Episode 34 with dr kate Balestrieri

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (00:02.182)

My first question for you today is a question that I've come to ask every guest right at the start because I feel like it gives us such direction and potentially the listener more language around the relationship they have with their bodies. So I will start with my first question of what does it mean to be in your body to you?

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (00:23.159)

Hmm, I love this question and now I feel like I'm gonna go back and listen to all your episodes to hear the diversity and how people answer it. To me what it means to be in my body is to be quiet and contemplative and present with the sensations that I'm experiencing in any given part of my body and I try to reflect on it from both an internal and an external.

perspective, right? So I bring my center of knowing kind of under the skin into that location and then my sense of consciousness kind of above the skin so that there's I guess an integrated way of understanding what I'm feeling.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (01:11.48)

How do you, in your work that you do with clients, blend the internal and the external? And I ask you this question because one of the things that I love so much about the work that you do is that you really bring in the systems that surround people and their experiences, their sexuality, their body. And so I would love to hear from you how you found yourself in a position of...

both honoring the internal and the external because I know that training as a psychologist or a psychotherapist doesn't necessarily mean that you honor the external forces and factors that surround people.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (01:49.087)

Yeah, I was super fortunate in my training that in my training program, we had a pretty intentional psychodynamic focus. And specifically, we use the Tavistock model of understanding systems and groups. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Tavistock.

Yeah, so for listeners who might not be familiar with Tavistock, it's really a British school of understanding group dynamics. And in America, we often use the language of group relations theory. So

The Tavi or the Tavistock model really understands all groups as big systems, including the intra-psychics. I believe this is probably where internal family systems kind of grew to become so popular because everything is a system. And when we look at the way our internal parts or our internal different constructs of self interact, we can start to understand the system and the Gestalt of who we are.

But so much of how we are shaped in this world is based on our neurobiology, our developmental neurobiology. And what that really means is that our brain, in interpersonal neurobiology, our brain is shaped by our relationships, and then our relationships are shaped by sort of the intrinsic factors in our brain. So we really can't get away from the influence of both the internal and the external. And when I...

work and sort of how I've come to learn is just to understand the influence that all of the systems have on who we are and who we are, how that influences the systems that we live in. So it's a constant feedback loop. And I do think my training actually gave me a lot of that context, although neurobiology helped to really home in on some of that understanding in a deeper way.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (03:51.626)

What are the systems that you like to or feel it's necessary to bring your clients awareness to? Because I know that there are some that are oftentimes in my own practice that I see that my clients maybe have never thought about the system or the internal structuring of misogyny or sexism or patriarchy. And you do such a beautiful job of really.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (04:10.647)

Mm-hmm.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (04:15.054)

providing psychoeducation that is tangible and relatable for people. So I would love to hear from you if there are some systems that you find yourself specifically providing education or psychoedit on for the people who share space with you.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (04:20.407)

you

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (04:28.343)

Yeah, thanks for that question. I try to bring awareness of all the systems that we can know about and can learn about into the work in so much as it affects my client and how they understand themselves and the goals that we're working toward. But personally, I feel probably the most

charge around helping people understand patriarchy as a system and how it influences so much of how we are taught about the world. And I see sort of differing opinions on whether

white supremacy or patriarchy came first. And I'm not a historian, so I don't want to put a stake in that right now. But from my understanding, a lot of the systems of oppression that we live in and encounter on a daily basis have their origins in patriarchy from millennia ago. So I think it's really important for people to understand what patriarchy is. I think there are a lot of misconceptions about what it means.

and to help them understand the ways that it's shaped the things that they're experiencing in their lives that are bringing them pain and distress and to help them find some empowerment and how they can begin to deconstruct some of the things that they've been taught that are not inherent truths but they are indoctrinations that we've been given because of these systems. And that can be really painful but it can also be really liberating and empowering for people.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (06:07.992)

Could you pull apart some of the misconceptions that people have about patriarchy?

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (06:12.829)

Of course. I think one of the biggest misconceptions that is born out of patriarchy is gender essentialism. And gender essentialism is a belief that there is a gender binary, meaning there are only two genders, and that gender is inherently tied to sex and anatomy and chromosomes, and that there are specific traits that are indicative of people who have one set of

anatomical or chromosomal characteristics and another set of behaviors and personality styles and traits that are inherent to people with other sets of anatomical and biological markers. And that just isn't true.

Even biological sex is a continuum. Gender is a construct and a continuum. And there are no traits that are inherent biologically. So much of what we think of as either masculine or feminine is a socialized construct. And people will fight me. They will die on this hill to say that I'm wrong. And this is what I mean by indoctrination. Right? We grow up thinking that our reality is such that these things are true, but really they're

that have been told to us over and over again and have been perpetuated in everything in our laws, in media, in the stories that were told about romance and love and how we should or should not be.

And it's really dangerous because no matter what your biological sex or gender, when you're forced to live in these very narrow parameters of a binary, you have to shut off parts of yourself in order to fit those molds. And so we're walking around with a bunch of humans on this planet, people of all genders, who are not really able to access themselves fully because to do so would mean they might risk.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (08:07.765)

being ostracized or being kicked out of their families, their communities, or groups that have been really reinforcing these rigid gender roles for a long time. So it's a really painful process to start looking at the realities of how patriarchy has shaped our ideas of gender and the things about ourselves that we may never be able to realize or may not have realized because we've been trying to perform

limited expression of gender to fulfill those expectations.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (08:42.796)

What are some of the things that you commonly maybe see, patriarchy leading to the suppression of in the people you support?

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (08:52.821)

I mean, so many things when I work with people who identify as men, they are conditioned over time to shut off their connection to their emotional process and even to the experience of affect in their bodies. So they become less and less aware, so much so in fact, that there's a term called normative male alexithymia.

And alexithymia is a term that basically means people have a hard time identifying their emotions, naming them, discerning between emotions, and communicating them effectively. So it doesn't mean that they don't feel, but the socialization of men over time is that they are so discouraged from knowing their feelings, talking about their feelings, or admitting their feelings because they're told to be stoic or men are, quote, logical.

Right, so this creates a lot of gaps for men in between how they feel and how they are aware of how they feel and how they communicate it, which means that a lot of their emotions are sort of channeled into anger or they're suppressed because those are the only permitted pathways for men in rigid gender role adherence.

That has a whole host of problems for men in their adult lives. It can really create a lot of deficits in their capacity for relational satisfaction. It can mean that they over sexualize their feelings or they again channel everything into rage or anger and they lose a lot of connection with the information that emotions give us about our day-to-day experiences which leaves them less connected to themselves and to other people.

So it perpetuates a lot of the loneliness epidemic that we're seeing with men, their substance misuse, their higher risk of suicidality. I mean, it has real, like dangerous, real world implications for them. It also creates a sense of dehumanization, which is then perpetuated against people of other genders. Because if you have been dehumanized your whole life, you have a hard time holding space and empathy for the humanity of others.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (11:09.783)

So that's one of the ways.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (11:11.894)

I love that you began answering this question by addressing how patriarchy suppresses those who identify as male, because so commonly, at least in the circles I have been in my academic career, it's that conversation doesn't even enter the room, even though

And my clinical practice is something I see so commonly again and again in having the privilege of getting to work with men. And I would love to even just dive a little bit deeper if you feel comfortable and just open to sharing more of what that experience has been like for you. How do you kind of work with men to start to acknowledge the ways that patriarchy has suppressed parts of their sexuality or parts of sense of self, it can be a very sticky place to be because oftentimes

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (11:42.561)

Yeah.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (12:00.356)

at least in my clinical experience, it's been the first time where men are allowed to be a part of the conversation around how a system has oppressed them.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (12:08.159)

Yeah, yeah, it's so true, right? So a little background, think maybe before we dive into that. My first foray into clinical work was with...

incarcerated sex offenders and also non-sexual violent offenders who had been incarcerated, who were incarcerated. So I've spent a lot of time working with men who are living the consequences of this suppression and of this impact because it's no surprise that prisons are absolutely more populated by men. And that has a lot of roots in patriarchy as well, right?

so many reasons why men become incarcerated more frequently than women, why they commit more crimes, how they're prosecuted, how they are found guilty. A lot of this has to do with the ways that we see men and the ways that we dehumanize them.

specifically the alexithymia piece or the difficulty in expressing emotions effectively, difficulty containing emotions, regulating emotions, the difficulty in regulating impulses, right, and maintaining impulse control.

all of these are functions of how patriarchy requires men to disconnect from their emotions. And we can see the long-term effects of this in this very, you know,

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (13:43.503)

in this microcosm of incarceration. And so in my time working with men, it was really in that setting, it was really amazing to me how so many of them would cling to this identity of masculinity being the thing that would carry them through how horrific it is to be incarcerated. I mean, it is so dehumanizing, especially in American prisons that are privatized. It's just really...

I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. And I don't think that it's rehabilitative for most people. It actually furthers their dehumanization and creates a greater desperation for survival, which means that their nervous systems remain in a state of priming for survival. And that lack of safety makes it really difficult for them to lean into their emotions. And what we would see is that the more therapeutic work we would do,

for many inmates, they actually became more vulnerable in the prison setting because emotions made them more vulnerable to being targeted by other inmates who couldn't tolerate seeing affect in other people because it would remind them too much of their own.

So it's, speaking of systems, right, it's a big system that really punishes anything that looks human because it's unsafe to be human in inhumane settings. So it was really interesting. And over time, working with men in non-incarcerated settings, I see that the prison sort of lives inside of them instead of them living in the prison. You know, a lot of men are really struggling and

Unfortunately, I think men are even more suspect, or not suspect. They're even more vulnerable to the conditioning of patriarchy because patriarchy sends them a message that they are tough, they are strong, they can't be weak, but it also gives them privileges that it doesn't afford women and other gender diverse people.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (15:51.283)

So there's a promise, there's a trade-off that is implicitly given to men. And so I think they're really stuck and the promises and the privileges of patriarchy make it more difficult for them to come to terms with it. For women and people who are gender diverse or gender expansive, they really are implicated and they see the downsides of patriarchy in different ways. And because they are not awarded the same privileges, it's easier for them to say,

Hey, wait a minute, this system doesn't work. This is crap. This is not a great system. And they're willing to speak to it more directly because they can see that it's not helpful, right, without those privileges to answer your question.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (16:34.796)

You did answer my question. I know that gender-based violence and sexual violence is a huge piece of your work, and I know that there is a relationship between

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (16:42.88)

Yeah.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (16:47.218)

men living within their own prison of masculinity and how that translates on to gender-based violence. And if you could spend some time really walking the listener through how that transfers out into kind of what we when we commonly think of the oppression of patriarchy, we go to the femme experience. And I would love if you could link how those two experiences of oppression actually go together.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (16:53.195)

Thank you.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (17:16.639)

Yeah, I love this question. So I'm going to not get the quote 100 % correctly, but Bell Hooks talks about in her book, The Will to Change, she talks about how...

the first act of violence that patriarchy requires men to commit is the killing off of their own emotional system, right? It's not actually violence toward women. That comes later. But the reason that patriarchy requires men to kill off their connection to all things emotional is because they are expected to define their masculinity and their sense of power in this world.

by being different than anything that's perceived as a feminine trait. Right, so here's where that gender essentialism comes in again. If emotions are coded as feminine, then men are expected to kill off that part of themselves, literally disconnect from it, disavow it. It doesn't exist in them. They can't acknowledge it because the definition of their masculinity relies solely on them being considered not feminine.

And so here's where gender-based violence starts, because men have to choke that part of them off in order to even be invited into the club of masculinity. And here's where masculinity becomes so, in colloquial terms, toxic, because it requires, you know, again, this...

this compartmentalization of self, this fragmentation of self, and an acknowledgement only of the parts of self that you can convince yourself are not feminine. And so what we might call toxic masculinity in common discourse, academically and clinically, we think of as precarious masculinity. And I love the word precarious here because it really does depict how fleeting

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (19:24.811)

the idea of masculinity is and the desperation with which men need to constantly be proving their masculinity. And so here's where masculinity becomes a prison because it can't just be something that men rest on. They can't just live in it and sort of have it be a constant. They need to constantly prove it and demonstrate it to other men.

in order to get the feedback from other men that they are man enough. And that doesn't come from women. Women become an object or a supporting figure in the demonstration of masculinity for men who ideate in these ways. So there's a violence toward women and a disdain and a contempt for women.

because that's the way in which men have to prove their dominance over anything feminine in order to maintain the projection of masculinity.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (20:30.742)

love that you pulled apart toxic masculinity and how that's used in common discourse with precarious masculinity. And as you were speaking, I've heard this before, but it's something I often speak of is just how masculinity is traumatized. The language of toxic is actually probably better suited as just traumatized masculinity and how different would our response be?

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (20:31.04)

and

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (20:54.583)

Thank

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (20:58.048)

to toxic masculinity if we saw it through that compassionate lens of trauma and really help the men in our lives with an understanding that they all are experiencing a different form of oppression and different form of trauma in their bodies and their hearts and in their psyches as well. I would love to hear.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (21:03.147)

Yeah, I love that.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (21:16.023)

That's a beautiful reframing.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (21:20.43)

I would love to hear from you how you really support people to integrate any form of trauma that they have into their sexuality because one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on here was to talk about sexuality and pleasure and being in the body and relationships and all these pieces. So under the umbrella that we all are living in with the system that oppresses us in different ways, how do you support people to connect to themselves and find

and all those yummy good feelings amongst systems that are trying to dictate that we don't.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (21:59.357)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's such a great question. Sex is for me one of the most interesting landscapes of adult play. And we get to create a sexual experience. And every time we do, it's created a little bit differently, right? The variables are never exactly the same. We can incorporate similar themes, similar styles of play. But really, sex is a

playground in which we get to express or access different emotions and sensations that we may not give ourselves permission to experience in our everyday lives or that we get to experience in a different way that we could in our everyday lives. So sexuality can be a place of healing, it can be a place of integration, it can be a place of experimentation with feelings that maybe feel scary in real life.

So for example, I work with people all across the gender spectrum and from every walk of life. And one of the themes that any sex therapist will tell you is that often when you have a group of people who are in very dominant, high responsibility roles, some of their play in sex may involve being submissive. There's a subversiveness to sex that gives us permission to be in a different form. And so,

It might not be safe for, let's say, a CEO who has a lot of financial responsibilities and maybe has to speak to a board of directors on a regular basis and answer for all of the decisions they make about a company's success. They may not get to be vulnerable in those roles. They may not get to sit with humiliation in a way that feels empowering or even tolerable. So going into a submissive role in their sex life,

allows them to have a controlled experience of those feelings that helps them create a path toward empowerment in them that can sometimes translate and generalize into their everyday lives. But sometimes people just love to keep it over here in the sexual space because then they can tap into it when they feel ready.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (24:16.556)

What is some of the unlearning that people need to do or that you see people need to do to actually just view sex as adult play? I love that you described it as adult play. And I ask this question because I don't know about the listener, but I know for me, actually allowing myself to be in a state of play and like put things down is like quite a challenging process.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (24:28.876)

No.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (24:42.078)

It may just always be considering that I live in capitalism. So I'd love to hear from you how you kind of start to do that work of seeing sex as play. Because I know that there is a lot of shame and stories and judgment and stuff that can stop us from viewing sex as an expression of play.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (24:54.871)

Yeah.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (25:01.333)

Yeah, I would say probably the first place that people can benefit from some deconstruction around is around the over coupling of sexuality and worthiness. And so a lot of this happens across gendered lines. When we live in a patriarchy, are conditioned to quote unquote get as much sex as they can. So it becomes a commodity that they're supposed to gather.

you know, a more proof of their masculinity, more proof of their prowess and their power. And so that leads a lot of men to over couple their worthiness with sexuality in so much as the more sex they have, the more worthy and valuable they feel in the currency of masculinity. And for a lot of women, the deconstruction that they would benefit from doing

is on the other side of that continuum where women in a patriarchy are often conditioned to be more valuable the less sex they've had. And so a lot of purity culture conditioning would teach women that it's shameful to desire or that it's shameful to be sexual or that it's shameful to center their pleasure, right? And so all of that shame becomes an inhibition around sex and pleasure.

And it also becomes an inhibition against knowing what you want, asking for what you want, educating a partner about how to help you get there. All of this is a silencing function on women's voices, period, full stop. But it also keeps women in a state of feeling like their sexuality is not for them and that it is for other people, but it speaks something about their worthiness. So

When I'm working with women, a lot of the work we're doing is around giving themselves permission to want, permission to have, permission to course correct if their partner's not participating in a way that works for their pleasure, permission to center their own sexual needs and their own pleasure and experience as a defining hallmark on whether or not the sex they're having is sex worth having for them.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (27:23.349)

A lot of women walk through the world feeling like if they want more sex or if they want more pleasure, then somehow they're not good enough women. They're not quote unquote pure. They're not quote unquote wife material. And this sort of bifurcation of women into Madonnas and whores is part of patriarchal conditioning that does, again, really commune power to men. And it takes power away from women because pleasure is power.

And so a lot of the work that I'm doing with folks is about reclaiming their power as much as their pleasure and being able to extend themselves in reciprocal and mutually beneficial ways when they're engaging in partnered sex and to find their voice in that process.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (28:11.81)

A lot of what you just described is, yes, underpinned by a strong basin theory and psychoanalysis and I imagine psychoeducation.

but I also know that you take a deeply embodied lens and a somatic kind of perspective. So I would love to hear from you how you kind of bring some of those things into the therapy room and invite maybe even is just exploring how the Madonna whore kind of complex shows up in the body or what that looks like for the listener who.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (28:41.687)

Thanks so much.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (28:44.078)

understands the theory, maybe knows it's influencing them, but doesn't exactly know how it lives within them or how it kind of moves their actions or their body.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (28:57.205)

Yeah, such a great question. I think the somatic experience of the Madonna-whore complex can be seen in or felt in rather the contrast of like deadness versus the contrast between deadness and sort of vitality. And in this sense, vitality

I'm linking that to the experience of desire, libidinal urge, but also to rage and the experience of activation. Because when we think about sort of this dichotomy of the Madonna-whore complex, what we're really looking at is a dichotomy of inhibition and expression. And so for men who espouse a Madonna-whore complex,

they often desexualize their partners and they have a difficult time bringing their libidinal energy to those partners in part because there's a lot of shame around their own libidinal energy, that rage or vitality, their arousal, all of those things. It's all activation in the body. And for men who, again, there's a higher correlation of splitting for people who embody this complex

And those men have have sort of split themselves in two and they've projected these parts of themselves onto women as sort of vehicles and proxies for their own experience. So they can only bring that libidinal, that rageful, that arousal perspective, the part that they've connected a lot of shame to, to people that they don't have to quote unquote care about, to women who they see as repositories and...

and containers for that shame because societally they've been deemed as whores and therefore don't need to be protected by benevolent sexism, right, the paternalism of sexism. So they can, in the unconscious mind, embodied experiences, I can unpack all of this and just put it on them. So it feels alive inside and it feels engaged. But afterward there's often a...

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (31:19.221)

reverberation of shame or disgust that lives in the body because I got that out of me but now I have to go back into my quote-unquote real life with my real partner where I put all of my love and my good parts and I have to face that there's this other stuff right that I can't bring here so it creates an embodied experience of compartmentalization and again like this deadness or like a guilt and an inhibition in one aspect of life.

and then this aliveness in the other. And for women who have internalized this process, the feeling can be different. A lot of women who might identify as the quote unquote whore often find liberation in that. They find a peace in not having to capitulate to the narrow restrictions of patriarchy and of this false dichotomy that

that demands adherence. Where I see a lot of deadness is with the women who are trying to be pure and they're feeling a lot of shame. And even when they're partnered with their own partner, their husband, and under all contexts, the sex that they're having would be permitted and welcome. A lot of those women have a difficult time.

really feeling pleasure in their bodies. They can even experience pain during penetration because the somatic bracing of all of that protection of one's purity, psychically and otherwise, has left this compensatory strategy of somatic guarding in the body that can make it very difficult for them to relax and to surrender in pleasure.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (33:09.004)

How do you support someone into surrendering into pleasure?

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (33:13.397)

Yeah, paradoxically, with a lot of permission and an integrated and very slow learning how to be embodied, right? Often there's a disconnect between mind and body when somebody's so protected in their body. So it's not even necessarily a sexual introduction at first, but more about just practicing how to feel, how to bring your attention back into the body and how to tolerate.

any emotions that might be present as you reintegrate mind and body. And from that, there can be a slow introduction of pleasure sensations that are non-sexual, and then gradually pleasure sensations that are sexual with themselves or with a partner.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (34:01.432)

I know that recently you wrote a book called What Happened to My Sex Life? And as we've been discussing things so far, there are curiosities that kind of have formed in my mind around how you work with aliveness or deadness or also what led you to write the book, what were some of the experiences that were like, I really want to write about this or I wish more people knew about this piece. And so I would love to hear from you.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (34:03.733)

Yeah.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (34:27.914)

what led you to write the book and what would the listener find in your book?

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (34:34.357)

Yeah, so one of the things that I kept thinking about as I was writing the book is all of the themes that come up in my clinical work that separate people from their sexuality but that we don't really talk about as often. So a lot of what we'll talk about in sort of public discourse around sex is pleasure, right? And that's necessary and it's important. If you're not having sex that's pleasurable, you're less likely to wanna have sex.

So that makes a lot of sense. But one of the things that's so fascinating to me about desire is not necessarily about learning what turns us on, but identifying what's shutting us down. And I find that recognizing the what is shutting me down, what's disconnecting me from desire, and addressing that is often enough for people to start feeling reconnected with their vitality and with their desire for life and desire for pleasure.

So I wrote this book thinking about some of the themes that I see most readily in practice as the reasons that people are shut down and disconnected. So things that are implicit or intrinsic like burnout or healing from sexual trauma or feeling angry or resentful toward a partner or toward something in life. Feeling that shame, feeling like there's something wrong with you.

All of those can be intrinsic variables that really can quell desire. And then part two of the book, I look at relational factors, things that might be going on between you and a partner. So one of the chapters, one of my favorite chapters is, I have to say yes? And in this chapter, I talk a lot about sexual entitlement and coercion and how those things can show up in partner dynamics and how they really are the antithesis of desire.

and the more sexual entitlement we experience in our lives, and with a partner, the less desire we're likely to have. So I wanted to normalize some of the things that people are experiencing as a result of these systemic influences, because they're having a big toll on people's lives.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (36:51.566)

When were writing the book, was there anything that came out in your writing that maybe surprised you?

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (36:51.819)

when you

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (36:59.86)

Hmm.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (37:04.193)

Well, I talk a little bit about my own sex life in the book and the gaps and the disconnection that I've been feeling with my own sexuality over the last few years. And so writing the book helped me gain more insight into where I'm at and how I can reclaim my role with sexuality again and like reintegrate it back into my world.

So it surprised me, don't know, but anchored me maybe. You know, gave me a guiding path back into my own self. Yeah.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (37:43.63)

In your answer, you touched on something that I often find in working with clients. I have to kind of keep sprinkling in the room and it is this idea that our sexuality is fluid and ongoing and that it will keep meeting our attention and redefinition and exploration all across our lifespan. And I would love to hear from you how you support

some of that mindset and some of that frame of like, this is an ongoing part of you. It's not something to be fixed or solved, but it is something fluid to that will be with us.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (38:20.513)

Exactly, yeah, our sexuality is a dynamic part of ourselves.

Right. And we can have as much or as little access to it and prioritization of it as we want and as our lives permit. So it's important to give yourself a lot of compassion throughout your lifespan, because if we're lucky, life is long. And that means that we're going to have lots of ebbs and flows and lots of different things that take priority and precedent at different times in our lives. And sexuality is one of them.

So I tend to think about sexuality as a practice, right? It's something that we can nurture. It's something we can always come back to. It's something we can take some space from. It becomes a practice of vitality, a practice of play, a practice of embodiment, a practice of pleasure. And when we think about our sexuality as a practice, it allows us to be more creative and communicative with our bodies around what

What does my body need right now? What does my mind need? And am I practicing in a way that will allow that to flourish? And that's going to be different, you know, different points in our lives.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (39:37.038)

What are some common barriers that stop people from viewing sexuality as a practice?

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (39:43.447)

lots of rigidity again around sexuality and worthiness. The good old compare and despair game, right? I think people are having this much sex or this kind of sex and I'm not and therefore it means X, Y, Z about me. When we start using sex as a weapon against ourselves or as a currency for our source of power in the world.

think we've really lost connection to what sexuality can be about.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (40:17.198)

Could you speak a little bit more about how one could use their sexuality as a currency?

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (40:27.061)

Absolutely. Well, let's see. I'll use a gross but popular example.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (40:28.75)

Thank

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (40:39.253)

The current president of the United States many years ago bragged about sexually aggressing women and he bragged that because of his celebrity status, women quote unquote let him do it. So first of all, that's a perversion of consent. No one was letting him do it, but systemically he was getting away with it because he was a wealthy.

wealthy white man who had a tremendous amount of privilege and could buy his way out of consequences. But this is an example of how sexuality is used as a currency of power, societally. He used that example to demonstrate dominance and prowess. And it was a statement not really to women.

but to other men about just how powerful he is. And in my opinion, was said as a way to garner the appreciation and admiration of other men. And so, you know, in essence, the president was saying, I'm so powerful, you should want to be like me. And this is one of the ways that I prove my power and you should do that too, right? So sex is often weaponized.

not just by men, but often by men as a currency of power and as a way to dominate. And here's that precarious masculinity piece again, prove their masculinity over and over to themselves and to the other men who are watching, right? Because men perform for the male gaze, probably more so than women.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (42:16.6)

What is one thing you wish more individuals knew around male sexuality?

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (42:24.129)

that men are just as complicated as every other human on the planet in their emotions, in their sexuality. Men are not these rigid erection robots. They often need a lot of stimulation. They have an emotional connection to their bodies and to sexuality. And for a lot of men, sex has been the only space where they've permitted themselves to connect with another person emotionally.

So, know, men don't always want to be sexual, but they feel a lot of pressure to be sexual. So I just think, you know, it's important that we understand that men's sexuality is super complex, just like everyone else.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (43:07.97)

really appreciate the language in which you speak around masculinity and male sexuality and the lens in which you continue to apply a more feminist lens to areas where oftentimes the feminist lens isn't applied and how inclusive that actually is. And so for my last question for you today is what is one thing that you really wish more people knew around sexuality?

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (43:14.709)

Yeah.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (43:35.103)

Hmm.

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (43:38.771)

I really wish people knew and took to heart that the things that you desire have nothing to do with your worthiness as a human, right? Our fantasies are an expression of play, they're an expression of discovery, of learning.

fantasies are just that, right? They are just a fantasy and if you fantasize about something sexually doesn't mean you're a good or a bad person, right? All of our fantasies are information and they just teach us about a way that we want to feel and that's really powerful when we can take away the shame and the fear around what our fantasies might say about who we are as people and instead teach us about how we want to feel.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (44:29.966)

Thank you so much for the work you put out in the world, but also the language in which you use to really break things down for people and make it accessible.

We will have information about your book in the show notes so people can go and read that, just came out. And then we'll also include information because I know that you provide support across a various number of different states and have people underneath of you. So we'll have all that information. Is there anything that you have upcoming that you would like the listener to know about?

Dr. Kate Balestrieri (45:03.403)

No, I mean, think that you think you've covered it. Thank you so much for having me on your show. I appreciate it.

Ailey Jolie (she/her) (45:10.68)

Thank you.

it.