Moment 79 - The Surprising Truth About Sex: Africa Brooke

00:03one of the things i've heard you talk about a lot is your your journey and your evolving relationship with sex and sexuality and how that changed from when you were very young through the period when you were drinking a lot um till today can you talk to me about that evolution and what you've learned about those topics that might benefit me yes absolutely so I'm going to sort of keep referring to my sobriety in that period of my life because it was so transformative and it revealed so much to me so much that I could have never imagined at the time so something that also happened when I got sober I think this was about a year into my sobriety I realized just how much sexual shame I was holding so much of it and I initially sort of wanted to fix it wanted to do something about it what are some surface level things that I can do what can I read what can I sort of dive into how can I deal with it from where I am now as a 25 year old but I quickly realized that I actually had to trace it back to see where it even comes from. And I realized just like so many things, it did come from my childhood. Being raised in a Christian home, I learned, again, not directly, more so indirectly, that being a sexual being was not something that was off God. It was not something that was supposed

01:38to be a part of who I am. Pleasure was never discussed. Sex was never discussed. Even intimacy in general I never saw my parents hold hands I never saw my parents hold hands I never saw them kiss I never saw them hug I never saw any sort of affection but I knew that they loved each other I knew that they cared about each other but affection and intimacy I just never saw that not for a moment did you see that growing up um it's a really interesting one because i'd say i'd say yes and no so i say yes because below the age of maybe eight maybe i could got memories of that and then above the age of 10 um no and i call my parents by their first names and i've really struggled with with intimacy because of the exact same reasons like right even the word best friend made me cringe until the age still kind of makes me cringe now like when people would say it or call me their best friend this is part of me like even boyfriend would make me like prison me too that's why when i found the word partner i was like okay that feels that feels much better we stand next to each other we don't oh my goodness so when i sort of wanted to really understand where a lot of the sexual shame was stemming from or just more so even outside of sex, intimacy, intimacy, feeling very

03:09disconnected to other people when it came to intimacy, but also from myself. I realized that I could only be expressive as a sexual being if I was drunk or if I was high, if I was in that place where, of course, my inhibitions are low, but I had no insecurities. I didn't have to feel like I'm doing something wrong. I didn't have to feel like my pleasure was wrong. But then when I got sober, all of those things came to the surface. And then I had to look that in the eye. So that also became something that I started sharing over time as well as sort of sharing my journey with sobriety. I then started sharing the things that were revealed as a byproduct of me getting sober and sexual shame was a huge one, was a big part of that. My relationship with sex has evolved a lot yeah over over time I think it was early in my early years influenced by porn yes so many people so me too that's the way I went into the game I just went in trying to be those those male porn stars right and I think over time and I think there's this wider issue in our society specifically I've got to be honest with men yes um what they think that what they think sex is in terms of this kind of very aggressive often dominating transactional um

04:29encounter yeah and then there's again i'm just i'm just talking freely i don't give a fuck what i do please do but i'm seeing a lot in my in my close friends they're all in relate they're often in relationships not all of them where they're having problems with their sexual relationship with their partner they're basically saying things to me and i'd say this is crazy i'd say 75 to 80 percent of my male friends are saying my partner doesn't want to have sex she doesn't like having sex yeah and i was there at 1.2 my partner said that to me at 1.2 yeah and i took it on face value i thought they don't like sex what i came to learn is that wasn't true but that what what i'd learned to be sex and what i was bringing as sex this kind of aggressive you know whatever was not yes the language that they spoke right and i feel like i'm surrounded by men that need to start seeing sex as a language because then you can ask yourself well actually she's speaking spanish and i'm speaking english that's why it's not she doesn't like english she just doesn't she speaks a different language yes yes that's a lot i'm just dumping that on you no no no no that resonates so and i'm really glad that you said this because i think you're speaking something

05:45that is on so many people's minds or something that they've just never really put language to. And a big part of my awakening, if you will, and really addressing that sexual shame is because I also learned sex from porn at 10 years old, 10 years old. So by the time that I had sex for the first time when I was 14, it was very much like a porn performance to put it very simply. And I speak to so many people, men and women about this very specific thing. A lot of us learn that we should perform, that sex should be driven by orgasm and ejaculation and this sort of production, if you will, which is not actually accurate for most people when it comes to what really actually feels pleasurable, especially for women. So I started to realize when I got sober that every time that I was having sex, for example, I faked every single orgasm. It was all a perform. I didn't know much about my body because I'd learned from porn. And because the men that I was with had also learned from porn, we were just in a performance and no one's actually talking about it. Right.

06:51So in times when I was in relationships and I made myself think, I don't want to have sex. I don't want to have sex anymore. It actually was not that I didn't want to have this type of pornified sex. that's what I actually meant. So what you just said is really important. And I realized that's when I found tantric sex, actually. Yeah, that's when I found tantric sex around 2018. Because I realized that I had always felt like sex was being done to me.

07:20Yes. That I was not a part of it. And that is how most women feel. I felt like I needed to apologize. Really? On behalf of men. Yeah, because that's what I came to learn. Yeah. was that the reason why the person I was with had turned around to me and said, I don't like having sex. And when we got talking about it, after I acted like, I mean, let me be clear. The first time she said that, I did not understand. My little Neanderthal monkey brain went, like I was emasculated by it.

07:52It made me feel, is this something that I was, I didn't do right. Ego steps in, right? Of course. Ended up breaking up with this person, got back with this person a year later. And when I was maybe a bit more mature, I apologized and I said, I want to have a conversation. And I also said to her that I'm going to be here regardless of whether we have sex or not. And then she had a safe enough space to start talking to me about it. And what I discovered is she'd been with, she'd had three previous boyfriends over the course of seven years.

08:19her view of sex was this person comes and takes from you treats you like this object and she was with him for five years treats you like an object takes what they want from you and then he was actually going and cheating on her as well right so not only was he taking he was then like hurting her and that cycle just repeated her relationship with what sex is was really really toxic she didn't like that yes she didn't want that anymore yes and that's what she and me probably referred to has this word sex so it was kind of like learning a new language of sex and what it actually is that she went from the place of like i don't have sex anymore to absolutely loving to have sex yeah i didn't think it was possible i thought if they don't like sex dump them yeah you know i'm gonna go find someone that will right that will let me take yes and you know what you you've articulated that so beautifully in terms of sex being a language and it's going to look different for every single person because something that I realized is that I could tell when I was with a man sexually, I could tell if they were sort of, if it was like a script almost, like a play by play, like this is exactly the method. We do this, we do that, switch into this, switch into that.

09:31It wasn't sort of flowing and very intuitive as to what's actually needed in that moment, which reminded me of porn. And I would also realize actually, and this is something that I've spoken about so much because I ended up starting a sexual wellness company called Cherry Revolution over time. And I realized that even some of the positions I would get in were very much like porn because certain positions in porn are like that because the camera is there, not because it's comfortable, because that's the shot for the viewer to be able to see it.

10:04So when I started to see that I'm starting to replicate this in my most intimate private moments, but we're both doing it. I made myself believe that I didn't enjoy sex. So then drinking and drugs and everything that came with it, I felt like those were the moments that I could be fully expressive without needing to perform, which is very interesting because you would think it would be the opposite, that I would then perform more. But I felt as if I could actually speak my mind. If I didn't enjoy something, can we try this? Can I do this instead? Or I just want to give or I just want to receive? Can we be slower? And then when I was sober, I felt like I couldn't say those things. Because if I say to you as my partner, I might be emasculating you, I might be embarrassing you, you might think something is wrong. So I would just perform and you're performing as well. And then it just causes a huge disconnect. So tantric sex was the first thing that I came across that made me realize and really articulated that sex is actually not a specific destination did you know that you can actually enjoy sex without a ejaculation that you can have a full body orgasm that you can be very slow that foreplay can be the main thing

11:17that you do that you can experience orgasm without penetration just so many different ways of articulating that experience of sex and it's just that an experience and that changed so much for me it's such a um sort of a narrative violation for so many people who've spent their whole life watching porn and then recreating it this idea that you can have an orgasm from touch that you can use energy to to to cause someone yeah orgasmic pleasure and yeah um yeah i just that's it's a really important topic that i think people need to talk about a lot more and i think just just saying to someone that's listening to this that might be in a relationship where they're not they're in a sexless relationship yes just proposing the idea that what if you both just speak there's just say there was 10 languages what if you're just speaking the wrong language right you know what i mean and what approach would you then take you'd probably try and learn the language yes yes and also communicate to them what language you speak and see and see how you can be bilingual i guess yeah you know what it it reminds me of um are you familiar with love languages and that that whole thing yes i realized that a lot of people

12:29expect someone to give in the way that they like to receive you know so no one really says okay how do you like to receive love how do you like to give love and the moment that i started asking those questions even though i believe me i fucking cringed in the beginning i'm like really am I gonna ask you but you get used to it yeah and if they run off good yeah it's Stephen it's been a game changer to just ask the person that I'm dating or my current partner to be like how do you like to be loved how do you like to receive love and how do you like to give it um because just those simple questions can change so much and then you can use the same with sex what do you like and what do you not like what have you changed your mind about what do you like to do now and again, or maybe not so much sometimes? How much time do you need? How does your arousal actually work? And I know that some people might not know how to answer these questions for themselves. So it's actually very good to start asking yourself those questions before speaking about it with someone else. These are questions that you can just start to ask yourself before introducing them to someone else, but they can change so much because I think we

13:38get into relationships and make so many assumptions based on our individual experiences and our worldview and we expect the person we're with to reflect the exact same thing back to us but we don't we don't ask questions it's it comes back in many respects what we were talking about earlier this kind of binary approach to life they either fit or they don't there's no space for conversation and nuance and and and I guess um mutual development together like towards the same this idea that you have to actually build and develop a relationship towards a place of um satisfaction as opposed to finding your perfect soulmate or perfect fit right I'm gonna find someone that likes to have sex like I do that likes to talk like I do that likes the things I do as opposed to this kind of molding towards being more cohesive together I love that term mutual development and it makes me think actually that this is a term that can apply even outside maybe even especially outside of romantic relationships this idea that people don't have to be perfect that they don't have to exist in the way that i want the world to be or in how i expect them to be maybe we can actually mutually develop a different perspective together because we're two different

14:53beings coming together because my most successful relationship my current relationship we are completely different really we don't believe the same things we don't believe the same we don't have the same fundamental beliefs yeah the reason why it works is because of one very simple thing communication a very healthy high respect communication where everything isn't an attempt to win it's an attempt to like genuinely understand to move forward yeah and i think you can have two people that are that want very very different things whether it's in sex or in business or their beliefs about religion and spirituality be bound together as long as they have respectful communication you know what i mean and i guess empathy is part of respectful communication yeah