I'm so happy to have you on the podcast.

Thank you.

Glad to be here.

Glad to be here.

Good.

Yeah, I mean, you talked about that question that I asked.

So tell me about sex, which is turned into a book.

So what, tell me a little bit about that book and how I'm sure that is a hot topic and what Yeah, the

I'm so happy to have you on the podcast.

Thank you.

Glad to be here.

Glad to be here.

Good.

Yeah, I mean, you talked about that question that I asked.

So tell me about sex, which is turned into a book.

So what, tell me a little bit about that book and how I'm sure that is a hot topic and what Yeah, the

[gentle music]

I agree.

I mean, you talked about sort of if you have 400 meals, it's gonna lose its, you know, flavor, but especially if those 400 meals never contained certain ingredients and never had certain spices, then you're never gonna experience, you know? Then you only know one kind of a meal that you've eaten 400 times.

So yeah, I focus a lot on people cultivating their erotic self, letting themselves open up to erotic themes, letting themselves open up to fantasies.

You know, in the very first session that I have with a patient, and your listeners can try this at home, is I say, "Instead of thinking about the sexual problem that you're experiencing, what is the solution?" "Oh, well, the solution would be way more foreplay, or way more romance, or way more kissing, or I'd love more oral sex, or I'd really like to try some power play," or, "Yeah, I do have this kinda kinky fantasy about, you know, the way my...

somebody could look or dress up." And they start to talk about that in my office, and they're describing not the problem anymore.

They're describing the solution, and then I'll start to, like, uh, support that and get them to thicken that up and make it really sexy.

Sure

Mm-hmm.

Uh, I felt like I couldn't connect the sex that I wanted to have in my head to, um, my body and, um, yet I really wanted to be a lover.

I wanted to connect sexually.

I felt like I really wanted those, um, experiences.

So when I finally got to college, I started doing a lot of research about how to sort of become, uh, a sexual adult.

A- and on the heels of the feminist sexual revolution, I learned a lot about female sexuality.

For example, that, uh, the vagina itself has relatively few sensitive nerve endings internally.

What would be your first tip for them? Where do they start?

enjoyed.

I did, but box office matters.

Demand matters.

You know, we keep seeing this.

This keeps being the misstep of making DC movies, right? Which is...

You know, I've said this before.

It's a huge misstep that we still don't know who Batman is in this current universe.

whole comic is about,

So what mysteries are you trying to solve, Sherlock? Okay.

Oh, boy.

I see that's some copy that maybe shouldn't have made it into the marketing copy.

But I have to say, I wrote it, so I'm responsible.

You know what I was trying to get across, which is that whenever individuals or couples come in, they often know what they're experiencing.

Like a lot of guys come in with erectile unpredictability, a lot of young guys, but they actually are not sure why.

And couples come in stuck in sex ruts, and they actually like sex, but they're not having sex.

What do you recommend in these kind of situations?

were you sexually? So like what was actually happening in your own life when you felt compelled to start writing these books? Yeah.

Yeah, compelled to start writing these books, compelled to become a sex therapist.

So I have found with people in general that people are born into one of three kind of home environments when it comes to sex.

We might be born into a sex-positive home environment in which healthy discussions around sex are promoted, and we have good sexual self-esteem.

We may be born into a sex-negative home where there's a lot of prohibitions against sex and there's a lot of shame around sex.

Most of us, I think, I'm going to venture to say, were born into sex-avoidant homes where it wasn't necessarily positive, it wasn't necessarily negative, sex was just not talked about.

And that was very much the case for me.

What do couples need to be doing if they're in a rut? How do we work through those situations, Sue?