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?

I think that to a large extent we simply replaced the good girl versus bad girl split with the Porn Star versus Prude. That sexual freedom only translated into the freedom to act like a porn star: do me big boy, yeah yeah - or…nothing, zip. You’re the Prude.

Too many people think that sexual freedom means acting like a porn star, doing things for free that a high class escort would only do for serious money. Oral, anal, threesomes, moresomes. you name it, they do it, because they’re oh so cool and sexually free. (Mind you, they often have to be drugged... read more

 


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.)

So what is real – are humans monogamous or not? Is monogamy a natural state that all humans gravitate to, or is it a social norm superimposed upon a different biological basis?

Well, it seems that monogamy is not biologically-based, it’s socially based. For an in-depth look at this issue I recommend you read the brilliant book “Sex At Dawn” by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha. It’s a thoroughly researched and very entertaining read. The authors look at our biology, at prehistoric remains, at our closest ape relatives, at existing and recent hunter-gatherer societies, and present a very plausible argument that we haven’t evolved to be monogamous, that the concept of “possessing” a partner exclusively is a social development, not a biological one.

This... read more

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.

Sometimes couples split up at this phase, thinking that they’re not right for each other. That might be true, but not always.

Others pretend it’s not happening, they don’t talk about the differences. These couples tend to lose the singular pronoun and talk about ‘we’ and ‘us’ exclusively, and their relationship becomes more and more limited. They are not game to push boundaries, make suggestions, try new things, for fear of creating ‘conflict’.

Others recognise the differences, and blame the other! These are... read more

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.

So the standard approach has three parts:

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?
   

I call this the Adolescent Male Masturbatory (AMM) Model of Sex.

It’s what we in the West have done for millennia.

... read more

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 was so pleased to hear this! For this couple, as with so many people, sex had become a Big Issue. It was a crazy mélange of expectations, obligations, desires, awkwardness, uncertainty, pleasures, confusions, misunderstandings - none of which they were able to deal with as they would with any other part of their lives.

As with other couples who stick with sex therapy, after (in their case) about ten sessions, they had unwound that knotty mess and had learned to speak openly and freely with each other. So sex had lost it’s “heaviness” and had once again become something light and joyful in their lives - to the extent that it had become an engaging and normal topic of dinnertime conversation.

I see this time after time - the ease with which couples come to see their sex lives after doing work with me, how they find a freedom to talk about... read more

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. 



I’ve had a client who ended a significant relationship because he felt he couldn’t last long enough to satisfy his partner, even though she disagreed. This was because his experience of women was that they wanted lots of intense sex. read more

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. 



But people don’t often see sex as self-expression. More often sex has so much attached to it that there is more suppression around it than expression.

Hindered by all the myths around sex in our society, caught up in our heads about what we should or shouldn’t be doing, about what’s right or wrong, confusion about expectations and obligations, sex often is more fraught with fearing than open to freeing.

Think about your own sex life: is there more expression or suppression? Would you describe it more as fearful or freeing? If it’s further down the negative end, what can you do to start shifting it to the positive?

• Is it shifts in your head? Do you need to change your way of thinking?

• Is it shifts in your heart? Do you need to change your way of relating?

• Is it shifts in your gut?... read more

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?

Well, it is inevitable. We are a voyeuristic species and we’re an inventive species, so inevitably we’ll use the latest technology to increase voyeuristic opportunities. And hey, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with watching people having sex to get turned on.

But like all other indulgent activities, whether it be eating chocolate, buying shoes, having a massage, you need to be know how much of a good thing is good and how much slips over into one of the deadly sins (gluttony, greed, sloth and of course, lust – to name four out of seven).... read more

 

Being a sex geek, I am both trained as a scientist yet explore areas more likely to be considered mystical - particularly in the area of sexual pleasure. I myself have ecstatic experiences and blissful states that are quite different and far more pleasurable than what is considered 'normal sex', and I have spoken with many people who also have them, and have helped many others discover these possibilities too.

I am not exaggerating when I say that 'normal' sex is to this type of sex what a fast food hamburger is to gourmet cooking (keeping in mind that sometimes a hamburger is just fine, and you don’t have to like fine food).

So the geek in me asks ‘why?’ Why do some people experience this and not others? What's happening?

Historically it’s clear that we suppressed sexuality in the West, particularly female sexuality, so when sexual liberation came in the 1970s there was a lot we didn't know about sexuality and it's potential.

Scientifically I feel that scientific interest in sex has been so focused on reproduction and disease that there has been very little focus on sexual pleasure, let alone sexual bliss and ecstasy. It’s still mired in the values of the past... read more