Ian Kerner, Ph.D: Understanding Our Sexual Potential
“We sort of get into this relational model. And look, when it's working, when sex is a form of intimacy and merging and lovemaking and dissolution of self, boundaries, I mean, it's fantastic. It's such a relationship boost and expression of love that only sex can provide. But very often, relational sex can become really rote. It can become really predictable. It can stop serving our need for kind of sexual expansiveness, which is what recreational sex can do, right? Embracing the aspects of sex, embracing variety, embracing that psychological stimuli. I think that's where, especially for heterosexual couples, we don't know how to integrate the relational with the recreational…,” so says Dr. Ian Kerner, a licensed psychotherapist and nationally recognized sexuality counselor who specializes in sex therapy, couples therapy and relational issues. Ian is a New York Times best selling author of She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman and the co-founder and co-director of the Sex Therapy program at the Institute for Contemporary Psychology.
Today we discuss his newest book, So Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex: Laying Bare and Learning to Repair Our Love Lives as Ian shares the unique methodology he has used in his sex therapy practice to help countless couples rewrite their sex script in order to actualize their sexual potential. We don’t know how to talk about sex, Ian tells us, we have erotic minds but encounter shame around communicating what is in them, leaving us open to impersonal, predictable sex that stops serving our need for sexual expansiveness.
To avoid falling victim to the plague of rote sex, we must rediscover touch, desire, and fantasy, he tells us. By reimagining and rewriting our sex scripts to include both the physical and psychological components of arousal, the promised land of mutual pleasure is within reach. Ian gives us the tools to get comfortable with the discourse around intercourse, and leaves us with the stepping stones to bridge the gap between the sex we are having and the sex we want to be having.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
Putting language around sex…(8:15)
Integrating the importance of touch…(13:34)
Fantasy, psychological arousal and the key to good sex…(25:07)
The plague of ill-cliteracy...(40:57)
MORE FROM IAN:
So Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex: Laying Bare and Learning to Repair Our Love Lives
She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman
Love in the Time of Colic: The New Parents' Guide to Getting It on Again
Follow Ian on Twitter
DIG DEEPER:
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
So we'll primarily talk about, So Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex, but obviously we can go beyond it, although it is a kind of an encyclopedia of sex. I have to say I was showing my husband diagrams and I was like, if you ever wanted to know, it's like the sex ed that we never had.
IAN KERNER:
You know, it's my most recent book and it really came out of me as a whole, like, I, I didn't have to work as hard on it as I thought I'd have to work on a book because it just came out really organically and holistically. And I really wanted to recreate the experience of being in sex therapy with me. And I realized that it, it does cover somehow like a lot of material and the only other book I've ever written that I felt that way about was She Comes First, which also just kind of, you know, just kind of came out of a place of sort of needing to be written.
ELISE:
It's wild, even just as someone who spent years working in the wellness industry and thinking about health from every single angle. And even now I'm like, I mean, there's so many things that I don't know, so snaps to you. I thought the book was revelatory and really interesting. And obviously you span the spectrum of experiences. And I can't, I would imagine that the timing is exquisite as we find ourselves in whatever it is, month 18th, 19th, 20th, like who is counting of this pandemic when we're forced into intimacy or living without intimacy. You must be very busy.
IAN:
Yeah. I am very busy. There hasn't been much rest or peace. You know, you know, what's happened with COVID. Is that so many of the factors that can affect our libidos, or diminish our libidos, are sort of concurrently occurring. You know, for example, just not eating as well, or being able to exercise, or hold on to those routines that can really take a toll on libido, just not having your self-esteem, where you want it to be like walking around in your pajamas or dealing with someone who's walking around in their pajamas. You know, not feeling sexy in any way, you know, and then relational issues being on top of each other and feeling claustrophobic, or being so near experience and not, you know, having any outlets or any external energy, all of those things on their own at any given time can really affect our sexuality, our own sense of self sexuality, our relationships.
And so to have these all occurring, you know, sort of concurrently at once is really taking a tremendous impact, has had a tremendous impact on people. And it's not that COVID is creating new issues in my experience. There aren't like new sex problems that are just specifically COVID-related, it's that all of the, usual issues that people might face, such as mismatched libidos or low desire, or sexual function issues, just experiencing pleasure are all really getting amplified. Right? It's an amplification. So if anything, after 19 months, it's sort of like, how do we dig ourselves out of this and actually get sexy, and get light, and embrace Eros?
ELISE:
Yeah, no, it's interesting. And I don't wanna belabor COVID, but at the beginning I was like, I wonder what's happening to people who are engaged in extramarital affairs, or in other sort of maybe sexual addictions, like what is happening or who suddenly are like, I have no space for my spouse to engage in these things that were, it has to have been an extra challenging time for people who felt caught.
IAN:
So if you're, if you're, if you're cheating, as many people are, you probably already have sort of an ethical quandary, like, should I be cheating? Like you probably have a reason that you feel gives you the right to cheat, but now you have having another ethical quandary, which is like, am I gonna potentially kill this person with a virus? So yes, it's been, uh, very difficult. It's been very difficult for people in open marriages. People are polyamorous, people who enjoy non-monogamy in any way. It's been very problem for singles who sort of found themselves isolated and not having access to sexual partners. It's also been challenging for singles who are only dating somebody for a week or two who suddenly got together and got a house up in Woodstock and a dog. And now they're like, what the hell did we do? Like, you know, so I'm so seeing, like I'm seeing just every side of it, I've had so many, COVID relationships that sort of began with COVID, and they're in couples therapy, they're in sex therapy. So it'll, it didn't take long to get here.
ELISE:
Yeah, it probably feels a bit like those long distance relationships that so many of us had, you know, in college or wherever where you're on that, that fast track to intimacy. Because you're just like talking so much in this highly primed, extreme period that I can imagine on the other side, as you re-enter life and start to see your friends again, and suddenly you have to introduce them to your new partner of a year and a half it's interesting. I’m sure there will be many movies and, and TV shows that come out of it. Yeah. Okay. So you mentioned inhibitors, which in so many ways the book seems to be a little bit about that, like…entirely about that sort of as a thesis that it's these, the ways that we are inhibited that get in the, of, I guess, full not only sexuality or expression of sexuality, but an ability to even know what we're about as sexual beings. Is that accurate?
IAN:
I mean, that's definitely one of the big themes of the book is that we don't really know how to talk about sex. That, we were sort of raised and socialized in so many areas of our lives to, to talk about problems, to solve issues, to communicate. We have, you know, hopefully an expansive vocabulary and sex is such an important area, but we just didn't, we didn't get the language, and we didn't get the mirroring, you know? And so think about it like, throughout life, as we grow up, we're hopefully getting mirrored, scaffolded, supported. And then we sort of arrive at sort of being like sexual adults and it becomes something that's tremendously important. And we just, we don't have the language, we don't have the ability to communicate. And so almost automatically, we are living with shame, right? We're living with something inside of us that we can't necessarily normalize or connect with around. So yeah, I work with a, in my work with, with couples, especially it's all often their first, people who might have been together five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years have often been living in silent desperation, like inches next to each other on the bed. But, but just not talking about this stuff. And, and this is very often the first place where they're communicating and really getting some language to a wrap around their experience.
ELISE:
What I also thought was so interesting and I don't know if this is gendered and more true for women, but I would imagine it is to some extent when you talked about the importance of touch, and how you were citing the work of Linda Weiner and Constant Avery Clark, and talking about how, and this has certainly been my experience of what is appropriate touch, and the way that touch suddenly becomes highly sexualized and supercharged when you sort of go through puberty, right? And for so many girls, women, it's like, you have to give everyone a hug who asks for a hug, there's this lack of consent around touch, which also I think becomes very confusing and, and they write about, and you write about how we need to relearn the importance of touch as also a nonsexual mechanism for love and intimacy. And so we can sort of understand the differences. Is that something that comes up a lot?
IAN:
Yes. So we do need to be more comfortable with touch and we do need to learn to touch. And, you know, certainly in this era today for singles touch becomes, you know, more complicated and there's more fear and anxiety around touch, and that fear and anxiety translate, you know, into sexual problems. And so certainly, looking at the work that you cited is they are practitioners of sensate focus, which is a way of sort of getting relaxed during sex and reintroducing touch in ways that aren't anxiety provoking and, and are incremental kind of exposure therapy. And that, that can be, you know, very important. The thing that I have found though, with a lot of couples it's so, how do you take touch and how do you combine that with eroticism? How do you put some sizzle in that touch? How do you tune in sexually?
We don't wanna be touched in non-sexual ways. I work with so many couples who come in and they can cuddle, they can spoon each other. Sometimes they can spoon each other completely naked and, be in bed, or they can take showers together, they can hug, but at the relationship is sexually inert. So sometimes we can also have a, kind of a, a touch that's disconnected from eroticism. So I think it's also in my work, focusing on sexuality, it's also about introducing eroticism into our lives and, and how we manifest it and how we project it. And how we communicate it. Most couples want that in touch when it comes to sex.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, it's such an interesting, I don't know there was something about it that was a bit of an unlock for me in the sense of also yeah, being able to, to separate platonic touch, intimate touch, sexual touch, and we, in the same way that we lack the language from our poor sexual educations, or as you mentioned, not having things mirrored to us appropriately. I think that there's confusion or at least I feel like, and I, I probably had sort of the, the normal amount of trauma as most women at least, but where it gets very confusing about what kind of touch is this? In a way that makes me wannayou know, be like, don't touch me at all.
IAN:
You know, what else is fascinating to me is that, and this, this definitely connects to touch and how much space we're allocating for touch is that I would say of the heterosexual couples that I work with. And my practice is right now, probably about 55 to 60% heterosexual couples of all ages. And then queer folks. If I'm working with the heterosexual couples probably, and my book is called, So Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex, that's the title. So if I'm asking that to a heterosexual, couple more than 90% of them are going to include intercourse, we had intercourse in some form, or we tried to have intercourse, and if I ask them, well, how long did it take you from the moment of it, someone initiated sex to get to intercourse. Surprisingly, most of the couples that I work with get there pretty much at under five minutes, if I had to average it out.
So we're not really creating much of a space to let touch flourish. At least if we're talking about heterosexual couples. And what I found fascinating is that there was a study of gay men and about 25,000 gay men were asked to sort of describe their most recent sexual event. And, and of that only 35% had intercourse. So it's like 30. So, so what were the other 65% doing? They were engaging in a lot more touch based activities for a lot longer period of time. You know, they were going from an intercourse model really to an outercourse model and putting sex together, putting what I call a sex script, sort of the sequence of things that happen during sex, putting those together in much more novel and personalized ways that really integrate the importance of touch. So I think a big issue too, focusing on one kind of touch, penis and vagina intercourse, and just not developing the facility to explore other types of touch.
ELISE:
Why do you think that that is, why are gay men so much more creative?
IAN:
Well, I think it's, it's actually, I found it's true of gay men. It's true of the lesbians. It's true of trans folks. I think it's almost true of anyone who not part of that sort of heteronormative intercourse discourse is that you've, you've been erotically marginalized, and that sucks. And you have to deal with a lot of shame and you have to sometimes you have to come out of the closet, but you're also not subscribing to the same set of rules that we've been socialized and internalized with. And have internalized. So I think that there's just a feeling of being able to make your own rules, being able to more follow your instincts in the moment. I think more thinking and talking about your sexuality allows you to communicate that. So you're already more prone to having sexual conversations. So I would just say that it's like the fabulous experience of feeling like you're off road, because that's not the road that you wanted to be on or that you've been on.
ELISE:
No, it's so interesting too in that, it goes to that discussion that you start the book with about reactive desire versus responsive desire. No, yeah. Yes. Is that right? And how this idea that men are reactive, which isn't true. Obviously some women are as well, but that is certainly the script, right? That we've given to non-heteronormative men in particular that they're hypersexual, hyperactive. And so in a way it's probably liberating, even if they're not, to not have to at least break the mold of being a responsive woman, for example. Where you are used to being desired, but not used to being desiring, which is so often what we teach young girls in particular.
IAN:
Yeah. I mean, desire issues, especially with heterosexual couples, are the number one issue I deal with. You know, desire discrepancy. And we're so quick to label our partners. I wanna be wanted, why doesn't she initiate? Why doesn't she wanna like, you know, rip my clothes off, or why is it always like sex, sex, sex? And like, everything is so sex-oriented. And you know, what about appreciating me as a fuller person? And, you know, I'm not just a you know, a set of boobs and a vagina and an ass, you know? And so we label and we bring all of these associations. And, and first of all. I think that we are much more flexible and fluid in our sexuality. So we, you talk about, like in the book, I talk about sort of spontaneous desire or what I call highly reactive desire versus responsive desire, which I consider to be more intentional or deliberative in how you approach sex.
I did not by any means, create those terms, just so you know, Emily Nagowski wrote a fabulous book called Come As You Are, which is based on the fabulous work of years of research into, especially into female sexuality. And so we sometimes have these different desire are frameworks, right? We might be a person who can just take in one sexual cue. Oh, here's my wife getting out of the shower. She looks super cute. I feel that in my body, in some way. Arousal gets generated in my body and I'm ready to react to that. Now, it's not like if I come out of the shower and my wife sees me that she doesn't think I'm, you know, sexy, it's just that she doesn't metabolize or take in a sexual cue in the same way. You know, context is gonna be much more important. The simmer in the percolation of cues. So A, we are often in different desire frameworks and B, we have stereotypes about who falls into those frameworks. And I work with plenty of men who do not experience spontaneous desire and are much more responsive. I mean, plenty of women who are in a spontaneous desire framework. So I, I hate when people say like, oh, like I approach sex like a man or, or what, man doesn't walk around automatically getting an erection. You know? So I hate when we just, you know, label each other in these frameworks.
ELISE:
I think, and this might be a stretch, which you can check me on, but when we fall into these stereotypes, as you call them too, it's, then we get into this wider culture of, she made me do it, or this idea, this like deep idea that's in our patriarchal society, that men don't really have control over their own sexuality, that they are so responsive that a short skirt or a glimmer of leg is enough to incite them to completely lose control, make bad decisions, commit violent crimes against women. There's still this sort of pernicious idea that women inspire, men respond. And it's the woman's responsibility for inspiring in the first place, which sort of goes back to this stereotype.
IAN:
Right. Well, it also puts a lot of pressure on men. I work with a lot of, you know, young men who have erectile unpredictability that's of a psychological nature, because they're able to masturbate, and, you know, they're able to get erections on their own. Are they sometimes wake up with erections. And for a while, or we're still lots of people like to blame porn for that. And somehow I don't totally get the association like I've watched porn, so now I'm not ever gonna be able to get an erections or in partnered sex. You know, we, we could talk about that more. I think that there are tremendous expectations for men to be reactive in their desire, highly reactive in their desire, and to be able to produce erections that are of a certain quality. And that puts a lot of pressure on men. And I think it's that act, it's that pressure that is causing such a proliferation of a erectile unpredictability. So, you know, I think we do internalize these stereotypes and they affect us. What what's interesting is, you know, in asking people about the last time they had sex, you really go through what, you know, I call the sex script, you know, how things happen and, and what they're feeling, and all of these issues, whether they are historical or cultural, or around the ways we think we should be having sex, you know, they all come down to, you know, that sex script and they, they all happen there.
ELISE:
It's fascinating, and, and you get into this too as well. I think it's, I don't know if you are talking specifically about Meredith Chivers's research, but you talk about how sort of the miscue you, and again, we love this idea of like, oh, if he's aroused, if he has an erection, then he is aroused. Right. And if she is lubricated, she is aroused, and there's so often a mismatch, right. And the opposite, “Oh, if he doesn't have an erection, then he can't possibly feel or be sexual.” And then we like to spin that out in really harmful ways of, oh, she wanted it, or on the flip side, he isn't into me or there's something wrong with him, but it's that, that misalignment, or maybe the fact that both need to work in tandem in order that for there to really be expression of desire that gets so confusing, because we're such a visual society.
IAN:
Totally So the, the phenomenon that you're talking about is arousal, non-concordance, where, you know, mind and body aren't really aligned. Right. So I may have an erection, but, but that doesn't mean I'm highly aroused. That doesn't mean I'm ready to be sexual. It just means that I, I have an erection. You know, and conversely I could highly aroused, and highly engaged, and highly interested in sex and, and not be able to muster an erection for any number of reasons. Right? So mind and body, don't always work together. Yes, women, women, uh, women can be lubricated, but she might not even know she's lubricated and it might have absolutely nothing to do with desire. In fact, it's a biological response so that the, the walls of the vagina don't get torn up during any kind of sex, you know?
So there is a lot of arousal, non-concordance. And, and what I find is as a culture, when it comes to sex, is that most couples sex scripts are very much based in physical interactions, right? So we're depending upon physiological arousal, that touch, to do all of the work of getting us turned on and, and keeping us turned off and what's not, there is psychological arousal, right. What might be in our heads is anxiety, but what's not, there is enough psychological arousal. And, and by that, I mean, there are some women who can fantasize their way to orgasms without ever touching themselves. There are sometimes when I'm working with men around erectile unpredictability are trying to figure it out. I'll ask them to next time they're watching porn to keep their hands at their sides and not touch themselves. And tell me what happens. And men come back and say, well, after 10 minutes, like I had a pretty firm erection, right? So psychological arousal is really important to good sex, to quality sex. And we don't know as a culture, how to create that except for being in the beginning of a relationship where something is new and novel, and that's the psychological excitement. We don't really know how to co-create and co-construct a psychologically arousing environment with a partner.
ELISE:
I thought it was hilarious, the stats that you cited around, how women get bored in relationships so much faster. Because obviously there's sort of the counter stereotyping that men, men get tired really quickly, but whereas it's women. But in terms of that arousal, and I wanted to go into fantasy and sort of what fantasy can mean for us, and what it can show us in an sort of inverse way about what it is that we actually desire. What makes us feel safe, or desirable. But do you think that the lack of psychological arousal is primarily from shame, and this idea going back to, I can only speak to this as a woman, but if I'm not a sex, if this is happening to me and I'm not a sexual person, or expressing my own desire, then there's I'm side-stepping the shame of being a sexually desiring person, Where do you feel like it? Where does, why is that getting cut off?
IAN:
You know, again, I think we have very erotic mind. Many of us do have erotic minds, but it does come back down to shame around communicating. I was just with a couple today and there was so much confusion between fantasy and reality and what someone wants to fantasize and talk about or, or watch versus, you know, what they wanna do or such a sort of action oriented material culture. Like it's hard to just grasp onto the intangibility of like fantasy. And I think ultimately it does come down to, uh, shame to feeling like we're perverse, we're weird. We're gonna be judged we're deviant in some ways, you know, there's, there's a lot of different ways in which, you know, shame gets introduced into someone.
ELISE:
Can't remember his name, his, a sex therapist or a therapist in San Francisco, but he wrote a book, I think it was called Arousal. And, and yeah, and it's really interesting because he talks about fantasy specifically is the focus of the book and how, for example, for women to fantasize about being dominated, which I think women immediately go to like, I don't wanna be raped or I like, this is bad. This is culturally, not what I want, but that really, that fantasy is about being forced to be sexual, which I think is really interesting and probably something that a lot of people can relate to. And that typically bears there's no resemblance to rape would actually feel like, or be like, or that, you know, when the fantasy, is about a lot of fantasies for women are being forced to be sexual rule in a way that makes it then acceptable and okay to be sexual, which I thought was so interesting. That was a little bit of a light bulb for me in terms of providing context for why we might shut those things down.
INA:
Right, it's a framework that provides permission to be desired, permission to be wanted. It releases us from our shame in a fantasy world because we're not responsible for it.
ELISE:
And I think you talked about an erotic formula for fantasy attraction plus obstacles equals excitement. Right. And is that a formula that sort of regardless it holds true that there has to be some sort of obstacle?
IAN:
No. So, in that I was actually going back to the, the work of, you know, Jack Marin who was a sex therapist and a researcher who died and uh, you know, he was trying to really sort of deconstruct in the way that Michael Bader did with Arousal. Like what, what, what are, what is Eros? What is fantasy? What is its function? And what he sort of came up with was that, that we have core erotic themes, which I, I really do relate to this idea that there are particular scenarios or particular storylines or particular kinds of dynamics like being dominated, or dominating, that appeal to us more than others and recur over time, and stay with us. So we have core erotic themes. Sometimes those core erotic themes can come from a peak experience in which there wasn't an obstacle, or sometimes those core erotic themes emerged because they helped us to work around an obstacle.
Right? So in that case, you know, our fantasies are our allies in that they, the obstacle is creating the energy for a fantasy to be generated that can be hot enough and see enough to distract us from the obstacle and get us turned on. So our fantasies are our allies. Although many of us are afraid of our fantasies. Our fantasies are always trying to do good work for us. They're just trying to lead us into arousal and pleasure, which is why I talk so much about there being a deficit of psychological arousal because our, our fantasies are our biggest allies.
ELISE
Do you think within the context of, of the couples that you see that fantasy becomes threatening to relationship because people fantasize about people who aren't their partner? Or what typically comes up as the reason why people are scared to lean into that, to get themselves to…?
IAN:
You know, I think it's mainly a fear of being judged. Am I perverse? Am I normal? It's a confusion around if I introduce this, if I say, uh, you know, I was just working with, uh, a couple and she enjoys watching porn and she enjoys watching like orgy scenes. And I think her boyfriend saw that and like, oh, well let's become swingers, or let's go to an orgy. Like that was like the last thing on her mind, right? Like why can't we distinguish between fantasy and reality, and that, you know, we don't wanna make our fantasies come true. Now you, you raise something interesting, which is what if I'm fantasizing about someone else? And what if I'm fantasizing about someone else, you know, during sex, you know? What, what does that mean? I'm not into the sex. I'm, I'm bored. I secretly wanna have an affair again?
I don't think we should be judging our fantasies. I think we should be creating a play space for them to emerge, and those fantasies, whatever they are, have to be arousing enough to turn us on, in light of all the turnoffs that are around us. Right? So if I am, let's just say I'm a woman and I'm somehow fantasizing about the Best Man that was at my wedding. That's my husband's, you know, best friend. Well, Hey look, maybe there's two kids in the other room. Maybe there's work that has to be done. Maybe there are deadlines. Maybe my mother is hassling me. Maybe all of that is getting in the way of sex, and no sexual touch is gonna feel sexual because I just can't let myself go there. Well, then we need, we need something psychologically potent to help us get into that aroused state.
ELISE:
So you brought up porn and I thought this was fascinating. So I had always assumed, probably just from reading various headlines and not reading the stories, that porn, and I know that you obviously take great pains to distinguish between ethical porn and problematic porn. And all of that is a given. So we're only talking about ethical porn here. But that even so I had thought that porn would dampen desire or that it was creating dysfunction. And maybe it is creating dysfunction in young boys who haven't really had a lot of intimate encounters. And as you make that, you point out Cindy Gallop’s Ted Talk where she's like, I don't want you to come on my face. But you sort of site research that suggests the opposite, that porn is very helpful, which is not what I expected to find.
IAN:
Yeah. You know, first of all, I wanna say on young men who find that they have sexual dysfunction, like erectile disorder, and blame porn. What I have found to actual the case is that porn is easy, right? Masturbation for most of us can be a pretty easy experience. There's no one looking over our shoulder. There's nobody we have to worry about or please. Porn is giving us all of this visual novelty and you know, what sex with another person can be complicated. I think it's better in the end. I know very few people who would rather than, than be touched, but once you're getting interpersonal, it just requires more attention. It requires more work. So I don't think it's that like porn gives you bad erections. I just think it's that porn is easy and it's easier to get an erection.
Back to your comment, I don't actually don't remember it came out of the Journal of Sexual Research, and it, and it, it was just part of a growing body of literature. That's trying to destigmatize porn, take it sort of out of this alarmist culture, sort of make it a choice of erotic material for someone. And, and yes, it, it was found that, you know, for couples porn doesn't diminish desire. In fact, watching it either on your own leading up to such or watching it together can be highly arousing. Right. So it can really add some valence into sort of our erotic atmosphere.
ELISE:
Yeah. You write “Researcher Nicole Prouse and psychologists, James Faus measured sexual arousal in 280 men and found that viewing more porn increased the participants' arousal to less explicit material. It also increased their desire for sex with a partner. Rather than reduce and interest in real sex porn appeared to improve these men's responses to real life cues and made them more desirous of real physical intimacy.” So interesting and so counter to what I think so many of us have been told that porn is threatening. Not only because your partner is engaging with someone who is not you. But that it would make the real thing less compelling.
IAN:
But I think we're entering an era where, you know, porn is sort of being destigmatized. I work with plenty of especially younger couples where they enjoy porn together and they have a really fun sex life. Watch it individually, you know, it used to be assumed that only men watch porn, but I encounter probably almost just as many women. I won't say as many women as men, but a lot of women also just enjoying it. And it kind of comes down to a question that I often ask couples once I hear about their sex scripts and sort of the physical behaviors they engage. I say, well, what do you do to generate arousal with, with your minds? How do you, how do you generate that mind-based arousal? So whether it's watching porn, whether it's listening to a sexy podcast, whether it's reading erotic literature, those are all easier experiences, I think, and that we're taking in someone else's material. But some of us may be able to look each other right in the eye and, you know, fantasize. So I think porn just sort of has its place in being one of the ways in which one of the tools we can use to generate that mind-based arousal.
ELISE:
I'm gonna out myself as not a major purveyor of porn, but in the context of orgasms, and this is what you also hear is that it shows women achieving orgasm sort of like very loudly and easily and without anything other than just like being pounded, right? So I'm sure the porn that we're actually talking about is much more nuanced and the way that it depicts female pleasure. But how do we culturally start to, and I loved the conversation about orgasm and how forcing orgasm can also be in its own way kind of a trauma, and that as a culture, orgasms are amazing, but we need to focus on these other things, the outercourse, the other types of touch. And you talk a little bit about research that's recent about sort of the physical different, like how women's anatomy can determine the types of orgasm that are most achievable for them. How do we get like, without rehabbing sex ed, which obviously needs to happen. How can people become more aware of how they're uniquely built?
IAN:
Right. So, you know, A, you're right. Like we grow up in the shadow of the intercourse discourse. So, you know, we expect, you know, intercourse that pounding to be able to provide the pleasure and you know, and, and we know, and this was my first book, She Comes First that, you know, I said that we're going to a plague of illcliteracy. And, and I believe that that is somewhat true today, remarkably, that we just don't get that the cliterous is the powerhouse of the orgasm. And I think the study that you were referring to was the one that talks about the cliterous vaginal distance, the distance between sort of, uh, the head,
ELISE:
The 2.5 centimeters.
IAN:
Yeah. Yeah. That makes a big difference because there's a distance between the glands of the clitoris, the head of the clitoris and the vaginal entrance. And so most sexual positions, most intercourse positions, you know, only intermittently are fail completely to stimulate the cliterous. And the closer ones clitoris is to the vaginal entrance. And there is variation, you know, in centimeters can make a big difference in terms of being able to have orgasms through intercourse, which might be why a lot of women say, well, that's a vaginal orgasm, right? It's still a clitoral orgasm. It's just the clitoris, the glands of the clitoris is closer to the vaginal entrance, the vestibule, and so there's more chance of an orgasm happening. But you asked a question like how do we get that knowledge out there?
ELISE:
Yeah. You can only see so many people, I know you're writing books, but yeah.
IAN:
I mean, I am encouraged that, first of all, I will say that many couples come in and understand still again, we're talking about heterosexual couples, they're having intercourse, but they recognize that there needs to be clitoral stimulation as well. And so we're also going through a Renaissance and sex toys where there are so many fabulous, beautiful, amazingly designed sex toys. And I find it so interesting that so many couples are incorporating those sex toys into the actual sex. And so I think there's increasingly space for literal stimulation during intercourse to happen. So I I'm encouraged by that. I'm encouraged by the, the boom in, in sex toys. I'm not encouraged by sex education in this country at all. And I'm not so impressed with, you know, a couple's ability to, to talk about this stuff and for a woman be clear about her needs and desires, or for a man to be genuinely curious and, and open. So I think it remains a challenge.
ELISE:
Yeah. I love though. And I think it's an, it's a really good framework to think about the, this idea that there are three types of sex. This is, I guess, for heteronormative couples, which is procreative, and then recreational, and relational, which gay couples would be doing recreational and relational sex, probably not procreative. And I think it's interesting because, like procreative sex sucks. I think anyone who has tried to get pregnant, it's really fun. It's really fun to pee on sticks and have sex on command. But sort of taking that out and then focusing on either the recreational or relational is maybe a good framework for how we think about our sex lives. Yeah. Just a different way.
IAN:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, penis and vagina intercourse is the procreative way of having sex, but damn, that's what it's good for, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's good for relational or recreational sex or it doesn't mean it's, you know, needs to be the dominant form of, you know, interaction. I think, I think what starts to happen in our culture though, and this is perpetuated by couple's therapists, it's perpetuated by media, is we kind of get stuck in relational sex. We get stuck in the relational, right. We, we no longer in a purely procreative model, you know, unless we're extremely abiding of certain religions, you know, we can kind of dispense with the procreative model. But then what happens is that we sort of get into this relational model and look when it's working, when sex is a form of intimacy and merging and love making and dissolution of self boundaries.
I mean, it's fantastic. It's such a relationship boost and an expression of love that only sex can provide. But very often, you know, relational sex can become really rote, it can become really predictable. It can stop serving our need for kind of sexual expansiveness, which is what recreational sex can do. Embracing the kinky aspects of sex, embracing variety, embracing that psychological stimuli. I think that's where, especially for heterosexual couples, we don't know how to integrate the relational with the recreational. I call it recrelational sex. And so, yeah, I think for, for most of us, it's about bringing the recreational into the relational.
ELISE:
Or just letting recreational takeover and recognizing that every relationship is gonna have its its phase. Right. Maybe you start relationally, you move into procreation, and then you get recreational.
IAN:
Yeah, yeah. And why, why, why isn't recreational…exactly. And why isn't like, why is recreational sex stigmatized and relational sex so valorized? I mean, why can't we enjoy a sexual experimentation and, and casual sex and all the different types of sex that we wanna have, you know, over the life cycle. I think, you know, relational sex sort of just gets ex stole and we kind of lose the recreational.
ELISE:
But I think that those categories are really helpful even as sign posts, even when you're dating. And you're like, this is just recreational. Yeah. Like there's something about even stating that and being clear about your intentions, that maybe people won't get so confused because I think that they all get conflated and then you're not on the same page and, and it becomes, then we really get stuck in these stories.
IAN:
Yeah. Yeah. I think what you're saying, Elise, is sex has many different expressions, and many different uses at different times in our life. And think about the sex that you're having think about the sex that you wanna be having, which really comes down to the basic concept of the sex script that I write about whether you're single or, you know, in a relationship, you know, getting to know yourself and the things that you desire and that give you pleasure in a way that you can communicate about it and, and make it part of the sex that you're having. So there isn't a gap between the sex that's in your mind and what's actually happening in the bedroom.
ELISE:
I love Ian Kerner's gentle and thoughtful rebrand and of sex into its three disparate parts: procreation, recreation, and relation. Because I think it takes a lot of pressure off, or it has the opportunity to stop making sex always about so many things when maybe it just needs to be fun. His book, this last one. So Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex is literally an encyclopedia of sexual know-how with diagrams and a lot of detail. We got to really only the very beginning. He also offers a really quick and fun survey of how, within context of religion and early prehistory, sex got its bad name, which you know, I am always here for one of those conversations.