We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - 104. Orgasm: Pleasure is the Final Frontier with Dr. Lori Brotto2

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

1. The shocking revelation that many women experience physical arousal but can’t reach orgasm because we are so “stuck” in our heads that we don’t even register it. 2. Glennon and Abby share about their periodic sexual droughts – and Dr. Brotto gives them (us) advice. 3. The biggest predictors of sexual problems for women – including stress/compulsive multitasking – and how to address them. 4. How to know if you are disconnecting from your body during sex, and how to reintegrate to increase your pleasure.  About Dr. Brotto Dr. Lori Brotto is a Professor in the UBC Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Women’s Sexual Health. She is also the Executive Director for the Women’s Health Research Institute—one of only three institutes in Canada devoted to advancing research in women’s health, and maintains an active practice as a Registered Psychologist. Dr. Brotto was recently featured in the Netflix series The Principles of Pleasure, and is the author of Better Sex through Mindfulness: How Women Can Cultivate Desire and forthcoming The Better Sex through Mindfulness Workbook: A Guide to Cultivating Desire. TW: @DrLoriBrotto

And to be loved, we need to be no. Hi, world. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. If you're wondering who this human is on the microphone with this incredibly sexy, sultry voice, it is I. It is I, Glellan with a cold. It is I glidden with a cold. And this is what I'm going to sound like for the whole time. Okay?

But we just show up. And so here we are. And today, I'm so excited that I have such a sexy voice for today because we are talking about sex. Okay. We're going to be talking about sex and women's bodies even more on this podcast than we originally planned to talk about women's bodies and sex because of all of the low so many amazing things that are happening in our podcast. country right now. Today, our focus is on women and desire and arousal and sexual challenges that many of us, it turns out, have. So, babe, Abby, this is my wife Abby. You may have known her from previous episodes like all of them. Hi, honey. How are you? Hi, babe. How's it going? Well, it's good. Are you feeling nervous because we're going to talk about sex today? And sometimes you get nervy when we talk about sex publicly? Yes. You are.

I feel a little nervous. But, you know, I'm going to get over it because I realize that that's the patriarchy living inside of me. And I want to talk about it. And so just continue. Okay. So the reason that's so sweet that you're bringing it up as the patriarchy lives inside of you is because I told you that I was going to introduce the idea of,

women struggling with sexual desire inside their relationships. And I do think that people might find it interesting that even though you and I have a very sexy, very wonderful romantic love story that the whole world knows, you and I also struggle sometimes with low sex desire. Would you say that? Sometimes. Sometimes. Here I am. My ego has to speak up in moments. Yeah, I mean, for sure. We go through our ups and downs and it's confusing. It is. It's actually a confusing thing for us. Yeah. Yeah. So because, and this is completely stereotypical. I don't know if I'm supposed to say this, but, you know, a lot of times we consider the woman in the relationship is the one that has the low sex drive. And we're two women's. You can imagine. that sometimes we just aren't driving so fast. Right. Well, low desire affects up to half of women over the course of their lives.

So if you two happen to have the have at the same time, that theoretically is 100% of the time. Right. So that could be a challenge. That could be tough. Right. But it is true. I'm so glad we're talking about this because we're just normalizing what feels like not a normal problem, but is in fact a normal problem. So half of women, low libido, 31% of women have lasting and

distressing sexual problems. Twenty-six percent low arousal, 21 percent difficulty with orgasm. So of the folks that are listening to this, any of those issues applying to you makes you a very typical woman. Cool. And we have someone here who's going to help us wade through all of this and he was a just delight expert in this field. Babe, would you introduce Dr. I'm going to introduce her. Dr. Lori Brotto is a professor in the UBC Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. She is also the executive director for the Women's Health Research Institute, one of only three institutes in Canada devoted to advancing research in women's health. Dr. Brato was recently featured in the Netflix series the principles of pleasure, which we loved, and is the author of Better Sex Through Mindfulness,

How Women Can Cultivate Desire, and forthcoming the Better Sex Through Mindfulness Workbook, A Guide to Cultivating Desire. Welcome, Dr. Brotto, or should we call you Lori? Please, we're going to get really personal, so please call me Lori. It's such a treat to be here. Thank you. Dr. Brito, or Lori, I would like it if you would call me Dr. Doyle, though. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. We are forever talking on this podcast about the thing that screws us up most is the picture in our heads of how it's supposed to be. So one of these things is that we believe that if we love our partners and we have a strong relationship, we are supposed to maintain a strong sexual desire for these people forever, infinity, and beyond. and that if we don't have that strong spontaneous desire,

that there means there's something wrong in our relationship. And hold on, because this is what... This is not a perfect comparison, Lori, but this is what we were talking about the other night. Okay, we hate diet culture here at this podcast. It has wreaked havoc on our lives enough. But I just read this story that one of these crazy diets... was proposed that if people ate the same food again and again, over and over again, because familiarity reduces desire they would eat less, like that people are actually trained,

that the more they're exposed to the same thing over and over and over again, the less they want it. Are you picking up what I'm putting down here, Lori? Yeah, and absolutely. And part of it is training. but a big part of it is just our basic biology. When things are new, novelty, the unknown, there's a particular part of our brain, the reward center that lights up. It shoots out dopamine. And when things become less novel, there's less lighting up of that area. So it's a purely physiological phenomenon that you can take to food, to sex, and to lots of other activities.

So when we look at it through that lens, we realize, well, of course love doesn't equal desire. They're not synonymous with each other. In fact, we can have lots of examples where we crave someone sexually and we don't love them and we sort of accept that. So then why is it then when we're deeply in love and years go by, decades go by, we think that the loss of desire means I don't love that person anymore. It makes no sense whatsoever. Okay, so let's just start there. Is everyone hearing that? Okay, there is nothing wrong with you.

It doesn't mean you're with, you might be with the wrong person. We're not saying you're not. But just because you don't have desire after low so many years, it does not mean. So, for example, if you love meatloaf, okay, if you love meatloaf, it's like your favorite. But you are fed meatloaf every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner over the weeks and months and years. And then suddenly a veggie burger walks by. All right?

You might be so sick of the meatloaf that you suddenly fall in love with the veggie burger. But Dr. Brotto, if then you marry the veggie burger and you have veggie, then you're going to see a chicken that walks by. And so none of this has to do with not having feelings for the meatloaf that are real. It's just we're trained. Our bodies are made to get sick of the thing that we're stuck with. So first, let's just start off that would you agree, Dr. Brotto, that those of us committed to monogamy, happily committed, we are working under suboptimal conditions.

Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. And that's at the best of time. That's also assuming mood is in check. You've slept all night. You don't have indigestion. you're awake at the time that you're planning sex with your partner.

Oh, and by the way, all those same criteria apply to your partner as well. Kids are not in the room. Dogs are put away. I mean, there's multiple things that sort of have to be in place in order to even create these suboptimal positions. So when we look at it from that perspective, we kind of give ourselves a lot more wiggle room to say, you know what? Sometimes good enough is good enough and good enough sometimes is great.

And striving for perfection actually only sets us up for failure because it takes us out of the present moment. We're constantly thinking about either how it used to be in the first two weeks of the relationship or were fed these false pictures and stories in the media and elsewhere about how things are, quote, supposed to be and they're really not. And a lot of that contributes to that 41% figure that you cited at the beginning, which essentially tells us that. when we look over the course of a year, across women, across ages, across cultures, across social determinants. So we're not just talking about women in their 60s and 70s. In fact, there's no relationship between age and desire. But this phenomenon of decreasing desire as the relationship continues on is near universal for women. I'm going to just stick in their men as well, but I know we're talking about women today. So we'll just talk about women.

And you said that the stories, the stories in our heads. And one of the things you talk about is how we internalize those stories and then that becomes part of who we are. So there's a lot of us are clearly struggling. Not all of us are struggling. And your research has identified a few things that are big predictors of those who will struggle sexually. And stress and this kind of compulsive multitasking is clearly the biggest one, which we're going to get back to because it's huge. But you also talk about this interesting one, which is that how our personal beliefs about sex, or in other words, our internalization of those stories that we have heard about sex in our bodies, predict our future sexual struggle. So what does that mean? And what are those beliefs and stories that mess us up? Yeah. So, I mean, the beliefs and stories might start out totally. benign, right? You might be a young kid and you are taught by a parent or someone else that you wait for sex until you find the person you love or depending on what state or province you live in.

You wait until you're married and you find your soulmate until you have sex. And at the time, you don't question these beliefs because you're a young person and you're starting to discover your own sexual identity. You just sort of take them on. And then, other experiences in life might happen. I'll give an example of one experience that I hear all the time, and that is the young girl who discovers her body, begins touching, maybe she's masturbating, parent walks in, scolds the child, and said, oh my God, what are you doing? You can't do that. That's wrong. That's dirty. And again, maybe in the moment, the child says, oh, okay, I guess I won't touch myself there anymore, files it away, but she internalizes it, right? Because it's not just

those two instances that I've just given you. It's repeated instances. It's that girl who then grows up and takes on the belief that in order to be loved and admired by a partner, I need to have sex even when I don't really want it. Or I need to endure sex even if it doesn't really feel good. And then there's other beliefs around to speak up and say what you like about sex is wrong and dirty and you're a nymphomaniac, that legacy of a term that was actually a diagnosable condition until, if you can believe, at 1980, diagnosis of nymphomania. So you've got these sort of, you know, small instances that add up over the course of a person's life. And then she grows up, she's mature, she's smart, she's got access to good health care. but these internalized beliefs are still operating below the surface. And they become triggered in sexual encounters.

They become triggered when she's feeling emotional. And that's when you see the consequences of them. So they're most certainly not benign when they add up over the course of your lifetime. It's our conditioning, right? I mean, that's what we, I talk so much about an untamed, the whole idea of how do we even know we're not starting at zero at zero. We're starting at negative a million because we have so many things to unlearn. And it's not just what we get from our families, which is all messed up, but the media are religions with the sex shaming there and the women shaming there.

Even in schools, all of the messages we hear about the girl who, the girl who's a slut or the girl who doesn't put out or does put out. There's, it's, we're inundated with sex messages our entire lives. And then when we get in relationships, we're just supposed to suddenly see it as something that is good. That's very hard to unlearn all of that. I have another question for you about this particular moment. When I was thinking about this conversation, especially during these past weeks, I remembered, I don't have this issue anymore in my marriage, but in my first marriage, I was married to a man.

And I had this thing that contributed to our sexual struggles, which was that I was unable to turn off. I was unable to compartmentalize what was happening in the world and to women and to women's bodies to feel safe in my own bed. I brought anger from what was happening to women in the world into my own sex life in a way that I felt unable to bridge the gap between the two of us. Like when I was supposed to be intimate with my ex-husband, I felt pitiful. pissed off that he wasn't under attack like my body was out in the world. And I find it amazing. Some of my friends feel that way. Many of my friends don't. But I kind of find it amazing that more people don't feel that way. First of all, it makes me so sad. And at the same time,

like other people that you know, I hear this all the time. And it's a byproduct of a very heteronormative worldview that we have that also applies to sex, which again, first of all, portrays sex as something you do to have babies, right? It's something for procreation, not recreation. And so the idea of women's pleasure, first of all, when you look at kind of traditional penis and vagina sex intercourse, the vagina is not a pleasurable vesicle. There's very few pleasure nerve endings in the vagina, right, compared to say the clitoris, which is the most innervated, the most nerves of anywhere in the human body in males or females. And yet the heteronormative view, which prizes penis in vagina sex, you can't talk about that

and also not accept that, well, of course, it's not pleasurable for women. You're stimulating something that is not very pleasurable and in fact can create a lot of pain for women if they're not lubricated and if they're not present and they're not in the mood. So that's one thing is we're kind of working within this worldview that we don't often think about until we pause and we get angry and we want to fight back against it. But the other thing, Glenn, in that your story really personifies is the fact that we multitask and we live in a multitasking. society where our mind is elsewhere, right? We're sort of talking, having a conversation and we're thinking about something else and we're ordering groceries and we're watching the kids soccer game

from the sideline and we're doing all these things at the same time. And in the moment, it feels really good to be doing all of this. You feel like you're on top of it. Many of us feel like that's the only way to stay on top of it. But it trains our brain to not be present, right? And emotion and fear further fuels that. So if we feel like we're inadequate, we're not doing enough, it's going to dial up that multitasking tendency. And we're going to bring it into sex. And then suddenly you find yourself feeling very safe. You feel wonderful with vulnerability. You don't need to multitask. The heteronormative view is gone. And suddenly you're feeling sex for the first time. Mm-hmm. Maybe. But just going back to what the first idea was before I let it go and then I'll let it go. If what I'm being mindful to, because I'm bringing my mind to the present moment, is a sex act in a bed with a man who is recreating the dynamic that's happening outside of my bedroom, which is what happens here matters for my pleasure.

and my power and my experience being translated to just like a vaginal intercourse, then actually me being mindful to what's happening in that moment isn't something that makes me feel safe and makes me feel loved. It's actually a recreation. So it's not in that moment. In this particular situation I'm talking about, it's not actually my problem because I'm multitasking. It's actually because in this bed, we are recreating. a patriarchal dynamic that happens to me every damn day outside of this bedroom, which is that my experience right here doesn't matter and that my body is being used for your pleasure. Right.

And I think that that's, I mean, it's just like a shout out because in this moment we're in right now, it's a historical moment. It's a good bridge between what the wisdom of the research that you're showing to us and the just really difficulty accessing it in this moment in time because your research tells us that women not being connected to our bodies, being distracted, being worried are the things that literally kill our ability to have satisfying sex. But we're living in a time in which, you know, two hot minutes ago, a man who admitted, you know, sexually assaulting a woman was elected to the highest office in the land. we're living in a moment where through the overruling of Roe, the government has claimed our bodies as a means of production over which we have no control. It is very tricky to experience and feel a sense of power and dignity and autonomy in our bodies in a moment in a nation that has dictated that we do not have any. That's right.

So before we move on to all the ways, how are our experts and researchers like you dealing with this very real phenomenon of women saying, wait a minute, the personal, the most personal is the political. Yeah. And how a man who is not focused on a woman's pleasure right now in the bedroom points to a bigger issue. How are you dealing with women's rage about that? Yeah. So being able to say no is part of our power. And that's also something we've never really been taught to do, right? If anything, it's say yes like a nice girl, right?

Except the hug from whoever gives it to you. You just acquiesce and you say yes. And now is a moment in time where we all say no. We say no to the things that give us pain. say no to these dictators that are claiming that they know more about our bodies and our pleasure and our rights than we do. And we say no to sex partners who do not have our pleasure at the center of the encounter. Yes. Yes. Thank you for that. Thank you for that. It's a new year. And instead of trying to

reinvent myself, I've been asking a simpler question. What would actually support me right now? And honestly, a big part of that answer is my home. I want my space to feel calmer, more functional, and a little more like a place that can reflect my goals and energy for this year, which is why I've been turning to Wayfair. It's truly a one-stop shop for everything your home needs this season. What surprised me most was how easy it was to find exactly what I wanted in my style and within my budget. Whether you're organizing kids' rooms, upgrading your work from home setup, tackling clutter, or just trying to make weeknight dinners easy. Wayfair really does have everything. Your home doesn't have to be perfect.

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reasons why your work is so fascinating and unique is because it teaches that, well, this is so fascinating that so many of us of women report decreased arousal or desire over time, that many of the women that are reporting this actually are, experiencing arousal. It's just that our minds are so disconnected from our bodies that we don't even notice it. Okay, this is what blows my mind. So can you talk to me about the study in which you found that women actually were getting physically aroused? We just weren't freaking noticing it. Yeah. This has not been one study. This has been literally hundreds of studies now that, so let me just kind of paint the picture for you. So woman comes in.

into a sexual psychophysiology lab, usually at a university. They recline back in a comfy chair. They use a little vaginal probe. It looks like a tampon. They insert it into the vagina. And then they put their hand on a lever. And this lever is on the armrest of the chair. Then they put on their headphones.

Experimenter leaves the room. Make sure the door is locked. And then they start watching erotica. And I could take a detour into the differences between erotica and porn. Suffice it to say that when we do this kind of research with women, we use female-friendly, ethical, female-directed erotica and not porn. So we can just put a pin in that one for later. So she's watching the film.

And within a few seconds, and of course we're in the next room, just watching the computer screen to see what is her body doing in the moment. And you can see within a few seconds of the erotic film showing up on the screen, an immediate spike in her physical response. There's an increase in blood flow, blood pressure, this kind of stimulation that goes down into the vaginal walls and into the vulva and into the clitoris. And then on the separate screen, we see the graph that corresponds with how she's feeling in her mind, right? that lever that she's moving with her hand. And it's not moving. And we're waiting.

You know, the film is progressing. It's getting pretty hot and heavy. And there's a slow increase, but certainly not a spike. And then the movie is over. And then we kind of go into the next room and we ask her, how did that go? And she says, me, it was okay. I was more fascinated by the artwork in the background than what the two actors in the film we're doing. We call this non-concordance, right? So there's this kind of disconnect between

physically the body is, it's almost as if this is a reflex. This is an automatic response that happens when she views something sexual, erotica in this case. But her self-report is not connected with that. They're not in alignment with each other. Contrast that with the dozens and dozens of studies that have been done with males, you can probably get. Yes, what those two graphs show, they're in perfect alignment. When the erection starts to increase, so does his self-report of feeling tuned in. Now, there's some exceptions to this for both men and women, but for the most part, this non-concordance between the body and the mind is a fairly well-established phenomenon.

And this, this blew my mind because what you describe in your research is your focus on mindfulness and presence isn't about the kind of presence shaming that we get all over the world. Put your phone down. Be there with your kids. You should, you know, optimally present at all times. What you're describing is about actual sexual functioning. The cycle with the brain and the body that it's like it's the brain body cycle is how sexual arousal actually works. So when you're engaged in sex, like, say that person in your experiment was actually engaging in sex with a partner instead of watching a film. So her body is showing up, but her mind isn't showing up. And that's making the sexual process end.

Your mind isn't noticing that the blood flow, the skin sensation, the physical arousal. And so even though the body's responding it, the brain is not acknowledging it. So it's not feeding back to the body, the information that it needs to continue to respond. So it's as if it's not happening in the body at all. So arousal stops, study. Arousal stops. Yeah. It's not just a reflex.

So there's been lots of researchers that have asked, and lots of people have asked, why, why does the body show this automatic vaginal response to something erotic? And there's different theories. There's theories that it's a way to protect a woman from, say, a urinary tract infection or other infections that go up into the pelvis, et cetera. But then there's the feminist viewpoint which says, yes, but that is also then accepting an unwanted sexual encounter if her mind is not, right? If it's just an automatic lubrication response, ultimately what's most important is what

her mouth says, not what her vagina says. Right. But Amanda, what you're describing, you know, the body starts, but it requires the brain to say, I like this. This feels good. I feel safe. Keep going in order for that physical response to continue and to be experienced as pleasure. But that's where it stops for, again, 40% of women. It's just wild. So your brain and what you say about this is that your brain is your most powerful sex organ for this reason, that your brain needs to feed back the loop to tell your body, yes, we're going there. We're interested in arousal right now. We're paying enough attention to our body to know that this is happening and we're going to facilitate it continuing to happen or not. And this is my question about, because the male chart

going in alignment and the woman's chart not at all, we know that when our brain is filled with stress and anxiety and self-judgment, that it prevents us from feeling aroused. Is the reason we see this showing up so differently in men, is it because they don't have the mind-body disconnection or is it because they don't have the stress or the shame or the or the conditioning? But they do. Or the patriarchy. Right. But they do, right? Because men have all kinds of shame about sex. Like, am I performing? Am I whatever? This is what Sister and I and Abby can't get at. It can't just be that we have grocery lists in our brain. No. Do we, are our brain and body connections actually made differently?

Yes and no. So, you know, if we kind of go back in time, let's go back. You know, I gave the example of the young girl touching herself and her first encounter is the angry parent that says, put that away that's wrong and that's sturdy. The young boy, on the other hand, is in the bath. He's two years old, three years old. The bath water is hitting him and hitting his penis in a way that feels really good. And it's normalized and he realizes, oh, baths feel really good. This is very exciting. Oh, look, I can see it grow. And there is this intense normalization that happens with experiences like that that are not necessarily sexual, they're just developmental, but they feed future erotic connection and erotic pleasure. And so it's a completely different developmental

pathway in boys and girls that starts out at the earliest possible age. So you really do feel like most of this is conditioning. Is it shame? Shame separates our mind from our body all the time. So is that what happens, that shame enters a little girl's life early and ejects her mind and her body from each other? Yeah, shame is huge in exactly the way that you've described. But there's also just basic lack of information and lack of education. So as an example, here in Canada, one of our more progressive sex education programs that was in Ontario for years and years. At the age of five, involved teaching children the correct anatomy, right? What's a vulva?

What's a clitoris? What's a vagina? What's a scrotum? What are testicles? And a few years ago, that was completely replaced with a very generic system, which referred to the entire anatomy as the genitals. And the view among those making decisions was that it was developmentally inappropriate, that it might instill fear in these young children if they knew what the clitoris was and could

point to it on a piece of paper. And the real danger is that those kids are now going to grow up and through their teenage years and they're going to have different issues that arise, or let's say pleasurable encounters that arise, and they don't have the language to be able to say, touch the labia, avoid the clitoris, touch the perineum, Or I was molested in this area. And in fact, there's been other research that shows kids who are not taught the correct genital anatomy words, later on, should they encounter sexual assault, they're less likely to report it. Right? That's because if you control language, you control a person's ability to express herself.

and that keeps people in all kinds of dangerous situations. It's a very good tool of the patriarchy to control our language and not give us the words we need. And it's introducing shame. Yeah. If that word is so shameful, you can't even teach it to me. What happens when I let someone do, which is my view, I let someone touch me in that place. That is so shameful, you can't even say the word to my face. It's all built in.

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How do we know? What are the signs? Yeah. You mentioned the word spectatoring. It's an old term, and it basically refers to this phenomenon that during sex, you are watching yourself from the stands. you're not a player on the field, right? And you're kind of viewing from a distance as opposed to engaged. And this phenomenon of watching yourself from a distance, number one, is really common. But number two, it's usually wrapped up in a lot of judgmental statements like, oh, I don't like that part of my body. Or, oh, I sure hope my partner doesn't touch me there because that doesn't feel good. or I have stretch marks, etc.

The list can go on and on and on. And so what happens is very often, and this is a bit of a gendered phenomenon, women are more likely to get wrapped up in these kinds of negative self-judgments than men, although they're certainly not immune to it. I see a lot of young men with low desire who report a lot of the same kinds of issues,

including body image issues. But that spectatoring, that tendency to not be there, But rather to be thinking, oh gosh, their hand is moving, please stop, please stop, or moving out of the way, which then creates tension in a body that then blocks the sexual response. So holding tension or maybe starting to hyperventilate a little bit, kind of creating that stress response. So the sexual encounter for a lot of people can be a stress response. It can be as if, you know, they're going through traffic and they feel like they're going to get

hit by a car. it can be that magnitude of the stress response system kicking in, which is the system that works against sexual arousal, right? For sexual arousal, we want the parasympathetic nervous system, the system that allows us to be relaxed and allows blood flow to go to the parts of our body that promote arousal. When we're in a state of stress, blood gets shunted to our big muscle groups. Why? To allow us to run the heck out of there or freeze and hide. That's what you're happens during the stress response. It is antithetical to promoting sexual response when we get into this kind of spectatoring mode. That's a sign then. People who are spectatoring, who a person who's in a

bed and in the middle of sex and they see themselves from above. What are some other things that happen to people who are having the mind-body separation? Yeah. Sometimes they can be totally benign distractions. You find yourself saying, oh, did I turn off the oven? Is the milk expired in the fridge? Well, what time do I have to pick my kids up from school tomorrow? So you start of going through the random list. And suddenly that's when all of the things that you had forgotten in the rest of the day, that's when they surface is right in that moment. And the kind of really dangerous thing is that because they're benign, they sort of flow under the surface. And we say, oh, yeah, I'll just.

just let these thoughts be there. It's okay. But ultimately, again, because of what we talked about earlier, this really critical brain-body connection, even those benign thoughts, if there are enough of them, it can either slow down the sexual response. It can be the reason that women don't reach orgasm. It can contribute to, say, arousal going down and thus sex hurting, right? Or perhaps in the start of the encounter, she feels lubricated and then suddenly it stops. So they're not benign when they add up over time within an encounter, but then over multiple sexual encounters in a person's life. And also your own performance, right? That's a big one. So if people are thinking, oh, my orgasm is taking too long, in that, too long to arrive, I should say, that that messes

with people actually reaching orgasm because they're worried about how they're performing as opposed to being in the moment, right? Yeah. So let me say something about orgasm because I was just reading something this week about this phenomenon called orgasm coercion. Ooh. And orgasm coercion, a big paper done by my colleagues, Chadwick and Van Anders, they looked at, first of all, half of women will say that they've been in recent

sexual encounters, where they experienced. orgasm coercion, which essentially is a partner pressuring, manipulating, maybe doing something physical to really encourage her to, aka, force her to reach orgasm. Now, for some partners, the idea of having an orgasm at the same time for them might be a sign of good sex or it might be a sign of their own performance and ability. So because of this orgasm coercion, it has a lot of striking similarities to sexual coercion, the same kinds of things. Manipulation, coercive behaviors, coercive words, and it can be very, very dangerous. I bring it up only because there's a huge range in the number of seconds, minutes, let's say even hours that an individual woman might take to reach.

And it's totally dependent on so many other factors like her level of energy and fatigue. And does she have enough external lubrication? And does she have pain in the moment? So we want to just be really careful with orgasm that there is no standard amount of time. And in fact, a lot of women will say, I don't even need an orgasm in this encounter for it to feel good or feel pleasurable. In fact, that kind of emotional orgasm or emotional satisfaction make sex rewards. for me. Maybe not every time, but the orgasm itself is not the sign of satisfying sex. Yes, yes. Okay. And also while we're on it, because for till the day I die, I want everyone to

repeat this in their heads is that contrary to the picture in our heads, of how we've been told, 80% of women exclusively have a clitorial orgasm. Correct. And if they are having a vaginal orgasm, it's usually because there is some stimulation of the clitoris. Yeah, that's mostly right. The 80% figure is right. It's 80% of people with vaginas, which includes women and trans men before gender affirming surgery. 80% of them will not reach orgasm from purely vaginal stimulation alone, whether it's a penis, a dildo, a finger, what have you, another kind of sex toy will not reach orgasm through vaginal penetration alone. The clitoris is far more reliable because it has deep and very extensive

tissue and nerves that go far below the surface of the skin. And so, even among those female-bodied and women persons who do have vaginal orgasms, for a lot of them, it's because the clitoris is being stimulated at the same time, either externally, with a hand, with their partner's pubic bone pressing against them, or internally, again, because the clitoris tissue extends deep, deep down below the surface of the skin. So we need to completely debunk that idea that vaginal orgasm is the only way to orgasm. It's a legacy of Freud, who in the 1800s, I think he was the father of patriarchy in a lot of ways because of his theory, which stated a woman who is only reaching orgasm through clitoral

stimulation, that's a sign of immaturity. And that's a sign of kind of arrested development at a certain stage. And there was a long legacy of Freud's teachings at the time that unfortunately still percolate to this day. Okay. And while we're debunking things, because this is something you do so beautifully, if four out of ten women are experiencing low desire, we know that many of them are still having sex, even though they're having low desire.

And so, again, this picture in our head that desires the only reason that people should want to have sex and it's some kind of dysfunction if you're having sex that wasn't prompted by this spontaneous desire. Can you tell us what the research says about the number of reasons people actually have sex and what knowing that does for us? Yeah. So believe it or not, there are 237 different reasons that people give for having sex. And I'm not making that number up. It actually came from research out of Cindy Meston and David Buss's lab about 10 years ago. And so they interviewed many thousands of people and they said, why do you have sex?

And then they interviewed others and they did this a number of times and distilled the thousands of reasons that people give down to 237 core reasons. And when we look at women, the reason, because I was in the mood or I had desire, was not in the top five list at all. It was somewhere in the top 10, but most definitely not in the top five list. That tells us that a lot of people are having sex, not necessarily because they're in the mood at the outset. They might have other really good reasons. I want to have an orgasm. I want to connect.

I want to celebrate a birthday. I want to feel powerful. I want to access my pleasure. I want to change my mood from angry to relax. Again, that's just a small smattering of the 237. But then the other thing that we know, and this is thanks to a lot of the really good research that's been done, is if the encounter is pleasing to her and she's present and she starts to feel vulnerable in a good way, that that gives rise to desire during the encounter. So I see a lot of women who say, I'm not in the mood at the beginning. It's kind of like going to the gym. I know I should. I know I want to. I know when I get there and I start lifting those weights.

I feel great. And at the end, I say, oh, can't wait to do this again. And there are some, it's a bit of a cheeky example. No, it's right on. Abby's laughing because that's the story of our life. We look at each other or go, we should do this more often. Every time. Why don't we do this more often?

This is so great. I literally say, that was a good idea. The gym or sex. I don't know what you're referring to. Sex. Sex. I don't go to the gym. I do not go to the gym.

That was a good idea. It was a good idea. Didn't seem like a good idea, but it is. This time of year, I am always looking for my sweaters. Luckily, Quince has all of the staple sweaters covered from soft Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like designer pieces without the markup to 100% silk tops and skirts for easy dressing up to perfectly cut denim for everyday wear. I can't tell you how much I'm loving my quince cashmere sweater in this gorgeous oatmeal color.

It's become the thing I grab almost every day. It's held up beautifully. It still feels soft. And it honestly looks way more expensive than it is. You know how frugal I am. And I've started picking up a few quince pieces for home too. They have travel bags and sheets. Their sheets are awesome.

10 out of 10. Refresh your wardrobe with quince. Don't wait. Go to quince.com slash hard things for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot-com slash hard things to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash hard things. I think we tend to assume that people who are not having sex are struggling, right?

And for me, interestingly enough, Glennon and I, sometimes when we go through our droughts, I sometimes worry that the lack of sex means that we are struggling. But that's not how I feel inside my body. That's not how I feel in my heart. I'm like, I mean, our life is perfect in my mind. And then sometimes during those droughts, I'm like, but are we going to be able to last or survive the kind of drought that we're going through sexually? I mean, I don't know how. Can you just share with us that we are not going to get divorced ever because we're having droughts?

Based on your research, Dr. Brato. Yeah. That's like my big concern. I'm like, everything's perfect. And sometimes when we go through the droughts. Is that just a shoulding? Like is it true? Yeah, that's a shudding.

Right. I should feel horny all the time because our life is. perfect. And because I'm so in love with my partner and we've got all these wonderful gifts in our life, that is the shoulding. And that's that kind of, you know, underline worldview and beliefs that we take on, right? Girls should do this. They should not do that. Relationships should look this way. You should have sex a certain number of times per week. And so while I can't promise you, you know, eternity in your or any relationship, although I feel pretty good about eternity in your relationship. Thank you. What I, what I can say is it's worth us investing the time to pay attention to

are we shoulding? Are we taking on and are those statements of I should do this, we should do that, my relationship should be a certain way, and are they kind of manifesting in our life, in our relationship, and in the bedroom as well? Because it's like, we will talk about this. We'll say, oh, God, are we, you know, how long has it been? Are we, we, we should. should be, but then we'll look each other and say, okay, but what is? Like, if we get out of what, what should, what we should be, can we talk about what is? Because I feel like we're closer than ever and we're happy. And so that's, the barometers we have are sometimes messed up. And I do think that we are trained to focus on frequency as the barometer of whether or not our relationships

are sexually okay. So, because we all do that. I mean, how many times have I Googled? Like, how many times a week am I supposed to be having sex? So I know. I know. I know. No, we're not supposed to focus on that, but real quick, is there a number that we're supposed to be having sex? Oh, yeah. I get really anxious when I'm asked that question, which I'm asked all the time. And here's the problem in research. In research, when you read a paper, it presents the average or the mean.

But then it shows you the range. And the range is enormous, right? So the range says there are plenty of very, very happy couples, regardless of the gender of the couple that have sex five or six times a year, right? So once every two months and the quality of those encounters is amazing and the foreplay between the encounters because I'm a big fan of extended foreplay that starts when a sexual encounter ends and goes all the way to the next encounter, even if it's two months from now. Love it. So there's there's research that shows that and there's there's research that shows there's a lot of unhappy couples that are having sex every day. So if you have

to have a number. If you absolutely insist and hold me to it, the research does say about once a week. And that's for couples in established relationships. And that's not necessarily penetration. That's any kind of sexual activity. Okay. And is that also lesbian couples? Or does that include it does? Yeah. So, you know, here is where I think we've been making some real strides in the research as being a lot more inclusive, not just to look at sexual orientation, diversity, but also gender diversity. So a lot more work on trans and non-binary people and trying to understand are they really different. It turns out they're really not all that, that different. And while we're on that topic, I do want to take the opportunity to debunk a myth as well. And that's lesbian

bed death. Lesbian bed death has been debunked years and years ago. It was this, it was this notion that, you know, two women in a relationship, it's all about companionship. And the sex doesn't matter and sex stops after a few years. And it's unfortunate because that notion, it really took hold without any scientific basis for it at all. And there have been so many studies that have found the opposite. Wonderful. And listener, Pod Squad, you will remember lesbian bed death from what I taught you it was, which is lesbian deathbed. I said it wrong months ago. It is not a deathbed. And turns out not bad death. It's neither of those things.

Okay, we're going to come back with Dr. Brotto on Thursday. And we're going to answer all kinds of practical questions about how to bring, how to have better sex, really. But before we go, I have a question for you. If we are not supposed to be using frequency to measure the vitality and health and fullness of our sex lives, What should we be using? So I'm going to use this as a platform to champion pleasure. And pleasure has been the missing conversation in the last hundred years of women's sexuality, which has been focused on, you know, frequency and then the whole era of testing Viagra for women.

and no one asked about pleasure, and no one investigated how to improve pleasure. And we're finally starting to say pleasure is, it's the missing link, it's the next frontier. How we measure that is completely elusive to all of us in science, but we do know that when women talk about really satisfying sexuality, and they talk about that moment when they were so present and so in sync, and nothing else mattered.

They're talking about pleasure. So that's a barometer. That's the barometer. So we stop asking, are we doing it enough? Are we whatever? And the question is, am I experiencing pleasure? Correct. And your pleasure is different from your partner's pleasure.

So don't use the same barometer for that. Use different ones. And this is everything. This is everything. This answers the question about the political question. This answers the question as to, stress being the biggest contributor to our sexual dysfunction, stress being the biggest contributor to our disproportionate lack of enjoyment of our lives,

leads to the lack of enjoyment of our birthright, which is pleasure and sex, leads to the decentering of us as people worthy of the equal protection of the law, it's everything. Yeah. It's seeing myself as worthy of pleasure as someone who deserves to want to have sex is the beginning stage of all the concentric circles around it. Right. And let me just insert as someone who is also deserving of the ability to say no and that no is respected because this does not bring me pleasure. And I know we have a talked about sexual coercion, but one and three women do experience sexual coercion, where pleasure is absent, pleasure is stripped from them. Okay. When we come back on Thursday,

I want to start and talk about, it's going to be an amazing Q&A. We have so many questions for you from our Pod Squad about sex. And I cannot, I love these questions so much. I cannot wait to hear your answers. And I want to start, though, with a question about what a woman does who is in a situation where her partner isn't addressing her right to pleasure. And what a script might look like to start a conversation about that. And maybe because she's never talked about it. Right. Maybe it might be she doesn't know who he or she isn't interested in it, but she doesn't know theoretically how to talk about sex. Right. All right, so we will be back on Thursday with Dr. Lori Brotto.

Thank you all. We can do hard things like talk about sex. See you soon. Bye. I give you Tishmilton and Brandy Carlisle. Through fire, I came out the other side. I chase desire. I made sure I got what.

mind and I continued to believe that as I'm a cause we're adventurers and heart breaks on map a final destination we've stopped asking directions to places they've had to be can do a hard Star times Things fall

I continue to believe The best people are free It took some time But I'm fine Those were adventurers And heart breaks Some destination

With lack They stopped asking directions To places So places they are too hard. Never been. And too. Yeah. We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence 13 Studios.

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