396. Hope Is Not a Strategy — Dr. Marty Klein on Communication, Masculinity, and What Makes Sex Satisfying

0:03Welcome to You Are Not Broken, the podcast that challenges everything we've been taught about midlife, hormones, and sexuality. I'm Dr. Kelly Kasperson, board-certified urologist, author, and a leading voice in women's sexual and hormone health. Enjoy the show. This is Dr. Marty Klein. He's amazing. We've been talking for five minutes without hitting record because I'm new at podcasting eight years in. But Dr. Marty Klein can be found on my other episodes, 169, His Porn, Her Pain from July 2022 and episode 204, Sexual Intelligence, What We Really Want from Sex, March 2023. And he's back because I'm just going to lob a whole bunch of questions at him.

0:39But we're basically talking about how we're all egocentric, reactive, dopamine-driven nervous systems at this point. And everybody else is the problem. Do you see that a lot more in Palo Alto? because you have like these disembodied, brainiac, driven, like does Palo Alto has like a sex type, right? Well, here I am. I'm a sex therapist in Silicon Valley in Palo Alto. And about half of my patients are software engineers. Whether they're male or female, they think like software engineers and they don't have much of a connection with their bodies. They're all up here and they want sex to work, but they're not quite sure what that involves.

1:21And welcome to my week. Do you should write a book just like The Sex Lives of Silicon Valley? I actually wrote a blog post. I did a blog post on that about 10 years ago. What'd you say? What'd you say and has it changed? Nothing has changed. I mean, once an adult decides that they know how the world works, whatever their theory is, once an adult decides how the world works, once an adult decides how sex works, unless they get hit by a truck, which might be going to your office or it might be going to my office, but unless they get hit by a truck, they're going to stick with that theory for the rest of their lives, whether it works or not.

2:00How do you get people to like see the ego involved in their fixed mindset? And the fact that if you actually want to be successfully sleeping with another human, it has to not all be about you. Well, for starters, I ask people, how's it working for you? You know, your ideas about men and women or your ideas about sex or your ideas about what's right and wrong, your ideas about bodies. How's that working out? And if people say, well, it's not working out very well. Well, OK, then let's talk about that. So that's the first thing. Another option that I have, because I get to see people for an hour at a time, is I talk about the relationship that the person has with me.

2:42You know, people walk in the door and a lot of my my clients are very nice people. And a lot of people walk in and they say, hi, how are you? But they don't look at me and they sit down and they don't listen to my answer. Sooner or later, we don't talk about that in the first session, but sooner or later we talk about that. So I have that advantage where since I'm with somebody for an hour at a time, we can actually talk about the relationship. And then the third thing that I talk about is narratives of powerlessness, narratives of, I can't help it, Narratives of that's just the way things are.

3:19Narratives of, well, what do you expect me to do? Change. And I talk about how there's a certain number of things in the world that you can't change, but there's a lot about yourself that you actually could change if you noticed yourself making decisions quickly enough. Most of the decisions we make all day long, they go by so quickly, we don't even notice that we're actually making decisions. But for example, if a couple are in bed and he loses his erection right in the middle. What most couples do about that is they say, well, I guess that's that. And they turn away from each other and that's the end of it.

3:56Or they have an argument and that's the end of it. And I say, wait, wait, wait, let me get this straight. You're both naked. You're all, you know, your bodies are all entwined. Yeah, you smell good. Yeah. And just because of one little thing, all of a sudden the two of you fly apart from each other and can't even talk about what just happened. Somebody makes a decision to make that happen and they could make a different decision. So I talk a lot about decisions that people don't even notice that they're making and how to make a different decision. So you get a different outcome. I love it. Why does it sound so simple, but like nobody got any adulting education?

4:37Well, it's simple, but it's not easy. Ah, I love that. Are you noticing sex therapy is changing because of the role of AI. And like, they talk about people having relationships with AI now. Is there this like, humans are messy. Let's just outsource our relationships to the perfect response who always says, yes, honey. Yes, honey. You're right, honey. You're right, honey. You're right, Kelly. I mean, humans are messy. And that's both the main disadvantage of a relationship with a human over AI. And it's also the main advantage of being in a relationship with a human over AI. Because if the relationship is messy, you're forced to grow.

5:18You're forced to listen. You're forced to have empathy. And that's where all the action is. That's where all of the personal unfolding and development comes from. Most of us, if we're not forced to grow, we're not all that eager to grow. Thank you very much. And the more time you spend with AI, the less you are forced to grow. and the more time you spend with people, the more you're forced to grow. And some of us think that's an advantage as messy as it is. I love that. I was talking to a sex educator and she was like, research on the AI, like if you're talking to the AI about like, should I break up with my boyfriend, right?

5:58The AI, because it's built to agree with you so much, you're more likely to end your relationship after chatting with AI than if you hadn't done that exercise. Yeah, it's just astonishing that people go to AI for advice about anything having to do with human relationships. I mean, people would say, I'm just being the devil's advocate, people would say you're biased because your job depends upon people going to humans to figure out human relationships. Go ahead and say that. No, but right. But that's the thing is like, people don't understand that AI is only as good as the soil it was grown in.

6:34Most people would not walk up to a complete stranger at the airport and say, do you think I should break up with my girlfriend? Most people would not do that. But they're willing to go to AI and ask the exact same question. And I understand that impulse, but I think it's a mistake. Well, most people don't even know sex therapists exist. Can you like, let's go back and just 101. What's the difference between a therapist and a sex therapist? And why does it matter? A sex therapist is just a good therapist who's comfortable with sexuality. A sex therapist is just a good therapist who doesn't choke at the word vagina and hopefully has some medical background so they know the difference between a vagina and a vulva or between a clitoris and a vagina.

7:19it. So sex therapy, that's more of a convenient label that some people use either to identify themselves as a professional or for, say, a physician to say, you need to go to a really good therapist who's really comfortable with sexuality. I know the sex therapist. So that's what it is. Half of my caseload has nothing to do with sex. What's your other half of your caseload? Ah, just the normal stuff. Like I keep getting fired from my job. My kids are driving me crazy. My wife says that I'm clueless. I can't seem to relax. My gynecologist doesn't understand me. You know, just the usual stuff. Human stuff.

8:03What advice would you give to physicians, nurse practitioners, PAs, the prescribing people, the bio people and biopsychosocial? Because I think a lot of patients will come to us, but they're giving us the stuff they should be giving to the therapist. And I'm here to say, we're not good at therapy. We weren't trained in it. We offer awful solutions every once in a while. We're good listeners and we can refer to sex therapy. But what advice would you give to us to be like, we feel like this big burden of having to be therapists because people come and give us all this stuff. How do we navigate that?

8:40When I would have a physician or a PT or somebody else, what I would have somebody say is, that sounds legitimately difficult to me. And I care so much about you that I'm going to send you to somebody who knows more about this stuff than I do. Will you please agree to go to that person? Love it. That's a very helpful tip. I think a lot of people, what I've noticed, because I've been doing this for a while and I use local sex therapists for my patients, is they come back and they've done some work and they say, I thought it was my childhood sexual trauma that was the problem, but actually I think it's now something else.

9:17And that's like, great, we're peeling off the layers, right? But we think it's this one big thing. And then you're like, no, no, I feel pretty good about that. Turns out, I just don't trust my husband. Yeah. Lots of people come in here. You know, I never ask people when they come in the first time, what's your problem? I never ask people, what's your problem? Because the way that people conceptualize their problem is often part of the problem. You know, if somebody comes in and says, I'm an orgasmic, there's something wrong with me because I don't have orgasms. I say, well, let's talk about this.

9:51What is the activity from which you don't have orgasms? And as you know, Kelly, people say, oh, you know, regular sex, the regular way, the normal way. Right. Washing my hands. So the label of an orgasmic or the label of ED, you know how I feel about that. A lot of the labels that patients give themselves are part of the problem in the first place. So I don't ask what your problem is. I ask, what do you want to accomplish here? That gets us off in a different mindset. And so we get to be goal-oriented in our work here. We don't just wander around for 40 days and 40 nights hoping we're going to bump into something.

10:29Hope is not a treatment plan. Talk to me because I don't think everybody listening knows how you feel about erectile dysfunction. Please share with them. I love how you feel about erectile dysfunction for what it's worth. You know, you and I are old enough that, and I'm way older than you, you and I are old enough to remember before Viagra, right? So before Viagra, people would talk about, oh, I don't get it up or he didn't get it up. but there wasn't this big social conversation about ED, about erectile dysfunction. And now there's this idea that, well, 40 % of all men are going to have ED, you know, by the time they're 40 years old, which is crazy.

11:10I don't call it ED. You know, what I call it is you don't get erect when you want to, or you didn't get erect when you wanted to, or you lost your erection when you wanted an erection. Because the expectation is typically a much bigger part of the problem than the poor penis. You know, penises, for the most part, they respond in a pretty reasonable way to the circumstances that they're given. I mean, there is such a thing as erectile dysfunction. Some people with advanced diabetes, some people after prostatectomy, some people with multiple sclerosis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I certainly understand that.

11:47But a lot of people, they think, well, I ought to be able to get an erection with a brand new partner because my brand new partner is really gorgeous and cooperative. Or I ought to be able to get an erection when I'm drunk. I used to be able to get an erection when I was drunk when I was 20. Why can't I get an erection now when I'm drunk when I'm 50? So a lot of the, I want to get an erection, but I'm unable to, a lot of the problem there is expectation. If you close your eyes and you can't see, you don't blame your eyes. So your nervous system doesn't have the circumstances that it needs to send the message all the way down to the blood vessels and penis.

12:30When your body doesn't have the circumstances that it needs, you're not going to get erect or you're going to lose your erection or it won't get completely hard. Don't blame your poor erection, you know. And my big quarrel, as you know, Kelly, my big quarrel with a lot of urologists is, guy comes in, I don't get it up. Oh, well, let me examine you for 30 seconds. You seem fine. Your T is high enough. You know what? Let's give you some Viagra. How about a simple question? How do you feel about the person that you're having sex with? Oh, you hate their guts? That may be a better explanation than you have ED.

13:07You're ashamed of being gay. That may be a better explanation for why you have trouble getting erections than anything else. This podcast is sponsored by FIGS. So much of what we talk about on the show is knowing that you deserve to feel confident and comfortable. And that's true, not just in your personal life, but everything. And as a healthcare professional, I realized that the same standard should apply to the way I show up to work every day. That's why I wear figs. Figs is my absolute go-to for scrubs when I'm in the clinic. And to be honest, even when I'm not, because they're so incredibly comfortable.

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14:19Why wear scrubs when you can wear FIGS? Take 15 % off your first order at wearfigs.com with the code FIGSRX. FIGSRX. That's wearfigs.com, code FIGSRX. When a doctor is confronted with a limp penis, it would be great if they had a couple of minutes to ask you just a few questions. Just tell me about the circumstances the last time you had sex. Were you sober? Were you awake enough? Was the other person enthusiastic or at least cooperative, or was the other person saying, I'd really rather not. All those things, they totally factor into whether or not you're going to be able to get it up when you want to.

15:03I love it. I mean, that's the biopsychosocial. And I think the advent of Viagra made the penis completely bio and took out the psychosocial from the activities and bringing it back to be like, yeah, yeah, no, testosterone levels matter. Heart disease matters, but so does the psychosocial part of the biopsychosocial. Don't forget about it. I Whenever I'm seeing somebody with ED, my question is like, what's your plan? If we fix this, what's your plan? And put this, and has that person been, does she want it? Has it been eight years? Has she had vaginal estrogen? Back in 1999, when Viagra was put on the market, I gave a series of lectures to doctors all over the country where I said, you know, you can't just give somebody Viagra without knowing about the context because it's like dropping a bomb into somebody's bedroom.

15:55And we're seeing that now. People are publishing like you're destabilizing relationships. Yeah. For one thing, from his end, he gets to say, okay, now I can, let's go. And she may not be ready. On the other hand, she may say, well, you don't have that excuse anymore. Come on, let's go. And what she doesn't know is that he doesn't want to have sex with her or he's angry with her or whatever it is. So I love your expression of where are you going to put this? You know, what's the plan? Assuming that we get you the erection of your dreams, what are you going to do with it? And it turns out that sexual function, genital function, is not a great predictor of sexual satisfaction.

16:38And a lot of people don't realize that. Well, I was going to throw that question at you. So all of these hypoactive sexual desire disorders, HSDD, low libido studies, use satisfying sexual event, air quotes, satisfying sexual event, as the measurement of if these medications work or not. And so now the joke amongst me and my urology friends is what the hell is a satisfying sexual event, which is never quantified in the papers. No, no. And of course, that will change in any person's lifetime, no matter who they are, no matter what their sexual orientation is. The definition of a satisfying sexual event when you're 23 is going to be different than it is when you're 53.

17:21It's going to be different. And desire is different when you're 53 than it is when you're 23. Desire is different when you're 33 than when you're 23. So it would be valuable if our patients gave a little bit of thought to So what kind of experience do I want to have? My patients, they want to talk about where they put their different body parts. And I say, you know, we don't need to talk about body parts. Let's say what kind of experience do you want to have? Do you want to have an experience that's gentle and reassuring and warm? Do you want to have an experience of exploration? Do you want to have an experience where you feel real womanly?

17:59What kind of experiences do you want to have? and when two people can decide about that, then the arms and legs, you know, they kind of do what they do. They're ancillary. They're important to have at the party, but they're not the experience. And I think like the assumption using satisfying sexual event as a research endpoint without defining it in the paper is making a lot of assumptions about, is this the researcher's satisfying sexual event definition? Is this the patient's? Did you clarify with them what you meant? Did you mean orgasm? Did you mean a good time? Did you mean good enough? It's so nebulous, but it is what we use to make medications FDA approved.

18:39Okay, that's an interesting draft of your idea. How do you quantify or how do you measure this or this or that? It was the same thing, you know, when Viagra and the erection drugs, the BD5s were being studied. Satisfactory erection. Satisfactory to whom? Under what circumstances? And for how long? Some people, they could get a completely hard, full erection, but they're so convinced that their penis is too small that they never, ever, ever have a satisfactory erection. Right. Well, then they blame their penis. Poor penises. Poor penises. I know. Okay, so this came from a friend. What do I tell my 80-year-old horny women about sex because there's no men that age around.

19:31I know I'm overgeneralizing, but what I'm getting at is the older we get, the less men there are. What to do? I'll tell you what drives me crazy. Well-meaning sex educators who say to these horny 80-year-old women, now remember about safer sex. And I feel like safer sex for an 80-year-old, that's don't fall out of bed and break a hip. It's got nothing to do. It's got nothing to do with chlamydia, you know? So, you know, this question is sort of part of a generalized question is what do we tell people who want to be sexual and they can't seem to find a partner? You know, there is no good answer to that.

20:07On the other hand, on the other hand, what is a horny 80 year old lady or what does anybody want from sex? Well, for some people, they want touching. There are ways to get touching without having sex. For some people, it's validation that they're a woman. There are ways to get that without sex. For some people, it's, I want to have an orgasm. There are ways to do that without a partner. So at the very least, we want to help people, whether they're horny 80-year-old ladies or anybody else. We want to help people get clear about what is it that you're wanting from sex and are there alternatives to the way that you're thinking about sex to get those deliverables.

20:50As far as how to find something to put inside your vagina when you're 80 and horny, you're right. Not a lot of 80-year-old guys laying around. I remember when my father, when my mother died, my father, who was a nice guy, he was no George Clooney, let's put it that way. And I said to him, Dad, you know, the women are going to be lined up around the block when they hear that mom died. And he said, Oh no, what does anybody want with me? I said, Dad, you have the single most important sexual quality in a man over 70, and that is you have a pulse. Sure enough, they were lined up around the block. My brother called that the casserole brigade.

21:30They were lined up around the block. My poor father, he had never been chased by a woman in his entire life. This was a brand new experience for him. You see more, and we should talk about this, the manosphere, these younger men who seem to be very angry because they are getting laid or whatever their grievances. I would argue anger is never the right emotion with which to attract orgasm. This podcast is sponsored by Addy. Ladies, if you're bothered by the fact that your sex drive isn't what it used to be, there's a medical term for that, HSDD. And more importantly, there's an FDA approved treatment.

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24:35Maybe what we tell these young people is just like, stay healthy, stay in the game, the odds will be in your favor. Going back to like our book idea on I think the genders do not know how to talk to each other is like the younger generations, the men are like angry and they feel like justified. And I hear I am being like, I don't have a male brain, but like, why is anger the plan to trying to find a girlfriend? And then you're angry at the women for not being your girlfriend. Like, to me, I'm like, it makes so little sense. Please explain it to me. Those guys tend to not come to my office because they're part of an ecosphere that's very self-contained.

25:15Everything you want is within that culture. It's self-validating. It's very ego-patting. It's totally self-validating. Yeah. So you don't go outside of that to a clergy person or to even a physician for advice. You don't go to a therapist because it's all inside. It's like a religious cult, you know? So it's like all contained in there. But I do need to say, not all men are angry. Not all young men are angry. Not all young men who don't get laid are angry. Some of them are sad. Some of them are lonely. Some of them get involved with AI and chatbots. Some of them, they just, they go to work all day.

25:52they come home, they're at their computer all night, and then they go to bed, and then the next day, lather and repeat. So there are a huge number of young men who are angry and are not thinking beyond the anger, like, what's the end game here? Am I going to be angry until I'm 77 years old and then die without ever connecting with another human? Or at some point, am I going to get over this anger so that I can then connect with somebody if I find somebody who's attractive to me. But there are a lot of men not like that. There are a lot of young men in their late 20s, early 30s. They're dying to have a maid.

26:32Some of them are dying to have children. They're dying to find a maid. It is so hard for a person in their late 20s now to find somebody to date. What's the gender ratio in Palo Alto at that age? I mean, there's got to be 110 men to every 100 women. Well, there is that gender imbalance, but there are women around here. A lot of these engineers, they don't have a lot of social skills and they don't know how to listen. And they don't know how to talk about themselves while paying attention to another person at the same time. People are just so used to texting now or doing email now. I just wonder what's going to happen when dinosaurs like me die out and no one has a living memory.

27:19No one has a living memory of before the internet. Is this person-to-person communication just going to be like some ancient thing that people did in the Roman Empire that we just don't know how to do anymore? I mean, all I want to do is like drink coffee and talk to people. It's the best thing in the world. But you kind of got to know to know, you know? Well, you're not normal, Kelly. I'm not normal, Marty. And proud of it. Yeah, thank you so much. So I think the other thing, just to stay on the how do we help the men a little bit longer, is what I hear from male friends is if a man in his youth, pick an age, late teenage, early 20s, gets wounded by a woman, meaning your penis is too small, you're unattractive, you're not good enough, whatever.

28:10there is something that is perceived as a wound what my male friends tell me is the recovery from that wound is like it's like a lifelong injury and they will not be brave again they will not try again they're just like i was mortally wounded by either my mother or a girlfriend and i can't whereas i'm like dude women get wounded physically or mentally by men all the time and they're like let's try again let's try again let's try it maybe it'll work this time right i'm like i just it seems to be two very different responses to everybody gets wounded at some point in our life. Well, I think when women get wounded in the way that you're talking about, it's not a challenge to their sense of femininity or womanhood.

28:53When men get wounded like that, they turn it into, or the culture turns it into a direct attack on their manhood or their masculinity. And I think that helps account for the divergent paths after that kind of wounding. Because men will come in here and they'll say, yeah, my first girlfriend laughed at my penis and I've never been the same since. And I'll say, well, you know, what's the problem here? And they say, well, it means I'm not a real man. And how am I going to compete with all of those other men who I see at the gym? And so I think that those early experiences for men, which can be nerve wracking.

29:30Men are expected to be the experts in those early sexual encounters, right? Which most men know that they're not. And men are supposed to take responsibility for the young woman's sexual experience when they have sex for the first time. And most men, you know, that's way more responsibility than they want or can manage. And when that doesn't go well, it's not just, oh, boo-hoo-hoo, it's there's something wrong with me as a man. And I think that can be really disruptive developmentally. Yeah. Because I was like, I'm like, how are these wounds? Everybody gets wounded, but it's like the core identity has been nipped in the bud and probably needs some therapy if it's not getting better otherwise.

30:14And to generalize, I think that as you yourself just said, everybody has wounds as they go through the early parts of their life. Yeah. What makes this wound more difficult to recover from than that one? It's when the wound has to do with our identity, whatever our identity happens to be, whether it's your identity as a parent, your identity as an intelligent person, your identity as a musician, whatever it is. If a wound rubs up against your identity, that makes it way harder to recover from. I think even the way we say things of I have trauma versus I'm traumatized, right? Like how much we've internalized that wound?

30:55Well, the therapy industry has a lot to answer for about this. Well, you know me. I'm so critical of the therapy industry. I'm critical of doctors. Like that's why we're who we are. Even though I love the profession, I'm honored to be in it. And when you see things, you see things. Yeah. So there's an analog to this in medicine that I know you're going to see and talk about that. When therapists talk about somebody having certain unfortunate experiences, okay, so we realize that you've been raped or we realize that you were humiliated or abandoned by your parents or your parents favored your older brother over you, whatever it is, right?

31:39Terrible trauma. Okay. Okay. Now, what are we going to do about that? So that at some point, the trauma is way less a significant part of your life as opposed to, oh, you're going to identify as I'm one of those traumatized people for the rest of your life. And yeah, it's too bad, but what are you going to do? My theory about therapy is that you go in with certain goals, you achieve those goals, and then you leave therapy because you're done. You don't spend the rest of your life wounded or injured, whether it's angry or depressed or whatever it is. And this trauma thing, you know, is relatively new in therapy.

32:22When I was being trained, we didn't even know about trauma. Okay, good. We learned about that now. Good. Now, can we just put it in its place instead of making it the centerpiece of everybody's life and saying, oh, there's a trauma. You're going to be traumatized for the rest of your life, as opposed to you had an unfortunate experience or somebody did something inappropriate in your life. Now let's get you the tools to deal with that in the global sense so that you can get on with the rest of your life and not always be referring back to, yeah, well, I was traumatized. Yes. I have talked to a lot of women.

33:01I mean, the ubiquitousness of sexual trauma, it's massive. It's everywhere. Just assume everybody's had something. It's very common. Most people don't know what you just said. Meaning they're like, you mean there's people who have sexual trauma who have amazing sex lives? Like, yes, yes, there are. Now they're not, they don't have an Instagram account being like, I was traumatized and I have a great sex life. Right. But like people don't know that there's kind of that light or that hope or that process or that evolution or however you want to say it. People think it's kind of like a fixed, like, well, you know, I guess I'll just wait for round two to happen where I come back in the world where there's no trauma of like, by no means am I dismissing trauma.

33:43I'm just saying people don't know that there are tools to where you can meet the goals that you want with your life with a history of trauma. The only thing I would change is you need the word ubiquity, not ubiquitousness. Ubiquitousness isn't good enough? No, ubiquitousness. But what you're saying applies to so many things. I know you had a miscarriage, but there are people who have miscarriages who can enjoy parenting after that. There's a whole range of difficulties that people go to you or to me with. And they have the belief that this is basically the end of the world. And it's tricky because we want to honor people's despair We want to honor people's tragedies.

34:30We want to honor people's pain. But I think the best way to honor somebody's pain is to say, I got room for it right here. You got to see my body here. I got room for it right here. You just give me all that to spare you. Now, what are we going to do over here? What are we going to do with the rest of your life? This is not the end of your life. This is one part of your life. What are we going to do with the rest of your life? whether it's the rest of your fertility, whether it's the rest of your sexual function, whatever it is. I love that. How do you help people or tips for people, whether it's a history of sexual trauma, whether it's pelvic floor pain, whether it's you just program a computer all day long and you're disembodied because you're in your frontal lobe.

35:14How do you get people to be like, sex is part physical. We got to get back into the body to be like sensations, feelings, breathing. How do you help the embodiedness part of this? This podcast is sponsored by Joy and Blokes. Can we please stop saying testosterone is only a hormone for men? One of the biggest myths I see is that women are told to expect fatigue, brain fog, loss of muscle, low motivation, and a disappearing sex drive as just part of getting older. No, sometimes it's actually aging. Sometimes it's stress. Sometimes it's sleep. And sometimes it's hormones. Here's what a lot of people don't realize.

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37:06That's J-O-I and B-L-O-K-E-S.com backslash not broken code not broken. You know, I just signed a contract to do a webinar on this subject on October 23rd. I'm calling it problematized bodies, how the body is part of part of our lives and part of therapy. But I digress. You know, there's an exercise that I have people do. And I say, do you have any grapes in the house? Everybody has grapes in the house, right? Do you have grapes? It doesn't matter. Some fruit or other. I teach my students, you know, when you give homework assignments, you don't have to give people three hours of homework. You know, here's like 60 seconds of homework.

37:47Take a grape, put it in your mouth, and I want you as slowly as you can to break the skin of that grape with your teeth. I want you to feel the sensation of breaking the skin with your teeth. And then I want you to have the sensation where the initial spurt of juice comes out of that grape and floods your mouth, right? Maybe you can even smell the grape, and then I want you to chew it as slowly as you can before you swallow. That is a little 60 or 70 or 80 second experience to remind people you have a body. And not only do you have a body, you can turn up the volume of your physical experience or turn down the volume of your physical experience.

38:40And most of us, you know, for each minute of the day that we spend at a keyboard or on a telephone, that's one minute that we're dialing down the responses from our bodies, right? So without being aware of it, people have dialed down the intensity of the consciousness of our bodies. So let's take a grape, just a grape. It doesn't have to be like a seven-course meal. Just a great. And I also tell people, don't look at your phone. Take two minutes while you're eating lunch, if you eat lunch, or any of your people don't eat lunch. If you eat lunch, I know you're going to look at your phone while you're eating lunch.

39:19I'm not going to tell you not to do it. I just want you to pick one consecutive 60 seconds, just one minute, where you're not looking at your phone and all you're doing is eating. I know you think you're going to be bored. I guess you're going to have to pay a lot more attention to the sandwich or the salad to not be bored. Please do that. And then come back next week and we talk about it. So intro to body 101. That's so good. Well, because I think people are like, well, I'm not in touch with my body, but I've got this seven-hour tantric orgasm course I should probably take. Like, you know, the 60-second snack is much more manageable.

39:59I'm not much for tantra. I don't think people need more rules for sex. You don't think they need a checklist of the 21 different ways to have an orgasm? Exactly. I think people need less rules, fewer rules, rather than more rules, and less of a checklist. Absolutely. Or yeah, that it always has to go this way. Otherwise, something bad has gone. You're missing out on way number 14, one of life's great chakra moments. You know what? We're all going to live and die without having every single possible sexual experience. It's really okay. It's really okay. All right. In our final moments, you're out well of wisdom.

40:39And because we all just want to be like experts and you're like, it actually takes way less than you think it does. Like be in the body, get rid of all the shoulds, maybe enjoy it a little bit. Like it's lighter than it perceived. That's for sure. What I tell people is that the common idea, the common Western and cultural idea about sex is that if you want to enjoy it more, you should make it more intense. That's what pornography shows us. That's what a lot of Hollywood shows us. That's what music tells us, you know, the more passion, the better. I tell people, if you want to enjoy sex more, don't try and make it more intense.

41:17Try and make it more relaxed. How much more relaxed can you be during sex? I'm not saying you should fall asleep, although for some people that would be like the most wonderful thing in the world, right? Can you relax your body a little bit more? Can you look at the person or people you're having sex with? And can you soften your face? Can you look at their face and smile and encourage them to relax? Can you make sex less about Well, the whole like, how am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing now? Yeah, so I'm encouraging people to have more relaxed sex. I suppose if we want to borrow what they're saying in restaurants, we would say slow sex, you know, that doesn't always work for people.

42:05So I say, make sex more relaxed. Go slower. Go slower. You know, your porn is beautiful breasts. They're going to be there five minutes from now. So you don't need to go after them the very first second she takes her clothes off. She will like it if she's relaxed, but we got to get her relaxed. You're doing God's work, Kelly. You are too. Okay, so tell me about teaching in Helinski and do they need a urologist? Helsinki. Helsinki? Yeah. Okay. So what do the Northern Europeans need to know about sex that they don't already know? The same that everybody else needs to know. Sex is not simply penis, vagina.

42:45of intercourse. Sex is not simply throwing the genitals together and hoping something exciting happens. Sex involves relaxation, not just intensity. If you're going to have intercourse, you got to get the birth control thing covered if one of you is fertile. Well, both of you are fertile. My joke is sperm causes pregnancy, except for that one large story in the Bible. One reference, one historical reference where sperm did not cause a pregnancy. But other than that... And everybody's focused on that one. As you like to say, hope is not a method. That's what we used to say at Planned Parenthood.

43:17Hope with a lot of methods, hope is not a method. That's fantastic. The tagline from my 2012 book, sex is not just an activity, sex is an idea. So if people want to have more enjoyable sex, if people want a more satisfying sexual connection, don't focus on the arms and legs and genitalia. Focus on the ideas that people have about sex. Focus on however my body likes sex is okay. My sexual fantasies, okay. The fact that I prefer a handjob to intercourse, okay. So get the ideas in line rather than focusing on how am I gonna get my genitalia to jump through hoops? I love it. I am delighted whenever your newsletter comes out in my inbox.

44:06So can you tell people how to get that in their inbox, please? Yes. Thank you for asking. Because the August 1st edition, well, this will be after the August 1st edition. There's always another edition coming out. There's always more to come, pun intended. 318 consecutive monthly issues. Can you believe it? It's over 20 years. Do the math. Thank you for dividing for me. Just on my website, you can either go to martykline.com or sexed.org. S-E-X-E-D dot O-R-G. On the right-hand side, newsletter sign up. And I swear, we never use your contact information for anything other than the newsletter. That's important with the topic you talk about.

44:51Yeah. Thank you for coming on again. Yet third time, you're up in the repeat customers here. So it's clearly you're a pleasure to talk to. I'm ready for the fourth. Just let me know. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Thank you, Kelly. If you found this episode funny, helpful, insightful, please take a moment to follow, rate, and share the You Are Not Broken podcast with someone who might need this conversation too. That support is how this information reaches more people. And thank you. For courses, books, and my monthly membership, and the Kasperson Clinic information, visit kellykaspersonmd.com.

45:29This podcast and all content from Dr. Kelly Kasperson is intended for educational and informational purposes only, and this is not a substitute for individual medical, coaching, or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the guidance of your qualified healthcare professional with any questions you may have regarding your health. Never disregard or delay medical advice because of something you've heard on this or other podcasts. Thanks for being here, and remember, you are not broken.

46:05Nice work. Thank you.