the education, the self-empowered perspective – to look critically at the choices they’ve made in the past, and why they made them, and then to start making smarter ones. It is by making better choices that people heal from the pain of the past, regain their confidence and make the changes necessary to get them to that next level of inner peace.
To me, an optimum model of adult sexual health is one we have yet, as a culture, to build: it’s a model that finds a place for all consenting adult sex while supporting standards of health and safety that protect both the individual and the public.
Thus the mission of this second volume, Sex for Grown-Ups: to provide encapsulations of the theories and perspectives that have enlightened and challenged my clients over the years, and which have transformed so many lives for the better, happier, and more orgasmic. It’s my way of offering sex therapy to people who’d never go for sex therapy, and sharing what I know about sex to as many people as possible. This book is dedicated to my clients, to my friends, to everyone who hungers for the truth, and to my loving and beloved life-partners William Brame and Jennifer Kleiman, and to my long-time friend, David Browde.
Three New Rational Rules of Sex
One of the most irrational yet widespread assumptions about sex is that there is a “right way” to have it. In the first volume of The Truth About Sex: Sex and the Self, I devoted a section to the evolution of that assumption from its roots in Roman philosophy, medieval theology, and Victorian psychiatry, respectively. For most of Western history, our religious doctrines, our national laws, our customs, and much of our thinking about sex has simply assumed that missionary position heterosexual intercourse in a monogamous marriage is normal and everything else is a deviation, something that abnormal or sinful people do. Until the late 20th century, psychiatrists too demonized everything from masturbation to homosexuality as “diseases,” perpetuating Victorian ideology instead of relying on the actual medical science which amply demonstrated otherwise.
Evidence shows that the only “wrong way” to have sex is to have sex that you or your partner do not enjoy. Equipped with data and studies as we are these days, sexologists can generally agree that psychological harm derives from unwanted or non-consensual sex. Behaviors where all partners feel fulfilled are acceptable, regardless of the precise way in which the partners fulfill one another.
If you look at sex and relationships without moral judgment or religious ideology, all sexual relationships which satisfy both partners are positive sexual relationships – whether they are casual or permanent, straight or gay, poly or monogamous or anything else. When it comes to sex between consenting adults, there is only one important question: was it good for all involved?
Over time, there have been so many false lessons about sex, and so many arbitrary boundaries, that most people end up completely confused about what is and is not acceptable. It’s not surprising that adults often look for rules on how to have a functional sex life. Unfortunately, many of those rules come down to pat clichés that are handed from generation to generation without question, rules like “casual sex is bad for you” (nope) or “fetishes are bad” (nope) or “open marriages are doomed” (nope, no more so than monogamous ones).
No one has ever been able to make a rational case to explain why such behaviors are bad quite simply because there is no rational evidence for it. There may be reasons why people who enjoy casual sex or have fetishes have problematic relationships but usually it’s because of judgment and shame stemming from those unquestioned rules and standards about what normal sex “should be.” I think many of our old rules about sex should have been laughed out of existence around the time doctors stopped examining the bumps on people’s heads to determine their mental abilities.
So I’m going to set out what I think are the only three rules you really need to know about sex.
Dr. Brame’s 3 Rules of Sex
1. Sex is as complicated as the adults having it
A successful sex life depends on individual variations in the people having it.
2. Diversity is normal
Everyone is wired a little differently.
3. Every adult can have good sex
Each of us has the capability to give and receive sexual pleasure.
These three rules are the framework for this book and for a complete adult education (or re-education) in sex. They express the most important concepts every adult needs to grasp in order to make their sex lives work for them, individually, and to develop a more sensitive and optimistic view of human sexuality in general. They apply across the board to every sexually active adult, regardless of orientation, sex, gender, or sexual identity.
The Shame of It
It’s strange how many people seem to believe that the solution to their sex problems should be something you can bleat out in 25 words or less. People want fast fixes, especially for problems they are embarrassed to talk about in detail. Many is the time people have emailed hoping for magic bullets or saying, “Just tell me what to do in bed and I’ll do it,” as if my telling them to manipulate genitals in a certain way will resolve the lifetime of inhibition that led them to a sex therapist in the first place.
Similarly, when a woman emails, “How can I get my husband to stop masturbating?” expecting me to deliver a meaningful answer in a quick email back, I take a deep breath, and ask her to make an appointment.
When I can spend an hour with someone, I take a full sex history. I can delve into the circumstances that created the problem and evaluate all the factors – is the behavior hurting their sex-life, is he compulsive about it, does he lie about it? Only then can I provide advice that will work for that individual couple.
I usually have to start with cold facts: so in the above case, I’d have to mention that there is no way to stop masturbation (psychiatrists devoted themselves to a cure for masturbation for a century until they finally, grudgingly, accepted that it wasn’t a disease in the first place). Also, it’s normal for adults to masturbate, married or not. What’s less common is for a partner to worry about or interfere with their spouse’s masturbation. Until I have a complete picture, it’s possible that the real problem is that the wife thinks it’s a problem, and that it’s her issues, not his, that need to be addressed.
Because people are generally unaccustomed to talking about the personal details of their most intimate relationships, they often never find out if the sexual behaviors they experience are normal or not. Instead, they base decisions upon what they learned growing up. The problem is that when you grow up in a culture where people are chronically ignorant about sex, the dialogue about sex at home, at school, and certainly at places of worship is often tragically out of step with real life.
Everyone pays a lot of lip service to the social rules of normality. And many, if not most of us still measure ourselves, and our sex lives, according to the model that our society holds up as ideal: a man and a woman in monogamous wedlock, happily bouncing away in man-on-top bliss. But how many of us actually live by that model? How many of us wait until marriage to experience intercourse and then stick with that one “normal” position for life? How many grown-ups are strictly monogamous and strictly heterosexual? Actually, a minority of us.
