Thank goodness Charlie Glickman is on the show. It’s post #metoo and I’m more aware of how I approach women, how I invite them on dates, and how I escalate sexual encounters. I’m less bold than I have been in the past because I’m scared of coming off as creepy. And I know I’m not alone.
Charlie Glickman, Ph.D. is a sex educator, sex & relationship coach, and co-author of The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure. He shares with us his invitation template for creating a situation for people to say yes rather than situations where they have to say no. Whether you’re asking for a date, sex, or a business meeting, you can use this invitation template just about anywhere.
We also discuss why some people have a hard time saying no, what it means to be sexually empowered, and take a quick peek at what it means to pleasure your prostate.
Key Takeaways (or what you’ll learn):
- How to use the ‘Invitation Template’ to invite anyone to anything
- How compliance creates dangerous hookup situations (and how to avoid compliance)
- Why we’re hardwired to avoid confrontation
- A mini deep dive into prostate play (for straight, gay, and queer prostates)
The Charlie Glickman Show Notes
Charlie Glickman Ph.D. is a sex & relationship coach, a sexuality educator, a sexological bodyworker, and an internationally-acclaimed speaker. Charlie Glickman’s website is http://www.makesexeasy.com/
Get his book The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure: Erotic Exploration for Men and Their Partners.
Free resources on prostate pleasure can be found at P Spot Book.
Read Charlie’s blog post How to Get Freaky Without Being Creepy.
Charlie Glickman can be found on Facebook.
Mantak Chia wrote the book The Multi-Orgasmic Man and it’s a must read if you want longer more pleasurable orgasms.
Martin has some amazing free resources and videos on her website. You can watch a video series on The Wheel of Consent .
Carey French teaches workshops and writes blog posts on Embodied Consent.
Lynne Forrest wrote the article The Three Faces of Victim – An Overview of the Drama Triangle.
This show has been produced by Shaun Galanos with help from Gilford Street Studios.
The Charlie Glickman Transcript
Shaun Galanos: Charlie, could you please introduce yourself?
Charlie Glickman: My name is Charlie Glickman and I am a sex and relationship coach.
I’m also a somatic sex educator based out of Seattle, Washington, and I’m one of the two authors of the “Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure: Erotic Exploration for Men and Their Partners”.
Shaun Galanos: You wrote a blog post that says “How to Get Freaky Without Being Creepy”. This is something that I have been thinking about a lot lately especially post Me Too Movement.
I am attracted to women and I often want to connect with them and now I’m more scared to. I am more scared to be as bold as I have been in the past.
You wrote this blog post that I love and I think a lot about being creepy, and so I guess we could just start off by sort of explaining what does creepy behavior look like nowadays.
Charlie Glickman: It’s hard to answer that question because everyone you ask is going to have a different answer for what creepy is. I know this because when I teach my workshop “How to Get Freaky Without Being Creepy”, that’s one of the questions that I ask the group and I get a really wide range of responses.
Rather than focusing on what the behaviors are, I think it’s more useful to focus on how they land, how the person receiving them feels. When we look at it through that lens, then creepy is a degree of closeness or intimacy or moving into somebody else’s space that is inappropriate for the situation or unwanted by that person.
This is where it starts getting really challenging because you might approach two different people in the exact same way and one person might say that it was totally welcome and totally fine and the other person will say, “Oh wow, that was creepy,” and that’s because they have different ideas about what they want.
Creepy is defined by the experience of the person being approached and that’s what makes this so ambiguous and this is why so many men in particular are worried about this right now. I know that this is a scary time because we might not know what the rules are.
I think this is also an opportunity for us though to build a little bit of empathy. The apprehension and anxiety that we, generally speaking, are starting to feel around being creepy or not, is a small fraction of the kind of anxiety and fear that, for example, women experience just walking through city streets on a daily basis.
I think this is an opportunity for men to get a little bit of empathy and understanding of what is it like to be on guard and worried and apprehensive.
I also want to be clear, I’m talking about men and women here because that’s the general trend that we see. We see some different patterns for some transgender people, but given that cisgender people are the ones who are the majority folks and certainly the people who are driving the bus on all of this, that’s really who I’m talking about here.
Shaun Galanos: Cismen are the ones that are generally perpetrating creepy behavior and ciswomen are the ones that are, for the most part, receiving it.
Just recently I’ve seen several of my female friends on Facebook writing these posts about what they do to prevent from being catcalled on the street.
They’ll make resting bitch face, there’s like a series of strategies, which is so sad.
Charlie Glickman: I think this is something that most men are completely unaware of because we’re not seeing it. It’s not something that we are doing as a general rule. It’s not something that happens in front of us.
As a sex educator and coach, I talk with people all day long about their relationships or how they navigate sexual dynamics. I hear a lot of stories. For the men out there, really trust me— most of the women who really are putting all of that time and effort into managing that and the amount of concern or anxiety that we might feel is a small taste of that.
Click below to read the full transcript.
Read The Full Charlie Glickman Transcript here.
Shaun Galanos: Charlie, could you please introduce yourself?
Charlie Glickman: My name is Charlie Glickman and I am a sex and relationship coach.
I’m also a somatic sex educator based out of Seattle, Washington, and I’m one of the two authors of the “Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure: Erotic Exploration for Men and Their Partners”.
Shaun Galanos: You wrote a blog post that says “How to Get Freaky Without Being Creepy”. This is something that I have been thinking about a lot lately especially post Me Too Movement.
I am attracted to women and I often want to connect with them and now I’m more scared to. I am more scared to be as bold as I have been in the past.
You wrote this blog post that I love and I think a lot about being creepy, and so I guess we could just start off by sort of explaining what does creepy behavior look like nowadays.
Charlie Glickman: It’s hard to answer that question because everyone you ask is going to have a different answer for what creepy is. I know this because when I teach my workshop “How to Get Freaky Without Being Creepy”, that’s one of the questions that I ask the group and I get a really wide range of responses.
Rather than focusing on what the behaviors are, I think it’s more useful to focus on how they land, how the person receiving them feels. When we look at it through that lens, then creepy is a degree of closeness or intimacy or moving into somebody else’s space that is inappropriate for the situation or unwanted by that person.
This is where it starts getting really challenging because you might approach two different people in the exact same way and one person might say that it was totally welcome and totally fine and the other person will say, “Oh wow, that was creepy,” and that’s because they have different ideas about what they want.
Creepy is defined by the experience of the person being approached and that’s what makes this so ambiguous and this is why so many men in particular are worried about this right now. I know that this is a scary time because we might not know what the rules are.
I think this is also an opportunity for us though to build a little bit of empathy. The apprehension and anxiety that we, generally speaking, are starting to feel around being creepy or not, is a small fraction of the kind of anxiety and fear that, for example, women experience just walking through city streets on a daily basis.
I think this is an opportunity for men to get a little bit of empathy and understanding of what is it like to be on guard and worried and apprehensive.
I also want to be clear, I’m talking about men and women here because that’s the general trend that we see. We see some different patterns for some transgender people, but given that cisgender people are the ones who are the majority folks and certainly the people who are driving the bus on all of this, that’s really who I’m talking about here.
Shaun Galanos: Cismen are the ones that are generally perpetrating creepy behavior and ciswomen are the ones that are, for the most part, receiving it.
Just recently I’ve seen several of my female friends on Facebook writing these posts about what they do to prevent from being catcalled on the street.
They’ll make resting bitch face, there’s like a series of strategies, which is so sad.
Charlie Glickman: I think this is something that most men are completely unaware of because we’re not seeing it. It’s not something that we are doing as a general rule. It’s not something that happens in front of us.
As a sex educator and coach, I talk with people all day long about their relationships or how they navigate sexual dynamics. I hear a lot of stories. For the men out there, really trust me— most of the women who really are putting all of that time and effort into managing that and the amount of concern or anxiety that we might feel is a small taste of that.
Shaun Galanos: Right, so basically the idea is they’ve been working on this stuff for a long time, now it’s time for us to do some work.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, we have to step up.
Shaun Galanos: It’s time to be a little uncomfortable.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, a little bit.
Shaun Galanos: Which is how I’ve been feeling it as discomfort only because I don’t know what it is, and so I have to learn a new thing, which is a new way of talking and a new way of interacting with people.
Charlie Glickman: Well, I want to take that one step further because I think it’s not just that boys and men don’t get taught these things. I think that’s a piece of it. We are also taught to be creepy, to cross boundaries.
Think about the way, the sort of the stereotypical way that men are taught to engage with women where you test boundaries and you push and you keep moving forward until she says, “Stop”.
For example, that might be the hug that starts with your hands on her upper back and then you trail your hands down to her waist, and then the sides of her hips, and then down around onto her ass.
At each step of the way, what’s happening there is testing to see if she’s receptive, or to put it another way, testing to see if she’s going to say, “No”. Because we are not taught to simply be upfront about our desires, we get this sort of indirect, plausible deniability approach to things.
The problem with that is that if you keep moving forward until someone says, “No”, even if you are 100% respectful of that boundary, you still cross the boundary. The way that we’re taught is a guarantee for boundary crossing.
It always reminds me of a dog who is well-meaning, doesn’t want to be pushy but is going to shove his nose in everybody’s crotch until somebody says, “Oh, what a sweet dog, I’m going to pet you. Even if ten or a dozen people shove you away”.
I think a much better approach rather than moving forward into someone else’s space is to sit back and invite them to come and join you.
Shaun Galanos: Which is a perfect segue into—
Charlie Glickman: I did that on purpose.
Shaun Galanos: You are really good at that. What is the solution if we don’t want to be seen as creepy or friend-zoned?
Those are the two things that we have available, either we can be pushy and figure out where the boundaries are or we can be seen as sort of pushovers, or people who don’t go and get what we want and then thus are put into the friend zone category.
I really dislike that term for so many reasons, we could talk about that later, but we’re either seen as kind of pushovers or not knowing what we want, or we’re seen as being too pushy and like going across boundaries to get what we want. What’s the solution in a landscape that seems to be constantly changing?
Charlie Glickman: I have a template, I used to call it a formula but it’s really more of a template because it’s adaptable to a lot of situations. I use this in a sexual context, I use this if I’m asking somebody out. I use this if I’m trying to schedule a work meeting with somebody.
There are two parts to it. The first part is an if statement, and it’s about the other person,
“If you’re available…”
“If you’re in the mood…”
“If you’re a yes to it…”
“If you’d enjoy it…”
The second half is a statement of desire.
“I would like to take you out for coffee.”
“I’d really enjoy kissing you.”
“I could really use some help moving a couch.”
So you put these things together and you get sentences like, “If you’re available, I’d love to take you out for coffee.”
“If you have some time on Saturday, I could use your help moving some furniture.”
I’ll use this in a work situation, “If you have time next week, I’d really like to schedule that meeting to talk about this project we’re doing.”
The reason why this works is that the second half of the statement is very bold. You’re saying, “I’d enjoy this, I’m into this, I would really like to_________” fill in the blank, but it’s situated within the context of, “If you would also enjoy this.”
If I say to someone, “If you’re into it, I’d love to go see a movie with you.” That’s a very bold statement.
It’s much more appealing than simply saying to somebody, “Would you like to go to a movie sometime?” because that lacks some of that boldness, but it’s also much more consent driven than simply saying, “I’d like to go to a movie with you sometime.”
What I have found with this is that because you’re situating the ask within the context of consent, people calm down. They don’t get as anxious and that means that they are a lot more likely to say, “Yes,” and if you’re asking them about something that they’re not really into, they’re more likely to offer a counter-proposal like, “I’m not really in the mood for a movie, but I totally be up for getting some coffee”.
Part of why that is, is by making it easy for someone to say, “No,” you’re making it more likely that they’ll say, “Yes’’. That’s the irony in all of this.
Shaun Galanos: When you create a safe space it lets people feel safe to actually really express what their desires are.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, and I would much rather have someone tell me, “No, I’m not interested in that” than to have them go on a date that they don’t really want to be on. Because now I’m wasting my time too, if you’re not interested in a date with me, I would rather know so I can go find somebody else who would be a yes.
And, by the way, using this template takes practice, so it’s good to use it in lots of settings and situations to get used to it. If you’re not sure how to frame it, you can always fall back on, “If you’re a yes to it.”
“If you’re yes to it, I’d like to go out dancing.” “I’d enjoy meeting you for dinner”, whatever it is.
“If you’re a yes to it, we just bought this book on prostate play and I’m kind of curious to try it out.” Whatever the thing is.
Shaun Galanos: One of the questions that I had for later was how do you bring up prostate play and you just nailed it right there.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, so “If you’re a yes to it,” works in most situations.
Shaun Galanos: I have two examples of this, one where I did it well and one where I think I could have done it better. I volunteer at some places in Montreal and I met somebody through this volunteer opportunity that I was very smitten with and I thought was attractive and smart and charming, and the list goes on and on.
I wanted to go out with her and so I sent her a message on Facebook and I said, “This might not be the appropriate medium for this and I’m sorry if this is stepping over any sort of like weird community guidelines within the organization, but if you’re available and single and interested, I’d really love to go on a date with you, which would either be like a walk in the park with my dog or some tea at a tea house,” and that was it.
That was the message and she wrote back saying, “I’m over the moon that you’ve sent me this message. I think it’s so bold and it’s so honest and so forward. Unfortunately, I’m in a relationship and I can’t take you up on this, but thank you so much for the invitation.”
Charlie Glickman: What a great way to have someone say, “No”. Part of what I like about that response is that she was declining the invitation, but it wasn’t rejecting you as a person. “I’m just not available for that”.
Shaun Galanos: We have been going out in a platonic capacity. We have walked the dog and we had tea and bike rides and it’s just platonic. I love the fact that she was able to say, “No” and also the fact that I was able to kind of craft a message that made it safe for her to express that she wasn’t able to take me up on my offer.
Charlie Glickman: One of the powerful things in that, and this is something that many men don’t realize, is that when it comes to male-female dating romantic sexual dynamics, women talk to each other about us far more than men talk to each other about the women in our lives.
The reason why this is really important to wrap your brain around guys, so to use this example, this particular woman wasn’t available, but maybe she has a friend who is saying, “Oh, wow, I’m curious if you know anyone you want to hook me up with,” or maybe she’ll see you at a party and ask a friend, “Hey, do you know about this guy, what do you think of him?”
By responding well to that, not only were you treating her respectfully and honoring her consent, but you were potentially laying a possibility for a referral further down the line.
Shaun Galanos: Not only referral, but people’s relationship statuses change all the time. I have found myself in situations where somebody wasn’t available, and then all of a sudden, it turns out they are because something has happened. Then you’re sort of like top of mind or you are at least somebody that they want to reach out to because they wanted to, but they couldn’t at the time.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, and that’s why when somebody declines one of my invitations, I like to say something like, “Oh, thanks for letting me know”, so that I’m appreciating them because saying, “No” is a tricky thing in this culture particularly for folks socialized as girls and women, but really for anybody. So that was the one that went well?
Shaun Galanos: That was the one that did well. I also want to talk about the rejection piece, but the other one actually went really well.
I was at a wedding this past weekend on Bainbridge Island, which is why I find myself in this part of the country, a phenomenal, beautiful island, by the way. It’s like Martha’s Vineyard of the West Coast.
I was chatting with a woman and we were flirting, we were sitting around a fireside and there were people mingling and chatting, and after a while, I wanted to kiss her. We were sort of in a social situation where it wouldn’t have been very appropriate to do it right then, and then I started thinking like, “Oh, what can I do to get her away so I can ask her in private.”
We were talking about something that was not relevant to kissing and I said, “I’m going to switch gears here for a second, I have a question to ask you.” And she said, “Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
Then I asked her if she would like to go and make out with me in the woods. It wasn’t an if-then, but it was still a question of, “Would you like to do this thing?” But how could I have made that question bolder and fit into the invitation template?
Charlie Glickman: You could say something like, “I think you are incredibly attractive and if you are in the mood, I’d love to go over there in the woods where there’s some privacy and make out with you”.
Shaun Galanos: How is that different than just like, “Would you like to make out with me?”
Charlie Glickman: This is actually touching on the piece around compliance. Betty Martin, who is an amazing teacher here in Seattle has some wonderful videos on her website BettyMartin.org, where she talks about compliance and consent. She taught me something really important about this, which is that human beings, there’s not many things that we all have in common, but one of them is that we have all learned that there are times when we don’t get to say, “No” to touch.
The reason why this is universal is because when we are infants and young children, our caretakers are parents or older siblings, family members, whoever, there are times when they have to do things for our own well-being that we don’t understand and we don’t want, because we’re a year old and we’re not capable of understanding it. What it teaches us is that there are times when we want to say, “No”, but that it doesn’t do any good.
Now, of course, this message gets reinforced in lots of different ways and to different degrees depending on gender and culture and race and ethnicity and all of these different pieces, but no matter who you are, you have learned in this really deep, fundamental way that there are times when you don’t get to say, “No”.
Part of why this plays out in this situation, for example, is if I say to you, “Would you like to come do this thing,” if you feel any difficulty around saying, “No”, maybe it’s because of who I am, maybe it’s because of your stories about who I am.
Maybe it’s because you had a boyfriend in the past who every time you said, “No” he would get really angry and so you’ve learned to not say, “No”.
Maybe it’s because you don’t know how to say, “No” confidently and politely and so you say things like, “Maybe later” or “Maybe another time” which is a great way to set somebody’s expectations up because you don’t feel comfortable saying, “No”.
So the problem with, “Would you like to do this” is that if somebody has any difficulty using their, “No” you might not get the full answer.
That’s why I like to say, “If you’re into, I’d like to go do this thing,” because that makes it easier for them to say, “No”. It’s not inherently a bad thing to say, “Hey, would you like to do this”, I use that question all the time with my partner, but that’s because we have an established dynamic where we know each other really well, but with a stranger or somebody who I didn’t know as well, I would definitely fall back on the, “If-then” because it reduces the possibility of compliance.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, I didn’t know anything about compliance and it’s phenomenal that it exists and that it’s sort of built in. I have had conversations with people where they were saying, “Yes”, but it felt like they wanted to say, “No” and in that case I did my best to sort of like digging under what was actually going on, because I want people to be happy about whatever it is the thing that we’re doing and I don’t like the idea of people saying, “Yes” when they really want to say, “No”.
Charlie Glickman: I’ve been on both sides of this, I have both said, “Yes” when I wasn’t a full “Yes”, and I’ve been on the receiving side of somebody doing that, and no matter which side of it you’re on, the experience just is not as good.
If somebody says, “Yes” to me when they’re not a full “Yes”, it means that they’re not totally present, they’re not fully there with me, they’re waiting for it to be over, they are enduring or tolerating which is never a recipe for good sex. I mean heck, enduring and tolerating isn’t a good recipe for enjoying a movie or a family dinner or whatever it is.
Shaun Galanos: Maybe like a marathon or something.
Charlie Glickman: This is the tricky thing about endurance because we talk about like sports endurance and also like enduring, a four-hour plane ride from Hell or whatever it is.
The upshot of all of this is, I think it’s better to ask somebody, “Would you like to do this,” than not to ask at all, but it still creates the possibility for compliance and one of the unfortunate things that happen is if I go into compliance and go along with what you want to do, I might be presenting you during it which is not a happy thing, or I might feel violated by it and blame you for it, even though you had no idea that there was a boundary there because I didn’t express it.
This is one of the tricky things about boundaries. If I don’t tell you what my boundary is and then you cross it, I’m likely to blame you for how I feel about it rather than saying. “Wow, I feel kind of crappy because I didn’t speak up for myself”. That’s a much harder thing to do.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah. How do we know what our boundaries are if we aren’t used to exploring and voicing what the boundaries are because it can be really hard to say, “This is what I want, this is what I don’t want.”
Charlie Glickman: We also don’t always know what our boundaries are until we cross them in much the same way that if you are training for a marathon, you might not realize that a 15-mile run was too much until you do it and you wake up the next day and you can’t move.
Part of exploring our boundaries means learning the emotional equivalent between being a little bit sore and then it’s like, “Okay, maybe I overdid it a little bit,” versus blowing past our boundaries and really hurting ourselves.
I would love it if people could figure out what our boundaries were without crossing them, but nobody’s figured out a way to do that yet.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, it seems like one way to do it would be just like you said to explore the edges which sometimes will involve perhaps crossing over, but not blowing right through it and like tearing your ACL.
Charlie Glickman: Exactly and sometimes after those sorts of explorations, you wake up the next day with a little bit of a shame over, which is kind of like an emotional hangover. And you wake up and you feel tired and heartache and just for some people it’s irritable, for some people it’s whiny, for some people it’s wanting to hide from the world, but recognizing that that’s the equivalent of being a little bit sore from a workout, it doesn’t necessarily mean that anybody did anything wrong. Being able to discern, did we go too far, or maybe we just went far enough to realize we need to do a little less next time.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, it sounds like in the context of a shame over, exploring what happened and how we feel about it seems like a worthwhile exercise, instead of just burying the shame over in a pile of ice cream and pizza and negative behaviors.
Charlie Glickman: It just naturally works anyway.
Shaun Galanos: It’s very short-lived.
Charlie Glickman: If you are experiencing a shame over going to the other person and saying something like, “I’m having a shame over” or, “I’m having some feelings come up” rather than saying, “You did this wrong,” because that blaming and shaming kind of behavior actually creates the opposite of what you want. It’s very difficult to respond with empathy when somebody is yelling at you.
I’m not saying that you have to set your feelings aside and manage the other person’s, what I’m suggesting is name what’s going on for you, like, “Oh, yeah, we did this thing last night and now I’m feeling a little upset. I just want to talk to you about that”.
Shaun Galanos: Instead of, “You did this thing and I’m pissed”. I have a hard time with criticism and even when it’s presented in the softest, gentlest way, still the first thing that I feel is often defensiveness.
It’s just that I’m conditioned that way and I fight it and I try to sit through it and it’s still really hard time to receive criticism, but also I think really important when we’re talking about boundary crossing.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, and that’s part of why if I come to you and I say, “Yeah, so we did this thing yesterday and now I’m having some difficult feelings about it”.Then it opens up much more room for us to sit down and talk about it.
Maybe that means we don’t do that thing again, or maybe it means that we do it but we know there might be some emotional tenderness afterward, but it’s not framed as your fault. It’s something we did together.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, in the first example, I’m much more likely to say, “Oh my God, let’s talk about your experience, why do you feel this way, how can we make it better, what’s a solution for the next time moving forward?” I like to work through problems with people.
Charlie Glickman: I do want to mention here because I think it’s relevant that when we’re talking about male-female dynamic, because of the way that girls and women get trained frequently, get trained to do all kinds of emotional labor and managing their male partners’ feelings for them and doing all of that, I’m not talking about doing these things to manage his behavior because that’s on him.
To use this example, if I come to you and I say, “Hey, this thing happened and I’m having feelings about it,” if you go into the same reaction, it’s not my job to manage that because that’s the core of codependency.
There’s a difference between emotional labor and non-defensive communication and I think the difference is that the codependency part is if I’m trying to manage how you feel the non-defensive communication is being honest about what’s going on for me, and then I let you have whatever feelings you’re going to have, and I’m not trying to change them.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, the codependent piece is I think something that probably comes up pretty often where for the most part a female partner will express some sort of dissatisfaction and then the male partner will take that as criticism, and will then start to feel anger about either having acted wrong, and then that will be the new thing that we’re talking about, it’s not the fact that there was this boundary that was crossed, but now it’s more about how I feel shame about the thing that you’ve told me about and we sort of sideswiped the original issue.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, and this is why I’m a big fan of Brene Brown’s work around shame resilience, because we need to be able to tolerate shame if we’re going to be able to cope with somebody telling us, maybe we did something wrong.
Shaun Galanos: I made a mistake.
Charlie Glickman: I made a mistake, I screwed up or even I didn’t make a mistake.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, and it’s okay to feel bad, and to sit through it and to use effective mechanisms to deal with it that don’t involve putting blame on the other person to get out of those feelings.
Charlie Glickman: Since you mentioned putting blame on the other person, have you heard of the Drama Triangle?
Shaun Galanos: No, but I love it.
Charlie Glickman: It’s this wonderful model for relationships. You can Google quite a few articles about it. The drama triangle, right, the triangle has three points, victim, rescuer, persecutor. When we feel like we are victims, whether we are objectively for lack of a better word victims or not, when we feel like we’re victims, the other person is either our rescuer or our persecutor.
So for example, if I feel like a victim and I come to you and say, “Hey, wow, you did this thing and that really hurt me”. There are only two possibilities that I’m allowing you to have, one is to be the rescuer by doing everything that I want you to do. Or you become my enemy, you become my persecutor, if you don’t do exactly what I want, then you’re just as bad as all those other people.
The thing about the Drama Triangle is that all three corners are actually disempowered. If I go into rescuing to try to manage your emotions, I’m disempowering myself. If I believe your story about me being the persecutor, I’m disempowering myself, right? The Drama Triangle describes a lot of things that happen in relationships where we start believing that if you’re not with me you’re against me, that kind of pattern.
Non-defensive communication is one of our tools for stepping off of the triangle and being able to say to someone something like, “Wow, I see that you’re really hurting, I’m so sorry that this is such a difficult time for you. If I had known that this was going to cause you pain I wouldn’t have done it.” Rather than jumping to the place of, “Oh my God, how do I fix this, this is a disaster. Do you hate me now? What’s going on?” Being able to stay in that grounded, centered place.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, it sounds like step one is to acknowledge the other person’s feelings.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, there’s a wonderful, fairly long article, Three Faces of Victim. It’s the drama triangle. I think it’s one of the best pieces on the topic and I think that should probably find it on Google for you.
Shaun Galanos: We were talking about compliance and you also wrote this article about compliance consent and sexual empowerment and you just mentioned empowerment.
I wonder if we could just touch base on compliance consent and sexual empowerment like a quick definition of them, so we can kind of hop into how these concepts fit together.
Charlie Glickman: Consent is really the act of making a choice. Fundamentally, in my view, that’s what empowerment is. Empowerment is making the choice regardless of what you choose, so two different people could choose two totally different things and both be empowered. Or two people could choose the exact same thing and one person be coming from a place of empowerment and the other one coming from a place of compliance.
What’s important is the act of making the choice, not what the choice is. I took a workshop a couple of months ago with Carrie French. She was a consent educator here in Seattle. We did something really interesting in the workshop.
I found it interesting because I’ve done variations of this exercise before and just to notice how things have changed for me, but where we paired up with somebody and the first thing they did was ask us to do stuff, “Would you massage my feet? Would you comb my hair? Would you buy me dinner?” Our job was to say no to every single request and just feel where that is in the body.
Then we did the same exercise and our job was to say, “Yes” each time and feel where that was in the body. What I noticed about this experience, which was a little different from previous times that I’ve done it, is how subtle those sensations are. That felt a sense of, “Yes, I want to do this” or, “No, I don’t want to do this,” can be very subtle. That means that it’s easy for us to override that. Like, “Oh, do you want to go to a movie? Well, not really but it’s not a big feeling, so I’ll just say yes.”
Shaun Galanos: Sure, why not?
Charlie Glickman: And override it, or the other way around, like I might have difficulty tuning into my yes for whatever reason. I find that especially common for folks growing up, girls and women growing up in communities or cultures where there’s a lot of slut-shaming, it can be very difficult to tune into your, “Yes” because that’s going to bring up all of those feelings. Learning to just notice where in your body you feel “Yes” and “No” and some people felt it in their chest or their belly or their upper back or their neck.
People really vary widely in where we feel these things. The question for each of you out there listening is where do you feel your yes and your no. Because I can’t tell you, everyone is different.
Shaun Galanos: Well, it can be really hard to tune into the body because I don’t think we’re taught, we’re not taught how does this feel. I never took a class that effectively taught me how to feel things and what this feels like and what that feels like.
In this article that you wrote there’s an example on compliance where you describe a conversation that I have had many times with female partners, that that goes something like, “Do you like this,” or, “What do you like,” and they’ll say, “I like everything.” “How does this feel?” “It feels great.” But that’s always the same answer, it always feels great. And we know that you can’t really like everything and everything can’t feel great all the time.
How do we learn to feel things that might feel kind of nuanced?
Charlie Glickman: If I ask somebody, “Does this feel good” and they say, “Oh it all feels great”. I will sometimes follow up with the question, “What could I do to make it even more amazing for you?”
Or, somebody might not know, this is where the practice of pleasure mapping might come in and this is a little difficult to do in new relationships, but it’s not impossible.
Pleasure mapping is, you set aside an hour or half-hour, however long you’re going to want. One person is giving the other one is receiving, and the person who’s giving you could use your hands, you could do oral sex, you could do intercourse, you could do toys, whatever it is, but your job is to think of this as a wine tasting.
If you go to a vineyard and you taste six wines and you only like one of them, that’s still a win. The same thing with this right, go in knowing that your partner probably isn’t going to like everything, but you’re collecting data.
You try lots of different techniques and after a little bit for each one, you ask your partner to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10. 10 is, “Oh my God, don’t stop, I love you.” One is, “This is boring, let’s put on Netflix”.
Remember that they are rating the technique not your skill as a lover.
Then, you ask them to rate it, if numbers are hard because some people find that numbers get them into their heads and they’re not feeling as much, you can do thumbs up thumbs down.
Or, every time you do something that feels really good, tap on the mattress so that they know. And then vary it, like if you’re giving somebody a blow job and you are circling the head of their penis with your tongue and they say, “Oh that’s a four,” and then do a little firmer or a little faster, or a little slower, or a little focus on one spot and see how that changes the numbers.
You can start looking for patterns like maybe somebody like circles on their clitoris and on their G spot. Maybe there are some differences like they like very firm pressure on their clit, but very light on their G spot or the other way around. You’re just collecting all the info.
Here’s the part where this gets, I think, really fun. If you’re with someone with a penis, if you’re doing something that they’re enjoying, they can just open their eyes and look and see what hand motion you’re doing or whatever, but when you’re playing with somebody’s vulva that’s a lot harder to see, so give them some words, like, “I’m using my index finger going back and forth on your clit.” Or, “I’m using my tongue to make circles on your perineum.”
Then the next time you ask them what would feel good, now they’ve got the words to tell you because a lot of the time when people say, “Oh, I don’t know” or “I like everything” it might be compliance, but it might be that they don’t know how to put it into words and the best that they might be able to say is, “Do that thing you did that time, you remember, we were on vacation in that little bed and breakfast?” Wouldn’t it be nicer if they could say, “I want you to go down on me while you have two fingers massaging my G spot.”
Shaun Galanos: Which is a popular technique.
Charlie Glickman: It is a popular technique. Or if you’re going to be a real geek about it, you could do what they do in CrossFit and give it a name like in CrossFit, a workout at has a name—
Shaun Galanos: Jackie.
Charles: Jackie. You could just decide that for you and your partner Jackie means tongue circles on your clit and two fingers on the G spot.
Shaun Galanos: Right, in a come hither motion.
Charles: In a come-hither motion, right, that’s Jackie. Is there a Jackie CrossFit workout? I don’t know.
Shaun Galanos: There is, there’s a Jackie there’s also a Jackie Rock Climb. So there should be a Jackie combo sex move.
What I love about this exercise is that it teaches us how to use our words. I think that oftentimes some people will say, “It all feels great” because they just don’t have the language available and it can be incredibly awkward to say things like, “I really like it when you push on my perineum in a certain way,” because we’re not used to doing it.
I know that if I try a new skill, I’m not great at it at the beginning. If you put me on a tennis court, I’m terrible, it’s embarrassing, the balls are going all over the place, I’m not a good tennis player. But eventually, if I keep playing tennis, and I take some classes, I’ll get better, and that’s the same with communicating about sex while having sex. You really do get better at it after a while.
Charlie Glickman: Even just to say to your partner, “That feels really good. Keep doing that”.
Shaun Galanos: That’s actually more than a lot of people can say.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, and the irony in all of this is that many people, it’s not universal, but many people report that getting that kind of feedback from their partner is the biggest turn-on.
They did a study a few years ago looking at male-female patterns and particularly looking at the sounds that women make during sex and how women will often use their vocalizations to encourage their partner, to try to get him more turned on so that he orgasms, whatever it is.
Nonverbal sounds are awesome, but they’re much more powerful with the occasional, “Oh, right there. Don’t stop. A little firmer. Back off a little bit.”
Shaun Galanos: I love getting directions, I just love it because I don’t want to do anything that you’re not going to like and I want to do more of the stuff that you do like. I don’t try to make orgasm the goal of sex, but it sure is nice when it happens and it does have a whole lot of beneficial side effects, and I’m not telepathic.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, although it is interesting how many men believe that we’re supposed to sort of be like these telepathic sex experts and just know what somebody is going to like. My partner and I have been together for 26 years. I still can’t order takeout Chinese food without asking because I know what we ordered last time, but that might be different from what we want tonight.
You really, guys, in particular, we’ve got to get over this idea that somebody telling us about a modification to make it feel better for them means that there’s something wrong with us as lovers. In my view being a good lover of mean saying to someone, “Hey, thanks for telling me, yes, let’s do that.”
Rather than saying, “Stop telling me what to do, I know what I’m doing, this is the G-Spot technique that worked on my last three girlfriends.”
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, this is Jackie. You’re like Jackie.
Charlie Glickman: Everyone likes Jackie. That just doesn’t work. Now I feel like I need to write a CrossFit for sex.
Shaun Galanos: I think that would be a very popular video course.
Charlie Glickman: I am going to think about that.
Shaun Galanos: Okay, if you need a co-producer, let me know.
Charlie Glickman: I have to find out about the copyright issues around it, there are some issues there.
Shaun Galanos: We have to talk to Reebok about it.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, also that.
Shaun Galanos: I’ll be an affiliate.
There is this piece about enthusiastic consent which I love the idea of and then I think you think it’s not quite nuanced enough. Is that right?
Charlie Glickman: It is.
Shaun Galanos: It is not nuanced?
Charlie Glickman: I agree. It is not nuanced and the reason why, I think enthusiastic consent is a great goal, some of the time. For that matter, I would really like to be able to invite a friend out for dinner and have them be really enthusiastic about it and be really excited about it.
But I think it’s also important to acknowledge that there are reasons why somebody might not be 100% enthusiastic but still be a full “Yes”. I might not really be in the mood for sex tonight, but you’re going out of town for a week, so I’m going to try to rally because this is our last opportunity until you go out of town.
Or maybe it’s that you were really sweet yesterday and did all of these things that made me feel really good and even though I’m kind of tired and I’d really just like to watch a movie, I’m going to you get myself worked up so that we can have sex.
I want to honor people’s ability to be in a yes, even if it’s not the 100% cheerleaders with pom-poms, yeah, hooray, let’s do it. It gets a little tricky to discern that. Ultimately for me, it’s about trusting people to tell me when they’re yes to something.
Shaun Galanos: Right. Yeah, and you mentioned this concept or this idea that some people take a little while to warm up and sexual arousal sometimes isn’t as spontaneous as we want it to be. The older I get the more I realize that I know I’m going to enjoy sex, you’re asking me if I want to have it right now and the answer is I’m kind of lukewarm about it, but I know that once we get going, I’m going to be over the moon.
And so this piece of sort of like informed consent takes into account the fact that I mean, “Yes”, but I’m not I’m not a, “Fuck yes”, and that’s okay. It’s okay not to always be a “Fuck yes”.
Charlie Glickman: Exactly, as long as there’s room to say to someone, and this would be within probably the context of a more established dynamic, where, “I’m not really feeling it at this moment, but I know that if we get started, I’m usually into it, so let’s go for it. But then 10 or 15 minutes later let’s just check and make sure that’s happening, so that if this happens to be a day, where trying it first doesn’t lead to turn on, we can stop”.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, I love that. I love the idea that there’s space. I mean obviously, consent can be removed at any time. But I love the idea that you can just continuously check in with your partner, which is something that I strive to do, but don’t always do throughout the act of sex, because I mean, it can last a long time and it can be an emotional roller coaster and there’s a lot there. And so I love the idea of being able to stop, I love taking breaks during sex and just like reevaluate where we’re at.
Charlie Glickman: Even just a question like, “How is this working for you? Is there anything that would make this even more fun?” I think that’s a very nice way to frame it. “Is there anything that would make this more fun for you or more delicious for you?” I think that’s a very positive way of framing that.
Shaun Galanos: Can you just shed some light on sexual empowerment and what that really means? Because I hear people talking about, empowered decisions and being empowered and I have a hard time kind of grasping what that really means.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, I think if you ask five people you’ll get eight answers.
Shaun Galanos: Okay good. Then I want your answer.
Charlie Glickman: My answer today. Well, I think that sexual empowerment it requires having enough knowledge and information. It’s very difficult to make an empowered choice when information has been withheld from you. So you have to know what your possibilities are.
You need to not only be free to choose them, but you also have to believe that you’re free to choose them. And what I mean by that is that because of the way that many of us are trained, we frequently don’t believe we have as much choice as we actually do, or that we don’t deserve to make a choice or what have you. I think fundamentally, empowerment is,
“I know that I deserve this. I know that I deserve to make this choice and if you are not respectful of my choice that says something about you, not me. And then, as part of that, I can make this choice without fear of retribution or punishment.”
So sexual empowerment is really tricky if your partner is going to go into a passive-aggressive sulk because you said yes or no to something.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, so how do you deal with partners like that? Change partners?
Charlie Glickman: Well, not necessarily. This has actually been something that’s come up with some of my clients and I’ll jump in my role as coach and say,
“Look, every time this topic comes up, I watch you get shut down and disengaged and you slide across the couch to be further away from your partner. What’s up with that? What’s going on for you?”
So observing the pattern, “I noticed that a lot of the times if I say no to you, you get really upset and then you don’t talk to me for two days and that makes it really difficult for me to be honest with you. So what would you like? Would you like to have me not be honest with you or would you like to try to change this pattern?”
And this, by the way, is a really good time to find a therapist or a coach because it’s really difficult to fix this from the inside. It is very difficult to get support from the person who you’re upset with, so having somebody who’s neutral, who can give you some perspective helps a lot.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, I had a friend say that sometimes can feel like being trapped in a box and the directions on how to get out of the box are written on the outside.
I love the idea of working with people that can help me work through some issues because there are some things that I can do and there are some things that I just can’t do alone.
Charlie Glickman: Especially when we’re talking about sexuality, because most people only talk about sex with their partners. Which means that there’s a very limited perspective on how things work. Finding a practitioner who has talked with hundreds or thousands of people, or who have read lots of different books, taken courses, they’ve got a wider perspective.
As an example, approximately 70% of cisgender women need some kind of clitoral stimulation in order to reliably orgasm. Most people don’t know that and get really worked up about, “Well, if you can’t cum from intercourse then there must be something wrong happening. It’s your fault. It’s my fault. There’s something bad.”
Having some perspective from somebody who can say, 70% of people by definition, that’s the norm.
Shaun Galanos: They need clitoral stimulation.
Charlie Glickman: That’s just the thing.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, I mean I’ve read those books and so I know that and I feel that like blaming somebody for not being able to either give a vaginal orgasm or receive one is like very unpopular opinion in certain circles. But in the reality is in the mainstream, people do not know that.
Charlie Glickman: It happens all the time. Blaming somebody for not being able to orgasm in a particular way would be like blaming me for not being able to reach the top shelf of the cabinet without a step stool.
Shaun Galanos: It’s going to make it a whole lot harder for that orgasm to happen. As soon as you start throwing blame in a sex situation, it’s out the window.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah blame and resentment will kill your sex life.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, that’s not a good thing to do.
Charlie Glickman: Not so helpful.
Shaun Galanos: You are one of two authors that wrote, “The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure”. What’s the second, what’s the subhead?
Charlie Glickman: “Erotic Exploration for Men and Their Partners”.
Shaun Galanos: How does it feel to be sort of one of the experts on the topic?
Charlie Glickman: It’s not exactly where I thought my career was going to go. But if I like it, especially because of my work as a sex educator and my work as a coach, it’s really all about saying or speaking the things that aren’t spoken. What’s not being said here, what’s the thing that you really want, that you don’t know how to talk about?
Anal play in general, and men receiving anal play in particular, those are topics that we’re not supposed to talk about in this world. I really enjoy the fact that I talk about them all the time and that just makes the world a happy place for me.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, I mean, I love talking about stuff that most people don’t talk about. I’m often the person that will say the thing that the people want to say, but don’t say. The prostate play is apparently not just for gay men. How is the landscape changing in the sense that, or in the way where straight men are getting into receiving prostate pleasure?
Charlie Glickman: I want to mention one thing first, which is that a lot of gay men I talk to don’t necessarily know much about the prostate. Some of that is that anal play and prostate play, it’s two different things going on in the same way that clitoral play and G-spot play are two different things going on.
I’ve talked with folks who really enjoy receiving intercourse, but don’t know anything about the G spot and I’ve talked with plenty of gay and bisexual men and men who have sex with men who love anal play, but they don’t know a thing about the prostate.
So, there’s this myth that the reason why gay men like the anal play is because of the prostate and that’s just not true.
Shaun Galanos: It’s one component of the anal play.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, it can be but it’s not the only reason and in fact, I know far too many folks with vulvas, cisgender women, transgender men, genderqueer folks, folks who don’t have prostates who really enjoy anal play too. It’s not a gender thing.
Coming back to your question about heterosexual guys and prostate play— we have this idea that sex is supposed to be all about the penis, right? It’s all about making the penis feel good and when the guy cums then that’s the end of sex and that’s the only sexual part of his body.
A lot of the men I’ve talked to have said that exploring prostate play has given them much more
access to the possibilities of their erotic bodies. They can see how sex is not just about their cock, that you don’t necessarily need an erection, that you can enjoy sexual stimulation on any part of the body. So that’s one piece.
Another piece is that for men who have never received any kind of penetrative sex, sex happens outside your body, right? Even if you’re having the hottest intercourse of your life, it’s still happening outside your body, it’s not inside.
When you start experimenting with receiving pleasure through penetration and exploring what it’s like to have sexual stimulation happen inside your body, all of a sudden you become much more aware of things like how your mood or your physical state affect your arousal. You can understand things like being really turned on and really into your partner, but still need lots of warm up.
A lot of the men I talked to tell me that it’s actually made them better lovers as givers because they now have this embodied sense of what it’s like to receive. Interestingly, a lot of the women I’ve talked to who have been on the giving side of prostate play have told me that now they understand why their boyfriends or husbands or partners or whoever, when they get excited they start going faster and like, “Slow down, slow down,” starts becoming repetitive.
I’ve heard from a lot of women who have said to me. “Wow, yeah, my boyfriend kept telling me to slow down but I was so turned on that was really difficult. Now I know why he does that.”
It’s this interesting way of walking a mile in the other person’s shoes that just opens up all kinds of possibilities. No pun intended.
Shaun Galanos: It makes what’s available more complex and more interesting. Because it’s not just about the cock and the balls, there’s now this other organ that can be stimulated and everything that comes with stimulating that organ because it’s not just slide in and start massaging the prostate, like you said, there has to be some warm-up.
That’s oftentimes the times I’ve experienced this sort of pleasure with another partner, it’s much more vulnerable and intimate and it’s not something that I’m willing to do with everybody.
Charlie Glickman: What a great lesson because then if you’re with a new partner and she says, “Yeah, I enjoy intercourse but it’s not something I really want to do at this point in our dynamic, we don’t know each other that well yet”, it’s going to be a lot easier for you to be cool with that because you know what that’s like, or maybe she’s just stressed out and that’s not the thing that’s going to feel good to her today.
This is why I genuinely believe the world is going to be a better place when more men take it up the ass, because we can talk about this stuff all day long, or you can have an embodied experience that changes everything.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, every woman that I’ve talked to about the possibility of pegging happening or of them penetrating me, they get like over the moon excited.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, I’ve definitely talked with folks who have some trepidation about it. When we wrote the book, we did a survey ultimately asking over 200 people, mostly men, but also partners of men, about their experiences and there were three concerns that came up over and over again.
“Is this going to hurt?”
“Is this going to get messy?”
“Does this mean I’m gay?”
And I’ve also heard this from women who have said, “Well, if my boyfriend likes this, doesn’t that mean he’s gay?”
I just want to acknowledge that because women also have fears and concerns potentially about this. So you’ve been lucky that all of your partners have said, “Yeah, let’s go for it”. But I just want to put that out there that not everybody will respond. It’s not a guarantee.
Shaun Galanos: The answer to those questions can be
“Yes, it can’t hurt.”
“Yes, it can be messy.”
“Yes, it can mean that you’re gay,” but for the most part, if it’s done with some considerations in mind, those can also be “No”.
Charlie Glickman: Those first two questions about pain and hygiene, those are technical questions, how to do this safely. Who you want to have sex with, that’s your sexual orientation. What things feel good to your body that’s about where your nerve endings are.
Gay men are not born with magic prostate anal nerve endings that straight guys don’t have. It just doesn’t happen, and I’ve talked with plenty of gay men who don’t like anal play at all. Interestingly, there is a study done a while back, they surveyed 2,000 gay men about their most recent sexual experience, what they did. Anal intercourse was reported 37% of the time.
Now, I’m pretty confident that more than 99%of those guys have tried it at least once because there’s a lot more conversation about anal sex in the gay community. Imagine what the world would be like if heterosexual couples were having intercourse 37% of the time that they had sex. It’s a very different world. The idea that anal sex is what gay men do all the time is just not true, and it’s actually sort of a projection of heterosexual patterns onto gay men.
Shaun Galanos: Now we can start dismantling the myth and then heterosexual men can start feeling more comfortable with the idea of being penetrated and eventually actually feel the benefits.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, and the fact is, from a sexological perspective, any sexual act that happens between two people of different genders is heterosexual sex.
A woman wearing a strap-on and pegging a guy is just as much heterosexual sex as him having intercourse with. her, because it’s not about the act itself it’s about the genders of the people who do it. So yeah, lots of myths about all of these things.
Shaun Galanos: Now we know, it’s been demystified, you’re not gay if you like— well, you might be, but it’s not going to change it.
Charlie Glickman: It might help you come more into alignment with your fantasies, but those fantasies were already there. Maybe you were just disavowing them.
Shaun Galanos: Having known that, how can men learn to receive, because it’s not obvious?
Charlie Glickman: I think the most important thing is learning to breathe and relax. When you hold your breath, your whole body tightens up, including your pelvic floor. L
earning to breathe and relax and long, slow exhalations actually relax the nervous system down. That’s one thing. The second thing is learning to enjoy the sensations even if you’re not doing anything.
So for example, learning to lie back and receive, honestly learning to lie back and to receive a blow job as compared to taking a more, initiatory active role with it. Yeah, I think learning to receive a lot of people and especially a lot of men have some anxiety around that, so I think this is a good place to take it slowly.
For example, if your partner is giving you a back rub, notice when you feel like, “All right, so now I should grab her and toss her on the bed. And now it’s my turn to be in charge.”
Where does that urge come from? If you are lying back and your partner is giving you a blow job, do you start noticing your attention is wandering and you’re planning ahead for when it’s your turn? Can you focus on the physical sensations of what is happening right now?
Shaun Galanos: What you just described, I think, can be attributed to men just as much as women. I know a whole slew of women who just have a hard time receiving, especially oral sex because they feel like they’re taking too long.
To just learn to sit back and relax and enjoy the show and that nothing has to happen concurrently in this situation— that’s hard to do.
Charlie Glickman: I was working once with a couple, a male-female couple, and she did not like to receive oral sex and it was because oral sex had never made her orgasm. She had a very specific pattern that caused her to orgasm and she could enjoy it, but it just didn’t happen. And she had had a number of boyfriends over the years who got insistent that like, “Oh my magic oral sex skills, you’re going to cum harder than you’ve ever cum before,” and that goal-oriented pressure turned her off to oral sex.
When her boyfriend said, “Thanks for telling me about all of that, I actually just really like going down on you, as long as you’re enjoying it, I don’t care whether you’re going to have an orgasm or not. I just want to know that you’re having fun with it.” She said, “Oh, well, if you’re not pressuring me to have an orgasm, then yeah, I do like this”. And then they were able to engage in that way.
That goal-oriented approach makes it really difficult to receive. Receiving works most easily when you’re not trying for any particular outcome, except pleasure, to feel good.
Shaun Galanos: Pleasure-based play, other than goal-oriented. Which is interesting because when we talk about the prostate play, there can be different types of orgasms.
There can be the act of like milking the prostate and having a lot of like fluid come out and that can be something that people really want to achieve. Or they might want to achieve like a whole body orgasm that they’ve heard they can have.
In my experience, every time that I have tried to play with my prostate, I’ve also wanted these goals and it gets in the way of just exploring new sensations.
Charlie Glickman: When it comes to things like whole body orgasms, it really is about relaxing into it. And yeah, the more you push for it, the less likely it is to happen. It’s a very Zen sort of thing, where you can’t achieve enlightenment if you’re trying to achieve enlightenment. I will say though if you are interested in exploring full body orgasms, Mantak Chia’s book The Multi-Orgasmic Man, it’s not about prostate play specifically, but about learning to run sexual energy throughout your entire body. I think his book is the most accessible and easy to read, it’s mostly focused on male-female patterns, but he does have a chapter on male-male couples which puts him a step beyond most people in that world in terms of what makes it into books.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, or you could just read that book from the perspective of just one solo male. I mean, that’s how I read it.
Charlie Glickman: Ultimately when we’re talking about sexual energy, it’s less about genitals and more about how you can ride those waves and it doesn’t really matter as much what you have between your legs, in terms of the practice.
Shaun Galanos: Well, and that’s different than like penis-based orgasms, because we’re taught that if you want if you want an orgasm, just hammer it out and you’ll eventually get one, and I think from what I know, and from what I’ve read that’s not the approach to take when it comes to prostate pleasure.
Charlie Glickman: Well, the difference is that ejaculation and orgasm are not the same things, even though we often use those words interchangeably and they often happen at the same time, those are actually two different processes.
My proof for this is, I’m willing to bet that everybody out there with a penis has had at least one experience in your life where you ejaculated maybe by yourself, maybe with a partner, but you didn’t really have much of that orgasmic energy, it was more like scratching an itch or sneezing right? Like, okay took care of the urge, let me wash my hands and go back to work or whatever it is.
You can have an ejaculation without orgasm and you can have an orgasm without ejaculation. It just takes a little bit more practice to figure out.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, I mean I’ve had those orgasms where I’ve not wanted to orgasm and so I have tried to pull back, but then I ejaculated anyways and the orgasm was like a one on the scale and it was like the most disappointing thing ever, but it happened. It happened and it was like disappointment, but I ejaculated and then I’m in the refractory period and that’s that for a period of time.
Charlie Glickman: Yeah, and I think that’s also common when we’re watching porn and I’m not saying that porn is bad or evil. I’m not one of the folks who argues that, but I do observe that when 98% of your attention is on the computer screen or the TV or your phone, that you’re not really being present in your body in the same way that if you’re watching TV while eating dinner, you’re not really tasting your food either.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, when I make a conscious decision to not look at pornography, it doesn’t mean that I’m not going to masturbate, it means that I’m going to masturbate much less frequently. But when I do, it’s when I’m actually turned on or I make a decision to like spend time with myself and to go like, “Okay, this is where I’m just going to like give myself love”.
I think that with prostate play it’s not something that you just kind of hammer out, I think it’s something that you spend more time and that you are more thoughtful.
The book is the is “The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure” and we could talk about this and we can go through all of the steps or you could just read the book.
Charlie Glickman: For folks who want the condensed version, the book’s website, which is prostate pleasure guide. net, it has a lot of information that will get you started and then, of course, the book goes into much more detail, but we wrote the website because we wanted to make sure that even just casual readers would still have the tips and tools to do it safely.
Shaun Galanos: Yeah, okay. So there’s the book. Where can we find more of you?
Charlie Glickman: Well, I’m pretty easy to track down. My website is make sex easy.com. You can find me on Facebook.com/Glickman.
If anybody is interested in one-on-one conversations with me, I meet folks both here in my Seattle space, but also over video. I work with folks of all genders, background, sexual orientations and literally all over the world. If you’re interested in getting in touch with me, make sex easy.com the contact form goes right into my email inbox.
Shaun Galanos: Do you have a final parting thought for our listeners?
Charlie Glickman: Nobody is born knowing anything about sex any more than we are born knowing about food, or music, or exercise, or cars. If you want to have an amazing sex life, it’s not that difficult to do, but you do need to learn how to do it. Whether that is books websites, working with a coach, exploring things with your partner, just try stuff and see what works for you.
Shaun Galanos: Do the work.
Charlie Glickman: Do the work. The payoff is worth it.
