Orgasm-Blocking Thoughts with Kara Loewentheil – an updated replay!

 

Orgasm-Blocking Thoughts with Kara Loewentheil – an updated replay!

a lightly edited Girl Boner Radio transcript

August:

Hey there, awesome listener. Before we get to today’s episode, I have a quick personal update. I had a pretty big episode planned for release today, one that requires a lot more time and effort behind the scenes by yours truly—a spicy one featuring several voices that you’ll hear soon.

But life had other plans. I was out for a walk a few days ago, took a spill and broke a bone in my foot. I’m doing well, all considering—very grateful to have good care. And bonus, you should see the sexy boot I get to wear while I hobble around on crutches. The injury has set me back a little bit, so I’m going with what I think is a really fun Plan B.

You’re about to hear an updated version of my chat from two years ago with Kara Lowentheil of Unf*ck Your Brain. We explored orgasm-blocking thoughts and ways to work around them. You’ll also hear a spicy activity I recommend for when you’re feeling a bit blocked in the O department. Then you’ll hear Dr. Megan Fleming’s brand new Pleasure Picks for August (meaning the month, not me!). She picked two awesome ones.

This seemed like an especially good time to remind you all that you can support the show and help me meet my goals of building my team, reaching more people and supporting a trauma survivor’s recovery program by joining the Girl Boner community at patreon.com/girlboner.

Options start at just $2 a month. If you join at the $5 level—the most popular — you’ll get access to a bunch of fun rewards, including access to original, unedited interviews you won’t be able to access anywhere else, Ask Me Anything opportunities (keep my DMs open), prize drawings and more.

Huge thanks to those who’ve joined me there already and to anyone new who’ll join me now. I’m sitting here on my couch with my leg in the air—seems kind of appropriate for recording Girl Boner?—and sending you my best vibes. Pun very much intended.

Okay, enjoy the show.

[intro music/intro…]

August (narration):

Do you ever find yourself thinking more about your appearance than pleasure during sex or worry about a partner’s pleasure more than your own or worry about orgasm taking too darn long? In this bonus episode that ends with a Girl Boner homework assignment I have for you (so keep listening to the end), I’m excited to share my chat on orgasm blocking thoughts with Kara Loewentheil. 

If you’ve ever listened to her podcast, “Unf*ck Your Brain,” you know that Kara is a powerhouse. As a feminist confidence coach, she teaches women how to overcome insecurity and anxiety by identifying ways society has taught us to feel insecure. And then by using a concrete method to change these thoughts to feel really confident. 

When I asked Kara about her personal journey, she told me she was working as an attorney in the social justice spheres. And while that fulfilled her to a certain degree, she had this basal level of anxiety all the time. She worried about ways other people perceived her and grappled with body image issues. 

So being a seeker she dove into therapy and yoga and meditation and tried a whole range of approaches to get to the root of these issues. All of this led not only to a ton of personal growth for herself but to this platform that merges cognitive psychology based techniques with feminist theory and is impacting so many people. 

Before our conversation, I had read an article Kara penned for mindbodygreen called “Four Ways You Can Hack Your Brain for Better Sex.” I love this topic and wanted to know why she chose to explore it.

[guitar music]

Kara:  

A lot of feminism is rooted in the understanding that people socialized as women are taught to view themselves as sexual objects and to understand their sexuality as not being an internal lived experience but we’re taught to believe that our experience of desire should spring from being desired by someone else. 

And so, in that sense, we’re this object that is supposed to be ignited by someone else’s gaze, which is not how I think people socialized as male in our culture are socialized to think about sex. Think they are socialized to believe that their sexuality is internal. It springs from within. 

And to me that’s the source of so many of women’s body image issues. Of course you add in all of the unrealistic depictions, the media—you just add in the anthropological aspect, right, which is that in any human society, people are obsessed with food and rituals around food and bodies and body modification. It’s just like a human thing. 

And then, you know, whatever is hard to achieve is valued and associated with eliteness so when there’s not enough food, being fat is considered beautiful and unattainable. And now we live in a society where there is a ton of food and so being unrealistically thin is considered to be attractive and unattainable. There’s so many intersecting forces but when you put all that together and then sex is obviously an outgrowth of that, too—how you feel in your body, how you think about your body, what you think when you look at your body. 

If you spend all day thinking about how your body should look different and you ate too many calories or whatever else, of course you don’t feel sexy at the end of the day. People socialized as women don’t know how to connect to that within themselves. And what does it mean to feel sexy in a way that really has nothing to do with whether anybody else looking at you thinks you’re sexy?

August: 

Yes. And that really does seem to take an awareness of what our thought patterns are, which I know you talk a lot about and some of the limiting thoughts. And some that become so second nature because of these cultural messages that we’re not even aware that we’re thinking them.

I loved your article that you wrote for mindbodygreen. You talk about different hacks for your brain for better sex. Why was that important to you to discuss actually challenging those brain waves, those thoughts we have? 

Kara:  

Because I think that we tend to think about sex as a biological experience. 

We’re attracted to certain people, and they touch us the right way or the wrong way. And then we get off, right? [laughs]

August:

Mm hmm.

Kara:  

It’s like math, like the building blocks. And I totally believe that there is some element of—whether you want to call it pheromones or sexual chemistry—whatever it is, I have certainly been surprised by that in my own life. I think we’ve all kissed someone we thought we were really attracted to and felt nothing and then kissed someone we were kind of mad about, and it was amazing. 

Some of that is there but I just think we really underestimate how much our thought process impacts our feelings of desire, our interpretations of what’s happening during sex are, especially for people who are socialized as women or who are kind of socialized to be pleasers in some way, to worry more about the other person’s pleasure.

August (narration):

Kara told me that all of those thoughts can really impact how we feel about and experience sex. And while she’s done a lot of self work in this arena, she was also lucky to have had a pretty sex positive upbringing.

Kara:  

It was a shock to me when I found out that there were people who have a hard time orgasming because they can’t turn off their brain.

August (narration):

Kara realized that the work she does with folks to “unfuck their brains” really applies to sex and pleasure. She told me that working on those thoughts and beliefs, really understanding and working through them, is some of the most empowering work we can do.

Kara:  

Sometimes you’re in a relationship with somebody and you don’t feel that much desire for them or you don’t want to break up with them, right? You would like to feel more desire for them but you think, Well, there’s no way to do that or we have to go through the checklist of Well, we tried lingerie, and we tried candles [chuckles] or whatever you’re supposed to do, right? 

August: 

Mm hmm.

Kara:  

And so to know that you actually can create desire and create the feeling of being desirable for yourself again; the stereotype is always that the masculine partner wants more sex than the feminine partner. I don’t think that is true. Like a lot of my clients struggle with it the other way around. And then they think they can’t feel desirable or sexy because their partner has a lower libido than they do. 

August: 

Wow.

Kara:  

And so those brain hacks, I think, are so important for both things. It’s both how to make actual sex you’re having better but, also, let’s say your partner doesn’t want to have more actual sex and you can’t control that. How can you still get some of the satisfaction that you’re attributing to the sex you want to have without having to have it?

August:

Completely, yeah. Such wonderful points. 

And I hear from so many people who internalize lower desire in a partner as “there’s something wrong with me. There’s something wrong with my body.”

But I think so many people struggle with that comfort around being naked, which I think often has to do with something deeper and a lot of times it’s more, you know, emotional nudity, I guess you could say.

Kara:  

Mm hmm.

August:

It’s vulnerability as well. But there’s so much pressure to look certain ways, and if you’re sitting there thinking about how your butt looks or how your boobs look, the size of your penis or whatever it is, it’s so disruptive. 

So one of the thoughts you talk about breaking this negative pattern is worrying about how you look naked. How can we change that pattern?

Kara:  

I think there are a couple of good hacks. I mean, on the body image level, anything you do to work on your body image will help, right, and so neutral or baby step thoughts. I always say they’re not inspiring enough to be on an Instagram post but they actually will help. [laughs] 

If your thought about your stomach is My stomach is disgusting. I have to hide it. Yeah, it would be great if you went immediately to thinking I’m a beautiful goddess, right. But most people can’t jump that far, and so they just give up.

August (narration):  

So she recommends starting with very neutral descriptions like “this as a human stomach.” While you’re at it, it’s also important to consider what you’re seeing and consuming in your daily life.

Kara:  

I also think we know one of the phenomenons of body image that we have good studies on are that visual exposure to traditional mainstream media with unrealistic body types promotes body dissatisfaction. And that visual exposure to real people’s bodies and bodies that look like yours promotes visual satisfaction. So, you know, looking at photos of people who look like you and particularly if you can find them, naked photos.

August (narration):  

For that you can check out ethical feminist porn, body positive influencers, and a website car recommended called The Normal Breast Gallery. It features hundreds of photos of natural breasts, and really shows what a vast range there is, and how unrealistic and limited many images we’re fed often are. 

Before you start this work, seeking out photos of naked people who have body parts that match up to one that you may be struggling with, Kara said to prepare yourself. It’s not going to be a garden of roses.

Kara:  

This is not going to feel great immediately. Because the first 10-15 times you do it, what’s going to come up is your own brain’s disgust for yourself. So you’re gonna think that it looks gross.

August (narration):  

But if you can keep doing it, she said, your thoughts and perceptions will gradually improve. And, of course, if you are in the deep depths of body image challenges—first of all, solidarity I’ve been there in the past—you may want to seek some guidance and support from a qualified therapist. 

Kara herself used to have a lot of body insecurities and she worked through them in stages.

Kara:  

So I worked on believing that men would be—I happen to be straight—that men would be attracted to me on dates or whatever. And then, but then my brain was always like, Yes but as soon as you take off your clothes, it’s all gonna, he’s gonna know. [laughs]

August: 

Mmm, yeah.

Kara:  

And then one day, I was like, Wait. We live in the age of the internet. So I’m a fat woman—people on your podcast may not know that—if this man likes to go on dates with fat women, he’s probably searched for porn of them, right?

August: 

Totally.

Kara:  

Like, he knows what it’s gonna look like, for better or worse. This is one of the plus sides of 4As right? Nobody doesn’t know what the thing they like looks like, right? It’s all just your own self critical thoughts. 

So that’s one of the things I also—it’s like, This person is attracted to me. Humans are really good at visualizing other humans naked. That’s one of our favorite things to do. If they’re attracted to you, they like what you look like.

August: 

Completely.

Kara:  

If you’ve had sex with them before, and they came back for more, then obviously they like it. But we don’t think that. We’re like, Well, they’re just putting up with my gross body because of my sparkling personality. 

August:  

Yeah, those are such good points, I think especially in our culture in the US, because there’s this shroud of secrecy still. This weird sort of—there’s forward movement but there’s also a backlash. And we’re still puritanical in some ways where we’re, you know, the body is taboo. And so we’re searching even more. If it were normalized, I don’t think we would be so “I need to Google what this kind of body part looks like” because we wouldn’t be so fixated.

Kara:  

Yeah and because we’re so exposed and saturated with a pornified version of sex. And everybody looking only one way. So on the one hand it’s women in bikinis with fake breasts selling cars that were in outfits that are so revealing that in the past, even your husband wouldn’t see you that way, right? [chuckles] But it’s all of a certain version, right? It’s not a true diversity. So we have the worst of both worlds in that way.

August:  

Completely. What’s another really common orgasm blocking thought, aside from about physical appearance? We talked a little bit about sex drive and desire.

Kara:  

I tend to work with people who have been socialized as women so obviously, patriarchy and racism and sexism—bad for everybody—but this is the thing that I work on. So I tend to see a lot more concern for the other person’s pleasure than your own. And I think that that’s socialized. 

So then there’s a lot of discomfort of “Oh, I don’t want the person to go down on me because it’s uncomfortable for me to just receive pleasure.” Or “I start to worry that I’m taking too long or he doesn’t like how I, you know, or she doesn’t like how I taste or look.” 

It all stems, I think, from some of us are raised to believe that we are entitled to pleasure, right? And that can be like toxic masculinity run amok, the idea that you’re entitled to pleasure regardless of what the other person wants.

And then the flip side of it is not believing that you’re entitled to pleasure at all. And that even if someone’s trying to give it to you, you shouldn’t take it or your pleasure is not important or it’s more important that they’re pleased. And you’re like worrying if they’re pleased that you’re pleased. 

So I see a lot of that. It’s a sort of discomfort with not being the person to be providing pleasure at all times. And then that just completely is a total orgasm blocker because you’re like, “And it’s taking too long!” 

August (narration):  

Which, of course, only makes it more difficult to reach and experience orgasm. If you relate to that, Kara has a hack for that, too.

Kara:  

Well, one of the things I recommend thinking is—this is like a neutral step thought, kind of—because it sort of accepts the premise that you should worry about the other person’s pleasure but that’s where people are, sometimes. It is giving your partner pleasure to give you pleasure, right, so you are giving them pleasure.

It’s never actually in a good sexual relationship, at least very rarely, is one person doing something that they’re like, “This is about equal to filing my taxes but I’m just doing it for the other person.” Even if they’re not into that particular act, they’re still doing it because they think it’s sexy when you’re excited, right? Or like they want to give you that experience. 

So that’s like the first step I recommend is just thinking, I am giving this other person pleasure. They’re getting pleasure by pleasing me just the way that I do. When I please them, it’s pleasurable for me. And then I think the second one is just there’s all this deeper thought work that’s not even just about sex but is about we live in a culture that’s very influenced by capitalism and by Puritan, literally religious thoughts from the founding. 

And so we have a whole kind of mess of thoughts, I think, about pleasure and pleasure being sinful, or bad, or lazy or indulgent and having to earn pleasure. The tendrils extend out far beyond sex but they really impact sex because sex is an activity where you are not really, unless you’re trying to get pregnant, you’re not going to produce anything other than pleasure.

August:  

You mentioned having gone through some struggles with your own kind of body image but that you grew up in a sex positive household. I’m curious how all of this work with clients and with Unf*ck Your Brain, your podcast, how has all of that impacted your sense of self?

Kara:  

My entire relationship with myself is different. The core of what I really teach people is that the relationship with yourself is the one that matters most. It’s really the only one you’re ever having: your relationships with other people are happening in your own brain. 

True confidence isn’t—having really true confidence, deep down, is not even thinking I’m amazing, although that’s part of it. It’s really like I’ve got my own back. I am not going to turn on myself, I’m not going to abandon myself, I’m not going to throw myself under the bus based on what I think someone else thinks about me. And I’m sort of gonna be here for myself. And I know that I can manage whatever thoughts and feelings and experiences I encounter. 

And like, to me, that’s the core of the piece I feel about being a human that I think most people don’t ever get to experience because they don’t know about this kind of work. I think that’s a little vague but I don’t know if that answers your question. 

August:  

It does! Yeah, no, I think it does. And it’s important, I think, and helpful to hear about your growth because I think sometimes when we want to change thought patterns that we want to improve our lives in the way that we approach pleasure and things like that. It’s hard, sometimes, to imagine what the rewards will be other than not feeling sucky, you know what I mean?

Kara: 

Mm hmm. Totally. 

August:

Like we can think, I want to feel like that, right? But we don’t always—

Kara:

Right. But I don’t even know what feeling good would be.

August:  

Yeah, so like what’s motivating me?

And it just seems like you have grown so much personally but then also professionally, and I think a lot of people admire and respect the fact that you do share so openly about vulnerable topics.

Kara:  

I think it all boils down to not being afraid.

August (narration):  

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t ever feel fear but it’s different because she trusts herself. She told me about a sex-related example from back before she started working on her thoughts and beliefs about herself.

Kara:  

If I had sex with someone, and then they didn’t call me back, I would immediately throw myself under the bus, right? It was like, Oh, this is a problem. Something went wrong. And it’s my fault. This is because of you, body. You’re the wrong body, and you don’t look the way you should, and that’s why this happened. 

So that’s what I mean by turn on yourself. You immediately blame all of the thoughts and feelings and suffering you’re having on yourself and on your body and you are willing to sort of sell yourself out for someone else’s good opinion of you. 

And now if somebody doesn’t want to see me again after a date or after sex or whatever else, I a hundred percent not just know intellectually but feel that that has nothing to do with me. That is their thoughts and they were supposed to come into my life for whatever it was one night or six weeks or six years, right?

August:  

Yeah.

Kara:  

And that whatever unfolded was what was supposed to unfold not in a god/fate way just literally that’s what happened. So that’s what was supposed to happen, right? Couldn’t have been any different because that’s what happened. And I would never blame myself for that or abandon myself, try to get their approval. I always have my own back.

[guitar music]

August:  

To learn much more from Kara Loewentheil, search for Unf*ck Your Brain wherever you listen to podcasts. 

[guitar strum]

August:  

Here is that homework, I promised: Turn yourself on first. This is helpful if you’ve dealt with this orgasm-blocking thought: It’s taking too long. 

If you’ve been there, you know exactly what I mean. You’re so concerned that too much time is ticking by for you to experience orgasm, that it’s even harder to get there. So before you next engage in sex with a partner, intentionally turn yourself on. Read an erotic story, watch a spicy film, insert a small vibrator or dildo into your vagina or rear, play with yourself with your fingers and lube, or close your eyes and fantasize. 

Practicing patience and not fixating on orgasm can be very valuable, too, of course, but I’m also all for claiming our orgasms, desiring and going after them as we so choose. So give yourself that time, the space and the permission before any partner play begins. I can almost promise that you’ll experience orgasm quicker and also a lot more powerfully. 

[Femine-sounding voice moaning][guitar music]

August [narration]:

Another fabulous way to get turned on? Spend some time alone, exploring your body. Or try a new toy, with a partner. Right now, The Pleasure Chest is celebrating their most popular, tried and true vibrator collection. Head to thepleasurechest.com to check out their latest specials. 

Learn more from Kara Loewentheil, JD or join her community here! And save 15% on your first Promescent order here.

Stream the full episode, which includes Dr. Megan Fleming’s latest Pleasure Picks, up above or on your favorite podcast app!