Plus Size Sexy Skills Online Course:
Embracing Your Curves with Confidence in the Bedroom

Welcome everyone to 'Plus Size, Sexy and Confident.' I'm Luna Matatas and I'm a sex and pleasure educator and I've been teaching sex ed for about 10 years and most of it has been through a public health perspective. So very much looking at like disease reduction, but like, no matter where I was, people were like, "oh, like, you know, how do I have better sex? How do I deal? How do I do this?" And so people wanted pleasure. They wanted to learn about pleasure and as I started teaching pleasure, one of the first classes I taught was group sex. I ended up teaching, I teach a whole bunch of things and the class that is the most popular and always sold out is sexual confidence and so you're not alone if you feel insecure, if you feel shy, if you feel like you're not good enough, if you feel that your sexiness is only limited to certain scenarios or positions or things or looks, everyone is dealing with this and we're gonna go through why in tonight's workshop as well. We're gonna talk about what is sexual confidence, you know, how is it unique for us as people in plus size bodies or if you like to have sex with people in plus size bodies and we're also gonna talk about how do we take all this bullshit and, you know, make some more space for pleasure because it's really tough to want to take up space when we're trying to edit ourselves and when we're taught that, you know, we have to tame ourselves and continuously like try to be smaller. So we're gonna talk about redefining our sexy. We're going to reclaim our gaze. We're also gonna talk about strategies to get you outta your head and back into your body and then the last little piece, we're also gonna talk about practical strategies for shame releasing and how sensuality can be a part of that. So a lot of these practices you can use to build your confidence in areas outside of sex, but I'm gonna give you specific examples and practices for sexy times, right? For sexy times. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about how I came to develop this workshop. I have always, always struggled with my body confidence. If you can relate, whether it's from plus size issues or if it's from other things, I definitely have also struggled being in a racialized body, being in a fem body. and one of the messagings that I always had was, well, you know, if you just lost weight, you would be happier and better and have more access to love and friends and success and being treated nicer and fashion and clothing and all of these like dangling delicious carrots were in front of me if I just like, didn't have a belly or didn't have jiggly thighs or didn't have a double chin or didn't have like bat wing arms and so those are very powerful motivators. They're very powerful to be dangling things like attraction and desire and love and companionship and dating and success in front of us if only our bodies were different and so I kind of grew up, one, thinking about myself as parts and so maybe you've had a similar experience where you get dressed and you're all cute in the mirror and then whatever your issue is with a particular part, it can almost steal from that moment. So you're looking all cute until you realize you turn to the side and you're like, oh, you can see like my back fat or something and then all of a sudden, that cute is gone and we're gonna talk about how to get that cute back because that cute can slip away real easy, especially in sexual situations where you're really vulnerable and so what it taught me was to really think of myself as pieces or cuts of meat and so to see myself in parts, like these are good parts, these are bad parts. These are parts I should work on. These are parts I need to get rid of, excuse me and so it ends up leaving us with a lot of energy to focus on not being ourselves and so imagine what that does for our ability to fee like we deserve to take up space. Another big issue is around, I always had trouble with lingerie and you can let me know if you've had trouble with this as well. I, for the longest time, I mean, there's way better options now but when I was in my twenties and looking for lingerie, I immediately approached lingerie as something that was going to help me hide or like redecorate my body during sex. So I wanted baby dolls because they were lingerie that was like tighter on my breasts and then like, flowier on the bottom. So as plus size people particularly, those of us that identify as fem or as women, there's often also, our parts are only valuable if they're desirable through the male gaze and whether or not you're attracted to men, the male gaze tends to determine a lot of our culture, a lot of our social stuff, a lot of all of our porn, you know? So it's also a pretty powerful motivator and the horrible thing is, is that, the horrible and the good thing. So any shame that you're holding right now. Anything that feels like you aren't sexy enough, you can't get the people that you wanna get, that you need to hide yourself when you're in the bedroom, certain positions, certain clothing, certain lingerie, certain looks are not for you, anything that you are thinking about that's holding you back from pleasure is actually a script that you have been taught. So it's not your fault. It's absolutely a hundred thousand percent not your fault that we hold these toxic thoughts. It is our responsibility and so the joy of this responsibility is that we get to relearn how to rewrite this script and we relearn that through building a relationship with our own sexiness. We get to like set our own measures of what that sexy is gonna look like and how we are gonna wield that power. So the work that you're doing tonight and the work that you're gonna continue to do is absolutely about resisting a lot of the stuff that is still circulating out there. The good news is, is that you don't have to go to bed with it. We're gonna develop tools tonight that help you have more cushion, have more nimbleness, have more resilience amongst the other types of influences that are still very powerful and very big and very oppressive and so, you know, I mean, clothing options always want our money and as soon as like there's enough demand, then they get our money. So, I mean, changing yourself is also an incredible force of power to be able to inspire other folks. And because as we start to rewrite that script, as we start to get a new story, that's actually our authentic voice. What can happen is that old voice wants to drag us back and we don't have enough representation. We don't have enough pop culture. We don't have enough laundry accessibility to really quiet that from the outside. So we have to quiet it from within and so be gentle with yourself because that resistance is letting go of an old way of being that has become really comfortable for most of us. I definitely went through phases where I only wanted flowy black things. I didn't want anything that would draw attention like red lipstick. I didn't want nail polish that was colors that weren't neutral. I just didn't want anyone to look at me because I thought, well, they're gonna see how ugly I am and how horrible I am and they're going to do something bad and either that's gonna like tell, they're gonna tell me, they're gonna shame me. There's gonna be this awkward experience of them noticing what I already deep down believe, that I'm unlovable and unattractive and unsexy and as you do this work as well, it's not so much about like, you don't have to like be perfectly a hundred percent body accepting to have good sex. You don't have to be a hundred percent body accepting to go on great dates. This is always a work in progress and so what we're trying to do tonight is develop that toolkit, a new toolkit to bust some of that bullshit when it comes up and then to also like really nurture ourselves to grow in the direction that we're trying to grow. So it's more of a direction. No problem, Rebecca. So we're gonna talk a little bit about how all of that fits into sexual confidence. So sexual confidence isn't actually so much like, it's not really an attitude. It's not like a look, a sexual confidence is actually about feeling like you belong in your erotic experiences. So feeling like you have a right to take up as much space, as much pleasure, as much energy as you want from whatever sexual experience you're having and the way to do that is to actually let go of self judgment and so people struggle with sexual competence around judging themselves for their bodies. So lots of body shame, it's super, super common. Also performance anxiety. So did I come? Like, or are they gonna make me come? Can I come for them? Or I'm coming too quick. People also worry about their fantasies and fetishes. So they have shames around their desires. So if I want to do this thing, is it going to make me this type of person? Or are they gonna think I'm weird? Or am I gonna have to do it all the time? Or what does it say about me? And so imagine all of those, right? All of those like stories are turning in our head as we're trying to get aroused and what arousal actually is, is our brain sending chemical messages to the rest of our body to open up blood flow and open up circulation and flooding us with all these fell good chemicals but if we're busy blocking that enabling of our erotic imagination because we're so worried about the ways that we're not good enough, it ends up blocking our pleasure. So people who are sexually confident, they have more fun in bed and they're more sexually satisfied because they're more relaxed. They approach sex kind of like with curiosity and a playfulness and they aren't worried about rejection or favor and so for those of us who have body shame, often sexual experiences become a barter for emotional connection and so we put up with sexual experiences that aren't so great because we're looking for that reassurance, that affirmation, that validation of our sexual desirability and our attractiveness, what we wanna move to, I mean, that's on the far end of the continuum, what we wanna move to is basically fucking like a goddess and so showing up as if like, hmm, I am so sexy. I am feeling myself and look at me overflow just enough to give you a taste and so that means that we walk into our sexual experiences really full. We walk in with like expecting that maybe you're just gonna top this up but I'm already feeling myself and like, won't you join me? And so that type of attitude is a game changer for many of us who have had to edit ourselves, tame ourselves, put up with partners who've maybe said terrible things to us, put up with a fat phobic society, put up with always trying to not live in this body right now and so moving towards feeling like, oh, sorry, I'm like not comfortable in my chair, moving towards feeling like you belong in the pleasure of those experiences can also help you be more of a recipient for those experiences. So sometimes we have partners that really wanna pleasure us, but we get in our head, how many of you have trouble with receiving? I feel like a lot of people have trouble, not just plus size people, but lots of people have trouble with receiving pleasure and we worry about like, am I taking too long? What if I don't like the thing that they're doing and how do I tell them not to do that and do something else? What if I smell bad? What if I taste bad? What if like afterwards they don't like it or, and so we go through all of the trouble of navigating someone trying to give us pleasure and, you know, we get stuck in our head about receiving. Think of it even on a very simple level. What happens when someone gives you a compliment? So if I'm like, "Oh, I really like your polka dot dress." And you say, "Oh yeah, I got this thing, it was only like $5 and it was in the back of my closet and I never," we try to detract from someone admiring and appreciating and complimenting what's happening for us, right? So take that and put that in a sexual scenario where it becomes even more precious. It becomes more about like we're giving and receiving in a sexual scenario of both energy, of physical activities, of erotic imaginations and if we're not able to receive, we are also putting up a blockage for things like orgasm, for things like feeling sensuality, for feeling intimacy, feeling trust, feeling vulnerability, feeling ourselves. So it becomes really difficult to even really enjoy sex. We're like, well, this thing kind of sucks, but I want it because I like things like touch or affection or orgasms. Sandy worries about taking too long. Yeah, yeah and sometimes these experiences are rooted in maybe a pathology of past experiences. So someone might have told you that you take too long. We might have also developed coping mechanisms around focusing on other people's pleasure and so it feels, we don't feel as comfortable sort of like leaning into someone just focusing on our pleasure. So that can definitely be a big challenge. I'm just writing down. I'm gonna with you some techniques for, if you feel like you're taking too long in the next section. I just got an idea. It's something that I definitely do. I have worried a lot about taste in the past, my husband can't accept compliment. Aw, yeah, I think it's really hard to watch someone when you give them a compliment and I do it all the time too. Someone will say, Oh, I like your, the whatever and instead of just accepting it, I'll tell them either where I got it or how much it cost or like a story about it instead of just being like, oh my gosh, thanks, yeah, I love it too. And so practicing even taking compliments can be a way to start feeling, like a very tiny way, it doesn't have to be a sexual compliment. It could be someone compliments you in another aspect of your personality or life, but it's a way of sitting in that pleasure without feeling expecting to or that expectation of giving back, that you have to tit for tat something, that you can't just receive. So translate that into an erotic context where you just get to receive and the joy and the gift to the other person is actually the pleasure of you receiving. So lots of us get off on like watching our partners receive and give them pleasure in a way that feeds back to our own desires. So practice with compliments if you think that you struggle with receiving even practice giving compliments and tuning into how people are kind of shying away from that and, you know, do your best to kind of encourage them, if they're like, "Oh my God, it was only $5." And then you could be like, "Well, that was good for you to treat yourself to that." And that affirmation of other people can also help us stand in our own power because sexually confident people don't believe that they're better than other people. They don't think that they're the best at sex. What they kind of feel, they're not focusing on like rejection or favor. They just feel like, oh, like, well, let's be curious about what works right now for the two bodies that are here right now and so it's letting go of that idea of a performance, idea of like showing up and like giving something that's perfectly curated for the other person. That has to do with communication. We have to learn to also speak up about our needs. So excuse me, we will talk about some skills for communication because as, for plus size sex, sometimes we feel like we're asking for accommodations and it can feel like, well, if I just had a smaller body, then you know, maybe this wouldn't happen which is not true. So people are of all different kinds of abilities, they're of all different kinds of flexibility, they're of all different kinds of pleasure, desire, arousal, perception and so speaking up about your sexual needs and your desires is actually a tool that will also help you outside of the bedroom but particularly in the bedroom, it will help you own that space. So everything is going back to how do we like own that space? So I hope I'm giving you lots of teasers here for all the things that await you as you start working on your sexual confidence. All right, so, a couple of things about the context as we go into redefining our sexy, I've got just a couple of pieces of context but you might have your own pieces of context as well. You might have your own unique histories and experiences that shape how you're going to reclaim your sexual confidence. So our plus size confidence is unique because we live in a fat phobic society, right? So where the word fat is a bad thing, where we're not allowed to exist in these bodies. We're not allowed to jiggle in these bodies. We're not allowed to dance and play in these bodies and there's a constant, I mean, there's like huge, huge, huge, $8 billion industry, the diet industry that's telling us that we can't exist and so, remember that all of that noise is going on in the back of your head, as you're trying on that cute outfit, that noise is in the back of your head as you're trying to like get on top of your partner and like ride the life outta them, you know? So it takes time to be able to quiet that noise and if you try and you kind of flop and you check out and you end up in that darkness for a bit, that's okay. We're building tools to be able to light the way back, right? We're like lighting the way back. I can have a really bad body experience or sexual experience or sexual confidence experience on Tuesday and then, you know, maybe by Friday, I've like found my way back. Whereas before it would've taken me years to find my way back or months, right? And so remember to also like pat yourself on the back for any of those accomplishments, you know, the moment where you're about to change your outfit, or you're about to edit a photo or you weren't about to approach somebody that was cute because you think that you weren't good enough for them and maybe you said hi anyways. So all of those moments, they really, those are the pieces that start to rewrite your script. Those are the pieces that start to get you into a position of believing in your own sexiness. So it's unique for plus size people because of fat phobia, also misogyny, so people who are fem or who identify as women are held to a higher standard. And so we see this a lot in, even in, we see it in fashion, we see it in our workplaces. We also see it in porn. We see it in sexualization. We see it in so many different ways and if you notice if, how many of you, any of you on dating apps? Are you on like, OkCupid or Tinder or anything? So if you notice any of the apps like OkCupid which allow you to self identify your body type. So lots of people who present as male or masculine or men, they often are showing their body type as in a higher regard than they actually are. So maybe they have a dad bod and they've put something like muscular but for fems and for women, we tend to underplay it. We tend to assume sort of the worst and we go with like something that is a little bit more of like taming ourselves or editing ourselves. So online dating, we'll definitely talk about, it's a world of its own. So there's also a lack of representation. It's only been recently that we've seen more plus size folks come out and be fashionable and fun and like have a good time and a sexy time in their bodies. So, do any of you follow any plus size influencers on Instagram that you find really inspiring? Let us know in the chat, I'm going to include some in your bonus resources that I follow. It's really important that you curate your content, curate your content and what that means is that you're going to look specifically for people who embody these attributes of this sexiness that isn't dependent on a conventional standard of attraction. So that means like people who you can just see such a vibe and a confidence and a colorfulness and a, you know, a fuck yeah-ness and anything that's like, wow, like that person is living life. It's less about their body and it's more about that they're living life and they're being inspired and desired in their authentic selves. It's in this body right now and remember, all of us are, you know, we're slowly dying, right? Like we're slowly dying. We're slowly getting disabled and to hang our sexual confidence and our ability to take up space on our bodies is a really fleeting standard and so for us to come to standards of where we have self-acceptance and we look at our bodies in a way that's like, hmm, like, thank you body. Like, thank you for, you know, holding this container of a kind, funny, smart, maybe you're athletic, maybe you're loving. Maybe you're really good at math. Like your body is a sack of skin and so our sexiness definitely, a hundred percent come from inside out, the outside just decorates it. The outside is also sexy but it sort of just decorates things. All right, I don't know if she's an influencer or not but I really like (indistinct). Oh yeah, I follow her too, I love her. Yes, okay, great. It has helped my self confidence to take out the average size supermodels outta my feed. Yes, Sandy, yes. I feel better without having that constant reminder that you are not the standard. Exactly. So maybe we can't change that from existing, but you have the power to change what comes into your feed every day, what you are engaging with, your gaze, that's the second part we're gonna work out on, but your gaze is so important to be reclaimed. Right now we're looking through somebody else's idea of sexy and that idea of sexy is actually only a sliver of the possibility of sexiness that's out there. It like defines like 1% of the people, it's like Beyonce and so Beyonce's sexy, but have we not found people that are sexy, that are not Beyonce? And so think about even who you are attracted to and think about the things that sometimes feels good, but maybe doesn't look as good. I love bellies, I think they feel so soft. They're so good during sex. They're great to be cuddled with but I struggle so much with accepting my own belly. It is definitely a part of my body that I've disassociated from and I'm only now starting to build a relationship back to, I concentrated all of my happiness on if I just didn't have a belly like this wouldn't happen and like, why is this belly here? And I gotta hide this belly and so it was really hard for me to have sex that actually engaged or used or celebrated my belly, right? I didn't wanna be in positions where it was hanging, but then I didn't wanna be in positions where maybe it was like flopped over and so think about if you have a body part where you are holding most of your unconfidence or feelings of shame because the way that our arousal also works is that our emotions create chemical reactions in our bodies and so a lot of our trauma around our body hatred, around feeling not good enough for such a long time, we actually hold it in our tissue and so it's very hard for our sympathetic nervous system to actually relax out of that place of like tension and anxiousness and insecurity and it can be hard to experience what the full freedom and playfulness and lightness of sex can actually be. So I'm really glad that some of you are starting to curate your content. So that includes everything, unfollow hashtags that are bringing up shit into your feed. You know, click like hide add when you see something that comes up, I often am talking about body acceptance or body love and so I get a lot of fitspo and like diet things coming in. There's definitely some good things if you're interested in really thinking about things like, not so much sensuality, but just sort of like folks connecting to their bodies in ways that are around movement but they aren't necessarily for fitness and they aren't necessarily for choreography. They're just sort of like enjoying moving their bodies and I'm gonna give you one of those exercises as well. All righty, can you drop in the chat for me something that you think is sexy, it could be about you. It could be about another person. It could be physical, it could be an attribute. I don't care and if you're watching this later, think about like three to five things that you think are sexy. You can even do something, I like to do this when I'm teaching class in person, is I write sexy on the middle of the page and then you can just sort of like, I'm a very nonlinear thinker, obviously. So then you can sort of just make arms out and like brainstorm about all the things that you think are sexy and whenever I do this in a classroom setting, you might think that what's on there is like, oh, like big dicks or big breasts or red lips or this but a lot of the times, it actually focuses on a mix of physical characteristics that are not only visual but sometimes it could be someone's scent or their taste or the way they make you feel and also attributes. So do we think kindness is sexy? Do we think humor is sexy? Funny people are sexy as fuck, do we agree? Do we think that people who are confident but not arrogant, right? There's a difference. So sexual confidence is feeling like you belong. Sexual arrogance is feeling like you're in competition with other people in order to belong and we know the difference when we feel those people in the room and when we think about how we can actually get to a place where it starts feeling more like second nature for us, we don't have to do all this like thinking through it. It comes from really rethinking what that definition of sexy is. We have to redefine sexy. Okay, good, Martina. I'm so glad you think all those things are hot. Sandy loves a deep voice. Yes. Ugh, laughter and good hugs. Yes, get yourself a good hugger. That is very sexy, absolutely. I think watching a partner like cook a meal for me is really sexy. I think it's so beautiful to see someone want to like feed me. I think it's really sexy. Yeah, I think big hands are sexy. Yeah, for sure. I think full lips are sexy, dominance, but not assholes, I feel like that whole sentence always needs to go together. I don't know why dominance is always interpreted as, oh, I'm gonna be an asshole to you and maybe I'll do a webinar called dominance, not assholes. Good hugs. Cleaning without being told. Yeah, someone who's thoughtful. That's so thoughtful to clean without being told. Yeah, these are beautiful, beautiful. When you make this list later, make one list for things that you think about for other people that you find really sexy and make a list of things that you find sexy about yourself and so I'm gonna challenge you to put at least three things on that sexy list. And it might be things that you don't outwardly own or admit. I always thought my legs were really sexy but I never was showing them off. I didn't even own a dress until I was like 27. Like I really, I really wasn't owning it, but I always kind of thought like for myself, I was like, oh, if only like I was allowed like to think that this was sexy but when I get rid of this belly, then my legs will be sexy and so a lot of redefining sexy is about giving ourselves permission to be outside of that 1%, that sliver of what's considered sexy and when we start to do that for ourselves, we also start to do that with our attraction and so I was on, I still am on stupid Tinder, and I was, I realized, oh, I'm like, wow. I'm attracted to people of all genders but the most problems that I had and the most aggression that I had was usually with cisgendered men and I remember thinking that the most fat phobia, I never experienced fat phobia with anybody who was a gender other than a CIS man and so we can see a lot of that is also connected to patriarchy, right? That, you know, women and fems and folks that are not men start to want to take up space and reclaim things outside of the standards that patriarchy has set, then it starts to really upset a dynamic and so the idea that I could be like a fat babe and not care what you think was really offensive. So I got kicked off of Tinder, Bumble, okay, I got kicked off of everything, but I then thought, I'm like, hey, I have to start to also reexamine my own desire because the things that I don't like about myself, if I'm trying to only fit into a world that also only desires a particular kind of partner, so let's say tall, white guy, then it's gonna be really tough for me to fit into that world of sexy. I just don't exist in the same world of sexy as tall white guy, right? So what I ended up doing was thinking, you got kicked off too? Yeah, which one did you get kicked off of? Did you get kicked off of Tinder or OkCupid? I had a fight with OkCupid about the patriarchy. Tinder, oh my God. Yeah, I feel like people get upset and they report because of rejection. Anyways, that's a whole other webinar, but yeah, I'm sorry that happened but, so I started going through my list of things that I thought were attractive and who I was swiping right on. So one of the things that you can do to redefine your sexy is to, if you're already in a partnership, you can also do this but to start to think about who you find attractive and so who do you find desirable? Who do you want to have sex with? And if they all look like Ryan Gosling, that's hot but that's also a problem that we are narrowing our view of sexiness. So what I ended up doing was swiping right on people that I normally would've swiped left on based only on their photo and one of the things for me that was really important was height. I was like, oh, I need to have a tall guy. I definitely wanna be the smaller one and that was my internalized fat phobia taking place in my dating. So I thought that as a plus size person that I had to be the smaller one, how could I possibly like exist as the bigger one in the relationship? That would be humiliating and I was like, oh, Luna, come on. We gotta figure this out. Let's interrogate this a little bit. So interrogating your standards of attraction can sometimes open up ways that you're internalizing fat phobia and so it's not yours. You learned this, it's not your fault but sometimes we take on that stick that other people have been beating us with and we bring it inside and we start beating ourselves from the inside. So I ended up going on a date with someone who was five, four, it to this day was one of the most fun dates I have ever had and I felt so adored. The conversation was amazing and I thought, wow, I would've missed out on this person had I continued swiping with my internalized fat phobia. So I'm really glad that I opened that up but it also opened up room for me to just be a person and that this person also really loved, like we'll talk about fetishes, but like, we didn't end up continuing dating because I felt there was a bit of a fetish but loved like the idea of like, you know, big, like beautiful women and so it was an opportunity to not feel like, oh, I'm trying to like be hot and sexy for all the people that are conventionally attractive but what about the rest of us, right? Like that's only like what? 5% of the population? So the rest of us also have sex. The rest of us also go on dates. "I felt the same way about being the bigger one. I have hated weighing more than someone I dated who was six inches shorter." Yes, Rebecca, absolutely and I'll say it a million times, like that's not your fault and I'm so sorry that that's even in your script, in your story, it's not right and it's not fair and it's not true and, but what it is, is it's helping us like behave according to the rules of male desire, right? Like according to the rules of what's considered sexy and those desires are, or those rules of sexiness are also very Eurocentric. They also center around particular types of bodies that are abled. We don't see all of the sexiness that's out there and at the same time, we're told that this sexiness is gonna lead us to love and companionship and romance and marriage and children and all of those things we're hanging on, you know, like being thin and tall, like it doesn't calculate, but the industries and the motivators are so big and so if you have trouble rewriting your attraction, remember this takes time. It absolutely takes time because there's also something that's been pounded into our brain around sexiness that if we can get those people that are conventionally attractive, if we can get them to like us, somehow that's power, that's social power and the social power that we might lose by being the bigger one, we just can't afford to lose any more social power. So remember, all of these thoughts are behind, oh, I just need to lose five pounds or I just need to get back on my diet or I just need to do that. That's all happening behind. So the stuff in the front, these behaviors, that's industry, and then behind are the insecurities that were planted for industry and in order to be able to kind of move around that, it really is about developing your own barometer of sexiness. So that exercise around finding at least three things that are sexy about you, that list will grow, but it will grow not in the way that that we expect. It's not gonna be about like, oh yeah, now I have like, you know, breasts like Beyonce or a butt like whoever, it will grow in that we stop giving a fuck about what sexy looks like and we start giving a fuck about how it feels and so think about what you do to yourself to get yourself presentable to go out the door and so I used to only go out with makeup, especially when I had a corporate job and one day I like poked myself in the eye with my mascara wand and it was so early and I had to take like two buses and a subway and I was so irritated and I was on the bus and I was looking at this man and he was sitting there and I was like, this man probably makes more money than I do and yet his eyelashes are exactly the same length as he woke up, his nails are not blue and that was the day I stopped wearing makeup to my corporate job and I had to sit with the feeling of being able to, what that was like to strip off something that I was using as a prop to be more acceptable. Granted, a lot of these things are built in as things that we have to do to be more acceptable. So I'm not saying you have to let go of all those things. Just start being aware because now when I put on makeup, it's for joy. It's absolutely for joy. I'm like, oh, I'm like decorating myself. I'm gonna go like help people. I'm gonna do this and it doesn't feel like I'm doing it so that I can exist in a particular standard of beauty. So when we start to do that with our sexuality, it actually opens up more space for us to get off better and get better partners, partners who actually adore our bodies. All right, so that's one way, is looking at your attraction in order to be able to redefine your sexy, sorry, two ways and then to also curate your content. Excuse me. Also think about what things you've been holding yourself back from in sex because of your body. So just think about that. You can share in the chat if you would like, I'm gonna tell you one of mine but you can share in the chat or just think about it. Think about in what ways do you edit yourself, edit your sexiness. Do you not buy the lingerie that you want? Do you not have the positions that you want? Do you not go after the people that you want? Getting on top, yeah, getting on top is a hard one. It is absolutely a hard one. Getting on top and riding is a particular challenge for people, face sitting, every time I do a face sitting webinar, people of all sizes are like, am I gonna kill him? Am I gonna kill him? And I was like, well, if he dies, he dies but you know, I've Googled, nobody has died from face sitting. "Since gaining weight I don't want to get on top." Yep, "Baggy clothes all day, every day." Yep, yep. "My husband trying new things because I probably can't do it." You all are so vulnerable. Thank you, thank you, this is huge. This is amazing and courageous that you can put into words what these things are. Sometimes if you haven't been able to identify it, it can feel like a swirl of just like not good enough, of not sexy enough. So with getting on top, even with lingerie on, getting on top is, so if you hold yourself back from getting on top because the position is actually uncomfortable. So some folks, their knees don't feel comfortable splayed enough. There's a position hack for that and that's raising the pelvis of the person underneath with a pillow that's bent in half or a sex cushion to get their body a little bit higher so you're not squatting as low. If you feel that it's because the angle, that they're looking up at you and like everything is like, kind of like down on them. What you're gonna do is kind of like, you wanna sit a little bit back. So you're gonna sit a little bit back and take their hands and put them on your breast, put them on your nipples, put them on your waist, put them on your belly, put them somewhere on your body so that you feel that connection because any position that we go into that we're uncomfortable about, on top is definitely a popular one that people feel uncomfortable in but what happens is we leave the pleasure of the position and we go straight into our head and we start thinking about all those things that hold us back from being on top. So tell me what some of these limitations sound like, like what's going on in your head about what's going to happen if you are on top or is someone gonna notice how ugly you are? Is someone gonna notice an aspect of yourself that you don't like? Is someone going to get smooshed? Like, what are we thinking? So think about the thoughts behind it. Like go deeper into whatever the thing is in order to feel kind of like connected to that script and if you can't decipher it, don't worry, it doesn't matter. It will come. Part of it is just getting like this authentic honesty, like being able to say, I don't like being on top, I feel uncomfortable. Okay, sorry, I'm just reading your, "Since gaining weight I also don't wanna get on top." Yep, think about, one thing that I also recommend when we start to reclaim our gaze is also looking at porn with bodies that are similar to yours and at first you're gonna look at it and you're gonna focus in on everything you also hate about your own body and you might even say, well, I can appreciate their body, but I can't appreciate mine. That's okay, that's all right because what ends up happening is the more that we recondition our brains to look at stuff that actually reflects a different reality than the one that tells us that we're not enough, we end up seeing the sexiness in certain things, we end up forgetting about the stretch marks or the tummies or the saggy breasts. We end up looking at the sexiness of what's happening and the desire and the attraction. "Baggy clothes all day, every day." Yeah, for sure. Lots of us feel much safer. We feel protected. We feel like we're also protecting the world from ourselves. We feel like we don't wanna draw attention to certain areas. It's definitely a behavior that so many of us have learned which makes it all the more troublesome to try and like own that body that you've been hiding all day in your sexy time and you don't necessarily have to want to feel, you know, have to give up your baggy clothes. It's more about, well, can you walk a little bit taller in those baggy clothes? Can you stand a little bit wider in those baggy clothes? Can you walk a little bit slower and with more intention and with more emphasis on your hips and every single step being about taking up space in your sexiness. So the clothes, they may change, they may not change, but the underneath intentions and the moods can be influenced for sure. "My husband trying new things because I probably can't do it." Okay, like in terms of ability? Like feeling like your body can't take on a new position or a new thing, lemme tell you there's like infinite creativity with sexual things that you all can try and one of the things that I recommend in my sexual competence classes is to, if you're in a relationship, to put out two jars, but in these jars, you're both gonna put in things, you're gonna put in little pieces of paper with things that make you feel individually desired. So Rebecca, your jar would be all about the stuff that would make you feel sexy and so it might be your husband giving you an oily massage. In my jar, I wanted to put on a strip tease for my partner and I was terrified. I had never done that before, I dance around at my house like a stripper all the time, but I'd never done it with a partner and so this gets you, it gives an opportunity for your partner to really affirm in something that you think is going to be about making you feel more desirable versus the other way where we're just kind of like picking out things to do for our partners. This is for you with your partner as a cooperator and a witness of you trying to take up space being more sexy. It's also fine to communicate with our partners and say, "Hey, babe, like I wanna try this new thing but I feel kind of shy, can you like, remind me," You know, just like, be like, "Babe, breathe, come back to me with your breath." Or like, "Babe, like I just, I can't stand how sexy you are." Like sometimes it's hard to believe those things in the moment and we think if we have to give people the communication that we want to receive that somehow it makes it less sincere. It doesn't. We need the information to be able to speak specifically and affirmatively to somebody's insecurities and so the people that you're having sex with, it's okay to be like, tell me I'm a goddess. Like, can you remind me I'm a goddess? And if you don't feel comfortable communicating with your partner, have that for yourself, have that in your head. So sometimes I'm having sex and I'll start to worry about a position or I'm sweating too much or I'm like, you know, I'm being really hard on myself and I'll say in my head, I'm like, oh yeah, I forgot, I'm a goddess and then I come back into the moment the first few times I did that, it made no difference whatsoever. So remember, all of this is a practice. It's a reconditioning. It's like water on a rock, right? Like we're wearing away a lot of very powerful messaging. "I'm worried I'll squish him and he can't breathe." Is that specifically for face sitting? For face sitting, some of the tips that I recommend are putting a pillow underneath their head. So their head is a little bit more raised and that way it won't necessarily like sink in directly into the folds of the mattress and also for you being in a position where you can have your hand on the wall and so if that means putting him on the floor and putting a pillow under his head and then you're on the wall so that the wall can take some of your weight when you need to relax a little bit. So you're not sitting and relaxing right on his face. Communication during face sitting is also so important. So have like a scratch or a squeeze or give him a squeaky toy, something to communicate without his mouth. So a nonverbal form of communication and over time you build trust that he will tell you when his level of breath is uncomfortable, that he can monitor that and we don't need to own that in the moment, that we don't need to be, you know, anything but other than just mindful and paying attention to those communication skills. Another tip for face sitting is if you're facing their head, you might try facing their feet so that you have more control sort of in all fours to kind of lift your bum up and then put your bum and your vulva or your genitals down back on their face. So there's your face sitting tips for life. "I just feel like I don't do it right and I'm focused 100% on how I look the whole time." Martina, I totally, totally get you and that's not your fault. That's a hundred percent not your fault. We have totally been told that sex is all about what it looks like. So many of people across all of my classes really struggle when I say, what does it feel like? And they're like, "Feel, I don't know feel, it feels sexy, it's just sex, like I'm horny." And, but sex is so much about sensuality. Sex is about all of our senses taking in all of this information and allowing our body to go into different phases and stages of arousal and desire. So without being able to feel those things, all we're doing is like a sexual release. So sexual releases can happen just by stimulating our genitals but we still need to engage our mind. Like we can't be doing the dishes and jerking off at the same time, unless dishes are your fetish, right? So don't worry, some of the tools I'm gonna give you around getting outta your head might help you a little bit, but also letting go of, I'm gonna give you some exercises for letting go of what it looks like. "They'll be disgusted and never wanna see me again." Yeah, yeah. So think about that, thank you for sharing that, Alise 'cause I feel like this idea of affirmation and validation from other people, especially our sexual partners is poison. It actually feeds our toxic thoughts and it just overwhelms us and so of course we can welcome when someone thinks that, you know, you're sexy or they like appreciate that but we can't walk into those experiences with an empty cup because then all that becomes is a lifeline to someone else's validation and that could change or your body could change and then what's gonna happen? And so really developing that your own sense of like what's sexy about you and what's sexy about you isn't just your physical appearance. It's gonna be your attributes. It's gonna be the way that you move, the way that your presence is, the way that you believe in yourself, the things that you accomplish, that you're excited about, where your passion goes into. So it comes from so many different aspects because our sexual energy is the exact same as our creative energy and so the more confident that we get in our sexual selves, the more creative, experimental, open minded, accepting we get in our sexual and nonsexual lives as well. So sexually confident people also are less likely to be bored in the bedroom because they see it sort of as play in the same way that children find like they've got this like desire for imagination and creating things and, but we're adults, so we get this like sexual reward. Okay, Sandy says, "then I interpret all panting as gasping for air and having a hard time breathing and I lose all my sexual energy." Ugh, I've totally been there. I hear that so much that we start to, we actually start to look for evidence of what we already think is gonna happen and so we already think that we're gonna either be disgusting or too heavy or we're gonna squish them or we can't get into that position and so any slight change in their face or their breath, we start to think of as like, okay, the worst thing I was thinking is actually coming true right now and so two things can help in those scenarios. One is having really clear communication skills. So if you think your partner is uncomfortable or they're not breathing, or you've got too much weight on them, be like, 'Babe, do you need me to let up a little bit? "Babe, let me know that you want more. Babe, tell me how much more that you want. Touch me if you want more, squeeze my thighs if you want more." And so inviting that communication in the moment, even talking about it beforehand can tell your partner so that they can be more enthusiastically communicative. So if you tell them, "Hey, I'm like worried about squishing your face" and they're like, "Don't worry, I'm fine." Then you're gonna say, "Okay, can you like remind me of that? Like, can you just like make sure that you show me how hungry you are when I'm on top of your face?" If we don't feel like being vulnerable in our communication with partners or it's something, I mean, you don't have to show up with your, you can show up with conditions around communications, like for specific positions, that's really important. If you've dealt with trauma or you're having some really horrible body hatred, that absolutely is something that you don't need to disclose. You can if you want to if it makes you feel more comfortable, but if you feel that it's actually gonna make you vulnerable in a not good way, then what you can do is regulate that yourself and that regulation of that, those thoughts yourself takes a ton of self awareness and it takes a lot of repetitive practice, repetitive. So we have to, we can't just like pick up these tools and use them, you know, when we have sex once a week or once a month or whatever it is, Well, none of us are having sex, right? Well, I'm not having any sex right now except with myself and we have to practice. We have to build them into our every day, right? So I could be brushing my teeth and be like, yeah, I kinda, yeah, I'm like, I'm cute and so being able to notice that means that when you walk into these sexual situations, even though deep dark down, you've got this idea that someone's gonna be disgusted by you or that you're not gonna be able to, you know, please them in a certain way or do the positions they want, that vibe of feeling yourself can help at least cushion it. It cushions it, eventually it takes over and it like rules the game which is amazing but what it does is it cushions it so that you don't have to use that toxic thought to get in the way of your pleasure. It kind of softens it so that you can still go about your business and you can pick back up that shame when you're done your sexy time and eventually you won't wanna pick that back up. These are great everyone. Thank you for being so honest. I'm getting so sweaty, I'm so excited. All right, so redefining sexy. The last thing I'm gonna say on there and then we're gonna go on to reclaiming your gaze and getting outta your head. A powerful practice is actually thinking about, you know, how would you rewrite, like even if you're in a partnership or you're in a marriage or a relationship, think about what you would write as a dating profile and so let's say you had the perfect photo, so photos up there, whatever. So with this perfect body that you imagine is gonna give you, you know, the best confidence and the best partners and the best sex of your life, you know, what would your profile say? You know, would it say like I have a perfect 34 inch waist. I have like perfect perky, non-saggy breasts. I have a giant dick. I have a beautiful hairless vulva or would it talk about like you as a person? And so think about like what makes you attractive to other people and not just sexually attractive but think about what your friends like about you, think about, you know, what your close intimate relationships that aren't necessarily sexual like about you and try and write a profile from that perspective. It's not gonna go anywhere. Just keep it for yourself. It's spatial exercise that helps get us a little bit out of our head and put some distance between those thoughts and what the evidence is on the outside. So being able to kind of take it out and write it. You might have a really tough time doing this. If you would like to send me yours when you've written it, feel free, if you just want someone to like witness it, I'm happy to look at it for you and cheer you on. All right, the next part is reclaiming your gaze. So part of this is the lingerie part. Let's start with that part, but I'm also gonna talk about fetishism of fat bodies and sexy selfies. Okay, so with lingerie, I'm gonna include a resource for you that lists some of my favorite places to shop and also I have a video up on another site that gives specific tips about how to feel confident in your sexy lingerie. So I'll send that to you as well but I wanted to give you some really practical tips for lingerie. So my lingerie game used to consist of black baby dolls, because that was all that was out there. So they'd have all these sexy, wonderful options and colors and styles for bodies that were standard size or straight size and I'd be left with these black baby dolls. So then I also began to think, okay, well, this is what like bodies like mine actually need to wear, like, I guess this is what we wear and I went shopping with my best friend once and he was like, "Oh no." He's like, "You're not wearing that." And I was like, "But it's like, I don't know, it's like what they have." He's like, "No." And he went away, left me in the change room, came back and brought me this like stringy thing which I'm gonna show you 'cause this stringy thing changed my life and I never would've picked it out myself. So this stringy thing is one of those, it's got like this like bra, right? But like the boobs kind of fall out of it. Who cares? And then it's got this piece down the middle, right? And then it's got like a panty with these two things on the side. So this whole thing, I was like, "Where's the rest of it? How am I gonna fit into this?" And my conception of my body was that, oh no, there's no way that my belly can be out and I'm thinking I'm decorated at the same time. So I was limiting myself. I wasn't giving myself permission to try anything different than I was already doing. So think about the ways that you're holding yourself back. Think about the ways, are you avoiding color? Are you avoiding fishnet? Are you avoiding lace? Are you avoiding demi cup? Are you avoiding corsets? Are you avoiding thigh highs? Are you thinking that because if you pull up your thigh high, your little crotch biscuit thigh is gonna like hang out, you know, that little triangle piece is gonna hang out and therefore you shouldn't wear it. So remember that the bodies that we see on boxes, in magazines, on lingerie covers, on Victoria's Secrets horrible ads, they're all edited, right? They're all edited. They're all hairless. They're all very childlike. They're not sagging. They don't even have nipples 'cause like we aren't allowed to have nipples. So remember how distorted our images are and give yourself a little bit of a break. If you're trying on new lingerie or especially if you're doing it in person, we don't really have that opportunity now but when you do, see how it feels by closing, (coughs) excuse me, closing your eyes and moving around in it and so focus less on, you know, what it looks like but what it feels like and so maybe you like the way that the material moves, maybe you like that your shoulders are out. Maybe you like that there's hardly anything covering your bum and so even do this with pieces of lingerie that you have in your closet that you're like, nope, this will never see the light of day, go in your bathroom and put them on and just move in them, like close your eyes and move in them. If you wanna put on sensual music or sexy music, do that too but like really just like feel what it feels like to move in them. Now, when you're shopping online, I'm gonna give you some practical tips, when you're shopping online, stuff that's great for plus size bodies, sometimes they take the same thing that's a straight size and they move it to a plus size and call it a day and that doesn't work for all plus size bodies. We all still have different bodies, right? So for those of you who have a fuller bust, anything that's a halter is not gonna be that great. You might have to reinforce it. So you might have to stitch it a little bit so that it doesn't start to weaken at the neck point but you also might find that it's just uncomfortable for your neck as is. When we're looking at things that are fishnet or are like body suits. Those are also wonderful if you want to feel sort of like you're decorating your naked, right? We're not trying to hide our naked. We're trying to decorate it and bodysuits, fishnet, those things give you coverage while also like giving you an appearance or an allure of something sexy 'cause where else are you gonna wear a fishnet bodysuit, right? Like you're in this thing, we're stepping into the fishnet bodysuit to step into the sexy. Those are also usually very stretchy and so if you find that some of the lingerie that's out there that has proportions that are cut, that are just different than yours, right? Maybe you've got a longer waist, a smaller waist, smaller butt, bigger butt, I don't know. And so lingerie that have specific lines that are or a defined waist, that often isn't going to be flattering on every plus size bodies, every plus size person's body. So we want things that are gonna give us the best hope for starting out like small, starting to reclaim our gaze. Another thing that some folks really like, but they're really uncomfortable to have sex in. So they're definitely like a, put it on dance around, show it off and then take it off. Corsets. So for plus size people, you can see here, how it's got, I dunno if you can, so it's got a lot of lines here. So what happens is in a corset because your bust is gonna be taking up more volume in the front, it's going to be creating sort of like side bends for you. So if you're investing in a corset, make sure that it has some kind of boning. It doesn't have to be metal boning, metal boning is gonna be much more expensive. I don't know if I can pull out the boning of this one. This one's got a plastic boning in it. So it's more flexible. So for sex, this is better. If you wanna get fucked in a corset, you want a little bit of a plastic boning, not a steel boning. If it says steel boning, it's also gonna be way more expensive. All right. Also think about color, if you're normally wearing things that are always black, like black and red tends to be like what sexy is, you know, does your partner have a favorite color? Do you have a favorite color? You know, what color like makes you pop in other types of clothing? If you're into that, if not, just put on a color, even black is totally fine, but think about like where you can bring other color, think about where you can bring other personality. So maybe you have a great pair of panties that you like and so wear those panties and then put on something that's like a necklace. So it adorns sort of like between your breast and maybe dangles on an area that you're not so happy with. I have this, it's a pearl bow tie. So I put on a pearl bow tie and then I'll put on just like thigh highs and panties and there you go, you've got something that's just like very comfortable for you. If you feel like it's really hard to get dressed in lingerie because it feels like someone is going to judge you, think about, or you don't want them to look at you or you wanna keep your body hidden. You want sex with the lights off, even think about wearing lingerie underneath your regular clothes during the day just for you. So buy a cute pair of underwear that's not uncomfortable, buy a bra in a different color, you know, pasties, like anything that's going to make you feel like you're decorating your nakedness just for you and if someone happens to see it, cool, if someone happens to notice it, whatever, but it's that close little reminder that you put it on today like just for you, right? That pearl necklace outfit. Just for me, I did it when I was, I'd had none partners and I was just like, huh, what would this feel like? Also think about, it's gonna sound silly, but think about dressing up for masturbation. I was married for for nine years and my husband and I didn't have really good communication and so when sex fell apart, like we didn't know how to talk about it and so I was dealing with a lot of like resentment and not feeling desired and so I actually started putting on heels and masturbating because one day I came home and I was like, "Hey, can we have sex? Like, and can I wear heels and can we have sex?" And he responded so like negatively and like was like very shaming and I was like, okay and I was already masturbating so much. So I was like, well fuck this. I'm just gonna put on heels and like masturbate and see what it feels like. It was a game changer because it was a moment where I took up sexual pleasure and space specifically for myself. I treated myself the same way I was trying to delight my husband. I wanted to delight him with those shoes but I also wanted to delight him with the sexiness that I would feel being in those shoes. So remember the things that you want to do, all those positions that you want to do, all the sexy things you wanna try, the lingerie that you wanna try, those are all about you adoring and giving purpose to your sexiness, your sexiness isn't in the pearl neck tie. It's not in the baby doll. It's not in the face sitting, it's in you and you put it through those vessels. You put it through the fishnet, you put it through the sitting on top. You put it through the whatever. So that's why it's the idea of sort of decorating yourself can feel like it's a little bit of role play or like you're putting on a costume. You're giving life to an alter ego, this alter ego, they already know how sexy they are, right? And so those pieces are in you but we just need to lift them up and give them a different space to play because this space right here has a lot of messaging that no longer works for us and so when we get into our sexy selves, whether it's for ourself, whether it's for sensuality, whether it's for masturbation, whether it's for our partners, we wanna pivot over to that sexy and that sexy person, she's confident, she wears red shoes. She does this, she does that. So that list that you're making of yourself of three things that you find are sexy about yourself, also think about, you know, what would someone say about you that is sexy? Like maybe someone admires something about you that you brushed it off. Folks used to tell me that I had a really great smile and I always took that as, oh, I have a nice smile because the rest of me is so garbage and oh, you have a pretty face, but you know, like, if you lost weight, you'd be beautiful and so I couldn't see what people were enjoying about me. I couldn't see any of that and so being able to take that back, right? Take it back through your lingerie, take it back through your positions and allow yourself to fail. Allow yourself to try and be like, yeah, I'm giving myself permission to try. I'm giving myself permission to dream differently. I'm giving myself permission to pivot into this sexy beast that I know is inside of me somewhere or I hope that is inside of me somewhere. My last tip for lingerie is when in doubt, you're gonna get stuff that's like very stretchy and I wanted to tell you that if you're sweaty, I'm sweaty, look for lingerie that isn't necessarily made of nylon. So you want things that are either cotton or even rayon. So things like these types of body suits, I'm gonna, I don't know where the crotch is on this one. This is like a long sleeved teddy. So teddy's are also great for some people. If you've got a voluminous bum, I don't really have a voluminous bum, but I have a big tummy and so they're good for if you carry or your weight is distributed in areas that you normally hide with like baggier your clothing because they'll give you some coverage but also some sexy, right? So this little thing, they're also so stretchy, like look at like how, like this could fit like so many different bodies and then the backs got like a little bit of a tie. The great thing about teddy's too are that you can keep them on while you have sex 'cause you can usually just move the crotch aside if you're having penetrative sex or if someone's going down on you. Likewise, anything with like crotches pantyhose, I love the models on it, look at her on the back. She's like, oh, like, oh yeah, yeah. She's also not plus size selling me plus size panties. So these are sheer crotchless panty hose. So if you're looking for like even any coverage like around your tummy, it's okay. It's okay in the beginning to want to be like, well, I'm just gonna focus on, you know, kind of like the things that I can feel vulnerable about. I'm gonna put my best assets forward, whatever you think that those are, because it'll change over time. You're just gonna get more and more and more assets. You're just gonna start to notice more and more and more spaces when you reclaim that sexy and you reclaim that gaze. So one thing I wanted to let you know is that when we talk about like movement and we talk about like feeling ourselves in movement. So think about right now, if you were to, from your fingertips, really just like roll your hands in. You wanna create this like super tight fist, this super tight thumbs, you're gonna pull your arms in against your body. You're gonna tighten your forearms against your bicep. I'm squeezing my thighs together, my knees together, my toes are gripping, everything's gripping and then I'm gonna release. So the contrast in our sensation of being tight and being anticipating rejection, anticipating unsexiness, anticipating we're gonna squish someone, that contrast, when we release it or that tension, when we release it gives us a contrast of peace. It really gives us a contrast of being more present in the moments that we have access to for our sex and so do that exercise because what happens when we're in plus size bodies or we're in bodies where we feel that we have to tame them or hide them, we actually start to become numb, right? We're just like, okay, I have to live in this body. I live in this body, but I'm not gonna like it and you don't have to love your body, but accepting that your body has more to do for you than to just look nice. You looking nice is probably the least interesting thing about you and yet it's where we spend about 90% of our energy when we're thinking about, you know, what are we working on or what are we doing? Or when someone sees me, what are they gonna notice? And letting go of that is also in realizing that it has a physical benefit. It has a physical benefit of relaxing. It has a physical benefit of even noticing where we were holding tension in our bodies by trying to make them smaller. So for some of us, we hold, you know, our shoulders way up here. If you're larger busted like me, I walked around for years like this, like trying to make my breast smaller by just like holding my shoulders forward and messing up my back. Some of us, you know, I always can see plus size women when they're sitting in my classes and where it's like somehow trying to, you know, like hide our tummies by putting our forearms on it or we're crossing our legs or we're uncrossing, we're so uncomfortable in being in this body because no one has allowed us to be in this body. No one has allowed us to have fun in these bodies. So having fun in your body, the next time that you're walking and you're like, you got your headphones on or you're in the shower. If you're a shower singer, you know, when you're in there, put your sexy music on and when you're massaging your scalp, scratch that scalp, scratch it and massage it. Like all those nerve endings get delighted and start to create those connections by, oh yeah, this feels good and like moving in ways that feel sexy. What looks sexy around choreography or like dance, it has no bearing on what actually is going to release sexiness in your sexual moments and it's more about like encouraging using movement as a conduit for all the sexy feelings that are coming in. So even the next time that you're masturbating, think about gyrating your hips. So think about like undulating your body and like rocking, like even hold the vibrator and like rock your body against the vibrator if it's your hand, rock your hips up against your hand. All of those connections back to like, damn, look what my body can do can also help you during sex and so we stop worrying about I'm gonna squish him, I'm gonna kill him and we start tuning in to what sensations are actually there 'cause when you're sitting on top of your partner, there might be a sensation of heaviness. They might like that sensation of like, feeling like a weight, like feeling, you know, something that's like significant, feeling like their partner. Like it's more of you. They also might just be like thinking about how good it feels to be inside of you and so sometimes it can help to remind ourselves of that during sex by asking our partners to affirm it and so if I'm on top, I'll tell my partner, I'll be like, "Tell me how good it feels to be inside me. Tell me how good it feels that I'm on top of you." And if you're, if you feel you want to say that in a less kind of demanding way, you could also be like, "Oh babe, you feel so good, do you like how you feel?" You know, you can do it in whatever vibe that you want, but it's communication, right? It's like, I want to tune to this moment because society is trying to drag me out of it with all that toxic noise about what sex should look like or feel like. "Big breasts are great, they hide my belly." That's adorable. I've definitely felt that way too and think about those things. Think about like, you know, what parts of yourselves you enjoy because maybe it like diminishes another part of yourself that you don't enjoy as much and that's okay. That's just sort of neutral and allow that thought to, maybe it'll change, maybe it serves its purpose. Maybe it won't, whatever and we just like working with what we have right now. We gotta start with just some awareness of where we are really hiding our beautiful selves and what our darkness is defined by and then where we're reaching for light and what that is gonna look like. All right, has anyone ever been fetishized by someone for their body? So people who like BBWs or who have like a curvy girl fetish or something like that? My partner is definitely smaller than me, taller than me but smaller than me. And we first met, I was like, I had already gotten over the smaller than me thing but he genuinely likes thick women and curvy bodies and I had a really hard time accepting that. I totally was like, well, is this just a fetish 'cause you think that we're easier? Is this like something about kind of like objectifying me for a body type and it obviously it wasn't that, I mean, it was from a place of attraction. So we might have a hard time believing that other people could be attracted to this body right now because we're so busy living in a state of trying to change it and so that's a big one and so if you don't manage to kind of soothe that one or regulate that one right away, that's okay. It took me a lot of time and I still feel sensitive to it because I have a hard time thinking of myself as sexy and I now can celebrate other attributes, right? I'm like, oh, like this or that or this but the sexiness for me, I have to constantly remind myself that the things I like about myself are the things that are sexy about myself and not the things that I think I'm missing. Those aren't sexy parts that are missing for me, those are sexy parts that someone else is using to make me feel less sexy and we don't have to buy into that, right? You're already starting to not buy into that by curating your content, by being here tonight. So there's so much room for us to be able to unhitch from that. All righty, the last thing for reclaiming your gaze and then we're gonna do out of our head, think about doing a sexy selfie photo shoot. It could be for you. It could be for your partner. It could be to send to your best friend. So I did one on Valentine's Day. I did it for myself and I set up like, just like my tripod that I'm using for lighting here and it just has like a clicker thing which I'm pretty sure I've lost now and I just like make sure the lighting was really good and I put on a sexy outfit that challenged me. It was the first time I'd ever put my bare belly on my Instagram. It was the first time I ever like was taking photos without thinking about my belly and so when you do this, you can even do this with video. I also did it with video. Remember that this is a practice. So set up a regular, like maybe it's once every two days or maybe it's once a week that you take a sexy selfie and at first and put it in a folder somewhere for yourself, it doesn't have to be nude. It just has to be sexy and if you're using angles, who cares, who cares? It doesn't matter because what ends up happening is over time, you actually start to get delighted by your cute self and for me, for the videos, I was taking videos of myself dancing and I think it took me eight videos to not watch them back and burst into tears. I was like, oh my God. Like, that's what I look like or like and I just kept doing it. I just, I kept doing it with the intention of, I just give myself permission to see this a different way. I give myself permission to reclaim sexy and so even if you don't believe it, set the intention and by the 12th video, I was kind of like, huh, I'm like, she's got a little bit of rhythm. She looks like she's having fun. She looks like she's having whatever. It took me until video 24 to actually be like, that's kind of hot and so it took me a long time to replace the images of sexy that I had already embedded in my brain that I am never going to look like and by video 24, not only had my gaze changed but the way I was dancing was way freer. I was looking less at the mirror. I was like making faces to myself and to this day, I don't show anybody those videos. Those are all for me and so if you don't have a lot of time or a lot of space to do that, even doing them in the mirror in the bathroom in the morning and so when I'm brushing my teeth, I put on a sexy song for two minutes to make sure I brush my teeth long enough and I'm just like moving as I'm brushing my teeth and feeling myself, even just winking at yourself when you go to the bathroom and just being like, you're giving yourself permission to be cute. You're giving yourself permission to be playful. You're giving yourself permission to feel sexy and on your own terms and then you can bring that to your partner as well. So to be able to get outta your head. So let's say you're doing all this work, you're doing all these practices and you're still like, I can't be on top. So in order to get out of your head, we wanna engage sensuality and so what sensuality is, is scanning all of our five senses as potential little portals of pleasure. So what can we add to each of our senses or dull to heighten another sense in order to see if we can experience a different sense of pleasure or a different way of being stimulated. So for those of you who are very like visual, you're very aesthetic, you might like watching your partner in lingerie. So maybe set up a lingerie date. Lingerie isn't just for bodies with vulvas. People with penises can absolutely wear lingerie and decorate themselves. Also think about the aesthetics of setting lighting in your room that feels flattering for you. That feels safe for you, that feels comfortable for you. So that might mean setting up some of those like big fat candles that give that sort of flickering light. If you wanna challenge yourself and there's a mirror available, try masturbating in front of a mirror and you don't have to watch the whole time. It's more about being exposed, about trying a different way to have an image that you can kind of like peek out at and then go back into your head. You could also do this with your partner. So you could have sex in front of the mirror with your partner or you can have sex in front of the mirror that isn't necessarily the kind of sex that you always have. So even put them in front of you between your legs or you sit between their legs and you both take turns just like watching each other's hands go over your body, go over your hair, go over your face. It's a wonderful kind of experience to see how beautiful what you come together to do actually is and that it isn't so much about like having a flat stomach or no double chins or like no flabby arm or whatever it is. It is about like the connection that's created and have your partner even close their eyes as you're touching them and like moving around them, that can also help you focus and watch them receive all the pleasure that your body right now is giving them. "Do you know of stores that sell lingerie for plus size men? My husband doesn't even quite believe that's a real thing." Yeah, actually, sometimes you, it's really hard to look specifically for lingerie that's for plus size men. So look in the same places for plus size women, but we're trying to adapt some of those pieces. So for example, you could wear things that are fishnet related. So if you wanna be able to have like fishnet shorts or you want a fishnet top, you can definitely do that. Also remember that the items for plus size men or for plus size women, so let's say something like a thong. It's not gonna look the same way as it does on the models. So I often used to refrain from like buying thongs or low cut panties because they roll under my belly and so think about like just finding things that feel more comfortable and less about like, okay, well this is gonna, you know, sit above my belly, just like the mannequin. It's really, it's a little bit tough right now to find things on Amazon that are plus size stuff. But I find that eBay is way better for plus size men and also the one that I'm gonna drop in your bonus resources is Hips and Curves and so Hips and Curves is a ton of like plus size women's stuff but there are some pieces that men could adapt but I will include one. I can't remember what the name of it is, but I will, I'm gonna write it down for you. A lot of times the plus size male ones also come from lingerie brands trying to be gender inclusive and so they start to release more androgynous things in a wider variety of sizes. So you might have to get a little bit creative with looking for like gender nonspecific lingerie or gender inclusive lingerie, also for performers, so like strippers, for drag, there's often things in bigger sizes just because bigger bodies tend to be taking up space in them. So definitely like it's out there, but yeah, I feel him. It's hard to find, I think it's growing, but we already have a stigma around masculinity and lingerie and so that's also hindering the industry. So I will definitely try and look up the one site that I'm thinking about that I can't remember. All righty, so we're talking about dancing. Okay, so another one is stretching. So in the morning, when you get up, what I do now is I kind of take my hands and I just like rub my belly as I'm like waking up, I rub my belly and I tell it, you know, today I'm gonna try and be a bit more accepting, you know or I thank it. I either tell it an intention for the day or I give it some gratitude. I'm like, thanks for holding, you know, this like very passionate, caring spirit that I have and like, you know, you're helping me through the day and so being able to give yourself a little bit of touch plus an intention daily, daily, like even in the shower or something, it's going to start to bring you in relationship with your body and in relationship with your body, you can access more pleasure. Another thing is when we're thinking about, how many of you have a, do you have a sexy or sensual playlist? 'Cause this can definitely help. If you're someone who's turned on by music or music gets you in the mood, get new playlists, like start creating those playlists and listening to them not during times where you're just about to have sex, listen to them throughout the day, right? Like put them on and just kind of listen to them and feel them because we want to create that relationship between sexy time and our playlist and ourselves. Yes, so important. Yeah, absolutely. I will include my sexy playlist. It's more of a one that I use when I teach classes where we're using sensual movement and so it's called goddess groove but it's all about just like, it's the one. So if you wonder what I'm doing when I'm not on here and not doing my taxes is that I'm on the floor. I bought kneepads specifically to be on the floor and I'm listening to this playlist that I'm gonna send you and I'm just moving and I don't care what it looks like. I'm just like really, like sometimes I'll close my eyes and just like move myself and like drag my hands on my body or feel my hair and to remind myself that what I have to offer isn't just in what I can see but it's also how I experience my surroundings and the energy that's available to me. So that will help you also pick up useful energy from your partners. Like where are they vulnerable? Where are they needing some empathy? Where do they have insecurities? And how can you be the more confident one in that space? You know, maybe they think they're too hairy. Maybe they've got, you know, acne somewhere. Maybe they're not as tall as they wanna be. Maybe they don't have as many muscles as they want. Maybe they also have trouble with coming or coming too quickly and so thinking about where we can also give empathy is built through a practice of giving ourselves self empathy and self-compassion. All right, so I'm gonna show you two of my toys 'cause I want you to consider something when you're buying sex toys. So depending where you've got more volume, so if it's your tummy, if it's your bum, you may also have trouble using toys that require you to be closer to your genitals. So sometimes for me like reaching past my tummy, some toys, the handles are too short for me. So I'm gonna show you two toys, three toys, actually, oh no, I have four for you. I'm gonna show you toys that I think are really great for bigger bodies and also to use with partners who have bigger bodies. So this one is the Njoy Pure Wand and it's made of stainless steel. So it's like quite heavy but what's great about it is that it can be used on anybody's body. So no matter what genitals you have, you can use this because it can be inserted anally or vaginally and it's got two different size of balls and it's intended to hit the P spot and the G spot. What's awesome about this is because it's so curved and it's got such a long arm, it's great if you've got more of a voluminous tummy or a voluminous bum and you like to on your stomach or on your back. So it's a little bit easier to be able to access things when you think about the length of it, if you see vibrators that are a little bit shorter, if you have no problem like reaching down and holding it, that's fine but sometimes the volume of our body can get in the way of some of the, how the toys are supposed to work best. Another good one is, this is like a little G spot one. I'm gonna include links to all these in the site as well and I only show you stuff that I own and that I like. So there might be other stuff out there. This is intended also for G spot or P spot but it can also be used on like nipples. It can be used on anuses. It can be used on the perineum. So that place between the genitals and the asshole and what's awesome about this one, oh, it can also be used on the penis, underneath the testicles or at the frenulum which is the underside of the penis closest to the underside of the head and it's kind of a little V. What's great about it is also, it's got a longer arm and it's quite powerful and so for a little kind of toy, I mean, you can kind of hear, for a little toy, it's got quite a motor. The only shitty thing is that it's battery operated which also makes it less expensive and then how many of you know about the Magic Wand? So the Magic Wand is known as like the Cadillac of vibrators and it's known as the Cadillac of vibrators because it's just so powerful. So if you like a strong vibrator, this is a great one for it. It's also like an actually like a really good like back massage or two and there are attachments on it so that it can be used for internal use or on penises. So the reason why I pulled it out for plus size sex is also because we might want to, we might shy away from actually experimenting with self pleasure. We might shy away from experimenting with different types of toys because we're just like not feeling sexy and we feel like gross and self pleasure and masturbation is one of the most joyful ways of reconnecting your erotic imagination back to your body and so because you have to use your erotic imagination and you have to be kind of selfish during masturbation to be able to get into a zone where you're going to produce pleasure. That pleasure might be orgasm. It might just be relaxation. It might just be arousal and you can use toys with partners and one great empowering thing to be able to do with partners is like a teach me to touch you kind of experience and so what that would mean, I know someone said that they often worry that they take long to come or that their partner's gonna get bored during receiving and so being able to set aside a date that's just for your pleasure and a date that's just for their pleasure and we focus, the whole date is gonna be just about me. You could also do it where you set a timer and so let's say like, you know, 45 minutes is just for you. It's all about you, until that bell rings I'm not moving my mouth or this toy from you and then it's the next person's turn. So you sort of let go of a sense of time and you just focus on what's happening in the moment and the teach me to touch you is a way of, if you feel comfortable masturbating in front of your partner, if you're not with a partner right now or you can't be with them because of COVID 19, think about sending little videos and if you don't wanna send your full face, you know, just like focus the camera on your genitals and like show how you like to touch yourself. You know, do you like direct Clitoral pressure? Do you like more like to the sides of the clitoris? Do you stroke your penis this way? Do you stroke your penis this way? Do you stroke it this way? Are you focusing on the head? Are you focusing more on the shaft? So paying attention to each other's responses to pleasure can also get you out of your head of performing sex, you know, with your appearance because sex is performed way more with our feels and the activities that we do and less about like what we look like. So that can be hard to believe as an intellectual concept or you may believe it as an intellectual concept but you don't know how to practice it. So masturbation, using toys and also telling and teaching your partners how to touch you can help you take up way more erotic space. All right, oh, it's 8:37, okay. Okay, that was all for, out of your head. Oh, okay, so we're down to my last three things. So I wanted to tell you about my experience when I left my marriage and I was determined, I was hell bent on falling in love with myself. I had lost myself in that relationship and many of us lose ourselves in all kinds of relationships or we lose ourselves in work or all different kinds of things and I had started taking burlesque classes and I was like, oh my God, these like women are so powerful and they're so like, their bellies are out there and they're jiggling and what burlesque taught me, and if you have time at home now, like definitely look up some burlesque videos on YouTube. What it taught me was that it is all about presence. It has nothing to do with how flat someone's stomach is or, and actually in burlesque, jiggle is good because jiggle like makes the audience cheer and burlesque was about an attitude. So we had to develop, oh, am I gonna be a kitten? Am I gonna be a vixen? Am I gonna be, you know, a sort of coy? And so if it helps you to build this sort of alter ego that has permission to take up space in their sexiness, think about the attributes of what you would want this person to have, right? Think about like how they would move. Burlesque is all about tease and seduction and so if we believe that we don't have anything worthy of revealing, then it's really hard to do tease and seduction and we end up going back to our same old, same old of like trying to make ourselves smaller and like hiding ourselves and not feeling like we can actually be present. So one of the ways to, so I came up with this, this one of my brands is Fuck like a Goddess and Fuck like a Goddess was very much about like, oh no, oh no, we are not having sex if you have nothing to offer a goddess. So it was about raising my standards and as a plus size person, I had definitely lowered my standards. Not only for people, but about like what I expected to get out of a sexual experience. So some of us go into sexual experiences expecting not to have any pleasure, but we do it for our partners or we do it because we're like, well, this is what like normal people do or we do it because maybe it makes us feel close to people or loved or having attention and so I had sort of lost track of that. So I was like, no, no, I'm gonna fuck like a goddess and so what fuck like a goddess means is definitely about feeling like you are there feeling your goddess self and these people just are lucky to get to join you and you get to cocreate with them and it's not about being above them, but it's about maintaining this level of confidence, of peace, of acceptance that is untouchable, that nothing can get in the way of and how you do that is you focus on boundaries. You focus on bedroom goals and you focus on self adoration. So boundaries, you're gonna think about the words, the activities, the things that just don't make you feel good in bed. If it, for now includes being on top, that's okay. Put that in your boundaries list. It may change, (coughs) sorry, bedroom goals. Sometimes when we don't think that we're taking up enough space in our erotic pleasure, in our erotic situations, we don't dream, right? We don't wanna spice things up and you mentioned that you don't wanna do all these new things 'cause you figure that you can't do them. So I want you to write down some goals and so that might be, you wanna give a sensual massage, that might be, you wanna try flavored lube. It might mean you wanna try spanking. Maybe you wanna watch porn together. Maybe you wanna have sex in a different room of the house. Maybe you wanna try sexting. Maybe you want video chatting. Maybe you wanna try sex with the lights on. Maybe you want to dress up, whatever it is, we need some bedroom goals. We need to allow ourselves to dream a little because that ignites the part of us that wants to be naughty. That wants to be naughty and wishes we would just get out of the way of our own naughtiness. So come up with a fuck it list, a fuck it list. It's like a bucket list but it's all the things you wanna fuck with and those things can be fantasies that then you share with your partner and just think about like, oh yeah, babe, I thought about like, you know, you coming home one day and I like had fish nets on and maybe I make you dinner in them and then we eat together and then you ravish me. So I will include something in your notes about how to talk to your partner about your fantasies once you have that fuck it list. You have a lot of homework tonight and then the last one is self adoration. So self adoration applies whether you're in a relationship or not, self adoration is about finding ways to plan dates for yourself as you would your lovers. So think about like the person that you adore the most. It could be your best friend. It could be a lover. It could be your partner and how you prepare for them, right? Like my partner's coming over, I get all cute, I like clean the kitchen. I like put out stuff, even though I know he's not necessarily gonna care but if it wasn't that way, he wouldn't love me any less, but it's about like a ritual and so do that for yourself. So if you're gonna set yourself a bubble bath, you're like tonight, I'm gonna like sink into essential bubble bath. I'm gonna allow it to wash away some of my shame, make sure you light a candle, right? Make sure you put on that sexy playlist or light incense, like think about ways to delight your own senses when you're planning these self adoration dates, it could also be something as simple as when you eat your meals, you light a candle and you treat it as feasting. This is feasting. We all have such distorted relationships to food. It can be really hard to get the sensual pleasure out of food that actually exists innately in it. Think about how you can delight your ears. So maybe you put together that sensual playlist, think about even doing hand massages, like put on your favorite Netflix show, get some really good oil, light a candle and just like massage your own hands for like 20 minutes or massage your own feet, put on a facial mask or whatever. The goal of self adoration is to make yourself feel as special as you wish other people made you feel and it's okay for other people to make you feel special, but we wanna be able to have access to that for ourselves. How does that sound? How do we feel about these self adoration dates? They're like a game changer for me. Game changer. I really, I'm doing very well in social isolation because I enjoy my own company and because I have stripper knee pads. So think about even your coffee in the morning. Do you wanna add a little bit of cinnamon to it? Do you want to drink it in your favorite mug? These very little joys and pleasures allow, it reminds us that there's so much joy and pleasure to take up space in, whether we're in a erotic context or in a non-erotic context. "Sounds like I know what I'm doing." Yeah, yes you are. Yes you are. self adoration dates are great, but mine will be crashed by two kids. Yeah, absolutely. I teach at a group for new parents and some of the ideas that they came up with were really wonderful and part of it is also like if you're in the shower and you've only got three minutes, you know, put on like that one song and make sure when you're in the shower, you're like really like taking advantage. Like sometimes self adoration is even just tuning in to what pleasure is right there. So sometimes when I'm standing in line, well, not anymore, but when I used to stand in line at Starbucks, even just standing there and like taking like a big breath and like allowing my body to open up, my belly to flop out, like wherever I was holding tension that I've just become so used to holding tension, that can be self adoration, eating your meal a little bit slower can be self adoration, making a cup of tea can be self adoration. So it's about the intention and the preparation of the activities but yeah, it absolutely can be tough to find that when your lives are really busy or when you live with lots of people. Pleasure has to become a priority and to be able to find space and time and resources for that becomes easier the more that you see the benefits of practicing it regularly and sneaking it in when you can but we, most of us who struggle with confidence also struggle with making time and making self care a priority. So that will also come, that will come with also boundaries, that will come with seeing this as part of your health. You know, we never get too busy to brush our teeth and we need to think about our confidence and nurturing ourselves as part of our daily practice and rituals. You do that with your kids to teach them to take care of their own selves but now we are stuck together 24/7. Yes, I feel you, I feel you. I'm so, so, so sorry. It is rough times for a lot of us. So maybe start planning your sensual, your self adoration, you could also do things where you have little reminders. So I sometimes leave little messages on my mirror of just like be kind to yourself today, or is there a way that you need to celebrate yourself? So even the practices of gratitude journaling, like wake up every morning and like, what has your body done for you? You know, your body like rested you, your body's breathing for you. Your body is like waking up and like making breakfast for people that you love in your house. At night even I write down my accomplishments for the day and they don't have to be things around productivity. Sometimes I write down, I managed a big emotion today. I managed to deal with my anger in a way that didn't hurt other people. So yeah, so those are some ideas that also are require a little bit less privacy. You can do them on the phone on the toilet. Oh, okay, good, I'm glad they go to bed a little bit early. So hopefully Rebecca gets some time to be able to self adore herself. So I've taken a little bit longer, but I'm glad that you stuck with me and I'm going to get your bonuses out to you. I should get them, excuse me, I should get them out to you by tomorrow night or the morning after and I'm also gonna make sure to put in the plus size men lingerie shop as soon as I find it in my bookmarks and thank you so much for coming tonight. So you've got your fuck it list homework, you've got your sexy list homework. You've got your self adoration dates to plan and you've got your desire dates if you have a partner and you wanna start playing with that and I'm gonna send you a couple more things to keep this going as well as my sexy playlist and just remember to be gentle with your sweet, beautiful, wonderful selves. This journey is tough. It's really tough and if you start to feel like you can't do it, that's also old conditioning. We're trying to hold ourselves as tender and tough at the same time and remember that we are here to also inspire each other. So the more that you do it, the more that I get inspired, the more that I do it, I feel like I can give to more people. So thank you for being here tonight. This is one of my favorite classes to teach and I don't always get to teach it 'cause folks are shy to come out in person to a plus size class. So thank you for being with me here tonight and I will see you hopefully on another webinar, I'm releasing a whole bunch more next week as well as some ones that are going to be around group coaching as well and definitely there'll be something around confidence. So thank you so much for coming with me on this journey and being so vulnerable and courageous to start to want to be a little bit different. So sexual confidence isn't actually so much like, it's not really an attitude. It's not like a look, a sexual confidence is actually about feeling like you belong in your erotic experiences. So feeling like you have a right to take up as much space, as much pleasure, as much energy as you want from whatever sexual experience you're having and the way to do that is to actually let go of self judgment and so people struggle with sexual competence around judging themselves for their bodies. So lots of body shame, it's super, super common. Also performance anxiety. So did I come? Like, or are they gonna make me come? Can I come for them? Or I'm coming too quick. People also worry about their fantasies and fetishes. So they have shames around their desires. So if I want to do this thing, is it going to make me this type of person? Or are they gonna think I'm weird? Or am I gonna have to do it all the time? Or what does it say about me? And so imagine all of those, right? All of those like stories are turning in our head as we're trying to get aroused and what arousal actually is, is our brain sending chemical messages to the rest of our body to open up blood flow and open up circulation and flooding us with all these fell good chemicals but if we're busy blocking that enabling of our erotic imagination because we're so worried about the ways that we're not good enough, it ends up blocking our pleasure. So people who are sexually confident, they have more fun in bed and they're more sexually satisfied because they're more relaxed. They approach sex kind of like with curiosity and a playfulness and they aren't worried about rejection or favor and so for those of us who have body shame, often sexual experiences become a barter for emotional connection and so we put up with sexual experiences that aren't so great because we're looking for that reassurance, that affirmation, that validation of our sexual desirability and our attractiveness, what we wanna move to, I mean, that's on the far end of the continuum, what we wanna move to is basically fucking like a goddess and so showing up as if like, hmm, I am so sexy. I am feeling myself and look at me overflow just enough to give you a taste and so that means that we walk into our sexual experiences really full. We walk in with like expecting that maybe you're just gonna top this up but I'm already feeling myself and like, won't you join me? And so that type of attitude is a game changer for many of us who have had to edit ourselves, tame ourselves, put up with partners who've maybe said terrible things to us, put up with a fat phobic society, put up with always trying to not live in this body right now and so moving towards feeling like, oh, sorry, I'm like not comfortable in my chair, moving towards feeling like you belong in the pleasure of those experiences can also help you be more of a recipient for those experiences. So sometimes we have partners that really wanna pleasure us, but we get in our head, how many of you have trouble with receiving? I feel like a lot of people have trouble, not just plus size people, but lots of people have trouble with receiving pleasure and we worry about like, am I taking too long? What if I don't like the thing that they're doing and how do I tell them not to do that and do something else? What if I smell bad? What if I taste bad? What if like afterwards they don't like it or, and so we go through all of the trouble of navigating someone trying to give us pleasure and, you know, we get stuck in our head about receiving. Think of it even on a very simple level. What happens when someone gives you a compliment? So if I'm like, "Oh, I really like your polka dot dress." And you say, "Oh yeah, I got this thing, it was only like $5 and it was in the back of my closet and I never," we try to detract from someone admiring and appreciating and complimenting what's happening for us, right? So take that and put that in a sexual scenario where it becomes even more precious. It becomes more about like we're giving and receiving in a sexual scenario of both energy, of physical activities, of erotic imaginations and if we're not able to receive, we are also putting up a blockage for things like orgasm, for things like feeling sensuality, for feeling intimacy, feeling trust, feeling vulnerability, feeling ourselves. So it becomes really difficult to even really enjoy sex. We're like, well, this thing kind of sucks, but I want it because I like things like touch or affection or orgasms. And so practicing even taking compliments can be a way to start feeling, like a very tiny way, it doesn't have to be a sexual compliment. It could be someone compliments you in another aspect of your personality or life, but it's a way of sitting in that pleasure without feeling expecting to or that expectation of giving back, that you have to tit for tat something, that you can't just receive. So translate that into an erotic context where you just get to receive and the joy and the gift to the other person is actually the pleasure of you receiving. So lots of us get off on like watching our partners receive and give them pleasure in a way that feeds back to our own desires. So practice with compliments if you think that you struggle with receiving even practice giving compliments and tuning into how people are kind of shying away from that and, you know, do your best to kind of encourage them, if they're like, "Oh my God, it was only $5." And then you could be like, "Well, that was good for you to treat yourself to that." And that affirmation of other people can also help us stand in our own power because sexually confident people don't believe that they're better than other people. They don't think that they're the best at sex. What they kind of feel, they're not focusing on like rejection or favor. They just feel like, oh, like, well, let's be curious about what works right now for the two bodies that are here right now and so it's letting go of that idea of a performance, idea of like showing up and like giving something that's perfectly curated for the other person. That has to do with communication. We have to learn to also speak up about our needs. A couple of things about the context as we go into redefining our sexy, I've got just a couple of pieces of context but you might have your own pieces of context as well. You might have your own unique histories and experiences that shape how you're going to reclaim your sexual confidence. So our plus size confidence is unique because we live in a fat phobic society, right? So where the word fat is a bad thing, where we're not allowed to exist in these bodies. We're not allowed to jiggle in these bodies. We're not allowed to dance and play in these bodies and there's a constant, I mean, there's like huge, huge, huge, $8 billion industry, the diet industry that's telling us that we can't exist and so, remember that all of that noise is going on in the back of your head, as you're trying on that cute outfit, that noise is in the back of your head as you're trying to like get on top of your partner and like ride the life outta them, you know? So it takes time to be able to quiet that noise and if you try and you kind of flop and you check out and you end up in that darkness for a bit, that's okay. We're building tools to be able to light the way back, right? We're like lighting the way back. I can have a really bad body experience or sexual experience or sexual confidence experience on Tuesday and then, you know, maybe by Friday, I've like found my way back. Whereas before it would've taken me years to find my way back or months, right? And so remember to also like pat yourself on the back for any of those accomplishments, you know, the moment where you're about to change your outfit, or you're about to edit a photo or you weren't about to approach somebody that was cute because you think that you weren't good enough for them and maybe you said hi anyways. So all of those moments, they really, those are the pieces that start to rewrite your script. Those are the pieces that start to get you into a position of believing in your own sexiness. So it's unique for plus size people because of fat phobia, also misogyny, so people who are fem or who identify as women are held to a higher standard. And so we see this a lot in, even in, we see it in fashion, we see it in our workplaces. We also see it in porn. We see it in sexualization. We see it in so many different ways and if you notice if, how many of you, any of you on dating apps? Are you on like, OkCupid or Tinder or anything? So if you notice any of the apps like OkCupid which allow you to self identify your body type. So lots of people who present as male or masculine or men, they often are showing their body type as in a higher regard than they actually are. So maybe they have a dad bod and they've put something like muscular but for fems and for women, we tend to underplay it. We tend to assume sort of the worst and we go with like something that is a little bit more of like taming ourselves or editing ourselves. So online dating, we'll definitely talk about, it's a world of its own. So there's also a lack of representation. It's only been recently that we've seen more plus size folks come out and be fashionable and fun and like have a good time and a sexy time in their bodies. So, do any of you follow any plus size influencers on Instagram that you find really inspiring? It's really important that you curate your content, curate your content and what that means is that you're going to look specifically for people who embody these attributes of this sexiness that isn't dependent on a conventional standard of attraction. So that means like people who you can just see such a vibe and a confidence and a colorfulness and a, you know, a fuck yeah-ness and anything that's like, wow, like that person is living life. It's less about their body and it's more about that they're living life and they're being inspired and desired in their authentic selves. It's in this body right now and remember, all of us are, you know, we're slowly dying, right? Like we're slowly dying. We're slowly getting disabled and to hang our sexual confidence and our ability to take up space on our bodies is a really fleeting standard and so for us to come to standards of where we have self-acceptance and we look at our bodies in a way that's like, hmm, like, thank you body. Like, thank you for, you know, holding this container of a kind, funny, smart, maybe you're athletic, maybe you're loving. Maybe you're really good at math. Like your body is a sack of skin and so our sexiness definitely, a hundred percent come from inside out, the outside just decorates it. The outside is also sexy but it sort of just decorates things. Right now we're looking through somebody else's idea of sexy and that idea of sexy is actually only a sliver of the possibility of sexiness that's out there. It like defines like 1% of the people, it's like Beyonce and so Beyonce's sexy, but have we not found people that are sexy, that are not Beyonce? And so think about even who you are attracted to and think about the things that sometimes feels good, but maybe doesn't look as good. I love bellies, I think they feel so soft. They're so good during sex. They're great to be cuddled with but I struggle so much with accepting my own belly. It is definitely a part of my body that I've disassociated from and I'm only now starting to build a relationship back to, I concentrated all of my happiness on if I just didn't have a belly like this wouldn't happen and like, why is this belly here? And I gotta hide this belly and so it was really hard for me to have sex that actually engaged or used or celebrated my belly, right? I didn't wanna be in positions where it was hanging, but then I didn't wanna be in positions where maybe it was like flopped over and so think about if you have a body part where you are holding most of your unconfidence or feelings of shame because the way that our arousal also works is that our emotions create chemical reactions in our bodies and so a lot of our trauma around our body hatred, around feeling not good enough for such a long time, we actually hold it in our tissue and so it's very hard for our sympathetic nervous system to actually relax out of that place of like tension and anxiousness and insecurity and it can be hard to experience what the full freedom and playfulness and lightness of sex can actually be. think about like three to five things that you think are sexy. You can even do something, I like to do this when I'm teaching class in person, is I write sexy on the middle of the page and then you can just sort of like, I'm a very nonlinear thinker, obviously. So then you can sort of just make arms out and like brainstorm about all the things that you think are sexy and whenever I do this in a classroom setting, you might think that what's on there is like, oh, like big dicks or big breasts or red lips or this but a lot of the times, it actually focuses on a mix of physical characteristics that are not only visual but sometimes it could be someone's scent or their taste or the way they make you feel and also attributes. So do we think kindness is sexy? Do we think humor is sexy? Funny people are sexy as fuck, do we agree? Do we think that people who are confident but not arrogant, right? There's a difference. So sexual confidence is feeling like you belong. Sexual arrogance is feeling like you're in competition with other people in order to belong and we know the difference when we feel those people in the room and when we think about how we can actually get to a place where it starts feeling more like second nature for us, we don't have to do all this like thinking through it. It comes from really rethinking what that definition of sexy is. We have to redefine sexy. When you make this list later, make one list for things that you think about for other people that you find really sexy and make a list of things that you find sexy about yourself and so I'm gonna challenge you to put at least three things on that sexy list. And it might be things that you don't outwardly own or admit. I always thought my legs were really sexy but I never was showing them off. I didn't even own a dress until I was like 27. Like I really, I really wasn't owning it, but I always kind of thought like for myself, I was like, oh, if only like I was allowed like to think that this was sexy but when I get rid of this belly, then my legs will be sexy and so a lot of redefining sexy is about giving ourselves permission to be outside of that 1%, that sliver of what's considered sexy and when we start to do that for ourselves, we also start to do that with our attraction and so I was on, I still am on stupid Tinder, and I was, I realized, oh, I'm like, wow. I'm attracted to people of all genders but the most problems that I had and the most aggression that I had was usually with cisgendered men and I remember thinking that the most fat phobia, I never experienced fat phobia with anybody who was a gender other than a CIS man and so we can see a lot of that is also connected to patriarchy, right? That, you know, women and fems and folks that are not men start to want to take up space and reclaim things outside of the standards that patriarchy has set, then it starts to really upset a dynamic and so the idea that I could be like a fat babe and not care what you think was really offensive. So I got kicked off of Tinder, Bumble, okay, I got kicked off of everything, but I then thought, I'm like, hey, I have to start to also reexamine my own desire because the things that I don't like about myself, if I'm trying to only fit into a world that also only desires a particular kind of partner, so let's say tall, white guy, then it's gonna be really tough for me to fit into that world of sexy. I just don't exist in the same world of sexy as tall white guy, right? so I started going through my list of things that I thought were attractive and who I was swiping right on. So one of the things that you can do to redefine your sexy is to, if you're already in a partnership, you can also do this but to start to think about who you find attractive and so who do you find desirable? Who do you want to have sex with? And if they all look like Ryan Gosling, that's hot but that's also a problem that we are narrowing our view of sexiness. So what I ended up doing was swiping right on people that I normally would've swiped left on based only on their photo and one of the things for me that was really important was height. I was like, oh, I need to have a tall guy. I definitely wanna be the smaller one and that was my internalized fat phobia taking place in my dating. So I thought that as a plus size person that I had to be the smaller one, how could I possibly like exist as the bigger one in the relationship? That would be humiliating and I was like, oh, Luna, come on. We gotta figure this out. Let's interrogate this a little bit. So interrogating your standards of attraction can sometimes open up ways that you're internalizing fat phobia and so it's not yours. You learned this, it's not your fault but sometimes we take on that stick that other people have been beating us with and we bring it inside and we start beating ourselves from the inside. So I ended up going on a date with someone who was five, four, it to this day was one of the most fun dates I have ever had and I felt so adored. The conversation was amazing and I thought, wow, I would've missed out on this person had I continued swiping with my internalized fat phobia. So I'm really glad that I opened that up but it also opened up room for me to just be a person and that this person also really loved, like we'll talk about fetishes, but like, we didn't end up continuing dating because I felt there was a bit of a fetish but loved like the idea of like, you know, big, like beautiful women and so it was an opportunity to not feel like, oh, I'm trying to like be hot and sexy for all the people that are conventionally attractive but what about the rest of us, right? Like that's only like what? 5% of the population? So the rest of us also have sex. The rest of us also go on dates. and those desires are, or those rules of sexiness are also very Eurocentric. They also center around particular types of bodies that are abled. We don't see all of the sexiness that's out there and at the same time, we're told that this sexiness is gonna lead us to love and companionship and romance and marriage and children and all of those things we're hanging on, you know, like being thin and tall, like it doesn't calculate, but the industries and the motivators are so big and so if you have trouble rewriting your attraction, remember this takes time. It absolutely takes time because there's also something that's been pounded into our brain around sexiness that if we can get those people that are conventionally attractive, if we can get them to like us, somehow that's power, that's social power and the social power that we might lose by being the bigger one, we just can't afford to lose any more social power. So remember, all of these thoughts are behind, oh, I just need to lose five pounds or I just need to get back on my diet or I just need to do that. That's all happening behind. So the stuff in the front, these behaviors, that's industry, and then behind are the insecurities that were planted for industry and in order to be able to kind of move around that, it really is about developing your own barometer of sexiness. So that exercise around finding at least three things that are sexy about you, that list will grow, but it will grow not in the way that that we expect. It's not gonna be about like, oh yeah, now I have like, you know, breasts like Beyonce or a butt like whoever, it will grow in that we stop giving a fuck about what sexy looks like and we start giving a fuck about how it feels and so think about what you do to yourself to get yourself presentable to go out the door and so I used to only go out with makeup, especially when I had a corporate job and one day I like poked myself in the eye with my mascara wand and it was so early and I had to take like two buses and a subway and I was so irritated and I was on the bus and I was looking at this man and he was sitting there and I was like, this man probably makes more money than I do and yet his eyelashes are exactly the same length as he woke up, his nails are not blue and that was the day I stopped wearing makeup to my corporate job and I had to sit with the feeling of being able to, what that was like to strip off something that I was using as a prop to be more acceptable. Granted, a lot of these things are built in as things that we have to do to be more acceptable. So I'm not saying you have to let go of all those things. Just start being aware because now when I put on makeup, it's for joy. It's absolutely for joy. I'm like, oh, I'm like decorating myself. I'm gonna go like help people. I'm gonna do this and it doesn't feel like I'm doing it so that I can exist in a particular standard of beauty. So when we start to do that with our sexuality, it actually opens up more space for us to get off better and get better partners, partners who actually adore our bodies. I wanted to give you some really practical tips for lingerie. So my lingerie game used to consist of black baby dolls, because that was all that was out there. So they'd have all these sexy, wonderful options and colors and styles for bodies that were standard size or straight size and I'd be left with these black baby dolls. So then I also began to think, okay, well, this is what like bodies like mine actually need to wear, like, I guess this is what we wear and I went shopping with my best friend once and he was like, "Oh no." He's like, "You're not wearing that." And I was like, "But it's like, I don't know, it's like what they have." He's like, "No." And he went away, left me in the change room, came back and brought me this like stringy thing which I'm gonna show you 'cause this stringy thing changed my life and I never would've picked it out myself. So this stringy thing is one of those, it's got like this like bra, right? But like the boobs kind of fall out of it. Who cares? And then it's got this piece down the middle, right? And then it's got like a panty with these two things on the side. So this whole thing, I was like, "Where's the rest of it? How am I gonna fit into this?" And my conception of my body was that, oh no, there's no way that my belly can be out and I'm thinking I'm decorated at the same time. So I was limiting myself. I wasn't giving myself permission to try anything different than I was already doing. So think about the ways that you're holding yourself back. Think about the ways, are you avoiding color? Are you avoiding fishnet? Are you avoiding lace? Are you avoiding demi cup? Are you avoiding corsets? Are you avoiding thigh highs? Are you thinking that because if you pull up your thigh high, your little crotch biscuit thigh is gonna like hang out, you know, that little triangle piece is gonna hang out and therefore you shouldn't wear it. So remember that the bodies that we see on boxes, in magazines, on lingerie covers, on Victoria's Secrets horrible ads, they're all edited, right? They're all edited. They're all hairless. They're all very childlike. They're not sagging. They don't even have nipples 'cause like we aren't allowed to have nipples. So remember how distorted our images are and give yourself a little bit of a break. If you're trying on new lingerie or especially if you're doing it in person, we don't really have that opportunity now but when you do, see how it feels by closing, (coughs) excuse me, closing your eyes and moving around in it and so focus less on, you know, what it looks like but what it feels like and so maybe you like the way that the material moves, maybe you like that your shoulders are out. Maybe you like that there's hardly anything covering your bum and so even do this with pieces of lingerie that you have in your closet that you're like, nope, this will never see the light of day, go in your bathroom and put them on and just move in them, like close your eyes and move in them. If you wanna put on sensual music or sexy music, do that too but like really just like feel what it feels like to move in them. Now, when you're shopping online, I'm gonna give you some practical tips, when you're shopping online, stuff that's great for plus size bodies, sometimes they take the same thing that's a straight size and they move it to a plus size and call it a day and that doesn't work for all plus size bodies. We all still have different bodies, right? So for those of you who have a fuller bust, anything that's a halter is not gonna be that great. You might have to reinforce it. So you might have to stitch it a little bit so that it doesn't start to weaken at the neck point but you also might find that it's just uncomfortable for your neck as is. When we're looking at things that are fishnet or are like body suits. Those are also wonderful if you want to feel sort of like you're decorating your naked, right? We're not trying to hide our naked. We're trying to decorate it and bodysuits, fishnet, those things give you coverage while also like giving you an appearance or an allure of something sexy 'cause where else are you gonna wear a fishnet bodysuit, right? Like you're in this thing, we're stepping into the fishnet bodysuit to step into the sexy. Those are also usually very stretchy and so if you find that some of the lingerie that's out there that has proportions that are cut, that are just different than yours, right? Maybe you've got a longer waist, a smaller waist, smaller butt, bigger butt, I don't know. And so lingerie that have specific lines that are or a defined waist, that often isn't going to be flattering on every plus size bodies, every plus size person's body. So we want things that are gonna give us the best hope for starting out like small, starting to reclaim our gaze. Another thing that some folks really like, but they're really uncomfortable to have sex in. So they're definitely like a, put it on dance around, show it off and then take it off. Corsets. So for plus size people, you can see here, how it's got, I dunno if you can, so it's got a lot of lines here. So what happens is in a corset because your bust is gonna be taking up more volume in the front, it's going to be creating sort of like side bends for you. So if you're investing in a corset, make sure that it has some kind of boning. It doesn't have to be metal boning, metal boning is gonna be much more expensive. I don't know if I can pull out the boning of this one. This one's got a plastic boning in it. So it's more flexible. So for sex, this is better. If you wanna get fucked in a corset, you want a little bit of a plastic boning, not a steel boning. If it says steel boning, it's also gonna be way more expensive. All right. Also think about color, if you're normally wearing things that are always black, like black and red tends to be like what sexy is, you know, does your partner have a favorite color? Do you have a favorite color? You know, what color like makes you pop in other types of clothing? If you're into that, if not, just put on a color, even black is totally fine, but think about like where you can bring other color, think about where you can bring other personality. So maybe you have a great pair of panties that you like and so wear those panties and then put on something that's like a necklace. So it adorns sort of like between your breast and maybe dangles on an area that you're not so happy with. I have this, it's a pearl bow tie. So I put on a pearl bow tie and then I'll put on just like thigh highs and panties and there you go, you've got something that's just like very comfortable for you. If you feel like it's really hard to get dressed in lingerie because it feels like someone is going to judge you, think about, or you don't want them to look at you or you wanna keep your body hidden. You want sex with the lights off, even think about wearing lingerie underneath your regular clothes during the day just for you. So buy a cute pair of underwear that's not uncomfortable, buy a bra in a different color, you know, pasties, like anything that's going to make you feel like you're decorating your nakedness just for you and if someone happens to see it, cool, if someone happens to notice it, whatever, but it's that close little reminder that you put it on today like just for you, right? That pearl necklace outfit. Just for me, I did it when I was, I'd had none partners and I was just like, huh, what would this feel like? Also think about, it's gonna sound silly, but think about dressing up for masturbation. I was married for for nine years and my husband and I didn't have really good communication and so when sex fell apart, like we didn't know how to talk about it and so I was dealing with a lot of like resentment and not feeling desired and so I actually started putting on heels and masturbating because one day I came home and I was like, "Hey, can we have sex? Like, and can I wear heels and can we have sex?" And he responded so like negatively and like was like very shaming and I was like, okay and I was already masturbating so much. So I was like, well fuck this. I'm just gonna put on heels and like masturbate and see what it feels like. It was a game changer because it was a moment where I took up sexual pleasure and space specifically for myself. I treated myself the same way I was trying to delight my husband. I wanted to delight him with those shoes but I also wanted to delight him with the sexiness that I would feel being in those shoes. So remember the things that you want to do, all those positions that you want to do, all the sexy things you wanna try, the lingerie that you wanna try, those are all about you adoring and giving purpose to your sexiness, your sexiness isn't in the pearl neck tie. It's not in the baby doll. It's not in the face sitting, it's in you and you put it through those vessels. You put it through the fishnet, you put it through the sitting on top. You put it through the whatever. So that's why it's the idea of sort of decorating yourself can feel like it's a little bit of role play or like you're putting on a costume. You're giving life to an alter ego, this alter ego, they already know how sexy they are, right? And so those pieces are in you but we just need to lift them up and give them a different space to play because this space right here has a lot of messaging that no longer works for us and so when we get into our sexy selves, whether it's for ourself, whether it's for sensuality, whether it's for masturbation, whether it's for our partners, we wanna pivot over to that sexy and that sexy person, she's confident, she wears red shoes. She does this, she does that. So that list that you're making of yourself of three things that you find are sexy about yourself, also think about, you know, what would someone say about you that is sexy? Like maybe someone admires something about you that you brushed it off. Folks used to tell me that I had a really great smile and I always took that as, oh, I have a nice smile because the rest of me is so garbage and oh, you have a pretty face, but you know, like, if you lost weight, you'd be beautiful and so I couldn't see what people were enjoying about me. I couldn't see any of that and so being able to take that back, right? Take it back through your lingerie, take it back through your positions and allow yourself to fail. Allow yourself to try and be like, yeah, I'm giving myself permission to try. I'm giving myself permission to dream differently. I'm giving myself permission to pivot into this sexy beast that I know is inside of me somewhere or I hope that is inside of me somewhere. My last tip for lingerie is when in doubt, you're gonna get stuff that's like very stretchy and I wanted to tell you that if you're sweaty, I'm sweaty, look for lingerie that isn't necessarily made of nylon. So you want things that are either cotton or even rayon. So things like these types of body suits, I'm gonna, I don't know where the crotch is on this one. This is like a long sleeved teddy. So teddy's are also great for some people. If you've got a voluminous bum, I don't really have a voluminous bum, but I have a big tummy and so they're good for if you carry or your weight is distributed in areas that you normally hide with like baggier your clothing because they'll give you some coverage but also some sexy, right? So this little thing, they're also so stretchy, like look at like how, like this could fit like so many different bodies and then the backs got like a little bit of a tie. The great thing about teddy's too are that you can keep them on while you have sex 'cause you can usually just move the crotch aside if you're having penetrative sex or if someone's going down on you. Likewise, anything with like crotches pantyhose, I love the models on it, look at her on the back. She's like, oh, like, oh yeah, yeah. She's also not plus size selling me plus size panties. So these are sheer crotchless panty hose. So if you're looking for like even any coverage like around your tummy, it's okay. It's okay in the beginning to want to be like, well, I'm just gonna focus on, you know, kind of like the things that I can feel vulnerable about. I'm gonna put my best assets forward, whatever you think that those are, because it'll change over time. You're just gonna get more and more and more assets. You're just gonna start to notice more and more and more spaces when you reclaim that sexy and you reclaim that gaze. it's really hard to look specifically for lingerie that's for plus size men. So look in the same places for plus size women, but we're trying to adapt some of those pieces. So for example, you could wear things that are fishnet related. So if you wanna be able to have like fishnet shorts or you want a fishnet top, you can definitely do that. Also remember that the items for plus size men or for plus size women, so let's say something like a thong. It's not gonna look the same way as it does on the models. So I often used to refrain from like buying thongs or low cut panties because they roll under my belly and so think about like just finding things that feel more comfortable and less about like, okay, well this is gonna, you know, sit above my belly, just like the mannequin. It's really, it's a little bit tough right now to find things on Amazon that are plus size stuff. But I find that eBay is way better for plus size men and also the one that I'm gonna drop in your bonus resources is Hips and Curves and so Hips and Curves is a ton of like plus size women's stuff but there are some pieces that men could adapt but I will include one. I can't remember what the name of it is, but I will, I'm gonna write it down for you. A lot of times the plus size male ones also come from lingerie brands trying to be gender inclusive and so they start to release more androgynous things in a wider variety of sizes. So you might have to get a little bit creative with looking for like gender nonspecific lingerie or gender inclusive lingerie, also for performers, so like strippers, for drag, there's often things in bigger sizes just because bigger bodies tend to be taking up space in them. think about doing a sexy selfie photo shoot. It could be for you. It could be for your partner. It could be to send to your best friend. So I did one on Valentine's Day. I did it for myself and I set up like, just like my tripod that I'm using for lighting here and it just has like a clicker thing which I'm pretty sure I've lost now and I just like make sure the lighting was really good and I put on a sexy outfit that challenged me. It was the first time I'd ever put my bare belly on my Instagram. It was the first time I ever like was taking photos without thinking about my belly and so when you do this, you can even do this with video. I also did it with video. Remember that this is a practice. So set up a regular, like maybe it's once every two days or maybe it's once a week that you take a sexy selfie and at first and put it in a folder somewhere for yourself, it doesn't have to be nude. It just has to be sexy and if you're using angles, who cares, who cares? It doesn't matter because what ends up happening is over time, you actually start to get delighted by your cute self and for me, for the videos, I was taking videos of myself dancing and I think it took me eight videos to not watch them back and burst into tears. I was like, oh my God. Like, that's what I look like or like and I just kept doing it. I just, I kept doing it with the intention of, I just give myself permission to see this a different way. I give myself permission to reclaim sexy and so even if you don't believe it, set the intention and by the 12th video, I was kind of like, huh, I'm like, she's got a little bit of rhythm. She looks like she's having fun. She looks like she's having whatever. It took me until video 24 to actually be like, that's kind of hot and so it took me a long time to replace the images of sexy that I had already embedded in my brain that I am never going to look like and by video 24, not only had my gaze changed but the way I was dancing was way freer. I was looking less at the mirror. I was like making faces to myself and to this day, I don't show anybody those videos. Those are all for me and so if you don't have a lot of time or a lot of space to do that, even doing them in the mirror in the bathroom in the morning and so when I'm brushing my teeth, I put on a sexy song for two minutes to make sure I brush my teeth long enough and I'm just like moving as I'm brushing my teeth and feeling myself, even just winking at yourself when you go to the bathroom and just being like, you're giving yourself permission to be cute. You're giving yourself permission to be playful. You're giving yourself permission to feel sexy and on your own terms and then you can bring that to your partner as well. One thing that I also recommend when we start to reclaim our gaze is also looking at porn with bodies that are similar to yours and at first you're gonna look at it and you're gonna focus in on everything you also hate about your own body and you might even say, well, I can appreciate their body, but I can't appreciate mine. That's okay, that's all right because what ends up happening is the more that we recondition our brains to look at stuff that actually reflects a different reality than the one that tells us that we're not enough, we end up seeing the sexiness in certain things, we end up forgetting about the stretch marks or the tummies or the saggy breasts. We end up looking at the sexiness of what's happening and the desire and the attraction. So in order to get out of your head, we wanna engage sensuality and so what sensuality is, is scanning all of our five senses as potential little portals of pleasure. So what can we add to each of our senses or dull to heighten another sense in order to see if we can experience a different sense of pleasure or a different way of being stimulated. So for those of you who are very like visual, you're very aesthetic, you might like watching your partner in lingerie. So maybe set up a lingerie date. Lingerie isn't just for bodies with vulvas. People with penises can absolutely wear lingerie and decorate themselves. Also think about the aesthetics of setting lighting in your room that feels flattering for you. That feels safe for you, that feels comfortable for you. So that might mean setting up some of those like big fat candles that give that sort of flickering light. If you wanna challenge yourself and there's a mirror available, try masturbating in front of a mirror and you don't have to watch the whole time. It's more about being exposed, about trying a different way to have an image that you can kind of like peek out at and then go back into your head. You could also do this with your partner. So you could have sex in front of the mirror with your partner or you can have sex in front of the mirror that isn't necessarily the kind of sex that you always have. So even put them in front of you between your legs or you sit between their legs and you both take turns just like watching each other's hands go over your body, go over your hair, go over your face. It's a wonderful kind of experience to see how beautiful what you come together to do actually is and that it isn't so much about like having a flat stomach or no double chins or like no flabby arm or whatever it is. It is about like the connection that's created and have your partner even close their eyes as you're touching them and like moving around them, that can also help you focus and watch them receive all the pleasure that your body right now is giving them. All right, so I'm gonna show you two of my toys 'cause I want you to consider something when you're buying sex toys. So depending where you've got more volume, so if it's your tummy, if it's your bum, you may also have trouble using toys that require you to be closer to your genitals. So sometimes for me like reaching past my tummy, some toys, the handles are too short for me. So I'm gonna show you two toys, three toys, actually, oh no, I have four for you. I'm gonna show you toys that I think are really great for bigger bodies and also to use with partners who have bigger bodies. So this one is the Njoy Pure Wand and it's made of stainless steel. So it's like quite heavy but what's great about it is that it can be used on anybody's body. So no matter what genitals you have, you can use this because it can be inserted anally or vaginally and it's got two different size of balls and it's intended to hit the P spot and the G spot. What's awesome about this is because it's so curved and it's got such a long arm, it's great if you've got more of a voluminous tummy or a voluminous bum and you like to on your stomach or on your back. So it's a little bit easier to be able to access things when you think about the length of it, if you see vibrators that are a little bit shorter, if you have no problem like reaching down and holding it, that's fine but sometimes the volume of our body can get in the way of some of the, how the toys are supposed to work best. Another good one is this This is intended also for G spot or P spot but it can also be used on like nipples. It can be used on anuses. It can be used on the perineum. So that place between the genitals and the asshole and what's awesome about this one, oh, it can also be used on the penis, underneath the testicles or at the frenulum which is the underside of the penis closest to the underside of the head and it's kind of a little V. What's great about it is also, it's got a longer arm and it's quite powerful and so for a little kind of toy, I mean, you can kind of hear, for a little toy, it's got quite a motor. The only shitty thing is that it's battery operated which also makes it less expensive and then how many of you know about the Magic Wand? So the Magic Wand is known as like the Cadillac of vibrators and it's known as the Cadillac of vibrators because it's just so powerful. So if you like a strong vibrator, this is a great one for it. It's also like an actually like a really good like back massage or two and there are attachments on it so that it can be used for internal use or on penises. So the reason why I pulled it out for plus size sex is also because we might want to, we might shy away from actually experimenting with self pleasure. We might shy away from experimenting with different types of toys because we're just like not feeling sexy and we feel like gross and self pleasure and masturbation is one of the most joyful ways of reconnecting your erotic imagination back to your body and so because you have to use your erotic imagination and you have to be kind of selfish during masturbation to be able to get into a zone where you're going to produce pleasure. That pleasure might be orgasm. It might just be relaxation. It might just be arousal and you can use toys with partners and one great empowering thing to be able to do with partners is like a teach me to touch you kind of experience and so what that would mean, I know someone said that they often worry that they take long to come or that their partner's gonna get bored during receiving and so being able to set aside a date that's just for your pleasure and a date that's just for their pleasure and we focus, the whole date is gonna be just about me. You could also do it where you set a timer and so let's say like, you know, 45 minutes is just for you. It's all about you, until that bell rings I'm not moving my mouth or this toy from you and then it's the next person's turn. So you sort of let go of a sense of time and you just focus on what's happening in the moment and the teach me to touch you is a way of, if you feel comfortable masturbating in front of your partner, if you're not with a partner right now or you can't be with them because of COVID 19, think about sending little videos and if you don't wanna send your full face, you know, just like focus the camera on your genitals and like show how you like to touch yourself. You know, do you like direct Clitoral pressure? Do you like more like to the sides of the clitoris? Do you stroke your penis this way? Do you stroke your penis this way? Do you stroke it this way? Are you focusing on the head? Are you focusing more on the shaft? So paying attention to each other's responses to pleasure can also get you out of your head of performing sex, you know, with your appearance because sex is performed way more with our feels and the activities that we do and less about like what we look like. So that can be hard to believe as an intellectual concept or you may believe it as an intellectual concept but you don't know how to practice it. So masturbation, using toys and also telling and teaching your partners how to touch you can help you take up way more erotic space. I wanted to tell you about my experience when I left my marriage and I was determined, I was hell bent on falling in love with myself. I had lost myself in that relationship and many of us lose ourselves in all kinds of relationships or we lose ourselves in work or all different kinds of things and I had started taking burlesque classes and I was like, oh my God, these like women are so powerful and they're so like, their bellies are out there and they're jiggling and what burlesque taught me, and if you have time at home now, like definitely look up some burlesque videos on YouTube. What it taught me was that it is all about presence. It has nothing to do with how flat someone's stomach is or, and actually in burlesque, jiggle is good because jiggle like makes the audience cheer and burlesque was about an attitude. So we had to develop, oh, am I gonna be a kitten? Am I gonna be a vixen? Am I gonna be, you know, a sort of coy? And so if it helps you to build this sort of alter ego that has permission to take up space in their sexiness, think about the attributes of what you would want this person to have, right? Think about like how they would move. Burlesque is all about tease and seduction and so if we believe that we don't have anything worthy of revealing, then it's really hard to do tease and seduction and we end up going back to our same old, same old of like trying to make ourselves smaller and like hiding ourselves and not feeling like we can actually be present. So in the morning, when you get up, what I do now is I kind of take my hands and I just like rub my belly as I'm like waking up, I rub my belly and I tell it, you know, today I'm gonna try and be a bit more accepting, you know or I thank it. I either tell it an intention for the day or I give it some gratitude. I'm like, thanks for holding, you know, this like very passionate, caring spirit that I have and like, you know, you're helping me through the day and so being able to give yourself a little bit of touch plus an intention daily, daily, like even in the shower or something, it's going to start to bring you in relationship with your body and in relationship with your body, you can access more pleasure. If you're someone who's turned on by music or music gets you in the mood, get new playlists, like start creating those playlists and listening to them not during times where you're just about to have sex, listen to them throughout the day, right? Like put them on and just kind of listen to them and feel them because we want to create that relationship between sexy time and our playlist and ourselves. So if you wonder what I'm doing when I'm not on here and not doing my taxes is that I'm on the floor. I bought kneepads specifically to be on the floor and I'm listening to this playlist and I'm just moving and I don't care what it looks like. I'm just like really, like sometimes I'll close my eyes and just like move myself and like drag my hands on my body or feel my hair and to remind myself that what I have to offer isn't just in what I can see but it's also how I experience my surroundings and the energy that's available to me. So that will help you also pick up useful energy from your partners. Like where are they vulnerable? Where are they needing some empathy? Where do they have insecurities? And how can you be the more confident one in that space? You know, maybe they think they're too hairy. Maybe they've got, you know, acne somewhere. Maybe they're not as tall as they wanna be. Maybe they don't have as many muscles as they want. Maybe they also have trouble with coming or coming too quickly and so thinking about where we can also give empathy is built through a practice of giving ourselves self empathy and self-compassion. So one of the ways to, so I came up with this, this one of my brands is Fuck like a Goddess and Fuck like a Goddess was very much about like, oh no, oh no, we are not having sex if you have nothing to offer a goddess. So it was about raising my standards and as a plus size person, I had definitely lowered my standards. Not only for people, but about like what I expected to get out of a sexual experience. So some of us go into sexual experiences expecting not to have any pleasure, but we do it for our partners or we do it because we're like, well, this is what like normal people do or we do it because maybe it makes us feel close to people or loved or having attention and so I had sort of lost track of that. So I was like, no, no, I'm gonna fuck like a goddess and so what fuck like a goddess means is definitely about feeling like you are there feeling your goddess self and these people just are lucky to get to join you and you get to cocreate with them and it's not about being above them, but it's about maintaining this level of confidence, of peace, of acceptance that is untouchable, that nothing can get in the way of and how you do that is you focus on boundaries. You focus on bedroom goals and you focus on self adoration. So boundaries, you're gonna think about the words, the activities, the things that just don't make you feel good in bed. If it, for now includes being on top, that's okay. Put that in your boundaries list. It may change, (coughs) sorry, bedroom goals. Sometimes when we don't think that we're taking up enough space in our erotic pleasure, in our erotic situations, we don't dream, right? We don't wanna spice things up and you mentioned that you don't wanna do all these new things 'cause you figure that you can't do them. So I want you to write down some goals and so that might be, you wanna give a sensual massage, that might be, you wanna try flavored lube. It might mean you wanna try spanking. Maybe you wanna watch porn together. Maybe you wanna have sex in a different room of the house. Maybe you wanna try sexting. Maybe you want video chatting. Maybe you wanna try sex with the lights on. Maybe you want to dress up, whatever it is, we need some bedroom goals. We need to allow ourselves to dream a little because that ignites the part of us that wants to be naughty. That wants to be naughty and wishes we would just get out of the way of our own naughtiness. So come up with a fuck it list, a fuck it list. It's like a bucket list but it's all the things you wanna fuck with and those things can be fantasies that then you share with your partner and just think about like, oh yeah, babe, I thought about like, you know, you coming home one day and I like had fish nets on and maybe I make you dinner in them and then we eat together and then you ravish me. So self adoration applies whether you're in a relationship or not, self adoration is about finding ways to plan dates for yourself as you would your lovers. So think about like the person that you adore the most. It could be your best friend. It could be a lover. It could be your partner and how you prepare for them, right? Like my partner's coming over, I get all cute, I like clean the kitchen. I like put out stuff, even though I know he's not necessarily gonna care but if it wasn't that way, he wouldn't love me any less, but it's about like a ritual and so do that for yourself. So if you're gonna set yourself a bubble bath, you're like tonight, I'm gonna like sink into essential bubble bath. I'm gonna allow it to wash away some of my shame, make sure you light a candle, right? Make sure you put on that sexy playlist or light incense, like think about ways to delight your own senses when you're planning these self adoration dates, it could also be something as simple as when you eat your meals, you light a candle and you treat it as feasting. This is feasting. We all have such distorted relationships to food. It can be really hard to get the sensual pleasure out of food that actually exists innately in it. Think about how you can delight your ears. So maybe you put together that sensual playlist, think about even doing hand massages, like put on your favorite Netflix show, get some really good oil, light a candle and just like massage your own hands for like 20 minutes or massage your own feet, put on a facial mask or whatever. The goal of self adoration is to make yourself feel as special as you wish other people made you feel and it's okay for other people to make you feel special, but we wanna be able to have access to that for ourselves. How does that sound? How do we feel about these self adoration dates? They're like a game changer for me. Game changer. I really, I'm doing very well in social isolation because I enjoy my own company and because I have stripper knee pads. So think about even your coffee in the morning. Do you wanna add a little bit of cinnamon to it? Do you want to drink it in your favorite mug? These very little joys and pleasures allow, it reminds us that there's so much joy and pleasure to take up space in, whether we're in a erotic context or in a non-erotic context. I teach at a group for new parents and some of the ideas that they came up with were really wonderful and part of it is also like if you're in the shower and you've only got three minutes, you know, put on like that one song and make sure when you're in the shower, you're like really like taking advantage. Like sometimes self adoration is even just tuning in to what pleasure is right there. So sometimes when I'm standing in line, well, not anymore, but when I used to stand in line at Starbucks, even just standing there and like taking like a big breath and like allowing my body to open up, my belly to flop out, like wherever I was holding tension that I've just become so used to holding tension, that can be self adoration, eating your meal a little bit slower can be self adoration, making a cup of tea can be self adoration. So it's about the intention and the preparation of the activities but yeah, it absolutely can be tough to find that when your lives are really busy or when you live with lots of people. Pleasure has to become a priority and to be able to find space and time and resources for that becomes easier the more that you see the benefits of practicing it regularly and sneaking it in when you can but we, most of us who struggle with confidence also struggle with making time and making self care a priority. So that will also come, that will come with also boundaries, that will come with seeing this as part of your health. You know, we never get too busy to brush our teeth and we need to think about our confidence and nurturing ourselves as part of our daily practice and rituals. Just remember to be gentle with your sweet, beautiful, wonderful selves. This journey is tough. It's really tough and if you start to feel like you can't do it, that's also old conditioning. We're trying to hold ourselves as tender and tough at the same time and remember that we are here to also inspire each other. So the more that you do it, the more that I get inspired, the more that I do it, I feel like I can give to more people. So thank you so much for coming with me on this journey and being so vulnerable and courageous to start to want to be a little bit different. Lemme tell you there's like infinite creativity with sexual things that you all can try and one of the things that I recommend in my sexual competence classes is to, if you're in a relationship, to put out two jars, but in these jars, you're both gonna put in things, you're gonna put in little pieces of paper with things that make you feel individually desired. So Rebecca, your jar would be all about the stuff that would make you feel sexy and so it might be your husband giving you an oily massage. In my jar, I wanted to put on a strip tease for my partner and I was terrified. I had never done that before, I dance around at my house like a stripper all the time, but I'd never done it with a partner and so this gets you, it gives an opportunity for your partner to really affirm in something that you think is going to be about making you feel more desirable versus the other way where we're just kind of like picking out things to do for our partners. This is for you with your partner as a cooperator and a witness of you trying to take up space being more sexy. It's also fine to communicate with our partners and say, "Hey, babe, like I wanna try this new thing but I feel kind of shy, can you like, remind me," You know, just like, be like, "Babe, breathe, come back to me with your breath." Or like, "Babe, like I just, I can't stand how sexy you are." Like sometimes it's hard to believe those things in the moment and we think if we have to give people the communication that we want to receive that somehow it makes it less sincere. It doesn't. We need the information to be able to speak specifically and affirmatively to somebody's insecurities and so the people that you're having sex with, it's okay to be like, tell me I'm a goddess. Like, can you remind me I'm a goddess? And if you don't feel comfortable communicating with your partner, have that for yourself, have that in your head. So sometimes I'm having sex and I'll start to worry about a position or I'm sweating too much or I'm like, you know, I'm being really hard on myself and I'll say in my head, I'm like, oh yeah, I forgot, I'm a goddess and then I come back into the moment the first few times I did that, it made no difference whatsoever. So remember, all of this is a practice. It's a reconditioning. It's like water on a rock, right? Like we're wearing away a lot of very powerful messaging. I hear that so much that we start to, we actually start to look for evidence of what we already think is gonna happen and so we already think that we're gonna either be disgusting or too heavy or we're gonna squish them or we can't get into that position and so any slight change in their face or their breath, we start to think of as like, okay, the worst thing I was thinking is actually coming true right now and so two things can help in those scenarios. One is having really clear communication skills. So if you think your partner is uncomfortable or they're not breathing, or you've got too much weight on them, be like, 'Babe, do you need me to let up a little bit? "Babe, let me know that you want more. Babe, tell me how much more that you want. Touch me if you want more, squeeze my thighs if you want more." And so inviting that communication in the moment, even talking about it beforehand can tell your partner so that they can be more enthusiastically communicative. So if you tell them, "Hey, I'm like worried about squishing your face" and they're like, "Don't worry, I'm fine." Then you're gonna say, "Okay, can you like remind me of that? Like, can you just like make sure that you show me how hungry you are when I'm on top of your face?" If we don't feel like being vulnerable in our communication with partners or it's something, I mean, you don't have to show up with your, you can show up with conditions around communications, like for specific positions, that's really important. If you've dealt with trauma or you're having some really horrible body hatred, that absolutely is something that you don't need to disclose. You can if you want to if it makes you feel more comfortable, but if you feel that it's actually gonna make you vulnerable in a not good way, then what you can do is regulate that yourself and that regulation of that, those thoughts yourself takes a ton of self awareness and it takes a lot of repetitive practice, repetitive. So we have to, we can't just like pick up these tools and use them, you know, when we have sex once a week or once a month or whatever it is, Well, none of us are having sex, right? Well, I'm not having any sex right now except with myself and we have to practice. We have to build them into our every day, right? So I could be brushing my teeth and be like, yeah, I kinda, yeah, I'm like, I'm cute and so being able to notice that means that when you walk into these sexual situations, even though deep dark down, you've got this idea that someone's gonna be disgusted by you or that you're not gonna be able to, you know, please them in a certain way or do the positions they want, that vibe of feeling yourself can help at least cushion it. It cushions it, eventually it takes over and it like rules the game which is amazing but what it does is it cushions it so that you don't have to use that toxic thought to get in the way of your pleasure. It kind of softens it so that you can still go about your business and you can pick back up that shame when you're done your sexy time and eventually you won't wanna pick that back up. Getting on top is a hard one. It is absolutely a hard one. Getting on top and riding is a particular challenge for people, face sitting, every time I do a face sitting webinar, people of all sizes are like, am I gonna kill him? Am I gonna kill him? And I was like, well, if he dies, he dies but you know, I've Googled, nobody has died from face sitting. getting on top is, so if you hold yourself back from getting on top because the position is actually uncomfortable. So some folks, their knees don't feel comfortable splayed enough. There's a position hack for that and that's raising the pelvis of the person underneath with a pillow that's bent in half or a sex cushion to get their body a little bit higher so you're not squatting as low. If you feel that it's because the angle, that they're looking up at you and like everything is like, kind of like down on them. What you're gonna do is kind of like, you wanna sit a little bit back. So you're gonna sit a little bit back and take their hands and put them on your breast, put them on your nipples, put them on your waist, put them on your belly, put them somewhere on your body so that you feel that connection because any position that we go into that we're uncomfortable about, on top is definitely a popular one that people feel uncomfortable in but what happens is we leave the pleasure of the position and we go straight into our head and we start thinking about all those things that hold us back from being on top. So tell me what some of these limitations sound like, like what's going on in your head about what's going to happen if you are on top or is someone gonna notice how ugly you are? Is someone gonna notice an aspect of yourself that you don't like? Is someone going to get smooshed? Like, what are we thinking? So think about the thoughts behind it. Like go deeper into whatever the thing is in order to feel kind of like connected to that script and if you can't decipher it, don't worry, it doesn't matter. It will come. Part of it is just getting like this authentic honesty, like being able to say, I don't like being on top, I feel uncomfortable. For face sitting, some of the tips that I recommend are putting a pillow underneath their head. So their head is a little bit more raised and that way it won't necessarily like sink in directly into the folds of the mattress and also for you being in a position where you can have your hand on the wall and so if that means putting him on the floor and putting a pillow under his head and then you're on the wall so that the wall can take some of your weight when you need to relax a little bit. So you're not sitting and relaxing right on his face. Communication during face sitting is also so important. So have like a scratch or a squeeze or give him a squeaky toy, something to communicate without his mouth. So a nonverbal form of communication and over time you build trust that he will tell you when his level of breath is uncomfortable, that he can monitor that and we don't need to own that in the moment, that we don't need to be, you know, anything but other than just mindful and paying attention to those communication skills. Another tip for face sitting is if you're facing their head, you might try facing their feet so that you have more control sort of in all fours to kind of lift your bum up and then put your bum and your vulva or your genitals down back on their face. So there's your face sitting tips for life. So one thing I wanted to let you know is that when we talk about like movement and we talk about like feeling ourselves in movement. So think about right now, if you were to, from your fingertips, really just like roll your hands in. You wanna create this like super tight fist, this super tight thumbs, you're gonna pull your arms in against your body. You're gonna tighten your forearms against your bicep. I'm squeezing my thighs together, my knees together, my toes are gripping, everything's gripping and then I'm gonna release. So the contrast in our sensation of being tight and being anticipating rejection, anticipating unsexiness, anticipating we're gonna squish someone, that contrast, when we release it or that tension, when we release it gives us a contrast of peace. It really gives us a contrast of being more present in the moments that we have access to for our sex and so do that exercise because what happens when we're in plus size bodies or we're in bodies where we feel that we have to tame them or hide them, we actually start to become numb, right? We're just like, okay, I have to live in this body. I live in this body, but I'm not gonna like it and you don't have to love your body, but accepting that your body has more to do for you than to just look nice. You looking nice is probably the least interesting thing about you and yet it's where we spend about 90% of our energy when we're thinking about, you know, what are we working on or what are we doing? Or when someone sees me, what are they gonna notice? And letting go of that is also in realizing that it has a physical benefit. It has a physical benefit of relaxing. It has a physical benefit of even noticing where we were holding tension in our bodies by trying to make them smaller. So for some of us, we hold, you know, our shoulders way up here. If you're larger busted like me, I walked around for years like this, like trying to make my breast smaller by just like holding my shoulders forward and messing up my back. Some of us, you know, I always can see plus size women when they're sitting in my classes and where it's like somehow trying to, you know, like hide our tummies by putting our forearms on it or we're crossing our legs or we're uncrossing, we're so uncomfortable in being in this body because no one has allowed us to be in this body. No one has allowed us to have fun in these bodies. So having fun in your body, the next time that you're walking and you're like, you got your headphones on or you're in the shower. If you're a shower singer, you know, when you're in there, put your sexy music on and when you're massaging your scalp, scratch that scalp, scratch it and massage it. Like all those nerve endings get delighted and start to create those connections by, oh yeah, this feels good and like moving in ways that feel sexy. What looks sexy around choreography or like dance, it has no bearing on what actually is going to release sexiness in your sexual moments and it's more about like encouraging using movement as a conduit for all the sexy feelings that are coming in. So even the next time that you're masturbating, think about gyrating your hips. So think about like undulating your body and like rocking, like even hold the vibrator and like rock your body against the vibrator if it's your hand, rock your hips up against your hand. All of those connections back to like, damn, look what my body can do can also help you during sex and so we stop worrying about I'm gonna squish him, I'm gonna kill him and we start tuning in to what sensations are actually there 'cause when you're sitting on top of your partner, there might be a sensation of heaviness. They might like that sensation of like, feeling like a weight, like feeling, you know, something that's like significant, feeling like their partner. Like it's more of you. They also might just be like thinking about how good it feels to be inside of you and so sometimes it can help to remind ourselves of that during sex by asking our partners to affirm it and so if I'm on top, I'll tell my partner, I'll be like, "Tell me how good it feels to be inside me. Tell me how good it feels that I'm on top of you." And if you're, if you feel you want to say that in a less kind of demanding way, you could also be like, "Oh babe, you feel so good, do you like how you feel?" You know, you can do it in whatever vibe that you want, but it's communication, right? It's like, I want to tune to this moment because society is trying to drag me out of it with all that toxic noise about what sex should look like or feel like.