Galen Fous reveals 5 keys to being a sexually authentic, conscious and empowered man.
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Being sexually authentic is your birthright. Sharing your deepest sexual truths with a trusted partner is one of the most loving, liberating, intimate and ecstatic of human experiences.
Many men hide authentic aspects of their sexual desire…for good reason! Our sex-negative culture, family, religions and even our relationships often deny men a safe, welcoming place to honor and discuss the full spectrum of their sexual desires. They seldom honor, bless and respect any but the narrowest view of acceptable sexual practice or frequency. In fact, the tangible fear of being shamed, harshly judged, or of losing partners, family or friends can leave many men secretive or shadowy about their true sexual desire. Some men are so deep in shame and guilt they can’t get past the fear of speaking openly about their desires to those closest to them. Some men can become consumed by fantasy, masturbation or porn rather than risk openly expressing what’s true to their partners…or even to themselves.
Many men were emotionally wounded (shamed or terrorized) as boys around their sexuality, if not in fact sexually abused. Many may have developed shyness or embarrassment, loss of trust, loss of confidence. They may have internalized the harsh voice of sex-negative moral judgment from their father or mother, religion or culture into their inner dialogue, or project that onto others. And to one extent or another, if they are secretive in their sexual expressions as adults, carry an innate fear of being discovered at the wrong time or place, the feeling of being busted, the fall from grace and the consequences that might bring.
Getting honest about your sexual desires can be a struggle, even in a supportive environment. To become sexually whole, it is important to learn and practice techniques to consciously engage and embrace your authentic desires, and share them honestly in a healthy, fulfilling, consensual manner. This is also the path to begin to resolve the conflicted, wounded, shadowy, dis-empowered aspects of your sexuality.
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Most people have a complex authentic sexual persona, as distinct as a fingerprint and inherent as their eye-color, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. There can be light aspects and shadow aspects, the parts we show and the parts we hide. There can be tender sweet aspects and primitive, wild instinctual aspects. These sharp contrasts do not necessarily cancel each other, but are a paradox that one can learn to hold honorably and in an ecstatically potent way sexually. Both light and shadow aspects of our sexuality possess a pantheon of archetypal parts and counterparts that we may carry at an unconscious level.
Finding safe ways to express these sexual energies consciously and consensually can be powerful, healing and ecstatically fulfilling. |
These sexual personas, or sex creatures as I sometimes call them, are distinct and independent from our outer social personas. Examples of these more primitive sexual archetypes can be dominant/submissive, predator/prey, beast/beauty, bad boy/good girl, teacher/student, mommy-daddy/son-daughter, older man-woman/younger man-woman to name just a few. There are as well, all the variations on cross dressing, transsexual, bisexual or gay sexuality. All and any of these expressions of Eros can be valid and authentic. They are far more typical within the sexual landscape than many want to believe. But for those so inclined, it is just their personal sexual baseline. It is their normal! Finding safe ways to express these sexual energies consciously and consensually can be powerful, healing and ecstatically fulfilling.
A hallmark of practicing conscious engagement of your sexuality is that there be nothing involved that would be ultimately harmful or non-consensual in your engagement with partners. Being consciously sexual would support whatever is true in the realm of fantasy without judgment, and explore safe, consensual, and/or ritual ways to express any desire, no matter how taboo, with a consenting partner or through private personal rituals.
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If you are already married or partnered in a long-term relationship, that is not likely to now embrace your authentic sexual desire, or if your social, religious or professional community will likely not, this is obviously very complex territory to suddenly reveal your sexual truth to. But I encourage you to start with claiming your sexual authenticity…for yourself! It has likely been the bastard of your personality your whole life. It has not been allowed to be included as a natural part of your everyday being. If you feel in am impossible situation sexually in your relationship, and that who you are sexually will never be accepted, you may feel you are faced with sacrificing your own truth, or ending your relationship. This may unfortunately be true. But there is a lot of middle ground to creatively work in that may offer enough room to allow you the dignity of owning your true sexuality and also preserve the mutual love and care in the relationship, if not enhance it beyond measure. It is a tragedy that many couples avoidance of the subject prevented them from discovering the depths of sexual intimacy they might have shared if they were not so afraid of their partner’s judgment.
Now if you are single, you have the opportunity to get clear about your wants and expectations sexually. I want to encourage you to express them honestly right out the gate of any new relationships you pursue. If asking your first-time date to have a mature, informational discussion about sexual desire, feels near impossible in the dating world you have roamed in, I suggest you enter a different world.
If you are serious about embracing your fundamental right to express your sexual truth, there are more straightforward paths to finding dates or potential partners that are open to if not welcoming of your desires. Why waste months or even weeks of time engaging someone as a prospective partner who turns out to be a terrible erotic mismatch.
There are all kinds of alternative social and dating sites that offer up a full range of available, sexually progressive, mature, monogamous or polyamorous adult singles, from the sacred to the profane ranges of Eros. There are meet-up groups, lifestyle events, socials or munches, workshops, play-parties, snuggle parties, and erotic guides of every stripe to help you take those first steps in your journey.
Most men have been socialized to keep their authentic sexuality on a leash, where it is hidden, feared, secreted, shamed and harshly judged by the unconscious mind and cultural messaging. |
But whatever path is right for you, I want to encourage you to raise your authentic sexuality out of the shadows to its rightful place alongside of your intellect, emotion, creativity and spirit as an integral aspect of your personality. Most men have been socialized to keep their authentic sexuality on a leash, where it is hidden, feared, secreted, shamed and harshly judged by the unconscious mind and cultural messaging.
You have every right to embrace, honor, bless, love and advocate for your sexual rights. Start there. Claim what is yours. Start to bring it into your own aware, benevolent acknowledgment. Welcome it out of the wasteland of your unconscious sexuality that holds all the projections placed on it – sex-addict, deviant, disgusting, selfish, rapist and every dark projection imaginable. If you are an honorable and conscious man, your sexual authenticity does not deserve to be so vilified, unloved, hidden and scorned. Hold it up to the light and cheer! Know that somewhere out there in the gene pool are plenty of cohorts who will respect and admire your sexual honesty, if not be ecstatically turned-on by your desire.
It is impossible to simplify something as complex as our sexual natures in a brief article. My intention is to stimulate your own natural yearning to be fully authentic, so you can begin your own inquiry. For me this means developing a practice that supports whatever the authentic desire is and untangles and diminishes whatever resists, judges or fears the conscious expression of the desire. From my work as a therapist with hundreds of men, women, couples and groups over the last 13 years, I have developed what I call the 5 Keys for consciously engaging the fullest range of your desire and find fulfillment in sex, life and relationships. I will define them briefly here. A more in-depth view of these and other aspects of integrating your authentic sexuality into your everyday life can be found on my website.
The 5 Keys to Embracing Your Sexuality and Finding Fulfillment in Life & Relationships
1. Sexual Authenticity
Each person has an innate, authentic sexual identity, as distinct as a fingerprint, and as inherent as your eye color. This is the first step – uncovering the deeper dimensions of your sexual desire, untangling the desire from all that resists, fears and judges you unconsciously, and owning what your personal sexual truth is. This includes understanding the core themes or Personal Erotic Myths’ as I define them, that maps the erotic types you are attracted to and the frequency of desire (For more about PEM’s see my “Discover Your Personal Erotic Myth Survey.”
2. Sexual Honesty
Your authentic sexuality is your birthright! Once you know what is sexually authentic for you, the next step is to learn how to express it honorably and in a forthright manner. This will mean also working through all that has kept it hidden in shame, fear and harsh internal judgments, so that you can move beyond those into advocacy. This will be critical to clearly communicate what you desire and deserve sexually and avoid disastrous erotic mismatches in your future relationships. Part of this practice will be to create a safe environment to encourage and support your partners to be honest as well, and bless them for their own sexual honesty.
3. Sexual Empowerment
By developing easy to use practices of conscious intention, negotiation skills to review and set boundaries, discussions about consent, presence, physical embodiment, and mindfulness you can learn to advocate for and embody fully your own authentic desires. These practices will also help diminish all that resists your desire physically, emotionally and psychologically. Attaining presence does not mean healing and resolving decades of shame, fear, harsh judgments or other serious issues that may have occurred around your sexuality. That can be a much deeper level of personal work. And this can be a perfect starting point to doing that deeper work. But practicing presence can allow you to recognize, to be aware of and to have an intention or choice about whether those past issues need to be around every moment. You can learn to put them aside and be present with your intention in the moment and who you are with right now. This level of presence itself generates tremendous trust and safety – the bedrock of any hot sexual engagement with your partners, no matter how off the charts and edgy the desires are. This level of awareness and intention is where you and your partner can begin to be engaged in a deep dance of intimacy and connection, and you can become an extraordinarily present, embodied, ecstatic lover to your partner(s).
4. Sexual Shadow
Bringing awareness to the ways you may have been out of integrity through expressing or hiding your sexual desires in shadowy, secretive, unhealthy, unconscious non-consensual ways, is an important step in consciously embracing your authentic sexuality and learning to express it in a conscious forthright manner.
5. Paradox
Learning to understand and embrace paradox allows us to accept we can be both frequent, perverse, wild, dark and taboo in our desires without detracting anything from our ability and desire to be a loving, tender, honorable, and considerate of our partners. Being authentic sexually does in no way detract from our being a good parent, partner, worker, citizen or spiritual, soulful being. The task here is to learn how to hold both your darkest desires and your most lofty aspirations for the world in an aware and noble balance that is in integrity with your agreements to your partners and yourself.
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There is no perfection in all this. We will fail if we are striving for perfection. But we can develop a strong intention to honor our own personal sexual truth, and be in integrity with our agreements and values, even if we stumble. And we can develop practices that help us continually renew our connection to our intention to be conscious men sexually and otherwise.
Photo: Samarel Erotic Art
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This is a brilliant and timely article. The women who have posted here cannot understand where the author is coming from because with all due respect they are women. The points they raise are relevant but not for this discussion
Interesting article. And men who feel like they hide their innermost sexual desires, yes they should try to express them without shame. I fully support that. While at the same time many women who love sex and like to be a little freaky are often judged as sluts and sometimes dumped for having had too many sexual partners or having an unconventional sexual history (if they feel like they can be honest about that at all). It seems like what we should be working towards is both partners having that freedom without judgement and shame?
To all the women, you should really stop posting your nonsense. All your concerns seem to be more about your and your insecurities and not so much about men. Especially anongirl. Clearly your poor choices in men or your insecurity with your own sexuality is a massive block and causing you to project all over men. “Men’s sexuality is dangerous so it’s not the same.” That is the most discriminatory and ignorant statement I have ever read. Clearly you must feel like that about yourself. Should we just chop our manhoods off? You need to do a bit more consciousness… Read more »
“To all the women, you should really stop posting your nonsense. ” And you should really learn that if you want to be heard as a man, you need to give more respect and consideration to hearing women out instead of collectively writing women off as just being full of “nonsense”. I’m here to tell you that after you’re very first sentence, you have lost the exact audience you were seeking to speak to because you disrespected them from the start. Your disrespect has begotten a lack of respect off the bat. “We make no qualms about it and are… Read more »
And calling male sexuality scary won’t cause you to lose your audience, natch ^_^
It shouldn’t. Do you think it’s easy coming here and reading alot about all the things men believe women are doing wrong? It’s not. But I do it because I want to be a better partner. If men want deep, truthful, communication with women, they need to be willing to hear the stuff that’s going to sometimes be hard to hear and ask women why they may feel that way and examine a point of view that may be different from their own experiences. Just as you want us to hear the stuff that sometimes hard to hear and validate… Read more »
So you can tell us our sexuality is threatening, but if we think that’s nonsense we can’t say it? Ta v much 🙂
Oirish, there is a difference between someone telling you how they feel (I.E, “I have sometimes felt men’s sexuality was threatening”) vs telling someone their point of view is simply “nonsense”. Do you believe that a woman should not be allowed to talk about her feelings and experiences when it’s hard to hear? I know it’s not an easy thing to hear but don’t you want to know the full gamut of women’s feelings in this department? At least to possibly fix or better understand each other? Would you want a woman to respond to you to tell you that… Read more »
Wow, Unashamed, way to make the point that men are crappy listeners. What troubled me here was that I thought Galen took on an important and volatile subject and it was obviously a risk, and unfortunately too many of the responses really were designed – in my opinion – to get men to shut up (or, if not designed to get them to shut up, that’s the impact). Your response, on the other hand, feels designed to tell women to shut up if they don’t like it, and is part of the crap that I wish my male brethren would… Read more »
Thank you Galen..great article. Just so you others; I’ve known Galen for years and
have watched him learn and grow so much. To see him follow his passions and dreams and to have
the courage to tackle this explosive and critical issue which affects all of us in huge ways is a beautiful
thing. thanks bro.. T
The reactions to this article strike me as odd. I wonder, would the commenters believe the advice to be dangerous if it were written about women? Would we react the same way to advice the women own their sexual feelings, interests, and inclinations, bring them to light, and deal with them openly rather than in a hidden way? I took Galen to be saying nothing more than that, and I think it’s spot on. It doesn’t mean you indulge every fantasy or inclination; it means you accept them and learn from them and share them in the open. The reactions… Read more »
Men’s sexuality is dangerous so its not the same
how is the potential danger in a man’s sexuality different to the potential danger in a women’s sexuality?
You’ll notice in the article that the author addresses this need for balance between the expression of one’s authentic sexual self and striving to be a good parent, partner, etc.
Maybe it seems like dangerous advice to you because you believe men are kind of fucked up sexually…
Which is why men (like myself) often internalize that message and feel ashamed of our sexuality, which I can tell you really sucks
That is precisely what troubles me. The natural response to being told that it’s dangerous even to write about being open about fantasy and desire is to shut up. And when the men who are trying to figure out a better way to be in the world keep shutting up, the only men left to speak are those that are acting out. And so the schism perpetuates. This seems tragic to me, and troubles me greatly.
and after comments like that we wonder why men feel ashamed of their sexuality…
Anongirl, with sincere respect, to say that men’s sexuality is inherently dangerous seems simply wrong. That most sexualized violence is done by men is not in question. That’s true, that’s wrong, and I spend no small amount of effort trying hard to fight it. But that’s NOT sexuality; it’s violence. Men too often equate the two; please don’t add to that mistake by committing it yourself.
Les, I’m not sure what the reaction would be if it was written about women. Men and women are socialized about sex in different ways to begin with. We don’t come to the topic of sex from the same side of the field. We don’t always experience the same issues. So you most likely won’t always see the same response to different sexual discussions when it’s about men or women. I understand it can be hard for men to talk about their inner lives more. Frankly, it can also be hard to hear about men’s inner lives. It can suck… Read more »
Erin, thank you for a thoughtful reply. The first part in particular sounded like we might have a dialogue, and then I found myself disappointed a little. First yes, if men want to be heard then they have to also be willing to listen to the response, even if it isn’t positive. Of course, and absolutely. As to the other things you say, just a couple thoughts. I do think that being sexually authentic is a birthright, for men and women and those who identify as neither or both. That’s not the same as saying that you get to say… Read more »
Excellent Reply, Les.
I agree with Erin that this is potentially dangerous advice. The idea that one’s sexual urges trump every other desire or goal in one’s life is fairly odd, and it’s easy to see how it could pretty quickly lead to short-sighted and destructive behavior. Certainly, if you are living a life that is making you miserable because you feel that your true self is unexpressed, you should make a change. If you’re working as an accountant because it pleases your parents but you really want to be a pastry chef, by all means start applying to culinary schools. If you’re… Read more »
I love how men are called “creatures” now. The rest is advice men really don’t need. What they really need is for every moral guardian to stop putting a cockblock every 5 minutes and accusing us of rape or some conspiracy of rape or whatever.
While the message of this post is quite well and good, I must say (without any malign intent) that the written quality is surprisingly poor. The Good Men Project has, in my experience, held itself to a much higher standard of writing, whether opinion-based or journalistic, and this has been a slight surprise. This is particularly troublesome for me as bad writing leads one to suspect bad thought, damaging the nature of the message itself. Please be more careful in the future.
While I don’t doubt heterosexual men suffer from fear, shame and being judged for the sexuality at times, heterosexual men actually are very liberally allowed to express their sexuality in our culture over anyone else. Even when it’s at the expense of others. We’ve been told for generations that “boys will be boys/men will be men” in varying ways. Especially in regards to sexuality. In a perfect world, in a world that didn’t have the kind of porn that seems to overwhelm the masses, books, television, even mainstream TV and movies, this advice would be fine. But we are *all*… Read more »
We’ve been told for generations that “boys will be boys/men will be men” in varying ways. What you may not have realized about that this sentiment does not mean “being boys/men, what they do is fine”, actually it means “What they do is disgusting, but there is no use trying to stop them, they will do it anyhow, we must tolerate it. But it still is disgusting.” That is the vibe I have always got from that phrase. It is not saying men are good whatever they do, it is saying they are bad and incurable. (Therefore feminism is actually… Read more »
“Sometimes as a woman, I do find men’s sexuality a scary thing though. Especially when it’s exploitive, predatory or objectifying”
That is really sad.
Any sexuality can be exploitative, predatory, and objectifying. This is a pretty common message said about male sexuality but I suspect its just a sexist stereotype.
Anyway you should watch yourself. People who are scared of something tend to try and control it.
“We’ve been told for generations that “boys will be boys/men will be men” in varying ways” …. this statement to me does not mean that men are authentically expressing their sexuality, but expressing a socialised version of themselves (what is expected of men according to social norms). Hence men find themselves tied up with all sorts of shame, guilt, embarrassment and fears regarding expressing their true sexual expressions…. for many this is buried deep in shadow and they would not even know what their true sexual expression of themselves looks and feels like.