Saturday, February 13, 2021

In Her Words: ‘What’s the big deal about sex?’

Is Emily Morse this generation's Dr. Ruth?
Are you "ready now to prioirtize pleasure," as Ms. Morse suggests?Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times
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By Alisha Haridasani Gupta

Gender Reporter

"Every day someone's faking an orgasm."

— Emily Morse, sex educator

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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.

Except she's talking about the ever-elusive, much mythologized G-spot.

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.

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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

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.

What else is happening

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
  • "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]

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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On Politics: Donald Trump’s Impeachment Legacy: Violent Extremism

Whether or not Mr. Trump is convicted, the extremism that flourished under his administration is emb
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By Lisa Lerer

Politics Newsletter Writer

Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. I'm Lisa Lerer, your host. A programming note: We'll be taking off Presidents' Day on Monday, and will return on Tuesday, Feb. 16. Enjoy the holiday!

Erin Schaff/The New York Times

It was an extraordinary moment.

As a mob of rioters stormed its way down the halls of the Senate, Officer Eugene Goodman of the Capitol Police ran past Senator Mitt Romney, frantically directing him to seek cover. The former Republican presidential nominee broke into a sprint, taking off in the other direction. He most likely had reason to run: The day before, Trump supporters had heckled Mr. Romney on his way to Washington, chanting "traitor, traitor, traitor" on a crowded plane.

The world has seen so much footage from that painful day. But nearly all of it has focused on the attackers themselves. In the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump, we saw a new angle: Members of Congress running for their lives.

I heard nearly every moment of the trial, moving through my apartment as the hours passed. First in the living room, I watched it on television. Then from the kitchen, I listened to the radio while I made more coffee. And later on my computer in the bedroom once the kids came home, so I could avoid explaining why, exactly, those people were breaking windows with flagpoles and all the other questions that — despite the detailed presentation — I still couldn't answer with much confidence. Questions like, whether they will all go to jail and if everyone is really safe now.

It's that last question that lingers. Mr. Trump seems poised to be acquitted. But does this unprecedented moment in American history mark the beginning of the end of a particularly violent era? Or the end of the beginning?

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In the trial, the House managers tried to show how things that once seemed extraordinary became standard political combat. Like chants of "Lock her up" and violence at political protests — yes, on both the right and the left.

"In 2017, it was unfathomable to many of us to think that Charlottesville could happen," Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado, one of the Democratic House managers, told senators, arguing that acquitting Mr. Trump could encourage more violence. "Frankly, what unfathomable horrors could await us if we do not stand up and say, 'No this is not America'?"

But what if that question has already been answered? Whether or not Mr. Trump is convicted, the extremism that flourished under his administration has embedded itself in our politics.

Robert Pape, a specialist in political violence at the University of Chicago, analyzed the backgrounds and statements of nearly 200 Capitol attackers. His analysis found that most were middle-aged and middle class or wealthier. Many had good jobs. Nearly all — 89 percent — had no apparent affiliation with any known militant organization.

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"The Capitol riot revealed a new force in American politics — not merely a mix of right-wing organizations, but a broader mass political movement that has violence at its core and draws strength even from places where Trump supporters are in the minority," he wrote in The Atlantic.

That force shows little sign of backing down: Two weeks ago, the Homeland Security Department issued a rare terrorism alert warning that violent extremists were emboldened by the attack and motivated by "the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives."

There is some indication that such violent acts have support among some Americans, particularly within the Republican Party. A survey conducted by the American Enterprise Institute this week found that 55 percent of Republicans back the use of force as a way to "arrest the decline of the traditional American way of life," as compared with 35 percent of independents and 22 percent of Democrats.

In their impeachment defense, lawyers for Mr. Trump didn't focus on the attackers but the former president, arguing that he didn't intend to incite a violent attack. The parts of his rhetoric cited by the House impeachment managers were "selectively edited" and the video was manipulated, they said. The Trump team showed video montages of Democrats using the word "fight" — further torturing an already worn piece of political rhetoric. (Of course, none of those politicians, it's worth noting, were being tried for inciting a riot.)

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And they used Mr. Trump's comments in 2017 after the events in Charlottesville, Va. — that there were "very fine people on both sides" — to argue that his words have long been misconstrued. Former homeland security officials have cited those remarks as a defining moment that emboldened extremists.

Many Republicans in Congress are likely to seize upon this question of intent. Even with Mr. Trump out of office, crossing the former president would mean alienating a significant part of their base. Those, like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who promoted Mr. Trump's baseless claims of election fraud leading up to the ransacking at the Capitol, show no signs of changing their minds. It's quite likely that the final number of Republicans who vote for conviction will be well below the two-thirds majority required.

Eventually, the debate over Mr. Trump's culpability will be left to the history books. What will remain indisputable, however, is that his words mattered. Extremist violence flourished under his watch. And uprooting that will be a far more difficult national undertaking than a few long days in the Senate.

Is there anything you think we're missing? Anything you want to see more of? We'd love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com and follow me on Twitter at @llerer.

How many Republicans will switch sides?

Is Senator Bill Cassidy a Republican Party unicorn?

Earlier this week, the Louisianian captured headlines after he became the only Senate Republican to switch his position and vote to proceed with the impeachment trial.

Mr. Cassidy said he was swayed by the poor performance of Mr. Trump's lawyers in their opening arguments.

"It was disorganized, random — they talked about many things, but they didn't talk about the issue at hand," he said.

The question for Democrats is whether there could be more Cassidys to come.

It doesn't seem likely. Including Mr. Cassidy, just six Republicans voted with Democrats this week to reject Mr. Trump's constitutional objection to trying a former president. At least 17 Republican senators would need to join all 50 Democrats to convict Mr. Trump by a two-thirds majority.

That would require changing a number of minds. According to a New York Times whip count, three dozen Republicans have already said they oppose conviction. An additional 13 senators are undecided.

Reports from our colleagues on the Senate floor offer some insights into the current Republican mind-set.

Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah were seen entering a room with the Trump legal team on Thursday night. The next day, the senators animatedly made their arguments for acquittal to some of their Republicans colleagues.

Others flaunted their lack of interest as the House managers made their arguments. At points, a dozen or more Republican senators were away from their mahogany desks. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina retreated to his party's cloakroom to read on his phone. Senator Rick Scott could be seen filling out a blank map of Asia, inviting speculation about whether the junior senator from Florida would rather be in Wuhan than Washington this week.

And on Friday, even Mr. Cassidy signaled that he may soon blend into the herd. Sharp-eyed reporters spotted him carrying a draft of a statement indicating he planned to acquit Mr. Trump.

… Seriously

Just say no to slime. Your couch — and your sanity — will thank you.

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