Karen is an advocate for giving voice to what needs to be said, even it it breaks a taboo or two. Read her blog below, ask her a question and download her free ebook, Choice Intimacies, and get satisfaction between the covers of her book.
It was our final meeting at BookPeople after a seven-year run, since our sponsor, The Good Life magazine, has ceased publication.
Watch as this site transforms over the coming weeks to take the Intimacies discussion to new dimensions.
Please tell us what you think of the book, the column or the meetings. Leave a comment below. (If comment form isn’t showing below, please click on the title of this post and it will appear in the new page.)
Hello. I hope you show your love boldly. Please accept as my gift to you a copy of my FREE ebook.
To request a copy please use the special-offer form on http://intimacies.weebly.com. All I ask is that you simply answer the one question on that form and let me send you—not a dozen roses, but “A Dozen Choice Intimacies,” a 38-page eBook, a special collection of twelve essays I’ve written on Intimacies. You’re welcome to share them with anyone you like—or anyone you love.
1. Ditch Mr. Lonely, you deserve a love that’s better
2. Meeting eye to eye may seen as invitation to romance
3. Massage can enhance love if you let your heart be touched
4. Why do people want to have sex? For reasons varied and complex
5. How to learn to be a lover? Experiment and communicate
6. Friends with benefits—just the perks without the ties
7. It’s a shame, shame, shame how we feel shame about sex
8. Why eat an apple a day, when sex may keep the doctor away?
9. Overcome complacency, revolutionize your sexual outlook
10. Whose duty is it to do what when sexual desire dims?
11. The mysteries of age meet the mysteries of sexuality’
12. Singles or doubles, it’s good just to be in the game
The first one, “Ditch Mr. Lonely, you deserve a love that’s better,” has never before been published. It was written for the February 2009 issue of the The Good Life magazine, which never made it to press.
To receive this free farewell gift, please tell me: What is your Number One question about relationships?
I will add you to my new email list to keep you posted about future events and Intimacies-related news. Of course, you can opt out at anytime.
I didn’t really feel like having sex the other day, but I did anyway. My motivation wasn’t very clear. I had some free time. There was an opportunity to join my husband while he was taking a siesta. I assumed correctly that he’d welcome my initiative, and I said to myself, “Why not?” I thought it would relax me and help me get out of my head. It did.
The reasons we choose to have sex vary from person to person and from time to time. People do it for serious life-affirming reasons, for frivolous debauchery and everything in between.
“Historically, the reasons people have sex have been assumed to be few in number and simple in nature—to reproduce, to experience pleasure or to relieve sexual tension.” So wrote a couple of professors from the University of Texas at Austin. Cindy Meston and David Buss, both PhDs in the Department of Psychology, have published a thorough taxonomy of sexual motivation in the Archives of Sexual Behavior after conducting a scientific study of why people have sex—an extremely important, but surprisingly little-studied topic.
Research in the nineteen-seventies, -eighties and -nineties showed that people had sex for reasons that were varied and psychologically complex. These included a desire for pure pleasure, to express emotional closeness, to please a partner and to make a conquest. Yet most of the reasons documented in those decades, implicitly assumed the context of an ongoing romantic relationship or long-term mate. Humans, however, have a menu of mating strategies, including long-term, short-term and extra curricular mating. There might be reasons for having sex with a casual sex partner such as the desire to experience sexual variety or seeking to improve one’s sexual skills. Sex could be exchanged for favors, special privileges and a preferred job or indeed for any resource.
Sex might be used to reward a partner or as a favor in exchange for something the partner has done. Or sex might be used to retaliate against a partner for some perceived wrongdoing. Also, sex might be used to intensify the relationship, escalate the level of commitment within the relationship or turn a relationship from short- to long-term. Women, in particular, were thought to engage in sexual intercourse for emotional closeness, bonding, commitment, love, affection, acceptance, tolerance and closeness.
In their recent study, Meston and Buss surveyed more than four hundred men and women, ranging in age from seventeen to fifty-two, who responded to the query: ‘‘Please list all the reasons you can think of why you, or someone you have known, has engaged in sexual intercourse in the past.’’ The more than seven hundred answers collected resulted in two hundred thirty-seven distinct reasons.
Once they came up with that long list, Meston and Buss asked more than fifteen hundred college students, in exchange for psychology class credits, to rank the reasons in terms of how they applied to their experiences. Keep in mind that these results reveal the behavior of those who are of an age when, Meston conceded, “Hormones run rampant.” She predicted significant differences when older people are studied.
The research found similar reasons for why these young adults got intimate, and the Number One reason was simply: “I was attracted to the person.” While the primary reason involved lust, rather than amour, expressing love and showing affection still were in the top ten for both men and women.
Gender differences were negligible. Twenty of the top twenty-five reasons given were the same for males and females. “Men were more likely to be opportunistic towards having sex,” Meston said. “So, if sex was…available, they would jump on it—somewhat more so than women. Women were more likely to have sex because they felt they needed to please their partner.” Men, the study revealed, were more apt than women to have sex to get things like a promotion, a raise or a favor. Guys were much more likely than gals to say they’d had sex to “boost my social status” or because the partner was famous or “out of my league.”
The study Meston and Buss completed inspired New York Times science writer John Tierney to provide an on-line forum where the public could add their ideas to the list of reasons to have sex. In just a few days, he got hundreds of responses, which lead the UT researchers to put an additional forty reasons on their list.
Reading the many tawdry reasons why others have sex, I felt more inclined to forgive my own past foibles.
The reasons I found scariest involved revenge: “I wanted to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease (e.g., herpes, AIDS),” “I wanted to get rid of aggression” and ‘‘I thought it would help ‘trap’ a new partner.”
The most inspiring reasons involved celebration: “Because life is short (and a hundred years from now we will all be dust),” “To recover or reaffirm life after the loss of (a) loved one” and “I wanted to become one with another person.”
While we may wish to keep to ourselves the rationalizations for our behavior, the act of reasoning itself has value. By delving into our own feelings, getting honest with ourselves about why we get it on, we’ll gain greater personal understanding of and appreciation for our own sexual natures.
Admit it. You and I have all experienced it, and we enjoyed it—though we’re loath to tell anyone exactly what we did. We felt heat emerge from within our bodies, as a flush turned skin red and self-consciousness became acute: We wallowed in our private sense of sexual shame.
Ever since Adam and Eve got expelled from the Garden of Eden (the Hebrew word for which, by the way, means, “pleasure”), humans have been ashamed of their nakedness. Sure, we’ve been through the Sexual Revolution and now many people have declared themselves “sex positive” (a movement promoting open sexuality with few limits, in contrast to sex-negativity, which adherents identify as the dominant view of sex in Western culture). But shame—either suffered by the submissive or inflicted and enjoyed vicariously by the dominant—still permeates the sexual experience.
There’s an undercurrent, if not an emphasis, on bondage and sadomasochism (BDSM) in erotica, pornography and adult entertainment. The master-slave dynamic is acted out to stimulate our imaginations. For some, it is a turnoff. For others—such as consumers who support the ten billion dollars-a-year pornography industry—it is arousing.
Most adults won’t talk about sex. For some, it’s a matter of discretion. For many, sexual issues are seen as “dirty” and immoral, even in this age of supposed sexual enlightenment.
Why is a natural act, even non-kinky sex, a source of shame?
Children are taught to feel shame from an early age. When used properly, it is a useful self-regulating mechanism for behavior. Sadly, it often causes the shamed one to pull back, physically and emotionally, afraid of being exposed or seen as being bad.
Feelings of shame may also be the result of sex abuse or early childhood stimulation, which could not be resolved—unrequited Oedipal longings. But even in normal, age-appropriate sex play, children may be shamed and told they are bad and wrong. When parents are embarrassed by their children’s sexual behavior, they pass their misgivings about sex to their offspring. As a result, for example, we begin to feel guilty about masturbation, the most basic self-care and self-pleasuring.
We’re fooling ourselves if we think we could totally free ourselves from these feelings of shame. So many religions and customs have linked sex with guilt that few of us are entirely unaffected. Over centuries, the Judeo-Christian ethic has ingrained into our psyches the belief that sex is synonymous with sin. Churches have used shame as the guiding force to redirect young peoples’ sexual impulse. Puritanical teachings say that life is about suffering and the hedonism of pleasure is to be shunned. It’s programmed into us. Yet we enjoy intimacy and making love. So when we do things that support that, we feel a sense of shame.
Some men have a Madonna-whore complex. They want to be mated with a pure virgin, but sex without guilt doesn’t to it for them, and they lust after the shame of a prostitute.
We pride ourselves on having evolved out of the cave to a highly sophisticated social structure where sexual impulse is restrained by intellect. Our fear of being discovered spares us from doing things we would later regret.
Guilt emerges when we revert to our animal behavior. We’re ashamed about appearing selfish in our desires or about having lost control of ourselves. Orgasm becomes taboo, experienced only in private and rarely discussed. We feel inhibited by something. Could it be the fear of being visible, disarmed at the deepest levels?
Sexual shame is rampant in our culture. We objectify each other sexually, and then we feel shamed for having done so. Thinking of someone as a sex object instead of as a human is a way of depersonalizing the experience, of toning down the intensity. And we can even recognize this self-imposed limitation and feel ashamed for indulging in it. Then we eroticize shame itself. Its “forbidden” status hooks us into an addictive cycle made even stronger by shame.
Although stories of sexual shame now fill tell-it-all TV talk shows, the pages of popular magazines and the plots of soap operas, few people will ever talk about or admit to their own feelings of shame. If one or both partners are too shy, embarrassed or ashamed to talk about sex and any shame they may associate with it, they’ll miss the exploration and risk-taking required for good, lasting sex with a long-term partner.
“There are two ways to absolve ourselves of shame,” states psychologist and sexologist Joy Davidson. “One is to speak of it, share it, expose it to the light and watch it burn away. The other is to use it, to eroticize it. Fantasy allows us to utilize shame in extraordinarily creative ways. If you allow yourself this privilege, you triumph over shame.”
Tantra is an Eastern tradition that teaches us to reframe how we see sex, to celebrate it as divine, not a shame. It views sexuality as a path on by which we may be guided out of the illusion of being incomplete and separate to an understanding of our intrinsic wholeness and connection.
Before we evolve to that exalted level of consciousness, we have some issues to work out. Perhaps it’s not a shame that we experience shame, for it compels us to self-examine and to better understand what triggers our response. Do enough of that, and lovemaking is bound to be something to be—not ashamed of—but proud about.
What motivates us to mate?
