Episode 407: How Men Can Become Better Lovers
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You're listening to the Sex and Psychology Podcast, the sex ed you never got in school and won't get anywhere else. I am your host, Dr. Justin Leigh Miller. I am a social psychologist and research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and author of the book, Tell Me What You Want, The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life. If you want to get better at sex, what do you need to know? In today's show, we're talking all about how men can become better lovers.

It all starts with building sexual confidence, so we're going to talk about how to do that. We'll also explore how to deal with performance pressure, how changing up your masturbation habits can actually help you in the bedroom, and some tips and tricks for improving your sexual technique. My guest today is Caitlin V, a sex and relationship coach specializing in helping men overcome erectile dysfunction, performance anxiety, and premature ejaculation.

With over 150 million views on YouTube and nearly a million subscribers, she has become a leading voice in the field. Her expertise is now reaching an even wider audience with her TV show, Good Sex, available for streaming now on Discovery Plus and Max. This is going to be another fascinating episode.

Before we get into the main topic for today, here is our Just the Tip segment presented by Popstar. Popstar was founded by two sexual medicine docs who are creating science-backed products to support male sexual health and pleasure. Whether you want to last longer, finish stronger, enhance your health, or just make sex feel better, they have a solution for you.

In our Just the Tips segments, my friend, Dr. Joshua Gonzalez, one of the founders of Popstar, will be joining me to answer your questions and share tips and tricks to help men boost their bedroom confidence and performance. Today, we're diving into the subject of how men can have better orgasms. Let's talk about it.

All right, Josh, I think a good starting point for this conversation is to recognize that our orgasms don't always feel the same. They can vary in strength and intensity and the amount of pleasure we feel. So why is that? Why don't all orgasms feel the same? I mean, there's a lot of different things that can influence that, right? So, you know, who you're having sex with, the kinds of arousal that is being provided by whatever activity or

we're engaging in, those are going to for sure influence the intensity of your orgasm. How many times you have orgasmed within a period can sometimes play a role as well because the part of the orgasmic experience is the contraction of our pelvic muscles and those, like any other muscles, if you're using them too often, can become weaker. So you may notice a decline in the intensity of orgasms the more

Often you do it if it's done close together. And then what's going on in your brain, right? Like, are you emotionally connected to the person or, you know, have some other sort of strong sexual attraction to them? Are you distracted? Are you worried about picking the kids up from soccer practice or paying the bills on time? All of those things can influence the intensity of your orgasm.

There's hormonal factors that can play a role. So orgasm is a complicated, complicated phenomenon and it involves hormone health, mental health, muscle health, pelvic health, all those sorts of things.

Yeah. And it can also be impacted by things like substance use. You know, if you're consuming a lot of alcohol, that can dull the sensation of orgasm. And that feeds into my next question, which is, let's talk about how to make your orgasms better. And in particular, whether there are any lifestyle changes you can make, things that you can do in everyday life that might make your orgasms better.

better or stronger. And of course, one of them might be consuming less alcohol prior to sexual activity. But short of that, what else might we be doing in daily life to help support better orgasms? So, I mean, I think in

When it comes to orgasm health or sexual health in general, it's really about doing the basics, like the stuff that your doctor teaches you to do or tells you that you should be doing to lead a healthier life in general. So we always encourage our patients to make sure they're getting enough sleep so that they're well-rested. That means shooting for seven to eight hours of sleep a day, eating a well-balanced diet, not intaking a bunch of stuff that's going to be bad for your body. Exercise. Exercise is really, really important.

for promoting general health, but also promoting sexual health. And some of that can translate to orgasms. And then mental health, right? Like having the ability to manage stress as much as possible, having access to resources if you are someone who suffers from things like depression and anxiety, or access to the medications to treat those various mental health issues can all help promote improved orgasms.

Yeah. And it goes back to what we say often on this show, which is that sexual health is health, you know, and anything that's going to be good for or support your overall physical and psychological health is probably going to be pretty good for your sexual health as well.

Absolutely. Now, one of the things that I've seen in the research is that for men and women alike, people who engage in more varied activities when they have sex have the most orgasms. So there's something to be said for just trying new things and mixing up your routine. But beyond that, how else might we change our approach to sex if we want to have better and more orgasms? So it's not just about the lifestyle changes, but also just in the way that we're going about having sex, right?

Yeah, I mean, I think redefining what sex is, right? Like, it's not necessarily just penetration. It's not just penis and vagina sex, right? Like, sex can be sensual touch. It can be massage. It can be foreplay, oral sex.

expanding the idea of what sex can involve and prolong the sexual experience and keep you, you know, slowly edging kind of towards that, reaching that orgasmic sort of plateau.

Yeah. And I think too, when you start to expand the sexual repertoire, that can make it more exciting because you don't always know where sex is going to go. It becomes less predictable, less routine. And when you add that element of excitement and novelty, that can help in terms of not just making it easier to have an orgasm, but maybe also making those orgasms more pleasurable. So one more question for you. Are there any products that you might recommend that guys try if they want to improve their orgasms?

Well, at Popstar, we are firm believers that when men ejaculate more, the intensity of their orgasm can increase and can improve. And so doing things to increase your load size, your ejaculatory volume essentially, can help increase the intensity and make your orgasms feel better.

I would encourage anyone who's interested in doing that to check out our volume and taste enhancer and doing the things that we generally recommend that can positively influence your ejaculatory volume. Yeah, and lots of other things you could try too would include exploring sex toys so that you can experiment with new sensations that might help to trigger more intense, more pleasurable orgasms. So again, it gets back to thinking outside the box a little bit and bringing some new things into the bedroom.

Thank you so much for sharing your tips with us, Josh. That wraps up our Just the Tips segment presented by Popstar. A huge thank you to our friends over at Popstar for sponsoring this segment and helping us all to have better and more pleasurable sex. We have much more ahead on today's show, so stick around and we're going to jump in right after this short break. Join me for an online training at the Kinsey Institute about the latest research on sexual fantasy. I've studied the sexual fantasies of more than 10,000 people from all around the world, and I'll be sharing everything I've learned in this workshop.

You'll learn what we know about where our fantasies come from, the deeper meaning behind our fantasies, how fantasies evolve across the lifespan, cross-cultural differences in fantasies, and so much more. This course is open to anyone who's interested in learning more about the topic, but it will also offer applicable skills and frameworks for clinicians, educators, researchers, and sexuality professionals. Participants will receive a Certificate of Completion from the Kinsey Institute.

This course takes place on Saturday, July 19th. Check the show notes for the link or visit knsy.in slash fantasy science.

Hi, Caitlin, and welcome to the show. Hi, thank you so much for having me. Thanks for joining me. So in today's show, we're going to talk all about how men can become better lovers. And I think a good place to start with this is by talking about confidence. You know, it's hard to be a good lover if you don't feel confident in yourself or in your sexual skills. Because if you don't feel confident in yourself, you're not going to be a good lover.

because then you end up getting in your head during sex and the insecure thoughts start to creep in. However, a lot of guys don't know how to build up their sexual confidence. And I think some of them are even confused about what confidence in the bedroom actually means. You know, I think some people equate confidence with dominance, but those are actually two very different things. So let me ask, how do you define sexual confidence and what are some things that men can do to help cultivate it?

And I would add that it's really hard to be a great lover if you feel like you are faking confidence, which is, I think, the fallback that a lot of men in particular come to. And it's a byproduct of the way that they're conditioned and socialized is that they should appear confident at all times, especially when they are not. So how do I define confidence?

I define confidence as a grounded awareness of what we know and don't know, can do and cannot do. And I say a grounded awareness of that because in order to feel confident in bed, we don't have to know everything or to...

think that we can do everything that we may want to do. It is having the discernment to know what we already know, what we don't know, what we can do, what we cannot do, and then having the ability and knowing that we have the ability to work through those things to figure out anything that we want to.

with our lover or lovers to make happen. I think confidence really stems from knowing that we have the tools, the resources, the capacity, the communication skills in order to create the type of sexual and erotic experiences that we want to have. And from there, we don't have to fake anything.

I think that's a really great way of framing it. And it's about knowing not just what you're capable of, but also what you aren't capable of. You know, I think a lot of times when we think about confidence, we're just thinking about what we can do, but we also need to know our limitations.

And when we know our limitations and when we have the confidence that is required to assess them and when we feel that we are capable of moving beyond them, but thoughtfully, intentionally, by skill building, by working through the hard stuff and the sticky stuff or learning the things that we don't know about yet. For me, anyways, that's where real confidence comes from. Like I would give you an example from building a business. You know, I set out to be a researcher and became a coach. And then eventually I kind of had to graduate to being a CEO. Yeah.

And I was very not confident that I knew how to do that. But I put a lot of resources around me, experts. I learned from folks. I learned from books. I learned from watching other people. And when I knew that I had the skills that were required to do

develop myself in the ways that I needed to, that's when I really became confident. Because, you know, just like the first time that you come across something that feels threatening or scary or you're not, you know, your lizard brain is saying, I don't know that I can survive this, which in bed, maybe your partner wants you to like tie them up.

or your partner wants to go for a squirting orgasm or whatever it is, and you don't know that you're capable of doing it, there's a moment for most of us of a little terror even, and not to like overstate it, but that's really kind of what's happening, right? On a neurological level is can I survive this?

I was thinking last night I got a stack of letters from the IRS. And years ago as a CEO, that would have really freaked me out. I would have really panicked. There would have been a bit of terror in my response to that. And now having survived that on several occasions, it's always that they're changing my mailing address. It's never like a red alert, you know. There's no more terror in it for me. Like I feel very deeply confident that I'm either already well equipped to figure it out or that I have the resources to figure it out.

Yep, totally agree. So let's talk a little bit about the hard part here, which is how you actually build up your confidence. The hard part.

I didn't really feel like I became that confident in myself until I grew a beard because it changed how I saw myself and how other people saw me and interacted with me. Like, I think there could be a surprising amount of confidence that stems just from having a beard. But what can you do short of growing a beard to help grow your confidence?

We could start on the physiological level. I mean, certainly there's a lot of great research that suggests that exercise and movement and building muscle actually not just improves our physical confidence and how we look, but it actually helps to improve our entire mental state, our emotional state. And from there, I think we can more easily build more confidence because when we feel strong in our body, I think it's easier to feel stronger in our mind and in our relationships.

You know, certainly committing to a long-term exercise routine helped me to end a marriage that was over, but I was like hanging on to for all the wrong reasons, like really trying to make it work well after I should have let it go. And becoming really strong in my body helped me to feel really confident in my ability to move on from a relationship. So I think there's a lot to be said around like physically building our confidence. The thing that I would go back to though is,

I think in order to close any gap, you know, between how confident we are and how confident we want to be, we have to begin by really getting clear and accepting on where we actually are, right? If we're on step A and step C is like the confident life that we want to live, we don't get to just bypass B, right? There's no shortcuts. If we try to shortcut it, I like to think of it as like a rubber band. We're like pushing it beyond its limits and eventually it's going to snap us back.

And I think all of us have an experience of pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone, pretending that we're something that we're not. And then like getting snapped back to things, even feeling like we took two steps forward and then five back in our process. So I think in order to develop that confidence, we have to get really clear on and not from a

doom and gloom and like, oh, I'm such a shit person and things will never change for me. But we do have to be really clear on where we actually are. Because if we're very honest with ourselves and where we are, we can develop the structure that's going to get us to where we want to be. But I think

Having a real assessment or real self-reflection of why is it that I don't feel confident? Is this a real skill gap or am I imagining it? Am I not confident because I'm comparing myself and playing the comparison game between what I imagine other people's sex life is like or what I'm seeing in porn?

Or am I really not confident because I really don't have a lot of experience? Like I truly don't have a lot of experience. A lot of the men that come to me across the board, no matter what it is that they're presenting with in coaching, premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction, feeling a lack of confidence, starting to date again, a lot of them say to me that they lack sexual experience.

But when we actually look back into their history, the truth is that most of them actually have a lot more sexual experience than they're giving themselves credit for. It's just that they're comparing themselves to what they think a man ought to have, right? So is your lack of confidence stemming from the cultural conditioning that you have been told that you are supposed to be a certain way and you're not fitting that? So unless you can have a real opportunity

honest look at those things, I don't know how else you would be able to assess your starting point, right? And once you have assessed your starting point, then I would say moving through all of those different areas. So we started about the physical body, but then also moving

through your mental body, like the mental structures that you have in place around sex and what sex means and what you should be and shouldn't be doing. You know, the ways that you get stuck in your head, moving through your emotional body. So are you confident that you can name and feel your emotions and that you can be present with your partner's emotions? And then moving through the skill gaps, right? Like the communications, how do you actually talk about these things? The technical, like the tips and technique stuff. I often joke, you know, on YouTube where I spend a

most of my internet life. People really want tips and techniques. But when I actually explain to them what kind of groundedness and foundation they need in order to make that tip or their technique work, they learn that thing. And then they really don't need the tip and the technique quite so much anymore, right? So if we can put those in the correct order, and then

And finally, like having an energetic awareness of ourselves, because at the end of the day, we are a body, but we're also a soul. We have an energy to us. Our partners have an energy to them. And so when we feel like we have a relationship, and again, I think that that is where the confidence stems from, with the non-physical parts of us.

then we can kind of get the holistic picture. Like we can kind of wrap it all up together. And from there, I think we come all the way back to step A and we have a higher degree of self-acceptance and awareness. And it goes back to knowing what we do and do not know.

Yeah, I think that's all great advice and information. And I think you're so right that a lot of people just want the shortcut. They're like, what's that one tip or technique or move that I can make in the bedroom that's, you know, going to make me a better lover. But you have to work on yourself a bit first to feel confident and, you know, trying new and different things in bed because just trying a new technique isn't necessarily going to solve these sexual problems that you have. Yeah.

And what if you try this new technique and you totally fail at it? And then you don't have any sort of like backstore of self-love or self-acceptance that is the foundation of confidence. And then, you know, you never try it again. Or you decide you're going to take yourself completely out of the dating pool because that was so embarrassing. I think if you have a foundation of like self-assuredness, the sense of like, I'll be okay no matter what.

Then you can try those new tips and techniques and you'll be able to actually implement them. And whether you quote unquote fail at them or not won't matter as much to your overall confidence in bed.

Yeah. So another big issue in the bedroom for a lot of men is that they feel pressure to perform. You know, sex becomes kind of like this test for them where you have to get hard, stay hard, last a long time, and make sure that your partner has an orgasm. And if any of those things don't happen, you've failed, right? And this can ultimately make sex feel like this very high stakes, anxiety-inducing experience that can actually interfere with your sexual performance. Right.

So I think what we were just talking about in terms of building up your self-confidence is going to help with this. But how else do we kind of like get out of this performative mindset and focus instead on presence and pleasure and connection? That is the million dollar question for sure. I think we have to approach that question on first a somewhat removed level, right?

which is to say that even today, our world requires men to constantly produce masculinity, right? To like constantly sort of earn their place inside of man, to earn the term man, right? Like you have to constantly be proving and showing that you are a man to be a man. This is kind of just the way that most people still live today. And although, you know, people from across the various spectrums of academia and therapy and coaching and like all of us are working to dismantle this, it's still kind of the water that we swim in.

Paul Keevil made this excellent visual aid, which is called the Man Box.

And he talks about all the ways in which you have to stay inside of the man box. And that can be like by kicking other people out of the man box, by like demonstrating your masculinity against weaker men or against LGBTQIA folks or against women. Like we define masculine as like not those things. And so there's this like constant production of being inside of the man box. And another author, I don't remember where it comes from, said that masculinity is constantly produced by money, muscles, and mojo. Mm-hmm.

Right. And in the climate that we live in today, proving masculinity through money and your ability to provide is like,

really shifty ground now. We don't have to like really get into politics to talk about that. Like it doesn't work the same way that it used to for dads and grandfathers, right? Like their ability to earn money and provide for a family was almost a given and less so for people who are adults and even young adults today, that's not so assured. And then muscles are nice, right? I started off by saying that like having confidence in your body by building strength is a lovely thing, but

We shouldn't have to rely on our body's capacity. Bodies are inconsistent at best, right? We're all just temporarily abled. And so if you feel on any level that you have to be constantly producing masculinity and money's not a clear way for you to do that, and maybe muscles isn't a clear available way for you to do that, or you don't want to do that, you shouldn't have to want to do that. You shouldn't have to do that.

then mojo is the thing where a lot of men rest their definition of masculinity and protect their masculinity. And what happens is if that is what is going to make you feel like a man, then you are constantly going to be using your partner to validate and prove your masculinity. And it's not fair to you. It's not fair to your partner.

It's not really, if you back up how I would want, if you were to design this system, I don't think any one of us would choose to design it that way.

But of course, that's going to lead to a performance mindset. Of course, that's going to lead to a degree of performance anxiety and pressure because we are resting so much on our sexuality. And then not just that, but when we look at the umbrella of eroticism as a whole, sexual intercourse and even like sex itself broadly defined are just one small part, one subsection of the pleasure umbrella of eroticism.

But we also tend to put all of our focus, and for men especially, make sex and intercourse, and like specifically PIV, penis and vagina intercourse, as their only access to pleasure. So now we've made sex your access to masculinity.

We've made sex your access to pleasure. We've made sex your access to maybe even feeling emotionally secure and pallid in your relationship. And it cannot hold. Like you said, it makes it such a high stakes environment. We would not want to put that kind of pressure on any one thing, especially any one thing that is as...

like lovely and alive and constantly interchanging and flowing as sex could be if we were just responding to it in the moment. That is a system that is designed to break.

Yeah, I mean, it is a tough thing. And there are lots of reasons why we get into this performance-oriented mindset. And you're so right that we attach so much meaning and significance to sex, and we're asking it to meet a heck of a lot of different needs for us. And the more expectation and pressure that we heap on ourselves in order to meet those expectations, the more difficult, challenging sexual performance can actually become. So, you know, it's kind of this self-defeating concept.

type of thing when we layer all of that pressure and expectation onto sex it actually makes it harder for sex to achieve the goals that we have in the first place

And it can be very hard to sort of release. I mean, even if you're listening to this right now and you're like, that sounds really nice in a laboratory setting, but that's not how it works in the real world. Consider that you get to keep all of the beliefs that you're willing to defend, right? And if you are willing to defend that this is the way it is and I'm going to continue to struggle with it because that's how it has to be, then you are only furthering those same scripts and

And of course, it's very scary to acknowledge that maybe sex doesn't operate the way that you thought it did or relationships don't operate. You know, I'm a female coach for men and I get the wildest range of comments on YouTube. Don't ask a fish where to catch fish. Ask a fisherman is like one of my favorites. The suggestion there is don't trust women to know what women want when it comes to sex.

Trust men to know what women want when it comes to sex. And so no matter how hard I preach it, no matter how loudly I yell it, no matter from what rooftop I am screaming from, I'm constantly getting this sort of pushback that says what you know to be true, not just because of your experience, but also because of your personal life, what you know to be true as a woman is not true.

This is how it really is. This is what women really want. And it's really interesting because the information that I'm sharing and trying to put into the hands of more people is information that would actually kind of lighten this load and take the performance pressure off and take the stakes down a little bit. And people will defend their right to feel anxious and have high stakes all day. Yeah. And we could go into a whole rabbit hole talking about social media comments, but...

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So let's talk about some ways that men can get better at sex. Now, you talk a lot about how men can leverage masturbation and self-pleasure as a way of leveling up their sexual performance. So tell us a little bit about that. How can changing up your masturbation routine actually help when it comes to having better partnered sex?

Yeah. So I believe that giving people what they need to shift and change their sex lives in the way that they want to needs to start tonight and it needs to start with them, right? I really believe in giving people practices that they can implement immediately with as little friction, pun not entirely intended, as possible so

So that they can start to see change because I think it's really motivating when we start to see change. I fully believe that we evolved over 300,000 years and even way, way, way more to have sex, to like successfully procreate if that's what we want to do. And so my job as a coach is just clearing things out of the way, getting stuff out of the pipes so that things can move.

Mm-hmm.

And because each of our sexualities starts with us, each of our sexualities is our own first. You were a sexual being before you ever started having partnered sex. You're a sexual being when you're single. You're a sexual being when you're in a partnership. Your sexuality is your own. And I find that one of the quickest and easiest wins that I can help men to achieve in coaching is when they shift the way that they approach themselves sexually.

Most of us, women too, are conditioned that masturbation is very perfunctory. I'm painting with a really broad brush here, but most of us kind of masturbate for an outcome, right? I'm doing this so that I can have an orgasm, maybe more than one orgasm, and then I'm going back to the rest of my world. We don't treat it in the same way that we do partnered sex. We don't elevate masturbation to the same degree that we elevate date night with a partner. And I think this is a huge mistake.

Because masturbation in many ways sets the stage for the kind of sex that we will have with a partner. And so most of the men that I work with started masturbating in their late teen years. Depending on their age, they may have had internet pornography available from day one.

I'm of an age where you had to work very hard to download internet. It was available, but it was always on someone's desktop computer. It was always in their living room or kitchen or something. It was a family desktop computer. I got kicked out of a friend's house. I was never invited back because I went to dildo.com on their web browser because I was meant to do this for a living. I knew early on.

Early days, dildo.com was exactly what you'd imagine it was, like Angel Fire sex toy shop. Not very even, not spicy content, actually. There was spicier content at that time. But if you are, say, you know, in your late 20s, you've had access to internet porn on a phone probably since you became sexually aware. Yeah.

And so many, many men, and this is true of all ages, condition themselves to masturbate as quickly as possible with a very specific goal of ejaculating. Some of that is because they were afraid of being caught. Some of that is because they maybe were shamed for masturbating. Some of that is because they were fearful of being walked in on or had been walked in on or they only had the one bathroom or whatever it is. There were real constraints.

that cause them to develop a habit of just getting to ejaculation as quickly as possible. But the thing is that our bodies are really, really good at learning shortcuts and processes, especially when that shortcut leads to what our body imagines is mating, right?

And so when we have a sort of shortcut that allows us to get to what we think is mating as quickly as possible, that is really easy to ingrain in our body. And it takes some time, but it doesn't have to be difficult. It just has to be a commitment to shift the way that we approach our own sexuality. And this is true for premature ejaculation, but it is also true for erectile dysfunction and delayed ejaculation. Barring

any sort of real physiological thing like diabetes or hypertension or other issues that are occurring like in the real physical body, even like nerve damage and injury and thing. If you have ruled out those things with a physician and what you have concluded is that the cause of whatever it is that you're struggling with sexually has a emotional and mental basis to it in some way or another, which I think it always does, but I like to make those distinctions, do go to see a healthcare provider and

Changing the way that you touch yourself, the way that you experience pleasure inside of yourself and inside of your own body and with yourself and in your quiet moments is one of the best ways to begin to shift the foundation upon which everything else is built. And it happens to be one of the more fun and pleasurable ways that will also hopefully create other avenues for you to experience and understand your pleasure in your sexual body as well.

Yeah, I love that. So let's talk about some tips and techniques for better partnered sex. Now, something you talk a lot about in your work is the power of using your hands when it comes to pleasuring your partner. Now, a lot of guys go hands-off or hands-free when it comes to sex, which is kind of a missed opportunity.

But also, there are a lot of guys who use their hands, but maybe not necessarily in the right way in terms of bringing pleasure to their partner. So I was reading a Reddit thread in advance of our conversation on bad fingering. And my favorite comment was from this woman who said it was like he was DJ scratching on my clit. And I'm like...

Like, that's a visual. Yeah, so you probably don't want to do the DJ scratching. But yeah, you know, some people are overly aggressive with their fingering or they're hitting the wrong spots. You know, some women in this thread were talking about how he was fingering their urethra and they're like, I don't find that to be pleasurable.

So yeah, sometimes when you're trying to like finger or touch your partner, you're doing things that end up being irritating or painful instead of pleasurable. So do you have any tips you can share on better fingering and you know, how to use your hands during sex? So start before penetration. Start well outside of the bedroom in developing your awareness and the quality of your touch.

I like to recommend to folks all of the time that whatever you are thinking, whatever intentionality or energy you are putting into your body, wherever your focus is, whatever you're in, let's be real. When you don't set an intention, you still have some kind of an intention, right? And sometimes your intention is just like prove myself by pleasing her, right? But that's still an intention. So

So she feels that even if she's not totally conscious of it in your touch. That's the quality of the touch that you have. In one of my certifications, we spent a tremendous amount of time just practicing loving touch that had no expectations. And

And the way that we do that is by holding that and then literally practicing it over and over and over again. So if I hold loving intention without expectation, and then I am really closely attuned to or following someone's body, and I'm trying to pick up on all of their nonverbal cues, but then also we have a container that does allow for verbal cues. So they're giving me feedback moment to moment that says move slower or harder or

or I like that better in a circle instead of a straight line. Combination of verbal and nonverbal cues plus my constant, and this is why I say it's a practice, just like any other practice, like practicing an instrument, we make mistakes, we come right back to it. We mess it up in some way, we try it all over again, we get back on the horse and do it a thousand times.

So my touch is really, really, really attuned, but I removed the pressure of also having orgasm or also pleasing my partner or also thrusting or moving or getting any sort of other thing happening at the same time and just practiced on attuning my touch with my hands. And

And you can do the same thing. It is easier when you're especially first learning it to isolate your hands. I think most of us don't even realize how much sensitivity we can move into our fingers, how much awareness we can place into our fingers and into our hands because we've never tried it before. And because the only time that we're trying it is maybe when we're like having intercourse and then we're like, oh,

I remember that she likes it when I stroke her face. Let me stroke her face, right? Like, even if I try to do that, it's going to come off a little clumsy, right? And if I try to split my attention between two or three things that are going on and I'm not practiced at that, then maybe that makes all of them feel a little clumsy. And that might make me a little bit reluctant to try again. And from a lover's perspective on the receiving end...

I would say that an attuned touch, even just holding still on a part of her body or making a really, really simple move against her skin somewhere that is energetically attuned, that is like speaking with love in your fingertips, is a better sensation, is more pleasurable than even the most highly skilled massage therapist stroking your face without any intention or without any love.

Yeah, so, you know, touching is something that I think we actually kind of need some practice with. And, you know, the way that we touch one partner and what they enjoy might be very different from another partner that we have. And so there's a lot of partner-specific learning that has to take place in terms of the right type of touch, in the right area, with the right amount of pressure. You know, there's a lot of different things that go into it. You know, touch isn't just as simple as putting your hand on your partner's body.

Right. And you know what? A lot of partners will show you exactly how they want to be touched because they will touch you. We all do this unconsciously. And once again, we're really skilled at touch. We unconsciously touch people that we like to be touched. So I like really soft stroking, really like light, energetic touch.

And some people find that to be very ticklish, right? Some people find that to cause like an actual like cringe, like nails on the chalkboard kind of response in their body. And so I have to be really cautious of that when I'm touching someone for the first time because that's my default. But if someone is really paying attention, then they're going to know, oh, they're defaulting to that because that's what they like themselves.

Yeah, and I think that can be a great tip is to kind of ask your partner to demonstrate the kind of touch that they like. And that can be they're going to touch themselves and show you or maybe they're going to touch you and show you that way. Or maybe they're going to take your hand and guide it on their body to the places where they want to be touched. Right. So there's a lot of different ways that you can kind of demonstrate that to your partner.

And going back to the subject of confidence, that is exactly it. That is how you build the touch confidence, right? It's not by going in there and saying, I know how you want it, and I'm going to show you how good I can do it. That's not real confidence. Real confidence goes from saying, hey, can you show me how it is that you like to be touched using any of those strategies? And then...

trying it and then getting feedback and then trying it again. That is the process of earning confidence when it comes to touch. It's not something that you come in with. It's something that you structure a path towards so that you actually do feel a grounded sense of confidence that you know what you're doing with this person.

Yeah. And stop DJ scratching on the clit. As a DJ, I can say definitively that's not the technique. That is not the technique. So let's talk about penetrative sex for a moment. This is one of those activities where porn leads a lot of men astray. You know, it encourages them to think that good sex is all about hard and fast thrusting and jackhammering. And of course, many women don't find that to be pleasurable. There are some who do, but most don't.

Now, that technique, you know, I think another thing that's worth pointing out about it is that it can also be very physically demanding and exhausting. And so if you're wanting to last longer in bed, approaching sex in that way or in the way that porn stars are doing it, you know, that can be at odds with your ability to last longer unless you're in like really great physical shape. So what can you tell us about better intercourse technique?

I love that you use that as an example because I have pegged on several occasions and I've also had strap-on sex with other women. I avoid pegging at all costs nowadays because I find it to be so exhausting. It's a lot of work. It's so much work. The first time I ever pegged someone, I was really like...

wow, I have a way deeper appreciation of what all of my male partners are doing for as long as they're doing it. Like, this is incredible, right? I have so much respect for that motion.

I have heard a lot of women say this, that like pegging can create empathy for men because, you know, it's, they want their partner to last longer in bed because maybe it takes longer for them to orgasm. But then when they try actually pegging and see what that experience is like, they're like, oh, wow, this is like physically demanding and exhausting and it would be hard to go for a lot longer. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Yes. So if you ever needed a reason to get pegged, if you were ever curious about it, there is all the reason that you need. It's really just for her empathy. Okay. All great points, though. I think that we have these very unrealistic expectations. Men have unrealistic expectations of themselves. Women have very unrealistic expectations of their male partners.

This is based on a combination of factors, not just porn, but also the way that people talk about sex, the lack of vulnerability. You know, when women get together and talk about a man not being particularly great in bed and men overhear that conversation and they're like further shamed when really they're not really telling the full story and men not being vulnerable with each other to say, like, here's where I'm struggling. Here's where my body is.

you know, not performing in the way that I wanted to. And here's how I feel about that. So when we keep sex kind of lights off behind closed doors and we never talk about what's difficult about it, we're doing ourselves and everyone around us a disservice because all of us have these struggles in one way or another. We all have a struggle.

I also like to say, and this is a byproduct of my show, Good Sex. So on Good Sex, which you can stream on HBO Max, we had cameras in everyone's bedroom. And I got to actually review the footage from their bedroom cameras and pull that into session and then actually show them what I meant, which is amazing because, you know, as a researcher, it is very hard to have someone put something into words, especially something as nuanced and complex as

as a sexual memory, right? When I used to sit down and say, okay, so tell me like how did, what started and with who and who did what and where did the toy come in and where did the hand come in? Like people have a vague memory of that. With the video, we got to actually see it. And there was this one couple and they, first session, first clip, they come into their bedroom and they started an absolute 10. I mean, he is pounding, she is moaning. And I know that she's not orgasming because that's why they've come to me.

They're coming to me because she's not reaching climax during sex. So when he starts at a 10 and she's already putting on a performance, I knew that we had to just start right there, hit the brakes, slow down. I like to say if you started at 10, there's nowhere to go, right? If you start at a 1, you can go up to a 5 and then down to a 3 and then up to a 7 and then back to a 3 and then all the way up to a 10. You have a lot of range.

You know, I just mentioned that I DJ. I think about this all the time when I'm crafting a DJ set. Like I want people to start with music that feels grounding and a little slower. And I want them to sort of like begin to get into their bodies and begin to feel out the other people on the dance floor and begin to wiggle and kind of like do a little bit of an exploratory move before we get to the hard hitting, pounding, you know, 128 beats per minute section of the day. We're going to get there.

If we want to, maybe we don't actually want to, but I do, you know, like likely we're going to get there because sometimes pounding is really great, but it has to be right place, right time.

And if we think more about sex as an adventure, and I almost think about it as like a hero's journey or with some kind of like a narrative arc. You know, at one point I was learning about the Fibonacci sequence and that the sort of like climax of most novels and movies happens at the, I think it's like the 0.61 or 67% mark. It's the equivalent of the Fibonacci sequence.

or the golden ratio. Turns out that if you flip to that book, that page, and pretty much any great book, that's the peak of the action of the book. Same with movies. And I thought, this makes so much sense. We should apply this to sex as well. The peak should come at about the 61 to 68% mark, and then the rest should be sort of like denouement and aftercare. And there's sort of this beautiful, natural rhythm that if we're actually really listening to and following our bodies and our biology is sort of built to support this,

And if we're not thinking about sex as an adventure, if we don't have the space to give ourselves permission to make it a story instead of making it into a performance or something that proves that we have earned our station in this world, we're really cutting off our ability to be creative and have fun with it. Be a sexual DJ. Just don't DJ scratch on the clit. Right, right, right. Their DJ skills are relevant, just not all of them. Yes, exactly.

Well, thank you so much for sharing all of this, Caitlin. I'm really looking forward to continuing our conversation in the next episode. Thank you. Can you please tell my listeners where they can go to learn more about you and your work? Yes. Thank you so much for having me. I had an absolute blast. You can find me on YouTube at Caitlin V. You can find me at CaitlinVNeal.com. That's C-A-I-T-L-I-N-V as in victorious, N-E-A-L.com. I have all the hard to spell names, so I have to spell it out. Thank you.

And on my website, you'll find tons of free guides. You'll find information about my courses, about my coaches. And there's many different ways that you can work with me or learn from me if you liked what you heard today. Well, great. And I'll be sure to include thanks to all of that in the show notes. Thank you again so much for your time. I really appreciate having you here. Thank you. My pleasure.

Thank you for listening. To keep up with new episodes of this podcast, visit my website, sexandpsychology at sexandpsychology.com or subscribe on your favorite platform where I hope you'll take a moment to rate and review the show. If you listen on Apple Podcasts, please consider becoming a Sex and Psychology Premium subscriber to enjoy ad-free listening for just $3.99 a month.

You can also follow me on social media for daily sex research updates. I'm on Blue Sky and X at Justin Laymiller and Instagram at Justin J. Laymiller. Also, be sure to check out my book, Tell Me What You Want. Thanks again for listening. Until next time.