1 May 2019

Today I am 55 years of age. It feels somehow special. I feel I’ve ‘arrived’ at a new stage somehow. I didn’t feel this when I turned 50, although that was significant too. Fifty-five feels strong, wise, powerful.

I woke up with the phrase 'Own the Crone' going through my mind.

It comes from the three classical stages of woman: maiden, mother and crone.

It’s the ‘maiden’, the young woman, who has been considered the most desirable, the most sexual in our society. We glorify youth, the beauty, the vibrancy of the young. That’s what’s considered sexually desirable.

The ‘mother’ phase of a woman’s life, well, this has been when she's considered the most ‘useful’ – as long as she had children of course, god forbid if she didn’t and remained a ‘spinster’. But was she sexual? Ah, no.

And as for the crone, that dried up older woman. What use was she? She’s past it, a post-menopausal has-been.

Hardly! I’ve never felt more confident, more capable, healthier or more sexually juiced up in my life! So, I’m coming out loud and proud about my age to be a beacon... read more

For centuries we had the Madonna - Whore polarity, good girl versus bad girl: bad girls put out, good girls are virtuous. You fuck the whore but not your pure, chaste wife. Female sexuality was only there to serve men's sexuality: the good girls provided offspring and the bad girls provided pleasure - and never the twain would meet.

Then that ridiculous notion changed with the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s. Finally we believed that sex was good and we should like sex - hip hip hooray, sexual freedom and liberation for all!!!

But has it really changed?

 


There are some old sexual myths of men being “naturally promiscuous” to sow their seed, and women being “naturally monogamous” because it’s “natural” for a woman to be less sexual and on closer examination these myths have no basis in fact. The former because it is a misuse of evolutionary theory and the latter because it is based on historical suppression of women’s sexuality not their biological reality. (See A History of Sexual Misinformation for more on this.)

Sex within intimate relationships can be an extraordinary place to grow spiritually, to deepen in love, expand conscious awareness, to feel more peace, bliss, ease. But it’s also very easy to fall into what’s called spiritual bypassing, thinking that you’re becoming more spiritual but actually doing some or all of the following:

• exaggerated detachment,
• emotional numbing and repression,
• overemphasis on the positive,
• anger-phobia,
• blind or overly tolerant compassion,
• weak or too porous boundaries,
• lopsided development (cognitive intelligence often being far ahead of emotional and moral intelligence),
• debilitating judgement about one’s negative or shadow side,
• devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual, and
• delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being. *
  

Which means you’re bypassing doing the psychological work you need to do to actually be able to develop spiritually.

I see a lot of this in my work, here are the most common examples:

• Spiritual narcissists, where one partner considers themselves spiritually ‘superior’ to the other. This may be because they have studied or engaged in spiritual practices more than their... read more

Phase One: Two Become One

When we fall in love, there is so much newness and discovery that it’s very easy to feel like ‘two become one’, you feel you have so much in common! It’s just like the fairy-tales and you feel that you really will ‘live happily ever after’!!!

This is the ‘symbiotic’ phase of a relationship. It’s a very important part and builds a strong foundation.
 
Symbiosis or Fusion?

However, inevitably, you start to realise that two have not become one, two are still two. The cracks start to appear, your differences are more obvious and unsettling. I call this the ‘aargh’ phase of a relationship.

For generations we raised our girl children to think they’re not sexual, that they shouldn’t be sexual, and if they were sexual - stoning or burning them to death or locking them away in insane asylums. Women didn’t have a chance to explore their sexuality, and neither did their partners.

So, with no alternative, when a man married he basically kept on doing with his wife what he’d been doing with himself for years - masturbating. Since puberty the adolescent boy had been stroking his penis as fast as he could until he ejaculated. So when he got a female partner, not knowing any better, he kept doing that inside her.

Essentially men were masturbating inside their wives.

1.    Find yourself aroused - you have to be horny before you start
2.    Stroke genitals rapidly - it's all about the shagging
3.    Have an orgasm - we all know the 'rule' that sex ends when the man ejaculates - right?
   

A couple who had been regular clients for most of the year finished their time with me recently. At their final session they told me they realized they were 'fixed' because they'd been out to dinner and found themselves happily talking about their sex life as though it was a normal part of life….

I find people's views on sex fascinating, even after over eight thousand hours of talking to people in detail about their sex lives! There's so much diversity around what we think of as “normal” or “abnormal” - far more diversity than you'd think if you based it on the media or general opinion.

I could go on and on about the range of opinions people have about what “normal” is.

But in my considerable experience as a Sex Therapist I’ve discovered that the idea of “normal” has little basis in anything other than what people themselves have experienced in their own lives.

Interestingly, whether they think that their own experience is normal or abnormal seems to be based more on their level of self-esteem than anything else:

• People with high self-esteem tend to feel that what they do and think is normal.
• People with low self -esteem tend to feel that what they think and do is abnormal. 



Sex is one of the great forms of human self-expression. It's a place where creativity, physical movement, pleasure and joy can manifest, just like the other forms of human expression - music, art, design, dance, cooking, sport, even writing. 



Humans love watching people have sex. The voyeuristic elements of sex have been part of human sexuality as far back as recorded history goes, and probably beyond. Erotic art is found around the world from all eras. Even in sexually repressed periods such as Victorian England there was a flourishing trade in postcards of nudes and amazing little paper contraptions that mimicked the sex act. In present times, there wouldn't be too many men around who, as a teenager, didn’t have girlie magazines stuffed under their mattress, which their girlfriends also looked at in fascination.

And now we have a proliferation of porn on the Internet. So is this good or bad?