From our vantage point here in the first quarter of the 21st century, I think most of us can agree that the dating, sex, and relationship landscape can be pretty bleak.

While sex ought to be one among many delightful ways we can connect with each other and experience intimacy and joy, it’s clear that various social forces benefit much more when we remain disconnected and isolated.

So we find ourselves in cultures and societies that cloak sexuality in taboo and that churn out reams of terrible advice and worthless mindsets that keep us stuck missing each other like boats in the night.

There is a lot of shapeless frustration out there. Maybe you feel it, too. Like a seething anger lacking an outlet, maybe you don’t even know what exactly you are angry about, but you feel deep in your bones that you’re being cheated.

Here’s the truth: you are being cheated. 

You have been set up to fail by a number of intersecting power hierarchies that benefit the more isolated and afraid you become. You feel frustrated and angry because, in your deepest, primal knowing, you understand that connection is what we are meant for. That connection is what YOU are meant for.

Indeed, there wouldn’t be so much effort expended to keep us separated and antagonistic if that weren’t the case.

As I mentioned way back in episode 1, one of the most potent ways you as an individual can change the world for the better is to become a living example of a better way to relate and collaborate in the service of pleasure. 

Most people in your local dating pool never learned how to create satisfying intimacy. A lot of people, including those who are in long term relationships, are deeply unsatisfied with their experiences of sex. So many people don’t experience pleasure - sensual, erotic, sexual, or otherwise.

So let’s talk about what you need to know, be, and do in order to create more connections, experience more pleasure, and make the world suck less by being an uncommonly excellent lover. How do you actually do this in practice, in the world?

Over the years, I developed a framework to transform and change the experience of dating, sex, and relationships that I use with my clients and in everything I create - every course, workshop, and even every podcast episode! 

At its core, this framework brings together hedonism - the pursuit of pleasure - with dignity - the recognition of the inherent worthiness of every individual. A worthiness that doesn’t need to be earned, by the way.

Remember, fascism benefits when you are left wanting, feeling like you’re not enough, feeling like there’s something more you have to do and then you’ll finally be deserving - of love, sex, or pleasure.

You are worthy right now. You are deserving right now. You matter. As you are.

And if you are worthy, deserving, and matter, that means everyone else does, too. Once you see this, you can’t unsee it. Worthiness radically changes everything about dating, sex, and relationships.

Dignity is what allows for an ethical hedonism.

Given that dignity and hedonism are the secret sauce behind the best relationships and sexual experiences, I call this the Dignified Hedonist framework.

Dignified Hedonism has 3 pillars. 

A Dignified Hedonist is Desire-Led, Sex-Forward, and Pleasure-Focused. 

Desire-Led means allowing desire to act as your compass and your guide as you navigate dating, sex, and relationships, as well as life at large. Being Desire-Led comes first because desire is the genesis of pleasure. Desire is the foundation upon which all of the other skills required to become an extraordinary lover are built. 

Desire is vital because desire is truth. Desire is honest. And because desire is truth, desire is your liberator. When you are led by desire, desire will inevitably lead you toward freedom.

Desire is powerfully attractive because expressing desire takes courage. Sharing desire is vulnerable, which we talked about back in episode 4, about how fascism benefits when you stay hidden. Desire is what becomes visible when you allow yourself to be seen.

Sex-Forward means artfully taking a stand for sex being a priority in your relationships. There’s a pervasive idea in relationship discourse that “sex isn’t that important.”False. 

If sex is important to you, it deserves to be a priority in your relationships. If sex is important to you, you need to create relationships with others who also see sex as a priority. The only way to do that is to bring sex forward and allow sexuality to take up space and be visible, rather than something hidden that you will reveal at some unspecified point in the future.

Pleasure-Focused means that pleasure is the goal you co-conspire toward with your partner or partners. Becoming Pleasure-Focused is a seismic shift to experiencing intimacy and sex as ends in themselves, rather than means to other ends. Being Pleasure-Focused is also about straight up pleasure skills development, which is a delicious journey that never has to end for as long as you have breath in your body.

Becoming Desire-Led, Sex-Forward, and Pleasure-Focused winds up resolving 99% of the concerns clients have brought to me over the years. 

Dignified Hedonism provides answers to why things have played out in certain ways and offers a pathway forward towards an authentic, honest, confident, and relaxed experience of sexuality. 

If you’re tired of playing the rigged game presented to you by traditional approaches to dating, sex, and relationships, Dignified Hedonism is an alternative that actually works.

What does it mean, to say an approach to dating, sex, and relationships works?

Often, when I first meet with someone who is thinking about becoming my client, they are yearning to experience a lot of the same sorts of things.

Generally, they want to:

• To feel confident
• To experience honesty in relationships
• To experience pleasure
• To be able to just relax
• For it all to just, somehow, be easy and joyful

By applying the mindset and skills-work contained within the Dignified Hedonist framework, my clients are finally able to have these experiences. It has been an immense pleasure to bear witness to these transformations over and over again.

When you become Desire-Led and Sex-Forward, that is the birthplace of sexual confidence. Always remember that confidence is a lagging indicator - it follows action taking rather than preceding it. Sexual confidence comes when you learn to follow your true desires, rather than what you think you “should” want, in a way that brings sexuality to the foreground in your relationships. 

Relationships that are formed when you are Desire-Led and Sex-Forward are the honest relationships you have been craving because, maybe for the first time ever, you are able to show up fully as yourself, in a way that not only includes but celebrates your sexuality.

When you become Sex-Forward and Pleasure-Focused, you open yourself up to experiencing pleasure and orgasms on a level of quality, and sometimes quanitity, that you didn’t know, or didn’t dare dream, was possible.

Finally, when you become Desire-Led and Pleasure-Focused, you remove, once and for all, the crushing weight and pressure of expectation from your sexual relationships, and in its place you discover the ease and joy that you knew deep down was possible. You come to your sexual experiences motivated by desire and seeking nothing more than to explore and discover pleasure with your partners. 

Within this dynamic and interconnected set of processes and practices, you undergo a radical transformation of your values, attitudes, and beliefs related to sexuality - your own and that of others - as well as your embodied practices within all of your relationships - from one night stands to life long partnerships, and also relationships with friends, family, and acquaintances. 

As you work through the process of shifting and changing your values, attitudes, beliefs, and practices, your experience of dating, sex, and relationships fundamentally changes in a way that is long lasting and steady. This shift brings an end to the chaotic ups and downs that are rampant when using traditional approaches.

If you are right at the beginning of your journey, or in the early stages of your journey with Slutty Activism, I can state with confidence that, from where you are right now, if you keep going, you can’t even conceive of what is possible for you yet. 

It’s extraordinary and it has been an absolute privilege to watch so many people over the years find their way to places beyond their wildest dreams.

I want to tell you about a client I had, let’s call him Keith, who reached out to me after the end of a long term relationship. He was in his mid-40s, was settled within his career, had a circle of great friends and support, and otherwise had a lot of satisfaction within his life. Sex and pleasure was an area interest and curiosity for him and he’d started going to workshops and reading more about sexuality.

During our first session, he started to share something and then stopped himself. I got curious, and after a gentle follow up, he admitted he was really interested in experiencing a hookup, but didn’t know if that would ever be possible. Or maybe it could be possible, but it would probably take longer than the 3 months we had agreed to work together.

Using action items from the framework, we defined his desires for experiencing casual sex and practical steps he could take to increase his odds by communicating that desire outward. That included making some significant changes to his dating profiles as well as exploring how to ask for what he wanted in a way that honored the dignity of everyone involved.

By the end of that session, he was grinning, the gears turning as instead of confirming his assumption that this wouldn’t be possible for him, certainly not in a way that was ethical, I’d gone and done the opposite, and together we cracked open the door of possibility.

When we met two weeks later, he was laughing. His eyes were bright and he was beaming. He’d had not one but two hookups since we last met. Something that had been a deep desire for two decades, something that felt totally impossible for so long, suddenly became real. All it required was unlearning what he thought he knew about how sex and dating work and taking a different approach.

I often say to my clients that Dignified Hedonism starts working both faster than you’d expect and slower than you’d like. Which makes sense, given that’s what you’d anticipate when someone equipped with the newfound power of honesty collides with their years of indoctrination and the survival responses that indoctrination saddled them with.

A lot of what you do as a Desire-Led, Sex-Foward, Pleasure-Focused lover will feel counter-intuitive. You’ll wonder from time to time if it could possibly work, because it goes totally against the grain of the standard narrative. 

You might feel afraid to try or like making these changes will mean it’s going to get even harder to find anybody. There will come a time, many times actually, where it gets uncomfortable. 

Know that it’s supposed to get uncomfortable. The work of liberation is ALWAYS uncomfortable. 

The systems of power want liberation to feel like betrayal so they can keep your loyalty and labor through coercion and fear. The systems of power want oppression, or the effects of oppression, to be perceived as natural and therefore impervious to change. 

As we’ve discussed many times on this podcast, making different choices to those you have been taught in dating, sex, and relationships requires a leap of faith. It requires courage. It requires the willingness to take imperfect action.

For those of you who decide to take that leap, to whatever degree you are able, you’ll go on a journey of discovery that will challenge and excite you, in equal measure.

The mindset and skills-work embedded in Dignified Hedonism require you to reckon with the past and become aware of the messages you received throughout your life about dating, sex, and relationships.

You will need to become aware of your values, attitudes, and beliefs about sexuality and then make a conscious choice about what you want those values, attitudes, and beliefs to be.

You will learn to get in touch with your desire, maybe for the first time in your life, and to take abstract desires and make them concrete.

You will build communication skills and then ask others if they share your desires. You’ll do this imperfectly, and you’ll learn a lot along the way. 

You’ll discover your boundaries and learn how to incorporate them into your life, even if you have always been a people pleaser… ESPECIALLY if you have always been a people pleaser.

You will adopt a daily practice of caring for yourself that makes you wildly attractive and prepares your body to receive pleasure.

You’ll gain the knowledge of human pleasure anatomy and learn through theory and practice how to create tons of pleasure in the human body.

You’ll tap into your ability to experience pleasure through the senses and regularly make time to go out and seek sensual pleasure.

What is waiting for you on the other side of this journey, in addition to confidence, honesty, ease, joy, pleasure, and orgasms, are real, nourishing experiences of connection.

Connection is our collective salvation. Real, intimate connection with ourselves and others is what fascism wants to keep us from at all costs, because it is the only thing powerful enough to effectively challenge it.

You can experience that connection with someone you meet for one night only, who you never see again. 

You can experience that connection with someone who becomes a regular friend with benefits. 

You can experience that connection with someone who becomes your life partner.

Your capacity to connect, despite what you have been taught, isn’t only available after you’ve known someone for a while and have entered into a committed relationship with each other. It is always available to you - with your lovers, and also with your friends, family, acquaintances, and even strangers.

Connection is your human birthright.

Through connection, your actions as an extraordinary lover have ripple effects far beyond you. 

Others will be inspired when they witness you in connection, or feel themselves in connection with you. 

You will give them, in a gentle way that honors their autonomy, the thing they have been searching for.

The thirst for connection often results in repeated exploitation for many people, and your example breaks that cycle and offers up new possibilities.

Offering authentic connection to those you are in contact with in whatever capacity is so powerful because it is the antidote to isolation and loneliness. 

Connection makes it possible to form authentic bonds of solidarity, rather than coerced bonds of obligation.

When we are together in solidarity, fascism cannot divide us. Connection centered on dignity makes it difficult to hate, and without hate, fascism loses its grip in the hearts of people.

Through your connection with others, you become a part of our collective liberation.

Come join me?