The Heart of It
Our sexual experiences tend to have a script— a series of cause and effects that play themselves out repeatedly, leading to pleasurable (or not so pleasurable) encounters. Underlying these scripts are our frameworks of desire; the emotions, thoughts, and somatic cues that turn us on or off. These frameworks are deeply impacted by sexual shame, trauma, and our personal histories.
In long term relationships especially, we can get into ruts in which we’re stuck in a particular script. Often, that script starts to get disconnected from our framework of desire, which grows and develops just as we do. This book is geared towards couples and is homework heavy. It contains a lot of exercises for understanding the sexual dynamics at play both in yourself and your relationship. The emphasis is on play, connection, and creating a space in which both partners can get their needs met.
Written by the author of the cheekily-titled bestseller She Comes First, Dr. Ian Kerner is a very famous sex therapist with a lot of experience working with couples. So the insights are coming from a place of clinical experience.
Quotes that Inspire
“People need to relearn the importance of touching for its own sake, touching mindfully. Re-experiencing the sensation of touch, without the pressure to like it, to be aroused by it, or to simultaneously arouse the partner, helps create a connection to oneself and/or to the partner. When the conscious mind gets out of the way of the body, the body may respond on its own, building up a simmering charge.”
“While its true that sex often does occur in the context of a committed relationship, and that what happens outside of the bedroom does indeed affect what happens in the bedroom, sex is also its own planet with its own atmosphere, its own laws of physics, and addressing the relationship issues will not automatically fix a sex problem. We require closeness in our relationships, but sometimes in sex we crave a kind of distance that allows erotic fantasy to flourish.
Key Takeaways
Reactive and Responsive Desire are both Normal
We tend to think of desire as it is presented to us in media. It usually involves someone (typically a man) becoming suddenly, intensely aroused. This is highly reactive desire— when a single sexual stimulus puts you in “the mood.” But there is also responsive desire, when multiple cues over time begin to put someone in the mood for sex. Both are healthy and normal!
I’m putting this here not because it’s extensively talked about in the book, but because I see this issue frequently. To borrow a metaphor from sex therapist Emily Nagoski, we can think of spontaneous and reactive desire as an oven and a microwave. The microwave is reactive. Put your popcorn in, set the timer for two minutes, and bam! We’re on. The oven, on the other hand, is a bit trickier. Do we select bake, or convection bake? What’s the right temperature? Then we have to wait for the oven to heat up before it’s ready. This is akin to responsive desire, which needs a build up for arousal to be generated.
While this isn’t always gendered, typically men are more reactive, while women are responsive. Not understanding this can lead to frustration in sexual relationships, so I really highlighted it here. In the book, there’s an exercise for understanding the stimuli that turn you on and off during both the lead up and act of sex. This exercise is worth the effort, especially if shared with a partner.
Engaging the mind is an important and undervalued part of sex
This is true in two senses. Firstly, sex is not simply a physical act, especially in long-term romantic partnerships. Instead, sex is an activity that engages our emotional, psychological, and physical selves. We don’t often think of foreplay as an opportunity to engage the mind, but Dr. Kerner provides ideas for how to bring play into the bedroom in this way. One part I think he misses about psychological stimulation is the emotional component. Connecting on an emotional level can be a profound opportunity to deepen intimacy and improve the sexual experience, and he misses the mark a little by not addressing too much.
Our minds are also present in the bedroom in the sense that our brains are also impacted by our histories. Sexual trauma, narratives of shame about sexual activity, insecurities about our bodies, mental health conditions, and stress all impact how we show up in the bedroom. This is especially true when there is shame involved. Dr. Kerner introduces a concept called the “compass of shame” and invites individuals to better understand how their histories show up in their sexual lives. Personally, I think these are the strongest exercises in the book. That said, there’s also a lot of cultural commentary here that I personally find grating. More on that in a moment.
Pleasure can be cultivated
If you’re thinking this is a purely theoretical book, boy are you wrong. The second half of this book goes into detail (we’re talking anatomical chart-level detail) about ways to pleasure your partner. This aspect of the book is self-help made fun— although not every exercise will suit every couple.
Fun Fact
Dr. Kerner discusses how Freud believed that the clitoral orgasm was an “immature” form of orgasm, and that only when a woman surrendered to vaginal orgasm was she relinquishing her “penis envy” and succumbing to her true feminine nature. Freud believed that women who failed to do this were stuck in an infantile phallic stage of psychosexual development. These types of thinkers still impact modern misconceptions about the female anatomy and orgasm. Yikes.
For more on how awful Freud was, click here to see my notes on the book Freud: The Making of an Illusion.
My Thoughts
This book is definitely geared towards those in long-term partnerships looking to explore and enhance their sex life. The exercises and questions offered by Dr. Kerner can definitely benefit this group, especially if both partners are willing to engage with the material.
It’s an engaging read with a lot of non-shaming language and legitimate ideas for enhancing your understanding of both you and your partner’s sexual self. That said, I took off two stars (perhaps I’m a harsh rater). Both were taken off because of Dr. Kerner’s incessant cultural criticism and insistence on his viewpoint as a factual reality that is, from my point of view, completely debatable. Good examples are his wholehearted recommendation of pornography as something that generates connection between partners and his insistence that all negative sexual attitudes are a result of cultural beliefs stemming from Christianity.
As a practitioner who has worked with many men who have shared their struggles with pornography, I believe a wholehearted endorsement of it is irresponsible and out of alignment with our understanding of pornography’s impact on the brain. Regular pornography consumption produces measurable neurological changes that share meaningful overlap with patterns seen in substance use. And his point about Christianity as the genesis (lol) of negative sexual attitudes is simply ahistorical. While it is true that sexual guilt is common in our society (or, it used to be, anyway), negative sexual attitudes have existed in basically every society to varying degrees. In Ancient Greece, being penetrated was shameful and a sign of your status as submissive to the penetrator. In Confucian China and Dharmasastran India, sex outside the purpose of procreation was frowned upon. Islamic societies celebrate sex within marriage, but also maintain strong, shame-based modesty norms and rules around sex outside marriage. Again, the reality is that negative attitudes about sex have been a part of almost every human society at some point in time. Blaming Christianity is intellectually lazy.
These cultural points are a problem with the field of sexology as a whole, which has a problematic history and historically one-sided point of view. So it’s not entirely Dr. Kerner’s fault. Still, I had to reduce the score. Even so, I still recommend this to clients. If you’re interested in this book you can take what resonates and leave the rest. You’ll probably get something out of it.