Dr. Kelly Neff - Sex Positive: Redefining Our Attitudes to Love & Sex

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Kelly Neff is a social psychologist, author, professor, futurist and talk-radio personality who has electrified the transformational media world with her unique focus on the intersection of psychology, consciousness and human sexuality.

An academically trained research psychologist, she received her BA (2004) in Psychology magna sum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Georgetown University and her MA (2006) and PhD (2010) in Social Psychology from Claremont Graduate University. She has spent nearly a decade as an associate professor of psychology, teaching both online and in-person Psychology of Human Sexuality courses at Saddleback College in California.

A millennial disrupter with a commitment to exploring the leading edge of psychology and technology, she wrote her first book, Teaching Psychology Online in 2013, and followed it up with articles on sex, consciousness, psychology and futurism that have been read and shared tens of millions of times across websites like The Mind Unleashed, Wakeup World and MindBodyGreen . Her hit show Lucid Planet Radio has attracted expert guests across the sciences, popular culture and esoteric traditions and has been streamed to hundreds of thousands of ears across the globe since it hit the airwaves in 2015.

Dr Kelly Neffs exuberant and engaging style has led to speaking engagements at both academic conferences and transformational events (like Sonic Bloom and Lucidity) across the US, demonstrating her ability to integrate her rigorous scientific training with her candid self-expression. Sex Positive (2020) epitomizes her desire to empower sexual freedom, inspire healing and improve peoples relationships by fusing cutting-edge scientific findings with Eastern philosophies and her own deeply personal insights.

This edition first published in the UK and USA 2020 by

Watkins, an imprint of Watkins Media Limited

Unit 11, Shepperton House

8993 Shepperton Road

London

N1 3DF

Design and typography copyright Watkins Media Limited 2020

Text copyright Kelly Neff 2020

Kelly Neff has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publishers.

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Typeset by Lapiz

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-786782-95-3

www.watkinspublishing.com

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Cultivating Sex Positive Attitudes

Im sure every generation feels this way, but my goodness, what an interesting and exciting time to be alive. Chaos is the only constant in a rapidly evolving world, and in our lives, we have surely experienced an unprecedented amount of change. Indeed, over the past three decades, human beings have witnessed a greater amount of technological development than in the previous 300 decades. Weve seen more innovation happen at a faster pace than ever before, and were just here trying to live our lives while we keep up! We have grown up, like no generation before us, with unparalleled access to every single piece of information out there, matched with an unlimited ability to connect to anyone in the world in the palms of our hands, 24/7/365. Our social and emotional development has unfolded enmeshed within social media and the worlds it creates, demanding that we maintain multiple identities and roles while offering us an audience for even our most mundane tasks.

It is hardly surprising then that millennials (the generation of people born between 1982 and 2000. Before you ask, yes! Im an older millennial!) have already begun to redefine everything about love, sex and relationships. Disrupters of the status quo, we are developing increasingly positive, open-minded approaches to love and sex, shifting away from the negative, shameful connotations that have lingered for centuries. More than any generation before us, we are refusing to be categorized by gender stereotypes, embracing gender fluidity, reclaiming the female orgasm, pursuing non-monogamy, creating a whole new language for relational communication and opening ourselves up to incorporating many forms of technology in the bedroom. Our attitudes about love and sex are shifting dramatically and as the largest generation in human history, we are undoubtedly leaving the world an immensely different place from how we found it!

Growing up so intertwined with social media and screen time, it can sometimes feel challenging to express our unique identities and know what we really want out of relationships in this ever-changing world. These rapid changes over the course of only one generation can sometimes feel overwhelming and stressful. It can be easy to know what we dont want, but it can become a lot more challenging to figure out how to get what we do want. When it comes to what we want out of love, sex and relationships, the challenge to find our way could not be any more apparent. We want it all: We want to be happy! We want to love and accept ourselves, we deeply crave our independence, but we also want to be heard and understood. But how do we get there? How can we make sense of the major attitude swings happening in our generation? My hope is that this book can help illuminate the new narrative about love and sex, while offering tools for personal empowerment and insight into building healthy, sex positive relationships.

Rather than offering a purely academic or theoretical approach to our new psychologies about love and sex, I take a holistic approach to the topic that fuses my academic training with my personal story and experiences, highlighted within the context of our rapidly changing cultural climate. I believe that the best self-help offerings focus less on rigid prescriptive advice (as in, telling people what to do, which is not my style) and more on fluidly emphasizing the experience of deep introspection, nurturing critical thought, encouraging dialogue about complicated ideas and affording readers the means to make lasting changes to better their lives and relationships.

The Sex Positive Movement

Redefining sex and love as a constructive, harmonizing experience is a crucial part of how we move forward as a human collective. After so much struggle, anger and purging during the #MeToo movement over the past few years, the time has come for a new narrative that embraces sexual diversity, freedom and autonomy. One of the core concepts of this book is that we can flip the script by envisioning our bodies, desires and sexual experiences as naturally positive rather than inherently toxic or shameful. Of course, the universe is not all love and light and sometimes we do go through negative experiences. As we will learn, it is the way we cope with these struggles to become aware of our learned behaviour patterns and self-limiting beliefs that can reframe our sex positive futures. Out of this desire to rewrite the story of our lives in a way that mirrors our evolving attitudes, the sex positive movement was born.

The sex positive movement is a social, political and philosophical movement that promotes and embraces sexuality and sexual expression, with an emphasis on safe and consensual sex. Sex positive relationships are ones where partners support each others choices and decisions without judgement, guilt or slut shaming. In a sex positive relationship, you can be whoever you want sexually, and do whatever you want sexually, without having to apologize for your sexual identity or expression, so long as you are not causing real harm to anyone else. In a sex positive relationship, you have permission to love your whole sexual body unconditionally, right now. Being sex positive can be best understood as a reaction to outdated misogynistic, patriarchal and religious structures that have sought to confine and control peoples sexuality for far too long, and that crucially no longer serve us.