If you are a heterosexual man who does not understand female arousal, your sex life will not improve and your relationships will suffer. Today’s guest is the author of She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman. Learn what it takes to have more pleasure and connection in your sex life.
Show notes
Have you heard of the pleasure gap, also called the orgasm gap? It’s important to know about if you’re in, or want to be in, sexual relationships with women!
Research has found that the group most likely to orgasm during sex is heterosexual men. 95% are shown to usually or always climax, as compared to 65% of heterosexual women. This may seem great for you, but the fact that heterosexual women are the least likely to orgasm of all the demographics studied means your sex life could be at risk of falling apart. Even lesbian and bisexual women have been shown to have significantly more orgasms than heterosexual women!
If you’re not talking to your sexual partner(s) about their pleasure and orgasm, this gap will grow bigger. It can cause women to stop wanting sex with their male partners, or even eventually leave a relationship.
Today’s Man Alive Podcast guest, Ian Kerner, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist who is best known for his best-selling book: She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman. Many men I know have found this book to be a life-line for understanding women’s arousal and making their sex lives more pleasurable. Ian shares many similar views to what I wrote about in Honest Sex and is regularly quoted as an expert in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Economist and NPR amongst others. Ian also contributes regularly on the topic of sex for CNN Health.
In our conversation about sex and intimacy we discussed:
- Becoming cliterate
- Shifting foreplay to coreplay
- Understanding sex scripts
- Mind-based vs physiological arousal — cultivating your erotic imagination
- The “arousal runway” and continuing the erotic thread between sexual events
One of the parts I love about this book is Ian’s manifesto. He focuses on respect for the female process of arousal, as well as postponing gratification to support mutual pleasure, and knowing and appreciating the clitoris. He also talks about letting go of genital penetration as the height of sexual pleasure (this matches my expanded definition of sex in my book Honest Sex), purging stereotypes, cliches, and prejudices, and being patient, respectful, sensitive, and tender. He describes a pleasure orientation and how to approach each sexual experience as a unique process of giving and receiving.
I highly recommend this episode to any man who wants to have better sex and more intimacy. And if you enjoy this one, I did an Honest Sex Series recently on Man Alive where I talked with experts about orgasm, radical intimacy, honesty, erectile issues and more. You’ll find those episodes here.
Links:
Connect with Ian Kerner
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Bio:
Ian is a licensed psychotherapist who works with individuals and couples on a range of relational issues that often lead to distress. He approaches psychotherapy from an integrative perspective, which seeks to explain human behavior by bringing together physiological, affective, cognitive-behavioral, neurobiological and systemic approaches as they apply to the natural stages of human development and the wide range of human functioning.1 Ian endeavors to create an atmosphere of inquisitive reflection, along with a sense of emotional safety and commitment to the therapist-patient bond.
Ian is regularly quoted as an expert in various media, with recent features in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Economist and NPR amongst others. Ian contributes regularly on the topic of sex for CNN Health. He lectures frequently, with recent presentations for the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium, Ackerman Institute, Tony Robbins, Goop, and TED 2021.
Ian is the New York Times best-selling author of numerous books, including She Comes First (Harper Collins) which has been translated into more than a dozen languages, as well as the recently published So Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex (Grand Central).
In addition to being a Clinical Fellow of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (AAMFT), Ian is certified by the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists and has sat on AASECT’s Board of Directors. He is also a member of the Society for Sex Therapy and Research (SSTAR) and The American Family Therapy Academy (AFTA). His practice is composed equally of heterosexual and LGBTQIA+ patients and is split between individuals and couples.
Ian has received post-graduate certification from the Psychotherapy Center for Gender and Sexuality and the Family and Couples Treatment Services of the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, one of New York’s oldest and most respected not-for-profit psychoanalytic institutes. Ian has also completed a post-graduate program in Trauma Studies at ICP, where he was trained in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) in addition to other modalities for working with trauma survivors. Ian is the co-founder and co-director of the Sex Therapy program at ICP, where he teaches and supervises other therapists. Ian has also trained at the Ketamine Training Center and he is a member of Ketamine Psychotherapy Associates.
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