Think back to junior high. Your body was running on a new set of instructions, and your mind couldn’t stop thinking about sex. You probably felt embarrassed about a lot of it, but nobody treated you like you were sick. Everyone understood it was puberty. Now fast forward. You’re 35 or 45 or 55, 65 … Continued
There’s a term from the 2012 film Savages. Blake Lively’s character uses the word “wargasm.” I’ve thought about that word a lot. Here’s what I think it actually points at: trauma doesn’t just sit in your memory. It sits in your body. Combat, danger, sustained survival mode – that charge doesn’t leave just because the … Continued
Viagra and Cialis are genuinely effective medications. For a lot of men, they solve the immediate mechanical problem – blood flow, in the moment, on demand. That’s real, and it’s not nothing. But I regularly talk to men who are taking one of these medications, getting a physiologically functional erection, and still dreading sex. Still … Continued
A lot of men start TRT expecting it to be the fix. Blood work comes back low, testosterone gets corrected, and the assumption is that everything downstream — desire, erections, confidence in bed — will follow along automatically. For some men, it does help, at least partially. For a lot of men, it doesn’t fix … Continued
Most men who come to me have spent years treating their own arousal like a liability. Something to manage, hide, or override. What turns them on feels arbitrary at best, embarrassing at worst – a glitch they’d edit out if they could. Here’s a different way to look at it, borrowed from a sex researcher … Continued
At some point, most men I work with asks a version of the same question: is this a kink or is this the pattern talking? He’s found himself drawn to something specific… a scenario, a dynamic, a type of content and he doesn’t know what to do with it. Is this just who he is … Continued
In my experience, most men don’t stop to ask where a specific turn-on came from. They just know it’s there, they know it’s oddly specific, and they’ve usually spent more energy hiding it or feeling strange about it than actually understanding it. That’s worth changing. Not because every fetish needs a tidy origin story, but … Continued
There’s a pattern almost every man I work with recognizes when I describe it. He acts. He feels shame. The shame is almost unbearable. To escape the shame, he reaches for the thing he’s ashamed of. Which generates more shame. Which generates another reach. This is the shame loop. And it is one of the … Continued
Some men can tell you exactly what’s wrong in their marriage and still find themselves pulling away the moment their partner tries to get closer. Not out of malice, and often not even consciously – it’s more like a reflex. Closeness arrives, and something in the body says not this, not now, not fully. This … Continued
Sexual shame in men has a particular quality: it tends to sit in the body quietly, like a stone that’s been there so long it no longer surprises you. You’ve made your accommodations around it. You’ve built your life at a slight angle to the truth. And you’ve gotten quite good at appearing fine. This … Continued