I was pleased to be invited as a guest on the New Body Electric School’s “Erotic Liberation Podcast.” The hosts, Craig Cullinane and G. Love, conducted a lively and frank hour-long conversation about sacred intimacy, pornography, and more. Check it out on the Body Electric website or, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts.
I recently had the pleasure of appearing as a guest on Gay Men’s Life Lab, a podcast that dives deep into the many issues facing gay men today. Host Buck Dodson is a board-certified life coach and licensed therapist who has been helping other gay men realize their full potential for over 15 years.
Our conversation revolved around my book “The Paradox of Porn: Notes on Gay Male Sexual Culture.” We talked about, among other things, my journey to being a pleasure activist and Sacred Intimate; the integral yet complex role pornography plays in gay men’s self-discovery; how porn both helps and hinders our views of our bodies, sexuality, and relationships; learning to distinguish sex, porn and masturbation; and the role of pleasure and desire in addressing issues with porn.
Check it out here or wherever you get your podcasts and let me know what you think. @buckdodsoncoaching@gaymenslifelab
There has been a lot of talk about the mental health challenges that everyone is facing during this time of the global pandemic, political unrest, and financial turmoil. I feel it myself, and I witness it in the people that I work with. And I can attest that one thing that really helps is witnessing a public figure speak with real integrity and moral authority, as President Obama did at the funeral of Georgia Congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis. Check it out for yourself.
Journalist and author Peggy Orenstein has spent many years writing about the inner lives of girls in a series of best-selling books. In recent years, she turned her attention to young men and interviewed teenagers and college students for her new book Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity. NPR’s Terry Gross interviewed her recently for the radio show/podcast “Fresh Air,” and it’s worth checking out. What she says about how boys are socialized not to talk about their feelings and the distorted ideas about sex they get from watching porn apply equally to men of all ages. I’m looking forward to reading the book (which just the New York Times’ best-seller list), but this interview is a tantalizing preview.
On Saturday, November 9, I’ll be speaking at Sessions Live 2019, an annual clinical event hosted by Esther Perel. I invite you to join me and this year’s esteemed guests for an invigorating day of learning online.
Click here to purchase your Livestream ticket for $99
Sessions Live is a one-day event dedicated to providing an opportunity for professionals in the field of mental health to come together to learn and challenge each other around a relevant topic in the field of modern relationships.
This year, Esther invites us to explore the topic of Eros, also known as eroticism. We’ll look at eroticism as a quality of aliveness, vibrancy and vitality that is critical to both life and the clinical relationship. It goes far beyond a repertoire of sexual techniques. It’s a sense of creativity, agency and pleasure that we often aim for in our clients but neglect within ourselves.
Learn more about Sessions Live 2019: Finding Eros Livestream
Together, we’ll answer the questions:
Your livestream ticket includes:
Purchase your Livestream ticket today and use code bodyandsoul for a special discount.
Join us online for a day of learning that will help you expand your definition of eroticism and increase your confidence in helping your clients tackle issues of love’s challenges and love’s celebrations.
illustration by Natalia Ramos (IG @natalia_ramas)
photo by Kathryn Wirsing
I traveled to Mexico City last month to attend the World Bufo Alvarius Congress (WBAC), bufo alvarius being the name of a toad species native to the Sonora Desert that secretes a substance that when dried and smoked creates a powerful psychedelic experience. When synthesized in a laboratory, the compound is known as 5meo-n-DMT, somewhat related to dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which is produced by the human body and many plants and is the active ingredient in ayahuasca. The gathering in Mexico City July 27-29, 2018, was the first of its kind to assemble in one room a few hundred people who had all experienced this sacred medicine – “the indigenous peoples, the practitioners, the scientists, the anthropologists, and the psychonauts – the now-global toad family whose lives have been touched by this most powerful of entheogens,” as the website described the target audience. “Join us for three days of lectures, panel and group discussions, and films by the leading experts in this nascent field…to address the pressing issues of toad conservation, ethics, best practices, and sustainable alternatives, and to explore the limits of both our science and our spirituality. What’s more, it is also a much needed gathering to discuss the power and responsibility of using this unique compound, and to find ways in which we can grow as an educated and unified community.”
I attended the congress partly out of professional interest, since I’m engaged in a year-long training in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. But I suppose I also fall in the category of psychonaut, someone with a passionate curiosity to explore these medicines for the sake of spiritual growth and self-awareness.
My report on the gathering, “Romancing the Toad,” has just been published in the online magazine Reality Sandwich. There was a lot of useful information conveyed, and not a small amount of drama. You can read the complete account here. Check it out and let me know what you think.
White Crane Institute promotes the study of the role of Gay men, queer sexualities and gender variation and orientation in the evolution, psychology, sociology, and practice of spirituality, ritual, and religion. Gay Wisdom, a project that evolved out of the quarterly White Crane Journal, broadcasts a daily dose of history and life reflection for spiritually minded queer folks. You can sign up to receive these free emails here or join the Facebook page here. Gay Wisdom recently interviewed me about my new book, The Paradox of Porn: Notes on Gay Male Sexual Culture. The first chunk of the interview appears below; you can read the interview in full online here.
A White Crane/GayWisdom Interview with author Don Shewey by Paul Wirhun
Paul Wirhun: First of all, this is a great book and an important read. Has no one else really written as extensively on this subject? I particularly loved the lack of judgment in the tone throughout, and the observation about how personal the path is for one’s use of porn. I especially loved Sgt. Shewey’s discourse at the end of the book – might it possible to excerpt that and get it into other gay publications as a stand-alone essay? It might also draw more readers?!?
Don Shewey: Thanks, Paul, for your kind words. The only other book I’m aware of that specifically tackles gay men’s experience of pornography is a scholarly volume from 1996 called Hard to Imagine by Thomas Waugh. I haven’t read it. It’s expensive, $75, and not only hard to imagine but hard to find. It’s funny you should mention the idea of circulating my list of things-to-do as a stand-alone essay: I’ve just submitted it to The Advocate, which expressed interest in publishing an excerpt. So we’ll see.
Paul: I’m curious about the impetus for writing this – a long-term idea brewing? What prompted you to finally write it?
Don: I’m someone who has always enjoyed thinking and talking about sex in an open and unembarrassed way, maybe because I came of age during an enlightened period when feminism and gay liberation had a big impact on me and taught me to value the body and to know that “the personal is the political.”
Paul: Did it come from your therapy practice and what you were hearing from clients, or from a more personal cogitation?
Don: That background has served me well as a sex therapist. I’ve talked about the impact of pornography on gay men’s sex lives with clients for so many years that I finally decided it was time to write down some of the thoughts and perceptions I’ve been repeating in therapy sessions day after day after day.
Paul: Your humor throughout is very engaging and sets a relaxing tone. I’m glad that voice is included. Why do you think are we still so skittish to discuss porn? Is porn still in the closet? What do we admit by saying we use it; and what do we say about ourselves when we deny our use in public discourse, whether with friends/lovers/sex mates?
Don: I think many people have a hard time talking about sex at all. It’s so intimate and revealing. Many people live with shame about their desires, religious guilt, fear of other people’s judgments. It’s hard even for couples in established relationships to discuss the nitty-gritty details of sex.
There’s a prevailing myth that “talking about sex spoils it.” Even psychotherapists and physicians who are theoretically trained to deal with all aspects of human life get squeamish when it comes to talking about sex. There are some realms in which sex is accepted as healthy and positive, not to mention essential for life, but pornography always carries the air of the forbidden, the sleazy, which makes it extra-difficult to talk about in public or in private.
Paul: Do you think that there is a way to break through this “air of the forbidden, the sleazy” — which your book accomplishes – or do we remain stuck in this paradigm – and have to keep these conversations more private? Why must society keep our deepest desires ‘in the closet’ and labeled sleazy?
Don: We could say that the world might be a better place if everybody viewed all aspects of sexuality as acceptable, human, healthy, whatever, including homosexuality, masturbation, pornography, etc. There will always be people who do; there will probably always be people who don’t. Jungian analyst James Hillman might point out that sexual inhibitions are archetypal – they go with the territory of being human and there may be some evolutionary purpose for those inhibitions.
Paul: Some of the discourse with your clients really brought home for me two experiences: 1. How porn personally affected that person’s life/perspective of their own sex life, causing me to investigate my use of porn more mindfully (thank you!); and, 2. How each of us creates a story about the our own disjuncts in achieving personal erotic satisfaction, and how we get trapped in that story and view of ourselves; speak to the mirroring that happens in porn and how that affects our sense of selves and these narratives we cook up about ourselves and our sex lives, if you would?
Don: This is the essential paradox of porn, right? We’re drawn to it because there’s something we recognize about the heat, the lure of sex, the pleasure of looking at bodies engaged in sexy activity, the feelings the emerge in our own bodies looking at it. So, porn (erotic imagery of any kind) is a kind of mirror.
And at the same time, it is an edited medium, a product of technology, with its own memes and formulas and codes, and when you look at enough of it you start seeing porn as the template and you start copying what you see. For instance, I don’t think many people really like having someone ejaculate on their faces, but it’s such a mainstay of porn because it’s highly visual, so now guys think it’s perfectly acceptable, if not required. It’s an ongoing question – does porn reflect our tastes or create them?
To read the complete interview, see here.
Esther Perel is a Belgian-born sex therapist who has become widely known for her speaking and teaching about sex, intimacy, and relationships. Her first book, Mating in Captivity, examined and overturned a lot of preconceptions about how to sustain emotional and sexual intimacy in a committed relationship. Her TED talk on desire (“The secret to desire in a long-term relationship”) has gotten over 11 million views online. And her new book, The State of Affairs, inspired another juicy TED talk distilling the essence of the book, “Re-thinking infidelity.”
Perel has achieved media stardom partly because she’s a strikingly attractive blonde woman with a charming European accent — I mention her photogenic personality to make the point that it combines with a sharp intellect and a gracious sense of humor to get across some very provocative and challenging ideas in a remarkably accessible way. She was recently interviewed about the material in her book on NPR’s “Fresh Air” by the ever-appealing Terry Gross. Few therapists in the public arena have impressed me so much with their sensible approach to the subject of sex and relationships.
In particular, I was struck by how Perel talked about a subject that I encounter frequently in my own practice, which is the situation where there is a big difference in libido: one partner wants sex and the other doesn’t.
Terry Gross: How do you deal with relationships where one partner desires something that the other partner isn’t willing to give? Doesn’t enjoy sex, doesn’t want it frequently, therefore they’ve become sexually incompatible. What’s your position for the partner who desires something that partner can no longer get within the marriage?
Esther Perel: If you ask about what to do with the discrepancy around desire for sex within the relationship, thinking that what people miss is the act of sex, you fail to understand what people are really asking for. Sexuality is often a pathway for connection, for intimacy, for tenderness, for sensuality. For playfulness, for power, for curiosity, for relaxation. When people are deprived of sex, it’s this whole set of feelings and experiences they are deprived of. They can have sex in various places. What they want is everything that the connection gives them. When they are deprived of that, what they experience is a depletion of energy, of vibrancy, of aliveness, of vitality. That’s what they’re yearning for. So the conversation begins not with sex but with loss. Loss on both sides. The person who is no longer interested is not so happy about that, either.
To me, this was the most interesting part of the interview:
Terry Gross: When someone no longer feels sexually aroused by your partner, is that something you feel they can get back?
Esther Perel: Arousal is one thing, desire is something else, and willingness is a third. We do not start sexually only because we are aroused and turned on. We sometimes start to be involved sexually because there is willingness. You’re not always hungry. But then there is food in front of you, and it looks beautiful, and it smells really good, and you have a little taste, and you think, “Hmm, after all, I wouldn’t mind a little bit more.” And even after you ate, you may say, “That was delicious, I wasn’t really hungry,” and you still enjoyed it. So we have multiple doors for entering into an intimate engagement with our partner. Excitement is just one of them. Sometimes you are desirous but you don’t have an arousal, you’re not turned on physiologically yet. But you have the idea, you have the wish for it, you’re in the mood. And sometimes you are excited and turned on but you’re not necessarily in the state of desire. I think we need to separate these concepts and these entry points, first of all.
Second of all, I think the more important question sometimes is: “I turn myself off…how? I shut down my desires…how?” That’s not the same as “You turn me off when…” and “What turns me off is…” That puts the responsibility only on the other person: if only the other person did amazing things it would move me. The fact is, if I’m shut down, if I’ve closed the door, you can do a lot of things but there will be nobody at the reception desk. There needs to be receptivity, an openness, a willingness, and that is the fundamental sovereignty of desire. That is something that I own. I decide if I want to open that or not. What they’re talking about is the ways they have closed themselves off from possibility of touch, of connection, of sensuality, of pleasure, of surrender, for a host of reasons that range from sexual trauma to self-criticism to lack of self-worth to negative body image to issues of self-esteem. It is those things that make us close ourselves down.
Terry Gross: Is that something you can help fix?
Esther Perel: Yes, many times. That’s the work. The work is about helping people often to reconnect with parts of themselves they’ve neglected or they’re in conflict with or that they despise. Or that they feel loathsome about or don’t feel deserving of because they gained too much weight or they haven’t performed well enough at work, because their mother left them for another man so they decided they would be all mother and they killed the woman inside of them the day they had a child. Or because their father was violent and aggressive and they don’t know how to bring together love and lust. Those are the deeper conflicts around desire and intimacy and sexuality that I work with in my practice.
I encourage you to listen to the entire half-hour interview yourself online here. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Luis Antonio Capurro is a friendly, enterprising young blogger and informal minister of culture to the gay male community in Lima, Peru. He recently interviewed me (by email) for his online magazine La Revista Diversa. Check it out here and let me know what you think.
Last fall RFD, the radical faerie quarterly reader-written journal, devoted a special issue to the topic of Substances. The magazine includes some extremely honest and searching writings looking at many different practices involving party drugs and sacred medicines. I continue to marvel and chuckle at the powerful, witty cover image created by managing editor Bambi Gauthier and art director Matt Bucy (above). I contributed a very personal essay about my own experience of using various mind-altering substances, what I’ve gained, and how closely I monitor the balance of recreational and ceremonial explorations, what’s excessive and what’s enough. The essay is titled “Pleasure, Anesthesia, and the Burden of Consciousness: Notes on Substances.”
Early on, I say:
I am at heart an epicurean. I believe that pleasure is the greatest good in life, and in my sacred intimate practice I’m a champion of healing through pleasure. I’m quite attached to the pleasures in my life: the four cups of strong black tea that fuel my day, the couple of glasses of wine or beer that are my treat at the end of the day, my robust sex life, my enjoyment of music, and the occasional toke that my stoner boyfriend has taught me to enjoy. At the same time, I’m aware that sometimes it’s hard to distinguish pleasure from anesthesia, and sometimes I wonder what pain or fear I might be medicating or numbing with the substances I routinely enjoy. I’m sure I’m a bit hypervigilant about this because my father’s alcoholism left a strong imprint on my life. But I like to believe that I remain in choice rather than compulsive about my pleasures, and I’ve noticed that when I diet to prepare for sacred medicine ceremonies, I get quite cranky about giving up tea and wine and still spend considerable energy thinking about and craving them. There are writing projects that are important to me that I’m trying to summon the energy and stamina and concentration to complete, and it’s unclear to me whether my use of substances helps or hinders that. The constant existential battle between Living a Good Life and Getting Things Done.
RFD has a fairly small readership, so after sharing the essay with a handful of friends, one of them suggested I approach Reality Sandwich, the online magazine created by Evolver Learning Lab, about republishing my piece. The editors there enthusiastically embraced the idea, so now it’s available to read in full. Check it out here and let me know what you think.
food for the joybody 