Emily Morse: Finding Our Desire
Emily Morse is not only a dear friend and a stellar human, but she’s also a doctor of human sexuality, revolutionizing discussions surrounding sex and the pursuit of pleasure. She is already a best-selling author, though her just released book, Smart Sex: How to Boost Your Sex IQ and Own Your Pleasure, is the navigational guide we all need in our lives. She also leads a MasterClass on Sex and Communication and hosts the top-rated and chart-topping podcast, Sex With Emily. Through candid conversations, she challenges the inaccurate cultural programming surrounding sex and promotes the value of open conversation to foster connection. Today, we talk about how women often find themselves disconnected from sex and their bodies, often due to social conditioning and traumatic events that occur during our sexual development. Emily helps us consider ways to reconnect with ourselves in order to feel more embodied, more aligned, and more pleasure.
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE: Well, congrats on your book, and I know in some ways it's just a bow on your incredibly long and varied career teaching us all about sex. But as I know from my many conversations with you, you're really interested more in pleasure and desire. And that's where there's a great Venn diagram between our work, even though I am, it's funny, it's like I even wanna call myself prudish, traumatized, I'm all of these things. But in talking to you, your push to reembody and actually get in touch with our wanting is very much aligned for me with the last few years of my life. And also the way that you connect it in many ways to an essential part of our wellness.
EMILY: Yeah, it is. Pleasure is part of our wellness and it's something that we put conditions on, right? We don't deserve pleasure unless we do these certain things or we check everything off our to-do list or I don't deserve dessert tonight cause I didn't work out or I don't deserve to go see a friend. Whatever you look at as pleasure, we often put out the back burner and the whole premise of my work and of this book too is prioritizing pleasure. And also looking at it as something that is presence, pleasure, is productive. Like the more you actually think about your life and you think about what can I do that actually feels good. And I'm not even just talking about sex, that's the other thing. I wanna expand the definition of pleasure. What makes you feel good? And actually how people put together a list.
I went in this retreat a few years ago, cause I love doing all the retreats and learning, right? I was trying to better myself. And they had this thing called, I have it in the book, the pleasure percentage, like how much of your week do you spend doing things that make you feel good, that they're giving you pleasure. And it could be anything. Picking flowers, gardening, seeing friends, going for a walk, cooking, baking, sex. And you had to write it all down. And then there's a formula which I put in the book and then you do like the math and you figure out what percentage of your life, of the week do you have anything pleasurable. And mine was like 1.2%. And I was like, that is a very pathetic percentage of time that is pleasure. And I had already been doing this work, this was like 10 years ago. And I said, how do I up that pleasure? Because then you realize once you start really consciously and intentionally placing pleasure into your life, like how you would plan your weekly workouts or your weekly other things that are important, then I realize that you will have more, you know, more joy in your life. And I tried to get that number up to at least, like my goal is to get up to like 20%, 15%. And I definitely have gotten that number up. So just like in thinking about all the things that are important, we don't prioritize our pleasure. So my mission is to get people to look at that, what makes us feel good, do more of that.
ELISE: Yeah. And we're gonna talk about dissociation and embodiment in a minute because I think so many of us, at least I found I was not really in my body. But pleasure, particularly in our culture and our society. It feels sinful and again, taking it to this idea of the way that you don't have to be religious for these tenets to live in us, there's something about pleasure seeking, we hear so much about our overly addictive society and this idea that all we want is pleasure. And there's still this puritanical vibe that runs through us that we should be denying ourselves that this should all be hard, that it's wrong to receive. We're also gonna talk about the masculine and the feminine. And, you know, that certainly lives in me. It's really difficult for me to shift to a place of allowing myself to feel good. And to even have that sense of the world and the way that I encounter it. And I write about this a lot, but just even the way that I was eating where it was this thing that I needed to do and I would stand and shove food in my mouth, but I wasn't really tasting anything, I wasn't enjoying it. Do you fe find that it's gendered? Do you feel like men are better at allowing pleasure or do you think we're all deeply cut off?
EMILY: I think we're all deeply cut off cause there's two different kinds of pleasure. So now when you're talking, I'm listening to you thinking there is the numbing pleasure. There's scrolling, or there's shopping, or there's a lot of numbing pleasure, but then there's the pleasure that's presence and that's the more embodied pleasure where you're really, you know, what am I feeling in my body right now? What am I tasting? What am I gonna take a bite of food, put the fork down, taste it, like if I've heard that so many times then I look down and my meal's gone. Right? So it's the slowness. I think that's the kind of pleasure that I'm talking about is that is tasting what I'm tasting. Like how does the food taste? How does it feel going down my throat? What are the aftertaste? What does touch feel like? I think we all go so fast. So I think that is not necessarily gendered. I think what is gendered is that maybe men give themselves more permission to do more things that make them feel good.
This is very much a stereotype, for example, I'm gonna go golf, I'm gonna go drink beers or hang out with my friends. But a lot of that is more the disassociative, distracted pleasure. I guess really what I talk about is pleasure that is embodied, meaning it's fully in my body, but I also don't have any judgment around it. It's like, I fully deserve this time with you as a friend. Like when we go on our walks, to me that's a lot of pleasure. It's connectivity, like the authentic connection with friends, getting a massage, being with my partner and doing like, touching that feels good and not feeling like I have to immediately give back. So I think that pleasure is very confusing word. I do think pleasure is a feminine word too sometimes. I think when I talk about pleasure, men sometimes shut off from it. But I think we all deserve more conscious pleasure and slow pleasure.
ELISE: I don't know if other women relate to this, and again, it might be my own pattern of repression, but for me too, my sexuality or sexual energy, I think has always scared me a little bit or it's been dangerous for me as a child or as a teen. And so what I always sense in myself too is this, I can feel it as a physical sensation in my pelvic floor of a tamping down and wanting to control the world by controlling my own response to it. And that might be, I don't know if that's uniquely me.
EMILY: I think that it's more common than not that most of us are disassociated, but I think if your experience, if you wanna talk about it, I don't know how much you've talked about you and your book and I think it’s in your last chapter where you talk about your experience disassociating. I mean, I gotta be honest, just globally, some of the most common questions I get asked is, why am I so anxious during sex? Why can't I focus? Why aren't I feeling it? Why am I thinking about the to-do list? But you get into your own experience of disassociating, which again is really, really common. So if you wanna share more about that.
ELISE: Yeah. I hope it's universal. I mean, the point of writing about myself in the parts that I do in my book is with the intention that obviously the personal is often universal. So hopefully there are women who recognized themselves and my experience and now have a name for it. But I didn't know that I was dissociating, so I would just often have this sensation of spinning and being elsewhere when I was particularly an intimate encounters, but it would happen also in other high stress moments for me where I would find myself spinning in what is now I now know a dissociated way and I have done a lot of therapy around it now. MDMA specifically was really helpful for me and it's was two things. It was the revelation of an early childhood experience when I was probably eight or nine with a friend of a family friend and I don't think that he, I don't even know what he did to me at this point, and I don't really care. Which I know sounds so odd because for me it was more about being in the presence of this man who made me feel like he loved me and found me irresistible and that it was my fault. My responsibility for inspiring this in him.
EMILY: Right. There's something that you did.
ELISE: There was like something about my body or my sensibility, even as a child that was responsible for his reaction to me, I was making him lose control. That's what I remember. And then I had an experience in high school that I had sort of shrugged off. I remember it very vividly, now I would call it a rape. I had spent an entire day trying to dog and avoid this guy and express to him my lack of interest. And then ultimately ended up in a room alone with him. And in that instance, the big thing for me was one, feeling like I inherently was making myself unsafe. And two was I had an orgasm. And then never managed to do that again until my forties in the presence of anyone else, because it was so disconnected between what I wanted, and this I know is universal, that there is this confusion between what we want and what our body does. And then after when I decided to write this book and to go back into that experience, which I was able to recontextualize after understanding what happened to me as a child. Because what I remember was, when I was a child, I will make myself very still and he will leave me alone. And that was my move in high school like, I will essentially go away and this won't happen.
EMILY: Thank you for sharing all this.
ELISE: Yeah. I also wanted to make the point that these stories aren’t uncommon or particularly bad. I think that a lot of women have the same experience, but there's this disconnect, this feeling of betrayal from my body that I had and so I think I, throughout for the next several decades, I was proving to myself that I had control and that there was something that couldn't be taken from me, even though I was with my husband, he's like the best guy in the world.
EMILY: Well, thank you for sharing all that. I don't know how much you've talked about, I know in your book you talk about it, and it's really common. Each of us kind of interpret sexual assault or rape in different ways and it's probably the most common thing that happens to women. And then what happens as a result of that is you just, you literally shut it down. For the first experience you were like, I'm not safe, men are not safe.
ELISE: I'm too powerful.
EMILY: It's my fault. So all these messages: I'm too powerful, I'm, I'm not safe, I did something wrong, It’s my fault, cause you're so young. Right? That's what kids do. Right? You think something goes out, parents explode, or they're fighting or whatever it is. That's what our default is, I did something wrong. It's my body. My body's not a safe place. And so I'm going to learn to disconnect everything. It's all energy. Right? Like your pelvic floor, you did feel tingling, right? Because it's also physiological. Like someone touches you, maybe there was some around, but you're like, I'm shutting it down. And then so it would make sense and then you talk about the experience in high school where then you had an orgasm, which is so confusing right. Anyway, because you're like, I don't want this, but it felt good, but you can't control it. So it's all being out of control. So you decided the next 20 years of life that there's like, no way I'm going to be able to even tap into what I want. What makes me so sad is that you never even got the chance to go on the journey, figure out what you wanted because sex became an unsafe place where you couldn't express to yourself, you couldn't be free, you couldn't be out there. You just kind of had to be a vessel and shut down.
ELISE: Yeah, and I have a feeling that that particular experience is common and as is the programming that women aren't supposed to really enjoy sex and all the rampant slut shaming that we do.
EMILY: Well that's the other thing. I think that is super, super common. And most women are not told, or don't know what we want because it's not okay to be sexual. It's not okay to be lusty. It's not okay to ask for what we want. It's more about performing for our partners, performing for our men. So you had like the 1, 2, 3 punch. Because I didn't think it was okay to ask for what I wanted ever, just because I was told that it was about men's pleasure and if they had a good time, well then it was a good time. They had an orgasm, they got off. I did all the moves that were sexy. I was a great lover. But for you, you couldn't even like go there, so you had to go into overdrive. You probably couldn't even feel it, like did you have feeling in your body?
ELISE: Not really. I think that there was like a deadening and that's been really interesting for me too, and a lot of it is learning where my pelvic floor was and then having an education in that. And this understanding also for anyone who's listening. That, you know, that's like your keagel zone, but we just clench it and so many women I think, don't feel safe and that then it's, you know, then you have a baby and you're worried about peeing all over yourself, but you notice, one of the body work people that I work with is like, just pay attention to how you feel in any situation and around people. Are you holding? Or are you relaxed? It's a really interesting.
EMILY: Interesting, so I've been working on that, that you're gonna love this. I've been working on this as well, because again, yeah, it is the pelvic floor, it's the power source. As our friend Lauren Roxborough says, that's I her book, it's the Power Source. We all walk around with this very clenching tensioning feeling that we're not even aware of. And a lot of women, first off, like about 80% of women have pain during sex at some point in their life. For many women, it's chronic. Every time they have pain when they have sex, even if a tampon goes in, they have pain. And it is because of this, and there's a lot of different reasons, for some women are just born with an overgrowth of nerve endings, but for many of us it's because of our earliest sexually experience. And we'd just walk around with this clenching. So if you think about a clench, there's no way that this energy can flow. Because if you think about the time you've might have felt aroused or turned on for anybody, if you just take a hand or you put it over your body or you touch yourself and you're like, what am I feeling? And then you start to breathe in your pelvic floor and then you start to feel tingles. But for many of us, like you have to actively get into that. But for many, we just don't feel it because we've been shut down for whatever reasons. And I've been calling it lately, and I had a friend who coined this, but she's like, when I'm trying to make a decision and I don't know, she's like, Emily, Is it a vagina blast or is it a vagina clench?
And I'm like, and it's so funny to get touched because that's literally when we talk about our intuition and how we went to follow it. And that's something that I've had to work on too. I shut down things and it's a kind of like a hell yes or a hell no. But taking it back to be like, what does your vagina say? Well, there's messaging in there.
ELISE: There is. And it's interesting to be in your presence, just out in the world because yes, you're a beautiful woman. But that aside, I've been around many beautiful women and when I am with you, I think I joke, I know it's called a vulva, but I say that you have a magical vagina, and I'm sure people can take an inventory of people in their lives who exude, who aren't sexy, they're sexual, and they have sort of this like erotic energy moving in their bodies. And so I will be with Emily and people are like, let me walk this coffee around the counter to give it to you, the way that men and women alike of all ages are just generally attracted to you is fascinating, but I accredit it, besides the fact that you're infectiously appealing to the fact that you're open and you're embodied and you're running this energy that's very open and magnetic. So you, I know in the book you teach us all how to do that, but it is so special.
EMILY: Thank you for saying that. That's really loving.
ELISE: Because you'll be wearing track pants. It's not about a performance, a sexiness. It's about a sexuality that I feel like you exude and that we should all work to exude so that we can have magical vaginas, too.
EMILY: We could all magic vaginas. I love that you think that. Well, thank you. I guess it's good branding if we think I do have that right, good marketing for a fact with Emily, like to have a magical vagina. Sign up right now, 10 days, magical vagina.
Because it's energy and it's a practice, I have plenty of days, moments, times where I am not that. And it's a practice, which I love that everything is a practice I can work on breathing into my pelvic floor. And like a great way to start with that, and I'd love to know some of the work you've done to kind of open up more and feel more like in touch with your husband because it's like, it's really just, at the end of the day, it's breath work, it's eye gazing, it's kegals, the pee stopping muscles that we use to stop and start the flow of urine. I wanna remind people that men can do kegals too, which is always shocking to people. But we all have a pelvic floor. And so even if you're feeling like you are disconnected, like what a great places to start, even for me, even if I can do three minutes a day of breath work, I've got this great app, it’s literally called like ‘Breathing’. And it's three minutes and I'll just go breathe and at the top of the breath I'm like, and I do like a little kegals? And then I release it and I do it again. And that just kind of, that really, it's like a pumping, it starts to to flow through you. So I just sort of, anything we can do, it's all blood flow too. So moving our bodies, walking, talking, releasing, you know, whatever's holding us back. There's a lot to it, but I think that if you just think of the mechanics of it, it's being more in touch with it because talking about your experience or what a lot of us go through with sex or just having shame around it, we completely shut down. And this is what I find from so many women, this is something that is different with genders, is that for a lot of women, we are shut down. We don't wanna take a mirror, we don't wanna look at our vagina. Like if we had pictures of them up on a wall and you're like, pick your out of a lineup, I don't think we could. We couldn't say, what does my vagina look like? Or my vulva? Because we just kind of want it to go away. Maybe there was shame, there was bad messaging around it. Maybe one person shamed us. Who knows? It's just not acting as if we want it. And then you have a baby—I didn't do that, hats off to you, because some women don't love their bodies, and then they have a baby—they’re like, I just had a human come out of my vagina and now I definitely don't know what's happening with it. I'm disassociated. So throughout our lifetimes from shaming, from being told not to masturbate, being told it's not okay, we are disassociated.
ELISE: Yeah. And this again, is so ancient and cultural. I was talking to my friend Laura about this and she was like, please write an op-ed. This is a better op-ed for you. But she was walking around the MET and she was like, it's wild because you look at ancient and modern art, but primarily, you look at these sculptures, you look at these paintings where like every wrinkle on the testicle is rendered. Like it is like an anatomical model of a penis. And then all of the women are Barbie dolled out. You don't see any detail ever. So of course women are like, I don't know what these are even supposed to look like. Much less weather mine.
EMILY: Exactly. I mean it's been shamed, it's been hidden, it's been ridiculed. And then we see the advent of porn, right? Porn's been around for this beginning of time, the advent of porn being available in our pockets the last 18, 20 years. And then that's even made it worse cause women are like, oh, it's supposed to look like this thing that I'm seeing in porn, which by the way, is like, they're cheating towards camera, it’s tough, there’s makeup on it or maybe there's certain vaginas that are attractive. So there's just been a whole shit storm of information for women about their bodies. They're like, it's not okay. It's not safe, it's not sexy, it's not pretty. It's dirty, it's wrong. And then we're supposed to be like feeling sexy and ready to go at the drop of a hat. And sex is supposed to be amazing.
ELISE: Much less like you watch porn and it, I think you say it's like watching F1 and like trying to learn how to drive, but not even because F1 is like a certain amount of artistry and excellence, whereas porn is just pure performance. So women are fed this like you should be shrieking like a banshee and pleasure as like you're pummeled from behind. Whereas I've heard you say like women need fingers, toys, mouth. Period.
EMILY: Fingers, toys, mouth is how we're gonna orgasm. Like that's how we're gonna have the most pleasure. There are people who could of course, have pleasured through a penis and there's reason for that. It's actually anatomy. The closer your clitoris is to your vaginal opening, you're more likely to have an orgasm during penetrative sex, that’s just how you were born. But otherwise it is fingers, it's a mouth. It's a toy. It's slowness. It's foreplay, whether it's verbal or it's touching. There's just all of these ways that we are told, and of course, because of being told that sex is only for procreation for so many years and if I'm telling you now that penis going vagina is not gonna give women the most pleasure, can you imagine just how the cards are stacked against stuff us in so many ways.
ELISE: There's a funny moment in smart sex where you write too about fielding calls over the decades, right? And the way that men are consumed, often obviously erectile dysfunction, but also by the size or girth of their penis. And you're like, it really doesn't matter because for women, it shouldn't be the main thing.
EMILY:No, not the main thing at all. But men are way, I always say, like men are way more obsessed with their penises, I think than women are. And also just to say that there are women who will definitely want that, a larger penis, but just like there'll be men who want really large breasts, and I'm not their girl. I'm not their person and that's okay. Like, you know what I mean? There's something for everyone, but there's so many other things that we can worry about. Just I guess I try to do that in Smart Sex is I just wanna rebrand sex altogether because so much of what we know about it is wrong and untrue and actually just not even true, not factual. And so most of us are walking around with dearth of pleasure and a lot of pain around sex.
ELISE: I wanna talk, a bit about the masculine and the feminine. Cause I was so happy to see you explore this too. This is, I think obvious to to many, but for some it's like new information, that, you know, and the idea is that there's your sexuality, it's different from your gender. We're there as a culture kind of, and then there's masculine and feminine energy, which is different from being female and male. These are energies that are not attached to gender. And we each have masculine and feminine energy. And, masculine being, I don't know how you would define it, I define it typically as like truth, order, structure. This is balance masculinity, divine masculinity, balance, divine femininity, creativity, nurturance care, receptivity. And that we're in and out of our masculine, and we both spend a lot of time in our masculine, I'm probably more comfortable in my masculine and but to have sexual polarity with your partner regardless of gender, regardless of whether you identify as non-binary or are very sort of binary. And absent those, that sort of polarity you're gonna struggle to have sexual tension. So, did you always know that?
EMILY: No, I've had to study this as well. I did not always know it. What I always knew was that attraction was so elusive, like why is it hot sometimes and not hot other times? And what makes attraction, I've always been fascinated by that. But the masculine feminine, just in recent years, by studying with different people and reading different teachers and studying, I realize that I've come to understand it more so about the polarity, with masculine feminine, and I think you do, that’s exactly what it is. It's like we all have it inside of us. I live more my masculine, except for when I guess my magical vagina's on this play, according to you, which I'm just gonna take that with me forever. But no, like in business, getting shit done, being productive, being, I think you cover this in your sloth chapter in your book, which is brilliant because it's like this productivity, getting things done. Check it off the list, keep going. That is, I'm running a business, right? I'm talking about sex. But when I'm sitting here talking about sex, I'm not necessarily in my feminine. Maybe we were breathing for a second, I was in my feminine just now, but mostly I'm like performing and I'm talking to you and we're being directive.
So the polarity and how I like to think about it is like, think about like two magnets, right? Opposite side. You got the plus and the minus they're going to detract, right? Unless you have the opposites. And the opposite is what we're talking about is the polarity of the masculine feminine. So when you think about sexual polarity. I mean, an easy way to think about, it's like who's initiating and who's receiving. Because in every situation, if we are both in a relationship and we're in our masculine and we're both initiating, that's not gonna work. Cause I want it. No, you want it. I'm leading. You're leading. Or if we're both passive, like, I hope that you initiate tonight. Are you gonna initiate? I'm gonna initiate. Then nothing happens. So when every sexual situation, you need someone to lead and someone to follow, to be in their masculine, to be in their feminine. And again, that can switch. It can be two men, two women, non-binary like you said. But it's, it's a concept that it can be tricky removal because first they get caught up on the gender. But all I'm saying is for attract to happen for that sexual chemistry to happen, you need somebody to be bringing more of the masculine, which is the purposeful directed the container the moving, I guess you could start with this initiation and then the feminine, I can give you an example for me, so if I'm in my masculine all day and I'm working and I'm doing my things and I'm in meetings, I'm on my zooms, but then I know I have date night, I'm going out my partner that night. Well I know that if I want to feel, I tend to be more my feminine when I wanna bring the polarity. I mean, there are times where I'm like, okay, I'm gonna give you a massage tonight and I'm gonna leave this. But mostly I'm a receptor, I'm receiving. So what I have to do is to get out of that is I take a shower. I'm going to shower, I'm gonna take a little bit longer shower, or maybe I take a bath. A bath is a great way to get into your feminine, to kind of surround yourself with the hot water to start to touch myself. Like it was more like suds and getting more in touch with my body. I always bring in breath work. I mean to be breath is just something that, doing more breath work because again, a lot of us are just disconnected and shut down and I do the little kegs and I breathe. Maybe I find some fabrics or first I'll like rub oil on my body and I put lotion on or something that makes good fabrics that make me feel good. And I literally just try to ground myself, even if it's like a half hour, an hour before I go out with my partner and just try and feel like, how do I show up in my feminine? And now how I'll allow him to show up and maybe he's making the plan or he's leading, like while it's so tempting to be like, did you get the reservation? Are we going, are you driving? Like the exercises that I've learned, and I've studied with some coaches, there’s a guy named John Weinland who I did some retreats with, he’s fascinating about this, where we would go on these retreats. It was kind of like a tantric, breathwork, masculine, feminine retreat and you get paired up with partners for the evening and I wasn't allowed to, no matter how hard it's, cause a lot of it's like we're getting shit done. I know you talk about this, you're the mom, you're the boss, you're getting things done when like, maybe Rob tries to do things, you're like, I've got this. Like I can make the sandwich better than you. You have to try to allow my partner to be like if we're gonna restaurant, I'm not putting the address into ways, I'm not opening the door.
I'm not making the plans as much as I want to lead it. I have to allow them to lead because when they're leading, they're in their masculine and I'm following, And the same goes into the bedroom. If it's harder to immediately is a little bit more esoteric to explain, but cause it's really energy, it's really like my energy is that I'm showing up, I'm feeling sensual and connected to my body, to my breath, and I'm allowing my partner to make the plans to lead whether we're going out that night or whether we're staying at home. And then he's making the move. He's kissing me, he's touching me, and then I'm responding to that. And that energy is a cycle that is feeding each other to stoke our masculine and our feminine.
ELISE: No, I think it makes a lot of sense. And, like you, I think it's, difficult for women to say, particularly at this moment in time, wait, so I'm supposed to be, you know, submissive and that's not really what it is. It's more of a letting go, which is also difficult. To let people do stuff for us to, again, going back to beginning of the conversation to allow pleasure and let someone make you feel good. I think can be really hard.
EMILY: It’s really hard to do that. But also, so if you take it into the bedroom, now just talking about sexual polarity in the bedroom, it’s like, and I believe this, if I'm receptive and open to what my partner's doing, which I have to show them, like if he's kissing me or doing things, I want to show it in a real way, in authentic way. Like before I started this work almost two decades ago, let's show the opposite of that. I was performative. I'd be moaning. I'd be like, this feels good, arching my back, doing all the things because that's what I thought was good. And that worked. And that worked because then he's getting the feedback that it feels good and that's making him feel more confident in his masculine. But now what I work on is, I love receiving touch, hat’s like my language, my love language is touch—so when he touches me, I let him know like, oh, that kiss feels good or the way you stroke my hand. In fact, we've actually worked with a somatic coach where we learned that pleasure is expansive. So we actually learned how to touch each other, close our eyes and touch just starting with touch on our hands and being able to give feedback and allowing the touch to expand through our bodies. So we've done some slow work around it, but really I just let him know and that's the energy, that's the feedback loop. So I'm feeling good that he's feeling good cause I'm feeling good and then eventually I wanna give to him and he gives to me and it's a dance. But if we're both waiting for the other person or there's no response, like I've been with men too who don't feel comfortable expressing their needs and they're like, mute. I'm like, are you feeling anything? Like, does this feel good? Are you making a moan? Are you making a sound? So I think there's a lot to be said for breath and letting our partner know that they're pleasing us.
ELISE: Well, it's so interesting too, sort of the wide curve. And I know this just from paying attention to you over the years and the breadth of calls that you take, and we're all on this spectrum of, you know, you have people who are like, how do I, I don't even know what pegging is, for example, but like, people who are like wanting sort of like advanced lessons and BDSM or a lot of kink, et cetera. And then you have people who are mute, right? It's such a wide range. And then to figure out how to get people on the same page, to get them to a place where they can feel safe. Let's talk about, I keep calling them trauma wounds. I know that that's not right, but when you, because again, I don't think I'm alone in, we live in a culture that is, teaches unwanted pregnancy, erections and STDs, the Dutch coach, responsibility and joy. But we have horrible sex ed. Nobody's talking to us about going beyond, you could have sex and die to how do you actually get in touch with your own desire? How do you figure out what you want? How do you talk about it? Like we don't, we're inept at that culturally. And I feel like most, I don't wanna say most, but a lot of people don't even know what they like. Or they have so much shame, one of the things that I wrote about that was incredibly helpful was Michael Bader and his research in the book Arousal. And I wanna talk to you about these because you write about this too, but you hear sort of women who think that they're having, for example, a rape fantasy, but it's really more of a ravaging fantasy. But it comes from this feeling that a woman might want to be over overpowered or overwhelmed by both a man's wanting, but also because she has been told throughout her life that she is too much and this somehow is confirmation that she's not, similarly, like fantasies around having someone like put their hand up your skirt under a table where you're sort of being sexual against your will. We’re absolved. I didn't ask for it. I didn't ask. So it was really, it's a really interesting read. But you write about this too.
EMILY: In your book, you write about how women are attracted to everything cause we don't really know.
ELISE: We have an arousal response even though it doesn't track to what we say we want, right?
EMILY: We're just disconnected, so disconnected from our wanting. And so, again, a lot of it does go back to the Dutch countries as they’re teaching responsibility and joy and we're teaching fear and danger. That's our sex ed. Like, just so everyone knows, like our sex ed was you, it's fearful and it's dangerous, and there's no talk of pleasure or joy. So as a result of that, We're going into sex. Like literally we're going into sex without any training thinking this is gonna be scary and this is gonna be weird. And then like, no one's saying, did that feel good? What did you like? So like that whole knowing what we want, like knowing what actually feels good is so foreign, and no one's even asking us that. So I think that, yes, to be like, one of the most common fantasies is like for women in, so what we're talking was like the four sex fantasy or the rape fantasy we're saying, because women can say, well I've never felt okay to be desired. I'll be shamed for it. If I do have desire, I'm shamed for it. So I'll be called a slut, I'll be labeled, that's not okay. And then there's nothing in our culture that's even like asking us for what we want. So sex is very, very confusing and becomes performative. So a lot of the work to do is to say, okay, I'll accept the fact that I don't know that I actually, this is where I started too, I was like, I actually don't know what feels good. I remember partners asking me, my twenties saying to me, you know, we'd be hooking up. They'd be like, does that feel good? And I just say, yeah, everything you're doing feels good. Amazing. And they're like, what else do you want?
ELISE: You wanna keep dry humping my leg?
EMILY: Dry humping all you want. Yes, baby dry hump me. Like, what else do you want? And I'm thinking, I have no idea. Even if I knew, I wouldn't even know what's on the fucking menu. I don't know what to ask for. Because there is nothing that celebrates women's sexuality and says, here's what's on the menu. Here's what you can eat. And a lot of it does start with recognizing that and saying, okay, so knowing what we know, and maybe we've had trauma and I would love to like, it's in my mind, circle back to how you've learned to be more embodied. I think that's just really important to close that at some point to get back to like where, how you got to where you are now from where you were knowing whether women had trauma. A rape trauma that you had? Something like that? Or just, just the cultural trauma of never even recognizing that your sexual being, that you're basically a vessel—really, cause that's what like penetration is or for semen or for birth. So how do we learn what our knowing is like, how do I know? And that starts, the first thing is the embodiment practice. I think that we talk about core desires or core erotic themes.
There was a guy named Jack Morrin, and I think he's the first, like in the seventies he started, cause remember the field of sex human sexuality is still very, very new, especially in our culture at America. We had, like the Kinsey Institute was started to study in the late fifties. And then Jack Moorin talked a lot about desire and he says that we all, and this is still debatable, but in some of it, but basically it's all, we have core erotic desires and we have something that had happened to us. We have these desires that, and I think for me, I like to look at it as a starting point because none of this is prescriptive. Like, like this is not for everybody, but when you think about sexual something sexual, what, where does your mind go? Like, where do you, where do you want this is more of the in intellectual way of thinking about it. But like, when you think of sex, do you wanna be ravished? Do you wanna be desired? Do you wanna be, is it transgression? Do you wanna feel beautiful? Do you wanna feel worshiped? Do you wanna feel, you know, do you wanna be spanked? Do you want aggression? Like, what, what kind of adjectives, like what words come up for you?
And a great place to start that too, is just really, again, but maybe when you're touching yourself or you're doing something like mindfulness practices, like what? Breathing into your public floor, this is how you awaken it. So I'm gonna keep mentioning that, like breathing. What have you wanted in the past? What's felt good to you? Are there any scenarios that come up? And then not shaming yourself for them, it's like we're trying to get colonels along the way of your sex, cause we're all sexual beings. And even if it was tied to an earlier, you know, assault or something like, that's okay too. Because I think for a lot of women who have had that, they might want more of aggressive sex, but then they feel shame rounded. It's a shame stew. But even just without judgment, recognizing what are my fantasies? What has turned me on? And so that's recognizing some of those themes, which he says comes from something earlier in childhood.
Now it could be, and that's because we're going through puberty. So our hormones are racing. And maybe at the time that we started having like an explosion of hormones, we saw something sexual. So like, let's talk about this as a very generic, like you have a foot fetish, right? And that's something that men are like, I don't know why I have this fetish, but maybe you were like 12 years old and you were sitting in math class and you were having some kind of hormonal surge at the same moment where you looked over and Mrs. Jones was leaning down and like straightening her socks. And for a second you saw a foot and maybe that got linked up in your brain as something erotic. And so now you have a thing for feet. And so for women it could be something like, you know, you had a math teacher who you thought was really sexy, and so now whenever you see a man teaching you something in some way, you like that kind of authority.
I mean, there's a long and winding road to think about what you might find at track, but your core, we have these erotic themes. And for me, like here's the thing, so when I study this in grad school, there were some women we have, like one of our homework was fantasies, right? You had to go home and think about your fantasies. Now there are some women who had these fantasies that were like, I'm picturing myself being like penetrated into the ground and I'm being fucked by nature and there's all these trees around me, I'm being like sunken into the ground and I'm just like that's not my fantasy. I don't naturally have fantasies, but what I knew was I like a little bit of a spank. Like I like someone to take charge, wake me up and I like a spanking, or I like to be pulled, or I like to be thrown on the bed. Now that could be because I haven't felt safe to be sexual and I don't wanna be the one leading sex, so I'm giving up my power. But sometimes it just feels good to let go and allowed me to be free. It allowed me to be free when someone was aggressive with
ELISE: Yeah. I think for me, going back to the rerouting or reconnecting and getting the phantoms out of the bedroom, because I think that was what was so present for me feeling like the presence of this guy from high school, or like, I could revoke, I could take it back. I'll show him. You know, and that's not very helpful, 20 plus years later. And so the big gift from that initial MDMA session and this feeling of re-embodiment is that it allowed me to connect somatically with my body. And this might sound so basic, but even just to be able to interrogate, or understand that I was holding certain things in my body. And so, working with a therapist who could say, where I'd say, oh, my right shoulder is hurts. And then it's like, okay, talk to your shoulder. And this sounds so silly, but this was really helpful for me. Okay shoulder, right shoulder, what it is it, it's tired. It like, doesn't wanna be doing all of these things anymore, et cetera. It's amazing the information that you get from your body when you start paying attention and you let your body talk to you. And it's possible that a lot of people have this ongoing relationship with their body from childhood. But for me, it was actually accessing everything that I had repressed and suppressed and shoved down. And as I started to interrogate my body and feel more comfortable in it and not just in my head, it let me get back in my body. And, you know, part of it is partner work and having a really loving and patient husband who I think could always sense that I was elsewhere, but had no proof. You know, again, like I'm a good performer and I like it. I like closeness. It was fun, but it wasn't taking me all the way there. And so getting into this like inquisitive presentness with Rob was what I needed to start being like, oh, I actually function pretty normally if I don't just speed through it and, refuse, you know, I would go straight to like, this is what I want, don’t linger, you know.
EMILY: I mean that's the thing. So much about sex is like the slowness around sex and we just speed it up. But going back to the therapy, which is so key, it's like why body scans are so important, the breath work thing where you're like, you start and so takes forever. You're like really? We're gonna go through everything. If you know those body scans are like your left eye, your right eye, your left, you're like, oh my god. But you go through literal, every part of your body. But that's so you can say like, my left cheek, what am I actually feeling in that moment? So you start with your shoulder just an awakening cause I think there's a lot of times where like, I remember this first experience of this in my twenties going to a therapist and I was not ready for her yet. Now she'd probably be the best therapist, but I went in there and I said, all I feel is anxious. And she's like, well, that can be true. I'm like, that's the only thing I feel. She's like, no, but what do you feel in your body now? And I was like, that's like crazy talk. Like what do I feel in my body? I feel nothing but anxiety. So I think that that's so relatable too, that you have to unpack it. So like in starting with your shoulder and again, they say like, your issues are in your tissues. Right? The Body Keeps Score, right? Your issues, like literally everything that has happened to us is stored in our body. So for you starting to say like, I'm feeling tension in my shoulder and this is not easy. Like maybe for some people it is, and I would love to know who those people are that they literally at every moment know what's happening. Like even right now, like the practice of embodiment is just, okay, I'm feeling your couch beneath me. I'm feeling that my butts on the couch, I got my one foot on the floor. Like that is the practice of embodiment and if you do that throughout the day or during sex even that allows you to be present and grounded and out of your head. Cause the disassociation then, you were probably out of what you were in your head during sex?
ELISE: I was physically absent and it's been powerful for, you know, even my husband who is not nearly as woo-woo as me, has had to acknowledge this. Like his lower back on the left side, his feminine side you would say always goes out. And only now after we've been together for what, 15 years does he recognize a pattern that if I get into a high stress state or something happens to me, his back goes out.
EMILY: Wow. And makes sense.
ELISE: it's interesting, we're such somatic creatures and I'm not saying that everything physical has an emotional root, but there's probably a component.
EMILY: I think most things, I think a lot of physical pain. A lot of physical suffering, a lot of diseases. I'm gonna say I think a lot of it is related to this. We don't know how to process emotions. We literally do not know how to, so we numb, we are addicted, we do all these other things. And what they say, like emotions just take 90 seconds to really process or two minutes to go through a full emotion. But since it's so scary, we clench, we hold. We stop. We do all the things. So I love that you guys are attuned and you can talk about it. Cause even during sex, why I tell people like, I'll do this sentence, I'll start having sex and I realize, cause again, I don't think that you ever in our body, I don't walk around in my body 24/7, at all. But I guess I have a knowing when I'm not. So even during sex with my partner, I'll say, I'll tell when I start getting to this like route where I'm just going through it and I'll like stop. And I'll say, and sometimes I bring them into it, sometimes I don't. But I'll take a deep breath, I'll breathe. Sometimes I focus on my senses and I'll say, and this is great, even when you're driving and you're stressed, but especially in the bedroom, I'll say like, okay, where are my hands? Like my hands are on his body. I'm feeling his skin. What am I hearing? I'm hearing my breath. What am I smelling? I'm smelling the candle. And when you do that loop with your senses, it immediately grounds you in the present moment. It takes you out of your head. Even you have to do that like 10 times during sex. I think that just a great practice for people who are feeling disassociated to come back into the moment as many times you have to do that to learn, to be like, what am I feeling now? And then another thing is just to slow down sex. Like take the penetration off the table and start with just some basic touching exercises with your partner.
ELISE: No, and it's good that you mentioned that too, because Rob is good, once we knew what I was contending with, he's really good at calling me back and sort of in this like, where'd you go? You know, like, where are you, sort of demanding eye contact or presenting? Another thing that I would definitely avoid.
EMILY: You avoid eye contact, but now you can't get away with it.
ELISE: I know, so the book obviously has tons of actual activities and practices, and I know that you're gonna bring us more and like just, I'm gonna put the pressure on Emily right now that all I want for her to do is to create a basic, simple video, like a sub membership where every week you get a very short assignment and video with something to do with your partner. And I think eventually, obviously you can make it a solo study, but just presenting exercises or try this or like actually map your pleasure and tell your partner maybe for once. I actually don't like it when you do this thing that you love to me, like my ears are so sensitive and Rob finally, like year three was like, please stop. I don't like that. The same way that you like ears, right.
EMILY: So you like when he touches your ear, but if you touch his he's not into it.
ELISE: I like to be tickled. Like he finds tickling for after and he does not find it erotic. So, but like it took us a minute to get there. So anyway, I want Emily to create this course.
EMILY: Okay.
ELISE: But having counseled just thousands, probably thousands of people at this point. Like with a live call and show. What is the question? Not to put you on the spot and make you answer the question that you are so tired of answering. Cause part of this, I'm like, Emily, we gotta categorize your content. Cause I'm sure there are certain things where you're like, I've only answered this question 702 times, but what's most present for people? What's are the most common? Is it erectile dysfunction? We mentioned Meredith Chiver, but the way that desire and arousal are mapped culturally to a physical expression is so crazy. And I feel like this whole like, oh, she was wet, quote unquote, she wanted it, is wrong. And also that men should really understand that because often men cannot show a physical sign of arousal when they actually feel aroused or are like, why do I have a boner right now? This is embarrassing. I'm not aroused. So just wanted to say that because it's one of those things that we had to stop in combining or conflating those things culturally.
EMILY: We do conflate desire and arousal and we were never taught it, right? Like, like basically desire is the wanting to have sex and arousal is the physical manifestation. So erection, blood flow, heart quickening. And then how we're going to get to that desire is so, is so hard because that's where it starts, the wanting to have sex and so I can unpack that in a minute cuz one of the top questions I get asked is, yes. Like people have the physical things like I would say off the top of my head, why, like from women, why can't I have an orgasm? Just in general with a partner, why can't I, what is wrong with me? For men there's something like penis problems, I put it under the umbrella like penis problems come too fast, can't come at all. Delayed ejaculation. And then I would say for couples, like the most common thing is mismatched desire. How do mismatch your libidos? How do we want sex at the same rate, the same speed? And that's a lot of what smart sex is about, is like how do you figure out, how do you almost like reverse engineer so you understand everything that needs to happen for you both to ha want to have sex or at least make sex happen at the very same time.
It's like negotiation. It's understanding your body, it's understanding what's turned you on in the past. That's why it's so good to know, like your core desires, which we kind of touched on, but like what turns me on? What time of day am I turned on? What time of month am I more turned on? What has to happen in my environment so I am the most aroused. Which is why in the book I write about these pillars of sexual intelligence because what I realized after all these years, people come to you for tips, right? And I could give you a million tips. I could give you the right vibrator, I could give you the right move for oral sex. I give you a million positions, I give you all the things. And that is like in a book, it is a Bible. It'll all be there. But sex is not a quick fix when there's these foundational challenges that you're having, you're like, I know how to give, you know, oral sex a million different ways, but I'm not in the mood and I'm not turned on. And I know that sex is important cause I love my partner and I know sex is important, but we can't quite hack how to be turned on and ready to go and ready for sex at the right time. And a lot of that is because we don't understand our arousal desire process. We don't know that if the house is a mess and there's dishes in the sink, or I have resentments with my partner, or I haven't worked out in a week, that there's all these factors of why you're not turned on. And so I think getting people to actually think about their sex life in that way and trying to think about like, what do I know to date just from my sexual history, but like, what's happening with my hormones? What's happening with my psychology? Do I have unhealed trauma? And you'd think that that would be sort of obvious, but it's really not. Like if you've been on an antidepressant for years or even just recently, or any other blood pressure medication and now you're like not as turned on. People often don't make that connection. So I try to unpack it for people wherever you're right on your sexual journey, these are the things that you need to know to get yourself to the place where you can have sex and be present conscious, embodied, and have more pleasure.
ELISE: Yeah. And you do a wonderful job of normalizing all of these questions and all of these experiences and making people feel not alone. And I love the central thesis of this book, which is in many ways the same as mine, which is can we just get in touch with our wanting?
EMILY: Yes, exactly. Can we start there and feel okay with it. Without shame. Can we want without Shame? Our books are just the same. Just kidding. So different. I love your book so much, Elise, but it is really about wanting and feeling okay with it and. And knowing that like pleasure is your birthright. What mine is, is like, how do I know it and how do you feel okay with it? And like, there's literally no roadmap for us to know what it is until we do the internal work.
ELISE: You're the best.
EMILY: Thank you, Elise.
ELISE: I’m so grateful that people like Emily Morse are leading the conversations that culturally we so desperately need to be having about pleasure, not just the practicalities of sex. And, while certainly she’s happy to get into the weeds with callers to her show, and it’s detailed extensively in her book, about positions and technique, etc., I think the core conversation she is trying to stoke in America for all of us, is around our pleasure and what we want. And for too many of us, we’ve never actually allowed ourself to examine that as a core driving impulse in our lives. So, hopefully this is a small invitation to begin that work. Thanks so much for listening, I’ll see you next week.
