it feels. We would love to hear from you. We love Dawn and you, by extension, are part of our family. So great to meet you. 

Dawn Serra: Well to everyone who listened, check the show notes and click through and check out the amazing work that Chris and Charlotte are doing at the Pleasure Mechanics. And if you’re a Patreon supporter, head over to patreon.com/SGRpodcast to tune in and hear our little bonus chat. So we will meet you over there. Until next time, this is Dawn Serra with Chris, and I will talk to you soon. Bye. 

Chris Maxwell Rose: Cheers.

Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured and this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and get awesome weekly bonuses. 

As you look towards the next week, I wonder what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?