Week 1 - Conscious Masculinity - Let’s Talk About Sex.. AGAIN

All right. Well, a little while ago, I talked about sex, and a lot of people thanked me for doing that. And just trying to begin, even to unpack the complexity of sex as it relates to men and how we're raised and how we're raised to view sex and how we're raised to cheat, treat sex, and how we're raised to conflate sex with so many different things, but not be able to separate sex and intimacy and connection and our sexuality and how distorted it gets from a very early age. Like, I talked about the last time, how I saw my first pornography when I was like, 7 or 8 years old, and I had no context or understanding for it.

And to make it even more challenging, some of the first pornography I saw had intersexuals. And so I didn't know what I was looking at because I knew breasts and I knew women had breasts, but then this person had breasts and a p****. And that caused some confusion for me and all of that to say. There's all this stuff going on inside of men's heads around sex that we just don't talk about. We just don't, like, give men the respect that we deserve to have. Healthy, challenging, provocative, healthy again.

Because can you be too healthy? Conversations about sex and sexuality, Right? Because, I mean, a lot of the times we just always, constantly just, you know, we make sex about intercourse as opposed to sex being about connection and sex being about lots of different aspects of the bodies and bodies connecting. And it's not just about o*****, and it's not just about getting off, and it's not just about, you know, what I do or receive, but it's about this whole kind of dance that we. We have. And then even more so there's all these guys that I know that pretend that they can just turn off their emotions when it comes to sex.

And I see this happening with young people, all young people, not. I don't mean all young people, because everybody's got their own journey, but a lot of young people are having sex, and they're having sex all the time and they're using these apps and they're doing all that stuff, but, like, they're pretending in my mind. And since I talk to a lot of these young guys pretending that they can just turn off their emotion, oh, yeah, I'm just going to sleep with you. And what I've told the guys that I talk to, I said, look, when you get together and you have sex with somebody, you think there's no, you know, there's no contract.

There's no, you know, no strings attached. At least one of you has a string attached whether you realize it or not. And women, sadly, are even more socialized to view sex and put it into emotion and put it into feelings and put it into all of these things, and to not necessarily understand that and not be able to identify it. So they come into these relationships thinking, oh, I'm just gonna have sex. And then the emotion comes in, the attachment comes in, all of our past comes in, and then it gets in the way.

And so the idea that people are just out there having sex with no attachment and they're just, you know, not. There's no wreckage because. Oh, yeah, well, you know, we just hooked up. You know, it's just. We're just dtf, you know, And I'm not trying to sound like some old guy. I'm not trying to sound like some old guy, you know, who doesn't appreciate sex. I love sex. I'm 52, and I still love sex. I think sex is amazing, whether it's masturbation or sex with my partner. Talking about sex, exploring sex, all of that, it's.

It's fantastic. But I also know that it can be complicated and it can be more complex. And I also know, like, there's a lot of people, they're having sex all the time, and they hate the. Their bodies. They hate their bodies. They hate. They haven't taken the time to truly, like, understand their bodies, figure out their bodies, but they're having sex. You know, in graduate school, we had a professor, and, you know, one of the. One of the lines that he would use, and he had many, many lines, but one of them was, if you can't talk about it, you shouldn't be having it.

Now, I will say I am amazed at how well younger generations are able to talk about sex. Like, some of the generations that I have or the young people or younger people that I've talked to, like, they're like, really open with their partners about sex, and they have a really kind of robust and vibrant sexual conversation. And if you have that, that's fantastic. If you don't have that and you're having sex, why not? Why are you not able to talk about sex? Why are you not able to talk openly about it?

I've been married 21 years, and we have gone up and down about being able to talk openly about sex and to explore sex and to experiment and to do things and to enjoy it. And, you know, and then it intersects, right? It intersects. Like, sex can be great as Part of a relationship. But sex can't fix a relationship, and sex can't make a relationship. Sex can be a part of. So if you want to just go out, you know, as guys, right? As guys, we're almost encouraged, we're almost told, you know, just go out.

So your wild oats, go get laid as much as you can. All right? If you can do that and if you can be like, here's what I tell the guys that I work with. You just got to be honest, right? You don't get to have sex with somebody and then tell them you're not looking for anything else. You need to be up front right now. If people, other people on the other side of that, they can't be honest with themselves, that's not your responsibility. Your responsibility, your side of the street, is to be as honest and open as you can be and then engage.

And sometimes, right, this is. This is like the next level. I've had this experience before. I was married, and I talked to guys about really trying to do this. If you're not into somebody or you're really only wanting to have sex with an individual and you can tell that they're into you, I believe you have a responsibility to confront that, to address that, and to not just go on having sex when you have completely different motives or interests or attachments to the experience, that's a part of it too, right?

That's healthy sexuality. That's like, contrary to how a lot of us men are taught. There's so many things we can talk about. So I'm look over this next year. One of the things that I said is periodically, maybe once a month or every other month or something like that, I'm just going to talk about sexual. Because we need to talk about sex and we need to have healthy conversations about sex as men. Not just watching p***, not just joking about p***, not just joking about sex, but like, really healthy conversations and to let men know it's okay to have your insecurities.

I'll end with this for today. I wrote a curriculum called Helping Men Recover. I co authored it and we use it. And one of the things we put into it was what we call the question box. And it's during the Sexuality module. And what we do is we ask all the men to write down a question anonymously and we put it in a box and we say, just write down any question about what you're struggling with around sex and sexuality and put it in the box and we will answer it as the facilitators, we'll answer it. We'll find the answers for you if we don't have the answers.

And all I have to say is that when men have an opportunity to be safe and to truly ask these questions, they ask amazing questions. They ask questions, some questions, you might think they're joking or not taking it seriously, but I think actually what it says is how ignorant, how poorly educated so many people are about sex. And so what we instruct our facilitators when we train them, we say, take every question seriously, even if it's a joke. The person wrote that down. There's a part of it, right?

There's a reason why they tend that, why they went to the joke for that. And so that's part of it, right? The conversation. Can we have a healthy conversation about sex? Can we talk about the insecurities? Can we talk about the shame? Can we talk about the things, you know, okay, I said I was going to end on that, but I'm going to end on this because this is even better. You want to talk about breaking the cycle? I got a friend whose son was sexually abused and he got into treatment and he didn't.

But he didn't know his son was sexually abused. He just, he knew that something happened around when his son was seven or eight and his son changed and he didn't know how to talk to his son. And then fast forward, his son is in treatment and now his son's been sober a while and like six, seven months. And then his son relapses and he's using and he's at one of those sober schools. And so then the people at the sober school say, hey, you know, your son's been using, but we think something else is going on.

He sits his son down and he says, look, when you were 7 or 8, did something happen to you? This is a father talking to his son. Did something happen to you? Because I noticed how you changed and. And his son opened up to him and his son told him, told him how he was raped by his friend's uncle one time, maybe one time. We don't even know if it was just one time, but raped when he was 7 or 8 and never talked about it. And he was carrying that around. Now this guy was also sexually abused. Think about the power of the fact that they can talk to each other, that they're both sober, that they are having this conversation.

That's what happens when men talk openly and honestly about sex and sexuality and how it has affected our lives. So it's a pretty intense way to do that.