Unlocking Pleasure + Exploring Gender with Rae McDaniel

“Unlocking Pleasure + Exploring Gender with Rae McDaniel”

a lightly edited Girl Boner Radio transcript

Rae:

And I was walking in a caving system, and there’s no light down there except your cell phones. There was no one else around me. And this caving system opened up into this beautiful underground pond. And I was just standing there absorbing the beauty of it. And I realized that I was kind of turned on. 

August (narration):

Rae McDaniel grew up as the adopted child of Southern Baptist fundamentalist missionaries, who taught their beliefs through puppet shows. In terms of sex education, there really was not any.

Rae:

It was very much “you save yourself until marriage.” I learned a little bit about sex along the way, usually with these kind of Christian sex books, which were largely not useful at all. 

So this would have been in the 2000s. There was this big cultural phenomenon in very conservative religious circles, based on this book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris. There have since been documentaries about how damaging this book was for so many people. 

August (narration):

Rae isn’t the first person I’ve interviewed to bring this book and its harmfulness up. It asserted that the best way to avoid premarital sex, and to be a good Christian, was to stop dating completely, and that God would provide the right partner at the right time. You just had to believe. 

It was in print from 1997 until 2008, when Harris publicly apologized for its flaws and asked his publisher to pull it from print. Over 1.2 million copies have been sold, and the Amazon description still calls it an “inspiring call to sincere love, real purity, and purposeful singleness.” 

Rae knows from experience what can happen when you’re led to embrace these kinds of ideas.

Rae:

I was taught that you don’t do anything physical until you are at the altar. So me and my boyfriend, and then to-be husband, didn’t do anything but kiss and we started dating while we were teenagers. We got married young, when I was 18. And I think the damaging part of that for me is that I didn’t realize that I was marrying my best friend, and that was all that he was. And I realized that too late.

August (narration):

Rae said they bought into these ideas for a long time, because they didn’t see other options, growing in a fundamentalist family and being homeschooled. Rae didn’t abide by all of the “sex is bad” messages, though. At least one part did not feel right to them from early on.

Rae:

Part of the narrative was that solo sex or masturbation was bad. And that was never something that I bought into. And I found myself being really, really curious and feeling like maybe at the time there was something to saving yourself for marriage. But beyond that, I wanted to know more about sex and what was being offered to me. 

And I wanted to know specifically about pleasure. And it didn’t quite make sense to me that you would not give anybody any sex education, not really talk about pleasure at all and view sex as something that was bad. And then the second that you get married, suddenly it’s this wonderful, beautiful thing that you’re supposed to enjoy with no inhibitions. That isn’t usually the way that it happened. And it certainly wasn’t for me.

August (narration):

Once Rae and their partner had said their “I dos,” Rae was excited to explore sex together. But rather than a pleasurable experience, a new experience to enjoy together, sex brought Rae physical pain. They noticed-

Rae:  

-a very sharp pain around the opening of my vagina. 

And after going to the gynecologist, he was able to find that there was some kind of unexplained scar tissue around that area and not from sexual abuse or anything like that it. It was truly unexplained how it ended up there but it was there. And it made the opening of my vagina not flexible at all. And it would cause this very intense stabbing and then burning pain when I tried to have sex. 

I think along with that, as you can imagine, if you are number one, anticipating stabbing, burning pain, and then experiencing stabbing, burning pain, that’s not exactly a turn on. So my body wasn’t responding, right? It wasn’t getting to the point of arousal that was comfortable for me, kind of no matter what I did. So lubrication was a problem. 

So we would have sex, and then I would immediately run a hot bath, get into the bath and sit in there, shut the door and cry. And I did that for years. And it was heartbreaking to me, it was heartbreaking to my husband.

And because I didn’t have any sex education and I didn’t really have anybody that I could talk to about it, I didn’t know that it wasn’t normal. So I kept trying to have sex, even though it was excruciatingly painful and eventually came to the conclusion that this can’t be normal. 

August (narration):

So they went to a couples therapist who wasn’t trained in sex therapy, which turned out not to be helpful. Rae also went to see a gynecologist, but unfortunately few gynecologists are knowledgeable about sexual pain and pelvic pain disorders. But how could Rae have known that?

Rae ended up having surgery, which helped somewhat, but it didn’t address bigger issues.

Rae:

Right? The emotional reaction to anticipating and experiencing pain for that long and also the muscles in my pelvic floor were so tight because they were expecting this pain. 

So once I got up to Chicago, which I moved to for graduate school, I saw an actual sex therapist and a pelvic floor physical therapist. And those two people combined, moved me from this is not excruciating and awful sex to this is pleasurable sex. And that was a game changer.

August:  

Oh, I bet. Do you remember the turning point? I’m sure it was probably a gradual thing. But was there a moment when things started to really turn around? 

Rae:  

As I moved to Chicago and got out of this very oppressive religious environment, I was able to really understand more about who I was—about my queer identity, about who I was attracted to, about my body exploring pleasure, my body for the first time. 

That exploration of my identity paired with seeing a sex therapist who is helping me work through those trauma reactions in my body, and also the emotions and the cognitions that were going into, causing my body to react in a certain way and then stay in that really heightened state. Being able to work on that paired with a pelvic floor physical therapist, who was able to manually get in there and really address some of the tight, kind of locked muscles in my pelvic floor. All of those things together really allowed me to experience pleasure for the first time in my life. 

My non-binary identity and my trans identity came a little bit later, after I had a few years to explore what it meant to be queer. I started realizing that the designation of woman really didn’t feel like it fully fit me. But I also knew that I didn’t identify as a man. And I identified somewhere solidly in the middle as a non-binary person. And it was also a slow lean. 

So over a period of probably four or five years, I started exploring this identity more. I changed my name. I started testosterone in December of 2020. So, you know, 10 months ago now, as we’re recording this, I got top surgery, which is a really exciting step. 

And I’ve just been very, very lucky along the way to be very supported in my community and in my partnerships.

[encouraging, acoustic music]

August (narration):

Rae said, overall, their coming out process has felt like a process of self-growth, and not something that came with a lot of angst. 

A few years ago, they took a three-week European trip, pretty much all on their own. In Portugal, they ended up connecting with their body and sexual pleasure in an unexpected place.

[jazzy, Latin music…]

Rae: 

And so I was exploring around Lisbon on my own. And there is a place—and I’m probably going to butcher the name of this—so anybody that speaks Portuguese, please feel free to correct me. 

But Quinta da Regaleira, which is an old estate castle, if you will, with these beautiful gardens and a huge estate of all of these gardens, these hidden caves. You have to go down into a caving system. And the only way to get out is by walking over stepping stones over a pond by a waterfall. It is absolutely gorgeous. Like if Greek gods had an orgy, it would probably be in this garden. That’s kind of the vibe of it. Magical. 

I was exploring this. And I had spent a long time that day exploring the garden. I was really feeling it. It was stunning. I was looking at everything with a ton of pleasure and just had this sense of awe and delight and joy already. 

And I was walking in a caving system, and there’s no light down there except your cell phones. There was no one else around me. And this caving system opened up into this beautiful underground pond. And I was just standing there absorbing the beauty of it. And I realized that I was kind of turned on. 

And so I got curious about that. And I realized that there was something about this cave and experiencing the pleasure that I had been experiencing all day exploring it. I felt very present in my body. I felt very relaxed. I felt a sense of awe. And I started realizing that I wanted to do some self pleasuring in this cave system in this gorgeous garden. So I let myself explore that. 

I gave myself permission to be turned on by this thing that I think the average person maybe wouldn’t think of being turned on by, which is my presence in this beautiful, natural environment. So giving myself permission to explore that pleasure for its own sake and to let my body fully experience that pleasure for its own sake with this little bit of taboo, right?

It wasn’t in public. There was no one around me. But someone could walk upon me; there’s that little bit of excitement there. But me in this cave had a great time. It really turned me on to this idea of how can we mindfully be in our bodies and experience pleasure for its own sake. And the sense of joy and awe at our surroundings at the context and also at our own bodies in a new way.

August:  

Yes, oh, that’s so powerful, so powerful. And how did this experience impact you moving forward?

Rae:  

Well, at this point I was already a sex therapist and doing a version of the work that I’m doing today. But I think having this experience and maybe not an epiphany but a very solid reminder of what I already knew was true. It pushed me to develop a model for working specifically with trans and non-binary folks, but pretty applicable to anybody who’s exploring their gender, that included pleasure and mindfulness in our bodies, as a core tenet of what I was teaching and what I was doing.

August:  

What a contrast to what you were learning growing up. I imagine that growing up it wasn’t just sexual pleasure that was prohibitive. It feels like there’s a lot of barriers around pleasure in general in those communities and then to be really on the opposite end of that. How did that feel?

Rae:  

It felt amazing. And you’re right. What I do today and the person that I am today is pretty much opposite of how I grew up. And I think in some ways being that isolated. And you’re right, it was very puritanical pleasure period. It was not something that was talked about. And it really wasn’t something that was encouraged. 

It made me really curious, when I got out of that, at how much pleasure was possible. And how could I help other people, who had similar experiences as me, to really embrace the full amount of pleasure, sexual and relational satisfaction that was possible for them?

August (narration):

Rae talks a lot about the importance of unlocking your erotic mind, a concept that stems for Emily Nagoski’s book, Come as You Are.

Rae:

We are all in systems that do not necessarily support our own pleasure and our own eroticism. And this goes for everybody but especially folks who have intersecting marginalized identities. 

When you live your days feeling like you are dealing with so much in the world, right? All of these systems that are impacting your day-to-day lived experience like microaggressions, like racism, like transphobia, like homophobia, like ableism, and cognitively having to deal with the fact that you have barriers generally in your life that maybe folks who do not hold those marginalized identities do, that impacts our ability to tap into pleasure. 

So unlocking your erotic mind is about understanding what are the blocks that you might have in your own life. Emily Nagoski talks about this as your brakes. So what is hitting the brakes when it comes to sexual pleasure? And then what is hitting the gas. 

And what Emily talks about in Come As You Are is that we can’t put our foot on the gas without taking our foot off the brake. Otherwise, it’s like a car that is just spinning in place. We’re not really going to get very far or it’s going to be a struggle if you’re trying to push the brake and the accelerator at the same time. So unlocking erotic mind is about, how do we take our foot off of the brakes? 

August (narration):

So many factors can serve as brakes, Rae said, especially if you’re part of the population they work with, trans and non-binary folks.

Rae:

It might be things like gender dysphoria, like making assumptions about the quote unquote “right way to have sex,” being stuck in this performance mindset of sex versus a pleasure. 

August (narration):

And many “brakes” can impact just about anyone. 

Rae:

It might be things like trauma or stress. If you have stress in the rest of your life, that’s a big killer of libido. 

I think one of the places that people get stuck the most is in this performance mindset and this orgasm focus mindset. And that generally isn’t a helpful frame. 

August (narration):

If we’re always trying to perform sex well, Rae said, we’re pretty focused on things like, “What is my partner thinking about me?” “Are they having fun [or] experiencing enough pleasure?” “Am I sexy enough?” 

Rae:

And it’s important to focus on a partner when we’re having sex. Absolutely. But I tell people to split that focus into a 50-50 attention. So 50% of your attention should be on your body and your own pleasure. 

So I don’t know about you, but I can tell when someone is having fun while I am receiving pleasure and that is a turn-on for me. I can also tell, usually, if someone is stuck in their head when I am receiving pleasure and that isn’t a turn-on for me. So people think that by focusing completely on their partner, they’re doing the partner a favor when in reality they’re not. 

If you can take 50% of the attention that’s on your partner and notice how your hand feels going over their body. Notice how your breathing has changed. Notice how their body feels to your skin, which is your biggest sex organ. By taking the time to focus on that pleasure for yourself, you are co-creating a more pleasurable experience where neither person has to be stuck in their head about, “Is my partner having fun?” or “What is my partner thinking about me?” 

August (narration):

Rae also speaks a lot about breaking down the ways our ideas about gender influence how sex should be. The concept goes like this:

Rae:  

We get stuck in this idea of masculine and feminine energy in the bedroom or certain sex acts are for people with certain body parts. And I talk about queering that up. And what I mean by queering that up is simply to question what are the boxes that we have created for ourselves? And are they actually helpful to us or are they limiting to us? 

August (narration):

If we’re trying to get to know ourselves intimately, Rae said, we have to unlearn or at least question the ways we may be engaging in sex and relationships based on societal messages about what it means to be a man or woman, or masculline or feminine. Instead, we can ask ourselves: What actually feels good for me? 

Rae:

And within that, knowing that there is no such thing as feminine or masculine energy. So we can get a lot more specific. 

Instead of using placeholders of feminine and masculine, let’s just say what we mean. Are we talking about dominant and submissive energy? Are we talking about soft and slow energy, versus hard and fast? And those are not gendered concepts. 

For example, I’ve worked with a number of transfeminine clients who have an assumption that because they are transfeminine they need to be submissive, they need to be a bottom, they need to engage in certain sex acts. And that’s not true, right? 

You can be a an amazing badass, high powered femme person who is a super top. You can use body parts that you have or use toys and dildos to be a penetrating partner. And that says nothing about your gender identity or your role in the bedroom.

August: 

It really bothers me how much information there is, well-intended advice, but around being more feminine or masculine in the bedroom, and I’ve even heard—I’m curious what you think about this—people will talk about their feminine side and their masculine side. And that’s never really sat well with me. 

Like one side of their brain is feminine, one side of their brain is masculine. One part of their body, a part of the clitoris, I’ve heard talked about in like, “this is the more feminine quadrant,” or whatever. 

Rae: 

What???

August: 

Yeah, I heard that recently. My brain almost exploded. [mutual laughter] 

Rae:  

Sorry, I can’t help myself. I’m just laughing at that. What???

August:  

Yeah. And this is somebody who works in sex and relationships. And I just… yeah. [chuckles]

Rae  

Wow! Okay. Well, first of all I think you can probably tell from my hysterical laughing that I don’t think that there are parts of the clitoris that are more feminine or masculine. In fact, the clitoris and the penis all came from analogous tissue in the womb, meaning it is the same tissue. It just develops differently and different people. 

I think what’s really interesting to me about your question is that we use gender as a shorthand. And it’s a little bit lazy, I think. So we’re not saying what we actually mean. You know, like I just said with the the masculine and feminine energy, do we mean dominant? Do we mean competitive? Do we mean nurturing energy or I should say collaborative or nurturing energy. 

All of those things can be a part of femininity and masculinity. No one is saying that you can’t be masculine and nurturing at the same time. That’s ridiculous. But yet, we’ve used that as a shorthand in a way that I think reinforces really harmful gender stereotypes and roles and expectations.

August (narration):

I love those ideas so much. I’ve probably mentioned this here before, but “femine versus masculine energy” terminology is one of my biggest pet peeves—and I’m sure I’ll think of Rae and what they shared when such comments come up. 

Another way to get more in touch with your sexuality and desires, your intimate self as Rae put it, is to set aside some private time for relaxing sensual pleasure.

Rae: 

I love a sexy bath or a mindful bath or shower, if you like showers instead. The reason I like this is because sometimes when we’re talking about exploring our bodies, going straight to exploration of genital areas or erogenous zones can feel like a lot. Getting naked in the bedroom, shutting the door, locking the door. It can feel like a thing, which can be a little bit intimidating to folks. So I like to start a step or two back from that and just focus on pleasure. 

So I tell people to hop in the bath, grab some coconut oil. Throw it in the bath or if you’re in the shower, get it in your hand and just start massaging that oil onto your body and noticing how it feels. 

August (narration):

Rae suggests focusing on three things, inspired by the sensate focus studies conducted by researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson: temperature, texture and pressure.

Rae:

So are you noticing parts of your body that are warmer or cooler than the other parts? Are there parts of your body the way the texture is different? Do your elbows feel different than, say, your stomach? What can you notice about that? 

And as you’re touching your body, try different amounts of pressure. What does it feel like if your fingers run lightly over your skin versus a deeper massage? And just practice experiencing all of that with your five senses, right? 

How does it smell in the bathroom? What are you looking at? What does it feel like? And expanding that slowly to exploring more erogenous parts of your body, whether that be your chest or, you know, different people have different erogenous zones or your genitals. It’s a spirit of curiosity. 

[guitar strum]

August:

Curiosity and exploration are so important for connecting with our sexuality. If you want to bring some fun products into that mindful bath, here are a few finds from The Pleasure Chest:

For your reading pleasure, check out Steambath Sweaty Gay Erotica, edited by Shane Allison. It features steamy encounters in a bathhouse…the description calls it “a rollicking romp of pretty boys and dashing daddies doing it.” 

For some sex toy fun, consider one of their many water-proof vibrators, such as the Womanizer Premium or the Fun Factory Fun Daze. The Sea Grape Sexy Travel Kit sounds tantalizing, too. It comes with a massage candle, a soothing bath soak, sensual massage oil and a hot and heavy honey dust tickler. 

Find these goodies and much more at thepleasurechest.com or click the link in the show notes. To save $5, sign up for their email list. Again that’s The Pleasure Chest at thepleasurechest.com.

[guitar strum]

August (narration):

As you’re getting in touch with your body, Rae also recommends applying an idea from the book, Trans Sex: Clinical Approaches to Trans Sexualities and Erotic Embodiments, by their friend Lucie Fielding.

Rae:

She talks about imaginal failures, which is to say, how can we explore our bodies from a Buddhist kind of new mind or beginner’s mind? How can we explore it without making assumptions about how things are supposed to feel? How can we take maybe typical ways that we explore our bodies or our genitals and switch it up and just be curious about what feels good?

[encouraging, acoustic music]

August (narration): 

Rae wanted to leave us all with a reminder that gender exploration and transition is not just for trans and nonbinary folks.

Rae: 

Thinking about gender exploration is something for everyone, because we all have these roles and assumptions about how we are supposed to show up in the world based on these constructions of gender. 

And I believe that we are all going to be able to walk around as more authentic, lit up human beings when we are able to intentionally engage with Am I expressing my gender in a way that feels good, regardless of what society says that should look like?

August (narration):

Rae teaches a lot about this through GenderFck, an online coaching program they created for trans and non-binary folks who want to explore and transition their gender with less suffering and more ease. It provides an alternative to the common narrative about gender transition being this horrible, anxiety-ridden, overwhelming time, where suffering is at the core, they said – a de facto part of the experience. 

Rae:

I wasn’t seeing a lot of literature around well, what about the great parts of being trans and exploring your gender? What about pleasure? And how do we help support both clients and the general trans and non-binary population in having gender exploration be something that is celebrated both personally and systemically? 

So my answer to that was the creation of the gender freedom model, which is a model of key concepts and skills to focus on during gender transition to make the journey feel better every step of the way. And one core piece of that is pleasure and with the subtitle of intimate justice, which is this idea that pleasure is not equitable.

That how we expect to experience pleasure and satisfaction in our lives is mitigated by intersectional identities. So folks who are marginalized tend to expect less sexual and relational satisfaction. And they also because they expect less, they tend to imagine that less is possible for them. 

So in the gender freedom model that the GenderFck, the club, is based on, it talks a lot about, how do we break that down? So how do we bring more pleasure equity into our individual lives and into the world systemically. 

And my answer to that is unlocking the barriers, like we talked about earlier. 

It is getting in touch with your body even if you don’t love every aspect of your body. We hear a lot about body positivity, but I really teach body neutrality because we’re not always going to love every single inch of our body every single day. But we can be kind to our bodies and show love to them, even if we don’t love every single part of them every moment. 

So teaching people that, teaching people how to use mindfulness and sensuality to get back in touch with your body, even if you’re experiencing, say, gender dysphoria, or something like that. And also this piece that we just talked about around queering it up. How can we break down assumptions and ideas about what we should do in the bedroom to actually find what feels authentic to us?

[acoustic chord riff]

August (narration):

Learn more about Rae McDaniel at genderfck.club (that’s gender f-c-k) or click the link in the show notes, where you can also find ally resources. 

If you’re enjoying Girl Boner Radio, you can support it and get fun extras by joining my community at patreon.com/girlboner. You can also show support with a rating and review in the iTunes stores or your Apple Podcast app.

Thanks so much for listening and have a beautiful, Girl Boner embracing week.