Pleasure (Behind Pain) and Orgasmic Living

 

“Pleasure (Behind Pain) and Orgasmic Living”

a Girl Boner podcast transcript

Suzannah:  The moment I say that phrase, orgasmic life, I can actually feel myself drop into my body. And it’s almost like we have sensations that are not awake. . If you actually like breathe into your pelvis and feel the breath, like send the breath to your genitals, you can feel like there is something buzzing there, like there is pleasure there without you even needing to touch yourself but We don’t often experience that.

August/narration:

 Suzannah Weiss is a writer, sexologist, psychotherapist, and author of Eve’s Blessing: Uncovering the Lost Pleasure Behind Female Pain. She want everyone, especially women and gender diverse people, tob find pleasure behind their pain — and to know that life can feel orgasmic.

Suzannah starts her book with topics so many of us find painful in some way: puberty and menstruation.

 Suzannah: My mom didn’t talk to me about anything. So I learned about periods first from girls in summer camp.

August/narration:

She and her friends were playing Mad Libs – remember that game?

 Suzannah: …where you have to fill in a prompt and the prompt was “a bad day.” And someone said, “the day before your period.”

And I said, “What’s that?” And she said, “it’s when your thing bleeds and you grow hair there.” And I was so confused. I thought you would be rushed to the hospital and just wake up with pubic hair. [laughs] And I got really scared when they started talking about it in school. Like that happens every month? I realized it wouldn’t be a medical emergency, but I also felt horrified by this idea that my vagina would be bleeding once a month.

I heard about things like cramps and PMS, and it just sounded like women were cursed. It was unfair that in the boys’ lesson, they learned about wet dreams and erections and experiences that are physically, if not psychologically pleasurable. It felt like God hated me or nature hated me.

And I think that was ’cause of a lack of education about the positives of periods or puberty, and also growing breasts was really scary ’cause you just see like tits on TV as this object for the male gaze. We’re just taught so many negative things when we could have been taught breasts are involved in pleasure or, during your period, some people actually feel more creative or more insightful and you can prevent period pain if you have it. It could be the sign of an underlying illness and there are positive changes throughout the menstrual cycle.

I wasn’t even told it shouldn’t hurt, which I think is the most important. And so this can affect women’s self-esteem. It can make us feel like being a woman is a bad thing. I think that could be in part why studies have shown that women’s self-esteem drops around adolescence ’cause all these things happen to them that they’re taught are horrible.

August/narration:

Later, in her 20s, Suzannah started to address another gap in her education. One that involved orgasms. She used to say that she never had an orgasm with a partner before age 25.

Suzannah: I’m questioning this now ’cause I think there are different kinds of orgasms. I think I didn’t have a clitoral orgasm with a partner until I was 25. It was in part ’cause I was on SSRI antidepressants, and in part because I didn’t know how to communicate to a partner and didn’t think that I was entitled to like make sure they do whatever I need. I thought it was too much work or too demanding.

And so I went on a journey when I was about 25. Because of my work as a sex and relationship writer, I had the opportunity to do a few things. One was a class by sex therapist, Vanessa Marin, called Finishing School, where she talked about, the ins and outs of female orgasm.

One part really stuck with me where she said, “Men will do anything that they need in order to orgasm.” And this may not be true for all men, but they will fantasize, they will tell you what to do, they will move to the right position, et cetera. and women are often really shy about it, so we should get fired up about that.

And I think that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The thing that caused me to make a change. I realized that I hadn’t been doing everything I needed because if I did, I could orgasm through masturbation. So that’s a sign that it was possible, but I was too scared to ask for or do the things I did when I masturbated.

August/narration:

Around that time, she had a new partner.

Suzannah: And I gave myself permission to fantasize and to tell him to keep going, even when I thought it was taking too long, and to tell him how to move his hand, etcetera. And then it wasn’t a problem anymore.

August/narration:

Not long after that, her nerves set in.

Suzannah: I had that one partner from ages 25 to 28. He was the first partner that I orgasmed with. And so after we broke up, I got scared. What if it’s just him? What if it’s his magic touch that allowed for that? And I really went into a deep phase of sexual exploration.

I went to nine sex parties in one summer ’cause I was excited to be single. I moved to LA that fall and got on tinder and was dating five different people at one point.

August/narration:

She had a heart-to-heart with one of them.

Suzannah: Where he talked about having partners who had never come with a partner and he solved their issue. that sounds like a ego trip, but it was more he was saying like, he likes to be a sexual healer for people.

So I told him that that used to be an issue for me and we had not had sex yet and he slept over and the next morning it got really awkward ’cause he started touching me and I was thinking, oh my God, now that’s in his head and it’s in my head.

August/narration:

Over-thinking palooza. She carried on anyway.

Suzannah: I remember taking my hand and showing him like, here’s how I touch myself and doing the motion. And then I like gave him feedback and then he got it. And that was a learning experience of

It helps to be open with someone emotionally about your sexual insecurities and also to be very specific in demonstrating or telling them what it is you need.

August/narration:

Suzannah’s experience with chronic illness overlaps with her sexual challenges and discovery.

Suzannah: I have chronic Lyme disease, which is a very controversial diagnosis — one some doctors disagree with. If there’s a better one at some point I’ll take it.

I went to 17 doctors before I got diagnosed with Lyme disease and I got told all kinds of things. I got told, I had used psychedelics and caused my symptoms ’cause of that. I got told that I was anxious, that I was depressed. That they didn’t really know, but I should just try a medication. I got diagnosed with a bladder condition called interstitial cystitis, which is really scary because they say it’s incurable when really often it is tied to another condition like Lyme disease or chronic UTIs or endometriosis or something else.

August/narration:

Through a lot of this, she said, she didn’t receive much help.

Suzannah: Even in the naturopathic, holistic world, there was a lot of stop eating dairy, stop eating gluten and that didn’t do anything either.

August/narration:

Eventually, she did find her way. And a lot of that mirrored what she’d learned about advocating for her her sexual wants and needs.

Suzannah:  But I was diagnosed with that in 2018 due to neurological issues as well as bladder issues. And I did a lot of holistic treatments, including plant medicine, I’m not saying this is like a medically proven, treatment. But for me, actually working with plant medicine like Cambo and Ayahuasca and iboga was part of my healing.

And that actually brought me deeper into my body and also helped me with my sexual struggles to learn how to feel more deeply and acutely what was in my body. And to realize I had almost numbed myself due to feeling unsafe in the bedroom due to feeling like if someone touched my breast, that’s just for him and that’s a violation or that’s objectifying.

Or just being in my head about is this safe? Is this okay to be doing, etcetera. And I also gained confidence in working through it and like advocating for myself with doctors.

[acoustic, encouraging music]

August (ad):

While we’re on the topic of pleasure behind pain, I have to tell you about a Beducated course I just took. It’s called Chronic Pain and Sex: Rediscover Sexual Joy Amidst Pain — which seemed so appropriate as I finalized this episode. Plus, my partner currently has a shoulder injury.

I tried one of the questions the teachers suggested asking, and my partner literally said, “Wow, that’s such a good question.” Then we had an awesome convo, the kind that brings you closer. I’m super excited to try to massage tips from the course.

To get a personalized pleasure roadmap, take the Beducated quick quiz — it took me like 3 minutes — at the link in the show notes. At the end, you’ll get a special discount for Girl Boner listeners.

So take the quiz, see all Beducated has to offer, including over 150 courses on sex and intimacy curated by experts, at the show notes link.

[acoustic, encouraging music]

August/narration:

Suzannah infused what she learned into her book, Eve’s Blessing. It’s full of stories of women, as well as some queer folks, who found their way from pain to pleasure, too. Her agent prompted the idea.

Suzannah: For my first book, Subjectified, we got a lot of rejections from editors saying that sex books don’t sell well.

She suggested I do something that combines women’s pleasure and women’s pain and talk about sex and general health. And I visited this passage from the Bible about the Garden of Eden and Eve being cursed.

August/narration:

It goes like this: “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. Thou shall bring forth children and your desire will be for your husband and he’ll rule over thee.”

Suzannah: This is a passage that is thought to describe a curse on women involving painful childbirth and or painful menstruation, and sometimes also pain during sex. There’s a passage in the Bible about, that you can prove your virginity through the sheet from the wedding night as if you’re expected to bleed.

These passages emphasize that women have to experience pain because of some mistake that Eve made. And they also are pleasure-negative. they’re at least taken to be pleasure negative, and there is a little bit of that connotation in “your husband will rule over thee.” So, you know, obey your husband, don’t pursue your sexuality independently.

The book, Sex at Dawn, actually postulates that this fall from the Garden of Eden represents the transition from hunter gatherer societies to agriculture because that’s when women’s sexuality started being policed, when we cared about paternity. Whose children are whose, whose property are whose.

So I started to make these connections between the normalization of female pain and also the prohibition on female pleasure. And I think these things are very related because pleasure is something that comes from accepting pain, not as something you have to put up with, but as a sign that something is wrong. And to listen to it and to feel it and to move through it.

August/narration:

She gave the example of ecstatic childbirth, also known as orgasmic birth — which may or may not involve an orgasm.

Suzannah: This is what advocates of orgasmic and ecstatic birth say that you might experience pain once you experience it like, listen to it. Is it a message to move, to breathe deeper? Maybe you need to talk to someone about how they can better help you find comfort.

And so we develop a different relationship with pain and consequently a different relationship with pleasure and vice versa. And sometimes it is by leaning into pain that we go into pleasure. But that doesn’t mean like we need to just accept pain. It’s more about finding pleasure on the other side of pain.

August/narration:

More health challenges inspired her to write the book, too.

Suzannah: I also am very frustrated with women’s healthcare, having certain health conditions that should be easy to treat, but took forever to even get diagnosed.

I had, in 2021, a clitoral infection called balanitis, which is a yeast infection in the clitoris, but if you look it up, it’s known as a yeast infection in the penis and a lot of gynecologists don’t know it can happen in the clitoris.

Thankfully I found a pelvic floor physical therapist. My OB-GYN couldn’t find anything wrong and just said, “Maybe it’s a pelvic floor issue.” The physical therapist said, “No, it looks red, like something is going on on the outside.”

And she referred me to the right doctor. All I needed to do was use a topical cream, but it took me months to even get it… And I had to live with clitoral pain, which basically meant no sex for that time.

As I said, I was diagnosed also with interstitial cystitis, which is a bladder pain condition, which is not well defined because a lot of people like me, I actually had chronic urinary tract infections and Lyme that were causing bladder pain, and I got better through antibiotics and there’s more studies coming out showing that often, what we call an incurable condition, in the bladder is actually an infection that the typical dipstick tests are missing. They actually miss about a quarter of infections.

August/narration:

So Suzannah wants women and people with a vulva to understand this:

Suzannah: Don’t just give up if someone says, this is incurable, or we don’t know what it is, or just take a medication and hopefully it will numb the symptom rather than eliminate it.

August/narration:

And it isn’t just women’s healthcare Suzannah’s frustrated about and wants to help change.

Suzannah: Just like women have been taught to feel broken because the male body has been the standard in medicine for a quote unquote normal body, gender diverse people, intersex people, two-spirit people, trans people, [and] non-binary experience this as well because their bodies have been erased from science and medicine and many doctors don’t know how to treat them.

Intersex people, especially sometimes as children, doctors will operate on their genitals because they don’t fit exactly what male or female genitals are normally classified as. And this is a human rights violation because often these surgeries are unnecessary and actually cause pain and are non-consensual.

I interviewed one intersex activist, Hida Viloria, who didn’t experience any kind of non-consensual surgery. But she did have many experiences with healthcare providers who were making inappropriate comments like, “Has your clitoris always been this big?” And being made to feel broken or abnormal. She also talked about just how much power there has been in reclaiming her own body and just celebrating her clitoris and all of the amazing sexual experiences she has had.

I also interviewed trans people, one two-spirit person who just has had their experience erased and not been able to communicate with doctors about things like pronouns and just how they like to be addressed.

And there’s also a lot of power in being able to take back these identities and say like, my body is so cool because it’s different. Just the same way that women are saying, you know, having a vagina and a vulva is not inferior to having a penis. It actually has so many amazing things, similar things and different things. Trans and non-binary and intersects two-spirit people are also have having their moment to do the same thing and hopefully will more so.

August/narration:

And so, no matter your gender, Suzannah really does want you to know you can live life orgasmically. That’s the theme of her last chapter. It features the story of Josephine Bashout, a woman who overcame pre-cervical cancer after feeling dismissed by the medical system.

She told Suzannah that:

Suzannah: …my life is like one giant orgasm. Her day is a series of sensual delights. She gets up in the morning, she does breath work or yoga or something that feels good like that, or meditation.

She savors her coffee and it feels orgasmic in her mouth and she notices the wind against her skin and her feet on the ground and feels like even when her partner just touches her collarbone, it sends shivers through her body. And I really liked painting this image of the orgasmic, which was based on her.

Sophie Lua, another mentor of mine I interviewed who is into sacred sexuality and similar things like that. She talks about doing similar things and finding that colors look brighter and she just feels more alive. And I included these bits ’cause I think they’re very different from how most of us in the western world live our lives, which is, and I do this myself, like I get up almost right away, go on my computer and I like advocate this orgasmic life.

We live in a very work centered culture where we’re glued to technology often, and it is really hard to lead a life that’s centered on pleasure in your body and listening to your body and letting your body decide what you wanna do in each moment.

What I’ve noticed is that the more that I do take that advice and prioritize things like, maybe I won’t work on my computer right away. Maybe I’ll go on a walk this morning, or maybe I’ll actually set aside a few minutes to mindfully masturbate and not have the goal of orgasm, but just give myself massage and touch myself, all of these things add up to help us to live an orgasmic life.

The moment I say that phrase orgasmic life, I can actually feel myself drop into my body. And it’s almost like we have sensations that are not awake. If you actually breathe into your pelvis and feel the breath, send the breath to your genitals, you can feel like there is something buzzing there, there is pleasure there without you even needing to touch yourself. But we don’t often experience that.

August/narration:

This is the message she hopes people glean from her personal journey and from Eve’s Blessing.

Suzannah: I hope what people take away is that their whole lives can be orgasmic. That their whole body is orgasmic, their whole body is ecstatic, pleasurable it. It has that there and the more you nurture that and water those seeds by yourself time to indulge, indulge in daily pleasures, which shouldn’t be an indulgence, the more alive and happy you will feel. And that’s something that goes beyond the bedroom.

August/narration:

If you want to feel that way and aren’t sure where to start, Suzannah recommends meditating while you imagine you’re breathing into your pelvis.

Suzannah: And almost imagine there’s like a balloon in your pelvis that’s filling up when you breathe in, and then you can imagine the balloon expanding.

So each time you breathe in. You’re sending the pleasure to a larger and larger part of your body until it fills up your whole torso, your arms, your legs. You can wiggle your fingers and toes. I think that’s a good starting point to get used to the idea of feeling pleasure throughout your body in a non-sexual context.

August/narration:

Beyond that, start with seemingly small things.

Suzannah:  In general, I think a good practice, if you can, is putting your feet on the ground once a day. If there’s a park or a beach that you can go to or, um, or just having something in the morning that you look forward to. I like to drink cacao or matcha like it. I mean, for a lot of people it’s coffee. I think that’s fine if it makes you happy. I think starting your day with sensual pleasure is just going to brighten your whole day.

August/narration: 

For more from Suzannah, order her book, Eve’s Blessing, via Amazon or most any bookseller. Find a direct link in the show notes, where you can also take that fun Beducated quiz and sign up for occasional extras from me.

If you’re enjoying Girl Boner Radio, I would so appreciate a rating and review and if you’d send a link to your friends. Thanks so much for listening.