Intimacy coach Lee Noto didn’t realize she’d been longing for surrender until a crush turned into far more. Author Liz Asch fell away from her queer expression, then gradually reclaimed it. And that growth led to more than squirting. Yes, this week’s Girl Boner Radio episode is a juicy one.
Stream it on Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio or below! Or read on for a lightly edited transcript.
“Kinky Surrender, Queer Reclamation and Squirting”
a lightly edited Girl Boner Radio transcript
August (narration):
Hey there, awesome listener. Before we start the show today, I have some special news to share. My latest book, co-authored by sex therapist Jamila M. Dawson, released yesterday.
It’s called With Pleasure: Managing Trauma Triggers for More Vibrant Sex and Relationships, and you can find it most anywhere books are sold. It’s full of compelling true stories, writing prompts, grounding exercises and practical information that can help you better thrive through difficult times.
If you listened to last week’s episode, you know that it has been quite a journey for us, from book idea to release, and I could not be more thrilled to share this news and the book with you all.
To order it, search for WITH PLEASURE at your favorite bookseller, or find direct links down in the show notes. Alright, let’s dive in.
[upbeat/pop intro music…]
August (narration):
Have you ever experienced something you had been longing for without fully realizing you’d been desiring it? That’s exactly what happened for intimacy coach Lee Noto.
Lee was living in New York City when she reached what she described as a “really pivotal point in [her] journey,” professionally, sexually and emotionally.
Lee:
I had been an entrepreneur for about five years at this point. And I was just this New York City go-getter, ambitious woman who loved casually dating, loved having control in the upper hand, would never let a guy spend the night at my house and would never spend the night at a guy’s house, loved flirting, and really, really longed for this deep sense of surrender that in my heart I knew I wanted but intellectually seemed like the death of me.
August (narration):
Meanwhile, she had been thinking about someone in particular.
Lee:
I had met this man who totally friendzoned me for like four months.
August (narration):
They met at a public speaking workshop that they had each received free tickets to. She called it a “divine meet cute.”
Lee:
And I was not looking for love or really anything at this time but happened to cross his path.
And the funny thing is, the day I met him I told him, “I think you’re the man I’ve been asking for.” And I meant that in a professional context because the kind of conversation that we found ourselves in led me to believe that he was the man I was asking for from the universe, that would be the man that I lead intimacy work with.
August (narration):
Lee was already an intimacy coach at the time, and she had been thinking about bringing in a male perspective to round out her work, make it feel more “complete.”
Lee:
So about two months through our friendship, when he was giving no signs of any sexual energy or anything other than platonic friendship, I remember being on a call with my mom who lived vicarious through me and my New York City dating life. And I said, “Mom, I really think I like this guy. I know I’ve been telling you about the other dates I’ve been going on but I think there’s something special about this guy.”
And I started to become aware of a desire for something more but a confusion, because there wasn’t that typical sexual charge that I had with other men where I would see them and just want to jump their bones. There was something much slower and steadier about our dynamic.
And that confused me because I was like, Is there a spark here? Do I want to kiss him? Do I not? Are we friends? I have no idea.
August (narration):
She said it felt as though he was calling her entire identity into question, an existential dilemma. Partly because,
Lee:
I longed to be touched and held by him. And this confused me also, because typically, I could say to a man, “Ravish me. Take me. Like, let’s go do unspeakable things in that back alley.” There was just such a different dynamic here. So I was the one making the moves and doing some of the courting, which was interesting for me. And I was the one asking him out and initiating plans.
But at that point, I was like, You know what? I’m gonna see this through to the end. And if it’s meant to be something great, I will know that I had done my best. And if it’s not, that’s fine, too. But there’s no way I’m letting this one get away. I’m going to tell him how I feel. I’m going to tell him what I want.
As I started becoming aware of my feelings for him, I invited him on a trip with some of my friends to Maine. We worked with some psychedelic substances on that trip, and I was completely open. And I approached him by the fire pit, walked up to him, after having given myself a pep talk. And I said, “Hey, I just want you to know that I’m low-key in love with you.” It had to be low-key because obviously, if it were too forward I would blow my cover. So low-key: “I’m low-key in love with you.” And he said, “Thank you for sharing that.” And that was it.
August (narration):
If that had been a scene in a rom com or sitcom, she would have felt completely crestfallen. “Thank you for sharing that” would equal rejection. But this was Lee’s reality and she thought his response was great.
Lee:
Because the pep talk I gave myself was, Lee do not be worried or in expectation of how he’s going to respond. This is for you. This is in service to your expression, whatever he says, fine. He said thank you. I felt complete.
August (narration):
Little did she know that that moment would start to shift things from platonic to romantic after all.
Lee:
After that weekend—the friend group that went to Maine—we went to Dim Sum in Chinatown the next day, and I knew that he was about to depart on a 10 day trip to Turkey, spiritual quest. And I was like, You know what? I want to see him before he goes; he’s going to be gone for 10 days. I could tell he wasn’t going to initiate. So I said, “Hey, I’d love to see you before you go to Turkey. Let’s hang out.” He said, “Great. Why don’t you come over on Friday. I’ll make you dinner.” I was like, oh my god. Okay, this is a date. Like, this is totally a date.
And so I dressed up, I put makeup on, I showed up to the date, and I said to myself, Lee, have no expectation as to how this is going to turn out. You could very well have dinner and go home, as you could have dinner and this progress into something sexual and romantic. So just be open to anything.
And I was, and throughout dinner, I felt confused. I was like, do I want to kiss him? Or do I not? Is he a friend? Is he more than a friend? Is he a colleague?
August (narration):
Soon, she had her answer.
Lee:
As dinner progressed, we made our way out onto his fire escape, which is very idyllic-New York. We smoked a little joint together. And then we had the most drawn out, sensual, passionate, spine-tingling kiss that I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. He took his fingers and just gently grazed them across my face. And I knew it in that moment. I’m like, Okay, here we go.
The way he spaced it out was as if there was not a rush in the world. And I couldn’t do anything. If I tried to speed it up, to deflect, he held me there with such energetic presence that it just like shattered me in the best way. And that eventually led to this heart-opening kiss that I will never forget. It was incredible.
August (narration):
Lee told me that that first date was the start of a surrender she didn’t even realize she was participating in, the kind she had been longing for.
And when he returned from Turkey a few weeks later, she delved deeper into that surrender, during an evening of kinky BDSM play. It started with an invitation.
Lee:
I remember receiving a text from him: “Come over wearing a dress and do not wear panties or a bra.” And I was like, Oh. My. God. Like, YES.
August (narration):
She immediately scrambled to put herself together and get to his place as quickly as possible. She followed his directions precisely–something she was not used to doing. Normally she was the one directing.
Lee:
And so I showed up at his apartment. As soon as he opened the door, he put a blindfold on me. Like in the doorway. I could not have stepped in to know what was going to happen. Yet what I will say is because we had cultivated such a deep relationship in the months prior I felt completely emotionally and psychologically safe to surrender. I had no question in my mind that evening, as I was progressing through it, that anything was going to be beyond my boundary.
He took me into the apartment; he hoisted me up on the counter. And I was sitting on the counter. And with no warning, he was completely silent. He had tools and implements, feathers and different sensation tools. And he would just come around and touch a different part of my body. Sometimes it would be my cheek. Sometimes there would be a squeeze on my leg or my inner thigh. I didn’t know what was coming next. He was silent. There was no – There were no words. There was just anticipating and dripping with pleasure and mystery about what was going to come next.
And so I was just like following the trail without knowing what was going to appear, what I might feel, emotionally, physically. And after some time, he picked me up off the counter, and he wrapped his arms around me. And he brought me into the living room. And he commanded me to get on my knees. And I was like, Oh, my god, yes! I absolutely will! Tell me to do anything. I will do it. That was just what I was feeling. And he handcuffed me. And he gave me these different commands.
The way I felt in my body, I think is even more important than the things that were happening because he beckoned me. And I followed. There was this insatiable desire to know what was next in a way that I had never experienced that before. Because in this situation, I had no control. And there was something that was simultaneously new and scary about that, and something that was titillating. And just, it felt like I was living for the first time.
And then he took me and he positioned me on the couch on all fours. And he had this beautiful technique with this leather cat o’ nine tails toy, I could hear it snapping in the background. So there was this auditory anticipation of Oh, my god. Okay, that’s going to hit my skin. And he did it ever so gently, just like warming up the area, letting my ass get a sense for a light touch and then a bit of a heavier touch.
And what I later found out about his perspective in all of this was he said, “I was carefully calibrating to and tracking your nervous system the entire time.”
August (narration):
A deep level of presence, she said, of attention, love and care about her experience –
Lee:
– that I’ve never in my life experienced before. And I’m getting teary as I say it. Because while this was certainly pleasurable for him, he made sure that the number one priority was that this was pleasurable for me and that I could gain something out of this experiential, you know, extravaganza about what it feels like to surrender. And how powerful that is. In fact, how powerful it is to surrender instead of to control all the time.
And so he crafted this experience from start to finish with my needs and my pleasure in mind. And as it turns out, it also served his pleasure. And there was something that was so beautifully romantic and erotic and very precise. The word I want to use is gushing. Like I was just gushing, emotionally, spiritually and sexually for him.
August (narration):
That experience was a lot more than a fun date for Lee. It really shifted things not only around sex for her, but in her life.
Lee:
This idea of surrender, this embodiment of surrender, has given me access to the deepest parts of myself that I have longed to know and to be intimate with for my entire life.
I’ve always known that there was something that I couldn’t put my finger on that I wanted to feel. I could feel it when I would write erotic poetry that there was this huge energy that couldn’t be contained.
And I thought for many years that I would satisfy my appetite for that energy by controlling, by being the dominant energy, by being the one who gives commands and certainly that satisfies me in some way. And the way that I have really come to satiate that part of me is through surrender. And I’m brought to such a beautiful spiritual connection that I have with myself and with my sexuality, through surrender as the gateway to that.
The embodiment of that concept has shown up and supported me in my work, in my business, in teaching other women how to do this in a way that feels authentic and safe for them. In my relationship with my family, my friends, money, my partner. This idea of surrender has been completely reframed in my mind and has allowed me to live such a potent, powerful and beautiful life. It’s changed my whole life.
August (narration):
If you want to start dipping into surrender yourself, in helpful ways, Lee suggests starting with self-compassion.
Lee:
At the foundational level, if we can cultivate a sense of deep compassion for ourselves and where we’re at, not trying to force surrender or opening, then we can meet ourselves where we are. And when we’re able to do that naturally, we feel more prone to open. So when we think of even like the feminine or a blossoming flower, a flower doesn’t get forced to open. We cannot rush a flower’s blooming; the flower will open when it’s ready. And as onlookers of the flower’s beauty, we wait.
And I think surrender is, can work in a similar way when we’re working with surrender early on, is that there are very intelligent mechanisms in our system in our body and in our psyches that keep us from surrendering. So to honor and have compassion for the mechanisms that have kept us safe and protected, is a huge thing to pay reverence to, because they work for our survival. Have compassion, and create awareness around the things that keep you from surrender.
The other thing I would say is surrender can happen with a sense of presence, a sense of awareness and a sense of slowness. So certainly we can rush surrender by maybe jumping out of a plane and going for it. And if that’s not feeling like the pace for us, being willing to slow things down, to stretch things out, with the speed at which our body and our heart moves, because it’s typically much slower than the speed at which our mind moves.
August (narration):
Lee told me that one of her biggest breakthroughs around surrender was realizing that being ambitious or powerful, and embracing surrender? They’re not mutually exclusive.
Lee:
Both can coexist and in fact, because I’ve learned how to create my life to include both, I feel happier now than I ever have before.
[encouraging, acoustic music]
August (narration):
The thing Lee is most excited about now is an offering that she’s releasing with her partner, the man who created that deeply erotic experience with her. It’s called Become the High Priestess.
She described it as a journey for high-achieving women who want to create conscious partnership, where they can learn how to open their hearts and surrender to themselves, with the overall intention of attracting the right partner and creating an intentional partnership.
Learn more at becomethehighpriestess.com. You can also follow her work and musings she shares about her personal life by following @leenoto_ on Instagram.
[acoustic chord riff]
To surrender to your own kinky desires in fun ways, head to thepleasurechest.com to start shopping. They’re currently celebrating their 50 year birthday with free shipping on U.S. purchases of $50 or more. Click “Kink” in the menu bar at the top of the site to explore two curated collections: Awaken Your Senses and Kinky Couples. Again that’s The Pleasure Chest at thepleasurechest.com.
[acoustic chord riff]
Writer and acupuncturist Liz Asch spoke spoke with me about her experience growing up as a queer kid, and a relationship she’s in now that involves a whole lot of authenticity and, yes, squirting—partly because of that realness.
Liz:
I was a really painfully modest kid. I wasn’t interested in sex as a kid or a teen. I grew up in the American South in the 1980s and 90s where Sex Ed was abstinence only and there were no queer role models. I was queer but I didn’t know it as a kid. I didn’t even know that women could be gay. So I think a lot of that informed my sexuality just because I witnessed so much heteronormativity in sex, and I was just uninterested in that.
August (narration):
That all changed when she left her hometown in her late teens.
Liz:
So I got to college and I was suddenly really free to just be myself and be artistic and creative and meet new people and just kind of reinvent myself. And I went to college, a few hours outside of New York, and it was a really queer welcoming space. And it was just so wonderful to just explore, you know?
First I started going to like raves and making out with, you know, anyone that was a friend. [chuckles] I had this huge crush on a girl and kind of the light bulb clicked on.
You know, I went back home for winter break. And my best friends were like “duh” [laughs]. My gay best friend, he knew I was a lesbian but he never pushed it.
So I came out in college, and I mostly dated women. I would sometimes date men. I’ve always been attracted to like femimen or men who are perceived as gay or bisexual. I tend to like more masculine women and more feminine men. So it took me a while to sort of figure all that out and find the language for it.
August (narration):
During her mid-20s she started going through what she considers a quarter-life crisis.
Liz:
It was after September 11. I’d been dating a woman, it was not a healthy relationship. We broke up. I had a huge death in my life. The painter who I worked as an assistant for passed away, and I was so shook by September 11, because I was living in New York at the time and struggling with anxiety and depression. It was just a really hard time.
In any event, the way that my best friend phrased it at the time was he went away for the summer with his boyfriend. And when he left, I was a lesbian artist with bleach blonde hair in thrift store clothes. And when he came back at the end of the summer, I had brown hair, I was wearing clothes that I let my mom buy me at Banana Republic, I was dating a man and I enrolled in medical school. He was like, “What happened?” [chuckles]
August (narration):
A lot had happened.
Liz:
Well, first I randomly on the subway ran into an old friend who ended up becoming my husband and my son’s father, which I would never have predicted. But his comfort and familiarity felt so good. We ended up starting to date. And I just was in such an unstable time in my life, I really wanted a career where I could help people feel better.
August (narration):
So she enrolled in holistic, Chinese medical school in New York.
Liz:
So it was a really big time of transitions. And I was in that partnership for a number of years. I felt like I had to compartmentalize myself or sort of kill off my queerness while I was in this monogamous relationship with a man, even though internally I really didn’t, but in a way I did, you know? It was some of each. And I knew that going into the partnership, and I just pushed it aside because that was all I could do at the time.
I told myself, This is a sacrifice I’m making. And it’s okay because I’m an artist, and I’m going to make art and that’s going to scratch that itch.
August (narration):
Only, it didn’t. For Liz, making art “didn’t scratch the itch of being a sexually embodied, liberated creature.”
Liz:
And so I had to find my way back to both because I also – I had given up art while I was in – Chinese medicine school’s extremely consuming and challenging and science focused, and I wasn’t writing or painting when I was in school or in the early years of my practice, and I also had a child during that time.
So all of those things together inhibit, you know, alone time and creative flow and all that stuff and being in a monogamous relationship, since I agreed to that, I couldn’t really express my queerness, you know, with other people. I did still do things like go to Pride and I identified as queer but I felt misread as straight all the time.
August (narration):
That led Liz to go through a bit of an identity crisis, she said, as she lost touch with her sexuality. When that relationship ended, she started to really reclaim it.
Liz:
I just started really, I guess, taking an interest in my sexuality, again. I’d had it sort of locked away for so long. And dating women again, experimenting with kink, just really getting interested in sex and sexuality as a big part of just letting myself be free again, like I’d felt that first year in college. I’d felt so free, and I needed to find that freedom again. And now I’m happy to say I live with that freedom in a pretty daily way.
August (narration):
She said that freedom was a long time coming. And dating apps have played a role, allowing her to connect with people and start dating. They also led her to the relationship she’s in now, and, as she put it, a whole lot of messing up of the bed. It started last year, after her roughest breakup.
Liz:
And I wasn’t ready for a new relationship.
August (narration):
She doesn’t even know what made her open an app that day. It was the Lex app—a queer app based on old-timey personal ads in the newspaper. Lex is short for lexicon, and they promote the idea of “text first, selfies second.”
Liz:
So I opened Lex and just saw this ad. It had just been posted. It was just this really cute ad. And it was something about like “nutritious but seeks thirsty femme or hungry femme” or something like that. It was cute. And it links to the person’s Instagram. So I went to her Instagram, and I was like, Oh, wow! She’s really cute.
August (narration):
So Liz responded to the ad, and shortly after they set up a date. They were both freshly out of relationships.
Liz:
I think we both had the sort of pandemic woes and were feeling isolated. And we were just both kind of looking for a flirtation. And so it started that way. And then it turned into like COVID consent talk and then sex consent talk and phone dates and first dates and we just kind of slowly embarked on this relationship, and now it’s been about eight months or so. And we’re really happy together.
So, who knows? We’re figuring it out as we go along. But it’s a really lovely connection with a lot of serendipity.
August (narration):
Those happy happenings along the way have definitely made their way into the bedroom. In fact, when the two were flirting back and forth through the app initially, they realized that they shared something steamy in common. Getting there took some strategy on Liz’s part.
Liz:
The first message I wrote her, she didn’t respond to. And I was like, Hmm. I really want to meet her. She’s really cute. How can I get her attention?
So I made some bold statements. She had posted an ad. It was kind of a pun on that, “how much wood could a woodchuck chuck” but she said something about “how much cum could a woman come?”
And so I wrote something kind of brassy back, like boasting about how much I could come. And she wrote back, something kind of boastful, too, and then she said, “Sounds like we could really mess up a bed.” And we do. [laughs] We really do. There’s a lot of laundry.
When you’re partnered with a woman who squirts and you squirt, there’s just a lot of strategies that don’t actually get put into place properly in the heat of the moment and then, just a lot of laundry.
August (narration):
Squirting isn’t just this cool thing that happens during sex for Liz. She’s pretty passionate about it. She told me she loves bringing light to it.
Liz:
I have strong feelings and opinions about it that are kind of all over the place. I don’t know if there’s an organized way to say it. So I’ll just see what happens.
But for me, personally, squirting isn’t just a physiological thing. I really think it’s an emotional and empowerment thing, just from my own experience. I had very fulfilling and stimulating sex for all of my 20s and into my 30s, and I didn’t squirt until my mid 30s. And then once I started, it was out of control.
I just like talking about it because I like demystifying it, and I like normalizing it because there’s not a lot of—well, now there’s more information—but there’s a lot of bad information about it, too, because people don’t understand it. And, you know, anytime there’s like some sort of sexual function that some people have, and some people don’t, it’s bound to get weird.
So I don’t think that I, for me, personally—I can only speak for myself—that I could have opened up, energetically in my pelvis and in my heart and in the connection between the two, until I really owned who I was and felt really confident in my sexuality. For me what came of that, and healing a lot of old wounds, squirting was what happened, like a heightened sexual experience.
So some people just come through their clit, some people come through the G spot, you know, which is typically where the squirting comes in but once the wishbone of the G-spot and the clit is activated, then anything can cause squirting. It doesn’t have to be rubbing against that little spot in the vaginal canal. Like if I’m really turned on, that whole mechanism is really engorged and hot and turned on, even a kiss could make me flood.
For me, it’s very much emotional. If I’m shut down emotionally, I’m never going to do it. So I think there’s a real connection between the heart and the pelvis. I mean, you know, I’m an acupuncturist so I talk about the body a lot, but that’s how it seems to me.
August (narration):
Writing has also played a huge role in Liz’s sexual self-discovery journey. And it’s become far more than a hobby or private self expression. I’m delighted that Liz Asch had a book release yesterday, too, called Your Salt on My Lips. The collection of mostly queer, taboo-busting literary erotica aims to overcome societal misconceptions about sexuality through embodied, inclusive stories.
Liz:
As part of my personal journey, I started writing these erotic stories. It was an exercise for myself to try to break the taboos that I felt were still repressing me from growing up in our very moralistic, sexually suppressive society.
I started off by challenging myself like, Could I write a story about this? Could I write a story about that? And then I started publishing them under a pseudonym, and that was really exciting because it felt like this subversive thing I was doing, publishing these stories. So over time, I just would write new stories and just was kind of collecting them.
And then, during the pandemic, it became a really fun project to work on. And I was like, I really want this to be a book. Let me just work on it and see if I can get it to the point where it’s a book. And the stories, at that point, were taking on a really different tone. They were becoming much more about embodiment and healing and the fantasy of – I mean, there’s a lot of down and dirty sex in this book – the fantasy isn’t just how can you have really raunchy sex. It’s also how can I make these characters be really eloquent in the way they talk about consent and be really radical with how much confidence they have about being in their naked body and connecting it to someone else’s naked body.
So it became much more like the fantasy is in being so empowered and clear and so okay with your desires and so persistent with what you want and being able to articulate it.
August (narration):
She told me about an example, a story series in the book, involving a woman who surprises herself by entering a polyamory foursome. She starts dating one of the people in the foursome. She communicates her desires and they end up having elicit public sex at a pool hall with the door closed.
Liz:
And so all of these characters are really embodied… They’re still sometimes awkward or self-doubting but it’s basically like 35 stories—some of them are so tiny we call them tableaus because they’re just really short—of various acts of sex, lust, longing, love. It’s just kind of a smorgasbord of sex stories.
[acoustic chord riff]
August (narration):
Learn more about Liz Asch at lizasch.com, and order Your Salt on My Lips in ebook form through the link in the show notes. The paperback will follow this winter.
If you’re enjoying Girl Boner Radio, I’d love it if you would post a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes and tell your friends about it. To support the show and get fun extras, including bonus segments, Ask Me Anything and more, join my community at patreon.com/girlboner.
[upbeat outro music begins then fades out gradually] Thanks so much for listening and have a beautiful, Girl Boner-embracing week.
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