 | | Are you "ready now to prioirtize pleasure," as Ms. Morse suggests?Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times |
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"Every day someone's faking an orgasm." |
— Emily Morse, sex educator |
She's a perfectly coifed brunette, wearing a silk green blouse, sitting in an armchair in what looks like someone's living room. Her feet are planted on the floor, her hands neatly folded across her lap. She could be a high-school history teacher conducting a Zoom class. |
And she's teaching on MasterClass: the education platform that has a select list of celebrity instructors like Martin Scorsese and Serena Williams. |
"What's the big deal about sex?" Emily Morse asks on camera, calmly, as though she's just told her students to turn to Chapter 1. |
In many ways, Ms. Morse's business — the business of sex expertise — was designed for a pandemic. Even before lockdowns began, she spent most of her workdays on her own in small recording rooms, answering variations of the same question: what to do at home when you're bored. |
Ms. Morse also hosts a podcast, "Sex With Emily," addressing listener questions that range from the common (how can I keep the spark alive?) to the niche (how can I safely get into swinging?); a daily two-hour radio show on SiriusXM; and regular live Q. and A. sessions with her more than 300,000 followers on Instagram — twice as many as she had before the pandemic. She also gave sex toy advice to Conan O'Brien on his show on TBS in April and joined the actor Dax Shepard on his new podcast, "The Armchair Expert." |
While Apple or MasterClass don't reveal traffic or streaming numbers for a podcast or a course, Ms. Morse's podcast is consistently highly rated, an average of 4.5 stars, and listener questions have increased significantly, she said in a recent interview. Her course has, since it was introduced in November, made it to MasterClass's "Most Popular" list, putting her next to Shonda Rhimes teaching writing for television and the French Laundry chef Thomas Keller teaching cooking techniques. |
"People are craving connection and intimacy," she said. "At the same time, couples are really struggling and so many people are experiencing stress and anxiety at alarming rates. So they're all ready now to prioritize pleasure." |
 | | The sex educator Emily Morse at her home in Los Angeles.Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times |
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On every platform, her work is focused on destigmatizing sex. "The name 'Sex With Emily' is intentional because every time somebody has to say the word 'sex,' it takes away the stigma a little bit," she said. It's also about amplifying pleasure for every body, and every gender identity. |
On any given day, she's dispensing practical advice, including how to clean sex toys and how to close the "orgasm gap," along with step-by-step guides for specific moves and tricks. |
Ms. Morse's success today isn't a story of an enterprising influencer jumping in at an opportune time. She started her podcast 15 years ago, at a time when podcasts were described by The New York Times as a "primarily amateur internet audio medium" and at a time when not many people were talking on them about sex and different sexualities in an open way. |
She realized early on that she could leverage her platform to sell products, long before Instagram was founded or the word "influencer" became common. |
The steady growth of her podcast suggested to Ms. Morse that, despite a long line of trailblazing sex therapists before her — like the iconic Dr. Ruth — despite a growing sex toys industry, and despite easily Googleable answers on the internet, people are still uncomfortable talking about sex, particularly when it comes to female pleasure and organs. |
Much of that mystery boils down to what she calls "False Evidence Appearing Real" or F.E.A.R. "Right now only 17 states in America require sex education to be medically accurate," she said. "And when they do teach it, it's often more fear-based — it's about abstinence or S.T.D.s or pregnancy — but never in any of these classes is it about pleasure." |
Pornography sites have been places people turn to for answers but, Ms. Morse said, that's like "learning to drive by watching 'The Fast and the Furious'!" |
"Not only do we have no information, but the information we have is misinformation." |
Ms. Morse recorded her first podcast episode in the summer of 2005 in her apartment in San Francisco. Until that point, right after graduating from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, she had worked in politics and as a video producer, most notably helping out on the mayoral campaign of Willie Brown in 1995, and later documenting Mr. Brown's re-election bid in 1999 in "See How They Run." |
Ms. Morse was still freelancing as a video producer when she decided to invite a few friends to her apartment to have some wine and share their sex stories while she recorded them, driven by "50 percent curiosity and 50 percent envy," she said. |
"I've always been a curious person but the envy part came in when I heard people talking about the amazing, mind-blowing sex that they were having," she said. "If someone said, 'I had great sex,' I would say, 'Wait, back up. What exactly do you mean by that?' I thought that perhaps I was the only one who was having sex that wasn't that amazing. I thought I was broken." |
Ms. Morse didn't masturbate until she was 25, she said, and by the time she started her podcast, at 35 years old, she still didn't fully understand female orgasms. This despite the fact that she had been in and out of several relationships and didn't have a puritanical or restrictive upbringing. Her mother would tell her to come to her with any questions, but "I didn't know what questions to ask — when you're young, you just don't know what you don't know," Ms. Morse said. |
That first podcast episode, with a Brazilian bikini waxer and a man named Captain Erotica, got roughly 75,000 downloads, she said — formidable considering how new the medium was. |
As a result of Ms. Morse's expanding recognition, her personal life has, at times, become a pain point. She'll go on dates with men (she has never wanted to get married, she said) only to realize they were there just so that they could brag about it or that they were just expecting out-of-this-world sex. "If I'm a chef, are you going to expect that every time you come over, I make a souffle?" she said. "What if I want to make you a microwave dinner sometimes?" |
Then came the pandemic, which shoved sex to the back burner for many. |
Ms. Morse said her listeners range from 18 to 85 and that in general the questions they ask aren't so different from the ones she got 15 years ago. "Every day someone's faking an orgasm. Every day somebody is in a long-term relationship where they are not getting their needs met and they don't know how to talk about it." |
But with couples locked down together and many single people loath to have casual sex, the tenor of the questions changed slightly. People want to know how to introduce variety or how to have sex when they are too exhausted. They want to know how to have an honest conversation with a new date about Covid-19 testing. |
And still, age-old myths persist. |
The biggest myth of all, she believes, is the one that drove her to this field in the first place — that everyone is having amazing sex all the time. "Our sex and our sexuality is a process, it's a journey," Ms. Morse said. Not something that you "can tick off the list, like tennis lessons." |
Read the full article here. |
Here are three articles from The Times you may have missed. |
 | | From left, Claire Johnson, Kari Brandt and Taylor Parsons, three female ski patrollers on duty at Diamond Peak in Incline Village, Nev.Jake Pollock |
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- "He said, 'I just want to tell you that my daughter wants to switch to snowboarding now, after seeing you.'" A surge in female ski patrols across the U.S. has helped that male-dominated sector catch up to the times. [Read the story]
- "When you get the job, you don't think of this in terms of: OK, I'm a woman getting a job. You think about: What is it that the company needs today?" In March, Jane Fraser will become the chief executive of Citigroup, making her the first woman to run an American megabank. She wants her gender not to matter. [Read the story]
- "I didn't mean it in that way." Yoshiro Mori, president of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee, resigned on Friday after making sexist comments suggesting that women talk too much in meetings. [Read the story]
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In Her Words is written by Alisha Haridasani Gupta and edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson. |
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