Men are just programmed to hide the things they think will make them look weak and vulnerable to the rest of the world. Things like being present with his emotions, accepting his feminine energy and a conscious relationship with sexuality. Remember what it was like to lose your virginity and how you felt the lack of knowledge about sex? Remember that time when you finally felt like you were the man who knows everything there is to know about being in bed with a woman, but you still felt there was this disconnection? You try to find yourself, and you eventually do. But then you finally meet the girl that will make you feel what love truly is. And then your relationship with your sexuality turns a new page where the connection and the love is there. One man shares his journey and relationship with his sexuality.
I’m very excited to be here as always, sharing with you my life and my experiences. This one is about the concept of my sexuality, my history, where I’m at personally now, what I’ve seen, and what’s happening. It was a challenging show to say yes to in my mind. It was a challenging show to prep for but now that it’s done, I am excited to present it to you. I am hoping that it will create some clarity, some possibility. For all those people out there who are not in love with their own sexuality, who have not engaged in a way they want to, hopefully this will give you some reality and some relief.
We’re going to talk about something that’s really interesting to me at the moment in my life around my sexuality. The first thing I want to admit is I want to hide this conversation from you, from myself, from Morgan on some level, and to the world. There is just this feeling of I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to have this conversation. That’s what we do the show on. That is the concept to the show. That is the freaking purpose of the show, to take those things that we don’t feel comfortable sharing about and broadcasting it. I’m willing to do it to the world. More and more people are going to know my secrets. All those things that you think you have to hide from the world are the things that are keeping you prisoner. My upcoming book, unHIDDEN, the definition is to bring what’s inside out.
I figured if I’m going to be a true teacher, a true educator, someone who’s going to be authentic, I got to bring it all. Those little things I don’t want to talk about, those are the exact things I should be chatting about. This is about my sexuality. I’ve talked about this on different shows and different videos. I’m just going to do a brief recap of my relationship to sexuality. I was a normal kid, born in the ‘70s and ‘80s, playboy’s enticement towards women or girl’s excitement, no information, no knowledge, no sex education, whatsoever. I lost my virginity the day before my nineteenth birthday, I went to Disneyland. Then at 19 to 24, it was very much lack of knowledge. I was in college. I was in grad school. I was fumbling around, not knowing what I was doing, had a girlfriend, didn’t know how to communicate. We never had sex. She was a virgin when we left the relationship because I had no skills.
All those things that you think you have to hide from the world are the things that are keeping you prisoner. Click To TweetMet my first wife, Carol, when I was 23. We got together when I was 24. From 24 to 28, I was pretty much straight-laced and normal and vanilla, as it came in terms of sexuality. I went to Birmingham at 28 and everything really shifted. From 28 to 33, I had exploration. I would call it explosion of exploration of just total insanity in terms of alternative relationships and sexuality, ecstasy, tripping, jealousy. It was a community college level education on exploration without a lot of guidelines. It was pretty much insane. From 34 to 44, I was involved in OneTaste and that’s a whole story in itself. Think about everything on your bucket list and I’d probably tried it. Think about everything you thought you never want to do, I’d probably tried it. I lived in a warehouse, ran a big sexual commune, had multiple partners, threesomes, foursomes, moresomes.
Looking back now with the advantage of hindsight, I don’t know if I was really connected to my sexuality during it, which is really interesting and embarrassing on some level to run an organization around sexuality to conscious sexuality. I was right in the middle of it and I don’t know if I was overwhelmed. I don’t know if it was too much. I don’t know if I was building facades to protect myself. In my hindsight, in my memory, when I look at it, there was a sense of disconnection of my sexuality. I didn’t know it at the time. I thought I was a gunslinger. I thought I was the big man on campus. The part of the guy of OneTaste, the guy who needs to know everything and answer these questions, “You’re an expert on sexuality, you can stroke genitals until the cows come home,” And all these things. I played the façade. I played the role and I played the role well I guess, but underneath it, there was a semblance of disconnection.
This is a really important thing and I don’t know if I’ve ever admitted this on the air. I don’t know if I’ve talked specifically around this with Morgan. I’m sure we’d had conversations around it or she knows. There was a level of disconnection I need to do in order to keep myself sane. We have this practice called orgasmic meditation which is a fifteen-minute practice. I stroke the genitals of a partner for fifteen minutes with my index finger. I did something like 11,000 OMs in my ten year, twelve-year tenure there. I don’t think I want to do more than 10% or 15%. Most of it was just like you go to the gym and you do swats and it hurt, not that OMing hurt, but there was a “should” more than a “want.”
There was a level of disconnection around it. I left OneTaste when I was 44 to 45-ish. It was really around recovery and trying to put my body back together. That was a way where I was trying to take the experiences of the last fourteen years on some level and just to find myself again which wasn’t easy. From 45 to 48, Morgan and I got together before my 45th birthday. There’s been this new exploration, and that’s the point I want to talk about, it was this 45 to 48. I’m going to give you the challenging embarrassing part now and then I’ll dive more into it. The challenging part now is I am 47, coming up to my 48th birthday, and my libido has dropped significantly, especially in the last six months. There’s just been this dive. I remember who I was at that horny teenager. I remember who I was at OneTaste. I remember who I was in my history.
Man, Interrupted: Why Young Men are Struggling & What We Can Do About It
I always had hunger. I always had availability. I always had something and now that I’m in this loving relationship, this mostly monogamous loving relationship, there is something that’s not optimized or in full tilt. There’s something in me that’s not fully connected to my sexuality. I’ve been doing some research and I’ve been reading a lot of books. This book called The Truth About Men and Sex, Abraham Morgentaler which is a pulp fiction, really easy to read, but he’s a good guy. He talks about ED, physical things you can do, emotional things you can do. Then there’s this great book Man, Interrupted which I talked about more than a few times. This talks a lot about the effect of porn.
The result is that there’s a lack of libido. There’s a lack of something that’s happened to me. I know from reading and I know just from my historical experience, as a man gets older, certain things happen. His testosterone decreases. His physicality decreases, his libido decreases. In relationships, relationship sexuality tends to decrease over time, the novelty which ran my life in terms of OneTaste. Talk about epic novelty, and that is a definition of OneTaste, “Hello, new sexy person. Hello, next new sexy person. Hello, new sexy experience.” It was like a crack, cocaine, available to you at any time to smoke. That was the novelty of OneTaste.
The deepening of my relationship, the novelty is not as it is available as it was when you ran a sex commune. Also there’s a mix of love. I am deeply, richly in love with this woman and I’ve never felt anything close to this before. I don’t know if I even knew what love was before I met Morgan and felt it inside of me. Connected to that is looking at this with sexuality and love, how does that mix in to the equation? The coolest thing about Morgan is she tells me the truth. In that truth-telling, it’s not so easy to hear. We had it really rough a couple weeks ago when it came to this conversation on sexuality. What I heard was that this is an issue, we’re not fully confronting the issue, and let’s confront the issue together. The effect of me feeling like a man, the effect of me feeling fully empowered, it really took a hit and I got really angry.
I was working through it and then Morgan said, “Why don’t you talk to Andrew?” Andrew Bartzis is the Galactic Historian. He’s one of my clients. Andrew is one trippy guy. Andrew can see into your soul. He sees things on different levels that I don’t even understand. He had a session with me a couple of weekends ago, and just laid it out for me. What he said was my past with OneTaste was still entwined inside of me. There was still damage that I had done to myself that was lingering. Part of me thought that I had worked through the trauma of this ten or twelve-year experience. The truth was I haven’t. There was much more for me to pay attention to. That was relieving. That’s the best way to describe it. I didn’t feel insane anymore. I didn’t feel there was something wrong with me anymore.
There was just the sense of I got out of my own head and start to believe that there was something beyond me. Before that I thought I was doing something wrong. Then Andrew, who talked to me, was able to look into me and feel into it and say there are still ghosts inside of me and they’re affecting me. He gave me this long laundry list of things to do. One is to call what’s called ancestral soup. You can go to AndrewBartzis.com or GalacticHistorian.com and hear more about this. This thing called ancestral soup where you put a pot upon a stove and put something in it. Then all day you tell to the soup your stories, the good and the bad. You share and you take what’s inside and out. You just speak it, and then at the end you throw out the soup.
He’s having me do Rolfing, myofascial release because around my physicality, around my groin and my pelvis and my stomach and my ribs, there’s stuck energy and he like, “Get in there and have someone really get in there and release that.” I had my first Rolfing session and I can tell you that shit hurts. It is like there’s certain spots he would lean on with his elbow for a long-ass time and he’s like, “How’s that feel?” I’m like, “It’s good.” I’m breathing into it and I actually felt parts of me relieving. That night I was fucked up. My head was whacked out. I passed out. I was like, “Morgan, I’m going to bed,” and read to the kid three pages that I could read, and then crawled into bed, pulled the blanket on my head and fell asleep, passed out. There are definitely things inside my body. Andrew wants me to go sword. He wants me to get a sword and do some sword thing to feel my warrior, to feel this part of me that’s in there. I’m going to go find some cool-assed Japanese sword and I’m going to do something with it. I need a little more guidance on that, but the point is I want to get a sword.
Your shit doesn’t go away unless you confront it. Click To TweetHe also wants me to write a letter to my past, firing these parts of me, these demons that still are connected to me. He wants me to actually overtly say to these parts, “Thank you and you’re done. No pink slip, no severance pay, you’re done.” That’s something I need to do and I hope I can do that. You don’t have to believe in anything I’m saying. You don’t have to believe in any of these techniques. You don’t have to believe Andrew. You don’t have to believe in what I’m saying, but I hope you believe in this one thing. Your shit doesn’t go away unless you confront it. This is a significant part. I’m 47, almost 48, I’m going to live for a long ass time. I’m not even at the halfway mark. I’m going to have sex with my hottie wife until I go. That is just a goal and that is just a reality and that is just the truth. The way I was going the last six months, I was like giving up, and Morgan felt that. I wasn’t blaming her but I wasn’t talking to her. This choice of looking at things and feeling things and noticing things, confronting it is really important. It’s really important to take care of the things that you don’t want to deal with. I need to deal with this.
This concept of novelty is really interesting because, like I said, I lived in the novel situation where every single day in terms of sexuality, there was a potential for something new. That’s where I got attuned to. That’s where I got used to. That’s where I got normalized to. Here I am living in the valley, very quiet with one woman. It was hard to generate my turn on without the novelty. I really have looked at that and I become like a novel junky. I became addicted to it. When I would masturbate, I would go back into the past where there was this novel situations. Here’s a really interesting part, even though I had a rich sexual experience at OneTaste, the things I would think about to fantasize about during masturbation were experiences that stopped, and in the masturbation fantasy, I took them to where I wanted them to go. Even though I was in this rich, deep orgy-like Roman thing, I was still creating novelty in my memory of the past because I wanted some control or something in there. I was a porn user for many years of my life. I stopped a while ago. I still touch it from time to time, no pun intended.
I really start to look at the effect and the more I’ve done research, the more I found. It’s a detrimental thing. The more I’m reading Man, Interrupted, porn is a really detrimental thing. I’ve talked about this a couple times. There’s an eBook called the Butterfly Effectwhich I highly recommend, if you want to have your mind blown about the effect of free porn in society. John Ransom. Listen to that and have your mind blown. If you’re raising kids, porn is not just boys. There’s actually a growing demographic of girls. In Man, Interrupted which is really statistics, he’s seeing a rise in young girls using porn, not as much as boys. Boys are still kicking ass in terms of porn usage, but more and more girls are using porn and the expectations. If you have a young child and they’re getting to that age, it’s good to have a conversation about that. It’s good to talk about that when it’s age appropriate, because if not, their friends are going to inform them, and that’s where they’re going to get their sex education. Sexual education, as we know, in the school is not getting any better. I don’t know if it’s any better now than it was when I was in school. Now with the power of Google, the power of all this free porn, that’s how kids are going to get their sex education. I can tell you this queue is increasing. The issues are increasing.
I’ll give you one really interesting fact from the Butterfly Effect that really affected me was that the percentage of teenage pregnancy is dropping in the last ten, fifteen years. The reason is these guys are watching so much porn that they can’t get erections. These kids in their teens have erectile dysfunction, ED, because they’re watching so much porn from eleven, twelve, thirteen and fourteen. Teenage pregnancy is dropping because young boys can’t get turned on by a real girl. In terms of sexuality, me cutting out porn was a really important first step to get back in my body. The second really big step was this confronting of this novelty. This me inside of my head, that this real, live, beautiful, loving woman in front of me in my mind wasn’t enough. How to come back into my body? How not to use porn or fantasy or other people or the possibility of other people to turn me on to really look into my body to find out what I want to develop my own sexuality.
Relationship With Sexuality: If your sexuality is not the way you want it, go and do something about it.
That is the state of the union for me in the moment, in this research. I’ll probably do a show on this maybe in six months with more Rolfing and more soup and more swords and all these things and focus and attention. I know Morgan wants a rich sex life and she deserves sex life, but that’s not why I’m doing it. I’m doing it because I want to have a rich sex life. I want to unlock these parts of me that are holding me back. I don’t want anything in my life to stop me from having it a 100% the way I want it. If you’re a guy with your sexuality not quite what it is or not flowing, if you’re a woman in a relationship, if your sexuality is not the way you want it, go and do something about it. Do it right away. Don’t say, “I’m going to do this in a week or a month or when this happens or when I have a partner.” Start to explore your body. There are sexual educators out there that are doing some amazing work. There’s no “great” sex educators out there, but there sex educators out there, there’s things being written, there’s this possibility. I’m just offering to you the choice that you can go forth and have your life the way you want it. That is this episode’s rant. That was a tame rant in the grand scheme of things. It’s my pleasure always to be here and help you. Until then, go forth and explore your own sexuality. You deserve it.
Resources mentioned:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
