Episode 70: Sex without Shame

Hi, I'm Suzanne Noble, and this is Sex Advice for Seniors, and I am not with my co-host Zoe Kors this week because the issues that she's had around her mother's fall have become more significant, and as a result of that, she's had to take the week off, which is totally understandable. But I am delighted to have a special special guest, so you don't have to listen to me just ramble on all on my own, which is Dr. Tina Schirmer Sellers. And, uh, you, you have got such a long— we call it a CV, you call it a resume— of working around sex, around shame, and all sorts of other things. That's what we're talking about today. I'm happy for you to introduce yourself and give a bit of background. How did you get into all of this? That may be a long story, by the way.

Right, it kind of is, and I'll see if I can shorten it. You know, I, I'm 63, so it's not like I've had just a brief moment of life, so things are a little convoluted. But suffice it to say, I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, I'm a certified sex therapist, I was a professor in a marriage and family therapy program for about 30 years. Did a lot of specialization in medicine and integrated medicine and oncology, women's health, trained physicians for 17 years at the University of Washington. And while I was teaching, one of the courses that I taught was the graduate level human sexuality course. And that's a course that's required for licensure if you're going to be a therapist. And I was one of my favorite classes. I love teaching it. And I would have my students write their sexual autobiography in the class. And people are like, oh my gosh, I can't imagine ever doing that. But I'd be like, well, if you want to be a good therapist, you have to know your own stories. You have to know where you begin and end and your clients begin and end. Otherwise you're going to get them mixed up. You're going to start projecting, you know, transference, all kinds of things. So, so I had them do that. And so I've read, I don't know, 600 of these in my career. And right around the year 2000, because I started teaching in the early '90s, there, the tone of these essays or these papers began to really shift and change. And they became more filled with just a sense of disgust and humiliation and anger towards themselves and feeling like they're really bad. And yet what they were describing in the arc of their story was very much in the field of common, right? Typical. So I couldn't figure out why they were feeling so much worse about themselves, their curiosities, what they had done, what they had thought, what they had wanted, whatever. But they also felt, they also displayed a level of ignorance around developmental common curiosities that I hadn't seen before either. And so this was happening year after year. And finally, it took me about 3 years or so of just asking a lot more questions of them, like, tell me more about what growing up was like and messages you got or whatever. And I, I started to realize I was hitting the first phase of kids that in the United States were exposed to abstinence-only education in their public schools and/or they were in religious homes that were even more conservative than they had been before. So this is post-1980. They all hit their adolescence in the mid-'90s or so. And then I was getting them when they were 25 or so, right? 10 years later. So, so I'm like, oh. And since then I've come to learn so much, you know. Abstinence education was 80% medically inaccurate. It was primarily religious education. It told them don't, but gave them nothing else. So they had no other tools by which to understand themselves, the world, relationships. Boundaries, consent, anything. They didn't know anything, and they were very, very vulnerable out in the world. This was a time though where we were also increasing online exposure. So the internet became something in the '80s, right? Yeah. Um, we had, um, an increase in video games for boys, for kids, right, which had much more female violence in it. And then we also had a reduction or a removal of, um, FD— uh, FCC. So the Federal Communications Commission, so what guides what can be on media, they had a withdrawal of their regulations. So now all of a sudden anything could be on media, right? So then again, we saw another increase in violence against women. So we had a lot of things converging at the same time. We had shut down all research in sexuality as well as really all any reasonable education in sexuality at 2. So this was the fallout that I was seeing, and it was an increase in what we've now come to call sexual shame. We didn't even have any research until 2017 on it, and now we, we do. So yeah, that's what took me there. It was very compelling. It was heartbreaking to me. I thought, this is not what's meant to be, you know. And so I started really researching, researching it and Wrote the first book on it to explain to people who've experienced this, here's how, here's how America anyway became sex negative. And I know it had a profound influence on many other countries, um, but here's how we became sex, sex negative. Here's the role consumerism has played. Here's the sex positivity that was there that you never got. And here's how you heal, you know, kind of that kind of thing. And just to help people context themselves and give themselves more of a benefit of the doubt and more grace and more information, frankly.

God, it's so depressing. But, you know, where— so I see two things going on there that impact, you know, I'm 62. I have to think about that. 62. So yeah, and I see with my kids who are in their 20s, how, and we've talked about this on the show, about the influence of pornography and violence towards women and all the sexual imagery now around women and how that's impacted on relationships. But equally, I know that as an older person, we didn't talk about sex at all with growing up. My parents really didn't discuss it. I wasn't brought up with shame because You know, Judaism typically is a culture that actually is pretty sex positive. So I was pretty lucky in that respect. But I know that most of my friends aren't Jewish and there is a lot of shame around sex. And what I've subsequently discovered is because, and this is something that maybe I don't even know if you've thought about it, but maybe you have, is that what I see a lot happen with women this is just generally, I'm just speaking very generally, is that if you were brought up with shame as a woman and you're in your 60s now, it is very likely that sexual pleasure wasn't something on your menu. Um, and so you never really had great sex because you weren't told that sex could be great, and you didn't, and, and the shame sort of sat in the back of it. Because of your religious upbringing and your conservative parents. And, and, you know, parents were conservative in the, in the '40s, '50s, '60s. And as a result of that, when you hit the menopause and maybe your libido falls off a cliff, you're relieved. You're relieved. You're like, sure, I'm so glad this is over. I didn't enjoy it in the first place, and now it's over. And I hear a lot from men who contact me mainly via my TikTok channel that their partners are just over it. They've just said, I don't want it anymore. And I think a lot of that has to do with our upbringing. And sure, you know, and then on the flip side of that, you still get men who are feeling quite sexual because, you know, they weren't brought up as much maybe to believe that sex was a shameful thing. It was the, you know, man's way to do his bidding.

Yeah. Yes, it was. Yes. They're very clear messages in patriarchy for men and for women. Yeah.

You know, so I don't know if you've seen it in, in how shame is, is different in when you get to that 60-plus with all of this stuff that's gone on in our upbringing. And I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, you bet. Well, I do want to say that if you have listeners that are 70, um, or older, they— there may be many of those that were part of the sexual revolution in the '60s and where we had psychedelics, we, you know, and, and people— and we had the pill. The pill became legal in '65, so you've, for the very first time, women got to control their reproductive future themselves. Never before had that really been an option in that same kind of way. And so that's the beginning of the second wave feminism, right? Women really began to say, I want a choice about how I live my life. And many of those women, certainly not all, but many of those women had sexual experiences and began to discover who they were apart from the messages that patriarchy had given them, right? So patriarchy, the messages, and that is very much still there for men, where boys will be boys, meaning you are going to be sexual, you should be careful, but we know that you're, you're not going to be really careful. And, you know, and really women have always been around to blame if you can't get your act together. So that's been around, that's been around since the 4th century. You know, we actually instituted that in Christianity, right? That, you know, body pleasures are terrible. The boys are trying to really prove that they were more spiritual than each other, but when they couldn't do it, they blamed the women. So that's been around forever. It's still around. Women, however, were given the message that their own bodies were an enticement for men. And if men acted out, right, they were somehow responsible for having not worn the right thing, they shouldn't have been drinking, whatever the thing was. So they began— they feel a little bit like their body's a little bit dangerous, right? They've got to be careful because somehow they'll still be responsible if something happens.

Yeah.

And then they're also given the message that men are the ones that are sexual. And they don't really care about relationships. Women care about relationships, but they're not really sexual. This is a message that's been around. In fact, there was a, you know, probably, I don't know, within 8 years or so, there was a content analysis of current contemporary teenage magazines, teenage and young adult magazines tailored to men and to women. The message was still there when they did the content analysis. That same message was still there. It's not true. Both men and women are emotional. They are human. They like to be seen, known, loved, and accepted. They want relationships, and they also want varying degrees of intimate touch, want connection and pleasure. This is part of being human. But women are given this message over and over again that they just want relationships, so they become over-involved in relationships. They are— they see their sexuality as dangerous. They see it for him And then they end up advocating after they're married in a straight marriage. For those that are, they abdicate their sexual pleasure to what he wants, and they see it as a duty. So it becomes a transactional sexual experience that is not actually fun for either one of them. Women often— yes, it's not fun for women for sure. But I've had so many conversations with men in my career where I say, well, what's it like for you when you could tell that your wife isn't really there? Her heart's not open to you. She's doing it because she feels she has to. And he says, I hate it. I hate it, but I don't know what to do. It's the only way I'm ever close to her. If I even get close to her in the kitchen now, she thinks I want sex, and so she pulls away. So it's the only thing I have. I don't like it. So both of them are actually miserable because nobody has taught them that the purpose— that people will often say when you ask them, what's the purpose of sexual intimacy? They'll be like, I don't know, connection, pleasure, sharing pleasure. You're like, yeah. So let's just imagine we take it away from penetrative activities and we say, here's a whiteboard. Anything that to you feels like it would be connecting and pleasurable to share with your partner that you wouldn't do with anybody else, write it on here. That's called a menu. Now you decide what you feel like doing. You both can help yourselves move through your arousal cycle on your own. That's called masturbation. You can do that on your own to calm yourself, to get all those good chemicals. But your partner, it needs to be about connection and sharing pleasure and having fun together. That's part of what keeps you bonded over the lifespan, which is a very Jewish idea, you know, that the elderly are sexual because it's about being bonded over the lifespan. Having fun.

But Tina, like, I— and this so resonates with so many, um, emails and messages and things that I get. So resonates. But I— but how do people move through this, this process of which a lot of it does come from shame and from patriarchy and from this whole notion that we shouldn't enjoy ourselves. We are not allowed. It's not allowed. We're not allowed to do that, you know. And, and how do we move through that? Because I think that's the biggest question that everybody writes to me. It's like, I can't, I, I, I can't find a way through this with my partner. I don't know how to get close to her anymore. As you said, as soon as you, you know, you touch her in the kitchen, she thinks Oh, he wants to, you know, that's it. I've got to bend over the worktop.

Right, exactly. Exactly. Yes, exactly. Yeah, you know, it's a bit of a process to heal from this, but it's also a fun learning. And it's really, I say to people, give yourself permission to question the messages that don't make sense to you. If any message is that you're not supposed to enjoy life, that life shouldn't be abundant and beautiful, question that. Because life can be abundant and be— even though we're all adjusting and dealing with different things that aren't fun, it still can have so much joy in it, you know? And you deserve to have that, and you can have that. Um, uh, oh, I lost your question for some reason.

The practical steps that, you know, yeah, right. We've been brought up with this sense of shame We're getting, you know, as you said, you have men that say, I can't get close to my partner. I hear this all the time. And I think many people in their 60s, they have been in relationships for 20 more years, right? I mean, Suzanne Noble, the length of time that people are in relationships now is longer than probably at any other time in history. I mean, my parents have been together like over 65 years or something. I last about 65 minutes typically with somebody. I just can't even begin to imagine, you know, like how people even do that. But I know that a lot of people, for a lot of people, it's just putting up rather than actually any enjoyment. They just think, oh well, I've been doing this for so long. It's just, Is it even worth making an effort to try and do, you know, leave or do whatever? But it's difficult. It is difficult.

Well, and you deserve to thrive. Really, people deserve to thrive. And but crafting your own relationship or your own experience where you matter is a big adjustment for a lot of people. And so I talk about in the book what I call the, the model for erasing sexual shame or healing the mess, M-E-S-S. And there are really 4 kind of steps to that. And I call them frame, name, claim, and aim. So frame is where we start. We get ourselves a frame or scaffolding of sex education, right? And so I recommend for women to read Emily Nagauski's book, Come As You Are, Oh yeah, yeah, great book. It's super, um, educational and affirming to you as a woman, and it teaches you a lot of things that most people didn't get. See, one of the big problems here and why we have shame is— or, or a big, big piece of it is that we don't have comprehensive sex education.

No.

So if you're not teaching, you know, your 2 and 3-year-olds when they find their genitals and they think it's the best thing ever, when you're not saying, hey, this is what this part of your body is called. It's a wonderful part of your body. And then when they're 4, you're teaching them how to use their bedroom or the bathroom instead of the living room. You know, it's like, this is all just part of growing up, right? And they need to know about body autonomy and how you ask permission to hug somebody. They have to ask you. I mean, you, you teaching them all kinds of relationship and social emotional skills when they're in their elementary ages, and then you introduce reproduction in the later elementary, and then you go on to the much more complex things as they move into junior high and high school, it unrolls exactly as their curiosity does. Nothing is ahead of them.

We didn't have that.

We didn't have— no, no. And we don't have it in the United States either. Um, very— we have 17 states at—

that's all—

no, 18 states that require medically accurate sex education. Just to be medically accurate, that's it. Could be one class, but it's got to be 18 out of 50. So, but when you give kids information, when you teach people things It empowers them to know what's true and what's false, what exploitation is, what it isn't, and then they begin to be able to stand up for themselves, right? And so we start by getting each other a frame of sex education. So I recommend— as a place to start, I recommend Emily's book Come As You Are. For men, I recommend the book called Great Sex by Michael Castleman. It's a man's guide to Secret Principles of Total Body Sex, because it's what we don't teach men that actually is way more pleasurable for them than what we teach them, which we don't. The boys teach each other. The media teaches our kids. It's not helpful. It doesn't set them up. If all you give children and adolescents as they grow up, the media, which is entertainment and consumer driven, it's not about caring for people and providing them what they need, and you give them, you know, like a lot of shame, like you tell them it's terrible, or they are exposed to religious ideas or whatever, that you give them that and you, you are not giving them the sex education, they're really lost. Yeah, you know, and I think the world's a little too dangerous to leave kids lost, frankly. I am all about you know, giving them this education. So I say to people, you know, go get yourself some books. I wrote a book for parents, but I'll tell you the other population I hear from all the time. It's people who either are not partnered, are older, and had a pretty silent growing up. And the book's called Shameless Parenting: Everything You Need to Raise Shame-Free, Confident Kids and Heal Your Shame Too. But what's fun about it is it's divided into birth to 2, 2 to 4, 4 to 6. And so people who don't have children are reading this now and going, "Oh, I was normal.

Look at this.

I was— oh." And then I ask questions in the book like, "How would it have been for you if you got this stuff I'm recommending parents get for kids? How would that have been for you?" You know, people are like, "Oh my gosh, it'd have been so different," you know. And they just— they've been liberating themselves by reading this. Tiny little parenting book. You know, it's been really fun to hear from people.

That's great. That's great. So, so we have to remove— frame our— how our existence has been up until now, essentially, right?

Yeah.

And so, and so, and then, and then once we've like realized it was a total mess.

Exactly.

Which of course it was for most people, I think, right?

Most people. Yeah, I go around talking to people all over, and I mean thousands of people, and I would say from just cute, you know, kind of querying audiences, that about 5%, only about 5% of people grow up in homes that actually teach them feel sex positive, unroll in time, you know. They don't ever remember a talk because it was just talked about like recipes, you know, like grandma brought it up or dad brought it up. Somebody brought it up at different times along the way and gave them info. And it was a soundbite. That's all it was.

Yeah.

But 95% of people grow up in homes that are either silent, like you're talking about, or silent and shaming.

Yeah.

And then they are left with whatever they can get from culture, which in the United States is really unhelpful and actually dangerous. So that's the frame. I often say Name is tell your story to someone. Just tell someone that who can be compassionate and empathic, because what you're going to find out is you weren't alone at all. So I say to sometimes to people, if you've got a group of friends, get my first book, Sex God and the Conservative Church, or the other one, but read them to read it together and then stop and tell your stories along the way. So, and then claim is learn to claim your body is good. If you're not waking up and being in horrible pain all day, if you're out of pain for the most part, you know, then how do you use your body to love and be loved? You know, like, your body is a good body. I don't care what shape it is. We all are way more informed by our heredity than we are by anything else.

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, yeah. I mean, the one of, you know, one of the challenges I think that certainly I found during my marriage, and I know that lots of people my age found is that we sort of grew up with many assumptions about sex, and those assumptions often proved to be inaccurate. And but we didn't talk about any of this with our partner because, you know, we were— we just thought, well, it all seems to be kind of working, so I guess this is how it is. You know, we didn't talk about alternative lifestyles. We didn't talk about our desires. We didn't talk about our fantasies. We didn't talk about some of the stuff that we thought about that maybe we thought was a bit risky to talk about because we might get rejected. We, yeah, we didn't talk about anything. And for me, it wasn't until I left my marriage and started exploring a lot of different types of, of, of lifestyles and, and, and ways of being that I thought, wow, God, if you start telling people what it is you really enjoy, they really respond well to that because, yes, they're not mind readers. But of course, for most people that I know in long-term relationships, there's this pattern of behavior. And so breaking that pattern down becomes so— it feels huge. It feels huge. I know it did for me. It felt, it felt like a big, big deal. Whereas starting a new relationship, it feels very low risk. To sort of, yeah, talk about all of these things, you know. You can just kind of like go, hey, how was it for you growing up? How'd you lose your virginity? You know, yeah, it's kind of like a fun first date conversation. Whereas of course when you're with somebody for 40 years and you don't ask them anything, suddenly it just becomes a really big deal. And I think, yeah, you know, that's one of the bigger, the bigger challenges?

Well, certainly what we would call in my field, we call desire discrepancy, right? You've got somebody with differing desires. When heterosexual couples in particular are coming in with desire discrepancies, um, often it's a patterned behavior like you're describing that has been suboptimal for both of them for years and years and years, and they have no idea how to begin to get out of it. But as soon as we identify it in the room and identify how it's not working for both of them, I can often turn to the high desire partner and say, if I could work with your other partner, the low desire partner, if I could work with that partner and find ways for them to be willing to show up to you with their heart open would you be willing to work with that? Would you be willing to work with me with that? Would you be willing to be patient as we find those things? Because we're going to take everything off the table that is not working. Everything.

Yeah.

And we're going to only start putting back on the table the things that are working, which means that you both are experiencing pleasure and connection, joy, fun, whatever. That's what we're going to put on there. Would you be willing to work with me? And they're usually so desperate for intimacy. This, and when especially I'm seeing if the high— this isn't always the case, 30% of the time the high desire partner is the female, but 70% of the time it's the male. And when it is the male, they are often so lonely for intimacy because they often don't have the friendships that she might have. Yeah, you know, and so they're like, uh, I'll— whatever it takes, I'll do anything. We're like, and I can talk about how you can like help yourself move through your arousal cycle if that's what you're needing to do, but I want to teach you to come together because nobody ever taught you how to actually be a good lover with and for each other. Never taught you that. So we're going to break down everything you were ever taught. We're building up something completely new. They're way more willing to do that, and it is work, But maybe it takes a year if, you know, and we can get them doing things and then they're like, oh, we, the retreat, I even, I run an institute and we run a couples retreat.

Yeah.

And we've had couples from couples in their 20s to couples in their 80s come.

Yeah.

And, and they're, because it's an intensive, it's 3 and a half days, because it's an intensive, we can move people all the way through this process. In the 3 and a half days that will, you know, take a year in therapy. And I have had more men say to me, because we take intercourse off the table for the weekend, and I say— they'll say to me, if I had any idea sex could look like what we've been doing, porn would have never held a candle to me. That was the most erotic and exciting stuff I've ever done. And it's really very basic giver-receiver tantra kind of Modified tantra exercises, and it blows people out of the water.

Yeah, yeah.

It's kind of sad.

So I think there was a Steve Carell movie made about your 3-day experience that I watched.

Maybe there was. I should go look for it. I love Steve Carell.

I'm not joking. There was a movie about a guy, a couple reluctantly went to see this guy for 3 days at his place, and he like broke them down, and then they, you know, and they all left happy families. I'll have to try and find it for you. It was really funny. That'd be awesome.

I love it.

I'm sure it was Steve Carell. But I, I mean, what— look, what I'm hearing is, and I think it's absolutely true, that if you really want to make your relationship work and your intimate life is not happy for one or the other of you or both of you, then the best thing to do is to see a professional.

And yes.

And get them to help you sort it out. Because I think it's the, you know, the message is loud and clear that a professional can, can, can be that objective person in your relationship. There's no, you know, it is difficult when there's a lot of deep, deep-seated emotions involved with all of this. And I think it is hard for, for couples often to do this work without, without the aid of a professional. Because, yeah, that's why, that's why you exist and you're out there, right?

And I'll say for your audience too that if they need to find one in their area, um, they can go to a, um, a-a-s-e-c-t.org. It's the American Association for Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists. And right on the homepage it'll say find a therapist.

All right.

What makes these therapists different is that they're, they're trained in individual, couple, family, and sex therapy. So if you think about what we were talking about earlier, the majority of professionals— yeah, OB-GYNs, pastors, therapists— did not get sexuality education in their grad training. No, you have to— in the States, you have to go specialize, you have to get further training. So I'm always saying to people, it's not enough to see a couples therapist, you have to see one that's also trained as a sex therapist, because then they can work with the whole arc of what you're going through, and their own biases or weirdness or lack of training isn't going to get in the way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's really, really useful advice, and we'll see if there's something similar to that in the UK. I suspect there may be or may not be. I don't know, but yeah, we—

there may be. And people in the States can work internationally online.

Oh, okay.

If you found somebody that you loved online, yeah, they can work internationally with you.

Cool. Well, that has been our— that just seemed to just, just go by so quickly and want to continue talking, but we do try and stop it. 30 minutes, because I've been told that 30 minutes is the maximum that anybody can pay attention to anything. Um, and otherwise they just go off and make a cup of tea and do whatever they do. But it has been so lovely to talk to you. And yeah, I'll put— we'll put links to your books, links to your website, links to everything so that people can get a hold of all of your great writing and great advice. And thank you so much.

Oh, thank you so much, Suzanne Noble. It was so great to be here with you and your audience. Thank you.