What do you want to be when you grow up?
I wanted to be a rock star, not a sex therapist.
And yet...I was THAT kid - the one who taught her friends about sex - hiding under the bed and reading aloud from my well-worn copy of “Where Did I Come From?” As a little girl growing up in the Boston suburbs, I fell asleep listening to “Sexually Speaking,” a radio show hosted by Dr. Ruth Westheimer, a psychotherapist. Night after night, I listened in my bed as Dr. Ruth responded to callers’ sexual frustrations, worries, pains and pleasures. She said “penis” and “vagina” without stuttering. Sex wasn’t a secret, not with Dr. Ruth.
Decades later, when I told a friend I was getting my doctorate, he asked, “Why don’t you research something interesting, like SEX?” He was the kind of friend who shared his gay porn videos with me (we both liked men A LOT, and the internet wasn’t invented yet)!
I studied linguistic anthropology at Columbia University (Barnard, baby) and Stanford, got a Fulbright, joined the faculty at Brown and the Hebrew University, lectured at the Sorbonne, London School of Economics, Harvard, MIT, Tufts, UCLA, Princeton and Georgetown. I published books and articles. Somehow, sex was never my subject.
Then I met a brilliant doctoral student studying linguistic taboos. Her case study was female ejaculation (“squirting”). The politics of language had been my business for twenty years, but this was something else. As her advisor, I asked, “Why don’t people talk about actually existing sexual phenomena?” And I asked myself, sheepishly, “Why don’t I”? I was over forty, a feminist, into sex...and I didn’t know there were so many kinds of orgasms. So, I began to learn. I learned what I liked and what I didn’t. I learned to say “no” and to say “yes, yes, yes!” And, yes, I can now squirt.
Talking and thinking about sex was fun, meaningful and eye-opening. It was applicable to real world problems, as well.
I WAS IN THE WRONG BAND! It was time to rock and roll. I quit my tenure-track job and went back to school to become a sex therapist, studying tantra, anatomy, sexology, non-violent communication and gestalt. I learned to relax and to reconnect to my body, its needs and its desires.
So, I didn’t become a rock star. But, I have found my music. Let me help you (or a friend) find your groove, joy and pleasure.
Message me for a free, confidential consultation. And follow this page for more juicy, informative and practical essays about sexuality and intimacy.
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