The Good and The Smelly transcript

[COLD OPEN/INTRO]

How do I please my woman with a small penis?

Do you have any tips for stimulating her innie belly button?

Why can’t I find a partner who’s comfortable with their own scent? 

From KCRW, this is "How's Your Sex Life?" I'm Myisha Battle. 

Myisha Battle: How is your sex life? You can always submit a question to sex life at kcrw dot org. The theme of this week's episode is bodies. And you wanna know what? We got a few listener questions that were responses to our kink episode. So that means we're gonna dig into kink and bodies and bodies and kink and all the ways that they intertwine and I am very excited to get into it. This first question is actually something that we got through social media. So I'm gonna go ahead and read this one. 

Question #1: How do I please my woman with a small penis? 

Myisha Battle: So we live in a culture that says size matters, and there's a lot of media out there that impresses upon us all that large penises are the only way to deliver pleasure to a partner. And here's what I have to say about that. Number one, I work with a lot of women who find penetrative sex very painful, or who don't find that it is the way that they experience orgasm. So that is something that I hope provides some relief for you as the question asker you know, penetrative sex isn't the end all be all to sex. In fact, there are plenty of people who have non penetrative sex out there, and they have very full, very exciting sex lives. And this is something that I think we as a culture don't talk that much about. But if you're having sex with women, who maybe penetration is not the way they experience orgasm. Oral sex is great. If they're not somebody who loves oral sex, then manual stimulation is great, and a fantastic way to share intimacy with your partner, and to give them an experience and a sensation that's going to take them to orgasmic territory. You know, when it comes to your small penis, there can be something liberating about like, not really worrying that much about it, and knowing that you have a skill set that’s gonna provide pleasure for your partner. You know, it's also worth noting, like what gives you pleasure, because if we're taking penetrative sex off the table for you, in most circumstances, then like, what are some activities that would provide you with pleasure as well. So, you know, something that you can lead with with a partner is like, hey, like, we don't need to focus on penetrative sex, I'm here to, you know, provide you with any number of experiences that you want from me at this point. And also, like, if we're not going to engage in penetrative sex, like, I would really appreciate a hand job, I would really appreciate oral sex. Whatever it is that makes your body feel good too. So I don't want to leave you out of the equation. I first just wanted to acknowledge that gaining a skill set, that you know you feel really comfortable with, when it comes to oral sex and manual stimulation is probably the best way to boost your confidence in this area. A fantastic book about oral sex for men who have sex with women is called "She Comes First" and it's by Ian Kerner. That's one recommendation where you can, you know, read about techniques and learn about the importance of oral sex in a partnership with women. I mean, if you are great at giving head it's almost like you can skip penetrative sex and like not even miss it. Honestly, like I've talked to so many women who expressed that if that's just what they had, they would be completely satisfied. So I also want you to hear that and know that too. You may have a partner who is like, I'm all about penetration. I need it, I want it, I really, you know, need a partner to penetrate me and that could be something that you, you know, can do with the use of a toy. There are also penis extenders, which is you know, it's a form of a toy. It's a sexual device, I guess you could say and so it's something that you would put on your penis, and so you would be able to penetrate your partner with something larger than what you have. This can be helpful for people who want to increase length as well as girth. So, you know, don't know how you're kind of defining small for yourself, but there are options out there. So I encourage you to explore them, learn, get that confidence up, provide, you know, some context for your partner about what you want to engage in if penetrative sex is not on the table for you. And then also, you know, start playing around with toys. I think that's a fantastic way to augment your sexual experience with your partner. Good luck. 

Myisha Battle: I want to get into our next question, which is something that I've actually gotten questions about before, but I'm sure that you would be surprised by that when you hear this question asker.

Question #2: My girlfriend is obsessed with my outie belly button. She has a fetish for the shape and likes to lick it and stimulate it with her mouth a lot. I really want to go on the journey of this belly button kink to see if I like it, but my stomach area and belly button are very sensitive. How can I start? And do you have any tips for stimulating her innie belly button?

Myisha Battle: Belly button play. Let's get into it. So I think the biggest thing to think about is if you want to engage with this with them, what's your tolerance level for this before it becomes uncomfortable for you? So you may notice that, you know, they could go on and on and on and on. But do you have a time limit where something kind of shifts for you where it stops being fun and playful and sexy, and turns into something that is uncomfortable, even painful for you because you said, you know, your stomach is very a sensitive area for you. So think about that, and maybe offer that as a guideline or a parameter for your partner. 'I love that you love my belly button,' you know is something that you could say 'I love that you love it, but when you stimulate it, sometimes I can get overstimulated, and it doesn't feel so good for me anymore. I've noticed that about after five minutes of that type of stimulation, it becomes a little painful, even for me.' So just communicating that with them. You're not taking it off the table, but you are putting a boundary around how much you want to engage with it. Your partner may come back and say 'oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. You know, I don't want to cause you any pain. I just really love your outtie'. Or they may say like, 'well, that's kind of the thing for me, and if I don't get to do that for 20 minutes, it's not going to take me to the place that I want to go.' But at least you will have started a conversation a dialogue about you know how this fetish functions in the relationship. In terms of stimulating their innie belly button. First I would ask them if that's something that they want, because people who have fetishes it's usually an external thing. It's usually something that they like to do to a person or experience a person doing to them, it looks like for it's like one or the other, right? So for instance, if somebody has a foot fetish, it's not like they're like constantly looking at their own feet, right? They're looking at external pictures of a foot, they're, you know, they're engaging with other people's feet, they want to touch other people's feet, they want other people feet on them perhaps. So it's not necessarily something where you need to stimulate them in return for the stimulation, they're probably getting a lot from the practice of stimulating you. So again, it can be part of that conversation where you share with them what it is that you think is your boundary around the stimulation that they're giving you. And you also ask them, 'Hey, by the way, is this something that you'd like in return?' And they may say yes, they may say no. My hunch is that they'll probably say, 'No, I'm good,' and you won't need to worry about that. 

Myisha Battle: We're gonna take a little break, but when we get back, we're gonna have a follow up question to our kink episode. 

[BREAK] 

Myisha Battle: And we're back. We got a lot of responses from my episode with Justin Hall, and if you haven't listened to it already, please do. But we really got into some fun territory when it came to kink. In particular, I think people were struck by my question of whether or not smelling someone's armpits and genitals was kinky or not kinky. Justin referred to it as a San Francisco handshake, but I know some of you may not agree. And others have questions about smelling their partners, you know, and want to know like, what's what's appropriate?

Question #3: Hi Myisha - I just got introduced to your podcast and I'm currently listening to the episode on kink. You asked a question about body smell. I'm currently in a non monogamous relationship and I struggle to find a woman who is comfortable with her natural scent. For me, that's the quintessential turn on. Can you please talk more about pheromones?

Myisha Battle: Yes, this is an excellent question. So pheromones are actually kind of debated. In other animals, there are chemical compounds that have been found to produce reactions in other animals, meaning like, I have a secretion of some kind, and it communicates something to another member of my, my group, right? In humans, the research is still kind of murky about like, do we actually have pheromones or not. But I think anecdotally, the evidence is there, that there's something about how we connect to other human beings through our sense of smell. And if you think about it, like, if you think about somebody who you were really, really close to, and you sit for a moment and kind of try to conjure their smell, it's remarkable that we have a such a strong link between memory and scent, and you might even be begin to smell like what that person's sweater smelled like, or their hair, their hair product, or whatever, like, we really do get a lot of information about other human beings through our sense of smell. So whether or not pheromones are real, and we did use that term, in the last episode, it's it's kind of a short shortcut way of describing what happens when we're attracted to someone scent, right. So that's what I mean. What I think is important here is that you have a desire, and you're coming up against some cultural resistance to going au natural. I can speak from personal experience that as a woman, there is this huge emphasis on minimizing my funk, you know. This is coming from outside, you know, sources, I personally, I'm pretty comfortable with my scent. I'm not an everyday showerer, nobody has complained. And I'm very familiar with like, the cycle of smells that I have. I know, for instance, my nervous sweat versus my like, non nervous sweat. I am somebody who's very sensitive to these things. I'm also very sensitive to smell. So if I did have a funk, I would be very embarrassed by it, but anyway, what I'm trying to say is that like most of us have internalized some deep shame about the way that we smell. And I think this is true for women in particular, who you know, get made fun of for being fishy when it comes to like vaginal, you know, vaginal scent. So it's really, I think, no shock that you're coming up against these these notions or ideas of cleanliness and being pure and not embracing a natural scent. What does that mean? I mean, number one, you probably aren't dating in the Bay Area, because I would think that you'd find plenty of women who go deodorant free or use very little to minimal deodorant if you are in the Bay Area, not to generalize, but I just think we're just like a lot more closer to nature up there. But I think that it's worth maybe putting out there, since you are a non monogamous dater, that you're looking for someone who, you know, is maybe  au natural, and there's, there's communities for you for sure. I mean, Justin, is part of a you know, a community where maybe that's a little bit more normalized, but I think even as somebody who dates women, you know, you could find people who are like yeah, I don't I don't wear deodorant I'm I'm really comfortable with my natural scent. I again, like know, my natural rhythms of scent, and I embrace them all. So yeah, I mean, the thing I just want to impress upon you is like it's it's not coming directly from the women that you're dating. This is something that's kind of imposed from larger structures that we have to be clean, we have to smell pretty at all times, and it's unfortunate because I do think there's, again, so much information that we get from people's natural scent.

Myisha Battle: As I mentioned, this episode was chock full of body quandaries, right? I'm too small, my partner has this fetish, and I want to engage with it, like, how do I do this? And I'm trying to find partners who are in alignment with like, how I want their bodies to smell. Yeah, this is this is all very human, and I work with people a lot who struggle with some aspect of their body. In my sex coaching practice, a lot of what we talk about is, is, you know, these these larger structures that make it difficult to accept who we are. And, you know, I think it's worth kind of talking about that here where, you know, when we think about what is a desirable body, who is considered sexy and attractive, we tend to conjure up these images and archetypes that aren't us, right? It's always somebody else. It's always somebody else's body, somebody who's more muscular or thinner, or more fair skinned, or has a certain type of face, and I just think that we owe it to ourselves to start imagining that image, as ourselves. We can be that vision of what is sexy, the things that we are drawn towards, our desires. Those are not things that need to be shamed. They're things to be embraced. It's information about your sexuality that gives you your uniqueness. It gives you nuance, it gives you this ability to connect with other people in very specific ways. So, you know, they say compare and despair, and I do believe that to my core, when you're constantly comparing what you have, or what your experience is to someone else's, you're going to fall short. It's, it's inevitable, and it is human to do that to sort of like look around us and compare. But when it comes to sex, I think it's so much more effective, and so much more pleasurable to, you know, think more about what we have, what we have to give, what we want to receive. We also have these beautiful bodies, whether they are abled, or we have disabilities that we're navigating, we still have a lot of access to our senses that help us connect with other people. And we should be using those to the fullest capacity of what we have every single day. That's, that's my opinion. So I hope it's helpful. I hope that we can get to a place where we embrace the good, I don't even want to say the bad, but maybe the smelly aspects of sex that can help us find connection.

[CREDITS] 

Myisha Battle: "How's Your Sex Life?" is a KCRW original podcast. Our producer is Andrea Bautista. Our executive producer is Gina Delvac. Our engineer is Nick Lampone. Our music was created by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Special thanks to John Meek, Nathalie Hill, Connie Alvarez, Meggan Ellingboe, Arnie Seipel and Jennifer Ferro. And last but not least, a huge thanks to our voice actors, and I'm gonna let them say goodbye in their own voices today.

Marque Green: This is Marque Greene. Follow the show and share with a friend!