Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question and answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us. Explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at Join.SoundsTrue.com. I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at SoundsTrueFoundation.org. And, in advance, thank you for your support.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Liz Goldwyn. Liz is an author, filmmaker, and the founder of The Sex Ed, an online community and podcast dedicated to sexual wellbeing. She’s lectured at museums and universities, including UCLA, Yale, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She’s been featured in Vogue, The New York Times, and Elle. With Sounds True, Liz Goldwyn is the author of a new book, Sex, Health, and Consciousness: How to Reclaim Your Pleasure Potential. Get ready for what is an edgy conversation, a conversation about many aspects of sexuality and the intersection of sex, health, and consciousness that are often considered taboo. Here we go. Here’s my conversation with Liz Goldwyn.
Welcome, Liz. We’re going to be talking about the intersection of sex, health, and consciousness. And that’s a topic that can be edgy for a lot of people, including me.
Liz Goldwyn: [laughs]
TS: Talking about sex, publicly. So here, at the start, I wonder if we could begin with some type of practice to help ground and center us.
LG: I would love to do that, Tami. And thank you for your vulnerability in saying that it’s difficult to talk about sex. Because it is a topic that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.
So, the first thing I’d like to suggest is that wherever you are, if you’re laying down or sitting listening to this, that we take a moment and we feel our feet on the floor. And we’re going to place one hand on our heart. One hand on our heart and the other hand on our belly. And we’re going to take a few deep breaths. And, as we’re taking this first deep breath, we’re going to let our stomach go, we’re not worrying about sucking it in and looking cute. We’re really feeling our flesh, feeling our heart and our stomach expand into our breath. And, as we let out that first breath, we’re going to make this sound. Shhhhh. Almost like we’re telling our mind and our self, “It’s okay,” like we’re a baby. So we’re going to take another in breath. And then exhale with that shhhhh. And now let’s take one more together. And, as we exhale that shhhhh, let’s feel that breath go all the way out of our body, down to the bottom of our feet, into the floor.
And now let’s pause for a moment and I want you to focus your attention on your genitals. And you may not normally focus your attention on your genitals unless you’re in a doctor’s office getting a prostate exam, at a gynecologist’s office, or having sex. But, in this moment of pausing and centering, I want you to tune in to your genitals right at this very moment and just notice how they’re feeling. Are they wet? Itchy? Dry? Numb? Does it make you feel uncomfortable to focus your attention on your genitals? Anything that you’re feeling is okay. The first step is just putting your attention and noticing. All right. I think we’ve broken the ice.
TS: Wonderful. Thank you. Here, right at the beginning, Liz, for people who are being introduced to you for the first time, can you share a little bit about how the whole area of sexual education has been the devotion of your adult life, really?
LG: Sure. It actually started when I was a kid. I was hyper-aware of the adults around me being led by this word, sex. Which no one would explain to me. But it seemed to me that so much of their decision-making process and behaviors were drawn by this word. By the pursuit of it, by shame around it, by fear around it, taboo around it, desire for it. I didn’t really understand why this word seemed to rule everyone around me and everyone seemed to have such a complicated relationship with it.
So, when I was a kid, I would steal my dad’s Playboys trying to understand. My mom is very feminist so she introduced me to that side of the conversation around sex and reproductive health and abortion rights very early. So, my first job was actually at Planned Parenthood, in a clinic, when I was 13. I was a paid intern organizing the media library and answering phones. And, from that age, I understood that there needed to be some sort of comprehensive database or place where people could go to find information and ask questions anonymously. So this was pre-Google, so you couldn’t look up things like, can I get pregnant from anal sex? Or, how to give a good blowjob? Or any of things that people can turn to the Internet now for. We literally had pamphlets. And it was a very small media library.
So fast forward to 2008, I bought the domain names for The Sex Ed, my company. You know, it took me a long time to get this off the ground. Two previous books, both more based around the history of sexuality. First one about the last generation of American burlesque queens. And the last one about sex work in LA in the 1890s. So really focused on, you know, as maybe some would say, the darker side of sexuality. Which I felt was very important to explore because so much of the way our culture frames sex, is around trauma. And, again, fear, shame, taboo, how not get pregnant, how not to have an STD, instead of pleasure.
And so this book, Sex, Health, and Consciousness, is really bringing sex into the light. And how we integrate our sexuality with mindfulness, with consciousness, with our spirituality. Keeping in mind that many of us, most of us, have some darker stories around our relationship with sex. Whether that’s trauma in the past, whether that’s feelings we have about our own bodies, shame around our bodies, things we were told as a child or by society. So it’s really time for me, I feel, to bring this work out and to help other people begin to reframe their relationship with sex and be on a path towards more pleasure.
TS: Liz, right here at the beginning, if someone’s entering this conversation and, as they’re hearing you, they think, “Yes, you know, actually I do have trauma. I do have shame in relationship to my own sexuality. Maybe I have a sense I haven’t been as experimental as I wish. I’ve been shut down. Or maybe this or that harmed me in the past,” how can we hold those feelings that are coming up for us as we have this exploration together?
LG: Well, I think that the great thing about sex is that we are constantly evolving from the moment we come on this planet until when we leave it. So there’s no point in your journey where it’s too late because I get that a lot. “I should know this by know. I should have it figured out. I’ve wasted all this time.” I believe if we look at our sexuality like our spirituality, we wouldn’t say, “Oh, my relationship with God or spirit is, you know, I should have done this earlier.” Wherever you’re at right now is okay. And there is no point on our journey, both with sexuality or spirituality, that everything is healed, right? That it’s all gone. We’re still going to hold these memories that we have, whether it’s shame or fear. They’re going to come up sometimes just to remind us of the work to do.
There’s a point in the book where I talk about the Japanese technique of wabi-sabi [kintsugi] which is when there’s a broken piece of porcelain or ceramics, filling in the cracks with gold. So it’s our scars and our traumas and honoring them that become part of our journey, part of our story. They can actually become beautiful marks of us as the warrior. But we need to be tender and gentle with ourselves. And, also, communicate more about sex, especially with a partner. If we are carrying some heavy shame or trauma, it’s really important that we don’t rush through it, rush through the process of, of, of that, you know, in, in the act of sex. Because we’re missing an opportunity to transform.
TS: Yes. Now, you’re someone who does a lot of writing and thinking about sex and you write that, as a culture, we need to radically redefine how we think and talk about sex. And I want to understand more what this new, radical redefinition is that you’re pointing to. What’s your new imagining of sex education, if you will, at this time?
LG: I think we need to completely burn down [laughs] the system that we’ve all been operating under because it’s based on shame and fear and taboo and trauma. It’s based on a broken system. It’s based on outdated, patriarchal, white supremacist models of the medical system and scientific study. For example, the father of modern gynecology and the inventor of the speculum, used that tool to experiment on enslaved women. So a lot of the ways in which we were taught about sex were also from people or systems that, themselves, were carrying a lot of shame, fear, taboo, and trauma. So, it’s a process of re-parenting and reprogramming ourselves and our ideas about sexuality. And I don’t think there’s any age where that stops.
Even right now, after I’ve written this book, [laughs] and it’s coming out, I’m really looking at myself and having things come up where I’m questioning, “Is this erotic desire actually my own? Or is this coming from issues I have as a child that I learned through my father?” for example. Who was someone who really loved women. There were always a lot of women around, extramarital affairs and, you know, used sex as a way to fill a void. So I think it’s really starts with going back to, as adults, looking at those earliest memories around sex and our bodies and what we learned and reconditioning. And that’s difficult to do. But I think when we want to raise children or a new generation of kids, we don’t want them to grow up with the same shame, anxiety, and fear that we had, so many of us had.
So I really think it’s a process of really looking at the system itself and saying, “Where did I learn this idea that my body needed to look a certain way? Or, I have to orgasm every single time? Or, sex has to only look like this? And why am I judging?” I think in those moments, then, you also start to look at yourself and think, “Where did these judgments that I have on sex that doesn’t look like the sex I have come from? Is there something I’m missing out on here? Was this something I was taught by someone else who had a fear of this type of sexual expression or gender expression? And so is it, actually, not even my own belief? Is this a belief that I absorbed through the media, culture, friends?”
TS: Now, there’s a lot in what you’re saying but I want to just take this slowly for a moment. The whole phrase, Sex Ed, is something that we associate, I think, with what’s happening around adolescence. We’re being offered Sex Ed in school. What’s your view of what good Sex Ed would be like as children are growing up?
LG: I think it would start with a lot of embodiment practice. With talking to kids, very young, little kids, about self-worth and self-esteem and self-love. And really loving and honoring your body and your own sexuality before you give that away to someone else. Before you ask someone else to tell you what pleasures you. I talk to a lot of parents and we have a lot of resources on our site, The Sex Ed, for parents, around… Because a lot of parents ask, “Oh, I’m in a… You know, when is it too, when is it the right time to talk to my kids about sex?”
As soon as they start asking questions because we know that gender and sexual identity is pretty well developed by the time a child is eight. And, even before that, you know that a kid is touching themselves. So, instead of saying, “Don’t do that,” you know, you can explain that it’s healthy and natural and normal to touch yourself. Normal, normal, normal is another word we need to reframe. That it’s not something that you’re not supposed to do. But maybe you don’t want to do it in the living room in front of Grandma. Maybe that’s a private thing for you.
TS: [laughs]
LG: And teaching kids agency over their body, body autonomy. Even things like, you know, we used to force children to “hug your uncle, kiss your auntie.” We can’t, you know, that’s not giving them agency over their body. Kids are a lot smarter than we give them credit for. They’re so intuitive. They’re not self-conscious. That’s the stuff we beat into them. Especially about our bodies and about the way we have sex. So many of the questions I get from people in their 20s, 30s, 40s revolve around insecurities and fear.
I heard a question yesterday from a 29-year-old woman who was talking about the way she masturbates. She said she masturbates on her stomach and she feels like that’s not the right way to masturbate and she’s doing it wrong and she’s ashamed about it. Where did she get this idea that there was a correct way to masturbate? These things start really early. So I think at those very early, tender ages, really teaching us and teaching kids to honor your body. Your body is amazing. Learn what gives you pleasure, because so much of that exploring pleasure happens when we give the agency to other people. Especially young women do this. At 12, 13, when these things are happening in secret, in the dark without any communication. So, if we put some light and openness around it at an earlier age, hopefully we’re raising kids and young adults that are feeling really good about their bodies and the way that they give pleasure, by the time they reach that age where they’re starting to experiment with other people.
TS: Yes. Now, you write in the book that we need to throw out any invisible barometer of normal and that our individual relationship to sexuality is as unique as our fingerprint. And it seems to me that this isn’t how most of us relate to our own sexuality. Instead, we’re comparing ourselves to something or, rather, some expectation. And I’d love to know more your view of how, how we get out of that, of comparing ourselves to something. Like, we’re supposed to have sex or want to have sex X number of times a week or else we’re repressed or shutdown, or whatever it might be about what our actual desires are.
LG: Well, you know what happens when you compare? You despair. [laughs] Compare and despair, baby. So, we have got to get out of that, because if I’m looking at you and saying, “I’m jealous of her life. This is… I want her house. I want her cars,” it’s the same thing as sex. You know, what works for you is not what works for me. We all have to kind of tune into what’s right for us and that’s, I understand, extremely difficult to do, especially with, you know, streaming media, social media, pornography. It’s almost… It can be impossible at times to tune out the noise.
But there is no sort of sexual gold standard that we should be measuring up to, and I’ve interviewed and am friends with some of the top people in the sex work world in the world. That includes adult performers, dominatrices, mistresses of the ropes, burlesque queens, strippers, you name it. And sometimes I’ll have people tell me, who are extremely adventurous, like, for example, Nina Hartley, who has the longest running career of any woman in porn, she actually trained to be a nurse, she’s incredibly bright, she should be a sex educator. She’s, you know, has been in thruples, she’s queer-identified, she tells me that she’s jealous of my ability to have multiple orgasms. This is a woman who’s had more sex than most of us will have in a lifetime.
So, it doesn’t really matter where you’re sitting, there’s always something to look at someone else and feel, “I wish I had that.” But there’s no right answer, you know? It might be right for you that your libido… And again, we have to remember that our libido is affected by so many things, especially for women. Environment, hormonal cycles, whether or not you’re on SSRIs or birth control, where you are at your age, at your evolution, all of these things affect our sex drive. So, we cannot beat ourselves up if we’re not raring to go 24/7. And also, you know, if we’re having bad sex, if you’re having bad sex five times a day, wouldn’t you rather have, like, a mind-blowing orgasm once or twice a week?
That said, I do believe that people don’t realize that sex is something like any other area of your life that requires discipline and mindfulness, for example, exercise or meditation or your diet. These are things that you understand, we all understand and we make time to work at, right? I’m learning to surf in the last year. So, I know that if I don’t practice fairly regularly, I’m not going to be good, I’m not going to get better at paddling and catching the wave. It’s the same thing with sex. Especially in a long-term relationship, I think we think that sex is just, if it’s good right away, we’re just supposed to coast or that if it’s not good right away, that’s how it’s going to be. Not true. You have to put in the time.
I like to tell people sometimes even, especially in long-term relationships, to send an iCal reminder, and it doesn’t have to be sex which means an orgasm. If we expand what that word means, and especially to include foreplay, kissing, you know, touching, licking, spanking, tickling with a feather, anything you want, role play, dirty talk, sexting, sending a nude, all of it. You know, these are things that you can build into your routine, the same way you would if you were training for a marathon or you wanted to try to set an intention to practice meditation every day.
TS: Now, already in our conversation and in the book, Sex, Health and Consciousness, you bring up and talk about areas of sexual life that personally, I found edgy, whether you’re talking about porn or bondage, and I wonder how we can approach these topics without judgment, and at the same time, if you have any principles or, or if you will, codes of conduct that keep people outside of harm, in your view in their explorations.
LG: Well, first, I want to ask you what came up for you when you say you found it edgy. Was it uncomfortable?
TS: Oh, edgy, edgy me… No, mostly what comes up for me are judgments.
LG: Yes.
TS: Judgments that people are using sexuality to avoid certain things, and saying that it’s part of their free exploration. So, these are just my own judgments and your work is helping me work through them and, and question them. And so, I’m, I’m wondering, what do you take as a sort of ethos? “This is the Sex Ed ethos. We don’t go outside these lines. But then outside, beyond that, it’s a free field.”
LG: Well, I think we should start with this idea of judgments that you brought up because it’s a really important one and one I hear over and over again, especially within the field of sex therapy. For example, one of my mentors was the late Dr. Walter Brackelmanns who passed away in his late 80s. He had started the Sex and Relationship Therapy program at UCLA and had been teaching there for over 50 years. Thousands of hours of clinical practice. And one thing that he always would drill into me was that sex and relationship therapists need to really be working on their own judgments before they’re treating other people, and I’ve heard this, too, from people who… Like, for example, Nina Hartley, who I mentioned, saying that it was very, very difficult for people like herself, who are working and living and, you know, their lives are revolving around a more kink/fetish space, to find therapists without judgment because these therapists they often found wanted to look at them, and say, “Well, there must be something in your childhood that makes you want to have sex this way.”
And that’s, I think, where we really need to start, is looking at our own judgments of other people. “Why does it bother me so much that you live your life this way? You’re not hurting me. You’re not hurting yourself. You’re not hurting someone else. So, why is it
incorrect?” Almost any kind of sexual behavior that we might deem edgy has existed since the dawn of time. There’s very little new in sex. We’re not reinventing the wheel. We may have sex robots now with the advent of, you know, AI and technology, but dildos and stone phalluses have existed in almost every culture in every single time period.
So, flogging, spanking, BDSM. This is not new. I think that what’s important to remember is that outside of a few really hard “no’s, which include, you know, very good discussions around consent, so you do not have sex with people without their consent. That includes minors, that includes people who are too drunk to give consent, that includes animals, that includes dead people, because that is, you know, a fetish. There are certain things that are hard, hard nos. But outside of that, if you’re not hurting me and you’re not hurting someone else and what you’re doing is between two consenting adults, there’s actually a lot more dialogue and discussion with people who are in the kink and fetish space, and a lot more that I think can be gleaned and applied to heteronormative, so called “vanilla” relationships.
And one of those things is a concept called aftercare, which I think especially would be helpful for so many young people I know involved in more transactional hook up relationships or using dating apps or hook up apps. And this idea of aftercare, which comes from kink/fetish/BDSM space, is that after a scene, which is a play scene between two consenting adults, and that can include any number of things, there’s a period where both parties need to recalibrate, and we know whether we’re having, you know, missionary position sex or oral sex, anything, after the moment of orgasm, it’s like a transcendence, right? You feel a little altered. You’re in an altered state of consciousness.
And if you’re in a sort of heavier scene, let’s say, that’s involving tying up, bondage or, or some kind of kink play, that altered state of consciousness is even more heightened. So, this period of aftercare, which is discussed in advance, means that both parties help each other come down from this altered state of consciousness and care for each other. That might be as simple as getting someone a drink of water, petting their head, cuddling, wiping them down, whatever it is. Because if that, if that’s not discussed in advance, for example, if I was someone who needed a lot of attention post-sex, and you’re someone who really feels smothered by that, and we don’t talk about that in advance, then when we’re done with whatever we’re doing, I might feel really rejected and abandoned if you get up and leave, and you might feel really uncomfortable with me needing this degree of attention.
So, if this concept can be applied in a casual hookup, this has nothing to do with relationship status or, you know, I’m going to, you know, wife you up or any of that. It’s really just, “This is what I need to feel okay after I’ve just exchanged bodily fluids with you. I need a call tomorrow morning. I need a text within 24 hours,” because that’s unfortunately not what happens for most people in a casual hookup. But if you’re intimate enough to exchange bodily fluids with someone, I think we need to be able to talk about it. And so, I think there’s a lot that actually we can learn from the kink and fetish spaces where there is so much discussion around boundaries, there’s so much communication. And so, I don’t think we can, you know… Some of these things that we might find edgy actually have a lot to teach us.
TS: Yes. Now, learning from the kink and fetish community is something that I’m interested in. I mean, maybe it’s obvious to you, Liz, I think I’m, I’m a pretty obvious person in terms of telegraphing things, although no one really knows about other people’s sexuality, and I’m not really going to talk a lot about mine, except to just say that I am a vanilla lesbian in a long-term happy marriage. But what I want to understand more about when you say we can learn from kink and fetish communities, tell me more about that in terms of boundaries. You mentioned this aftercare concept. What else?
LG: I have a section in the book called Boundaries, Bondage and Healing, which goes extensively into a lot of ways in which I feel that bondage can be a healing tool. A lot of people I know that work in the space, who are mistresses of the ropes or dominatrices, a lot of their clients are women healing from trauma, sexual assault, abandonment issues, divorce, all sorts of things. It’s really inspiring and after being in the space for a long time, meaning researching sex, writing about it, studying it, being in a place where I’m answering people’s questions and knowing a lot of, having a lot of friends who worked in bondage, I had never personally been tied up professionally. So I could understand intellectually what they were telling me, but it wasn’t until my first experience being bound by Betony Vernon, who’s a mistress of the ropes, who’s written a couple of books, one called The Boudoir Bible that’s incredible. She’s also an erotic jeweler, very high-end, beautiful things.
She had been telling me for years, “I want to give you a session. I want to give you a session,” and she travels around the world. People pay her thousands of dollars to do this. So, I was very lucky to be broken in by her, so to speak, and I did a session with her. The first session I wore lingerie and she spent hours tying me up in this intricate braided rope corset, really beautiful. She kept on telling me to admire myself in the mirror, which, you know, initially made me super uncomfortable, right? I think most of us look at ourselves in the mirror and we might cringe or we might think, “Oh, it’s so embarrassing,” or, “I don’t like this or that.”
She also kept telling me during the session to remember to breathe, to be in my body and to remember my yoga, and I wouldn’t have connected those two things until I was actually bound myself, because you’re constricted so tight and if any of you have ever worn a corset, you might know a little bit of what that feels like. It’s almost like being held. The ropes become sort of a womb, a womb-like embrace, and at a certain point when I was ready to be taken out, she said to me, “Before we stop, I think you’ll like this. I want to play this trust game with you.” So, I don’t know if any of you ever played this game when you were kids called Trust, where you have to fall back backwards into someone’s arms, right, and they catch you. It’s a childhood game I think a lot of us have played.
So, I’m in this braided rope corset and all the knots at the end are sort of in the middle of my back and she’s holding onto the end of the ropes, so there’s a bit of slack. So, instead of falling backwards, she has me fall forward, and before I reach the ground, she pulls the ropes taut so I’m suspended above the ground, held by this rope corset, and it was really a major somatic experiencing moment for me where in my body, I felt totally supported. I felt totally safe. I felt nurtured in my body. It wasn’t a sexual thing for me at all. It was a real ah-ha moment, and I understood how this can be such a powerful tool for learning boundaries, for reclaiming your body, for being able to experience what it’s like to feel totally safe, because the safer that we feel, particularly in sex, the more that we can let go.
She’s told me stories that are incredible of working with people who, for example, she’ll do a number of sessions with them and on a last session, she’ll have them choose a color of silk ribbon that they feel represents them or maybe it might be an issue with, you know, a mother, a father, a family member or abuse, and at the end of being bound in this, you know, incredible silk ribbon, she’ll have themselves cut themselves out of it, metaphorically. So, these are body exercises that we can look at if any of you are familiar with somatic therapy or the idea that sometimes talk therapy or being in our heads or exploring things intellectually are not going to push through those layers that we have deep in our bodies, especially with sex. We actually need to feel into our bodies and feel where those spaces of fear or judgment or trauma are arising. So for me, I think bondage can be an incredibly healing tool towards moving past uncomfortable edges, towards understanding, you know, some of us maybe never have experienced what it’s like to feel totally safe in a sexual relationship, especially younger people. And I think it’s really important, first and foremost, to feel safe.
TS: Now, Liz, let me ask you a question. You’ve given a powerful example of bondage as a healing tool. When does bondage not work in that way, and is it possible that it could actually retraumatize someone, and how do we prevent that?
LG: I don’t think you want to be trying things amateur style. If you’re working through a high degree of trauma and you’re even interested in this subject, there are so many professionals, and we actually have a lot of resources on our site, The Sex Ed, that cover bondage, and we answer questions all day long through our site. And you can email info@thesexed to give you resources. And you know what? A lot of people, a lot of professionals, whether that’s a dominatrix who’s working extensively in healing or whether it’s a somatic therapist or pelvic floor therapist, for example, they’ll just do talk sessions with you.
I know pelvic floor specialists who will work with people with vaginismus or who are dealing with assault that they will not touch you at all. There’ll be six months of just talking. So I think that if you’re curious about this but you’re feeling nervous, you need to tune into those feelings and go slow. I’m not suggesting that you have someone inexperienced tie you up. At the same time, if you’re interested in this and you want to experiment in the bedroom, you can also start slow by taking a silk scarf or a necktie. And again, all of these things should be discussed in advance with clothes on, preferably not in the heat of the moment, but before.
You could go to dinner or you could, you know, bring it up casually while you’re sitting at the breakfast table having your coffee. It’s important to communicate about these things and, again, normalize it.
TS: Now, Liz, you know, at the very beginning, I said that you’ve written about how we need to radically redefine how we think and talk about sex. And I notice there’s a part of me that feels like, “Wow, sex is really private.” Here I am, I’m talking about myself and you’re sharing your own stories here in this public forum, and I’m curious what you think about that?
LG: Well, I’m of two minds because you’re not really telling me much, and I’m not actually telling you much, right?
TS: No, and—
LG: We’re talking about it in service. [laughs]
TS: And I don’t want to tell you much. That’s part of the reason I’m asking this question. [laughs]
LG: And I have a podcast called The Sex Ed and I interview tons of people on it, ranging from thought leaders and sexperts, to celebrities, and I’m not interested in what your sex life is right now, unless that’s something you want to share. It’s really about those edges that you’re coming up against. Like, we’re talking about judgment or we’re talking about reframing things or we’re talking… I do think it’s important to normalize our experiences, and I think that talking about things that maybe have happened to us in our past are really helpful so other people don’t feel so alone. You know, I don’t share my personal sex life now, but that’s also something that I’m not really… I don’t really do that in my private life because that’s something for me.
But if things have happened in the past and I think they’re helpful to share in the service of a larger story, then I will share them, and that’s where I’m at. You know, other people share a lot more than I do, and that’s okay for them, and that’s, again, giving space for people to be where they’re at. One thing [laughs] I talk about in the book, and I find this is particularly in heterosexual couples of a certain age is that they’ll be obsessively asking about other people’s sex lives, and it always makes me think, “Hmm, they’re not having a satisfactory [laughs] sex life at home. They’re trying to live vicariously.” And I don’t think it’s okay to pry into other people’s sex lives, again, without consent, you know, for your own titillation.
I think when you find yourself wanting to that, you really want to look at yourself [laughs] and think, “What am I missing out on? Why am I so concerned about what they’re doing?” So I think it’s a balance, but I think sex is something that, you know, in so much of the way we look at sex now, social media, pornography, it has become public. So if we don’t have the tools to talk about it, we’re just letting that technology and that pornography overtake us. We’re not using logic or intelligence to decipher that it’s not real, that it’s performance, and we can get really tripped up into thinking that that’s how our sex lives should be.
TS: Yes. Now, one of the things you mentioned and you also write about it in Sex, Health, and Consciousness is this notion that we can use sex to fill a void. And I’m curious what kind of discernment we can use? When is sex like, “This is just pleasure. This is enjoyment. This is what I want right now,” and when is it, “Oh, I’m actually avoiding something. I’m avoiding some void in my life and sex is kind of making up for some emptiness I feel?”
LG: I think most of us and most of our culture most of the time are using sex to fill a void, which is why we’re not bringing up that energy into our higher chakras or the realm of consciousness. And I think we can look at it the same way we would with like food, drugs, alcohol, reality TV. I mean, listen, I am definitely watching the Kardashians on Hulu. [laughs] Does it make me feel amazing afterwards? Not always, but, like, sometimes I need that mindless entertainment. I talk in the book about how I have this habit of rolling tobacco with cannabis even though I ostensibly quit smoking at, like, 19. It’s just like this thing that I… When I get anxious, it’s like this habit I have, or, you know, eating chocolate bars in a row when I’m watching political debates because I get anxiety.
A lot of us use sex in that way too, because we feel a lack, a low self-esteem. We feel lonely or bored or we just want to feel like someone desires us, and a lot of times it’s not, you know, amazing sex when we’re having it from that place. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with casual sex, I just think we need to be aware of where that instinct is coming from. So if I’m able to pause in those moments before, for example, I reach for the tobacco or eat my second chocolate bar in a row, and I consider whether I’m coming from a place of, “I just need to escape. I don’t want to feel this anxiety,” or “I really want to savor this chocolate bar. It feels so delicious.” I think that’s the first step.
As I mentioned earlier, my dad, bless him, was someone who definitely used sex to fill a void and, I don’t think he was aware of that until really the end of his life. We had some conversations as he was dying around his extramarital affairs and him sort of realizing that he… In his words, he said, “You know, I’ve been an asshole,” and I said, “No, Dad, you just [laughs] loved a lot of women.” And I think, you know, it went back to him having a lonely childhood, and him not having parents that were really present for him, and him feeling at a very early age that, you know, sort of replacing this idea with someone desiring him or him desiring someone, or sex as, like, a substitute for love.
I think a lot of us feel that way. So if culturally, we’re kind of more operating from that level, we’re not tapped into the consciousness-altering, transcendent pleasure potential of sex. We’re not even a tenth of the way there because we are really using sex today the way… We’re just, you know, we’re swiping on dating apps, we’re looking at porn on our phones, we’re scrolling through it with such a short attention span, the way we’re scrolling through social media. Sex is wrapped up in instant gratification. We’re not taking our time. We’re not considering just touching, just licking, just kissing, just breathing as an activity that can be sensual. It’s very much coming from wham bam thank you ma’am.
TS: Yes. Now, Liz, one of the edgy parts of the book, and there were several, had to do with this whole notion of developing porn literacy and what you’ve learned from interviewing porn stars, and I wonder if you can share more about that. I mean, I’m completely outside of the porn world, so I realized I’m not literate or illiterate, I’m just completely ignorant, so give me your Sex Ed 101 on porn literacy.
LG: Sure. Well, I think that, you know, it’s kind of like Amazon, right? [laughs] I know most of us use Amazon, and what’s our relationship with Amazon? Do we use it? Are we against it? It exists. Whatever we think of Amazon, it can be a really helpful tool for a lot of the world to get products super easily, and it can also put Mom and Pop shops out of business. But we’re not getting rid of it. So pornography, it is what it is. Streaming porn, adult webmasters were the first to monetize the internet. Some much of AI that we use in everyday life not related to sex was actually first developed by pornography, by pornographers and the adult industry.
So we’re not putting it back in the box, so the idea that we would just ignore it or not develop skills with which to decipher it and be critical consumers of it, it just makes sense, right? We’re critical consumers of the food we eat, of the media we consume, so we need to be critical consumers of the porn that we’re looking at, and even in the way that we talk to kids about porn. Because it is also a reality that a kid between the ages of eight and 12 is going to see streaming porn somehow. I hear it all the time, and it’s really scary to them to have that be their first view of sexuality. And actually, it was for me.
As I said, I would steal my dad’s Playboys. I have four brothers, so there was definitely pornography in the house growing up. And it was… It freaked me out, to be honest, to see some of the things, some of the videos when I was a kid and not have any adults talking to me about sex, so I didn’t really understand, and I thought, “Oh, is that what it’s supposed to be like?” So this is where porn literacy comes from is this idea that we need to tackle it as a topic when we’re talking about sex education. There’s a really great erotic female film maker…
Ethical porn is something that does exist and that means that we understand how people are treated behind the camera. We understand what kind of boundaries and consent is discussed before the takes roll, which is any kind of professional porn will happen. It’s not like you just, you know, show up and you’re in, doing a gang rape scene, for example. These things are really heavily discussed and forms are signed before those things are filmed. So there’s an ethical porn filmmaker called Erika Lust, and she has a site called XConfessions, and it’s very much directed with female gays. And she’s also a parent. She has two daughters who are both under 15, and she’s developed resources for parents, they’re downloadable, to talk to their kids about porn.
So porn literacy is really having an understanding of, one, this is not real. Two, all of these acts are discussed by paid professionals before cameras start rolling. Three, some things that we see in porn that are extreme acts, like, for example, choking. I see a lot of kids, like, take that practice into the bedroom. You cannot choke another person if you’re not facing them in the face because you don’t know if they’re turning blue. You know, these are dangerous activities to just emulate from a movie. You wouldn’t go watch Mission Impossible and then think that you can drive a car at 150 miles an hour down the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, so why would you think that you can, you know, watch a porn, and that you’re supposed to get hard and stay hard, you’re supposed to squirt, you’re [laughs] supposed… You know, these are…
But with porn, because it is so intimate and because we don’t talk about it, it’s like we develop these insecurities, and I think, especially for men, there’s so much performance anxiety that has grown along the rise of streaming porn. There’s so many… The cases of erectile dysfunction and ejaculatory disorder has totally spiked in correspondence when we look at studies with the rise of streaming porn. So porn literacy is exactly what we’re doing right now, is having this conversation and deconstruction it so it’s not this elusive, mysterious thing that we’re supposed to emulate.
TS: Yes, you write that each culture gets the pornography it deserves. Do you have a vision of what consciousness-infused culture would generate as pornography?
LG: That’s actually a quote from Nina Hartley, who I’ve mentioned twice already, and who’s amazing, and who also wrote a book called Nina Hartley’s Guide to Total Sex, which I highly recommend because she, again, she trained as a nurse. She came up in the sort of radical feminist movement in the 1970s in Berkeley. She’s a really interesting woman, and her book, Guide to Total Sex, breaks down a lot of extreme practices in real layman’s terms, which I think is great for people who are interested in swinging or consensual non-monogamy.
What would our porn look like? I mean, there are a lot of sites that call themselves ethical porn. We can get into a conversation about, like, who owns [laughs] most of those sites, so it is essentially capitalism, right?
A lot of those sites are owned by streaming tube conglomerates, but there are sites like Erika Lust sites, XConfessions, Bellesa, which are geared towards, geared towards women. I don’t think we’re at that place of consciousness-raising porn quite yet. I think that the more that we start to incorporate mindfulness practices, breathwork, mediation even, into our concept of sexuality maybe the closer that we can get to that.
That said, sex is the oldest profession, sex is a basic human desire. Fantasies take all forms and shapes, and a lot of what we think or what we eroticize might not be things that we actually act upon, and that’s okay. I think it’s healthy to have those fantasies and I think porn can be a very useful tool for people that are exploring their sexuality or, you know, might want to try something new. I think it can be extremely helpful. Yes, I don’t think it’s a black and white issue. I think it’s us coming from a place of consciousness and mindfulness approaching that topic.
TS: Yes. Now, at the very beginning of our conversation, Liz, you led us in a breathing practice where we became aware of our genitals and brought breath and attention to our genitals, and in Sex, Health and Consciousness you take this even further and you introduce people to something that you call “stage one of orgasm breathing,” and I wonder would you be willing to share with us, how we do that practice, and can we do it, can we do it right here, right now?
LG: Sure. I’ll walk you through a short stage one of orgasm breathing meditation, and if you’re interested we have a 15-minute podcast called Orgasm Breathing on The Sex Ed. Wherever you stream podcasts, Spotify, Apple, you can find it. The first time I was taught this I, you know, let’s go back to that instant gratification, I was like “Great. I want to have an orgasm right here, right now, hands free.” And, you know, like anything else, practice makes perfect, so it took me a while to get to that place, so I am not promising in this, you know, very short intro I’m going to give you that you’re going to have an orgasm, but these are the tools, these are the basics.
TS: This is truly insights at the edge here. Yes, go ahead.
LG: [laughs] We’re at the edge, Tami, but, you know, there is… The late great Betty Dodson would actually lead groups of women in group orgasm sessions and give them Hitachi magic wand vibrators, to get in touch with their sexuality. These are not new concepts. I’m not reinventing the wheel here. The basics of orgasm breathing go back to, you know, ancient Sanskrit texts and Tantra.
So, we’re going to put our feet on the floor like we did before, although you can practice this laying down, and we’re going to bring our attention once again to our genitals, and we are going to practice our pelvic floor squeezes first. So, everyone has a pelvic floor. It doesn’t matter what kind of genitalia you have. If you have a vulva, you have a penis, you have a pelvic floor muscle. It’s those muscles that you use when you’re stopping pee. So, everyone pretend like you’re stopping pee for a moment and locate those muscles. These muscles, exercising them responsibly can help aid in incontinence as we get older, they can give us really intense orgasms as well as exercising those muscles. They can help with elasticity of the vulva.
Okay, so we’ve located our pelvic floor muscles and everyone’s doing those squeezes like we’re stopping the pee. So the second step is our breath, and what we’re going to do is as we breathe in from the very bottom, imagine your perineum or your pelvic floor muscles as you’re taking in breath from those muscles, and that you’re going to begin to squeeze them as you breathe in slowly as if you’re sucking in breath from a straw. So, it sounds like this. [whoosh]
I’m going to talk while I’m holding my breath, which is hard to do. So I have my pelvic floor muscles continued to squeeze and I’ve got that breath all the way in. It’s traveled in from my pelvic floor muscles, through my belly, through my chest and my throat, and I’m going to hold that in, and then I’m going to slowly exhale as though I’m sort of blowing air back out through the straw, while I’m still squeezing my muscles, all the way down to the very, very bottom when you can not let out any more air, and that’s when we’re going to release that squeeze. So, it sounds like this. [whoosh]
So, let’s try that a few times together. We’re going to breath in through that straw, all the way in while we’re holding that pelvic floor squeeze, and then we’re going to breathe out. We’re still squeezing. Still squeezing, still squeezing, still squeezing. And you’ll notice if you start to let that squeeze go, it might be a good time to continue to exercise those muscles a little more just when you’re standing in line at the grocery store. Keep breathing all the way out, and then you release the breath and the pelvic floor muscles at the same time.
Now, I’m going to ask you again, how do your genitals feel? They feel a little bit different, because now you’ve brought muscle control and breath into that area, so there’s even more attention. Physically, they might be tingling a little bit, they might have a change in sensation. These are all things we want to notice. So, this particular breath and muscle control combination, you can practice that on your own, and the better that you get at it the more fully and deeply you embody into that practice, you can actually bring yourself to orgasm hands free.
Now again, don’t, I mean, you can be like me if you want [laughs], but I expected it to happen right away. It definitely took some practice, but it was a good lesson for me in also asking time for myself to really explore my sexuality without a partner. Something that, you know, I definitely didn’t do when I was a teenager and first experimenting sexually was taking myself on a date, setting the mood, lighting candles, really getting into and being like, you know, “I’m going to be intentional with myself. I’m going to really practice this breath, and pay attention to my genitals and work on bringing myself to orgasm hands free,” and once I got to the place where I could do that, then I brought it into partnered sex, and it was a total game changer, because there, all of a sudden you’re in your body, you’re very much in the present moment, you’re taking a deep breath into those spaces where you feel anxiety or feel uncomfortable, and you’re able to stop and be present with yourself and notice “Does this feel right? Does this situation I’m in feel right? Do I want to have sex right now? Do I want to have sex with this person? Am I truly in my body?”
And it’s quite simple, right, because your breath is free and your pelvic floor muscles are free. You have total control of them. You can do this exercise any time. No one has to know what you’re doing. As I said, you can practice your pelvic floor squeezes in line at the grocery store, sitting in your car, sitting at your desk on a Zoom, on a podcast. I’m doing it right now. [laughs]
TS: And Liz, have you found this orgasm breathing hands free works equally well for men as for women?
LG: Oh, definitely. I’ve taught it in my personal life, and my last relationship was not into spirituality at all, but he got super into breathwork with me, and this breathing, and even got into kundalini yoga with me, because he really liked the way that it made him feel physically, mentally, and the sex was amazing, because, again, this the basis of ancient practice. When we’re, when people ask about tantra, it really, a lot of it besides the spiritual practice, is about breath and muscle control, so it doesn’t matter how you identify.
TS: Sure.
LG: It doesn’t matter, it’s not for any particular gender or sexual orientation. Anyone can do this.
TS: Now, you also write about how we can infuse our orgasm with intention and have a type of empowered orgasm. Can you share some about that?
LG: Sure. So the same way that we might have an altar or light a candle in a church or a temple, or wish on a star, and we can look at those things as a form of intention or energy, our orgasm itself is very powerful energy. Sexual energy is life force energy. It’s your mana, your prana, your ki. It’s extremely powerful. It’s creative energy, and we can harness it.
So this idea of intentional orgasm, let’s take if you’re just solo, for example, masturbating. You can focus your mind on a color in that orgasm, the same way that maybe if you’ve done any breathwork practice or meditation practice, maybe you are visualizing colors or you’re thinking of an intention. It could be even, with the orgasm it could be, “I really want this job,” or, “I want to improve my life in this way.” You can have a specific, you know, goal in mind, because that energy is powerful and it’s yours. It’s yours. It belongs to you, you can direct it however you want, so it is literally setting an intention with that orgasm.
TS: Liz, I would say that this podcast has really delivered on the promise of being Insights at the Edge [laughs]. I want to thank you so much for your work with The Sex Ed, an online community dedicated to sexual wellbeing, and also the writing of the new book, Sex, Health and Consciousnesses, and as we end here, just one final question for you to comment on. You write that, “Pleasure is an essential right now as each of us face another decade of political, social, personal unrest and climate change,” and we are at such a challenging time right now. How do you see this work of sex, health, and consciousness and the intersection being critical right now at this time in our collective life?
LG: I think wherever we can find space for joy, for pleasure, for love, is so essential right now, because we are living in such high states of stress—politically, environmentally, socially—that any moments that we can tune into pleasure, that we can tune into love, that we can tune into joy, that we can find those small moments for ourselves, in our relationships with other people, empowers us to keep going, to keep fighting for the world that we want to live in, to change the system to live in a more radically empathetic, loving, consciousness-based society. And I don’t want to get dragged under by all the fear and trauma that we’re living in, and I don’t think most of your listeners do either, and it can become, be very easy to get stuck in that.
Especially in the last, you know, five or six years it seems like everything is speeding up so much, but if you are listening to this podcast and if you are buying self-help spirituality books, I think that you believe that there is another way, that there is another path, and that that’s what you want to hold on to. And your pleasure is your birthright, your sexuality, your sexual energy, whether or not that’s with another person or just, you know, manifesting that and harnessing that for yourself is an essential part of it, and love.
Love is, you know, to sound hippy-dippy acid trippy for a moment, it is the highest vibration. And love, love is the opposite end of hate. So as much as we can remember that and find those small moments, remember that these things are free and they’re available to all of us no matter our socioeconomic strata, the color of our skin, what our body looks like, how we identify in terms of gender or sexual orientation, and try to operate from that place as a human being, create more spaces to empathize with each other, then the more we can grow and evolve as human beings and evolve this species in this timeframe that we’re living in.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Liz Goldwyn, founder of The Sex Ed and author of the new book Sex, Health and Consciousness, and if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in after-the-show Q&A conversations with featured presenters and have the chance to ask your questions, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community that features premium shows, live classes and community events. Let’s learn and grow together. Come join us at Join.SoundsTrue.com. Sounds True, waking up the world.
