You’ve heard people say it a million times: “Sex is the most natural thing in the world.” And it is – for every other species except humans.
For better and for worse, it has been humankind’s unique biological destiny to have an unnatural relationship with sex. Unique to our species, we intellectualize sex. We also feel shame and guilt about sex; we lie and cheat about sex; and we think it’s noble to rise above our lusts and pretend sex isn’t as important as it is to us. We are, when it comes right down to it, as bizarrely repressed and baroquely ritualistic as it gets in the great wide world of sex. If any of the species whose sexual antics we routinely giggle over on YouTube knew what humans went through to get laid, I wonder who’d get the last laugh.
In the first volume of this series, The Truth About Sex, I focused on the two most basic and fundamental elements of sex: masturbation and orgasm. It came as a surprise, I suspect, to people more familiar with my work on BDSM and fetish sex, and my history of tackling unusual and radical sex topics. For fans of my more radical work, this volume will clear up any confusion about why I decided to start the trilogy at what I consider the very beginning – the relationship each of us has with our own genitals and sexual desires.
I also know a key step to a balanced sex life is to develop a more positive view of orgasms, a harmless behavior long demonized for no rational reasons, and now, in the 21st century, something all the sciences, from medicine to sexology, can agree is healthful, and perhaps even key to longevity. So I felt I should start my trilogy with a basic sex-positive primer designed for both adults and their kids to gain familiarity with their own bodies, and to develop good sexual health habits through education.
As masturbation is the fundamental building block of adult sexuality, and the first type of sex most of us have, you’d think people would do it naturally and not worry about it, but it’s the rare and fortunately uninhibited person who feels that way. Most people are hung up about it, think it’s wrong, can’t talk about it, get stressed out if their partners do it, and essentially manifest all the fears and inhibitions you would expect in any intensely sexually repressed culture. Years of clinical experiences have shown me that people who find masturbation difficult or embarrassing bring their inhibitions with them into their sex lives with partners. The ongoing myths about masturbation and orgasm as somehow dangerous or unhealthy activities that one should avoid have done more to screw up adult relationships than most people will acknowledge.
It’s a basic principle of my therapy practice to help people emotionally connect to the importance of loving our individual erotic potential and embracing that potential by developing healthy, mature, and regular sexual habits according to our individual needs. I consider it a basic requirement of an adult’s sex education to know that masturbation is good for you, and that orgasms are healthy. By the time you’re in a relationship or planning to marry, you should also understand that sex is as complicated and magical as love, and that sexual intimacy enhances our quality of life.
Instead, our culture and laws treat sex as something that is so dirty that we need not only to be protected from it, but prevented from having it. We still abide by 18th and 19th century beliefs that sex is a dangerous force which has the power to pollute minds and drive adults mad.
As I see it, much of what we label as sexual dysfunction (meaning inorgasmia or a woman’s inability to climax, and erectile dysfunction or a man’s inability to sustain an erection until climax) are consequences of this enduring perversion of sexual intimacy. When you grow up in a world where depictions and descriptions of the beauty and fun of sex are considered obscene, while ghastly sex crimes make national headlines, you can’t help but come to believe that sex is fundamentally unsavory.
It’s a tragic social lie. Sex itself doesn’t contaminate anything. Real life is not a Victorian morality piece in which pleasure invariably leads to dissolution. In life, people can be celibate and still be monsters; or they can screw every sailor who hits shore and still be saints. The number of blow jobs you have performed and the number of people you have bedded don’t factor into whether you are a good parent, partner, business associate, colleague or friend in daily life.
To me, it’s sex-negativity that contaminates human behavior. One commonplace in a sex therapist’s life is the client whose aggrieved partner/spouse/fling is threatening to out them. I’ve had male clients whose wives threatened to call their employers and expose information about their husbands’ fetishes if they won’t give them up; I’ve had female clients whose husbands threatened to expose their interest in swinging or kink to win child custody cases. Worse, people on the sidelines often cheer the bullies on, re-enforcing the notion that if someone doesn’t act the way you think they should act in bed, you have the right to destroy their life.
Sexual blackmail, using sex as punishment, deliberately provoking jealousy, and making sex the scapegoat for bad relationship skills has been the human condition for thousands of years. But it doesn’t have to be.
MARISSA AND TOM fought over everything. I’ve never seen a couple fuss at each other quite as much as they did. If one recalled something happening on a Tuesday, the other was certain it was a Thursday; if one remembered a restaurant called “Three Guys” the other swore it was “Two Guys.” They fought over money (Tom wouldn’t buy her the house she really wanted). They fought over the house they had (Marissa never kept it clean enough to please him). They fought over their dog, Mr. Wiggles, who Marissa considered ill-behaved and Tom thought hilariously lively.
But they were seeing me because they believed they only had one real problem: Tom’s anal obsession. As Marissa explained it, something was wrong with Tom because he was always looking at anal porn of men having things stuck up their butts. At first, she tried not to think about it but then he started asking her to do it to him. When he brought home a butt plug one night, she told him she was done with the marriage. The way he pestered her for sex all the time was bad enough but this was the final straw. In private, she told me she thought he was gay. Who else but a gay man wants anal sex? She said their sex had never been very good but now she could barely stand to be in bed with him.
Tom didn’t think he was gay. He knew other men had all kinds of wild sex with their wives. Marissa wasn’t a prude when they first met, but now after 14 years of marriage, she treated her vagina like a prize he had to earn each time. To him, it wasn’t such a prize anymore. He got tired of constantly asking for it. Marissa and Tom decided to see a sex therapist as a last step before filing for divorce. It made them sad to get divorced, but they couldn’t live like this.
Tom couldn’t look me in the face as he nodded and mumbled his way through the session with his wife. But during a one-on-one alone with me he found it easy to tell me things he never told his wife. As it turned out, he became fascinated with anal sex after the spark had gone out of their sex life. His wife didn’t seem interested anymore so he went looking around the Internet for something new and different. When he found the anal porn site, it turned him on so much he convinced himself it was the answer to their sex problems. Marissa’s hostility stumped him at first, then angered him. It was proof that she didn’t care about their sex life and, by extension, about him. The angrier she got, the angrier it made him that she wouldn’t have sex with him. Meanwhile, he’d started feeling insecure about whether or not he was normal.
This part of the problem is easy for a sex therapist to work on. In reality, anal eroticism is very common, and therefore, should be considered normal. Adventurous lovers have explored it since the beginning of time. It has nothing to do with sexual orientation and everything to do with nerve endings in the region which make it a particularly delightfully erotic experience (done properly, of course). Also, because of the taboos around the anus, for some people it’s an adrenalin high simply to traverse that forbidden territory.
After individual sessions with them both, my assessment was that someone with a robust interest in experiencing anal penetration was married to someone who thought the adult anus was the puckered passageway to Hell. We could fix that through education and information and reach a comfortable compromise because that is just the technical side of sex. The larger problem in this marriage was that they were incredibly angry people who couldn’t communicate without fighting. It was the reason their sex life was in a mess in the first place. They’d both behaved badly, and each made the other feel unloved and unvalued. The fact that each of them could talk more freely with me about sex than they could talk to one another was the first problem I addressed – it told me that they were afraid to be naked with each other. If you can’t be emotionally naked, if you can’t tell your sex partner your secrets, if you’re too angry to tolerate each other, the chances of a fulfilling sex life are virtually nil.
In Dr. Brame’s world, sex is a beautiful and bonding thing. It holds the potential for people to find relaxation, intimacy, and connection, thanks to the phenomena of sexual brain chemistry. In a happy, loving couple, sex reaffirms the romantic bond and provides you with the best free private entertainment known to humanity. It’s a privilege and a thrill to be so naked with someone – not, as some couples treat it, an invitation to rejection and criticism. Rather than a dangerous evil, sex is a natural resource adults can exploit for the good. We can tap its potential to build deeper and more lasting commitments. We can learn to communicate, negotiate, and become team-players in ways that enrich permanent relationships.
The emotional and psychological importance of sex to human health is consistently devalued by our culture. I am continually interviewed by popular magazines on “creative quickies” or “adventurous positions for orgasm” or one I did last week for Glamour on “10 places to touch him.” I do my best to be anatomically accurate but honestly, telling people to have sex in a certain way when you don’t know the people involved could be a recipe for disaster. What if one or both are too tall, too short, too fat or too skinny for a particular position? What if one of them is disabled and is numb in the place you recommend licking? It’s like when food sites promise you the recipe for a “perfect” meal and you find out it’s filled with things that give you hives.
Nothing in sex is ever gospel, neither on a broad-scale nor on a one-to-one basis. No matter how comprehensive one may try to be, sexual emotions and responses are too varied and complex to be authoritatively catalogued. There is much more to sex than techniques and anatomy. Sex is both private and social. It is intensely private in that most people don’t talk about what they do in the bedroom. But it is also very social, in that most people abide by, or at least are aware of, “rules” set by society.
What most people don’t realize is that those rules are in constant flux and, like all social customs, change, evolve, revert, and are subverted by historical, political and religious forces. In the 21st century, I must also add “technological” forces since the advent of a generation raised after the Internet was invented, and in possession of gadgets to hook up and “sext” with from puberty on, has altered the course of human sexual history.
When we look at the emerging data on sexual relationships, it’s still a chaos of unanswerables. For example, a 2012 study reported that more women are breaking their vows of monogamy than before, and that their number may soon rival or even outpace the number of male cheaters. The way it was reported and blogged about, one might think the news that wives are now fooling around almost as much as husbands is proof that Western Civilization is collapsing. The notion of women doing something men have traditionally done is terrifying. Prepare for Armageddon! At least, that’s how the story sounded, filtered through the minds of sex hysterics always on the look-out for proof that the Rapture will be triggered by a lubricated vagina.
As a sexologist, I take all such data to mean exactly what they mean: we are looking at a snapshot of human sexual behavior at a moment in time and at a particular place. Even if I trusted that this one study was definitive, it still said very little to me about overall human behavior. It is interesting only in that it suggests we live in a culture where American women feel freer than they did 20 to 30 years ago to break their marriage vows.
The key difference between now and past times is not that we are necessarily more permissive as a society: it’s that we keep more records now. But we’ve only been gathering data on sex since the Victorian era and, needless to say, have gathered it from a Victorian point of view, operating from some of their assumptions, possibly asking the wrong questions, and then acting alarmed by data that shows society is not living up to the idealized model.
To my knowledge, no such survey existed at the time but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that female adulterers were numerous during the WWII era. The draft and the War’s effect on ordinary civilians was what you’d expect: an awful lot of lonely military wives left behind in the prime of youth, surrounded by men yet to be drafted or soldiers passing through, at a time when happiness was about what you could have now because tomorrow might never come. If the statistics didn’t show massive amounts of fooling around during the war years, I’d be surprised.
What we don’t know about the history of mating and sex will always be greater than what we do know. We may know a period or place’s public face of sex, according to the dictates and precepts of the dominating religion or political system. The only assumption we can make with any certainty about the past however is that despite different customs and belief systems, humans have always been sexually creative, sexually diverse, and very horny.
Even when religious fervor was at a pitch in Medieval Europe, and a celibate monk named Albertus Magnus was describing the only correct position (missionary) for married couples – a theory which later became religious doctrine – there is abundant documentation that people carried on then just as they do now. Unmarried sex, extra-marital affairs, threeways, gay and lesbian sex and everything else many people still call abnormal have always been pretty normal for humans. As someone who has looked at tens of thousands of vintage porn photos, I’m absolutely certain that if there were webcams in the Middle Ages, we’d have footage of debauched serf orgies. Instead, we have to rely on Flemish paintings depicting them.
I find it grim how many adults are inexperienced or clumsy with sex and how many limit themselves to a tiny, sometimes monotonous repertoire of sex acts. Whether it’s the traditional couple who only have intercourse in one position their whole lives, or the kinky person who obsesses so much over toys, he or she never learns the basics of orgasmic sex, acquiring basic techniques for giving and getting sexual pleasure is a litmus test of your own ability to function as a satisfying, adult sexual partner.
If we really cared about supporting committed relationships and marriage, we would encourage grown-ups to mature sexually. Like the rest of your life, if your sex life doesn’t grow it will stagnate. In my perfect world, adults would experiment with all the different ways they can climax – oral, anal, manual, penetrative, non-penetrative – so they can have enough variety in their sex lives to sustain them and keep them interested into old age. The longer you are with someone, the more ways you should know how to turn them on and get them off. That would be a more successful model for permanent sexual partnership than telling people they can only have sex in one or two positions for the rest of their lives.
I’m more flexible when it comes to frequency. Some experts claim there is a fixed number of times it is normal to have sex. I disagree. I encourage people to orgasm regularly but I’m content with whatever is regular for them, without pressuring them to meet an artificial standard. The desire for orgasms is one of the greatest variables in human sexuality. I’ve worked with couples who had sex ten times a week and wished they had time for more; and couples who didn’t want or need it more once or twice a month. When all partners are satisfied with their pattern, their sexual health is good, and they’re getting enough intimacy to feel content, there is nothing to fix or change.
To me, frequency is not as important as respecting the importance of sex and making it a regular part of your relationship, according to your and your partner’s needs and schedules. The couples I worry about are the ones who make sex their lowest priority, avoid it, never make the time for it, don’t communicate about it, and thus don’t really sexually mature.
LARRY and JEAN-MARIE had been married for 45 years. They were in my office because she didn’t want to have sex with him anymore. While she sniffled into a hankie, he glowered as she said that while she didn’t mind it too much, he wanted to have it every day and after 45 years of it, she just couldn’t anymore.
My first thoughts, naturally, went to menopause and the thought that Jean-Marie’s libido had significantly altered. But by the next session, the problem came into focus.
In 45 years, they had never changed their routine. When Larry got to bed at night, he always began by touching her breasts until he was aroused, and then penetrated her. Jean-Marie had come to dread that breast-grab. She didn’t really know if she’d ever had an orgasm. All she knew was that she was tired of having sex with him. Larry, meanwhile, was hoping I’d tell them if there was a pill to make her more sexually compliant. She wouldn’t let him touch her anywhere but her breasts. Neither was open to making changes in the way they had sex. Jean-Marie wanted to write sex off completely; Larry just wanted what he wanted, a wife who’d let him get on top of her every night.
Frankly, I would be tired of having sex too if it was that predictable and unvaried. A common thread uniting many marriage partners who complain of poor sex lives is that neither of them are actually very good at sex. Sometimes, it’s because one partner is selfish in bed and doesn’t care as much about how their partner feels. Sometimes they’re too shy to introduce alternatives, too embarrassed to make themselves look foolish if they make a mistake, or too inhibited or guilty to suggest variations that might make it better for one or both of them. Sometimes, one partner’s shame or inhibition casts such a chill over the bed that the sex itself is cold and anti-septic.
My clinical view is that the problem here was chronic sexual immaturity. Larry was still a fumbling fratboy, trying to have the kind of sex he had at age 20, with about the same success most men that age have (i.e., limited). Jean-Marie had never reached her own erotic potential and she blamed it all on her husband. No longer the newlywed drenched with hormones, she was turning into a bitter old lady who had stopped caring about her husband’s genuine need for intimacy and physical love.
For them to heal, they had to restart their sex life on a healthier footing, and learn to spend more time on all the cuddly parts of sex – the fondling and kissing and teasing. Jean-Marie had to let her husband touch her all over, and Larry had to learn to go slow.
I designed a special behavioral challenge for them: they couldn’t have intercourse again until they had each been able to make the other climax with hands and mouth. It took them a while to get going because they both avoided their homework for months. But once they began the exercise in earnest, it was amazing how quickly things began to shift. Re-learning sex, and focusing on new ways to do it, empowered them to return to intercourse with a new sensitivity and understanding of the kinds of pleasure they could give and receive.
Jean-Marie’s libido did not hugely increase as a result but they were able to reach a happy compromise. Larry still wished it happened more often, but Jean-Marie was now enjoying it. Getting such positive results from their experiments convinced Larry to change his attitude about adding sex toys to their intimacy. Though their intimacy was still more mild than wild, they were tickled to death to think they were having sex like “the kids do today.” It really changed their lives. The anger and resentment melted from Jean-Marie’s face and Larry was so much more self-confident and upbeat. It was a wonderful thing.
I attribute some of the lifelong sexual immaturity in couples to an exasperatingly common cultural myth that “sex isn’t that important in a relationship.” When I hear people say that, I take it to mean that they’ve given up and think others should, too. For the rest of us, sex is important in a relationship. If we are monogamous, then our sex life with our partner is critical, because they are our only source of sexual intimacy. Take that one source away or obstruct it, and the stability of the relationship becomes unpredictable. Sooner or later, one or both partners may look for that sense of sexual intimacy elsewhere.
KYLE came to me because he had been having an affair and his wife had just found out. She accused him of being a sex-addict and said that she would give him another chance if he went for counseling and tried to fix himself. If he could come back to her, saying that he’d dealt with it and he’d never cheat again, she would take him back.
Kyle told me he started the affair after his wife had their second child. Her body had snapped right back after the first one, but after the second, her breasts were droopy and her waistline was gone. He accepted the changes as part of the price of having children and wanted to get back to a regular sex life, but his wife pushed him away, telling him she didn’t feel sexy with all the extra weight, that she was too tired from taking care of the kids, and other excuses that left him completely high and dry in the romance department.
Being a 21st century man, he started visiting dating sites as a hoot, but before too long, one thing led to another. He met a woman who shared his libido, and they had started an amazing affair. The sex was so much better than it had ever been with his wife. His girlfriend was adventurous and playful in bed, whereas his wife had always acted like sex was something she just went along with for his sake.
The problem was that he really loved his wife and he couldn’t stand the thought of being apart from his babies. He didn’t know what to do – he’d never had such great sex as he did with his girlfriend, but he felt obligated to his commitments. Should he stay with the hot girlfriend or should he go back to his wife, knowing in his heart he’d never have really great sex again?
If there is any one theme which unites all the diverse people who see me, it is their disappointment with their sex lives. They may come to me for an issue concerning their genital function, but inevitably, there is an underlying emotional reality we have to puzzle through. To help clients make smart sexual choices, I have to understand who they are as human beings and what their relationships are like. And that’s a big piece of what makes sex between or among adults so complicated: we aren’t just dealing with body parts. We are dealing with interpersonal dynamics and psychological landscapes.
While we do not have all the answers, we know more than we ever did both about the nature of sex and how to turn things around emotionally for people. People can overcome inhibitions. People who are inorgasmic can become orgasmic. People who fail with partners in bed can succeed with partners in bed. People who cannot have penetrative sex can still enjoy sexual intimacy. Most importantly, people can learn from their mistakes and make better choices which will bring them much greater sexual happiness.
I’ve witnessed radical transformations in the course of therapy that leave me in awe about our seemingly innate capacity for sexual resiliency and recovery. Even when a person’s early sexual potential is damaged by traumatic sexual experiences, such as rape or molestation, their underlying sexual identity can become vibrant. It’s such an important message, yet so rarely expressed: Good sex is as beneficial as bad sex is harmful. I’ve seen people rehabilitate themselves and re-start their emotional lives through better, more nurturing sex.
Clients may think I work miracles but mainly what I do is give them the tools – the science, the education, the self-empowered perspective – to look critically at the choices they’ve made in the past, and why they made them, and then to start making smarter ones. It is by making better choices that people heal from the pain of the past, regain their confidence and make the changes necessary to get them to that next level of inner peace.
To me, an optimum model of adult sexual health is one we have yet, as a culture, to build: it’s a model that finds a place for all consenting adult sex while supporting standards of health and safety that protect both the individual and the public.
Thus the mission of this second volume, Sex for Grown-Ups: to provide encapsulations of the theories and perspectives that have enlightened and challenged my clients over the years, and which have transformed so many lives for the better, happier, and more orgasmic. It’s my way of offering sex therapy to people who’d never go for sex therapy, and sharing what I know about sex to as many people as possible. This book is dedicated to my clients, to my friends, to everyone who hungers for the truth, and to my loving and beloved life-partners William Brame and Jennifer Kleiman, and to my long-time friend, David Browde.