592 - Intimacy When Sex Is Off the Table - Listener Q&A
Fostering intimacy…without sex
We’re back with another listener question this episode:
I (38F, she/her) and my partner (35M, he/him) have been together for over four years. Recently I had chronic yeast infections and then a hysterectomy, so sex is off the table for at least two months. My partner is very focused on my pleasure, but we have to abstain for a while. How can I center intimacy, pleasure, and bonding without sex?
Worried on the West Coast
Of course, there are plenty of reasons why someone may not want to have penetrative sex beyond our listener’s experience with surgery, but luckily, there are techniques that can help us all foster more intimacy.
Sensate focus
Sensate focus is one of the most popular intimacy-building techniques, and usually the first one you’ll see if you google “intimacy without sex.” It’s a foundational technique of modern sex therapy, created by Virginia Johnson and introduced in Johnson and William Masters’ 1970 book Human Sexual Inadequacy. Unfortunately, the online version is almost always wrong, so we’re going to go into the actual protocol in case you want to try the whole method.
Sensate focus is touching for your own interest, not pleasuring your partner. In the first phase, the person touching focuses on their own sensory experience, not on giving their partner a good time or making themselves feel good.
Masters and Johnson’s founding premise is that “sex is a natural function,” and therefore, trying to force arousal and automatic bodily processes “is a major psychological source of sexual difficulties.”
The surest way to NOT get aroused is to try to get aroused. Arousal and pleasure show up secondarily as a byproduct of putting your attention on plain sensation instead of chasing a result.
In the first phase of sensate focus, pleasure, enjoyment, relaxation, and arousal are explicitly treated as distractions, or things you notice and then refocus away from back to physical sensation. The setup should be deliberately unromantic (no candles, lotions, or music), because setting a scene “reinforce(s) the expectation of pleasure or relaxation.”
Mechanically, this is systematic desensitization—you cannot hold anxiety and absorbed attention in the same moment, so sustained sensory focus crowds out the performance anxiety.
The protocol of sensate focus
If you want to actually try sensate focus the way it was meant to be tried, follow these steps:
Take one undisturbed hour, roughly every two to three days. Make sure devices are off.
Start with “breasts and genitals off limits.” One person touches the other one head to toe, front to back, avoiding chest and genitals. The toucher uses hands and fingers only, no kissing.
The toucher attends to three things only: temperature (cool or warm), pressure (hard or soft), and texture (smooth or rough). When the mind wanders, notice it and refocus on temperature, pressure, texture.
The person being touched simply receives, and only moves a hand away if something is uncomfortable or ticklish.
Switch roles. Afterwards, each person notes what they felt and what pulled their attention (the diagnostic part).
Only later, and gradually, does it progress to genital touching and eventually intercourse.
Note: Sensate focus, as an answer to this listener question, is a great starting point but NOT the whole answer to the question, since it was engineered as a treatment for sexual dysfunction and its whole point is to return to intercourse.
Intimacy and pleasure without intercourse
Based on a 2009 study, Kleinplatz, P. J., Ménard, A. D., et al. (2009), "The components of optimal sexuality: A portrait of 'great sex'," The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 18(1-2), researchers looked at what made sex exceptional. The results of their interviews showed that almost none of what made sex great for their subjects was physical. They were all psychological and relational: being present, deep connection, erotic intimacy, extraordinary communication, authenticity, vulnerability, exploration, and transcendence. Orgasm and function were rated “minor,” and “neither necessary nor sufficient.”
The Good-Enough Sex (GES) model from sex therapists Michael Metz and Barry McCarthy, is a clinical model positing that satisfied couples do not treat “we did not get to intercourse” as a failure, they treat it as normal variety. “Pleasure is as important as function.”
From Basson, R. (2001), "Using a Different Model for Female Sexual Response to Address Women's Problematic Low Sexual Desire," Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 27(5): This study proposed that she doesn’t have to “feel like it” first; a person can start from neutral, choose closeness, let arousal build, and feel desire afterward. Desire is often responsive, not spontaneous, and the thing that kicks off the whole cycle is “the wish to enhance intimacy.”
Even full non-sexual affection such as holding, cuddling, and massage does real and measurable good, and touch does something that talking alone does not, as per Ditzen, B., et al. (2007), "Effects of different kinds of couple interaction on cortisol and heart rate responses to stress in women," Psychoneuroendocrinology, 32(5).
Actionable tools
Keep the following in mind as a toolkit you can actually use:
Reframe the sentence. It’s not “sex is off the table,” it’s “penetrative sex is paused, intimacy, pleasure, and eroticism are not.”
Use sensate focus, but change the goal. Use the non-genital touching exercise for presence and connection, not a runway back to intercourse.
Widen the menu: Sensual and non-intercourse erotic play counts as real sex. Up to a couple months of it is not deprivation, it’s variability.
Let intimacy lead. Choosing closeness and receptivity is where arousal and desire actually start.
Build the eight components. Presence, communication, vulnerability, playful exploration. The research says a limitation like this can make those more vivid, not less.
Bank the non-sexual touch. Daily warm affection buffers stress and bonds them, with real physiology behind it.
Follow the doctor, not the calendar. Non-genital intimacy can start whenever she is physically comfortable, and progressing towards genital contact should track her clinician’s clearance.
Transcript
If you find any transcription errors, please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: So the way they defined success was if the man was able to get and keep an erection on more than 75% of coital occasions after that.
Emily: Okay. Coital occasions. Coital occasions.
Dedeker: Ooh, that's my favorite part of that. I'm gonna write that one down. Coital—
Jase: Coital occasions.
Dedeker: Yes.
Emily: All right.
Dedeker: Okay.
Jase: I would like to invite you to a coital occasion.
Dedeker: It's a formal invitation.
Emily: Dear God.
Dedeker: Okay. So sorry.
Emily: Yeah.
Dedeker: Back way up. The success rate was just about boners.
Jase: Right. That's really what it was.
Emily: Of course. Dedeker, are you surprised?
Dedeker: Come on. No, I'm not. I'm just still disappointed though.
Jase: Welcome to the Multiamory Podcast. I'm Jase.
Emily: I'm Emily.
Dedeker: And I'm Dedeker.
Emily: We believe in looking to the future of relationships, not maintaining the status quo of the past.
Dedeker: Whether you're monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently, we see you and we're here for you.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're getting intimate with the research about intimacy, especially what it shows us about sex when penetrative sex is off the table. We're going to start with the most famous technique of all in sex therapy, which is sensate focus, and why almost everyone, including the foundational book about it and most of the internet, of course, gets it completely wrong. Then we're going to get into the science of what makes sex great, even if it has nothing to do with intercourse, and even a study showing how non-sexual touch does something that even talking cannot do on its own. Very excited to get into all of this based on a listener question today. If you're interested in learning about our fundamental communication tools that we reference on this show, you can check out our book, Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships, which covers some of our most used communication tools for all types of relationships. And you can find links to buy it and more information about it at multiamory.com/book or wherever you like to get books.
Emily: Just a quick disclaimer before we start. We've spent a lot of time studying healthy relationship communication, but part of what makes relationships so interesting is that they're all different and every situation is unique. So we encourage you to use your own judgment and seek professional help if needed. We are not doctors. Nothing here is medical advice. Ultimately, you are the only true expert on your own life and feelings, and your decisions are your own. Additionally, this question has been edited for time and clarity.
Dedeker: Our listener question today: How can I be more intimate with my boyfriend without actually having sex? I and my partner have been together for over 4 years. Recently, I've had chronic yeast infections and then a hysterectomy, so sex is off the table for at least 2 months. My partner is very focused on my pleasure, but we have to abstain for a while. How can I center intimacy, pleasure, and bonding without sex? That is sent into us by Worried on the West Coast.
Jase: So I wanted to start this off with a little discussion. So this question asker is talking about surgery specifically being like, you can't have sex for a little while. I think we maybe talked years ago when I had my vasectomy, same thing. It's like no sex for a certain amount of time. I forget how long that was, but Things like that can come up, but there's also a ton of other reasons why penetrative sex could be off the table, right? There's mood, it could be functioning, like there's all sorts of reasons, or just one of you doesn't like that, or that's not part of your physical anatomy in terms of how the two of you have sex together. So there's a whole lot of reasons for this, and I think it's a cool thing to explore. I'm just curious about our experiences with this real quick to kind of set the stage of— have we had experience needing to figure out sex that can't look like the typical way?
Dedeker: Yeah, I think for me— so for many years I was an egg donor, and when you're an egg donor, when you get matched up, long story short, you have to go on this very particular protocol of fertility meds. And understandably so, when you're on those fertility meds, you're not allowed to drink, consume substances, smoke, all the things that you might expect. But also no sex of any kind, no penetrative sex of any kind, which makes sense because you're so protected. You're so fertile. If a condom breaks, it's like that could be—
Jase: If a condom breaks in the next room, you could still get pregnant. Like, it's possible.
Dedeker: Yeah.
Emily: Okay.
Dedeker: Yeah. So that would be usually at least a month, sometimes longer, of not being able to have sex on the table in that way. And I know for myself it was for sure frustrating and challenging because you're also on fertility meds, which—
Emily: so you want to have—
Dedeker: you want so much sex to reproduce so badly. Oh, so badly. And I will say that everything that I did that was not penetrative sex with someone that could impregnate me, all the other things on the palette of possible sexual activities would work up to a point. But because you're on fertility meds, your body knows. There's something about your body just knows you're not doing the thing we actually want you to do. You're not reproducing. You are producing orgasms and pleasure, but you are not reproducing. And so it would be a frustrating time.
Emily: Yeah.
Jase: Yes, I remember. I remember these frustrations from you.
Emily: Yeah, I can imagine. Geez. I had friends recently who were quite young but also on the surgery route. A friend who had to get hip surgery at a very young age, and it kind of immobilized her for a while. And so she couldn't really walk that easily. It was a lot of laying down, but then also any sort of sexual act really at all was very difficult for her and her partner. And so that was like 6 weeks of basically just needing to be off of any sort of sexual act of any kind. I also have had partners who, because of the agreements that they have with their partners, do not want to engage in certain sexual acts because that is not okay within the scope of their partnership. That is not a primary partnership with me, for example. So it does offer opportunity to get creative, and that might include non-penetrative sex. That might include not going down on someone, for instance, or non-genital play and a kink setting. Exactly, all of the above. So of course, within non-monogamous situations, I think depending on what type of relationship you are in and with whom, there may be certain things that you're not allowed to do or that are not within the scope of the type of relationship that you have with this person.
Dedeker: I also just want to make space for the fact that there may be people listening to this and thinking of no sex for 2 months, what's the big deal? I'm fine with that. Some people's partnerships are like, whatever, sure, we can wait the 6 weeks until your hip is healed or until this passes or whatever. For some people this may be not at all an issue, not at all something that they would worry about. And that also fits under the umbrella of totally normal sexual functioning. So don't listen to us, I guess, horn dogs, and compare yourself and think that there's something wrong.
Jase: Yeah, for sure. And I think that this question asker is showing that in this heterosexual relationship that they're in, there is still that sense that we've all talked about on the show before of sex is just this one particular thing, right? It's just penis and vagina, penetrative sex, and maybe we'll throw in oral sex as sort of sex with an asterisk. I think that's kind of the prevailing cultural idea there, right? And so as soon as we get into any kind of queer relationship already, we're kind of having to throw some of that out the window. I think that's also a common misconception in same-sex male relationships, that it doesn't always have to be anal sex, that that isn't the only thing that defines sex. There are lots of gay men who don't like anal sex, that's fine too. So just to kind of start this all off with, there is already a big spectrum without any medical issues or treatments or hormonal things forcing this. There's also a lot of other reasons for this too, right? And it could also be your preference. It could be someone who is asexual but still wants to connect on an intimate level with someone at a certain point. That's an interesting piece that we're going to explore a little bit in the research here too. Another piece of this question that I thought was interesting was this line about, my partner is very focused on my pleasure but we have to abstain for a while. How can I center intimacy, pleasure, and bonding without sex? And it's like, on the one hand, I think your partner being interested in your pleasure, great. I think most people would be like, thumbs up, good partner there. But I could also see a world where that creates some pressure on you to be able to receive pleasure when maybe you're not, right? Maybe your body's not feeling great, you're not feeling in the mood, whatever it is. And so just to kind of put that out there too, that just because your partner wants to please you doesn't mean you have to feel that pressure to deliver on being pleased. Does that make sense? Is that relatable there?
Dedeker: It totally makes sense. Yeah, it totally makes sense. And I think especially because a lot of people do live— their own pleasure sometimes centers around giving somebody else pleasure, and that's where it starts to get a little bit fuzzy about what is happening and for whose benefit.
Emily: Well, and pleasure can take a lot of different avenues, I think. Pleasure can be sexual intimate pleasure in that way, but it can also just be sensual touch, like a back rub or a foot rub, if you find and take pleasure in doing those things. Still being able to do something for your partner that is sensual but not necessarily sexual. I think that that also can be maybe an avenue or a road to go down.
Jase: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that this really fits a lot of different situations that we'll face in our lives. And if you think about longer term too with aging, this isn't really a question of if this ever happens, but kind of when. There will be times in your life where you have to change the way that you approach sex, or you have trouble with things functioning the way that you're used to, right? This just will happen. It's just a part of life. And so I think there's a lot here in this question for everyone. So part of what we want to do today is to actually take some of the pressure off of the pleasure itself. And I know that sounds counterintuitive, but in looking into this, I found some fascinating research and a lot of misinformation out there. And so we're going to get into that right after this quick break to talk about our sponsors. Thank you to all of them for supporting our show, letting us do this every week for free. Thank you to all of you for taking a moment to listen to them. Use the links in our show notes, all of that. And of course, if you would rather support us directly, join our amazing community and get ad-free episodes, you can go to multiamory.com/join and sign up there to be part of our community. Getting into the first bit of research here, I teased this in the intro, and I was curious if either of you have heard of this thing called sensate focus in the sex therapy world.
Emily: Sense8?
Jase: Sensate. Not Sense8 like the show. Yeah, but sensate.
Dedeker: No, I'm sure it's probably crossed my desk at some point. Can I take a guess at what I think you're referring to? Yeah, I think that a lot of sex therapy and people in this situation are often encouraged to just focus on sensory experiences with your partner that are pleasurable but not necessarily sexual. Is it something along those lines?
Emily: It's kind of what I said.
Jase: Yeah, well, kind of. And that's exactly what we're going to get into here. So this is something, if you were to just do an online search for intimacy without sex or rebuild intimacy or something like that, you will most likely land on some kind of source that's based on sensate focus. And so what it is, is it's this foundational technique of modern sex therapy now, but it was developed in the '70s or even the '60s by Masters Johnson. So William Masters and Virginia Johnson, that show Masters of Sex is about. So in this 1970 book by them called Human Sexual Inadequacy, which is a banger of a title—
Dedeker: I'd love to pull that one right off the shelf for my nighttime reading.
Emily: Good Lord.
Jase: So in their research—
Dedeker: Wait, hold on, sorry. Is there an alternate universe where that was actually written by aliens who tried it out with humans and they were like, mm, Human Sexual Inadequacy.
Emily: We wrote a whole book written on how bad humans are at sex.
Dedeker: Yeah, I just don't even— I know you think it's going to be exotic and fun. Just don't even go there, bro.
Emily: Just trust me.
Jase: I could see that being in the whole sort of literotica genre, but it's fairies or vampires or something that is talking about how humans are always not as good at sex as you think. But then, of course, our protagonist ends up being the chosen one who is as good as— —who's incredible as the sex. Yeah, exactly. Dear God.
Dedeker: Isn't that kind of every romantic book, right? That our protagonist is the human who defies all human tropes and is just so good at sucking it.
Jase: Yeah. Anyway, for those of you who are writers out there, just give us an acknowledgement in your book, please, if you use that premise. Okay, so— in this book is when they first introduced this to the world. But it's something that they had developed as an intervention, basically, in sex therapy for couples. And at their time in the '60s and '70s, they are only focused on heterosexual couples who do normal penetrative sex, right? That's the world that they're working in. So this technique supposedly came from Virginia Johnson with this memory of her mother tracing her face as a child. So like lightly touching her face and tracing the contours of it or whatever. And I'm going to get into what the technique is in just a second here, but this is something that's been so foundational in sex therapy. In a survey from 2014 of 94 sex therapists, about 85% said that they use some form of this sensate focus therapy in their practice. So this is very foundational in the sex therapy work. The thing is that the version that you find online is almost always wrong in a very specific way. And our best two sources of this are actually two peer-reviewed papers by Linda Weiner and Constance Avery-Clark, who are both former research and clinical associates at Masters Johnson Institute, who both wrote specifically to try to correct the record about all the problems about sensate focus out there. So one was called Sensate Focus: Clarifying the Masters Virginia Johnson Institute model, and the other one was called Sensate Focus: A Critical Literature Review. These are from 2014 and 2016, so way after the initial publication of this. And that they actually quote another researcher who knew William Masters, and he said— this is from David Schnarch— he said William Masters has said on many occasions that Human Sexual Inadequacy, the book, "Does not accurately depict the Masters Johnson treatment approach." So, his own book even doesn't accurately portray this. Rough. However— the quote continues, "However, interpretation of this publication constitutes the sum total of most therapists' knowledge of the clinical work." That doesn't surprise me. Yeah. So in doing some other reading, I learned that they apparently wrote the whole book in like, 7 weeks or some tiny amount of time for this book, and it just— things got missed. I don't know why. It sounds like a bad idea. The book's been criticized by some researchers for that, and Masters is like, yep, you're totally right, not a good book, not a good summary. So do we need to—
Dedeker: does someone need to publish a book called Human Sexual Inadequacies Inadequacies?
Jase: That's good. Ah, shoot. Okay, we're really—
Emily: I think we're very generative in this episode, apparently.
Jase: A creative font right here.
Emily: That's what happens when you don't have sex, you use all of that energy doing other things, which I— isn't that—
Dedeker: I've never found that to be true. I know people make that argument. I mean, if anything, it's like, no, I'm more distracted and less creative.
Emily: There you go. Fair enough.
Dedeker: Okay, I'm sorry. We're being chuckleheads. I'm dying to know. Okay, what do we get wrong about?
Emily: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jase: Okay, so I'm gonna start with the incorrect version. So this is the misconception that gets tossed around online, and you've probably heard this before. And this is to rebuild intimacy within a couple is to start out by banning intercourse, be like, no intercourse. We're going to take turns giving each other sensual, pleasurable massages to relax and build arousal as a warm-up back to sex, or as a thing to do instead of sex for a while. It's that we're going to sensually touch each other, right? That's the idea. Here's what it actually is. It's to get in touch with touching without it being focused on pleasure at all, which is a huge and kind of counterintuitive difference. Yes, so here's very different. Here's how it actually goes. So in the first phase is, one person is the toucher and the other is the touchy, the one being touched. And what it is, the person doing the touching focuses on their own sensory experience of doing the touching, not of giving their partner a good time, and not on making themselves feel good. So it's this wide misunderstanding that it's about focusing on the sensations that please one's partner, and it's actually the opposite. It's avoiding any effort to please them or to please yourself, and it's actually more like a mindfulness technique. Of as you start to have those thoughts about, oh, I wonder if they're liking this or they're not liking this or whatever, to use that as an opportunity to just bring yourself back to just feeling the physical sensation without that judgment piece of is this pleasurable or not to them?
Dedeker: Is this pleasurable or not to me? Yeah, so Betty Martin, who made the Wheel of Consent model, which I think is fantastic and I recommend it to everybody, but she has an exercise called Waking Up the Hands that she has people do, not even with a partner at first, right? It's literally with an object where it is a mindfulness exercise of just opening up that channel of communication in your touch senses around what you're actually experiencing. Not about is it pleasurable, is it not pleasurable, just what am I actually experiencing without that judgment. Yeah, cool.
Jase: 100%. And so the whole thing here is based on this founding premise that arousal erection, lubrication, orgasm, all of those are automatic bodily responses. They're natural physiological processes like your bladder or breathing or your bowel functioning, and they're not something under your direct control. And so trying to consciously control them actually gets in the way of those things functioning well, right?
Dedeker: So as in, when you put that pressure on yourself of, I got to get aroused now, that's when you don't.
Jase: Yes. The surest way to not get it— exactly— is to try to get aroused, right?
Emily: Well, and I would say from the men in my life, or people with penises who really focus on, oh, I gotta make sure that it stays up in the middle of some sort of sexually charged event, that that is a surefire way to make sure that that doesn't happen. So that kind of makes sense to me. And often, when you think about arousal, sometimes it does just happen. And you're like, well, I don't know why I'm aroused right now, but I am. Let's go.
Jase: Or when your body is reacting to arousal and you're like, I am going into a work meeting. There is nothing to be aroused about right now. But my body just did that. And it's like, crap. Okay, I've got to try to think about something else or focus. That state of mind. Yeah, right. And again, it's sort of this weird, it's a little out of our control. We kind of think of it more like it's in our control, but that can trip us up, right?
Dedeker: But the whole thing is about, we're not focusing on pleasure, actually, right?
Jase: So in this first phase, pleasure, enjoyment, even relaxation are explicitly treated as distractions. Wow. You just gently notice, and then you refocus away from them back to just the physical sensation as a neutral thing. And the setup is supposed to also deliberately be unromantic, so no candles, no lotion, no music. Because those— Lotion? Well, you know, like a massage lotion.
Emily: Yeah, yeah, no, I'm kidding. Yeah.
Dedeker: Get on a— get on a freaking, doctor's office exam table.
Jase: Unless that's your thing, then don't. Yeah, I might want to. So the idea is that you're doing something like a systematic desensitization, which is also a behavioral therapy technique. Uh, Wolpe, I think, has a technique like this. I didn't look into that a ton, but there's some overlap with other psychological interventions. And the idea is that from their findings, a lot of sexual dysfunction in couples— so this is not about intentionally not having penetrative sex, but more like treating sexual dysfunction is where their research came out of— but that anxiety was the trigger for a lot of the problems. And so the point of this exercise is that you can't hold anxiety and be fully absorbed in your attention at the same time. So by having this mindfulness exercise to really sustain the sensory focus without it trying to be about accomplishing something, basically your focus crowds out the performance anxiety. So actually a lot of researchers have called this the first use of mindfulness in sex therapy ever, even though I don't think they called it mindfulness at the time. Sure, at all. But Yeah. And so Johnson said fear of inadequacy is the greatest known deterrent to effective sexual functioning. So here's kind of the idea of how you would do this. You would take, if you want to be ambitious, a whole hour for this, right? This is something like we really need to figure this out. Set aside an hour, maybe every 2 or 3 days, turn off your devices and start with genitals, breasts off limits. One person touches the other head to toe, front to back, avoiding chest and genitals, hands and fingers only, no kissing. The toucher attends to just 3 things: just temperature, pressure, and texture. Just noticing those things as you go. And when the mind wanders to, oh, is she enjoying this? Am I doing it right? Just notice that, refocus on just the texture, the pressure, the temperature. And then the person being touched just receives, and you only move a hand away if something is tickling you or it's uncomfortable. But try not to move the hands around or suggest things, right? And then you switch, and then each person notes what they felt and what pulled their attention. And that noticing is kind of helping you understand what's going on. And then only later, once you've kind of gotten a good foundation of this, could you then progress on to more sexual touch. But the idea is to really start by training yourself out of that kind of pressure to achieve something. I just thought that was so interesting because I've often found when we've looked into this, even in the past for episodes, it's just that thing of like, oh, sensual touch, or oh, you know, have a bath together or do these things. And while those are nice, if it's about sexual function and recreating intimacy with the two of you that actually might not be serving. That might just be keeping the pressure just in a different form.
Dedeker: Sure. Well, it seems like this provides an opportunity to just not be putting on a show for each other to a certain extent. And I do think good sex— sometimes good showmanship could be a part of sex. Yeah, I don't think that means it's bad. I don't think that's bad. But yes, there's just human social dynamics of that, yeah, I need to be engaged, I need to be on. If my partner is trying to do something that's pleasing to me, I need to be communicating that it is pleasing to me. And just scrubbing all of that away really leaves a pretty blank canvas for a lot of— I know this is an unsexy term, but it sounds like they want it to be not sexy, uh, for a lot of data to come through.
Jase: Yeah, that turned me on though. I love data. Uh, so, okay, so I don't want to spend the whole episode on this one study because it has a few limitations. The first of those is, like I mentioned, it's only studying heterosexual couples. And also the goal of it is to get them back to penetrative sex, right? So a little bit of a different goal with this particular thing, right? There's quotes that get tossed around saying this has like an— that they found it had an 80% success rate. That's not actually true. They never actually reported that. It's more that they looked at people that this failed for, and that those numbers were like 20% when they followed up with people 5 years later.
Dedeker: But fail state being like they didn't go back to penetrative sex.
Jase: So yeah. So the way they defined success was if the man was able to get and keep an erection on more than 75% of coital occasions after that. Okay. Coital occasions. Correct.
Dedeker: Oh, that's my favorite part of that. I'm gonna write that one down. Coital occasions.
Jase: Yes. All right. Okay. I would like to invite you to a coital occasion.
Dedeker: It's a formal invitation. Dear God. Oh, so, okay. So sorry. Yeah. Back way up. So the success rate was just about boners.
Jase: Right. That's really what it is.
Emily: Of course. Dedeker, are you surprised?
Dedeker: Come on. No, I am not. I'm not. I'm just, I'm still disappointed though.
Jase: So they did measure other things, which includes— so there's the restored erections, but then also not coming too soon was the other thing they were looking at. Also becoming orgasmic. So that was for men and women.
Emily: Becoming orgasmic. Yeah.
Dedeker: Okay, becoming orgasmic. That's also a good book title. I really like restored erections as well. Okay, no, okay, maybe that's my home restoration company.
Jase: Hold on, I'm thinking these could be the books in your series within the world of the Human Sexual Inadequacy. Oh yeah, so book 1 is called Restore Direction. Yeah, book 2 is Becoming Orgasmic.
Dedeker: Okay, I don't know, book 3 is the—
Emily: Coital Occasions.
Jase: Coital Occasions.
Emily: There you go. Yeah, that's great. Coital Occasions with Dedeker Winston. It's your new series on ABC. Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Jase: Um, and then also, uh, so becoming more orgasmic and then also resolving painful penetration too. So it was kind of— I mean, that's both sides there. Good.
Emily: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fascinating. How does this help with that?
Jase: Well, again, it's taking the pressure off of getting aroused. Okay. And the idea is by getting the focus to just the touch, you're learning how to focus and not focus on your anxiety. Yeah. And that's going to help whoever it is with whatever's going on.
Emily: Less seizing up, having maybe the same neural pathways in the direction of if X happens, then I'm gonna have painful sex or whatever. Interesting. So it— I mean, I like that it kind of focuses on almost like a mind-body connection with all of this, for sure.
Dedeker: Yeah. Well, and also it seems like— my big grievance is how even with our limited sex education that we get, we're still taught that certain things should be arousing, certain types of touch should be arousing. And I imagine doing this, when you really go back to blank slate, it also opens up the floodgates for you to notice what actually is arousing for me, or what actually is pleasurable, or what actually moves me in the opposite direction. And so with that more information, then that can make reapproaching penetrative sex better, I imagine.
Jase: Yeah. This also reminds me a little bit of some stuff I feel like we haven't talked about in a while, but the whole, who is this for? Or giving— Betty Martin Wheel of Consent, right? Giving for your pleasure. The idea of this is about touching just for the experience of sensation and not trying to arouse yourself or them. But it reminds me of the whole, what if you touch your partner but for the purpose of arousing yourself instead of arousing them? If both of you are like, yeah, let's try that, that's also an interesting dynamic to play with, to just explore and understand more about what that looks like, to get more in touch with what does arouse me, what is exciting to me. So to bring this back to our question asker, so in this case where there is a specific limited amount of time when sex with certain types of sex are off the table, this could be a great exercise to just do during that time as sort of a, hey, this is a little special project period, this is a little opportunity for us to explore this, and then maybe it'll make our sex even better once we have it again. But that brings us to the overall question of, well, what if that isn't necessarily the goal, to go back to penetrative sex? Or maybe that's never been the goal, or maybe that's no longer the goal. So that's what we're gonna get into in the next part here, but we're gonna take another quick break to talk about our sponsors for this show. Really do please give them a listen and use the links or promo codes in our show notes, cuz that does directly help support our show. And then of course, if you would love to get ad-free episodes and join our community, we would love to have you as part of that. And it's also extremely affordable. I know things are weird economically right now, but for as little as $5 a month, we have access to the full community and the ad-free episodes and our video processing groups and all of that. We really try hard to make this affordable. If you can spend more, that's great. That really does help support our show. We have a lot of people that do that. But to check it out, learn more about it, go to multiamory.com/join, and we would love to have you as part of that. Now let's get into how to have sex without sex, or how to not focus on just one type of sex being sex, right? Let's do a little bit of that.
Dedeker: That's another book title: How to Have Sex Without Sex.
Jase: Mm, okay.
Emily: Sex without sex. Sex without sex.
Dedeker: Yeah, that's gonna sell like hotcakes.
Emily: Yeah, boy, everyone's gonna walk right by that shelf and be like, no, I mean, well, aren't the, the young people are having less sex these days, so maybe they would love that book.
Jase: It'll be a big Gen Z hit. Yeah. Anyway, okay, I'm gonna hit you with several researches as we go, and I'm just curious kind of what, what these inspire, what thoughts get inspired here. So the first of these is a study from 2009 by Kleinplatz and Mnard et al., and it's called The Components of Optimal Sexuality: A Portrait of Great Sex. This is from the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality. Eh? So what they did is instead of studying what goes wrong in sex, they did the approach kind of like Maslow did with just general well-being of like, what if we look at people who have good sex? And see what they say. Like, let's try to learn what good is, what's great, rather than just focusing on what's bad. And so they ran this in-depth qualitative interview with 64 people, 44 of those who said they had experienced great sex, and that they deliberately recruited older adults and people with illness or disability, as well as 20 sex therapists. Then they analyzed the transcripts for recurring themes and Essentially what came back was they had 8 qualities that emerged from all of these interviews that made sex magnificent. It made it great. Magnificent. And check this out, here's the list of the 8 things: being present, deep connection, erotic intimacy, extraordinary communication. Whoa, extraordinary.
Dedeker: Yeah.
Jase: Authenticity, vulnerability, exploration and transcendence. Whoa! Wow!
Emily: We floating off into another dimension here? What's happening? I mean, hey, every—
Dedeker: every magnificent coital occasion I can think of was also— had some transcendence to it.
Emily: Yeah, sure. I mean, fair.
Jase: What you'll notice on that list of the 8 things that emerged, 0 of those were orgasms. Erections, yeah, or physical in any way, right? Sure, right. They were all psychological. Love that. So that, that was like a big standout finding from this. So in this, people ended up rating orgasm and sexual function as minor, of neither necessary nor sufficient, meaning those on their own are not enough to make sex great, and also that they're not necessary for great sex. So first of all, just to kind of pave the way for sex doesn't have to look this one particular way. I love this study because it does exactly that. And it does it looking at a population of people who I'm presuming have had all of that kind of sex, have had penetrative sex and orgasms and all these things, right? That of those people— this isn't just people who never have those saying they have great sex. It's like, nope, look, they get it and those things are cool, but they're not the main thing, right? They're not absolutely necessary, right? And so I'm curious of those, which of those 8 qualities can you try leaning into more, especially if you took intercourse off the table? But even if you didn't, right, just like, what of those 8? I kind of like the idea of having an 8-sided die or little note cards with one of each of those and be like, we're gonna try for this one today. I don't know, just as a curious thing to get yourself out of thinking about sex having this one particular way of way of being great or way of being successful. All right, you ready for number 2? This is from a study from sex therapists Michael Metz and Barry McCarthy from 2007 titled The Good-Enough Sex Model for Couple Sexual Satisfaction. Have you heard of this before? I feel like I have heard of the—
Dedeker: yes, this sounds—
Emily: this sounds familiar. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Jase: And so basically the idea is it's this clinical model. So this isn't just a specific experiment, but kind of a model that they synthesized from various existing data and studies to reframe couple sex away from performance and toward pleasure, flexibility, and intimacy. So one of their key findings was that satisfied couples don't treat 'we didn't get to intercourse' as a failure. They treat it as a normal variety of what having sex together looks like. Nice. And that's kind of the core of their Good-Enough Sex model, where pleasure is equally important as function. Again, so it's not about achieving particular acts, things like that. So here's a specific quote from the study. So the model accepts that among satisfied couples, up to 15% of the time their sexual encounters will not flow to intercourse. Rather than thinking of these as failures, accept them as part of normal variability. Transition to a backup scenario, either a warm sensual scenario or an erotic non-intercourse scenario. And they're also very keen to emphasize that this is not about having boring sex or saying, well, good enough is good enough, I guess. But it's like, no, good enough sex means this is actually good and that it doesn't have to look a particular way.
Dedeker: So, yeah, Good-Enough Sex is like, this other thing also counts as good sex to us, right? Even if it doesn't involve penetration or intercourse in the way that we might be used to it. Yeah, yeah.
Jase: I think their naming could have used some workshopping, honestly, because Good-Enough Sex does seem like just—
Dedeker: your book, The Good-Enough Sex. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jase: Maybe that can be a turning point in your book about the Human Sexual Inadequacy, is that at first they're just trying to be good enough, but they realize that that's holding them back from greatness.
Dedeker: Yeah, that's how they become king of the land. Yes, king of sex.
Emily: Yeah, king of sex. Yeah, it's what we all want to be, king of sex.
Jase: Oh boy. Okay, one more study I want to hit you with that's all relevant to this so we can discuss is from Basson, R., in 2001. This title's a doozy: Using a Different Model for Female Sexual Response to Address Women's Problematic Low Sexual Desire. Please, please.
Dedeker: Okay, I understand that they didn't mean it this way. I understand. Probably what they meant was to address low sexual desire that occurs in certain women and where the women themselves find that to be problematic, right? Exactly. I couldn't say all that, and they made it sound like it's just all women's desire.
Emily: All women have low sexual desire, and that's a problem for all of us. Yes, exactly. They've clearly never met Dedeker while she's ovulating.
Jase: Yes, or on fertility drugs.
Emily: There you go. Yes, that's an opposite.
Dedeker: That's problematic high sexual desire.
Jase: Yes, right. Okay, so what this is is a proposal for an alternative, quote, circular model of female sexual response, telling how well it fit the assessment of 47 women referred to the practitioner for low desire. So Basson herself reports that all of them could relate to it, relating to low sexual desire being a problem, and that simply mapping where their cycle broke down itself was therapeutic. So we'll get into this in just a second here. So let's talk about this circle. So picture the old model as a straight line where it goes from spontaneous desire, then arousal, and then orgasm. Bada bing, bada boom. Great, great times. Everyone had a great time. And in her research, Basson found that it was something crazy like 30 to 50% of women that she talked to identified with having too low of desire or arousal. And it kind of begged this question of compared to what? Too low for what, right? Is it what you're seeing in movies? Is it your male partners? What's going on here? But so this kind of led down this whole rabbit hole of trying to understand this. So hers, instead of being a line, it's a loop. So instead of starting with a desire, it starts at sexual neutrality.
Dedeker: Oh, another good one. Sexual neutrality. That is good. Boy, we just keep 'em coming.
Emily: Tim Kurzweil is writing all of these down by the way, everyone. Coming to a bookstore near you.
Jase: Okay, so keep in mind, I'm sure this has all evolved some. This was from 2001. But so here's her model. So it starts with a woman at sexual neutrality who wanting closeness, chooses to be receptive to sexual stimuli. That willingness leads to arousal. That arousal brings on desire, the responsive kind, to keep going, which can then build toward more arousal and maybe orgasm. And then the step that makes it a circle is if the encounter felt good emotionally as well as physically, it deepens the couple's intimacy, and that greater closeness raises her motivation to be receptive to intimacy the next time.
Dedeker: Well, I already want to pick a bone with her only passive and receptive, but I'm sure— I just want to say that.
Jase: In some ways I hope that socially some things have changed a bit in the 25 years since 2001 to make some of this a little different, but it can really depend on the microculture that you're in, I think, too, in terms of that. So anyway, the idea here is that she had that circle and then would have the women that she was working with in this study kind of go through that and then identify which part in that circle is where she got stuck. Was it, and then I felt bad emotionally with my partner and so I didn't feel closer and I didn't want to do it again? Was it, okay, I want to be open to this but I can't get aroused? Or is it I got aroused but I didn't have desire? Identifying what part in that circle gets stuck can be helpful for kind of satisfying all of that. So essentially the idea here, and I think the way it's relevant, is to not feel like spontaneous desire is the only way to have sex. And I think that a lot of us, especially as we get older, experience a lot less of that just spontaneous desire. And some of us may just experience less of that in general, or less with certain partners, or anything like that. But to throw out that usual script that it has to start from, oh shit, I want that sex, to instead, I want to be intimate with this partner, so I want to be open to that. Let me find the pathway to arousal and then desire and then more arousal and then hopefully emotionally satisfying connection with that partner to make me want to do that more. And I think that putting that different lens to it opens up some ideas about non- intercourse-based sex as well. So what would be some of our takeaways here in terms of going away from just the normal advice of do massages, or just like long kissing sessions or whatever? And those are great, don't get me wrong, those are great. If you want to do those, do them. What else could we look at here?
Emily: I loved the idea of the good communication piece being something that helps with intimacy in general. And also in terms of the things that people said made their sexual encounters or just sex in general better is having great communication. And I do agree that the more comfortable you feel with someone, the easier it is to speak to them and be communicative about what it is that you like and what it is that you are feeling in a particular moment, that that's something that can aid in feeling pleasure. And even if that's not necessarily sexual pleasure or sensual pleasure, but just feeling pleasure when you're around them, for instance. And that can hopefully lead to more sexual desire for and with that person in the future.
Jase: It also reminds me about the importance of touch. And this is something that I remember in college on a whim, I took a contact improv dance class for a semester.
Emily: And that sounds like something you would do, right?
Jase: And I'd never taken a college-level dance class. There's a little more intellectualism that goes into a college-level dance class, at least at Oberlin. At Oberlin, for sure. Where there's sort of a philosophy of this dance and why this matters in the world, and not just doing the dance, right? Especially with something like contact improv, which it's not like you practice moves exactly. So anyway, one of the things that our teacher got to is the importance of touch in this way that's intimate, but it's also platonic, and it's also with whoever, right? You're— there's kind of this safe space that you're in, and it's not about this sexual connection. And she would always make this point of she thinks that this is why, especially in young boys, they do a lot of roughhousing. Is because we all have this need for touch. But once we reach a certain age, people stop touching us, and we stop kind of being allowed to touch each other, to touch our friends, especially as boys, right? We're kind of socialized out of being touchy or cuddly or whatever with each other after we're like 5 or something quite young. And so she was saying, so there's still that need. So how do we get it? Well, we can fight, we can wrestle, we can roughhouse, and that's a way of getting touch. And then later in life, our only avenue to it is sex a lot of the time. And that's the only time we can get touch. I also found just a couple studies to mention the importance of touch in general. So one was this one from 2007 where they had people go into— one part of a couple go into a stressful situation. I'm not sure what it was, but it was like in a lab setting, right, trying to do something a little stressful. And these were 67 women that were assigned to go into this stressful lab situation. And in the 10 minutes before it, they were assigned to one of three groups. One was that their partner who they were with would have no interaction with them. One was that their partner would give them verbal support before going in, and the other was that they would give them a standardized neck and shoulder massage. And they found that only the massage group showed lower cortisol and lower heart rate. In the stressful situation, that verbal alone did nothing. And obviously that no contact didn't have any change either. And then there was another study too that did a 4-week-long intervention with 34 different married couples. In one group was just monitoring their behavior over 4 weeks, and then the other one, it was encouraging them to do more warm touch. So hand on the back, holding hands, little things like that. And they found that the touch group showed higher oxytocin, which is the binding hormone, and lower stress markers for both partners, plus lower 24-hour blood pressure in the husbands specifically. So anyway, I also think this is a great opportunity to just sort of explore that— is part of our need for sex because we don't touch a lot outside of that? I don't know if that's your case or not, but that could also be something to explore. Have you all been watching the World Cup?
Emily: These men are No, they're— it's really beautiful because they're, they're embracing each other in these very intimate ways. At least to me, I don't often see men embrace each other in such a way, but I think that that makes sense also to maybe lower the amount of anxiety and intensity that the moment is bringing, and just true camaraderie. So maybe that's something not only to do with our emotional life partners, but also with other people around us who mean a lot to us, to engage in more touching with them too.
Jase: I think there's an argument to be made for the appeal of sports too, to get that touch somehow, because it is an environment where you're right, a lot more physical touching is generally accepted as normal than other things. Maybe some sports more than others. I don't know how much people cuddle after fencing or something. Dedeker, did they cuddle a lot when you fenced?
Dedeker: No, no, not a cuddly sport, fencing.
Jase: Yeah, but team sports, but team sports for sure. Well, thank you for joining me on this spontaneous deep dive into a bunch of research about intimacy. I'm actually kind of surprised we haven't come across more of these studies before, so this was nice to get to really see what some of the sex therapy research is showing here. And I would say if we had to sum up some takeaways from all of this I'd say first of all is when it comes to arousal, removing your focus from getting aroused or from arousing your partner can actually be really healing as a way to get more focused on that and get away from focusing on what could go wrong, right? The hardest way to get aroused is to try to get aroused. And then I think also with this whole exploring touch and exploring the transcendental non-physical ways to connect, through communication and vulnerability and intimacy and things like that. And maybe part of that's physical. In this, we didn't even touch on the kink side of things too, because there's a whole lot of non-sexual but very emotionally intense and connected stuff in the kink world as well. So there's just a lot to explore here that isn't just about leading up to orgasms or leading up to penetration or leading up to touching genitals. And that's beautiful. Thank you to Worried on the West Coast for writing in with your question. And we would love to hear from all of you. Our question of the week this week is: outside of sex, what makes you feel the most connected to a partner? So this isn't just about physical intimacy, but what makes you feel the most connected? Curious to hear what everyone has to say on that one. Also, if you want to discuss this further, the best place to share your thoughts with other listeners is in the episode discussion channel in our Discord server. Or you can post in our private Facebook group. You can get access to these groups and join our exclusive community by going to multiamory.com/join. In addition, you can share publicly on Instagram @multiamory_podcast.
Jase: Multiamory is created and produced by Dedeker Winston, Emily Matlack, and me, Jace Lindgren. Our production assistant is Carson Collins. Our theme song is "Forms I Know I Did" by Josh and Annen from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on Multiamory.com.