March 13, 2025
112: Sex Doesn't End at Menopause with Laura Lee
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What happens to our sexuality during menopause? Far from signalling an end to pleasure and intimacy, this transition offers an unexpected opportunity for sexual rediscovery and deeper connection.
Psychologist and sexologist Laura Lee joins me in this episode to masterfully unpack the evolution of desire through midlife, challenging our cultural fixation on "loss of libido" by revealing how desire simply changes form.
Sexual communication can feel particularly challenging during menopause, when changing bodies and shifting desires create vulnerability. Laura provides practical strategies for starting these conversations without the paralysing pressure many couples feel. Rather than dreading "the talk," she suggests sharing resources, expressing genuine curiosity, and validating one another's experiences to foster meaningful dialogue about evolving needs.
Perhaps most thought provoking is Laura's invitation to expand our sexual menu beyond the narrow, penetration-focused definition of sex that dominates cultural narratives. By embracing a broader understanding of sexual connection—from sensual touch to passionate kissing—we create more opportunities to say "yes" to pleasure, even as our bodies change. This expansion allows us to discover new pathways to pleasure uniquely suited to our midlife bodies.
Ready to transform how you think about sex during menopause? Listen now to discover how this transition can become not an ending but the beginning of your most authentic sexual experience yet.
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Chapters
00:00 - Introduction to Psychologist Laura Lee
09:22 - Why Sexual Communication Feels Risky
18:11 - Breaking Through Shame and Sexual Scripts
27:30 - Starting the Conversation with Partners
37:20 - Spontaneous vs Responsive Desire
45:22 - Expanding Your Sexual Menu
54:25 - The Importance of Masturbation and Exploration
Transcript
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Welcome to the Dear Menopause podcast.
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I'm Sonya Lovell, your host Now.
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I've been bringing you conversations with amazing menopause experts for over two years now.
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If you have missed any of those conversations, now's the time to go back and listen, and you can always share them with anyone you think needs to hear them.
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This way, more people can find these amazing conversations, needs to hear them.
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This way, more people can find these amazing conversations.
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Welcome to today's episode.
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Everybody, I am joined today by the lovely Laura Lee.
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Now, Laura is a psychologist and sexologist and she is here for us to talk about a whole host of topics around sexuality, desire, the evolution of our sexual relationships throughout our life stages, which I think is going to be a really cool conversation.
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Laura, welcome to the show.
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Why don't you start off by telling everyone a little bit about who you are?
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Thank you, thanks, sonya, I'm so pleased to be here.
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I'm actually really excited for this conversation too.
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So, as you said, I work as a psychologist and a sexologist.
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I really love working at that intersection of all things sex relationships and mental health.
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So that's really the work that I do.
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I have a clinical practice and I do a whole bunch of different therapy and coaching bits and pieces.
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I work at that intersection to help people to really explore and enjoy and embrace their sexuality wherever they're at.
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In that, journey.
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Did you start off as a psychologist and then move into sexology, or vice versa?
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How did that kind of unfold?
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I did so.
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I've been a psychologist for quite some time now I'm in my early forties now and I've been a psychologist since I was 25 and I've had my own clinical practice for quite a few years and had worked in the clinical and coaching space for the entirety of my career, really and what I noticed was happening was my clients and I mostly work with women Most of my clients, a lot of my clients were starting to talk to me about sexuality, sex within their relationships and things to do with sex that I myself had experienced, you know, do issues of communication, difficulty communicating or issues of pain or difficulty navigating it in their partnered relationships, and what I felt in myself as a psychologist was a real desire to help.
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I was pretty comfortable talking about sex although that's been a whole journey for me in and of itself but I felt really ill-equipped because sex is something that's not really covered in a lot of our training.
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And as I started to talk to other healthcare providers, I realized I was not alone.
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Other healthcare providers, including doctors, were saying to me yes, sex was hardly mentioned in my training, so I typically just don't talk about it with my clients, and I was like hold up, that doesn't sound right.
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It's a part of all of our lives.
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Regardless of whether or not we're having sex, sexuality is a part of all of us.
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So I went back and retrained.
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I did a Master's in sexual and reproductive health and psychosexual therapy, but that was only a couple of years ago, so that was only in 2022, 2023.
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And now, kind of I've really embraced for myself working in this sexology space and I have the enormous pleasure of talking to people about their sexuality and their sexual selves every single day.
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I think that's so cool and I love thank you for sharing that part of your story with us, because I think it's really important to sometimes understand what actually led somebody into their field of expertise, because often, you know, it's not as simple as like oh, I just decided I wanted to be a doctor, so I went to medical school and now I'm a doctor.
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I'm going to make a broad assumption here Please don't come at me anybody that's listening with this but I feel that it is most likely, particularly in the space that we're talking about, a woman that is likely to have started in her field of expertise, been open and listening to her patients and her clients, and then decided that to be able to really serve them in the best way possible, she needs to go off and upskill and really get the education and the skills required to be able to support people where they're at and with what their real burning needs are.
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Yeah, yes, absolutely.
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I think the other piece, too, for me was that I work with women of all different ages and a lot of what I was hearing from younger women really surprised me.
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I think I thought sexual health literacy and sex education was better than it was when I was maybe in my, but it's kind of not the.
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The access to more information is both a good and a bad thing, and I was hearing some belief systems, some values, some myths about sex and relationships that I had thought were kind of were kind of gone now.
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I thought, yeah, those things didn't exist anymore, but they still did.
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And these, you know, what I was hearing from my clients was these issues still required support, the way that I wished I'd had when I was a younger adult and first starting to explore my sexuality.
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That's really interesting, isn't it?
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And I would imagine, as well as all of those myths that still exist and the topics that are still a bit taboo and not spoken about and addressed, there's also, for the younger generations, that added layer of social media and digital porn and all of that sort of thing.
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It must be a really complex world for the younger generations that are coming through in that many respects, but they're not who we're here to talk about today.
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From what I've gathered, you really are passionate about communication, desire, being able to communicate in a way where that desire is satisfied.
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So how about you kick us off with why sexual communication is so difficult?
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You know, I sit here as a 55-year-old woman thinking when you were saying the younger generation are still working their way through some of these myths I kind of go, I'm 55, you know, I've been having sex now for probably 40 odd years.
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There are still things that I feel now that I wouldn't go and ask for help around because I kind of go, I'm 55.
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I should not have sorted this stuff out by myself.
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This feels a little bit silly for me to go and ask questions about now.
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Does that make sense?
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It makes so much sense.
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I really appreciate you sharing that because you are definitely not alone.
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When I was first getting interested in studying, as I said, I was hearing from healthcare providers they didn't feel confident to talk about it with their patients so they weren't bringing it up.
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And then, certainly just like what you were just sharing, individuals don't feel comfortable to go to the healthcare providers.
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The awkwardness is palpable you were just sharing.
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Individuals don't feel comfortable to go to the healthcare providers.
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The awkwardness is palpable.
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But within relationships it is such a fraught topic.
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I am yet to come across a more tense and emotionally charged topic for most couples than sex, and it is in fact, very common for people to be having a certain amount of sex whether that's a lot or a little and not talking about it, and I certainly have experienced that for most of my relationships to be having sex and not really talking about the sex that we are having.
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The reason it is such a fraught topic is that it is incredibly high stakes.
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So what I mean by that is talking about sex has some really high risk to it in that there is a chance I'm going to be judged, that I am going to feel awkward or embarrassed, that I'm going to feel ashamed, that I'm going to be rejected and that I'm going to be hurt or hurt this other person I care about.
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So that feels pretty high stakes.
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And then you overlay that with all our own stuff that we've all got to some degree around sex.
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You know our upbringing and whether we were exposed to healthy conversations about sex, which for most people was not the case.
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The fact that we still live in a very sex negative culture where it's still pretty taboo to talk about this stuff.
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There's lots of messaging we get very frequently that there's something about talking about sex that is like either not okay, like not allowed or high risk.
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You know, as I said before, high stakes.
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So it feels it feels really scary and that really activates things for people in their body.
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I mean, I felt it.
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I'm sure you have.
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I can think of conversations I've had in my own relationships where you feel that activation of anxiety and stress just flood through your system as you go to have one of these conversations.
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So I understand why people wouldn't.
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I understand the avoidance.
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Yeah.
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So how do you?
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Because I very much relate to that.
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You know I am a product of a Catholic schooling system.
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I am a product of a generation where I can vividly remember.
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So two things.
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First of all, my parents never showed any, really any physical, actual emotions towards each other in front of us as children.
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There was never any holding hands, no cuddling, no, nothing.
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And then I can remember as a teenager starting to watch, you know, shows where my mum might walk into the room and you'd be watching, I don't know, pretty in Pink or something like that, and that you know the main characters would be pashing on screen and my mother would be going.
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It's disgusting, and there was this real kind of like, I guess almost revulsion to the fact that these people were sexually attracted to each other, that that was being depicted on screen, and so I very much relate to what you're talking about from the generation that I came from and the upbringing that I had.
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So how do you break through that high risk and that feeling of being judged or that this is not a topic that I should be having, you know, bringing up in conversation?
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Yeah, I really appreciate you sharing that too, like those experiences you had when you you were younger.
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I've got those too.
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I remember being actively discouraged from talking about certain things or watching certain things.
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Um, and I really acknowledge how, uh how close shame is to so many people's experiences of sex, because shame refers to those very tender spots that we all have that when they're touched it feels like the most painful bruise you've ever had, because it's those, it's those parts of ourselves where we feel like we're not okay as we are, like I'm not enough, I'm defective in some way.
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It's very painful stuff and that activates for a lot of people with sex.
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Most, most people have had experiences where they experienced some of those risks I talked about before.
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You know judgment or rejection or awkwardness, so it's a really real risk for people.
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You know your question about how do you break through it.
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I actually help my own clients do this by first understanding the shame and the tender spots they have around this topic and how that was never theirs in the first place, and what I mean by that is that that shame has come from to your example, parents and their own stuff, and their own upbringing and the cultural context within which we exist, and social media and patriarchy and all these other systems that exist to limit our freedom to experience and express our sexuality.
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So I think the first step is being really willing to understand and unpack the shame that we carry and how that's not ours.
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One of the really practical exercises I get people to do that can be really helpful is to start to examine what are the scripts I have around.
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Sex Scripts are the stories that we kind of have told ourselves and they're kind of running in the background for all of us and we all have them.
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But the really exciting news is that we can, once we know what ours are, we can actually start to like, unlearn them and relearn new ones.
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So some of the most common sexual scripts that I hear for women, particularly women who have sex with men, are things like men are always up for sex, or sex is over when the man is finished, or sex is a performance, like sex is something to perform well or be good at, like.
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These are the kinds of scripts a lot of us internalize when we first started having sex.
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I know I did and it takes real, it takes work and intentional focus to know what they are, start to unlearn them and start to learn some new ideas about ourselves and our sexuality.
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So I think that's the start.
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Yeah, and that's.
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That's a whole conversation I can imagine having in a session.
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That would require lots of unpacking and lots of work.
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But you know, as you say, that ability to be able to communicate within our relationships is what is going to lead us to actually seeking or achieving the desire that you know we all deserve and that we all want at the end of the day.
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So how does that play out then?
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In couples and not even long-term couples, like obviously I am, but somebody perhaps that's in a new relationship, there are a lot of people at this midlife age that find themselves in new relationships.
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Relationships change for various reasons, some end up for various reasons, and then we find ourselves out in that whole dating pool again.
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How does it become?
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I think the term that you use is a multi-directional conversation.
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Yeah, I think it's really important to find out if we don't already know.
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Find out if you're in a relationship with someone, no matter what stage it's at.
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Find out if it's one you've never had before and you're nervous.
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I actually think that initial conversation is just a checking for willingness.
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It's not a raising of issues or trying to solve problems.
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It's not a hey, we've been together for 10 years and I want to suddenly talk about our sex life, because that sounds terrifying.
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It's really just a checking for willingness along the lines of hey, I and you might even say hey.
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I was listening to this podcast or I read this article today and I've been thinking about the fact that I want us to have sex together for quite a long time to come and I really care about us both having a great experience with our sexuality and I think that would be really nice for us to be nurturing and prioritizing and talking about more.
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Are you up for that?
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And finding out if they're even up for that.
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And that's it for the initial conversation.
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That's actually it.
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So that initial conversation is just a checking for openness and a great okay, you're up for it?
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Fantastic, we'll make sure to keep that conversation going, right.
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So that's the first conversation.
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I think there is this pressure sometimes to imagine that sexual communication is a place where we're like raising issues.
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I would like less of this, more of this.
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I'm not happy with this.
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It's just a fluid, dynamic, ongoing conversation.
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The power of that, by the way, is that that significantly reduces that high stakes feeling we were talking about before.
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I'm in a relationship currently where we talk about sex or our sexual connection in some capacity every single day.
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I imagine that sounds quite full on.
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I think it would have to me up until a couple of years ago, but I really understand now that when I say that, that doesn't mean we're sitting down and having emotionally charged, late and heavy conversation.
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That's about us just engaging with each other in an erotic or sexual or sensual way, which could be flirtation or expressing attraction or expressing desire or talking about an old memory or just touching each other.
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It's just about nurturing that part of our relationship in some way in a fluid, ongoing capacity.
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Yeah, that's really cool and thank you for sharing that my reaction to you saying that was like, wow, as soon as I kind of had that reaction, and then you were like, but that doesn't mean it's a heavy laden conversation, it could just be an act of flirtation, it could be.
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You know, that's like actually.
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Yeah, and that kind of takes me back to those very early years of our relationship when we were like, I mean, obviously young, but we were super flirtatious and we were super into each other and you did have those daily kind of interactions that were much more, I guess, sexually charged than when you're, you know, 35 years down the track and you know you're plodding along through life.
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One of the other areas that I'm really interested in hearing a little bit more from you about and it's something that I touched on a long time ago when I had my first conversation with Dr Kelly Casperson, who's an American urologist and she does a lot of work on female sexual health, and she was the first one that introduced me to the idea of the difference between spontaneous and responsive desire and the reason I bring it up, and you and I did have a chat beforehand and this was one of the things we were going to talk about is that that changes over time, doesn't it?
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And particularly when women are in this midlife kind of transitional phase of life, hormones are a little bit haywire.
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We all know that one of the symptoms of perimenopause and postmenopausally can be a loss of libido, along with vaginal changes and things like that.
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So I feel like hand in hand with those changes goes that kind of natural spontaneous desire.
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So if you are someone that feels like you've lost that as a result of everything that's going on, can you explain the difference then between having that spontaneous desire and having a more responsive desire?
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so I'm such a huge fan of these concepts of spontaneous and responsive desire because they really expand our understanding of what desire is now.
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Desire is our want and wish for sex, right, and culturally we're pretty obsessed with desire, like we are.
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It's actually the number one reason people seek sex therapy.
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People are so concerned with how much they want sex, right.
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So I just wanted to kind of I'll come back to that Spontaneous desire is.
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This is what we think of when we think of spontaneous, of what we think of desire.
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It's that I'm walking around during the day and suddenly I just kind of feel like it.
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It's kind of like that.
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It just strikes me, and if you've typically experienced your desire in this way, it can be quite a shock and quite scary if it changes right.
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So I really acknowledge that if you are someone who has experienced spontaneous desire which you probably have at some point in your life, but maybe not if that changes to something more responsive that can be quite a shock.
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Responsive desire is when desire for sex or want for sex shows up when it's got something to respond to right.
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So it might not strike you out of thin air, but when you do the things that your body kind of likes right which could be, you know, being in a beautiful warm shower with your partner and touching each other or getting into bed together and your naked bodies are cuddling and maybe they're like stroking you and you're like, oh yeah, now I kind of feel like it.
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I hadn't given it a thought all day and I thought I couldn't be bothered, but now I kind of feel like something.
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So that is spontaneous and responsive desire.
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For women, 75% of their desire experiences will be responsive over the course of their life.
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So we may as well get used to the idea that most of the time our desire for sex will only show up when it's got a reason to, it's got something to respond to right.
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And actually for men it's 45%, so it's still pretty significant.
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So about half the time for men, desire will only show up when it's got something to show up for.
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So I really like to help people to adjust their expectations around what desire for sex might feel like it might not show up out of thin air and, as I said before, if it has before, that's why people get so concerned with this loss of libido, this loss of thin air and, as I said before, if it has before, that's why people get so concerned with this loss of libido, this loss of sexual desire.
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It's not lost, it's just changed.
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It's just changed and I really try to get people to bring some compassion to that, that like that's okay if it's changed, and bring some curiosity to that.
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This idea of adjusting expectations is crucial, particularly when it comes to our sexuality across the lifespan, because not only does our experience of desire change, but our experience of our sexuality changes.
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And that's where curiosity can be so powerful, because if there's something that used to work for you and you used to be into and now it doesn't work so much, I really understand why that can be distressing for people.
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But this is where I invite curiosity, because I kind of go okay, if something's not quite doing it for you the way that it used to, how interesting and exciting, because I wonder what could now do it for you, what could now be of appeal to your body that maybe wasn't before, like, maybe there's something that you haven't tried before because you thought you went into, that you're open to trying now.
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Or maybe there's something that your body didn't respond to that much before, but maybe it will now because your body's different, because our bodies are always changing.
00:20:32.602 --> 00:20:41.691
So this idea of adjusting our expectations and leading with curiosity and expansion is such a powerful tool in our sexuality.
00:20:42.320 --> 00:20:49.262
Yeah, that's really interesting and I love that you talk about there how to not look at a loss of libido as a loss.
00:20:49.262 --> 00:20:52.830
But it is actually just a change and to be expected.
00:20:52.830 --> 00:21:01.654
Really, in many ways, when we are going through such a period of change, with our hormones being all over the place, you know we see so many physical changes.
00:21:01.654 --> 00:21:06.491
We know that we are also having emotional, and you know, and cognitive changes.
00:21:06.491 --> 00:21:12.232
Then libido as well is just another one of those changes that I think you're right.
00:21:12.232 --> 00:21:18.632
We've really hung this kind of negative connotation on it through this constant overuse of the term.
00:21:18.632 --> 00:21:19.794
It's a loss of libido.
00:21:19.794 --> 00:21:20.622
Yeah, absolutely on it.
00:21:20.622 --> 00:21:25.469
Through this constant overuse of the term it's a loss of libido, because when you lose something, you know you think you're not going to get it back.
00:21:26.010 --> 00:21:37.307
Yeah, yes, and that's really scary for people If you you know if your sexuality and your sexual connection has been a big part of your life and your relationship and then you feel like it's lost.
00:21:37.307 --> 00:21:42.741
That's terrifying for people and I really understand that and I really.
00:21:42.741 --> 00:21:50.190
That's why I'm so concerned with this language of lost libido and why I'm also concerned with this focus on desire more broadly.
00:21:50.190 --> 00:22:03.585
As I said before, it's one of the most common reasons people seek sex therapy, particularly mismatched desire or mismatched libido in a relationship, and I am firmly of the view here that we all have mismatched desire.
00:22:03.585 --> 00:22:12.769
What on earth is perfectly matched desire to people wanting the exact same kind of sex at the exact same time every day for the rest of their lives?
00:22:12.769 --> 00:22:14.661
That is not going to happen.
00:22:14.941 --> 00:22:16.624
No, that sounds very unattainable.
00:22:16.884 --> 00:22:18.847
Yes, absolutely so.
00:22:18.847 --> 00:22:25.268
Instead, what we do, just like we do in all areas of our life, is negotiate, and you already do this with your partners.
00:22:25.268 --> 00:22:31.559
You already negotiate where you live and what couch you buy, and what you have for dinner and where kids go to school, and what you're going to do on the weekend.
00:22:31.559 --> 00:22:46.242
So you're already negotiating and you're already both making the best of what you can in those situations Like, okay, I kind of wanted a bigger couch, but this couch is still pretty nice and I'll just I'll just make sure I get the best spot on the couch.
00:22:46.242 --> 00:22:52.384
And so we're already we're already bringing these negotiation skills and we can do that to our sex lives too.
00:22:52.665 --> 00:22:58.969
We don't have to worry about being perfectly matched with our partner all the time, but it can be like, okay, what, what am I up for?
00:22:58.969 --> 00:23:00.452
What can I say yes to?
00:23:00.452 --> 00:23:14.594
And that idea of, again, expansion and expansion of our sexual menu is going to is going to be key to experiencing our sexuality positively across the lifespan.
00:23:14.594 --> 00:23:21.829
Cause I'm going to, I'm going to say something that I think is going to be like shocking for people to hear it's shocking for my friends when I say it which is that, in some form or another.
00:23:21.829 --> 00:23:29.269
I have sex in my current relationship every single day, but my definition of what sex is is really broad.
00:23:29.750 --> 00:23:29.891
Yeah.
00:23:30.539 --> 00:23:39.732
It is very rarely anything penetrative actually, but our cultural idea of sex is very penetrative, heteronormative narrow.
00:23:41.640 --> 00:23:41.759
I do.
00:23:41.759 --> 00:23:42.501
That's what you were going to say.
00:23:42.501 --> 00:23:46.729
We have so much association with sex, meaning penetration.
00:23:46.729 --> 00:23:52.085
Yeah, yes, but it's great to hear actually that's not the case.
00:23:52.666 --> 00:24:04.767
Yeah absolutely it's not, and some helpful language here might be around moving away from having sex to language like being in a sexual space together or being in an erotic space together.
00:24:05.208 --> 00:24:14.902
So when I say to you my partner and I spend time sexually connecting every day, there's a million things that fall into that category for us.
00:24:14.902 --> 00:24:20.173
That does not mean we're having like three hours of acrobatic something or like, of course not.
00:24:20.173 --> 00:24:26.421
We've both got like.
00:24:26.421 --> 00:24:26.821
We've got like jobs.
00:24:26.821 --> 00:24:30.030
My partner gets up for work very early, like that is not going to happen, right, but we do.
00:24:30.030 --> 00:24:30.792
We do something.
00:24:30.792 --> 00:24:32.037
We do something.
00:24:32.037 --> 00:24:41.467
It might be, you know, we have like a spicy playlist that we put on at night before we go to sleep and we might kiss and cuddle and listen to that for like a couple of songs and then we go to sleep.
00:24:41.467 --> 00:24:58.464
So we spend time nurturing that part of our relationship every day and the really cool part about that is that there's we can usually together as I mentioned before about negotiation we can usually find something we both want to say yes to and that our love, responsive desire will show up for.
00:24:59.286 --> 00:25:00.607
Yeah, yeah Now.
00:25:00.607 --> 00:25:21.204
So I think that leads us nicely into talking about what some of the nonverbal forms of sexual communication are, because that's what you've pretty much just expressed, and we've talked a lot about communicating and negotiating, but what are some of the nonverbal forms of communication when it comes to being sexual?
00:25:21.861 --> 00:25:34.048
There is a really important part of any sexual interaction that occurs between people who are having sex, whether they've known each other for a couple of hours or many decades, and that is the power of attunement.
00:25:34.048 --> 00:25:54.096
And attunement can only be achieved when we're able to be as present as possible, as present as we can be, for an interaction, and that's when we will be able to both give and receive nonverbal indications, feedback and consent Right.
00:25:54.096 --> 00:25:56.228
So I want to talk about what some of those are.
00:25:56.228 --> 00:26:10.465
One of the ways, though, that I want to kind of help people think about this before I give some examples, though, is an exercise I sometimes do with my clients who are young adults and who are getting ready to maybe you know start to have sex for the first time, is they have a pretty clear understanding of consent.
00:26:10.787 --> 00:26:17.046
But sometimes I will say to my young clients how would you know if somebody was saying yes verbally, but you had a gut feeling?
00:26:17.046 --> 00:26:18.627
The answer was really no.
00:26:18.627 --> 00:26:19.788
How would you know?
00:26:19.788 --> 00:26:22.291
When you say gut feeling, how would you know?
00:26:22.291 --> 00:26:30.449
And, of course, they talk to me about eye contact and facial expressions and body language and tension and energy.
00:26:31.130 --> 00:26:40.444
So they are the lovely examples that I would want to share here of nonverbal communication that we can pick up when we are really present and attuned with someone.
00:26:40.444 --> 00:26:53.634
You will notice things in their body, movements, body language, but also body tension, in their own energy towards you, like what they do to reach for you or to not reach for you.
00:26:53.634 --> 00:27:05.034
And if you're wondering what this might look like with someone you know, like a partner you're already with, I want you to bring your mind to another sensory experience that you observe or have with your partner.
00:27:05.034 --> 00:27:13.423
So an example that I sometimes think about with my own partner my partner surfs and it makes him a better human when he surfs.
00:27:13.423 --> 00:27:21.809
He really needs to be in the ocean as much as possible, but I can tell when he's been for a surf, sometimes without him even telling me, and I think about that when I say that to you, I go how can I tell?
00:27:22.631 --> 00:27:34.487
I can tell some things in his face and the brightness and lightness in his face and his energy and his posture, and how enthusiastic he is towards me, and the tone and pitch of his voice.
00:27:34.487 --> 00:27:51.851
As I start to unpack that, and I think of the many different ways in which his body communicates to me the aliveness and vitality it's felt from being in the ocean, I can bring that now to our sexual interactions and go, yep, do I sense that kind of energy from him or not?
00:27:51.851 --> 00:27:57.528
Does he seem kind of lower energy or distant, or yeah, whatever it is?
00:27:57.528 --> 00:28:14.606
So I think that's a nice exercise for people to do is to think about other sensory experiences they have with their partner, how their partner shows them enthusiasm or not when they're doing other things like a delicious meal or something like that, and then you can bring those cues and information to your sexual encounters.
00:28:15.480 --> 00:28:16.720
Yeah, that's really interesting.
00:28:16.720 --> 00:28:36.098
I like that and, yeah, drawing that information from that, an experience that's not related to sex you do need to be having those non-verbal cues to know and you need to be able to read them, and drawing on that with your younger patients and consent is really really important.
00:28:36.098 --> 00:28:38.665
So, yeah, I think that was really well explained.
00:28:38.665 --> 00:28:40.778
Thank you, I really resonate with that.
00:28:40.778 --> 00:28:41.820
I think that's really cool.
00:28:41.820 --> 00:28:47.380
I'd like to bring up a topic now that we didn't talk about beforehand, but I'm sure you'll be open to it.
00:28:47.380 --> 00:28:50.484
Yeah, cool, and if you're not, we'll just edit it out.
00:28:50.484 --> 00:29:09.384
But I think, if we go back to where we started, which was talking about areas that are taboo and aspects of our sexuality that we just have kind of been, I guess, a little bit programmed to not talk about, however, is actually from what I've been led to believe and you can tell me if I'm right a very important part of our sexuality and that is masturbation.
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