'Laid and Confused' by Maria Yagoda: An Excerpt

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Would you be down for a stranger to assess your masturbation skills over Zoom? For writer Maria Yagoda, whose debut book Laid and Confused comes out today, it was all in the name of prioritizing pleasure.

I set my timer to ten minutes and secured my Chihuahua in the bathroom with a bowl of water and a stack of dried pig ears. To run the clock a little, I leaned against my dresser and stretched my quads, wondering if anyone's checked in on Ashlee Simpson lately. I moved toward the bed but then remembered there were Ritz Crackers in my kitchen cabinet due to expire soon. I took care of it. I returned to the bed, caked in cracker dust, and glanced at the timer: 8:34. I could no longer put off my first "homeplay" assignment from my sex coach: for ten minutes, all I had to do was touch my body and explore. There was no objective, no intended outcome, no need, even, to engage with genitals. The assignment was merely to feel sensations in my body. It sounded excruciating.

After interviewing sex coach Amy Weissfeld about masturbation, I realized I could use some professional guidance—specifically, a type of sex coaching that played to her biggest strength and my biggest weakest: self-pleasure. Amid an ongoing global pandemic, sexual partners had become rare for single recluses like myself, so my journey away from bad sex toward fulfilling, satisfying sex would be in my own hands, quite literally. Beyond the social climate, though, it occurred to me that I’d fallen into the same paradox as so many in my generation: optimizing everything in my life—from the amount of overnight oats for maximum energy to amount of boob in selfie for maximum engagement—except sexual pleasure, a vital pillar of sexual wellness. Hustle culture dictates that we grind to get what we want, to become the people we want to be. Even if we resent the premise, we mostly buy into it. When we want abs, we download a fitness app and carve out ten minutes at lunch. When we want to change careers, we grab coffee with mentors and refresh LinkedIn on the toilet. When we feel bad about sex with our girlfriend, however, we simply feel bad about sex with our girlfriend. Or we stumble through a conversation, mostly give up, and bide our time until the breakup.

To be clear: I don't believe everything should be optimized. Some of the best experiences in life are un-optimizable, and call for resisting the capitalist pressure to streamline or upgrade. I don't think, for example, that Gushers can, or should be, improved upon. Fly closer to the sun and you’ll get burned. Same goes for wandering around a random park with nowhere to be. You could research better parks, you could research better shoes, but you’ll probably just get a headache from looking at your phone.

There are moments when the commodification of sexual wellness troubles me. Any time a corporation profits off people's sexual insecurities, we should tread carefully and critically. And yet, I’ve found something else to be even more sinister: a widespread learned helplessness about sex. So many millennials I interviewed and surveyed felt miserable about their sex lives, yet had never once considered the possibility of improving it, with or without professional help. The rampant resignation to bad sex, and our ambivalence toward self-pleasure, moved me to write this book in the first place. Pleasure is worth prioritizing, in the same way (if not more than!) we prioritize work and exercise and food and synthetic eyelashes that curl up to our eyebrows. It may not be our fault we have bad relationships with sex—society!!—but no one is coming to help us. We have to work on it ourselves, and outsource guidance as needed.

"You can't follow the tendrils of pleasure in your body unless you’re tuned in," Weissfeld told me in our first session. "Pleasure is three things: it's attention, awareness that something feels pleasant, and stimulation. In our early conditioning, we hear, ‘Don't feel that, or don't go there.’ When we talk about self-pleasure, it's [about] paying attention to the sensation in the body stimulus." Relearning tactile pleasure, then, warrants a physical practice, and lots of it. It requires deep, concentrated attention that is not always pleasant.

Weissfeld is a certified somatic sex educator based in Portland, Oregon. According to the Somatic Sex Educators Association (SSEA), somatic sex educators "teach through body experiences," which includes coaching in breath, massage, body awareness, and even erotic trance. Coaches are trained to touch their clients’ genitals and anuses "for education, healing, and pleasure," and to foster connection between body and spirit. (Since our sessions would be on Zoom, my privates had an easy out.)

To start the session, Weissfeld asked me if there was anything I needed to feel embodied and comfortable in the present moment. Did I need to change the way I was sitting, or move somewhere else? Was the temperature okay? Did I need a glass of water or a bite of something? Was I hungry, thirsty, cold, uncomfortable? This line of questioning jarred me. I don't ask myself these questions, nor does anyone else, at least not since my Italian grandmother was alive. I fidgeted in my seat, genuinely unsure. I felt numb and sensation-free. Was I uncomfortable? What is uncomfortable . . . Was I hungry? What is hunger . . . I could eat, that much I knew. That much I always knew. I strained to locate hunger in my body but couldn't find it, so no, I wasn't hungry. But I felt a little cold! I think? That tingling on my feet was cold, yes? I counted this as progress—the ability to recognize I was cold. The bar was low. I let my mind run wild with the implications this had on my sex life, which obviously was the point of the exercise: How many times during sex have I not felt right in my body, but ignored the messages my body was giving me? I was on the precipice of spiraling.

"I’m cold," I said, and grabbed a blanket to wrap around my shoulders. I couldn't tell if I was thirsty, so I said I was fine otherwise; I didn't want to waste her time, even though I was paying her and she was begging me to take the time I needed to decide if I was thirsty. Weissfeld has just three rules in her sessions, which, like everything else under the sun, apply to sex: 1. Take care of yourself. 2. Listen to your body. 3. Don't endure.

Don't endure, don't endure, don't endure. Yet again I had been viciously attacked! Enduring is my way of life. It's my heritage, my religion, my lifestyle, my sexual ethos: if something doesn't feel quite right, I wait it out, because that's easier. He's going down on me and I say faster and he goes faster but then he loses the clit and the wave of pleasure dissipates. Well, I’ve already said my one thing, better now to endure; enduring costs me nothing, or at least costs my partner nothing. What does it cost me?

We began with breath work. She referred to breath as my "inner lover" and invited me to imagine it as such. "It's carrying this nourishing oxygen to all these different parts of your body. It's like giving you a little massage from the inside. It's a nourishing touch."

Throughout the session, sex was rarely mentioned. We played a game called "Yes, No, Maybe." Weissfeld asked if she could do certain activities to and with me—give me a massage, go for a hike, borrow $500—and the "container of safety" was that none of these things would happen. For the first round, I had to say yes to everything. The second round, I had to say no to everything. The third round, I had to give my real answer. Before we began, she asked me to gently cup my hand on my vulva, and to place the other hand on my throat or heart. Before and after each question, I was to pause and tap into how my body felt. If I had to say "yes" to something that I wanted to say "no" to ("a hug"), I had to notice what that felt like in my body. If I had to say "no" to something I wanted to say "yes" to ("free money"), I had to notice what that felt like in my body. The idea was to practice interpreting messages from the body, not the head, and notice what it feels like in your body when you say what you want—and how uncomfortable it feels when you don't.

My homework was to enjoy something for fifteen minutes every day. It could be a hot shower or a walk around the block; I just had to notice the sensations with all five senses. I was grateful she backed off self-touch for the time being; that felt too advanced.

"That skill of tuning in to the sensation of the body is known as ‘interoception,’" she said. "What has happened to many of us very early in life is that we might say something to a caregiver that reflects a sensation that we feel, like, ‘Oh, I feel a tightness in my tummy. I don't want to go to school today.’ Right? And somebody along the way says, ‘Oh, you’re fine, honey. You’re just nervous.’ When that happens often enough, we learn to translate the sensations that we’re feeling in our body to emotions and beliefs and feelings. And we never really reverse-translate. We never go back to, ‘What does it feel like in my body when I feel happy? What does it feel like in my body when I feel anxious?’"

This translation work—surprise—shapes the sex we have. "One of the biggest keys to having good sex," she said, "is the ability to feel that sensation in the body, and to learn how to both expand pleasure, but also follow the pleasure that's there, regardless of how big or small it is."

In 1973, Helen Singer Kaplan opened the country's first sex therapy clinic, drawing from her experience in psychiatry. She approached "sexual desire disorders" as fundamentally emotional ones that required unpacking psychological experiences like trauma, shame, and insecurity. Kaplan helped usher in a new era of Americans’ sexual frankness, which regretfully coincided with increasing sex anxiety. Should I be having more sex? Should I be more sexually attracted to my husband? Should my dick be harder and last longer? The more sex infiltrated the public discourse by way of popular media, the more expectations escalated that mind-blowing, multi-orgasmic sex was attainable if you took the correct steps; at least that's what magazines and TV shows suggested. Perfectly timed to play off these fears, Viagra hit the market in 1998, earning Pfizer billions of dollars and transforming the conversation around sex forever: sex was now fully medicalized.

And, of course, the social conditions that led to the sexual wellness industry—pharmaceutical deregulation, increasing scientific and popular attention to sex, demographic shifts—didn't impact only men. Women bore the burden to enjoy sex, and to enjoy their partner's medically sustained boner, or to work on themselves until they did. The medicalization of low desire and low arousal pathologizes disinterest in sex—a disinterest that is often quite reasonable. Self-help culture, mixed with this cultural imperative to have a very specific kind of sex, has increasingly put pressure on women to achieve orgasm by doing deep solo work to uncover their deepest desires, and if they can't, "they are also supposed to keep their partners in a state of blissful ignorance (literally) about their truncated or absent pleasure."1

This pressure to love sex can be enormously overwhelming, and manipulated for profit. This is also true: many people benefit from sex therapy. CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) has been shown to be effective in treating a wide range of sexual issues, including vaginismus, anorgasmia, and erectile dysfunction. More specifically, mindfulness-based interventions are effective in improving sexual satisfaction among women. Even internet-conducted cognitive behavioral and mindfulness treatments can help women experiencing sexual distress.Since I already had a therapist (bombshell!), I decided to see a sex coach, both to learn more about the practice and to better understand my sexual dissatisfaction.

At the beginning of our third session, Weissfeld instructed me to put a pillow on my lap, rest my forearms on top of it, and caress it.

I grabbed my waffle pillow, which was crusted in oatmeal, and did as she said. She asked me to lean back into the couch. She did the same. I wanted to know everything about her. I opted to speculate about her life to avoid feeling what it was like to caress a pillow, which was the exercise.

We were to alternate saying things we noticed, "popcorn style." I said I noticed the pillow was soft. She said she noticed her feet on the floor. I said I noticed that the temperature in the room was fine. She noticed her hands were dry. I noticed my dog farted. As we continued, the observations got more specific, the language more precise. I noticed a sort of tingling heat building on my hands as I rubbed it across my pillow. She lifted her pillow to rub the edge in between her fingers. I tried that, too, and felt a soft coolness; I felt different temperatures as the pillow came into contact with different parts of my hand. Just five minutes earlier, my only note had been that the pillow was soft.

Our next exercise was the raisin game. I didn't have raisins. "Oranges are okay," she said. "Or even dark chocolate." I rummaged around my kitchen, laptop in one hand and opening drawers with the other, feeling around all manner of trash in hopes of catching something edible. "Would a loose Peep work?" A loose Peep would not be ideal, she said, but it could work. I rummaged around my kitchen some more and found a slowly rotting apple that still had an edible side. I cut off a slice and returned to the couch.

First, she had me hold it in my hand and say everything I noticed. The slice felt light. It felt smooth. After a minute, she had me touch it; I noticed the softness of the flesh and firm silkiness of the skin. I rubbed my fingers up and down it, alternating the pressure, and then pressed it in between my fingers; the sensation was pleasing. It felt like I was playing on the outskirts of pleasure, somehow, as I molested this apple slice on a video call. It felt good.

The exercise continued with a sight portion (one minute), a smell portion (one minute), and then the most challenging portion: taste, which required I put the slice in my mouth without chewing or swallowing. I agreed and popped it in, but inadvertently began sinking my teeth into the juicy flesh. "Sorry," I said. She forgave me, but I was still tasked with describing the taste. The crunch was louder in my ear, almost like a sound effect. My mouth moistened around the multiplying pieces of flesh as the somewhat grassy, tart, and sweet flecks of juice spread across my tongue. Clearly, all of this was meant to happen on my vulva, if I simply tuned in. My senses were so heightened I’d be very lucky if it did.

The dopamine hits we get from social media are addictive, and the main reason I couldn't complete my next homework assignment, which was to "enjoy something for fifteen minutes."

When I reported this in our session, Weissfeld said I could cut the time down to five minutes. That was my homework, and to continue practicing touch—with any object, not just a pillow. It could be a pen, remote control, or tampon applicator—didn't matter.

The shift didn't happen right away, or dramatically, but over the week I found myself getting more specific about physical sensations. It didn't just feel like "my feet are on the ground." If I truly paid attention, I could notice my soles receiving soft, even pressure pushing upward from the earth. I noticed how temperature and air felt on my skin; how my skin felt on my laptop, typing this. There were little vibrations everywhere. "It's a practice," Weissfeld had told me—feeling things.

Practicing pleasure is a lifelong endeavor, and I resent that to my core. When I committed to the daily awareness practices that Weissfeld assigned me, the payoff was not immediate, but deeply informative. Walking to the Dunkin’ Donuts because they had a deal on their gummy little egg wraps, I noticed my arms swaying in the breeze, the cool, dry air grazing them. When I acquired the wraps, I sunk my teeth into the chewy, salty simulacrum of a breakfast taco, and let the gloopy American cheese coat the top of my mouth. In that moment, I could feel and taste everything, and I loved my life. I loved all life, past and present.

A few days later, while having sex with a recurring character, there were moments of gummy little egg wrap bliss. There were moments that felt good all over my body. I noticed these sensations, and tried to sink into them, rather than allow myself to get pulled by any number of distractions: My Chihuahua Bucatina licking my toes, my upstairs neighbor's comically loud electric guitar riff, thoughts of climate disaster. But I stayed the course. I remained committed to feeling the subtle waves of pleasure this man's penis provided. After he orgasmed (I hadn't come close), he rolled over onto my arm and removed the condom. I considered asking him if he would go down on me. I wasn't scared to ask—progress—but after taking a few breaths to check in with myself, I realized I didn't want him to get me off. I wanted him to get off me; my arm was asleep. I slinked out from under him and went to the bathroom. When I came back, he was already getting dressed. He said he had work early the next morning. I threw on a towel, walked him out, and rushed back to my apartment, skipping every other step. I lubed up my favorite vibrator and lay down on my bed, now gloriously vacant.

I loved my life. I loved all life, past and present.

1. Katherine Rowland, The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution (Seal Press, 2020)

Maria Yagoda is a Brooklyn-based editor and writer covering sex, food, and culture. Her first book, Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop, comes out May 30.

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