Rediscovering Her Eroticism: Charlotte Mia Rose

“Rediscovering Her Eroticism: Charlotte Mia Rose”

a Girl Boner podcast transcript

 

Charlotte: The level of vitality and aliveness and joy that I feel now, again, is so vastly different than I felt in those years. And it feels like that’s what eroticism brings to us. It’s like, you can live without it. But it is one pathway to an aliveness  and a vitality that is exciting and part of a thriving life.

August/narration:

That’s Charlotte Mia Rose, a somatic sex educator and co-founder of pleasuremechanics.com. After many years of feeling deeply connected to her eroticism, Charlotte’s life changed dramatically. And she found struggling to prioritize any of that.

But let’s go back.

Charlotte knew from early on that the info she received about sex was off.

Charlotte: There was so little conversation about sexuality. I feel like the main narrative I remember my mother pushing was around that sex was only something that happened between two people who love each other. And I just knew, even as like an eight year old, that that was a lie, and that she wasn’t somebody to talk to about sex.

I had asked her as a kid, like an eight year old, I’d heard the word blowjob, and I was like, “What is that?” And she was like, “Oh, it’s something people do who love each other very much.” And it just was so clearly not true.

Do you know what I mean when you know someone’s lying? I feel like there was much more learning around what it was to be a woman. There was way more gender education, I feel, than sex education.

August: Ah, and what were you taught would make you a woman?

Charlotte: There was so much around being a wonderful parent and being a wonderful mother, and that that was like more important than having your own life. That that was central, that was where your value came.

I know that was in response to her mother who left her in order to go pursue being her own self and an artist and an art therapist.

August/narration:

Still, her upbringing encouraged eroticism in certain ways.

Charlotte: I feel like my family was very touch oriented. There was no talk about sex, but there were a lot of hugs. My mom used to give me a massage every night before bed when I was little. Cause we lived in Hong Kong and she learned all this acupressure. So she would give us acupressure massages. So I feel like there was a lot of connection to bodies.

She also was very focused on beauty and on creating occasions and events. Like she really loved being in the sensual parts of life. Enjoying life in a certain way. So I think all of those elements and threads are very parallel in sex.

So I feel like it was a pleasure positive context, and a sex neutral spaces.

August/narration:

Charlotte also knew that she liked girls.

Charlotte: I remember at 14, I knew that I liked girls and I remember walking through London on my way to school and I like picked all these daffodils and brought them to a girl and asked her if she wanted to meet me in the dark room. And she said no, and didn’t talk to me for a year, but I felt like I really loved who I showed up in that, as like, I like you, I’m gonna do something romantic and a little, like, naughty at the same time, and you can reject me and that’s okay.

So I guess there was a comfort just kind of in me, which I’m grateful for, and I’m not fully clear about the why.

August/narration:

All-things-erotic stayed steadfast in Charlotte’s life into her adulthood.

Charlotte: In my early 20s, I was an erotic masseuse for many years, and I loved that work. It was wonderful, and I feel like being in the space of eroticization, For like eight hours a day, supporting people in being in their pleasure, I had to learn how to take care of myself and to like nourish my own eroticism.

I had all these practices that I would do between sessions: dancing, self massage, I did a lot of breast massage, just like taking care of my own body. I was just in it all day long. The joy of it, the pleasure of it.

August/narration:

During that time, Charlotte met Chris, who would become her long-term partner — in life and work. When they met, those sensual flames were stoked even more.

Charlotte: We had a rich and beautiful, adventurous erotic life together. We run a business together. So, you know, it was just a full part of life that was woven into my world.

We were road tripping all over the country and so there was time and opportunity and spaciousness and a lot of touch and a lot of pleasure. Yeah. [endeared laugh]

August/narration:

Things changed a lot when Charlotte became the primary caretaker but for three people.

Charlotte: The baby came first and gratefully they were healthy and it was a beautiful experience. The first year of having the kid was blissful.We had worked very hard to get pregnant. It took a lot of time, a lot of money. So we were so grateful when the kid appeared.

Then when my kid was about one, Chris got really sick. Like acutely sick. They were in hospital for a week and very close to passing, unfortunately. And then my mom had moved to the area to try and support us and then got a cancer diagnosis and needed a lot of care-taking and a lot of support.

So sort of all of a sudden, it was three, across the generations, all the most important people in my life needing a lot of care and support at one time.

August/narration:

For the first time she can remember, Charlotte was drained of her interest in and her availability for her eroticism. It started gradually before then.

Charlotte: I mean, in truth, I think when I got pregnant, it sort of started to feel a little bit more distant and separate and definitely my creativity. The eroticism and creativity, are really linked for me.

I was in a really amazing flow of making art and painting. And as soon as I became three months pregnant, there was this moment where it was like, just stop doing this and focus on growing this human as your work of art.

That felt so real and true and like a body knowing. And so I just l put down the paint brushes and stopped. And I’m learning that those,

And it was kind of a shift towards so many other pleasures and intimacies and connections of touch and cuddling, but little humans, different than sexuality. And so it felt very pleasurable and satisfying in a different way. But then once Chris started getting sick, that’s when I think it really shifted.

August/narration:

Chris’s illness appeared gradually, too, over about a year. Then it took a dramatic turn for the worse — something you’ll hear more about from Chris in the next episode.

Charlotte: While they were in hospital, there was like a seven day in hospital sort of experience where I really felt like it was a moment, you know, and I was like, I need to resource myself. I am in charge of everything here. I need to make sure everyone else is okay.

August/narration:

Charlotte leaned on the lessons she’d long implemented and taught, along with  Chris.

Charlotte: And at that point I really implemented my own five minute pleasure practice. After I put the kid to bed and just, like, took five minutes and was like, I matter. I am a caregiver first right now, but, like, I matter. My needs matter.

I have got myself. I am supporting myself right now and I’m gonna take five minutes and just like love on my body and massage myself and touch myself. And I literally set a timer because it helped me to actually do it and not make more excuses. Cause I was like, yes, there isn’t more time, but right now I can do five minutes. And that was really helpful. It really did nourish me and support me and just like grounding me in this crisis moment, really.

But once it kind of turned into a chronic situation of multiple years, I wasn’t as good at holding on to that practice. It was only five minutes and I did find it really effective and then I just sort of lost the stamina for it as I got more and more tired, I guess.

August: Yeah.

Charlotte: I’m laughing, it’s not funny, but you know.

August: No, I laughed, too….because it’s like such a real thing, so human.

Charlotte: Yeah.

August: Like we love the idea of our pleasure practice and we’re gung ho and we do it and then it’s just reality. We get exhausted when we’re carrying so much.

August/narration:

The load Charlotte was carrying kept getting heavier.

Charlotte: My mother didn’t have a home for part of it, so she was living in our living room, using our car. Chris needed to be in bed for most of the day, sleeping and resting. They were fully asleep by 4pm for the night. We were just convinced that sleep was going to be what they needed to do healing, for their body to heal.

So my kid was really wanted to be held and touched. They’re one at this point. So I would put on a hiking backpack and put them in my backpack so that I could cook dinner, and clean the kitchen because they didn’t really want to be put down and there was no one else to hold them.

I mean, I was driving my mom to doctor’s appointments. We were taking care of her finances, doing her laundry. You know, it was just a lot.

I mean, going and getting her groceries. Like, you know, yeah. It was full on for a minute there.

August: I was just trying to imagine when you would go to the bathroom and eat. Like were you making meals for everybody, too? Were you feeding everyone?

Charlotte: Yeah, I did a lot of batch cooking and freezing, and you learn to defrost kale white bean soup in batches in the freezer, defrost it, put it in a mug so you can drink it with one hand, because you don’t need a fork or a spoon, so it can be more quick. The bathroom, I mean, my kid came with me when the door was open. Yeah, it was like that.

August/narration:

In all, the triple care-taking lasted for about three years. She said the first year was the most challenging.

Charlotte: For the first bit, I really focused any extra energy I had on massaging Chris because we were also really convinced that touch for them was going to be part of the healing and like reconnecting them, or supporting them in connecting with their own body. So we had a daily touch practice on them. Which I feel like also kept us connected.

It wasn’t a time of great eroticism by any stretch at that point for us. And that was okay, and needed, and not problematized.

But we do feel like touch is essential. And it did keep our bodies connected and kept so much love and warmth and support in a really practical way.

August/narration:

Over time, as Chris’s health improved, Charlotte was able to get back to more pleasure in her life. Not necessarily sexual, but definitely sensual.

During the intense care-taking years, Charlotte said she would steal away moments for a quick solo orgasm. That was restorative, she said, but it wasn’t enough to create a massive change. To experience “a full sense of erotic aliveness again” she needed “many layered practices.”

Time alone, with herself, first.

Charlotte: Most of my pleasure practices at that point were more like going for a hike with my kid in a backpack and that was really joyful, but it was moving my body. and we live, upstate New York, beautiful mountains. That was nourishing to me, in the way that I could manage at that point, but in terms of personal moments, not so much.

August/narration:

Charlotte said she always finds her eroticism through her body.

Charlotte:  So it’s movement, dance, hiking, and then self massage and touch. So those started to build and then creativity, like starting to be able to take time for making again. And that felt really significant.

But it was really once Chris was all better, then I could like, take time out of the house. And that was a really important first step for me, just having solo time to be able to think. And be in a space that, where I just like, had no one else to take care of. I could just like, start reconnecting to myself. Just sit and have coffee in a coffee shop and that felt so luxurious and so pleasurable and so freeing.

Like it just was the entry point to be like, okay, everyone’s well enough that I can like start paying attention to what I need, want, and desire again.

August/narration:

Sexual pleasures, especially lengthy or intense ones, took more time.

Charlotte: I think I experienced it more like a slow burn, honestly. I felt like I needed to thaw. I did enjoy those moments, but it felt like to really thaw and get back to the point of feeling, like, genuinely, erotically alive and interested was like a multi year process that was a slow thaw of myself.

And I just had to be okay with that. And it was like, reconnecting with the erotic in the broadest sense of like, that which makes us feel alive – the Audre Lorde kind of definition of it.

August/narration:

Audre Lorde was the first person to conceptualize eroticism, back in 1978 in the essay, “Uses of the Erotic.” She described eroticism as “a way to examine feelings and gain knowledge about the world and ourselves.”

Charlotte: And sex being part of that, but not the only piece. And the kind of reconnecting to self amongst all the other parts.

In that process, it did make me appreciate why sex and pleasure and eroticism matters. The level of vitality and aliveness and joy that I feel now, again, is so vastly different than I felt in those years.

And it feels like that’s what eroticism brings to us. It’s like, you can live without it. But it is one pathway to an aliveness and a vitality that is exciting and part of a thriving life.

There are other pathways to it, but it is the one I choose, the one I’m most interested in. I think creativity is a pathway. People have really meaningful work that can sometimes have them feel enlivened, but eroticism is certainly one that just like animates our life and is like a way to create kind of a thriving experience of our existence. And I love and value it in that way.

August/narration:

Charlotte took intentional steps to cultivate erotic, sexual pleasure again. Things like fantasizing, taking longer amounts of time for sexy solo play and returning to paining all helped and felt enlivening, she said.

She also started date Chris again. As the pair had long conversations and played together laughter returned. Through that experience, she said, touch and erotic connection re-emerged. In an email to me she wrote:

“Cultivating all of these elements together allowed for an erotically alive experience of life to emerge and return more fully and authentically.”

All the while, Chris encouraged that for her and the both of them. Like this one time, in the thick of the care-taking.

Charlotte: There was one moment where Chris was really worried about me, and out of care they said to me, “You used to light up a room anytime you walked into it. And right now, you’re flat, you’re like dimmed.”

They are like brutally honest. And I love that about them. And it was said with a lot of care and love, but that was true. Then I knew what they were talking about, that it was just like, kind of just in the surviving, kind of let’s get things done, kind of vibe.

And it does feel so good to have that blossomed, revived, returned again.

August/narration:

Blossomed and revived indeed. I nearly made a dorky “it’s been a long time coming” joke. Which I’ll skip — you’re welcome.

Instead, here’s Charlotte, with far more eloquence, on her eroticism, and relationship with Chris, today:

Charlotte: After reconnecting, taking the time to reconnect to my pleasure through this kind of holistic, multi year, multi area of life experience, my eroticism feels like it’s back and it’s alive and there’s space for it.

And everyone is well enough that I can take all this time for myself now. And Chris and I have like re-found each other and it’s been really delicious and delightful and surprising and expansive.

We were just saying this morning as I was reflecting on this and they were like, I think we’re doing better than we’ve ever done.And just to feel that full renaissance of eroticism and reconnecting with a partner after 18 years and just letting it be okay, that there are different seasons of,  emptiness and care and connection and working together. And then like an erotic aliveness again, and knowing that no one is broken when, if they’re in a period of  it being not fully present and there are things that can be done.

I feel so grateful to have had that knowledge through my work and to trust in eroticism and its ability to  be there when I was ready for it again and when I felt like I could make time and energy for it and to trust that, it would come back and it has and I’m grateful and I am enjoying my world again in that way, fully.

August/narration:

If you found that whole idea of different seasons, of emptiness, care and connection, and times of aliveness refreshing — well, same.

August: Ah. That is gorgeous, and I think it’s so powerful to hear about it from an expert who has so many I’m going to give you a couple of years of experience and expertise around these subjects because I’m sure you hear from many folks. I hear from folks, they almost confess to me in a way that they’re feeling disconnected or they don’t have time or they’re carrying so much and they’re going through X, Y, and Z.

They feel almost a sense that I guess it’s shame, but they’ll use words like guilt. They’ll use words like I’m embarrassed. I’m letting so and so down, because there becomes this, this hyper focus on the sexuality piece for a lot of people, especially if it’s impacting another person in their view.

And I think because we don’t often learn that our sexuality is ours first and is innate and all of that. It’s much easier, especially for female identifying folks or, or people raised as, as girls to kind of go, Oh, I’m not being sexy enough, or, you know, I can’t believe it’s been X, Y, Z number of years or months or they’re tabulating.

I didn’t hear any tabulating from you and the way you talked about this slow thaw was so moving because again, that’s a very real healthy. natural experience. And I think people sometimes guess that, oh, a sex expert, a sensuality expert, an erotic embodiment expert, this person, they’re just gonna like turn on that light, or they’re gonna, they’re gonna have orgasms to get them through the stress, or you know, they’re just gonna go to the headline-y things that we see.

So thank you for sharing that, because I think it’s really important to hear that you were able to gracefully respect these changes.

Charlotte: Thank you for that. I mean, I do think that we are so focused on our sexuality being in relationship with other people, and I think. partly being in a queer relationship and with somebody who wasn’t well for a bunch of those years, that there wasn’t the demand on me to show up or perform sex for somebody else, which I know is a pressure that a lot of people feel and experience.

So there was space for me to connect with my sexuality and eroticism, again, on my own terms, at my own pace, authentically. And so it was perhaps slower in that way. I think also if people , have more support around them, they can do things more quickly. We didn’t have support around us at that time,

I mean, I think that’s why I just wanted to talk about this, truthfully, is because so many people feel like there’s something wrong with them because sex isn’t working in the way they imagine that it should be, or they’re not as turned on and whatever as they’re supposed to be, or as they see their Instagram people being. And I just want people to know that our conditions and our contexts really do shape our experience of ourselves and our sex and our eroticism. And that’s normal and okay.

And like there really is nothing broken with you if you are at a point in your life where it’s not a priority or it’s not something you can access. And there are a lot of choices that you can make if you want to cultivate this part of your life again. Like we have so much agency around shaping our conditions and to cultivate this more if we want to.

People think that where they’re at right now is like, that’s where they’re at forever. One of the things I love so much about sexuality and eroticism is it’s something that is so fluid and malleable and responsive to the inputs we put into our life and the conditions that we change.

I just love that, that like, no matter where we’re at now, it can change and grow and build, if we choose to invest and put some time and focus and energy and care into this part of our life.

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August/narration:

If you’re feeling a bit stuck or stagnant in your erotic life, or think you may want to cultivate more eroticism, Charlotte suggests thinking about your needs and then your desires.

Charlotte: I really love to just put on a timer, if that helps you get over the resistance to “not having enough time,” like all of those voices that we have, because you can carve out five minutes if you want to. The timer can be calming to our nervous system.

And then asking this question of what do you need? Do you have any organismic needs? Does your body need something to drink? Are you cold? Do you need to pee? Like starting at that basic level, and then, what would you like? What would comfort you right now? What would feel good to you right now? Is there a texture, a sensation? Kind of beyond those basic needs and wants.

So it’s just really asking yourself what would feel pleasurable to you in this moment for five minutes. Would that be stroking your skin? Would that be lying down to rest? Would that be stroking your hair? Would that be taking a shower? Would that be eating a certain kind of food or drink? Is that holding yourself? There are so many micro, five-minute practices that we can participate in for ourselves that do change our body’s chemistry and do change our experience of ourselves and our day.

The more we practice listening and then offering ourselves that, it builds some self sufficiency. It builds a loop of self knowing and self care. And then notice how you feel afterwards: what shifts in your body and your awareness and your experience of yourself. Cause it can just uplift in a way that’s important to anchor because then that can help you be motivated to keep trying it.

August/narration:

For Charlotte, the most powerful practices involve touch — on her own body or shared with or received from a partner. And benefits almost always emerge straight away.

Charlotte: I feel like I experience it as when there’s that tightness of working on things and making things happen and then it’s that kind of release, relaxing. It often is a shift of my whole nervous system. Sometimes I start like, tears come out of my eyes.

Not that I’m crying, but I feel like it’s a moment where it feels like the body state has shifted from like doing to a more relaxed state.  I love doing it right before bed too, because I feel like it really helps that transition from the rest of day, the day, to a more restful state.

Because before we experience pleasure, we have to experience safety and a sense of, like, calm. And so, so often, these sorts of practices help us, just rest and relax and release some of the tension that we’ve been holding in so much of our day.

August/narration:

Charlotte often chooses the practice she loved back in her early 20s, before her adventures with Chris, their business and parenthood began.

Charlotte: I mean, self massage is often where I go, because I feel like I experience it as really nourishing, but that’s not for everyone. It really helps me flip that switch from doing to kind of being in my body more.

August: And do you have to have skills for that? Or can you just rub?

Charlotte: I think that just rubbing is good, touching our own skin, like we know how to comfort somebody else if they hit themselves or they need comfort. And so it’s just kind of offering that like mammalian human quality that we all know how to embody to ourselves and turning that towards ourselves and offering ourselves that kind of care. And attention and focus, and I think it can really do wonders.

I think for me the power of touch both to myself and to my partner is really what helped me move through this time. I mean it’s a way I’m already oriented and I really value touch in general. But I do feel like I leaned heavily on it, relationally and personally. And I feel like it really was significantly helpful in connecting me to my partner and to myself.

I think so many of us could benefit from more touch and remembering to offer that to each other and to ourselves, in small moments. Really does make a difference, I think, to our lived experience in our own body.

August/narration:

In addition to the Pleasure Mechanics online courses on erotic touch, embodied joy and boundless pleasure, Charlotte and Chris run a podcast called Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. Find the show and all of their offerings at pleasuremechanics.com. Get a free Listening to Your Pleasure worksheet at pleasuremechanics.com/listen.

It features a practice Charlotte and Chris do with their clients. It can help you tune your body and listen to your  internal sense of desire – and experience more pleasure.

Charlotte: I do feel like pleasure is such a portal to connection and to feeling joy and love. I want more of that for us all, especially in these really challenging times. I feel like it is a resource and it is a, it is a resource to remind us of what matters and that each other matter because when we can feel more and feel, and pleasure helps us feel, I think.

So when we can feel more, I feel like we can be more connected to other people and we can care about each other and our planet and what needs to be attended to more fully.

August/narration:

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