okay so I thought we’d start with a
quick view of the history of sex in one
slide and this is it boy meets girl girl
meets boy something’s gonna happen and
the other bit about the whole history of
sex when I really want to be talking
about the recent history of sex but the
whole thing about the whole history of
sex is that fundamentally men want to
want and women want to be wanted and
that is the basis of our biology of
course sometimes men want to be wanted
and women can want to want but
fundamentally the difference between us
which is deeply rooted in our
evolutionary history and in our biology
is that men are the ones who do the
pushing but women have the power women
in the end have the capacity to say yes
or no which is very scary for men well
we know we’re on to a good thing when
the Economist has sex on its front page
it doesn’t do this very often on its
title page but they were really talking
about reproduction there’s another very
ancient magazine in London published out
of London called Spectator it’s been in
continuous publication for more than 250
years and it had this lovely bottom
title on very recently which says men
why men should watch girls girls is a
television program but it’s interesting
that both these publications are talking
in some ways about things sexual in
order to improve circulation now the
fascinating thing is that it is
circulation which creates sex and come
on to that later but here we are
typically boy and a girl men and a woman
are getting together if you think about
it in the process of giving her body to
a man and letting a man penetrate her a
woman puts her life
risk it’s not amazing she might become
pregnant and until recently across the
whole of the world and very recently in
the developed world the possibility of
death has been reduced somewhat quite
considerably but it still exists and
even if there is no death but there is
the creating of life and there is a
pregnancy that comes happily to term the
woman changes her life in all kinds of
ways in the act of making love that’s
not true for me that’s not true for men
20 seconds if they’re lucky
but in 1961 we had this remarkable
availability for the first time ever in
the history of the world of the
contraceptive pill now we could control
the beginnings of life for the first
time ever and you here are the
inheritors of that experience it is
remarkable that we can actually begin to
think about our bodies as potentially
sources of pleasure not just as
reproductive processes because if we
look at the history of understanding
about sex we can see that for hundreds
and hundreds of years before 1935
hundreds and hundreds of years
the general view about sex was that it
was for reproduction that was the
primary task of men and women as of all
animals mammals and others in the human
Kingdom in they in the zoological
kingdom so there was a reproductive view
of sex and then Hollywood by about 1935
had begun to convey through film that
something else seemed to happen there
was a thing called relationship and we
began to get a relational view of sex of
course Hollywood at that time couldn’t
show anything sexual but there was an
idea that the people wandered off into
the sunset something was going to happen
so there’s a relational view of sex but
then in 1961 we get the pill the
contraceptive pill across
the developed world begins to make it
possible for us to think about sexual
function much more in terms of
recreation so we get a reproductive than
a short-lived rectory a relational view
and then a recreational view and we’re
now the generation that is struggling
with the implications of that and he’s
opening up the conversation about what
place to sex having our lives and it’s
opened up the conversation about the
possibilities of homosexuality gay
relationships transgender relationships
things that to my parents generation
would have been inconceivable that could
have been topics of conversation
the topic of sex has widened up very
considerably but the real change happens
in recent time when we found out how it
worked in 1967 just fifty years ago half
a century ago a couple in the states
called Martin Johnson produced this
remarkable book called human sexual
response and for the first time
another borrowed tree there had been a
systematic inquiries into how does the
body work sexually medicine didn’t know
medicine was good on reproduction but
anything to do with sex for medicine was
kind of off caught that was a bit
private you were not interested in what
happened there you were only interesting
when there was conception and so
medicine physiology in general had very
little actual working knowledge and I
was a young clinical psychologist in
1961 before this book was published
working in outpatient clinics dealing
with sexual problems realizing that we
were in fact completely ignorant all we
had to go on as clinicians was our own
private experience which actually isn’t
much to go on professionally so there we
were doing our best people coming with
sexual problems and then Masters and
Johnson published and began to tell us
how the body works well this is where
circulation comes back in because the
most important thing is that
when we begin to be interested in
somebody sexually blood starts pumping
around the body now it’s very obvious
what happens in a man here is a man he’s
got this all hanging out sexual
apparatus it’s a bit like a hamburger
store with neon lights on it you can
just see it at a distance and if he gets
sexually interested blood begins to flow
it flows into the soft tissues of the
penis
here’s another diagram it flows into the
soft tissues of the penis here and in a
hydraulic fashion the penis will lift
and become erect if it’s working
properly
of course sometimes it’s not and we’re
going to come on the problems a bit
later but it’s a simple process in which
the man is effectively a delivery system
for the sperm which are being
manufactured here sent up through this
tube stored a bit here and delivered out
through here there’s some clever muscles
which control whether he’s going to
ejaculate or whether he’s going to pee
but there we are the system is
extraordinarily well designed and it
manages that quite well but it’s the
same it’s the same tube down which
everything comes well it’s not so clear
in women not so clear at all we can’t
actually see very much if a man is like
a hamburger stall a woman’s sexual
apparatus is a bit like well there’s
extraordinary exciting interesting but
slightly scary small alleyways that one
sees in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City
you’re not quite sure whether you ought
to go in there you’re not sure what’s at
the end of it when you get there I’m
partly the dilemma for that is that that
women are therefore left teaching men
how it works but what marcin johnson
discovered was the vast swathes of women
don’t really know much about how it
works only about a third of women in
lots of surveys have ever reliably
looked at their own external genitalia
and many women many women are troubled
that maybe their genital area it’s a bit
unlike other people’s most women do not
see another adult woman’s genitalia
whereas men often see other men’s
genitalia of course get very concerned
about size so you leave to all men to
find that the limp size bears almost no
relation to the erect size but they
don’t really believe that they always
think it is anyway the problem for women
and for men is how do we find out
because if we look at this in a simple
anatomical diagram we see that there’s a
fleshy area of the lips here there’s a
vaginal canal here but there’s an
extraordinary organ called the clitoris
now you may all know that we are
conceived all of us as female for the
first six or seven weeks of life we are
all female and then if there happens to
be a Y chromosome that’s been ejaculated
in the hundred million sperms you know
one ejaculation about a teaspoonful has
a hundred million sperm in it and only
one of them is going to fertilize an egg
if there’s an egg waiting to be
fertilized it’s been like the whole
population of Vietnam standing on the
end of her Kim Lake diving in at the
same time and the one that wins gets to
the far shore first that’s the prize
unless of course three or four happened
to get there at the same time and you
get quads but that’s a different matter
so how how are we going to find out well
there is a lot of knowledge around
because of masters and Johnson’s
research work they had subjects lying in
the laboratory masturbating to climax
making love they were taking the best
electrophysiological measures that were
available at the time well the very
clever things they did was to create a
small camera device in a plastic tube
which inserted into the vagina showed
for the first time what lubrication was
for lubrication in a woman beginning to
get wet is exactly the same in terms of
sexual arousal as the beginnings of a
stiffening in the man the man beginning
to feel the beginnings of an erection
the equivalent is the woman is
lubrication and the reason for both of
them is blood pumping around the body so
sexual interest begins to create blood
flow and in the man it creates the
hydraulic reaction which I’ve briefly
described in the woman it creates what’s
called a trans sudorific reaction it’s a
kind of sweating reaction across the
walls of the vagina as the tissue around
the vagina fills with the flowing blood
that is connected to sexual excitement a
number of other things happen in the
woman’s the the womb itself here the Oh
begins to lift the vaginal canal itself
begins to increase in width
these lips here become filled with blood
and open up and the clitoris becomes
very sensitive now the clitoris
anatomically starts if we all start as
female the clitoris in the woman the
embryo becomes the penis in the manner
the men’s sexual excitement is entirely
focused in the head of the penis that’s
extremely sensible what the man wants is
something warm soft and preferably wet
that he can push against that’s what a
man is after a woman is much more
diffuse in her sexual responsiveness and
the dilemma for a man in a sexual
relationship with a woman wanting to
arouse her one who could please so on
to make love to her is that to
finger-touch the sexual organs the lips
around the vagina the clitoris itself
are very difficult to distinguish what’s
happening the man has no real signals
and off the woman’s not quite sure what
should be happening
eventually with effective penetration or
effective finger stimulation reactions
start happening in the lower part of the
vagina which are a pulsing orgasm and a
man it’s an ejaculation but it is a
remarkable process and one that perhaps
the only way that we can find out about
it is that we all fumble our way into it
as we all did when we were teenagers or
young adults
it may be extraordinarily difficult to
teach sex properly even though there’s a
great cry in the West for teaching it
properly and even though there’s quite
rightly a huge concern about sexual
aberrations and perversions like
pedophilia actually teaching what his
ordinary normal sex is such a private
experience that it’s very difficult to
know quite how it could be done we can
teach the knowledge but the experience
we’re better teaching teenagers to drive
cars than we are about sex we have to
find our way but the dilemma is that we
may not find out very much we may not
become skilled and one of the things
that marcin Johnson taught us was that
actually good sexual relationships
depend upon good skills knowing how the
body works being able to enjoy it
feeling relaxed with it feeling it’s a
source of pleasure and not feeling
either frightened or that there’s an
imbalance in the relationship because
one of the extraordinary things is a
woman does not have to be sexually
interested in any way at all for a man
to achieve penetration and to have a
climax the man has to have a climax in
order to be reproductive the woman does
not well one of the things that we
discover from us and Johnson is that sex
tends to happen between two people for
clinicians that was a remarkable
discovery because clinically somebody
came with the clinical problem we would
see that individual with the problem
Marcin Johnson hey it’s actually a
relationship that’s here and sexual
activity is part of the expression the
sexual relationship and it is not much
fun for a woman who’s been married 10
years maybe in a job may be tired there
are two or three children a man goes out
drinking on a Friday night comes home
doesn’t wash very well it’s got a lot of
beer on his breath
and once a quick fuck that is not much
fun for a woman Marcin young and
teaching us and why should it be why
should it be so the skill for a man is
to learn how to please a woman but the
skill for a woman is to find out how she
wants to be pleased and if they can
please each other there’s a giving
process in which you get an enormous
amount back so the giving to get was
another principle that marcin Johnson
taught us and so it’s blood pumping
around the body and there are four
stages of this sexual arousal process we
can have desire we can have arousal we
can then have orgasm and then we can
have relief and we can have disorders of
those two so here’s our couple and the
fact is that sex is perfectly natural
but it’s not always naturally perfect
and so we get disorders which marcin
Johnson talked about in their second
book called human sexual inadequacy men
don’t get erections properly the
erection goes away the woman can’t get
an orgasm neither of them are terribly
interested one is over sex one is
undersexed
those kinds of problems but at last we
have a method of approaching those
problems sometimes with medication but
rarely with medication mostly it’s about
the nature skill so I want to leave you
with the thought that what good sex is
about is enjoying each other
we have all the equipment that we need
in order to do that we may not have
learned to use it as well as we could it
takes time but it’s fun thank you
[Applause]
quick view of the history of sex in one
slide and this is it boy meets girl girl
meets boy something’s gonna happen and
the other bit about the whole history of
sex when I really want to be talking
about the recent history of sex but the
whole thing about the whole history of
sex is that fundamentally men want to
want and women want to be wanted and
that is the basis of our biology of
course sometimes men want to be wanted
and women can want to want but
fundamentally the difference between us
which is deeply rooted in our
evolutionary history and in our biology
is that men are the ones who do the
pushing but women have the power women
in the end have the capacity to say yes
or no which is very scary for men well
we know we’re on to a good thing when
the Economist has sex on its front page
it doesn’t do this very often on its
title page but they were really talking
about reproduction there’s another very
ancient magazine in London published out
of London called Spectator it’s been in
continuous publication for more than 250
years and it had this lovely bottom
title on very recently which says men
why men should watch girls girls is a
television program but it’s interesting
that both these publications are talking
in some ways about things sexual in
order to improve circulation now the
fascinating thing is that it is
circulation which creates sex and come
on to that later but here we are
typically boy and a girl men and a woman
are getting together if you think about
it in the process of giving her body to
a man and letting a man penetrate her a
woman puts her life
risk it’s not amazing she might become
pregnant and until recently across the
whole of the world and very recently in
the developed world the possibility of
death has been reduced somewhat quite
considerably but it still exists and
even if there is no death but there is
the creating of life and there is a
pregnancy that comes happily to term the
woman changes her life in all kinds of
ways in the act of making love that’s
not true for me that’s not true for men
20 seconds if they’re lucky
but in 1961 we had this remarkable
availability for the first time ever in
the history of the world of the
contraceptive pill now we could control
the beginnings of life for the first
time ever and you here are the
inheritors of that experience it is
remarkable that we can actually begin to
think about our bodies as potentially
sources of pleasure not just as
reproductive processes because if we
look at the history of understanding
about sex we can see that for hundreds
and hundreds of years before 1935
hundreds and hundreds of years
the general view about sex was that it
was for reproduction that was the
primary task of men and women as of all
animals mammals and others in the human
Kingdom in they in the zoological
kingdom so there was a reproductive view
of sex and then Hollywood by about 1935
had begun to convey through film that
something else seemed to happen there
was a thing called relationship and we
began to get a relational view of sex of
course Hollywood at that time couldn’t
show anything sexual but there was an
idea that the people wandered off into
the sunset something was going to happen
so there’s a relational view of sex but
then in 1961 we get the pill the
contraceptive pill across
the developed world begins to make it
possible for us to think about sexual
function much more in terms of
recreation so we get a reproductive than
a short-lived rectory a relational view
and then a recreational view and we’re
now the generation that is struggling
with the implications of that and he’s
opening up the conversation about what
place to sex having our lives and it’s
opened up the conversation about the
possibilities of homosexuality gay
relationships transgender relationships
things that to my parents generation
would have been inconceivable that could
have been topics of conversation
the topic of sex has widened up very
considerably but the real change happens
in recent time when we found out how it
worked in 1967 just fifty years ago half
a century ago a couple in the states
called Martin Johnson produced this
remarkable book called human sexual
response and for the first time
another borrowed tree there had been a
systematic inquiries into how does the
body work sexually medicine didn’t know
medicine was good on reproduction but
anything to do with sex for medicine was
kind of off caught that was a bit
private you were not interested in what
happened there you were only interesting
when there was conception and so
medicine physiology in general had very
little actual working knowledge and I
was a young clinical psychologist in
1961 before this book was published
working in outpatient clinics dealing
with sexual problems realizing that we
were in fact completely ignorant all we
had to go on as clinicians was our own
private experience which actually isn’t
much to go on professionally so there we
were doing our best people coming with
sexual problems and then Masters and
Johnson published and began to tell us
how the body works well this is where
circulation comes back in because the
most important thing is that
when we begin to be interested in
somebody sexually blood starts pumping
around the body now it’s very obvious
what happens in a man here is a man he’s
got this all hanging out sexual
apparatus it’s a bit like a hamburger
store with neon lights on it you can
just see it at a distance and if he gets
sexually interested blood begins to flow
it flows into the soft tissues of the
penis
here’s another diagram it flows into the
soft tissues of the penis here and in a
hydraulic fashion the penis will lift
and become erect if it’s working
properly
of course sometimes it’s not and we’re
going to come on the problems a bit
later but it’s a simple process in which
the man is effectively a delivery system
for the sperm which are being
manufactured here sent up through this
tube stored a bit here and delivered out
through here there’s some clever muscles
which control whether he’s going to
ejaculate or whether he’s going to pee
but there we are the system is
extraordinarily well designed and it
manages that quite well but it’s the
same it’s the same tube down which
everything comes well it’s not so clear
in women not so clear at all we can’t
actually see very much if a man is like
a hamburger stall a woman’s sexual
apparatus is a bit like well there’s
extraordinary exciting interesting but
slightly scary small alleyways that one
sees in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City
you’re not quite sure whether you ought
to go in there you’re not sure what’s at
the end of it when you get there I’m
partly the dilemma for that is that that
women are therefore left teaching men
how it works but what marcin johnson
discovered was the vast swathes of women
don’t really know much about how it
works only about a third of women in
lots of surveys have ever reliably
looked at their own external genitalia
and many women many women are troubled
that maybe their genital area it’s a bit
unlike other people’s most women do not
see another adult woman’s genitalia
whereas men often see other men’s
genitalia of course get very concerned
about size so you leave to all men to
find that the limp size bears almost no
relation to the erect size but they
don’t really believe that they always
think it is anyway the problem for women
and for men is how do we find out
because if we look at this in a simple
anatomical diagram we see that there’s a
fleshy area of the lips here there’s a
vaginal canal here but there’s an
extraordinary organ called the clitoris
now you may all know that we are
conceived all of us as female for the
first six or seven weeks of life we are
all female and then if there happens to
be a Y chromosome that’s been ejaculated
in the hundred million sperms you know
one ejaculation about a teaspoonful has
a hundred million sperm in it and only
one of them is going to fertilize an egg
if there’s an egg waiting to be
fertilized it’s been like the whole
population of Vietnam standing on the
end of her Kim Lake diving in at the
same time and the one that wins gets to
the far shore first that’s the prize
unless of course three or four happened
to get there at the same time and you
get quads but that’s a different matter
so how how are we going to find out well
there is a lot of knowledge around
because of masters and Johnson’s
research work they had subjects lying in
the laboratory masturbating to climax
making love they were taking the best
electrophysiological measures that were
available at the time well the very
clever things they did was to create a
small camera device in a plastic tube
which inserted into the vagina showed
for the first time what lubrication was
for lubrication in a woman beginning to
get wet is exactly the same in terms of
sexual arousal as the beginnings of a
stiffening in the man the man beginning
to feel the beginnings of an erection
the equivalent is the woman is
lubrication and the reason for both of
them is blood pumping around the body so
sexual interest begins to create blood
flow and in the man it creates the
hydraulic reaction which I’ve briefly
described in the woman it creates what’s
called a trans sudorific reaction it’s a
kind of sweating reaction across the
walls of the vagina as the tissue around
the vagina fills with the flowing blood
that is connected to sexual excitement a
number of other things happen in the
woman’s the the womb itself here the Oh
begins to lift the vaginal canal itself
begins to increase in width
these lips here become filled with blood
and open up and the clitoris becomes
very sensitive now the clitoris
anatomically starts if we all start as
female the clitoris in the woman the
embryo becomes the penis in the manner
the men’s sexual excitement is entirely
focused in the head of the penis that’s
extremely sensible what the man wants is
something warm soft and preferably wet
that he can push against that’s what a
man is after a woman is much more
diffuse in her sexual responsiveness and
the dilemma for a man in a sexual
relationship with a woman wanting to
arouse her one who could please so on
to make love to her is that to
finger-touch the sexual organs the lips
around the vagina the clitoris itself
are very difficult to distinguish what’s
happening the man has no real signals
and off the woman’s not quite sure what
should be happening
eventually with effective penetration or
effective finger stimulation reactions
start happening in the lower part of the
vagina which are a pulsing orgasm and a
man it’s an ejaculation but it is a
remarkable process and one that perhaps
the only way that we can find out about
it is that we all fumble our way into it
as we all did when we were teenagers or
young adults
it may be extraordinarily difficult to
teach sex properly even though there’s a
great cry in the West for teaching it
properly and even though there’s quite
rightly a huge concern about sexual
aberrations and perversions like
pedophilia actually teaching what his
ordinary normal sex is such a private
experience that it’s very difficult to
know quite how it could be done we can
teach the knowledge but the experience
we’re better teaching teenagers to drive
cars than we are about sex we have to
find our way but the dilemma is that we
may not find out very much we may not
become skilled and one of the things
that marcin Johnson taught us was that
actually good sexual relationships
depend upon good skills knowing how the
body works being able to enjoy it
feeling relaxed with it feeling it’s a
source of pleasure and not feeling
either frightened or that there’s an
imbalance in the relationship because
one of the extraordinary things is a
woman does not have to be sexually
interested in any way at all for a man
to achieve penetration and to have a
climax the man has to have a climax in
order to be reproductive the woman does
not well one of the things that we
discover from us and Johnson is that sex
tends to happen between two people for
clinicians that was a remarkable
discovery because clinically somebody
came with the clinical problem we would
see that individual with the problem
Marcin Johnson hey it’s actually a
relationship that’s here and sexual
activity is part of the expression the
sexual relationship and it is not much
fun for a woman who’s been married 10
years maybe in a job may be tired there
are two or three children a man goes out
drinking on a Friday night comes home
doesn’t wash very well it’s got a lot of
beer on his breath
and once a quick fuck that is not much
fun for a woman Marcin young and
teaching us and why should it be why
should it be so the skill for a man is
to learn how to please a woman but the
skill for a woman is to find out how she
wants to be pleased and if they can
please each other there’s a giving
process in which you get an enormous
amount back so the giving to get was
another principle that marcin Johnson
taught us and so it’s blood pumping
around the body and there are four
stages of this sexual arousal process we
can have desire we can have arousal we
can then have orgasm and then we can
have relief and we can have disorders of
those two so here’s our couple and the
fact is that sex is perfectly natural
but it’s not always naturally perfect
and so we get disorders which marcin
Johnson talked about in their second
book called human sexual inadequacy men
don’t get erections properly the
erection goes away the woman can’t get
an orgasm neither of them are terribly
interested one is over sex one is
undersexed
those kinds of problems but at last we
have a method of approaching those
problems sometimes with medication but
rarely with medication mostly it’s about
the nature skill so I want to leave you
with the thought that what good sex is
about is enjoying each other
we have all the equipment that we need
in order to do that we may not have
learned to use it as well as we could it
takes time but it’s fun thank you
[Applause]
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