In Your Pants with Dr. Susie G - 3 Ways to Orgasm Without Ejaculation

Starting point is 00:00:00 on this episode yeah it's i like to say porn is cocaine for your penis or your sexual response system i've never heard it said that way but for me it really helps you're listening to the in your pants podcast i'm your host dr suzy gronski your penis friendly pelvic health physical therapist sex counselor and educator helping you get in the know down below in today's episode i dive into the realms of men's sex and relationships with certified sexologist and men's sex coach taylor johnson taylor brings a wealth of wisdom and authenticity offering practical strategies for men to enhance their sexual pleasure without ejaculating we unpack the intricate layers of internal sexual scripts and societal gender

Starting point is 00:01:05 expectations around sex that often breeds performance anxieties we dissect the influence of pornography on sexual experiences and expectations and then we dive into how couples who may have grown distant in their emotional and sexual relationship can reignite the flames of their intimacy. Tune in and engage your senses. This is one episode you don't want to miss. Taylor, welcome so much to the show. Thank you so much for having here. I'm super excited about this conversation and grateful that you brought me on. Me too. Well, let's dive right in to my first question, which is what are three strategies that men can use to enhance their sexual pleasure and extend their sexual pleasure without ejaculating? Yeah, that's an awesome

Starting point is 00:02:06 question. I get asked that question a lot too. And just to preface a little bit of my background as context, like this is something I used to really struggle with years ago. Like I was the guy that would ejaculate in 30 seconds regularly, 10 seconds a minute. I was totally demoralized and I felt all kinds of shame and my identity as a man was just destroyed from that. So I deeply understand the pain and the challenge of that experience for an extended period of time over years. So if you're listening, I just want you to know that's where I'm coming from. And I did a lot of work to figure it out, to be able to fix it in my own life and then eventually transition into helping people perhaps like you with the same issue. So that's where I'm coming from. And the

Starting point is 00:02:51 first thing that comes to mind is, and this is going to sound like, oh, everybody says to do this, but breath is one of the most powerful and underrated sexual techniques that people just don't really think about so much. So I'll give you an example. Anytime I'm about to be sexual with my partner, I'm in a long-term relationship for anybody who's curious, we're almost four years in, so that's the context that I'm in, I start to breathe deeply as a practice. And I breathe through my nose because there's a whole list of benefits that I'm not going to describe right now that you can read about, about nasal breathing. But I breathe deeply and fully through my nose, at least 20 full exaggerated breaths as a practice to sort of prime my sexual response

Starting point is 00:03:37 system, to prime my nervous system, to go into intimacy in a more balanced way. And 20 breaths is a lot. It's a lot. So you could maybe start with 10, right? But if we were to take even three deep breaths right now and really pay attention to how we felt, how our minds felt, how our nervous system felt afterwards, there would be a really noticeable, tangible shift in our body. And so in the sexual experience, what that does is it, it sort of opens the gates of pleasure to the rest of your body. So for so many of us men, like when we have sex and we're starting a sexual experience, there's so much of a focus on our penis. A lot of the times it's because that's how we've masturbated. And that's just where our minds go like, Oh, touch me there. And when that is the

Starting point is 00:04:22 case, it's so much easier to ejaculate before you would want to, because there's not as much awareness throughout the rest of your body. And there's not as much pleasure happening through the rest of your body. So try the deep breathing thing and see what happens. It's pretty miraculous. And I'll also say in sex, when you are getting close to the point of ejaculation, most guys maybe haven't thought about this yet, but you'll notice if you really pay attention, your breath actually starts to become more shallow and more frequent. It's a thing that happens without you even realizing it. And so people are like, ha, ha, ha, ha, like that, and then boom, right? But if you catch it and you can start breathing more deeply, then it's kind of like surfing. You can use the power of your breath to stay ahead of the wave of the ejaculation response

Starting point is 00:05:10 and then learn to ride that. And I think the breath is, like, that should be done before any other, in my opinion, any other sort of more advanced technique that you might have heard of out there. Like I think foundational number one is start doing some breath practice. So I'll pause there and see, Susie, if you have anything you wanted to add, because it looks like you raised your hand at some point. I'm just nodding and agreeing with you, essentially like totally making valid points because when I work with men in my practice, the first thing is breath awareness, breath focus, slowing down, regulating the nervous system because ejaculation and erection are ultimately reflexes. And we can train these reflexes with conscious awareness. And so without the awareness piece, without recognizing one's own arousal level or gradient, you know, where that is, of course, of course, there isn't going to be a sense of space, slowness, presence, and extension of that pleasure tolerance, because it is just purely acting on reflex and those reflexes are certainly trainable and i'm glad that you mentioned that training historically you know in our culture is just focused on the

Starting point is 00:06:33 penis centric you know that's where all all the pleasure comes from but you're you're really bringing in the main points here of that's not just the main focus of one's sexual pleasure or capacity even. There's so much more to the experience than just your penis. A hundred percent. Yeah. And you might find if you really focus on your breath and do that as a practice for an extended amount of time during lovemaking, you might actually start to legitimately experience sexual pleasure in your shoulders or in your arms or in your entire body. And it's pretty miraculous. And there's all these books that go back generations about these different esoteric techniques, et cetera, to have these cosmic sexual experiences. Even without any sort

Starting point is 00:07:21 of that language, you can have amazingly expansive, beautifully sexual, full body, pleasurable experiences just with breath alone. And so there might be some people listening who are thinking, well, that's going to be weird. How am I going to breathe really deeply with my partner being there? They're going to look at me like, ah, this guy is doing this weird practice thing it it doesn't have to be awkward like that and actually one of my favorite things to do in the beginning of intimacy too is to just sit close with my partner or be close together and really feel the tension that's building between us and even say hey baby let's breathe together let's take 10 deep breaths together and that way you're bringing the whole experience into a shared

Starting point is 00:08:07 breath practice that's really beautiful and can actually be highly erotic too. So it's a way to share that with each other. And you can even pause at different parts of sex and do that. So yeah, I'm a huge fan of the breath. I love that practice that you just described, this partnered embrace, this nesting, because a lot of the people that I work with have experiences of trauma, sexual pain, et cetera. And that technique that you just described would be such a beautiful way to experience safety, to experience eroticism, sensuality, emotional intimacy, sensual intimacy with their partner without that heightened sense of needing to be protected or this bodily protective response, which can certainly inhibit one's capacity to

Starting point is 00:08:57 experience pleasure because there's so much more at stake, right? So I love that embracing, attuning to each other and the energy in in in a very safe and sensual way yeah yeah which to me segues into the second thing that i would say which is to in the beginning of actually having penetrative sex with somebody like we're skipping over the whole foreplay experience right now but say you're starting to have penetrative sex with somebody most guys have received the programming from movies or TV shows or porn that you need to start going quickly, immediately. And for a lot of guys, what that does is that puts our system into that, you know, fast breath, heightened pleasure, focused on the penis sensation that pushes us to orgasm, pushes us to

Starting point is 00:09:48 ejaculatory orgasm. And so I like to encourage people to actually start slow and even start slower than you think is slow, because there's a beauty and an incredible amount of pleasure that can happen in, in the just like molasses style, sexual penetration movements with you and your partner that a lot of people and myself included, you, I can numb out to that sometimes when I forget that that exists, but if you really slow down and sensitize yourself to the experience of slow movement with your partner, while you're breathing deeply, you'll find that every millimeter of motion is full of so much more pleasure than you might have otherwise imagined. And I'm not opposed to fast, animalistic, rough sex when the time is right for that. It's beautiful

Starting point is 00:10:39 and it's amazing too. And there's something to be said for allowing your nervous system to relax into the experience of being sexual so that your body and mind can realize that ejaculation isn't the goal. And once your whole system realizes that, then it becomes easier to have sex in whatever way you want going forward. I want to go back to something you said, because you made a distinction between orgasm and ejaculatory orgasm. Can you expand on that? Yeah. Well, that's a whole podcast itself. I imagine so. Yeah. So the difference between ejaculatory orgasm and non-ejaculatory orgasm, in my experience, is pretty massive. And there are different techniques to do it different ways. And a lot

Starting point is 00:11:25 of guys think, oh, I want to have an orgasm without ejaculating. And they think of the typical genitally focused contractile experience without the refractory period, without the actual semen coming out. And that's not really what I'm talking about. There are certain hacks you can do that I don't particularly recommend. So here's one, for example. Some people teach this. When you're approaching the point of ejaculation and you cross the point of no return, as we call it, then some people say, squeeze everything as tight as you possibly can, squeeze your pelvic floor, create an insane amount of tension in your body, and then you'll hijack your ejaculatory response and experience somewhat of a genitally focused orgasm without the ejaculation. But I don't

Starting point is 00:12:09 recommend that. It looks like you don't recommend that. The people who originally taught things like that are actually recommending against that now too, because it's a sensitive area. It's a sensitive area down there and you don't want to create pain or tension or stagnation or like enter a muscle cramp in your pelvic floor or whatever else could happen while you're doing that. So that is one hack that people talk about. It's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something that takes usually a longer time to train your nervous system to be able to enter into what I call the state of orgasm. It's a state of consciousness almost that can feel like your entire body is ejaculating for an extended period of time, but you're not. And you're not

Starting point is 00:12:53 going into the refractory period afterwards. And the first time this happened to me, it was a total accident actually. And I thought that I had figured out sex and my ego became massive afterwards. And I was like, I am the most amazing sexual guy I can. And then all my sexual problems came back after that. And it actually took me years to get back to that experience again. So it was a really good, humbling learning experience, but it was like, you know, when you go hiking and you know what it's like to look out from the top of a mountain, like you don't really forget that when you come back down, you just might forget how to get up there, you know, or maybe the path changed something like that does that kind of make sense at least it totally makes sense yes

Starting point is 00:13:35 thank you i and i i imagine that this is a more nuanced conversation that we can we can broach but unfortunately we don't have time for that today because there's so many other questions i have for you i did i did want to to also go back to when you had mentioned the couples perhaps a couple strategy to slowing down and being more present in that second strategy that you described now how would someone do this individually with themselves yeah that's a great question you might want to take a breath just like that because i noticed like it's so interesting even in these conversations i noticed my mind is like all right next topic boom like jump right into it and there's such a nice thing that happens in my nervous system when i pause even to just

Starting point is 00:14:21 take a single breath. And so what I encourage pretty much every guy I work with to do is to shift their masturbation habits. I'm guessing you probably do this too, but I have guys start what I call a self-pleasure practice of masturbating for at least 20 minutes at a time without ejaculating. And throughout that 20 minutes, I have them experiment with different things, like doing different kinds of breath practices, like making sounds on their exhales. Most guys are mute in sex. And if you're having sex with somebody else, like most people who have sex with men, they're not actually ever really sure if the man's in pleasure because he's sort of just like being there stoic through the motions. And then he has an ejaculatory orgasm. And maybe for those

Starting point is 00:15:06 10 seconds, the partner's like, oh, he's in pleasure. Great. But prior to that, they're like, oh, I don't know. It's kind of a mystery. It's kind of a mystery. So making sound in the self pleasure experience is another way to, well, one, open up more pleasure in your whole body. And then if you get into the practice of that, when you get into a sexual experience with another person, it will demonstrate to them that you're in pleasure too. And that will probably arouse them more. And then it becomes this upward spiral of beautiful sexual connection. Exactly. And in the self-pleasure practice, I also encourage guys to treat it as a lovemaking experience, you know, like shift how you think about it. Like now you're

Starting point is 00:15:49 going into lovemaking with yourself. And I don't necessarily mean like you're sitting in front of the mirror with your hand on your heart, singing slow, like Enya, new age songs. I mean, like- Nothing's wrong with Enya. I mean, I personally like Enya. No, totally. I think Enya has some great songs and there's some new age associations with some of these kinds of practices. So I just like to say it. I encourage you to get up on your hands and knees and act as if you're having sex with somebody, but have sex with yourself. Roll around in your bed, bite your sheets, growl, do all those sort of things that you might do in a lovemaking experience. Because then you're getting into your more primal self and it's bringing your

Starting point is 00:16:29 full system online versus what most men do and which I have done for years in my previous younger life was just to lay there still like your hand goes up and down you're not so embodied you're not making sound usually you're fantasizing about something else and you're disconnected from your internal experience and that trains your body in the opposite direction for sexual success with another person and it's just it's fun no sorry go ahead because it just it brought to mind ejaculatory inhibition also so you have the other side of the spectrum right we're talking about ejaculatory control in some way. I don't really like to use the word control, but for simplistic purposes, we'll go with that. But delayed ejaculation or ejaculatory inhibition,

Starting point is 00:17:15 part of what you were saying really kind of lit up for me in this aspect of like, that's just taking you out of your body experience. So how are you supposed to build up your sexual energy and connect with your inner sense of sexuality, sensuality, arousal without really being taken out of that experience and then having it be so mundane and routine. And of course, that's just going to not really work in the long run. Maybe it does for people, but I don't know. Can you talk to us about maybe the opposite of what we're talking about? Well, I'll say that I 100% empathize with the strategy of ejaculating as a stress relief mechanism right like it feels great it does great things to your neurochemistry like there's

Starting point is 00:18:04 of course like and i like to get now in my practice i like to get my stress relief elsewhere so i'm not headed into the sexual experience with this pent-up tension that i need to release because i've found that that opens up a lot more doors for me but to your point of the delayed ejaculation experience one thing and it might sound counterintuitive but one thing i like to encourage guys to do is to start a self-pleasure practice without even thinking of ejaculation as the goal at all, like decentralize ejaculation from the sexual experience and make it just about what pleasure can you experience in 20 minutes? You know, if ejaculation is even off the table completely, what, what can you find in your body that feels really good? What feels erotic to you?

Starting point is 00:18:54 Like maybe try touching your arms or touching your nipples or touching different parts of your body that you haven't normally touched and just use it as a pleasure building practice. And I don't necessarily mean that when you touch your arm, you're going to feel sexual pleasure per se, but you can experience still the pleasure of giving yourself a massage while perhaps you're still sexually aroused or partially aroused. And then you can go back and forth between those experiences. Then you're orienting your brain and your nervous system to experience more pleasure and more pleasure. And the more you do that, the more your system is going to be oriented towards pleasure. And perhaps the less important it will be if you ejaculate.

Starting point is 00:19:34 But also ironically, what happens for a lot of guys is the more they do that, the more easy it becomes to ejaculate because they're not trying to get there, you know, and they're more immersed in the moment of the experience. I, oh my gosh, I'm going to go on. Maybe there's a little bit of a tangent I'm going to take us on. not really, but it's to your point. So the person that you're describing that's doing these practices and kind of connecting with oneself. Now, the other side to that is the partner's expectation. And in the culture that we have been, or I'm going to speak for myself, that I have been brought up in around sex, sexuality, et cetera. There's this illusion

Starting point is 00:20:17 or false expectation that if my partner doesn't ejaculate, that means something and it's usually negative. So it's almost this like, there's expectations from the other person as well that are coming into that sexual dynamic that also is going to impact the pressure for this person to perform. And it doesn't have to be with delayed ejaculation or early ejaculation. In general, there's some expectation that a partner has, a false expectation of what sex should look like and what satisfaction or the end should look like. Can you speak to that, the partner's role in what you're describing? Yeah, 100%. And I also want to acknowledge that like it's not the partner's fault it's not your fault either like this is the context of the

Starting point is 00:21:17 society that we've grown up in and if you're partners with a woman like women have received a massive amount of sexual programming with the belief that says like your role is basically to please the man and the metric of that is whether or not he ejaculates and your pleasure actually isn't that important you know and so even if women some women have done a fair amount of work on themselves, like that program still lives in there. It's kind of insidious sometimes and it can come out when you're at least expecting it. So there's two things I would say to that. Number one is that that's why creating a solo pleasure practice is so important because you can build a really strong foundation within yourself and a sort of sexual inertia that you

Starting point is 00:21:58 can then bring into a sexual scenario. So that way, even if your partner does have this unspoken desire for you to have that experience, you've built up such a foundation within yourself that you're kind of standing your ground, not in a disconnected way, but you have this sort of like grounded vitality that is contained in a really beautiful way. A lot of people find that attractive. The second piece I would add is that this is why communication is so incredibly important. And most people want to improve their, when most people want to improve their sex lives or specifically their relationships, if they're in a long-term relationship, they might not actually need to learn a new sexual technique. They might actually just need to have a proactive conversation

Starting point is 00:22:45 with their partner about their sexual desires and their sexual fears and their sexual boundaries. And I've found that if you approach those conversations with intentionality and love and care, usually people are really receptive to that. So you could say, hey, this is one of my favorite ways to do it. Like, hey, I would love to have a conversation with you about our sex life at some point. Are you open to that? If so, let's schedule it. That way you're kind of opening the doors in the moment, giving an opportunity for somebody to say yes. And then you can have it at a different time where you can both prepare to come into that conversation resourced. And that way you don't ambush somebody with the, hey, I don't always want to ejaculate every time we have

Starting point is 00:23:21 sex. I need to talk about it with you. As you're eating dinner. Yeah, totally. Because these sexual topics are nuanced and most of us hold some charge in our body around them, whether it's shame or fear or something like that. And I also want to say that those conversations work, even if you're not in a long-term relationship and maybe you're having a one night or a one week stand with somebody. And I believe those can happen in healthy ways too. Prior to this relationship, I did have some of those experiences. Always before we were intimate, I would have an intentional conversation with the person to talk about my own preferences and practices. I'll say again, most people who have sex with men never get to experience the man bringing an intentional conversation about sex to the interaction before sex happens. So that in and of itself is usually a massively refreshing thing and erotic and big turn on for people. People are like, oh my God, he's an intentional sexual man. Wow, what is lovemaking going to be like? And in those sexual experiences, they were beautiful and they were connective and they were short lived in the sense of maybe one or a couple of nights. And they, then it was this like beautiful experience for them to have a sexual experience with somebody where they got to reprogram some of their own beliefs too and leave the experience fully in pleasure.

Starting point is 00:24:50 And just in case anyone who's listening is wondering, like, I still also love ejaculatory orgasms and have them on occasion, but I do have sex without ejaculating with my partner. And I don't feel at the end like I've cut myself off from pleasure. I don't feel like it's a sacrifice. I feel like it's actually a net gain of pleasure for myself and my life and for our relationship. And then it also makes when I do have an ejaculation with her that much more special and pleasurable for both of us versus this thing that just happens on default on autopilot. So that's a larger conversation, but I do generally think that decentralizing ejaculation from being the main point of sex or a metric of success is a game changer when it comes to sexual experiences. Thank you so much for letting me go there with you because

Starting point is 00:25:44 I think this is an important message that everyone can really learn from and maybe start to reframe their, you know, traditional sexual narratives or these internal rules that we don't know we have, but we follow and all the things. So I appreciate you letting me kind of go off on a detour with you. We've kind of, you've kind of touched on this a little bit already about this performance pressure, anxiety, and this notion of, again, almost like a one-sided job that a guy has, right? Like, well, my job is to give my partner an orgasm. That's what I need to do. And if that doesn't happen, then it's not satisfactory. So from the perspective of the, let's say, the penis donor. How would you unpack that as far as reducing that performance pressure,

Starting point is 00:26:53 but also that pressure to give, and I say in air quotes, give their partner an orgasm? Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that question. And it's definitely nuanced and there are multiple things happening. One of which is the very real internal expectation and desire of the partner to be given air quotes and orgasm from the partner. And so that lives in a lot of people, you know, and that lived in my previous self too. I remember different sexual experiences where I like the person air quotes, didn't give me an orgasm in the way that I was hoping for and didn't bring me to that point. And there was this like distaste or dissatisfaction or frustration, like, well, you didn't give me what I deserve or needed from this experience. So therefore like

Starting point is 00:27:46 X, Y, and Z, right? So I just want to normalize that most people or a lot of people have that in them at some point. And that's where, again, intentional communication about sex outside of sexual experience can be so helpful to set expectations and to set desires and to have that conversation like, hey, I would love to have a sexual experience with you where neither of us focus on this just as an experiment, just as an experiment to deepen our connection and see what other kinds of pleasure we could have. Are you open to trying that and noticing what happens you know just as like a doorway opener and that that can often be a good eye-opening experience for people you know you can even set a timer or better than setting a

Starting point is 00:28:36 timer set a playlist that's that's music you both like i love that idea for a certain amount of time yeah it's a great idea that way you're not hitting the alarm right you know there's like oh you can tell, oh, there's three minutes left of this song. That sort of a thing. That's great. That's wonderful. Communication, really, it just comes down to talking about sex. I say this to folks that sometimes the physical aspect, the mechanical aspect of sex is much easier to do, but talking about it is so much more challenging. And it's only because it's been so stigmatized and there's so many again these rules and negative sexual narratives and what should and shouldn't happen and gender roles and all the things that really imprison us you know it's not helping to attain

Starting point is 00:29:31 sexual freedom and liberation and full allowing oneself to be vulnerable in that situation in that experience for all that it has right because and then and then that's what's coming into that sexual experience is all the baggage. And so, yeah, of course you're going to have a mediocre experience because that's just pretty heavy. Yeah, totally. And especially as men, like one of the pieces of programming we get is that you're not supposed to show vulnerability. You're not supposed to ask for support. You're not supposed to do anything where you need another person. You're supposed to be entirely self-sufficient and have it all figured out. So there's an extra fear or weight of talking about sex from a vulnerable position because we've been trained

Starting point is 00:30:16 not to in so many different ways, you know, don't show your weakness, et cetera, all of this stuff. So I just want to acknowledge that that's there. And the process of speaking about it is one of the things that can actually start to break apart those layers of self-protection that aren't actually necessary, you know, for the most part. And I just want to jump back and say one other thing too. Like, yes, conversations are super, super important. And also there is a lot that we as men can do for self-training purposes as well. You know, it's this interesting sort of thing that happens with sex where somehow for whatever reason in society, a lot of people just have the belief that we should just naturally be skilled at sex and we should naturally be good

Starting point is 00:31:05 at it and but that's not the way anything else works right like you want to learn how to play the guitar you take lessons your practice you want to learn how to do jujitsu like you study for a long time like nobody goes to the jujitsu gym for a month and expects to be good at it you know like yeah and so but for whatever reason in sex maybe it's because it's like oh we're naturally you know air quotes supposed to do this for the sake of procreation sure but all this really required for procreation is like 10 seconds of intercourse followed by ejaculation. Like, yeah, so that's, I think that's a tangent, but I just want to say like self-cultivation and self-practice is also a really powerful way that you can build resource

Starting point is 00:31:50 and confidence within yourself that then reduces performance anxiety and sexual anxiety when you go to connect with somebody else, because you've spent so much time learning what you like and learning what works to keep you in the realm of pleasure that doesn't push you towards ejaculation, that there's just like, you know, the well is bigger, the resource pool is bigger. And even if it gets drained a little bit in the sexual experience with somebody else, there's so much more there because you've built it up over time. I love that because you're right. I use this analogy often of an itch. Like if you have an itch that you want scratched and you can't reach it, you need to know exactly how you want that itch to be scratched, go harder, go faster,

Starting point is 00:32:30 go slow or go up, go down, left, right, whatever. You need to know that for yourself and so does your partner. So there's that expectation that a partner needs to know exactly without any information whatsoever, needs to know exactly how to press all your buttons and turn you on. That is just a complete farce. It's a complete fallacy. How ridiculous is that? Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it is ridiculous. And it's like the Disney fairy tale of sex. Please know exactly everything I want without me describing it to you, including my deepest wildest fantasies. And please do those without request, you know, now. Right now, you know, yesterday, forget it. Yeah. Yesterday. I hear you, Taylor. I hear you.

Starting point is 00:33:18 And I think the more that we can openly discuss the reality of two humans, human experiences and individuals who know one individual is alike and to be flexible, right, to like be curious about your partner and for them to be curious about you, because as you evolve as a human being, as your partner evolves as a human being, one's needs, wants, desires are also going to evolve. It's just like an ongoing curiosity landscape, you know, but we can only dive into that if we are going to allow ourselves to be flexible. And like you mentioned, to love, to care, to be curious in those experiences. Yeah. So there's one really, really important thing that I want to name that we haven't talked about yet. And I don't think this topic is black and white, but it definitely impacts this dynamic that we're talking about right here. And that is use of pornography, watching pornography. And again, I'm not saying all porn is bad. But what I will say is that 99.9% of porn that's out there, if you're a guy watching porn, you can type in exactly what you want, find exactly what you want, like high reward, basically zero risk, and you get it immediately. Then you can go on to the next fantasy and the next thing. And it's all designed to be 100% eroticized for your fantasy, without you having to communicate to anybody or put in effort to make it happen.

Starting point is 00:34:57 And so one of the subtle insidious ways porn can kind of start to reprogram your brain is you might start to develop some unconscious expectations that women should just be doing that for you because you're so used to going in and just getting that without risk or without effort in the porn experience. And this is something that like most people aren't thinking about as much with porn, but it can 100% impact your sexual experiences with your partner and or partners, you know, does that kind of make sense? Totally makes sense. Yes. No. And I'm glad that you brought that up because expectations, one's own experiences can shape the reality of, you know, partnered experiences, right? Like if your expectation, as you mentioned, is for your partner to know exactly what your curated fantasy list is at a push of a button, then you're going to be very disappointed, very disappointed and dissatisfied. And really, when we're talking about sexual imagery, sexual film, pornography, whatever you want to call it, it's the intention behind – I think always, always we have to think about intention and use of a particular modality or a sexual resource, right? And for some people and couples, it enhances, it can enhance, right? Their sexual experiences. But really, again, it goes down to the how, how am I using this? How is it impacting my own, my own sexuality and then my expectations and sexual connection with others? And, and I'm glad that you did bring this up because I think it is one of the number one questions that I often get asked is, you know, what are your thoughts about pornography? yeah right yeah it's i like to say porn is cocaine for your penis or your sexual response system i've never heard it said that way but for me it really helps it helps it land for me because like

Starting point is 00:36:58 okay i'm not 100 opposed to drugs either but i haven't done cocaine since i was like 20 right and like maybe once a month maybe once every six months or whatever frequency works best for you with the understanding that this is potentially a drug that does have, you know, research validated effects to impact your brain in certain ways, like understand the impact, proceed with care, proceed with caution, you know, it absolutely has a huge impact. And the research that I'm aware of that's out there says that men, when they watch porn by themselves in isolation and don't talk about it, that's when it's at its most negatively impactful. That's when it's most negative. Compare that to if you're watching porn with a partner while you're in connection with them

Starting point is 00:37:47 in bodies in the moment, then there's that actual human connection there. Then you're sharing a human experience versus an isolated, usually dissociated experience with pixels on the screen. And to jump back 15 minutes in the conversation to add this other piece in too, some of the guys I've worked with who have the delayed ejaculation experience, they have watched a fair amount of porn too, and they're so used to such high stimulation that they need such high stimulation to get to that point. So a lot of times it's a process of actually just cutting out porn completely and resensitizing the body to subtle amounts of pleasure that eventually will turn into large amounts of pleasure. I don't know if you or

Starting point is 00:38:29 anybody listening has ever done a fast from sugar or a break from processed sugar for a while, But after you go seven, 10 days, even, it doesn't take long. All of a sudden a carrot tastes like a, like a, like a brownie or like, it's so sweet. You're so, you're so right about that. Yeah. So if you give yourself space to be sensitized to the pleasure that's there, like, it's amazing. It's amazing. You know, what can happen.

Starting point is 00:38:56 Absolutely. Well, awesome. Awesome. I have one more final question for you. Great. And again, I think you peppered in your answers throughout this conversation that we've had, but it's for couples who have grown sexually distant, like they just have grown sexually distant. They have grown apart in their sexual relationship and are looking to, for whatever reasons, we're not going to go into the multiple reasons that that might be, but let's say they're interested in rekindling this connection. how or where should they start yeah man so thank you that's a great question and i'll say like it

Starting point is 00:39:38 is challenging to give a universal answer for that because so many people could be experiencing disconnection for so many different reasons so i guess that the unsexy answer that first comes to me is like try to do some inquiry by yourself and possibly in your relationship as to why this is the case, you know, could be because there's some unspoken emotional hurts that are happening, or it could be because you're spending too much time together and you're enmeshed and there's not enough space in your relationship. You know, there could be a ton of different things. So like try to figure out what's actually going on there. I'll say, I'll give a personal example in my relationship with my partner. Last year, we bought a house together. We moved in together. We combined

Starting point is 00:40:23 finances together. We renovated this house. We had family visit. We got a puppy. We renovated some more. The list of stuff was just endless that we did. And what ended up happening was we started to spend too much time together. We spent too much time together and I got stressed out and burned out from all these different things. And then I thought, oh, well, I'm 38 years old. I hear a lot of guys talk about low testosterone. Maybe that's what's going on for me like certainly that's it like i have low testosterone so i got a test and i went on a testosterone boosting protocol after 30 days my testosterone levels didn't change at all and they were still within the normal ranges but what did change was really interesting was that

Starting point is 00:41:07 my cortisol levels dropped like massively like massively it was like 25 reduction or something like that you know and lo and behold it was stress that was causing in our connection my lack of sexual desire and stress on our connection that when I reduced stress and when we just took a little bit more intentional space from each other, the sexual desire came back. And I'll say as part of that, so this other piece is a really interesting and useful practice to do. I have done this multiple times in this relationship, and I think it's useful to normalize that this is a practice that you might need to do it again and again and again in long-term relationship. But I took some time with a journal and wrote down in a couple of different categories. Number one, what do I do in

Starting point is 00:41:55 my relationship that hurts the sexual charge in my relationship? And that list was surprisingly long for me, you know, and here I am a sex educator, like I should have all this stuff down, but I'm also a human, you know? So it would be simple things like I might come into the kitchen and my partner might be there and I might mindlessly grab her butt versus touching that part of her with intention and reverence for the sexual being that she is. And in doing so, then I desexualize her and de-eroticize her and I remove her from that beautiful, sexy place and just kind of normalize, oh, this is just my partner's butt. So if instead I, and what I did was, and I made an agreement with her too, because we talked about all of this stuff. I'm not going to

Starting point is 00:42:44 touch your butt unless it's in a sexual context specifically, or if I'm approaching with erotic intent, you know? And so there were a number of different things like that too. Like how did I approach her for kissing? What sort of like jokey kind of like baby talk would we do together? You know, we reduced that as well. And like all that stuff has an impact on the sexual charge. And for us, that was something that, that rekindled it and brought it back to a really, yeah, beautiful, sexy level. That's so powerful. What a powerful reflection and profound insight. I thank you. That's amazing. And I like that you use the butt grabbing thing because I think someone in my life could use that advice. I won't name any names, but I appreciate that. I really do. And I think

Starting point is 00:43:36 it brings so much value and really you're an example of humility and introspection and being humanistic. Thank you for everything that you've shared with us today and your genuine authenticity in the work that you do. It really does shine through. So I really appreciate you, Taylor. And for our listeners out there who want to connect with you, can you share where they can find you and what programs you have available. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for having me and asking all the great questions. And I loved having you on my podcast too. And I love these conversations. So I have a podcast. It's called the sex upgraded podcast. It's for men and anyone who loves men as well. And there's an episode on there called how I had my first tantric orgasm,

Starting point is 00:44:20 which I kind of referenced earlier in this episode, which is how I accidentally had that full body, non-ejaculatory orgasmic experience. That was mind blowing. That could be a good place to start. I have a course called the Orgasmic Mastery Course, but it just started a couple days ago for the winter round. So there won't be another one until the summer, but it happens a couple times a year. That's a great place to start as well. And even before that, I have different free guides and I can send you those to put as links in the show notes as well. But yeah, thank you so much again for having me here and thank you for listening and for caring about your sex life and creating a better sex life. Because I really do believe that it has positive ripple effects

Starting point is 00:44:58 out into the world as well. It sure does. It really sure does. So we'll be sure to link all of the resources that you've shared with us today in the show notes for all of our listeners and YouTube viewers out there. Thanks so much for being here with us today. Until next time, my friends, this is Dr. Susie Gronski in loving wellness for your pelvis. Thanks for listening to today's episode. Be sure to visit my website, drsusieg.com, for show notes and related resources on today's topic if you like what you're hearing head on over to YouTube and subscribe to my channel on my youtube channel you'll find content related to sex pelvic health and expert interviews

Starting point is 00:45:43 for men if you got a question or a topic that you'd like me to answer on my channel be sure to type it in the comment box below

In Your Pants with Dr. Susie G - 3 Ways to Orgasm Without Ejaculation

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