Walk With Reid Facebook Live: Sexual Confidence, Arousal and Erotic Vs. Sensual
Reid: Good morning sex geeks! Hello everyone! It’s, it’s time for our, our walk. Our morning or afternoon walk or maybe evening. I’d sent out an email last night about, about these videos and, and those emails go out all over the world and a lot of the comments we’re getting from folks are from different places so I don’t know what time it is that you’re watching us. You could be watching a recording. I’m just super excited that people seem to kind of like what we’re doing.
So first thing sound check making sure that wireless mic’s work and so leave me a comment also let me know where you’re where, where are you today? Where are where are you in the world? So I’d love to see in the comments ‘coz I read I tried to read all the comments to see where are you tuning in from today. I’ve got my computer screen in the back so I could look at your comments as they come in and there’s the video so I think everything’s working and we’ve got like fourteen viewers right now and we’re off.
So good morning everyone! British Columbia, Hey Greg! It’s 8:51 your time over there and Loren you’re in British Columbia. Who else? Oh wait, so Sean this is this is I light green regular sex geek t-shirt maybe this represents shamrock shakes perhaps I don’t know but when I’m just wearing my regular normal sex geek shirt, this is a relationship and a sex advice and then if I’m wearing my sex geek summer camp shirt that is business advice for sex educators and workshop leaders and things like that people like that. So if you’re interested in more business advice you can go to http://www.sexgeeksummercamp.com/ that’s a business retreat for sex educators and https://reidaboutsex.com/ for just relationship nerdy and and advice and things like that.
So good morning everyone! We are talking today about sexual self-confidence, arousal I wanna show you one of my favourite Star Trek sex moves from my nerds out there. And I wanna talk about something else let me see what is it that I write in the description these are my notes. Oh and erotic versus sensual so we’re gonna we’ve got a lot of phone calls and meetings today so we’re gonna we’re gonna get this out of the way. But I’m so glad that so many people are not completely bothered by my treadmill desk. My walking desk that I’m using and there are seemed to be enjoying these videos. Feel free to share them, feel free to you know post them in other places. I super appreciate it and I hope that they are useful for you and I also wanna say thank you everyone who emailed me or, or leaving me messages with questions or and things that they want me to talk about in these morning walks. I sent out my email to my email list last night alerting folks about these videos and asked them to hit reply and share what they’d like me to talk about and one of the reasons I’m doing this it’s almost 11 a.m. on the West coast right now is I was reading we’ve got so many emails and I was reading so may interesting things that people wanna talk about. So if I can’t get to all of them in these morning walks, you can also check out my YouTube channel where I,I have a little folder where I keep all the questions and I try to answer them sometimes with my myself, sometimes with other educators Cathy Vartuli and I answer a lot of questions. Cathy Vartuli from the http://theintimacydojo.com/ so, Hi Cathy wherever you’re at today.
So please just always feel free to send me questions. I do try to read all my emails I’m pretty good about that I don’t always reply in the same situation here or like I try to go back to the videos and read all the comments but this is the more the videos we shoot, the tougher it’s gonna be to keep up on everything and I just wanna set expectations for folks that you know I will try to read and like everything that I can and please don’t talk it personally if I don’t like something or if I don’t respond directly to a comment or question. I’m, I’m sorry if I can’t be on top of all of that and I’ll try to do my best and just like good relationship advice in life, let’s try to be gentle with ourselves and not beat ourselves up for one step falls to the cracks and do your best to show up and clean up your messes. So there are the just of my expectations. Good morning Louie! Jean Marie hi! Nancy hi! Burger boulder and so good morning everyone! Or good afternoon or whatever that is.
Okay so let’s talk about sexual confidence and arousal. We are really sweet person if I can pull up my email on this hang on. I make I have friend on the screen. Somebody wrote in this morning so this is a Sarah who gave me permission to use her name and I’ll just read the email ‘coz it’s actually really good thing to talk about and inspired today’s talk. She goes, “Hey Reid! I was wondering if you would talk more about women’s need for emotional safety in a relationship to be able to be vulnerable enough to feel intense pleasure. I’m not sure if this is an issue for every woman but I’m very sensitive and my partner can be rather abrasive and I find that when we’re not getting along, my libido just disappears. And it’s so bad that I can’t orgasm and feel and I feel so much less pleasure but I notice when he takes the time to be more loving and reassuring to me, my libido wakes up. I have intense orgasms and I feel so much more open and alive. I think this may be a serious issue to a lot of women and I don’t think very many men understand this. Many a.. maybe a lot of people are suffering in their relationships because of this issue as both people suffer when one person is turned off sexually. It loses connection with each other. Anyway, thanks for listening Reid. I wish lots of love and pleasure to you.”
So first of, thank you Sarah for sending the email. I’m gonna, I’m gonna comment these questions sideways because there’s a couple of things that are going on here as a sex and relationship nerd that I haven’t talked to thousands of people over now that since 2004 is when I kind of consider my career starting when cuddle party became the big news story in the media and everybody wanted to talk about why New Yorker’s are paying money to cuddle? Cuddle party was founded by myself and Marcia Baczynski and now exists in several different countries and taught in different languages and I’ve stepped away from cuddle party but one of the things since 2004 just like talking to thousands and thousands of people, the one of the biggest issues that’s going on or just challenges for just human beings in general is that people don’t really get great sex education and a lot of opportunity to practice getting good at sex because we don’t really frame it in that way and we don’t talk really openly about it. Now just I’ll, I’ll take responsible or not responsibility but I’ll, I’ll speak for America for the United States. There’s not a lot of open conversation and we do know psychologically that when people don’t feel confident or competent about the things that they’re doing, it creates a lot of hesitation. And when you just don’t know things about your own body or other peoples bodies or how they speak up and ask questions and learn when you’re with another human being in an intimate situation, there’s a really huge opportunity for people like just do things wrong and treat each other’s bodies in not in appropriately but just to treat peoples bodies in ways that aren’t gonna work for them. And when you grow up in a culture where you’re not supposed to be talking about sex and you grow up in a culture where a lot of people have been exploring their own bodies and masturbating and self-pleasuring and having to be quiet, well you end up creating is a race of adults who don’t know how to speak up feel anxious asking for what they want or basically sexual you know minds in the bedroom sexual ninja. And if people aren’t talking about sex and also the situation were some people aren’t having a lot of sex and they don’t even know how their own bodies operate, it can be really it’s really easy to just mistreat people’s bodies and be very clumsy and clunky. So the idea here is to think about how ways that you can up your sexual self-confidence and practice getting better at speaking and asking for things that you want and talking about sex. I’ve recommend talking about sex when you’re not having the sex and then just practicing getting better at talking about sex during the sex.
[inaudible 00:09:51] she’s a good friend of mine and amazing educator that was the first time I ever heard from her the advice of like practice talking about intimacy and the sex that you want and the things that you like when you’re not in the bedroom like when you’re driving a car it was Megan’s great example you know ‘coz you can both look straight ahead and when it gets awkward, you’re like “oh my god I love this song” and you just crank up the music for a while. Talking about sex when you’re not having it allows you to have those awkward moments with the stakes a little bit lower. When you’re talking about sex while you’re having it or in the bedroom or back to this I’m gonna say the wrong thing and ruin the moment and nothing’s gonna ever happen and all sex will be remove for me. We talked about that in the in the awkward walk and hop that we did the other day.
So understanding like we could all benefit from more confident and competent and the reason I say confident and competent is you can feel like you’re amazing in bed and not know what you’re doing and no one speak enough about it and you’re just doing it wrong and you would never know that you’re doing it wrong because people aren’t telling you that you’re doing it wrong. So we want confidence and competence and the competence piece means you kind a need to learn how bodies work how your and understand your own body. What’s really great about psychology and studies on confidence and competence is this the thing that we, we talked about called the confidence-competence loop which is people generally speaking when they feel more confident tend to perform better and when you tend to perform better your confident shoots up. And this is kind of a feedback loop where you start to get to you just get better at things because you feel better at things and because you feel better at things you start to become better at things. Where this is really useful in sex? Is the more confident and competent you feel, the more relax people tend to be and they really start to kind of dropping to this disown and the flow will start to have more fun with the sex that they’re having. And that can take a little bit of time a little bit of learning curve from learning how to do something well and then really kind in kind of having it to start to become second nature to where you can really enjoy it.
For those of you who’ve ever I don’t know like try to learn how to play music or maybe learn how to golf or some other physical activity even like knitting and crushing like it takes a while until it become second nature to where you can relax and you’re just kind of having fun with the fun of it. This can seem insurmountable for a lot of people ‘coz they’re like, “Reid I’m not even dating.” We got a lot of emails from people talking about like you know challenges in dating and finding relationships and partners for for sex and intimacy and I’ll address those in some future talks. But even if you’re not dating anyone, you can still start learning how bodies work and understanding how to be better with them.
So, here’s our quick I’ll I’m gonna jumped into my, my favourite Star Trek bedroom move but first I’m gonna jump and see some of the comments so Hi Anne! Sunny! Sunny Megatron in the house ladies and gentlemen, from Chicago Debbie! How are you? Alright I think that’s those are the people there. Who else? Victoria has joined us. So, so getting the, the idea that just learning and getting better with bodies and your own bodies and using your words, that’s gonna start shifting things in a world filled with anxiety, you just being able to talk about sex makes you a superhero that’s like a superpower to be able to handle the awkward and actually hold space for other people to feel awkward but to start to talk about things. Ask for what they want. Talk about things that maybe they’re interested in. That’s huge and you wanna be that kind of person in the world who has that superpower. So let’s start with the Star Trek move ‘coz and this will all kind of weave together and make sense in a in a few minutes.
So everyone say good morning or good afternoon to the wondrous vulva puppet. Hello everyone! And now I feel like Mr. Rogers of sex ed. So this is a great puppet you can get in on on Etsy you wanna search for wondrous vulva puppet it’s.. got a clit and these are the inner labia and the outer labia and there’s even a representation of the G-spot that will poke out from time to time. The reason I’m using my wondrous vulva puppet is to show you this move. So for those of you were Star Trek fans I’m I apologize for what’s about to happen you won’t be able to unseen this. For those of you who don’t know who Start Trek is go go see a Star Trek movie or a Start Trek episode. I am I’m a fan of the original series but you know the next generation and all the other spin offs amazing, amazing stuff. If you would like to do the Vulcan greeting with me the peace in long life, live long in prosper greeting that Mr. Spock, Leonard Nimoy who is rest in peace used to do made famous. What I want you to do is imagine that take your knee and put the palm of your hand on your knee if you’re sitting down or standing up, if you’re driving if you’re driving, why you’re even watch this video? Don’t do that. Watch this later. And I want you to put your palm of your hand on the top of your knee as if the top of your knee was your, your pubic mount or the pubic mount of somebody who has a vulva. In technical sex geekery, the vulva is the outside and the vagina is the inside and when you take the palm of your hand and pace it on top of your knee in the Vulcan greeting, and drip it over your knee with your fingers open. And when the reason I’m teaching you this is what we know now about the vulva and the arousal and erectile tissue inside that basically the clitoral clitoral structure is that there’s as much erectile tissue in the clit and the clitoral structure inside and around the vagina as there is for penis. So one of the biggest mistakes that people make when playing with vulva is they go for the whole too soon. And if you are a vulva owner and you know this to be true or you ever had somebody go for the whole too soon then maybe you want to leave a like comment or agree in the comment section or hit the like button or something like that.
So one of the things when I’m teaching college students is to use this Vulcan what we called the inverted Vulcan because when you’re under pulling is with your palm on the knee or the pubic mount in this case on your knee and your fingers drape over you can then give pressure and kind of a massage in a way that allows somebody the vulva owner to hump back against you and use all their pelvic core muscles there’s a great book by Sheri Winston called the I think it’s called the Anatomy of Female Arousal. Yeah, I think that’s it’s the Anatomy of Female Arousal by Sheri Winston which goes into great depth about the erectile tissue underneath the surface. But when you wanna do is you wanna give pressure and, and kind of a massage in a way when you’re not going for a whole too soon. Where this little Trek which is really funny ‘coz now whenever you see anybody giving you the Vulcan greeting you’re like vulvas. And this move will also work on penises you just wanna you can either come up from underneath and have the palm against the taint and the penis and, and the knots kind of in between or you can come from above and do a similar thing and the, the shaft coming out this way. But where this little teaching technique is useful is it reminds people to use pressure and massage to give people time to become more fully aroused rather than just going for the whole too soon. Or, or you know when you’re when you’re playing with the penis or with the butt hole like you just you’re just going too fast, too hard, too soon. When you slow down and give people time to drop into their bodies and to start to feel more aroused, you’re what you’re doing is you’re is you’re leveraging their body and what we know about humans and their erectile tissue and their arousal so that they will start to feel more pleasure. If you give people more time and you slow things down, they as they start to become more aroused they’re also kind of semantically dropping more into their body. Things don’t feel as aggressive or as abrasive as Sarah said in her email and then as we start to drop into our bodies, we can feel more and everything feels better. You just slowing down and giving people more time to connect with you and to get turned on will make them for the most part think you’re just great at sex! So you could still live and be in your learning curve clunkinnes you’re like I know there’s the, the Start Trek move but I’m not sure, am I doing it right? Use lube, lube is really huge and big and just creating more pleasure in general to genitals in general but with this little as you’re getting clunky and learning, you’re just slowing things down breathing with people, letting them to get into their body, understanding that most people take ten to twenty minutes to start to calm down and relax and drop into their bodies anyway which for those of you who aren’t dancers, I am not a dancer. I always wondered why when I when my friends took me out dancing why that first twenty minutes was so excruciating was torture to me being on the dance floor like all awkward and, and super nervous and what I learned was, “oh! If I give myself twenty minutes of just being super self-conscious often, I will shift and my brain will refocus and I’ll drop into my body and I’ll start to feel less anxious.” Twenty minutes is a long time to feel awkward and clumsy and anxious so understanding that the people that you’re in bed with might need fifteen or twenty minutes to start to get out of their head knowing that and taking your time and intentionally creating making out massage, gentle caressing the Vulcan inverted Vulcan move. Giving people time to get into their bodies will just make you a better lover, period. Slowing things down so that later you can go fast and hard and furious can be really useful.
A lot of us picked up bad role modelling from watching mainstream porn because porn is edited to be active and, and often all the warm up gets edited out because they wanted cut, cut the cut the chase scene. And understanding around the porn literacy perspective and porn is amazing and I’m actually gonna be at L.A. this week hosting some award stuff for some of the porn awards for, for XBIZ so that’s gonna be really fun but like just understanding like when you go and watch a race car movie, you’re not looking for driving cues and trying to learn how to be a better lover from watching mainstream porn is like trying to learn how to be a better driver from watching the Fast and Furious. You need to understand that that porn is edited and that these people are like Olympic circus a Cirque du Soleil performer of the sex and all the negotiation, all the warm up, all the sole stuff often get edited out, it’s there. It’s just we don’t see it because it doesn’t look active enough. When you can put in all the slow stuff and help each other get into your bodies and become fully aroused then all the fast stuff makes way more sense. And you can have these amazing pornographic moments of, of a fix of fantasy and excitement but it works so much better when you take time to set things up properly and a lot of people like we said don’t really know their bodies really well. So they don’t know how to get themselves there.
One of the things I’ll, I’ll end with is this idea between what’s erotic and what’s sensual? And this will help you get to those places and help you get your lovers for those places. And the distinctions are that you know there is sensual things that feel arousing to you that generally ways you like to be touched, positions that you’re like to be in areas of your body that you like to be touched ‘coz it is not just how you’re being touched but where you’re being touched to your erogenous zones? And those could be different for everybody and those things could shift and change as you become more aroused you know not everybody wants to be spanked right away but some people like in the froze of passion then they want to be spanked. So it’s get very different and you have to learn these things and pay attention to each other and communicate what your needs are. So the sensual piece is what turns your body on? And then the erotic concept or distinction is what turns your brain on? For some people, they don’t ever wanna be spanked but the idea of being spanked turns their brain on.
So understanding and learning about yourself like what are the things that your body likes? And what are the things that your brain likes? And just because your brain like something doesn’t mean that you ever have to do it. But understanding the distinction that between erotic and sensual allow you to leverage things, you could be doing something really slow and sensual with peoples genitals while perhaps you’re dirty talking about something that’s a fantasy of theirs that’s turning their brain on. So as you’re going slow and helping them to become more aroused physically through sensation, you’re also creating things that turning their brain on so that they get more they get even more aroused.
The other thing that’s really need about understanding what is erotic for your lovers is you can play with eroticism and never ever had to do any of it. You can, I once had a couple come to a threesome workshop with mine and they share in the beginning of the workshop they’re like, “we never wanna have a threesome.” And I’m like ‘”you, you realize that this is a threesome workshop the title is negotiating successful threesomes” and they’re like “we know!” And I’m like “why are you here?” And they, they look at, at the, at the room proudly and they announced, “we just wanna know we could have a threesome” and the room was like ruuuuuhhhh! Because for them it was gonna be a turn on to know that they could have one and they’re probably went home that night and made love and talked about the threesome that they could’ve had. So understanding that what turns your brain on doesn’t ever have to be something that you actually do and that knowing these things allows you to teach your lovers how they can play with you and get you to be more fully aroused and they can feel more competent about being a lover of yours because they got to do a good job and it allows you to start asking better questions of the people that you are sleeping with and playing with because you can now start to figure out what turns their brains on too. Which means you need to have communication, which means you’re role modelling it’s okay to talk about this stuff.
I think we’ve come to the end of what I want to talk about today. We’ve got all kinds of comments and a Leanne Hi! Thank you, everyone! I’ve got some thumbs up and I just wanna say thank you everyone. I’m gonna look at the comments right now better than stay here and try to you know fix with my phone but I’ll, I’ll start answering questions and went on the comment section. Please feel free to email me at http://Reid@reidaboutsex.com/ with your questions and if you’re looking for geeky programs for upping your sexual self-confidence, there are some free videos at http://sex10x.online.com/. So it’s sex 10 the number 10X online .com that’s a I’ve got some free training videos there for you and, and then an invite if you want to go further and go deeper you can go to my six week online course which is my sex 10X online course.
I think that’s it! Thank you so much for going on this morning walk with me. Share the video. Leave a comment and I appreciate you all put up with my geekiness. Talk to you later. Mwah! Have a great week!
Oh and tomorrow I’m gonna be in L.A. so I don’t know how we are gonna do our walk yet. I might have to just walk around the hotel or something with you I don’t know. We’ll, we’ll figure it out but be prepared for tomorrow. We won’t be in the office we’ll actually be outside in another place. Bye everyone!