2026 Sex Reset for Men: Stop Performance Anxiety & Get Harder, Longer, Better

Every January, men promise to fix their bodies and stop worrying about performance in bed. But what if trying harder is actually the problem?

In this episode of Talk Sex with Annette, we dive into the 2026 Sex Reset for Men with sex and relationship coach Caitlin V, host of Good Sex on Discovery+ and HBO Max, and author of Harder, Better, Longer, Stronger.

We explore why performance anxiety disrupts confidence, arousal, and connection, how the nervous system plays a bigger role than most men realize, and what actually helps men feel confident and present in bed again.

This episode is for men ready to move out of performance mode—and for partners who want better, more connected intimacy in 2026.

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Chapters

• 1:30 New Name And Mission
• 2:21 The 2026 Sex Reset For Men
• 4:16 Meet Sex Coach Caitlin V
• 8:18 Why Erections Fail: Start With When
• 13:42 Mind First: Performance Anxiety Explained
• 18:08 Emotions Men Aren’t Taught To Feel
• 25:00 Pressure, Porn Scripts, And Mismatch
• 30:24 Redefining Sex Beyond Penetration
• 35:00 Quantity Vs Quality: What Actually Matters
• 39:12 One Root, Many Symptoms: ED, PE, DE
• 45:55 Your 2026 Reset Plan: Mind, Body, Talk
• 57:24 Book, Summit, And Final Takeaways

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:46

I'm Annette Benedetti, host of the podcast formerly known as Locker Room Talk and Shots. The show has a new name, Talk Sex with Annette. But at its core, this is still your locker room. It's where we strip away shame, get curious, and speak the unspoken about sex, kink, dating, pleasure, and desire. Around here, nothing's off limits. These are the kinds of conversations we save for our boldest group chats, our most trusted friends, and of course, the women's locker room. Think raw, honest, and sometimes unapologetically raunchy. If you've been here from the beginning, thank you. And if you're new, welcome to my podcast where desire meets disruption and pleasure becomes power. Now, let's talk about sex. Cheers. Right, Love. Today's Talk Sex within Net topic is the 2026 Sex Reset for Men. Now, most of you already know that on January 1st, I launched my 365 days of orgasms, Pleasure is the Resolution journey, which primarily focuses on women and people with vulvas having and accessing more pleasure and accessing their sexual power and also helping their partners pleasure them more and feel more connected in bed. Well, today we are going to focus on men and getting men off to a great start in 2026, experiencing more confidence in bed and more pleasure. Because every January men promise themselves the same thing. I'm going to fix my body, I'm going to fix my performance in bed. I'm going to stop worrying about sex this year. But what if the problem isn't your body at all? What if erections, stamina, and confidence aren't mechanical issues, but more of a nervous system issue. Today's episode is a 2026 sex reset for men. And we're talking about why trying harder is often the thing that kills arousal and what actually works instead. And today we are all very, very lucky because my special guest, you've probably heard of her before, seen her before, or listened to her content before. My guest is Caitlin V. She is a sex and relationship coach, host of Good Sex on Discovery Plus and the HBO Max, and the author of an upcoming book that you are all going to want to get called Harder, Better, Longer, and Stronger. It's out January 27th, 2026. So if you are listening to this later on in the year, you're going to want to go get it. If you are listening to this on day one, you're going to want to like bookmark that and make sure that you are one of the first to order it. I mean, the name alone says it all. Her work is centered on helping men stop performing for sex and start experiencing it with confidence, presence, and pleasure. And I can tell you, as a woman who, you know, has sex with men, that is something we love to experience in a man. And this conversation is specifically for men who are ready to stop feeling broken because you're not, and start making real changes this year so that your year is full of better, harder, longer, stronger sex. Because I know that's what you want. But before we dive in, I have to remind you that I'm over on OnlyFans, and there I'm sharing my sex and intimacy how-tos. They're more in-depth there. My demos, my audio guided self-pleasure meditations. I'm also giving you an opportunity to have those one-off sex coach questions answered. That's where you do it. Head over there and I'll answer them for you. You can find me there with my handle at TalkSexwithanet. I'm on Substack doing a whole lot of the same. Find me there with my handle at TalkSexwithanet. You can also scroll down to the show notes below this episode, and you'll find the links to find me and Caitlin wherever you might want to find either one of us. So do that. But for now, Caitlin, I'm going to hand the mic over to you. And I would love for you to tell my listeners a little bit more about you.

SPEAKER_01: 4:48

Well, thank you so much for having me. First of all, I started as a sex curious youth who became a professional sexual health researcher. So I have a master's degree in public health, and I was actually working on my doctorate in public health when I realized that I was setting myself up to be trapped in the ivory tower for life, because the better that you are at academia, the more academia you do, just like anything else, the better you are, the the harder it is to leave. So I had a sort of wake-up call that what I really wanted to do, which I had been doing already at that point for 10 years, was sex ed and sex coaching and supporting people one-on-one. I would go and research and publish papers and be in the chlamydia lab and recruiting participants and organizing studies during the day, miserable. And then at night, I was the in-house educator for a non-monogamous group. I was the in-house educator for a nonprofit that worked with house, housing unstable, and unhoused youths. I was on the board of an LGBTQIA youth nonprofit. And those were the things that I was living for. When I would go and I would talk to someone and they would give me like a very specific ask or request, or we would talk out what was going on in their sex life. And then the next week they'd come back and they'd say, I tried the thing that you said. You know, I talked to my partner. I had an epiphany. And I would watch their life improve week over week over week with my support or guidance or just being a safe space for them to ask questions or work out these things that were very like taboo and personal and complex and nuanced. And so I decided to leave all of that and start a sex coaching business. Very soon after that, I got invited to be on someone else's YouTube channel that was doing well at the time. And we did a video on squirting, female ejaculation, and it went viral. And that was back in like 2015. And then I instantly had thousands of men asking for my support or my guidance or my coaching. And that launched my YouTube career. I now have uploaded over a thousand pieces of content on YouTube. And that led me to my television show, like you mentioned, and now my book.

SPEAKER_00: 7:03

And I think you are just going to be a great resource for this episode in particular. I think your knowledge base is incredible. Guys, you're going to want to go over, of course, to her channel, check it out, because she does have a lot of fantastic, high-quality, trustworthy content over there. And I think it's really important that you're listening to the people that are invested in and truly high-quality, trustworthy content creators over there. I'm now going to tell you guys why you want to stay to the end, which I think is obvious. So whether you are a man or you're someone who is with a man right now, by the end of this podcast, you are going to have a pleasure journey to launch and go on over the course of the 2026 together. You're going to have directions for that so that by the end of this year you are having the kind of sex and intimacy you want to have. And we're going to give you the tools, things you're going to be able to do throughout this year to feel more confident in bed, to stay harder if that's what you want, longer, if that's what you want, and to experience more pleasure, which I'm hoping that's what you want by the end of this year and feel confident doing it. So stay to the end, you're going to have a full course for the year. That's the plan, right? And Caitlin is definitely the person to help us with that. Caitlin, I am ready. I'm ready. Let's talk about sex and men's performance. Cheers. Cheers. All right. I want to start with this question. When men say I'm having erection problems, what do you think they are actually struggling with?

SPEAKER_01: 8:45

So the first thing that I ask is, when? When are you having erection problems? Is it with a partner? Is it solo during masturbation? Is it that you're not waking up anymore with an erection in the morning? Is it all of the time? Because that's going to give me the very first piece of information that I need to decide where to head. Because if they say it's all the time, we got to start with the physical body. We have to start with the cardiovascular system. We got to start with the endocrine system. We need to check for diabetes or prediabetes for heart conditions. The penis shows signs of a heart problem, let's say, years before it'll show up in other places. So the penis is a tremendous check engine in light. And so it, if that's the case, then great, we know exactly where to start. And we're going to send you to a doctor, we're going to get some labs done, and then we're going to figure out where to go from there. And I say great, but I only mean great in the sense that like clarity is really, really powerful. And so great that we have clarity on where we're going to start. If it's happening only with a partner and they're able to wake up with an erection and get hard when they want to when they are alone, also fantastic, clarity, right? Now we know that it is inside of the mental, the emotional, or the relational space. So the check engine light is not on the physical body, it's on the relationship. It's on his mindset, it's on his emotional world. It may even be inside of his spiritual engine that we need to look. But the information on where to begin is really sorted by that initial question of when is this happening?

SPEAKER_00: 11:29

So when we have the physical body out of the equation, which is going to be a big concern, right? We want to make sure you're healthy. But when we have that answer, it's not that you have health problems that are causing you to be incapable of getting an erection. And we know that it's the mental, emotional, or spiritual body. Which one of those do you find is most common the underlying cause of erection problems?

SPEAKER_01: 11:57

That's a fantastic question. In my system, I always start with the mental body. And that is because it's the easiest for most of us that are like in this Western world to begin with. Because we can all, we're all clear that we do have a mind and that we create thoughts and that our thoughts dictate how we move through the world and that they can get in the way of us having a great sexual experience, whether that includes being hard or not. Our mind is incredibly powerful and it directs a lot of what we do and how we do it and how we receive other people. And so for a lot of men, especially when it comes to having erectile challenges or inconsistent erections, they have now made it in their mind that this tremendous, like an ongoing burden that they that they are like constantly mentally focused on. Is it going to happen again? So it happened one time, right? Or it happened and it caused them to start thinking about it happening again. And now they're inside of another encounter with another partner. And their mind is presenting all of these fears and concerns and caution signs, and it's preventing them from being present with the other person. And when that happens, yeah, you are actually more likely to lose your erection or not be able to get hard. But it's not necessarily because of your physical body now, because your mind is telling you that and your mind is focused on those things. And if your mind is focused on those things, it can't be focused on the person in front of you. It can't be focused on your actual felt experience and the pleasure that's happening in your body. You can't be present because you are somewhere else. And that is sort of the core of performance anxiety as most folks experience it and understand it. So that is where I always start. And besides that, it doesn't hurt to start with the mind, anyways, because we can always clear up a little bit of the mindset that someone is bringing to sex anyway. Right. Like, are you approaching sex from a scarcity mindset where it's like I have to say yes to all the sex that's offered to me, or it could go away at any time, or that I have to I have to like perform because if I don't, I'm gonna lose my partner. Right. All of those mindsets also contribute to us being absent from our experience and absent from our body in bed. After we've moved through sort of what I call the mental engine, then I get into the emotional engine. Because it does not matter how in tune you are as a man, what kind of work, like self-work or processing or therapy you have done, all men that are alive today, at least in the United States where I do the majority of my work, and and I would say like most of the Western world, are very divorced from their feelings and their emotions, even if they're really good at naming them, even if they kind of have a sense of like what is going on and how to process them. I think all people are sort of divorced from their emotions. It shouldn't be until I was in my mid-30s to figure out how to feel my feelings. And it was a terrifying process at first, turns out to be one of the most pleasurable and exciting. And my life is like so much easier and happier now that I know how to feel my feelings. And, you know, I rely less on numbing out or I rely less, you know, I'm less anxious now that I know how to feel my feelings, but it took a process to get there. So I don't blame a single human being for not knowing because we were not educated on how to have a quality relationship with our emotions, and men got the shortest end of that stick. Men across the board have been taught that to be a man, you must repress your emotions, do not show them, do not feel them. And if you do, make sure that you route them all through anger because anger is acceptable. Isn't it funny also that we've kind of convinced people that anger is somehow not an emotion? That the cultural narrative is that women are the emotional gender and men are not. Yet I've never, I've not known too many women to like punch a hole through a wall, you know? Anger is an emotion. It happens to be the emotion that men have the most access to because it is culturally assigned to them and it is appropriate and it doesn't challenge your masculinity to experience anger. But emotional outbursts, whether they are anger or sadness or grief or shame or whatever, are are all a result of us channeling our emotions inappropriately. So I work with men to figure out sort of like what is their emotional texture that's happening underneath the surface. Maybe they lost a job and they're grieving. In the case of erectile dysfunction, they might be grieving the loss of of their body, the functioning that they could always rely on. I got hard every single time I wanted to get hard until just now. And I'm grieving the loss that of ability that I'm experiencing. But if I'm not able to name that it's grief, feel the grief, process the grief, and move on beyond the grief, then it's just sort of like sitting in there and rotting. I like to think and compare emotions to vegetables. Like they are best eaten fresh. When you get them home from the store, the farmer's market, or whatever, that's like kind of the best time to eat those vegetables. The longer that you leave them in the fridge, the grosser that they get. The weird thing about emotions, and it's true about groceries too, is you you're gonna keep bringing them home. You know, you're gonna keep adding vegetables to this drawer. So if you don't clear out the old ones, you're just setting yourself up for a disaster. Better to just get to them while they're fresh, clean them out. They're a lot easier to deal with. And then once we've moved through those, we'll go into the relationship, which includes communication, the relationship dynamics. If there's like unspoken or unresolved things that exist in the relationship, and then into the spiritual body, my question, is the sex that you are having aligned with who you are as a person? Is it fulfilling the role that sex and eroticism is really designed to fill in your life? Or are we putting more or less of an emphasis on it than it really deserves? So if you're having orgasms but they feel sort of empty, or you feel incomplete on the other side, or you feel that the sex that you're having doesn't deeply connect you to yourself and another person, then there's a missing in the spiritual nature of sex and sexuality. And so by the time that we've moved through these four layers mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual, then we've usually cleared up the gunk that's getting in the way of doing what your body was designed to do, which is to be able to enjoy and experience sex and pleasure.

SPEAKER_00: 18:07

Do you think that most men, I could say most people, but we're focusing on men, have thought through or even know why they really want to have sex and what role sex is supposed to play in their life beyond procreation.

SPEAKER_01: 18:30

That is another great question. Yes and no. I think because we culturally prescribe men that they are supposed to want sex, whereas we do the opposite for women, and so a lot of women struggle with that question. I think men know that they are quote unquote supposed to want sex, and sex is supposed to be the way that they feel connected. And I think a lot of the sort of interrogation or reflection process stops there. But what ends up happening because of that is that men associate sex with love and sex with connection. And so much emphasis gets placed on sex and sexuality that it cannot hold. So, for example, if if sex is the only place where you're allowed to experience pleasure, you're gonna put an outrageous emphasis on sex, right? Because we as you know and all of your listeners know, like pleasure is key to part of it's part of what makes a human experience worth having, right? It's one of the reasons I think that we're embodied is so that we can experience pleasure. And if sex is the only place that you can experience pleasure, and say you're like single, right? Or or you're divorced, you've set yourself up really to to a need sex in order to have this very human experience. And B, you've set yourself up to like create sex as a as a transaction almost. Which is not to say that sex isn't a need, it absolutely is, but if it is the only place where you can get some of those needs met, then you've put such a tremendous weight on it that it cannot hold. Another example of that is connection. I tell a story in my book about a couple, friend of mine, where he really wanted and expected to have sex every single day with her. And she was feeling like she could not fulfill this requirement, this need that he had. And what it came down to is that he wanted to have sex in order to feel connected. He didn't really feel connected and safe and loving in the relationship unless he was having sex. And she wanted to feel connected before she could open up and have sex. I think a lot of people find this to be an experience that they've had in a relationship before. But men, more than women, are told that to want connection, to want to just be held, to want to experience physical touch, to want to have a moment of release or or just like tenderness is not masculine. It's it's it's that's effeminate, right? And but it is masculine to want sex, even though what maybe we want through sex is something that is so much more like general to to to human functioning and flourishing. But if sex is the only road that is appropriate or culturally prescribed in order to get those needs met, then sex is all you have to focus on. If all you have is a hammer, then all of the world is a nail. Right? If all you have is sex, then all human connection, touch, tenderness, love, acceptance, and all that has to be routed through sex, and sex cannot hold all of that.

SPEAKER_00: 22:29

Right. And so what I'm hearing is men are experiencing a lot of pressure to have sex, whether it's to get the needs met. That they have, or to be considered manly or masculine enough, whether that's by their partner or by their community or by the society, which is more of what they think the society thinks of them. It's this pressure that's going to build up inside of them. What does that pressure do to their mind and their body then once they are in an intimate situation?

SPEAKER_01: 23:10

Yeah, that pressure is exactly the thing that causes erectile inconsistency or dysfunction, premature ejaculation, coming too soon or before you and your partner are ready, delayed ejaculation, the inability to come, but it is also what creates disconnection. It is also what causes them to watch themselves from outside of themselves, performing sexually. It is also the thing that creates breakdown in relationships around fantasies, around desire, around creating the kind of sex that we want to have. And what ends up happening is that we we're performing a script. We're performing a script that was assigned to us from outside of ourselves, in locker rooms, when we were young, from porn. And I'm not against porn, but a lot of porn is designed really for entertainment and not because that is what the kind of sex that you should be having at home with your partner would look like if you both were like slowing down enough to communicate around that. And there is some great porn that does demonstrate that, but most people are not accessing that kind of porn, right? Most people are accessing the the I like to think of it as like Jurassic Park or like Fast and Furious, right? Like Fast and Furious doesn't really describe how it's like to drive for most of us. It would be a less interesting movie, I suppose, if it was just like here's how I drive to go get my groceries.

SPEAKER_00: 24:26

Right. So this is such a great point. You can watch porn for entertainment, but like a movie, they're taking out the messy part, the work part, the constantly reapplying lube. They're taking out the cleanup or the prep that goes into like if you want to have anal sex with her, she might want to know that ahead of time and do some prep. Like all of those details, just like in Fast and the Furious, it's not, you know, they don't go into all of the work that goes into the car and the hours spent thinking or whatever, because we'd get bored. Right. And so that if you think that you just go into like sex and you don't have to do those things, like put the lube on, like prep her, do that. You know what I mean? Right, you're gonna go in and her reaction is not gonna give you the feedback you want, which is, oh, this is fantastic. She's gonna be bracing and clenching against you, right? Right.

SPEAKER_01: 25:26

And consider that the absence of all of that prep work and planning and considering and reflecting is what creates pressure. Because now you're operating with an incomplete manual. You think that you're just supposed to show up, get hard, get her off, get off yourself, and like, you know, turn the music off and go to bed. It operating without a complete instruction manual does create a ton of pressure. If you've ever been, you know, put in a situation where you were woefully unprepared and all of a sudden had to do, had to perform a task that that is that is the definition of pressure. I would be shocked if your body did work under those circumstances, right? Your body is just a reflection of what's happening inside of your mind and your emotional state and your spiritual and cultural and relational places. Like it is, it is the best mirror that is just reflecting all of that. And so if your body isn't quote unquote performing the way that you want it to, that is a reflection of something that is off inside of the system. It is not what a lot of folks make it out to be, a lot of men especially make it out to be an indication that something is wrong with you or that you are broken, right? It is an indication of a lack of complete information, a lack of education, a lack of knowledge, a lack of wisdom, a lack of know-how. But the good news is that you can learn. You know, I like to compare sex to cooking a lot because I'm not a natural, I'm not a natural foodie. Or I don't like food's not my thing. It's not my main love. I'm more of like an eat to live than a live-to-eat person. But I have had to learn because I wanted to have a healthy relationship with food, and because the people who I love love food. And food is such an important part of like how we connect with each other. Like I've had to learn how to prepare food, how to have a relationship with food, where to go to learn from experts about food, how to like, you know, converse with our recipe book and like develop these skills. It didn't come to me naturally, but wait, no one shames me for that. No one looks at me and goes, Caitlin, you should you should know how to roast a chicken from birth, you know, just shut off the lights and know exactly how to roast a chicken. Sex is no different, it is a series of skills that you can learn.

SPEAKER_00: 27:37

I want to go back to something you said that I thought was interesting. While things will show up in your body, like your body won't work during sex, and it's telling you something is off. It is true when you can't get hard or stay hard or you come too soon. It's showing up in your body, it's telling you something's off. A man, and correct me if I'm wrong, you're the expert here, is automatically gonna say, What's wrong with my body? What's wrong with me? But what they aren't understanding is it's not necessarily your body, it's a warning sign that something's off, but it could be just knowledge, it could be education, it could be so many other things than your body, but instead there's this like self-blame and the shame and embarrassment, which affects the confidence, and then you get stuck in this loop. Shame shame loop, right? Where it could be, oh, I'm not able to get hard, something's off. Maybe I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing here.

SPEAKER_01: 28:45

What I like to say is like you don't know what you don't know. And so, you know, uh the and this is totally a byproduct of the world that we live in, but a lot of men will go straight to a urologist, right? And they're just like, oh, my body, because men have been taught to treat their bodies like machines, they'll go and they say, Okay, there's something wrong with my machine. Can you give me a pill or a prescription or a treatment or something that fixes the machine? Right. When in reality, even if there is, even if even if you do decide to take a pill or a PDE5 inhibitor like Viagra, they are shown consistently in study after study to be more effective if they are combined with some form of behavioral shift, talk therapy, or sexual education. Over and over and over and over and over again, stress management, like you name it, they they are always improved, even if you decide to take the fill. It is always improved by some other intervention that is not physical in nature and is instead more on the mental, emotional, relational, spiritual world. And that is because you are not just a single system and you are not a machine. And I think, you know, my book really at the end of the day, if I was to describe my book in like, or what's the core thesis of my book, essentially is that like men are whole human beings. And we have treated their sexuality as if it should be extremely straightforward, as if it is it is uncomplicated. And if anything is wrong, it's on the individual. Whereas on the opposite side of that, we've often treated women's sexuality as if it is complicated and nuanced and and some sort of like enigma and very difficult to like sort out. So women have the privilege of being treated like whole people, but we are also treated as if our sexuality is like a series of problems that need to be solved. And men have had the experience of being treated like machines, and any sexual problem that they have has been treated as if like just making a tweak to the machine would improve it. And what I'm here to propose is that both sides of this spectrum, and and that we're not even including non-binary folks inside of this, but in this individual spectrum of just cis men and cis women, that both sides are getting shafted is the word that's coming to mind. I like that word. Both sides are shafted in this deal. It's not fair to anybody, you know? We it's not fair when we treat some people as whole complex and nuanced beings and some people as if they're not. And it's hard to have this conversation because a lot of folks are very, very sensitive and rightfully so, to censoring men, right? We finally got to a point where, in a lot of our conversations about sexuality, about culture, about power, about leadership, no longer center men and particularly like cisgender, heterosexual men. So, so it can be very difficult to like put this thesis forward. And by the way, this book was so difficult to get published because of this. So many people said no one wants to talk about men's sexuality, men don't buy books, no one cares. Right? What I'm trying to say here with this book and and and you know, with my individual work and what I'm putting forward on YouTube is to say, like, we all don't rise unless all of us rise. Like it is not about decentering men and centering women, it is about centering the the person in the person's experience. And we, it's not a competition for a single spot at the center or at the top of the mountain. Like all of us have to be at the top of the mountain together for this to work. And the women who we are now centering all want to have relationships with men. They're having sex with men. They're looking, they want partners, they want husbands, they want lovers, right? And if we're not talking to men, then we're we're missing half of the equation. And the other piece of this, and why I'm really passionate about working with men, is that a lot of the time relationship stuff in general falls on women, right? I'm guilty of this. Like if something doesn't feel totally right in the relationship, in them talking about again, heterosexual relationships, then I'm often it's the woman who's taking them into therapy, who's like dragging you into coaching, who is doing the research, who's reading the books, who's like, I'm gonna fix the relationship, I'm gonna work on the relationship, we're gonna figure out what's going on, right? That's amazing. It's so cool that women are willing to do that. What I want is to take some of the burden off of women when it comes to the intimate and sexual partnership, and say, men are great leaders in this environment. Men are phenomenal at taking a leadership role when it comes to sexuality, when it comes to the intimacy in the relationship. They are often the torchbearer of that in the partnership. They're also the cheerleader who's saying, like, we should be having sex. Let's have some intimacy. Life would be better if we touched each other a little bit more. Let's use that. Let's take that momentum instead of instead of shaming men for wanting sex or being sexual beings, let's teach them exactly how to approach that. And I think you're doing a fabulous job of this yourself with your content. Like, let's teach them how to do that in such a way that women want to get on board and want to follow along. And that has to start with them as individuals.

SPEAKER_00: 33:49

I wonder if your experience is the same as mine as mine. 90% of the couples that come to me for help with sexual issues come to me because the man initiated it. I mean, almost all are men saying to their wives, now to be fair, they're saying I want more sex. I think what women do is say, let's go to a therapist. I want more connection and intimacy. And the and I think what we're seeing here is they're both wanting the same things. They're using different routes to it and language to it for it, and language for it to get their needs met. Now, so my question to you is this, because we've talked about the pressure on men for performance for sex, and in this conversation, I'm sure that it's being interpreted by men and probably cis women. We are and to be clear, you did point out this this conversation is kind of centering more around heterosexual relationships, right? But when they're thinking about sex and performance, my guess is a lot of it's like P and V. We get in bed, we make out for a minute, maybe I go down on you for a second, but my dick goes in you now or having sex. Is part of the solution having a more expansive definition of what sex is. Because I'm wondering if that's a big part of the problem, too, is how sex is being defined by both people in the relationship, assuming this is a heterosexual relationship.

SPEAKER_01: 35:34

And the role that sex plays in the relationship for both people, right? Like if we can have a really honest conversation around, you know, what does sex mean to you? What does it, what role does it play in our relationship? What needs does it fulfill? What needs isn't it fulfilling, but you think maybe it could fulfill if we applied some time and energy to it? Most people that come to work with me in general are men. So so I think that when they and and sometimes, yeah, and I guess to answer your previous question, like it is often men who are initiating the conversation and their female partner who's going along and saying, like, okay, I, you know, having more sex doesn't excite me. But if you're telling me that we're gonna have better sex, maybe even less of it, but it's gonna be really high quality, I could get on board with that. Because sex does matter to me, and I want to make sure that like we're we're maintaining that part of our relationship. So I think that is part of the and the impetus for people to come into coaching.

SPEAKER_00: 36:29

That's interesting to me. You say women are like, I don't necessarily want more sex, but if better sex. But what if, because the wording around this is interesting, what if it men were like, well, I want to figure out how we can have more intimate pleasure or more physical connection. I think the wording between men and women is interesting because if women start perceiving intimacy and touch and laying in bed and stroking bodies as the connection they want, and men start seeing laying in bed without necessarily penetrating and humping away as sex, because sex can happen, right? I am queer, I have sex with men and women, people of all genders, and I have plenty of sex that never involves any penetration, right? But I definitely know I got laid, right? But the view of what sex, what equals sex.

SPEAKER_01: 37:27

Yeah, yeah. Have you heard of the Ravioli study? This is me shorthanding it. It's that's not what it is called, but I think what I took out of it is this really great analogy, which is like researchers are asking men and women how much do they enjoy sex, right? And we're using this word sex, and men and women are giving us two different responses, right? But what they learned is that the average sex that most like heterosexual couples are having isn't really the same for both people, right? Because the sex that we're having for the most part is centering the penis and penetration and all the things that you're mentioning there. And so it's almost like, you know, you took men and you prepared a like farm-to-table Michelin star ravioli, and that's what they ate for the study. And then women got Chef Boyard ravioli out of a can. And then we said, Do you like ravioli? Well, you would expect that they would have two different responses based on what ravioli means to them. But did they both get ravioli? Absolutely, they did, right? So we're not asking the right question. Do women enjoy sex? Yes. When when sex is good, when it is when it is quality, when it is centered on not just her pleasure, but an equal shared amount of experience of pleasure, women report overwhelmingly that they like sex as much as men. But if we're asking the average, and a lot of these studies are done on college students, right, who are already not having the best sex of their lives, and we're not asking them the same question. We're not asking them a fair and equitable question. We're defining sex as, or they're experiencing sex as two totally different things. And therefore, we're stuck in this place where we have a very limited term to describe a whole bunch of experiences and behaviors. And you're totally right. When we limit sex to just like penis and vagina penetration, then we are missing out on the energetic aspects of sex, the sensual aspects of sex, even just the kinky aspects of sex. Like, I have definitely felt like I had sex just having a conversation. One time I remember I was at a restaurant and the waiter came up to me. This meet me and my ex-husband were out to lunch. And the waiter came up and all three of us looked at each other, and I was like, Did we just have threesome? Like, I it was like the whole world. I've only had this happen one time. I would love for it to happen again. But but the whole world stopped for a minute. And I could tell it happened to all three of us. All three of us had like a get moment, like, what just happened, right? And I was like, Did we instead of the waiter walked away was like, did we just have sex? Like, what is going on? Right. So that's that's maybe on the most extreme of the abstract examples and energetic examples. But if we can, if we can define sex more broadly and if we can include eroticism in it, then it is going to be capable of holding more and giving us more back. The other thing I'll add to that is I I write about this client in the book too. I had a client, I've actually, this is not a singular client. This is an amalgamation of many, many clients who have come to me and said, I want to have more sex. And I've said, Okay, I think you what you want is more quality sex, but let's start with more sex, because we you can have more sex, right? And we'll work together, we'll work with, you know, maybe him alone or maybe him and his partner. And they'll end up to a point where they're having more sex. And inevitably he'll come back to me and say, We're having more sex, and it's not great. I've I've discovered that more was not the answer. And I say, Yeah, I are you ready to like actually do the work to figure out how to make the sex better? Because I guarantee that quality matters more than quantity to you, but it's so much easier to focus on things that can be easily measured, right? It's very easy to say we went from having sex two times a week to two times a month. That's no one can argue with that. Look at the board, look at the statistics. Like that's that's clear, right? We can't argue with the chart. But what they're actually saying is I went from feeling really safe to be vulnerable and accepted and held by you to feeling like I have to work really, really hard to deserve to be vulnerable in your presence. It's way harder to even know that that's what's going on, let alone communicate it to someone else, and like that's the real work that we do.

SPEAKER_00: 42:29

So for men who are listening to this, and let's say they could be suffering from ED, or they feel they come too fast, or they're not hard enough, or you know, they just feel like at the end, like, okay, I had sex, but I don't I don't even feel like I was in it. First of all, are all of these things likely to be linked to sort of a similar cause if it's not physical? Are we gonna approach most of these things in the same manner?

SPEAKER_01: 43:04

Yes. And I I'm so glad that you're highlighting that because I think for men and for women they appear as these like totally distinct categories, premature ejaculation, delayed ejaculation, or tell dysfunction. Like they seem very, very different because their physical manifestations are very distinct, but the root causes are the same. And it's sort of like each individual body deals with pressure in its own way. You know, some men are more primed to deal with pressure by ejaculating early. That has evolutionary advantages. If your ancestors ejaculated quickly, you were more likely to pass on your genes. That's a very legitimate way to deal with pressure at a biological level. Some folks they deal with pressure. By not entering, right? They'll go soft and then their body's saying, like, I'm not even going to go in there because I'm afraid of failure, I'm afraid of resentment, or I don't feel safe in this relationship. The body's just reflecting what's happening inside and the pressure that's being placed internally. And for delayed ejaculation, that pressure might look like I don't feel safe enough to completely let go and to fall into the abyss of orgasm or to lose control for this moment. Or I've desensitized myself so much that I can't really be totally present with my pleasure, or my body's not capable of sort of like amassing enough of a wave of pleasure and sensation in order to push me over the edge to orgasm. And I don't know where to go other than just real physical sensation in order to get myself there. The equivalent often, and I think this is one of the things that makes it very confusing for folks, is often the equivalent for women is some form of painless sex and inability to orgasm. Right. And that can come from pressure, right? When I feel like I need to orgasm or it should be orgasming or I ought to be more orgasmic or whatever, I'm feeling pressure at work, I'm feeling pressure at home. That can often translate to me not being able to reach orgasm in bed or not being able to have multiple orgasms like that. A good day without a lot of pressure, my body just kind of like responds to pleasure as it comes. And the more that I pressure it to be your responsive to pleasure, like a cat that doesn't want to be caught, I'm just kind of chasing it around my apartment, right? Or repeat that over, you know, years or decades and add having sex or having penetration before we were ready. And now we have a recipe for pain with sex. And so the causes are like we're we're all human, right? Like the causes are pretty much universally the same. There's not that many places where we can go. The cool thing about my work and and I think like teaching people and educating people on sex in general is that all of us kind of think that we have a very unique presentation of challenges and obstacles. And like at the end of the day, it's always either physical, mental, emotional, relational, cultural, or spiritual. It's one of those categories. There's nothing else that it could be. It is a finite number of categories, and it's often a few of those, and it's often one that we avoid or that we haven't been willing to tackle head on that will make the biggest difference and cause a crescendo that will allow us to get clear in all of the other ones. At the end of the day, our bodies were all designed and evolved to experience sex and pleasure. It's the one thing that all of our ancestors have in common. Some of us are lactose intolerant, some of us can, you know, are more inclined to have this chronic condition or that chronic condition, but every single one of us, up until very recently, the last couple of few generations, reproduced sexually. We're meant to do it. Anything that's getting in the way is existing in one of those areas as sort of like gunk in the system, and we can clear out the gunk and get back to a degree of pleasure and functioning that feels good to us and helps you feel confident.

SPEAKER_00: 46:38

So for men who are listening to this right now now, they know the categories that things could be in. I want you to kind of give them a starting point, right? For this year, for their path back to feeling confident, to figuring out what the gunk in the system is and getting it cleared so that by the end of this year, they are on the same path. Hopefully, that their partners or female partners are going to be on working with me. Where do they start? What are some tools, exercises? What is the approach they can start tonight to set on that path for a complete sexual reset in 2026?

SPEAKER_01: 47:18

The first thing is a mindset shift, which is acknowledging that we don't know what we don't know. And it is potentially the largest and biggest and scariest thing that we can do to set us off on a different path is to acknowledge that there are things that we know we don't know, and there are things that we know we we don't know that we do not know. Because that mindset creates a sort of openness to discovery about ourself and about the world. And I think this is an area that's very vulnerable for people to acknowledge. Scary to acknowledge that there are things that I don't even know that I don't know about intimacy and about sex. I'm a fully functioning adult. I've been having sex for 20 or 30 or 40 years at this point. Like, how is it that there's things that I don't know? Starting there creates a sort of curiosity, a spaciousness. I hope it creates some safety for you to go into exploration. And that also, when you go into exploration, is not going to limit you to just things that you think you can learn from. You become an erotic explorer and discover that the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. And that you can learn about how you are sexually by watching how you go grocery shopping. You can learn about how you are erotically by witnessing how you handle a meeting at work. Like it's you, you are a complex being and there's information about how to improve your confidence or your sex life available everywhere. You, when you increase your confidence in one area of your life, you are developing the skills and capacity to increase that in other areas. So if you feel very confident, for example, in the gym, but you don't feel very confident in the bedroom, then how can you take what you have learned, what you know about yourself in the gym and bring that into your erotic life? So working on that mindset shift, which may seem a little bit vague, but really is a practice that you can engage in just by watching your own mind and constantly sort of going, nope, this is the new way that we think. This course correct, like just like you with it with child. Like, nope, we don't do that. Nope, we don't put plastic in our mouth. Nope, we don't eat plastic. Nope, we don't eventually they learn, right? The second thing that I would invite you to do is some sort of somatic work. So this may look like somatic therapy on one end, but it also might just look like learning how to breathe, how to move slowly. It might look like even just a gentle movement practice or a practice of like rolling yourself out with like massage balls and foam rollers, like, but make it guided, make it slow, make it intentional, because tension in the body translates to tension in the mind and tension in the bedroom. So when you have a somatic practice that helps you to feel your body, notice where tension is, notice where emotions live in your body, and like make it safe to feel them and express them, you're going to see that payoff dividends, but it is slow work. It took years for me to get to where I felt like I could safely feel my body and feel my emotions and process them intelligently. Start now. And by the end of this year, you will have seen tremendous shifts. But it's not a one-time thing. You don't just dip in and then dip out. The cool thing about somatic work is that it works best when you do it at a pace at which you feel safe. So if it feels like it's too much, it's too much. It's actually way more effective. And this is something I'm very masculine instead of the way that I do things, and it's one of the reasons that I work so well with men is like, I think if it's not intense, it's not working. No, no, no, no, no. With somatic work, the less intense the better. The body is so cool. So figuring out some sort of practice that allows you to connect your mind and your body and to like slowly expand the way that you can process through your body, you're gonna see an incredible shift over the next 12 months. And then the third piece that I would say engage in a conversation that you have been wanting to have, but have been held back on. And that could be a conversation with yourself. That could be a conversation with someone who isn't even present anymore. That could be like you writing a letter to your ex and then burning it, but saying the things that you needed to say. That could be you having a conversation with a current partner about something you want to try in bed, a sexual fantasy that you have, something that you you just haven't opened up with them about. That could be a conversation that you need to have, even with like a platonic relationship, a friend. But clearing out these things that you're holding on to, releasing the stuff that's no longer serving you, that's like protecting you, that's like potentially keeping you stuck where you are. Engage in some kind of a conversation related to your sexuality, sure, but engage in the one that you know that you're thinking of like right now, that you're like, that's the conversation you really don't want to have. I guarantee you'll survive it. Number one, you've lived through every single hard conversation you've ever had. You're still here to tell the tale, you're breathing, you're listening to this right now. You will survive it and you will experience benefits in and outside of the bedroom for getting clear on those things.

SPEAKER_00: 52:20

Clearing out the gunk. Clearing out the gunk. I like that. I like the gunk. It is so interesting listening to your advice and seeing how much it aligns for what I tell women I work with. You know, it's so funny when it all comes down to it. And you said this in the middle of our conversation. It's about the person. Right? It's about the person. We're all people. Right. So thank you for this conversation. I think it this is a great launch into 2026, folks. I'm gonna give you an opportunity right now, Caitlin, to tell everybody where they can find you, everything you have to offer, because I know that right after I launch this, they are going to want to get your book and and and see your content and find out all the information you have.

SPEAKER_01: 53:12

Thank you so much. I'm holding up my book right now. The book is called Harder, Better, Longer, Stronger. And you can actually pre-order it anywhere that you buy books. So you can get it from Brunson Noble, Waterstones, Amazon, you can buy it on Kindle or e-reader, and I recorded the audiobook. So if you enjoyed listening to me speak today, you can listen to me dictate a book to you for however many hours. I don't know. It's not, I haven't seen it yet. Pre-ordering this book in particular is incredibly helpful because the way that the New York Times and USA today count bestsellers is based a lot on pre-orders. And because this book was so difficult to get published, and because people generally believe that men don't buy books, men don't buy books on sexuality, and no one cares about men's sexuality, it's it's sort of like sending a big message to the publishing world that books like this actually do matter and people really do care about these subjects, and it will make way for more books like this to be published. It's helpful for me, yes, but it actually is more helpful for breaking the ceiling that we've all been living under that I discovered when I went to propose a book. It was it publishers turned it down, agents turned it down. I heard over and over and over again there's a reason that a book like this has never been published. And so here it is, the first one, and and you could be a part of sending that message. So it's very helpful if you'll pre-order it. We're also doing a summit launch event. The summit is called From Pressure to Power, presented by Bathmate. And that is happening on January 17th at 9 a.m. Pacific, noon Eastern, and it's totally free. You can register for the summit. It's me and five guest speakers, and we're going to each be talking about one of the engines that we spoke about today. So the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and cultural engines that that are part of my work and my process and that the book is based on. And you can register for that. I'll make sure that you have all the links there, but you can find all of this at HBLS Book. That's harder, better, longer, stronger. HBLS Book.com.

SPEAKER_00: 55:12

I also want to add in I know that we talked primarily about cis heteronormative relationships in this conversation. I think this book, though, is for anybody. I think heterosexual men, yes. I know that gay men, bi men, you know, all have these same struggles in their relationship. I also want to say that women who are with men who struggle, or even if they don't, if you're single and especially middle age, and you're finding a new partner, and then how often do women say that I started dating and he can't get hard, and you feel bad about yourself, or you feel bad about him, this book is gonna help you understand the men you are being intimate with or the people with penises. This isn't gonna affect any AMAB body. So this book is for everyone and and making helping men and people with penises have you know have answers to some of these questions and be able to access more confidence in bed helps everybody. So everybody who's listening to this, regardless of gender and sexual orientation, should consider getting this book and educating yourself because as we said in this podcast, education is the cure and the fix for so many sexual problems. Period. Yeah? There we go. I thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you coming on and offering your wisdom and some answers and some guidance to my listeners. I hope to have more conversations with you in the future.

SPEAKER_01: 56:52

Thank you, it's my pleasure.

SPEAKER_00: 56:55

And to my listeners, until next time, I'll see you in the locker room. Cheers.