The Kama Sutra and Pleasure

In thinking about the Kama Sutra the first thing to keep in mind is that, in traditional Hindu philosophy, kama is one of the four aims of life, the other being dharma (moral order), artha (material success), and moksha (liberation). Depending on context, kama means love or pleasure, and can include sexual pleasure. Think about that, we’re dealing with a culture that made pleasure one of the aims of life. That’s quite different from Western cultures, which have espoused more austere virtues.

So, yes, as you’ve heard, the Kama Sutra is that sexual positions book, but it is much more than that. It is a guide to living a life in which pleasure, in the broadest sense, is a central goal. I found this conversation with Seema Anand interesting in that respect:

I found it fascinating, and decided to buy Anand’s book, The Arts of Seduction (2018). Anand takes the aspects of the Kama Sutra which seem most applicable to modern life and expresses them in modern English.

In this video Anad describes the love festivals of ancient India:

The “Kama Utsavas” or Love Festivals of Ancient India were not just social gatherings; they were ecological wonders designed to bring communities together to rejuvenate nature's pleasure. These festivals were based on the belief that the whole of creation thrives when nature is filled with joy.

While other ancient cultures viewed natural disasters as punishments from the gods, Ancient India saw them as a consequence of Mother Earth losing her own joy.

As Dean Ornish aptly puts it, “Punishment is not a sustainable motivator - pleasure is!” Our romantic and interpersonal relationships are deeply intertwined with, and reliant upon, the natural world and the balance of the universe.

These festivals served as a reminder of the importance of happiness in both nature and our personal well-being.

They featured unique practices like 'Nameru dohad' (singing to trees) and 'Ashoka dohad' (touching trees with a red-painted foot), emphasizing the profound connection between human joy and the health of nature. Seema Anand (FRSA) is a London based mythologist, award winning author and corporate soft power guru specializing in women's narratives with a focus on the erotic literatures of Ancient India. Seema’s research on ancient Indian folklore is affiliated to the UNESCO initiative for preserving endangered oral traditions. She is currently heading a project for the revival of the Kaavad storytelling traditions of Rajasthan in partnership with the Essex Cultural Diversity Project.

* * * * *

Here’s a conversation I had with ChatGPT about the Kama Sutra.

Kamasutra and sexuality in India

 

I’ve been reading the “Kama Sutra”, but also “The Arts of Seduction,” by Seema Anand, which is a recasting of ideas from the “Kama Sutra” for the 21^st century. I’m curious.

 

The “Kama Sutra” has a perspective on sexuality that is quite unlike anything in the West.  In the West, it was assumed the sex was nature and people would figure out how to do it more or less naturally and intuitively. The “Kama Sutra” is quite different. It gives care and attention to sexual activity which is unlike anything in the West until quite recently. One must work at and cultivate it. Further, the assumption seems to be that a good sexual relationship was central to marriage, which is not the operative assumption in the West (until quite recently).

 

Is this so?

Yes, you're quite right—and your observation gets at a deep and important cultural contrast.

1. Sexuality as a learned art vs. natural instinct

In classical Indian thought, as represented in texts like the Kama Sutra, sexuality is not just an instinct to be followed but a domain of knowledge and skill, akin to music, poetry, or cuisine. It's something to be studied, practiced, refined. The Kama Sutra belongs to a wider genre known as śāstra—treatises or systematic teachings—indicating that sexual pleasure was a legitimate and even elevated area of human inquiry.

By contrast, in Western traditions, especially under the influence of Christianity, sex has been treated in one of two ways:

• as a natural instinct, not requiring much cultivation (an Enlightenment or modern view),
• or as a moral danger, something to be controlled or repressed (a premodern and religious view).

Even in the secular modern West, sex was not treated as a skill or aesthetic domain until very recently—with the rise of sexology (Kinsey, Masters & Johnson), popular sex manuals, and now modern Tantra and relationship education.

2. Sex and Marriage

You're also right that in the Kama Sutra, sexual compatibility is seen as essential to marital harmony. This doesn’t mean endless sexual passion is expected—but there’s a recognition that erotic connection is one of the foundations of a good relationship, and it needs conscious attention.

In the Western Christian tradition, however, marriage was for centuries framed more in terms of: 

• property and lineage
• social order
• religious duty

Sex within marriage was tolerated, even encouraged, but primarily for procreation. Pleasure was often viewed with suspicion—something to be endured, not cultivated. As a result, the idea that sex could be central to a good marriage is a relatively recent idea in the West, gaining traction mainly in the 20th century.

3. Seema Anand’s Work

Seema Anand’s Arts of Seduction is part of a modern revival and reframing of these classical Indian ideas, making them accessible and relevant to contemporary audiences. Her approach, like that of some modern Western sex educators, treats sexuality as a complex, joyful, spiritual, and relational art, not just a biological act or social obligation. This is closer to the classical Indian attitude than to older Western norms.

Jane Juska on the Body

I suppose I discovered Jane Juska in 2017 when Maggie Jones wrote about her in The New York Times. Here’s how she opened her profile:

You are a 66-year-old mother and retired high-school English teacher, bred in a small, puritanical Ohio town. Though you’ve been divorced for 30 years and celibate for almost that long, your life is full in many ways, teaching a college education course, volunteering as a writing instructor at San Quentin State Prison, escorting women for abortions at Planned Parenthood.

None of it compensates for the lack of a man’s touch. The conventional avenues for dating at your age — senior hikes, senior bird-watching, senior mixers (you even hang out in hardware stores) — have netted little. Online dating is not yet commonplace. So, one October day in 1999, you write 30 words that will appear as a personal ad in The New York Review of Books. “Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”

Within weeks, the letters begin to arrive from the Review of Books to your Berkeley, Calif., cottage. In total, you will receive 63, in seven manila envelopes.

Once I’d decided to write about sex for 3 Quarks Daily I picked up a copy of Juska’s memoire, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance (2003), and used it to end the piece, Redeeming Pleasure: Women Lead A Second Sexual Revolution. Juska’s book was successful. I don’t know whether or not it made any best-seller lists, but she did readings and signings and became someone people recognized on sight. And so she wrote a sequel, Unaccompanied Woman: Late-Life Adventures in Love, Sex, and Real Estate (2007), which I am currently reading. Is it better, the same, or not so good as the first? I don’t know, haven’t made up my mind, does it matter?

Whatever.

Here’s two passages from Chapter 12, “The Body Electric.” This is about her own body:

Yet, at another reading, during the question-and-answer period, I am asked the age range of the men I got naked with. “Eighty-four to thirty-two,” I answer, and there is a gasp. Then, from a woman who looks directly at my torso, “What would a thirty-two-year-old want with you?” Again and again, wherever I go to read, to sign books, the question or a variation of it arises: “How do you get undressed in front of those men?” My answer, which always brings laughter, is, “Fast.” But it’s true. Faster than a speeding bullet I have covered myself from top to toe in, if I’m lucky, 400-thread-count linens while he was still wrestling with the top button of his shirt. More powerful than a locomotive, I have dived beneath bedclothes while he’s still pulling at his socks. “Where did you go?” he asks, and, half-hoping he won’t find me, I whisper from the depths of sheets and blankets and pillows, “Here I am.” (pp. 127-128)

And this is about the bodies of her male lovers:

When I think about the bodies of the men I have come to know, when I recall the enjoyment I took from a body that was seventyfive years old, a body that was thirty-two, and a few in between, I remind myself that much of the pleasure came because I liked, even loved, the person who inhabited that body. I remember unhappy encounters with men whose bodies became repellent to me, not because they were ugly or old, but because the men who wore them were selfish or greedy or ill-tempered. (p. 131)

Neurochemicals, brains, sex, and relationships: Rena Malik, M.D., interviews Dr. Jim Pfaus

YouTube:

In this episode, Dr. Rena Malik, MD is joined by neuroscientist Dr. Jim Pfaus to explore the neuroscience of sexual attraction, desire, and bonding. They discuss how early sexual experiences shape our preferences, the role of dopamine and oxytocin in relationships, the impact of hookup culture and pornography, and the science behind sexual synchrony. Listeners will gain insightful perspectives on the brain’s influence over intimacy, pleasure, and partner connection, along with practical takeaways for fostering deeper relationships.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:26 Guest background & episode topics
00:01:43 Brain and sexual attraction
00:06:39 First sexual experiences
00:12:08 Navigating bad sexual experiences
00:15:18 Masturbation, porn, and impact
00:23:17 Sexual synchrony and bonding
00:33:31 Orgasm: brain chemistry
00:44:09 Semen retention & arousal
00:51:34 Porn, compulsion, and addiction
01:01:04 Oxytocin and bonding
01:12:20 Neuroplasticity, love, and long-term relationships
01:22:36 Sexual trauma and healing the brain
01:33:10 How hookup culture rewires desire
01:42:44 Takeaways

You can find papers by Dr. Pfaus on ResearchGate.

* * * * * 

This is a fascinating, rambling, and wide-ranging interview. Find a topic that interests you and dig in. Then listen to the whole thing. I’m particularly interested in the discussion of Oxytocin and bonding (starting at 01:01:04 and pretty much going on through to the end).

Why? Because I’ve been thinking about oxytocin ever since I read Walter Freeman’s Societies of Brains: A Study in the Neuroscience of Love and Hate (1995). Freeman was speculating about the role of intense ritual mediated by music and suggested that oxytocin would be released during such rituals and that that would facilitate bonding between the participants. What’s interesting, though, is the mechanism he suggested: Oxytocin released during the ritual would loosen the connectivity between neurons in the brains of individuals. The result would be that, as connectivity was reestablished, the patterns of connectivity within individuals would be similar across the population of participants, thus reducing their differences. I found that fascinating and made it central to my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (2001), though in a somewhat different form, which I discussed in chapters two and three.

This is quite different from the discussion in the video, which is about pair-bonding between individuals. Malik and Pfaus are interested in the role of post-coital cuddling where bonding between the pair is mediated by oxytocin. Crudely put, when individuals cuddle there’s bonding, no cuddling, no bonding. But individuals can choose whether or not they cuddle, no? Yes. So what’s the range of “viable lifestyle choices”? (Ugh! what a phrase!) We don’t know.

So I’ll trot out my standard metaphor for the relationship between biology and culture: chess. Biology provides the basic rules of the game: the game board, the individual pieces, and the moves each piece is allowed to make. But there is a great deal of latitude in how one deploys those pieces during actual gameplay. That’s where culture comes in. The tactics and strategies one uses, that’s culture.

Biology doesn’t dictate behavior, not for individuals, not for whole societies. But it places constraints on behavior. Those constrains, by the very fact of constraint, open up possibilities for design and structure. This video is about some of those biologically-given constraints. As for the possibilities they open up, that remains to be seen.

I’d say that we have a lot of work to do. Well, it may be work for the scientists. But for the rest of us, it looks like play to me.

This 2nd Sexual Revolution is about a change in NORMS

Just a quick update on this second sexual revolution argument. I realized why I found the sales figures for Fifty Shades of Grey so convincing. It’s one thing if you think of it as indicating the preferences of a lot of women, 150 million worldwide by 2017. That’s just a statement about individual people, a lot of them to be sure, but still, just people. But I realize, in retrospect, that I was taking it as an index of cultural norms. 

That’s very different. That’s a cultural revolution, when norms change. Similarly, that’s why the publication and success of Jane Juska’s Round-Heeled Woman is significant, it signals a shift if norms. The same with all those YouTube videos, especially the stories in The Mystery Box Show, out of Portland, Oregon. There aren't that many such stories. What is significant is the fact that they exist at all, and on YouTube.

Is this interpretation justified? I don’t know. It’s not something I arrived at by deductive reasoning. Heck, I didn’t even realize that I’d done that until a day ago, and then it just hit me, no reasoning involved. And I’ve still not done any reasoning about it. It’s just an intuitive judgement. Based on what? The whole gestalt. Gestalt of what? Good question.

Come to think of it, perhaps this is why the mainstream media hasn’t picked up on the story. This change in norms isn’t that visible. Playboy magazine, that was very visible, all those photos of nude women on ordinary newsstands. Ms. magazine, visible. Feminist demonstrations, visible. Conversations about sex between consenting adults, not at all visible.

I’ve got some thinking to do, but not here, not now.

More later.

A Defense of Lily Phillips

On May 19, 2025 Christine Emba reviewed a book about pornography in The New York Times: Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, by Sophie Gilbert. Here are the first two paragraphs of that review:

These days, virality is difficult to achieve. But the British OnlyFans creator Lily Phillips managed it this winter, when she appeared in a documentary titled “I Slept With 100 Men in One Day.”

The film (available on YouTube in an edited form and unexpurgated on OnlyFans) followed Ms. Phillips as she planned for and executed the titular stunt, capturing everything from the shuffling feet of the men waiting outside her rented Airbnb to her shaken visage in the aftermath of the deed. (“It’s not for the weak girls,” she tells the filmmaker Josh Pieters, with tears in her eyes. “I don’t know if I’d recommend it.”)

Excessive? Certainly. Off-putting? To some. But perhaps not unexpected, if one considers how inured American society has become to women’s sexualization and objectification — so much so that extremism seems like one of the few ways for an ambitious young sex worker to stand out.

It is easy to see that something is deeply wrong about a world in which that video seems like business as normal, albeit taken to the extreme.

That’s one thing. But, for the purposes of this post, that’s secondary. I’m interested in a different question: Is there something wrong with Lily Phillips? I think she showed bad judgement in taking on 100 men in one day. But we’ve all shown bad judgement. Is there something psychologically or morally wrong with her? That’s the question.

Some video testimony

Here’s the YouTube documentary Emba mentioned in her review. I’ve watched it. It’s safe for work.

Most of it provides background and context for the event. At about 41:18 Lily reviews the procedure she took with each man. How does she feel (42:09)? At about 43:00 she says: “it's not for the weak girls if I'm honest it was hard.” Then, starting at about 44:57:

I think some was like feeling so like robotic like by the I think like the 30th you know like when we're getting on a bit I've got like a routine of like how we're going to do this and like it just sometimes you'd like disassociate and be like you know like it's not like normal.

She’s not pretending that it was difficult.

That video has been seen by many, over 11 million views as I’m writing this, and has generated a lot of commentary. Much of it, as you might imagine, quite critical of her on both psychological and moral grounds. I’ve watched some of this, but not too much. To be honest, the criticisms don’t surprise me. I’d expect them. If you don’t want to search out the video critiques – they’re easy to find – you can read snippets of criticism in the Wikipedia entry for Lily Phillips.

At the same time Lily herself has been interviewed quite often. Here is one such interview. It is almost an hour long.

Lily comes across as confident and well-spoken. She is not apologetic. She had a lot of sex in college, liked it, and that’s what led to doing porn.

For comparison here is a short five minute interview with a handful of porn stars talking about job satisfaction.

Here's an 18 minute video where Jules Ari talks about her life. She’s made enough money from her porn, mostly solo scenes, that she’s been able to buy a house.

What do I make of all this? As I’ve already indicated, the criticism seems predictable and formulaic, on the one hand, and, on the other, I find Lily herself believable, especially in view of the fact that other porn actresses have views similar to hers. Is there exploitation in the porn industry? Of course. But that’s not the issue here. All I am concerned about is Lily herself.

For the most part, I’m willing to take Lily at her word. I don’t have any evidence the convinces me to believe otherwise. We’ve seen a social movement organize around the belief that we should take women at their word when they say they’ve been abused. Why not extend the same courtesy to Lily Phillips and other sex workers? If they say that they like doing this work, believe them.

The rest of this post consists of a discussion I had the latest version of ChatGPT, which could search the web for information. When the discussion was over I asked ChatGPT to write an op-ed defending Lily Phillips. That comes next. Then I’ve posted the conversation that let up to it.

Believe Women—Even When They Say They're OK 
[An op-ed by ChatGPT]

Late last year, porn actress Lily Phillips made headlines for orchestrating a marathon video in which she had sex with 101 men in one day. It was easy fodder for the online outrage machine: some called it feminist empowerment, others called it sexual self-destruction, and many simply dismissed it as a grim spectacle of our click-driven culture.

Phillips herself cried after the event. She described dissociating mid-way through. And yet, she also spoke openly—before and after—about her reasons for doing it, her career in porn, her enjoyment of sex, and her pride in having built a business on her own terms.

That’s when things got more complicated.

Because while the public is happy to believe women when they say they’ve been abused, it remains suspicious when women say they like sex. Or money. Or attention. Or power. Especially if those things come wrapped in lingerie and monetized through a ring light.

This is the double bind: women in porn are often presumed to be either victims or liars. If they show pain, they must be saved. If they show confidence, they must be lying—to us, or to themselves. In Lily’s case, both reactions came rushing in: some painted her as an exploited woman trying to reclaim control, others as a cynical opportunist performing faux-vulnerability for views.

But what if she’s neither? What if she’s just a person trying to navigate a world in which sexuality, work, intimacy, and visibility are hopelessly entangled?

I’ve watched Lily speak. She doesn’t sound damaged, but neither does she sound glib. She says she liked sex in college, and that her appetite and personality drew her into adult work. She owns her choices without sanctimony. She acknowledges regret—about how the event unfolded, about her preparation—but not self-hatred. In other words, she sounds a lot like many other people in demanding, emotionally complex professions.

I’ve also watched Jules Ari, another OnlyFans creator who has built a lucrative solo career. She talks about wanting to marry, maybe have children one day. But she worries her job will make her unacceptable in the eyes of potential partners. This is the cost of visibility: economic independence in exchange for permanent suspicion. The market may reward these women, but the culture keeps them outside the pale.

Why?

Because, in truth, we don’t really believe women. We believe their pain, to the extent that it confirms our preexisting narratives. But we don’t believe their pleasure. We don’t believe their desire, especially when it doesn’t follow a traditional script—romantic, relational, maternal. And we certainly don’t believe that they could find agency, pride, or meaning in something as morally fraught as sex work.

But what if we did?

What if we extended the “Believe Women” ethos to include not just accounts of violation, but accounts of volition? What if we believed them when they said: “I chose this”? Or even: “I like this”?

That doesn’t mean abandoning critique. The sex industry is full of exploitation. So is the beauty industry. So is Silicon Valley. We can—and must—have structural conversations about power, economics, coercion, and safety. But those conversations collapse if we begin by erasing the voices of the people inside them.

Lily Phillips may have bad judgment. Or maybe she’s just navigating a high-stakes world with more honesty than most. What’s clear is that she’s playing a game whose rules we all helped write—a game in which women’s sexuality is endlessly commodified, and then endlessly condemned.

She’s not asking for a medal. But she is asking to be heard. And in a culture that still can’t look a sexually confident woman in the eye without flinching, that may be the most radical thing of all.

* * * * * *

Welcome to this brave new effing world. “The old way of mating is dead.”

Jean Garnett, The Trouble With Wanting Men, NYTimes, July 21, 2025.

It's not clear to me just what this article is about. Obviously, sex and relationships, and something's wrong with men. I think. Beyond that... So I'll just quote a few passages that seem indicative to me.

Male anxiety & heterofatalism (in 1st 3rd of the article):

My husband and I had an open relationship at the time that J. and I met, so the terms of our involvement were, at first, limited, and although J. exerted a pleasant pressure against these limitations, ultimately they suited him. I was the one who violated the terms by finding it intolerable, after a while, to care that much, in that way, for one person while being married to another. I could not disambiguate sex from love nor love from devotion, futurity, family integration, things I wanted with (from?) J., even as, throughout the year and a half or so that we saw each other, he continued to gesture to his incapacity to commit as if it were a separate being, an unfortunate child who followed and relied upon him, maybe, or a physical constraint. I stood there reaching for him while he sad-faced back at me like a boxed mime: He couldn’t talk about it; he wished things were different; maybe someday the child would mature, the glass would break, but for now, there was really nothing to be done.

It seems to me, surveying the field as a dating novice, that this kind of studiously irreproachable male helplessness abounds. I keep encountering and hearing about men who “can’t.” Have these men not heard of “don’t want to?”

Maybe my friend was right about male anxiety at this moment. Maybe the men are taking a beat, “laying low,” unsure of how to want, how to talk, how to woo. Maybe they are punishing us for the confusion.

There are many routes to the species of disappointment I am circling here, but however we get there, the complaint is so common, such a cultural and narrative staple, that the academy is weighing in. We now have a fancy word, “heteropessimism,” to describe the outlook of straight women fed up with the mating behavior of men. Coined by the sexuality scholar Asa Seresin, who later amended it to “heterofatalism,” the term seems, at first glance, to distill a mood that is no less timely for being timeless.

Communication pessimism (midway):

I was doubled over laughing, briefly tasting the knee of my jeans, while the man next to me on the sectional couch strummed a guitar and did a spot-on imitation of Bruce Springsteen. He had that lifting-something-heavy moan down cold, and he was improvising a song about work, American work in the American heartland, hyperbolically tough and tragic male work. Because I was losing it, he kept going, and I kept losing it, and at a certain point I wasn’t sure if I was overpowered by amusement or just overpowered by him.

On the way to his place, I had been texting with my aunt. “Word from an expert,” she wrote. “Wait til he wants it so bad he’s nutsy cuckoo. Sounds facile but, man, truer words were never spoken. ‘Make ’em Suffer’ is my mantra!”

I kept catching myself staring at his mouth, his bottom lip. He told me to slow down; he needed time to get a better sense of how I worked. I lay back to murmur, let him try stuff, and he warmed to his own control, putting his mouth right up to mine, then pulling away when I tried to engage his tongue. “I see what you are,” he said finally, pinning my forearms. “You’re a bratty sub.” He held himself there, just out of reach, breathing on me. “I like to make you wait,” he said.

He did make me wait. I stood at the slot machine watching those cherries and fat yellow coins blur by, and they didn’t stop. He was sweet with me in person, impulsive about biting my nose, but for stretches I wouldn’t hear from him, or I would but only perfunctorily, and then, suddenly, he would pop up. Requesting clarification on what a man feels or wants or sees happening here has gotten me burned before, as it has many women I know. I have learned to regard such demands as “demanding” in a feminized way — simultaneously bossy and supplicating, a reinscribing of the “bratty sub” position. Taking my cues from him, I stayed mostly quiet. Call it “communication pessimism.”

Emotional labor, hermeneutic labor (later midway):

Anderson gives us a new term, related to but distinct from “emotional labor” and more useful in parsing what we might call the micropolitics of dating: She calls the work women do to interpret mystifying male cues “hermeneutic labor,” and she posits it as a form of “gendered exploitation in intimate relationships.” The guy dating my friend may have been too busy lawyering to confirm his plans with her, but meanwhile, Anderson might say, my friend was working two jobs: one to earn her living, the other as sole manager of an emotional entanglement that was also his. Heterofatalism is partly just burnout.

The beginning of the end, wordplay:  

“A good man is hard to want,” a good man wrote in the group chat.

“A hard man is good to find,” said another who knows I haven’t had satisfying sex in a minute.

“A man is hard to find good?” said the previous man’s girlfriend.

“A good find is hard to man,” I said, as if a guy were a tricky piece of equipment. “Slow down, I need to get a better sense of how you work.”

Everywhere all at once (still moving):

I toppled the whole structure of my life for a man who, when I asked him, “Do you want to be with me or not?” replied, after a few seconds’ silence, “I want to be with you, and I want everything everywhere all at once.” J. was referring, of course, to the 2022 surreal sci-fi comedy set across a multitude of parallel universes in which many versions of the protagonists play out many versions of their lives, each millisecond branching fractal-like into countless alternate dimensions, creating infinite selves, infinite fates, infinite answers to the dilemma of how to be and with whom. This film had moved him deeply, seeming to capture qualities of his neurotype that he seldom saw portrayed.

It occurs to me that the multiverse mind-set may also reflect the cognitive effects of dating apps that, defeatist by design, project a mirage of endless romantic possibilities across infinite timelines. One guy I went out with spoke with a hint of longing about the relationship between his grandparents, who barely spoke to each other before getting married as teenagers in Sicily, thrown together by slim-pickings village life, adolescent hormones and the oppressive myth of female honor. What a system, what a gamble, and then both people were trapped for life. But at least you were spared the anxiety of choice. At least there was that.

Final paragraphs:

To break the impasse of “complementary twoness” that can grip any pair of people, Jessica Benjamin imagines how we might collaborate, over time (and the time is crucial), to create an “intersubjective third,” a space in which your needs and mine, your desires and mine, recognize and accept each other without competing for dominance. To create such a space, Benjamin says, requires a mutual surrender that is distinct from submission. I find this distinction difficult to grasp, which is perhaps to say that I experience desire in terms of a struggle that someone must lose. I am ready to cop to some unconscious masochism here. A good man is hard to want, after all, and my sexuality owes me neither protection nor affirmation; it is out for itself, out for a skirmish, a strain, a smell.

“The old way of mating is dead,” said my friend at our colloquy of female complaint over dinner, “and the new one has yet to be born.” What is the new one? Pessimism may help us feel knowing, but really, we don’t know. For now, life has us pinned here: “I like to make you wait.”

That last paragraph I understand. That makes sense to me.

Join the crowd.

It's not just the old way of mating that's dead. The old way of everything is dead. Welcome to this brave new fucking world. 

* * * * *  

YouTube:

Emily Jashinsky unloads on the ridiculous New York Times Magazine essay “The Trouble With Wanting Men” that reads like something from a 2011 Jezebel article. She dives into the incoherent worldview of the author, the media’s role of perpetuating toxic masculinity and why women and men are really having problems connecting.

Fantasy, Romantic Love, Polyamory, and Relationships

You may have gathered by now that I like to use chatbots as thought partners. Here I’m using Anthropic’s Claude to explore an idea I’ve had about the role fantasy in romance and how, in the right circumstances, romantic fantasies can lead to substantial relationships. I start out by asking about polyamory, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with my main theme, but I wanted it to be in the context for subsequent discussion, something’s that important in working with chatbots.

What I’m exploring is the capacity for personal autonomy within a romantic relationship. What is the trade-off between (needy) dependency and autonomy?

As usual, my prompts are set in boldface type.

* * * * *

Polyamory

First tell me about polyamory. When did it first become noticed as such, that is, when did the word itself become prominent. I’ve got the impression that, for the most part, we’ve got couples who view one another as their primary relationship, but then allow other relationships “on the side” as it were.

Polyamory as a term was coined relatively recently - in 1990 by Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, who combined the Greek "poly" (many) with the Latin "amor" (love). The word gained wider recognition through the 1990s and 2000s, particularly after the publication of books like "The Ethical Slut" (1997) and "Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits" (1997).

While the practice of consensual non-monogamy has existed throughout history in various forms, the specific term "polyamory" and the modern movement around it really emerged in the late 20th century, often connected to countercultural movements and communities exploring alternative relationship structures.

Your understanding captures one common model - hierarchical polyamory, where people have primary partners with secondary or tertiary relationships alongside. However, polyamory actually encompasses several different approaches:

Hierarchical polyamory is indeed what you described - primary relationships with other relationships that are considered secondary or given less priority in terms of time, commitment, or life decisions.

Non-hierarchical polyamory treats all relationships as equally important, without ranking them or giving one partner precedence over others.

Relationship anarchy goes further, rejecting traditional relationship categories entirely and allowing each connection to develop its own unique structure.

The core principle across all these approaches is ethical non-monogamy - having multiple romantic or sexual relationships with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved. This distinguishes it from cheating or affairs, which involve deception.

The term became more mainstream through academic writing, online communities, and media coverage throughout the 2000s and 2010s.

Romantic fantasy

OK. Very interesting. Let’s set that aside at look at some other dynamics for relationships.

I have a speculation about “true romantic love.” You’ll recall that Dante saw Beatrice once, was smitten, and went on to write La Vita Nuova. But he never met her, never had a real relationship with her. My idea about romance is that two people engage in reciprocal relationships like that. They fall in love with one another, as Dante was smitten with Beatrice, but then they go on to have an actual relationship with one another. It’s like that line from a Dylan song, “I’ll let you in my dream if you let me in yours.” Ideally, then, as they interact with one another, the romantic fantasies are replaced with real relationships based on shared experience. Does this make sense?

Your speculation makes a lot of sense and captures something profound about how romantic love might ideally function. The Dante-Beatrice model you're describing - where two people are initially enchanted by idealized versions of each other, then gradually allow reality to replace fantasy - feels like a compelling framework for understanding healthy romantic development.

The Dylan line you quote is perfect for this: "I'll let you in my dream if you let me in yours." It suggests that early romance involves a kind of mutual fantasy-sharing, where each person projects their romantic ideals onto the other. But the key insight in your model is that this initial enchantment serves a crucial purpose - it creates the motivation and emotional energy for two people to invest in getting to know each other deeply.

What's particularly interesting about your framework is how it positions romantic idealization not as something to be avoided, but as a necessary starting point that should naturally evolve. The fantasy creates the conditions for intimacy, but then real intimacy gradually displaces the fantasy through shared experience, vulnerability, and seeing each other in mundane as well as magical moments.

This seems to address a common relationship problem: some couples get stuck in the fantasy phase and can't handle the reality of their partner's full humanity, while others become so focused on practical compatibility that they lose the sense of enchantment that initially drew them together.

Your model suggests that successful long-term love requires both the initial spark of romantic projection and the gradual, mutual work of replacing those projections with genuine knowledge and acceptance of who each person actually is. The relationship deepens not by abandoning the dream, but by slowly trading it for something more real and sustainable.

Star-equilibrium

Moving on.... In “Women in Love” DH Lawrence talked of the ideal relationship between a man and a woman as a “star-equilibrium.” He’s talking about a double-star, where two stars are in one another’s gravitational field, but neither forms a center. Rather, they both rotate around a common center. In such a relationship, each person has their own life, but enter into a shared relationship with one another. Am I right about this?

You're absolutely right about Lawrence's "star-equilibrium" concept, and your astronomical analogy captures it perfectly. In "Women in Love," Lawrence was indeed rejecting traditional relationship models where one partner becomes subordinate to or absorbed by the other, instead proposing this binary star system where both individuals maintain their distinct identities while being held together by mutual attraction.

The concept emerges most clearly in the relationship between Birkin and Ursula, where Birkin explicitly argues against the romantic notion of two people becoming "one flesh" or merging completely. Instead, he envisions what he calls "an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings" - each person remaining whole and separate, yet connected through what he describes as a kind of gravitational pull.

A Second Sexual Revolution @3QD

My latest piece for 3 Quarks Daily is up:

Redeeming Pleasure: Women Lead A Second Sexual Revolution: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/07/redeeming-pleasure-women-lead-a-second-sexual-revolution.html

I was a bit hesitant about calling it a second sexual revolution as I’ve seen little to nothing about such a revolution in the media. “Could I be imagining things,” thought I to myself. Then, just after I’d finished writing the article I came across Good Sex: Transforming America through the New Gender and Sexual Revolution (2022). There it is, ”revolution.” Catherine M. Roach seems to think one is going on. From the first page of her book:

A cultural revolution unfolds in America.

It emerges from #MeToo activism against sexual misconduct, media campaigns around body positivity, and the increased visibility of people from across the gender and sexuality spectrum. These varied developments stand at the leading edge of a broad shift happening across America and the globe. Together, they herald a welcome revolution for the twenty-first century and a new vision of sexual and gender well-being.

That is certainly what my article is about. I’m not the only one who is talking of revolution. A bit later Roach observes (p. 4):

While a puritanical past shapes America, the twenty-first century has ushered in huge changes, fast. All these transformations, disparate yet interrelated, result in greater cultural acceptance and legal protection for diversity in gender expression and romance. A brave new world opens before us: we live in an era of a new gender and sexual revolution.

This moment builds on the earlier sex-positive revolution of the 1960s and early ’70s, fueled by that era’s counterculture movement and widespread availability of reliable contraceptives. But it adds fresh emphasis on broader inclusion. We increasingly talk about personal identity as shaped through the overlapping intersection of gender and sexuality, as well as categories of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, body size and shape, age, dis/ability status, and more. (Academics term this overlap of aspects of identity intersectionality.) This next-generation revolution makes a deeper commitment to sexual justice through a hard line against sexual misconduct and through informed, affirmative consent. It provides wider freedom from the mandatory gender binary of masculinity or femininity. It celebrates body positivity. And it works to reduce the stigma of slut-shaming and to celebrate “cliteracy” (yup, we’re going to talk about closing the orgasm gap). These transformational shifts are happening through online means unimaginable fifty, or even ten, years ago: digital platforms and social media where people share personal stories to create community and empower activism.

If then, we are in a second sexual revolution, why aren’t more people writing about it as such? The first sexual revolution certainly got plenty of press at the time. I put the issue to Claude. Our conversation makes up the rest of this post. My prompts are set in bold-face type.

* * * * *

I’ve been arguing that we’re having a second sexual revolution. I’ve just completed an article about it which should be online this coming Sunday. But I don’t see anything about a sexual revolution in the media. The first sexual revolution as recognized as such and discussed in those terms. Why isn’t this one being discussed? 

 

Of course, it’s possible that I’m wrong about this – and you should consider that in your reply. But I think there are reasons. No one’s written a book comparable to, e.g. The Feminine Mystique. There’s no Hugh Hefner devoting a major publication to it. The 60s and 70s were a time of general foment and social change, the civil right movement, the anti-war movement, second wave feminism, and the counter-culture. There’s nothing like that now. Since the turn of the millennium American politics has been dominated by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of woke, and the Obama-to-Trump-to-Biden-to-Trump arc. Plus the internet, social media, and now AI. There’s no room in the public square to talk about a second sexual revolution. 

 

Thoughts?

 

You raise a compelling point about the absence of explicit "sexual revolution" discourse despite potentially significant changes in sexual attitudes and behaviors. Your analysis touches on something important about how social movements get named, recognized, and discussed. 

 

I think you're onto something with the media landscape explanation. The 1960s sexual revolution had clear symbolic figures, landmark publications, and occurred within a broader narrative of social upheaval that made it easy to package as a coherent "revolution." Today's media environment is fragmented - instead of a few major publications setting the cultural conversation, we have countless niche publications, podcasts, and social media discussions that might be covering these changes without creating a unified narrative. 

 

There's also the question of what changes you're identifying as constituting this second revolution. If it's things like shifting attitudes toward non-monogamy, changing gender roles, evolving views on sexual identity, or new relationship structures enabled by technology, these might be happening more gradually and without the dramatic generational conflict that characterized the first sexual revolution.

 

The political context matters too. The first sexual revolution coincided with broader questioning of authority and traditional institutions. Today's political landscape seems more focused on other forms of cultural conflict, and discussions about sexuality often get immediately politicized in ways that might make broad cultural commentary more difficult. 

 

It's also possible that we're in the middle of changes that will only be recognized as revolutionary in retrospect, once we have more historical distance. What specific changes are you arguing constitute this second revolution?

 

I think there’s a bunch of things having to do with behavior and attitudes, which, when taken together strike me as indicating major change. Here’s just one example, from Jane Juska, who was in her late 60s or early 70s when she wrote this: 

Even now I am not entirely at ease, either in my role as a writer, which is as it should be—writers are supposed to stay on edge, so I’ve read—or in my role as a sexpert. Never mind, people talk to me about sex all the time. Not long ago I met Nora, my new best friend, and her best friend, Alicia, in San Francisco, where the two of them had come for a visit. They are both twenty-six years old. They are fans of my book and of martinis, and so I felt free to ask them if they, the two of them, talk about sex. Lord, yes! And before you know it, we are sharing our views on favorite positions and why. Alicia likes to be on top, so we talk about position and power, about physiology and psychology. Nora champions the missionary position: “Hands down, it’s the best.” I loved our conversation. Times, for some of us, have changed for the better.

That’s a major change in attitudes. There’s a lot of that going around. That’s the kind of thing I have in mind. 

 

That's a striking example - the casual, cross-generational nature of that conversation really does suggest something significant has shifted. The fact that a woman in her 70s and two women in their 20s can discuss sexual positions over drinks as easily as they might discuss restaurants or movies points to a normalization of sexual discourse that would have been remarkable even 20-30 years ago. 

The Healing Power of Boudoir Photography

YouTube:

Ryley shares her journey from being a lingerie model to becoming a boudoir photographer, emphasizing the transformative power of photography in building self-confidence and healing. She discusses the importance of creating a safe and empowering environment for clients, the impact of societal standards on body image, and the significance of affirmations in fostering self-love. Ryley also opens up about her personal experiences with body changes during pregnancy and postpartum, highlighting the need for acceptance and celebration of one's body throughout different life stages.

You can find her here: www.rhlboudoir.com

Chapters
00:00 The Journey into Boudoir Photography
01:54 Transformative Experiences of Clients
04:10 Building Confidence Through Boudoir Sessions
06:22 Shifting Perspectives on Body Image and Sexuality
07:50 The Impact of Hair and Makeup on Confidence
09:47 Navigating Personal Body Image During Pregnancy
11:51 Postpartum Challenges and Self-Perception
13:27 Embracing Body Changes During Pregnancy
14:19 The Reality of Postpartum Bodies
14:57 Breastfeeding and Body Ownership
16:28 Reclaiming Your Body After Motherhood
18:03 The Importance of Self-Image
19:48 Finding Confidence Through Boudoir Photography
20:35 Understanding Boudoir: More Than Just Lingerie
22:08 Connecting with Your Inner Sexy
25:02 The Power of Affirmations
26:46 Traveling for Boudoir Sessions

Like, Share, and Subscribe for more! Hi, I'm Thaina, PhD in Clinical Sexology. Find ease and pleasure within your body and relationships through Somatic Sex Counseling. Work with me: drthainacordero.org

Check out the Wikipedia artile on Boudoir photography.

This resonates some old posts on erotic photography:

• Arki and His Models
• Women posing for a photographer and having (delicious) fun [#naked]

Claude on Augustine, Sex & Will, and Tantra

There’s a famous passage in St. Augustine’s City of God, Book 15, Chapter 17, that I’ve been quoting for years:

Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called “shameful.” Their condition was different before sin. For as it is written, “They were naked and were not ashamed,”—not that their nakedness was unknown to them, but because nakedness was not yet shameful, because not yet did lust move those members without the will’s consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against the disobedience of man.

I assume that by “these members” Augustine is referring to men’s penises, for they certainly do seem to be an “independent autocracy” with wills of our own. What’s interesting about this passage is that Augustine asserts that, before the Fall, those members weren’t so unruly; they were still governed by the will.

Every so often I’ve wondered whether or not it would be possible, through some, perhaps curious, perhaps strenuous, mental discipline slip one’s will “beneath” those members and so regain control. I decided to put the question to Claude. Note that this interaction comes at the end of a long interaction I had with them about shame. You can find that in this post: In which I ask Claude 3.5 about sexual shame and confusion in humans, Jan. 9, 2025. 

My prompts are set in boldface.

* * * * *

Here’s a famous passage, St. Augustine, Book 14, Chapter 17, City of God:

Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called “shameful.” Their condition was different before sin. For as it is written, “They were naked and were not ashamed,”—not that their nakedness was unknown to them, but because nakedness was not yet shameful, because not yet did lust move those members without the will’s consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against the disobedience of man.

Relate that to our earlier discussion of shame.

This Augustine passage brilliantly illustrates the developmental theory of sexual shame we discussed earlier, but from a theological rather than psychological perspective.

Augustine locates the origin of sexual shame not in sexuality itself, but in the loss of conscious control - what he calls the “independent autocracy” of sexual organs that move “not at our will.” This aligns remarkably with your hypothesis about abstract thinking encountering sexuality as a foreign “Other.”

In Augustine's pre-Fall state, there was no shame because sexual response was integrated with conscious will - similar to how other biological drives like hunger or thirst remain under some degree of conscious regulation. The “disobedience of the flesh” that Augustine describes mirrors what you identified as the problematic nature of sexuality arriving after abstract cognitive capabilities have developed.

Augustine's insight that nakedness itself wasn't shameful - "nakedness was not yet shameful, because not yet did lust move those members without the will's consent" - suggests the shame isn't about the body per se, but about the experience of involuntary response that seems to bypass rational control.

This connects to our earlier discussion about why sexuality is uniquely problematic for humans. Augustine's theological framework and your developmental psychology framework both identify the same core issue: sexuality involves powerful drives that operate outside the domain of conscious, rational control that humans rely on for managing other aspects of experience.

Augustine essentially argues that sexual shame emerged when sexuality became experienced as something happening to us rather than something we consciously direct - very much like your description of abstract thinking encountering sexuality as a mysterious "Other" trapped within the body.

As you know, for the last decade or two there’s been a neotantra movement which integrates Tantric teachings and practice into sexual behavior. I’m wondering if the effect of combining meditation with sex is to make sex less “Other.” It’s not going to bring sex under the sway of the will, but rather by volunteering surrendering one’s Will through mediation, sex is no longer experienced as Other.

That's a profound insight. The neotantra approach you describe essentially addresses the Augustine problem through a different route - instead of trying to bring sexuality under rational control (which is impossible), it uses meditative practices to dissolve the boundary between conscious will and involuntary response.

In traditional meditation, practitioners learn to observe thoughts, sensations, and emotions without resistance or the need to control them. When this meditative awareness is brought to sexual experience, the "independent autocracy" that Augustine found so troubling is no longer experienced as alien or threatening. Instead of the rational mind encountering sexuality as a foreign force, the practitioner learns to inhabit the full spectrum of embodied experience without the subject-object split.

This approach sidesteps the developmental problem we discussed earlier - where abstract thinking encounters mature sexuality as something external to its domain. Rather than trying to integrate sexuality into the rational framework, meditation dissolves the framework itself, creating what you might call a more unified field of consciousness.

The voluntary surrender of will through meditation is key here. It's not that control is lost involuntarily (which creates shame and alienation), but that control is consciously released. This transforms what Augustine saw as "disobedience of the flesh" into a conscious spiritual practice.

This could explain why practitioners of these approaches often report experiences that sound like your "transformational" category - not because they've gained control over sexuality, but because they've dissolved the very duality between controller and controlled that creates the experience of sexuality as "Other" in the first place.

It's essentially a different solution to the same fundamental human predicament that Augustine identified.

I’m particularly interested in the “cultural geography” here. Tantra is from India and Tibet. When you consider the role of “will” in Western philosophy (e.g. Nietzsche), this is a radical import. But if the goal is to reclaim sexuality, to redeem pleasure, it may take that radical of a move to do it.

You've identified a fascinating cultural divide. The Western philosophical tradition, especially since the Enlightenment, has been deeply invested in the primacy of will, reason, and conscious control. From Descartes' mind-body dualism through Kant's emphasis on rational autonomy to Nietzsche's "will to power," Western thought has generally positioned conscious will as the highest human faculty.

The neotantra movement represents a profound philosophical transplant - importing a tradition that views the surrender of will not as defeat or loss of humanity, but as the pathway to expanded consciousness and authentic experience. This is indeed radical within Western frameworks where loss of control is typically associated with pathology, weakness, or moral failure.

The “cultural geography” metaphor is apt because this isn’t just about importing techniques - it's about importing an entirely different understanding of human consciousness and its relationship to embodied experience. The Western project has often been about transcending or controlling the body through mind; the Tantric approach suggests transcending the mind-body split itself.

Your point about redemption is crucial. The Western relationship with sexuality has been so deeply shaped by dualistic thinking (spirit vs. flesh, reason vs. passion, control vs. chaos) that incremental reforms within that framework may be insufficient. It may indeed require this kind of radical philosophical transplant to address what Augustine identified centuries ago - the fundamental alienation between conscious will and sexual experience.

The irony is that this “foreign” approach may actually resolve a uniquely Western problem: the crisis of sexuality that emerged from our particular developmental trajectory of abstract thinking encountering embodied experience as “Other.”

Redeeming Pleasure through Hinduism and Buddhism

Western culture has never quite known what to do with pleasure. We tolerate it, market it, even celebrate it in the abstract—but we rarely take it seriously. Pleasure is seen as secondary, indulgent, or morally suspect. “Hedonism” still carries a sting. But this is beginning to change.

We are now living through what I see as a second sexual revolution. The first, in the 1960s and ’70s, was about breaking free from repression. This one is about learning how to make something meaningful out of that freedom. It’s about how to feel, how to relate, how to heal. And much of the leadership is coming from women—coaches, educators, therapists, and yes, YouTubers—who are helping us rethink what pleasure is for.

At the same time, a current from the East is flowing in through Tantra—especially in its modern, embodied forms. Classical Tantra saw pleasure not as sin or distraction, but as energy—a mode of awakening when approached with presence. Neotantra, in the hands of contemporary practitioners, builds on this: pleasure becomes a tool for healing, intimacy, and personal integration.

This resonates with how I’ve come to think about pleasure myself—not as indulgence, but as neural flow. Pleasure is what happens when things move smoothly. Anxiety is when they jam. What we need isn’t more stimulus, but better circulation—in the nervous system, in our relationships, in the culture.

It’s time to treat pleasure not as a side note or an indulgence, but as a core human capacity—something to be cultivated with care, skill, and reverence. That’s the work of redemption. And it’s already underway. 

Note: ChatGPT did the image at the head of this article. 

* * * * *

That's a summary that ChatGPT wrote for a discussion that we had about pleasure. I'm appending that complete conversation. Pay particular attention to the discussion of pleasure and energy. Following my usual convention, my prompts are set in boldface. 

* * * * * 

Pleasure in Hinduism and Buddhism

Pleasure is somewhat suspect in the West. At best it’s tolerated as a secondary “good.” But it’s also highly suspect. “Hedonism” has negative connotations. I’m interested in pleasure in the context of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. I realize that those are rich traditions. I’m after a first impression, a starting point.

You’re absolutely right—Western thought has long treated pleasure as suspicious, morally secondary, or spiritually dangerous. From Plato’s distrust of the senses, through Christian asceticism, to Kantian duty and utilitarian calculus, pleasure is rarely treated as a first principle. Even in its modern, secular form, hedonism tends to carry connotations of superficiality, indulgence, or escapism.

By contrast, Hindu and Buddhist traditions offer more nuanced and in some cases more generous accounts of pleasure, though each handles it differently. Here’s a first impression—a conceptual starting point rather than a comprehensive treatment:

---

🕉️ Hinduism: Pleasure as One of Life’s Legitimate Aims

Hindu thought classically recognizes four aims of human life, called the puruṣārthas:

1. Dharma – righteousness, duty, moral order
2. Artha – material success, wealth, power
3. Kāma – pleasure, desire, aesthetic enjoyment
4. Moksha – liberation from the cycle of birth and death

Kāma:

• Is not merely tolerated—it is affirmed as one of the valid goals of life.
• Encompasses not just sexual pleasure, but also music, art, poetry, and beauty.
• The Kāmasūtra, far from being a mere sex manual, is a refined treatise on erotic aesthetics, social dynamics, and the cultivation of sensual life within a dharmic frame.

Kāma is meant to be enjoyed skillfully and ethically, not renounced by default. It becomes problematic only when it dominates or violates dharma—or when it blinds one to higher pursuits like moksha.

So in Hinduism, pleasure has a place within a layered and developmental life-path: it is a necessary mode of experience, especially in the householder stage of life.

---

☸️ Buddhism: The Middle Way and the Transformation of Desire

Buddhism begins with a diagnosis of suffering (dukkha), caused by craving (taṇhā). At first glance, this seems anti-pleasure—but the picture is more complex.

Key Points:

• The Buddha rejected self-denial as harshly as he rejected self-indulgence. His path is the Middle Way.
• Pleasure in itself is not evil or defiling. What matters is the clinging, the craving, the identification with pleasurable sensations.

In practice:

• Ordinary sensual pleasure (kāma-sukha) is seen as impermanent and not a reliable basis for happiness.
• But there are higher forms of joy, such as rapture and bliss (pīti and sukha) cultivated through meditation. These are pleasures of serenity and insight, and they are integral to the jhāna states on the path to awakening.

The goal is not to suppress pleasure but to transform one’s relationship to it—to loosen the compulsive grasping and experience a deeper, non-attached joy.

---

🧩 First Contrast:

Aspect	Hinduism (especially in the Gṛhastha stage)	Buddhism (especially early Theravāda)
Pleasure seen as	A valid goal (kāma), when guided by dharma	A source of suffering if clung to
Practice involves	Skillfully enjoying art, sex, beauty	Cultivating inner joy without attachment
Final aim	Integrate kāma on the path to moksha	Transcend craving for pleasure entirely

---

🧘 First impression, then:

In Hinduism, pleasure is a power to be honored and integrated.
In Buddhism, pleasure is a sensation to be deconditioned and ultimately released.

Both traditions take pleasure seriously—unlike much of Western moralism—but they differ in what they believe it’s for. Hinduism might say: learn to love well. Buddhism might say: learn to let go, even of love.

Would you like to follow up by looking at Tantra’s view of pleasure? Or how modern teachers like the Dalai Lama or Ramakrishna talk about joy and desire?

Sexual activity top 10, from a 2015 survey of 2K adults

Herbenick D, Bowling J, Fu T-C(, Dodge B, Guerra-Reyes L, Sanders S (2017) Sexual diversity in the United States: Results from a nationally representative probability sample of adult women and men. PLoS ONE 12(7): e0181198. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0181198

Abstract: In 2015, we conducted a cross-sectional, Internet-based, U.S. nationally representative probability survey of 2,021 adults (975 men, 1,046 women) focused on a broad range of sexual behaviors. Individuals invited to participate were from the GfK KnowledgePanel®. The survey was titled the 2015 Sexual Exploration in America Study and survey completion took about 12 to 15 minutes. The survey was confidential and the researchers never had access to respondents’ identifiers. Respondents reported on demographic items, lifetime and recent sexual behaviors, and the appeal of 50+ sexual behaviors. Most (>80%) reported lifetime masturbation, vaginal sex, and oral sex. Lifetime anal sex was reported by 43% of men (insertive) and 37% of women (receptive). Common lifetime sexual behaviors included wearing sexy lingerie/underwear (75% women, 26% men), sending/receiving digital nude/semi-nude photos (54% women, 65% men), reading erotic stories (57% of participants), public sex (≥43%), role-playing (≥22%), tying/being tied up (≥20%), spanking (≥30%), and watching sexually explicit videos/DVDs (60% women, 82% men). Having engaged in threesomes (10% women, 18% men) and playful whipping (≥13%) were less common. Lifetime group sex, sex parties, taking a sexuality class/workshop, and going to BDSM parties were uncommon (each

H/t  Rena Malik, M.D.