Linear Sex Was Built for the Patriarchy (Your Desire Isn’t Broken—It’s Just Not Male, Mechanical, or Marketable)
If you’ve ever wondered why sex feels more like a checklist than an experience—or why your arousal doesn’t show up “on time”—you’re not broken.
You’ve just been living inside a model that was never made for you.
In this fire-breathing, history-shattering episode, Nicole takes you on a tour through the origins of the linear sex script: the tired old pattern of
Desire ➡️ Arousal ➡️ Penetration ➡️ Orgasm ➡️ Curtain call.
Spoiler: It wasn’t handed down by the gods. It was built by men in lab coats, corsets, and colonial mindsets.
You’ll learn how this model was born from Victorian shame, Freud’s obsession with vaginal orgasms, medical sexism, and a centuries-long war on anyone whose pleasure wasn’t profitable, penetrative, or performative.
This episode will make you laugh, seethe, exhale—and most of all, rethink everything you thought you knew about desire.
🔥 In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
Why the sexual “script” most of us inherited is rooted in patriarchy, not pleasure
How Victorian medicine and Freud pathologized female desire
What sex research got right—and what it left out (hint: almost everyone)
How trauma, neurodivergence, queerness, and cyclical bodies get erased by linear models
Why your arousal isn’t “late”—it’s layered, sacred, and smart
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🌿 Resources & Links:
Free Erotic Body Reconnection Kit (Previously 3 Best Sexological Bodywork Practices)
The 3 most impactful practices from My Erotic Literacy Vault—
field tested in sessions, and personally loved by yours truly—
to Melt Freeze, Rebuild Trust, and Restore Erotic Aliveness.
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The DSM-XXX
🌀 Desire & Somatics Mythos
✨ 100+ page reference guide: a RADICAL RECLASSIFICATION of what our culture calls sexual dysfunction—and what your body knows as sacred. 🌿
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DSM-XXX: Desire & Somatics Mythos is our 100+ page reference guide for anyone who’s ever been told their sexuality is dysfunctional—when really, it’s just been misinterpreted.
Inside, you’ll find:
✦ Reframings of so-called “sexual dysfunctions” like pelvic pain, vaginismus, anorgasmia, through a trauma-informed, pleasure-centered lens
✦ Somatic context for things like low libido, pain, dissociation, and numbness
✦ Radical translations of what your body might actually be saying when it doesn’t follow the cultural script
✦ Alternatives to diagnosis culture that honor nervous system rhythms, safety, and truth over performance
👉 DOWNLOAD HERE
🔥 Join the pleasure rebellion
Sacred sex ed, somatic rituals, and a radical return to your body.
📲 Share the Truthbombs:
This episode is for the ones who’ve faked desire, blamed their bodies, and wondered what’s wrong with them.
Tag @yourbodyisgreen, send it to your therapist, and share it with your lover—because it’s time to stop performing sex and start reclaiming it.
You’re not too slow.
Too sensitive.
Too complicated.
You’re just not a machine.
transcript
If your sex life feels like it's running on a script, desire, arousal, penetration, orgasm, curtain call, it's not because you are broken, it's because the model is, I. In this episode, we're dragging the tired ass myth of linear sex into the light. We'll unpack how a bunch of corset wearing colonizers, Freud's, fragile ego and some very clinical dudes with boards created a model of sex that left most of us behind.
You'll learn why low desire isn't a diagnosis. It's a misunderstanding how hysteria, vibrators, and Victorian repression are more connected than you think. Why queer neurodivergent, trauma-informed, slow cyclical, relational pleasure was never included in the original data and what it actually means to build a model based on your body, not their agenda.
We're burning the performance script. We're reclaiming the spiral, and we're doing it with Cs, history, science, and a whole lot of truth telling, just like always. So if you've ever felt like you weren't doing sex right. This episode will blow that myth wide open. , Because your body was never the problem.
The model just wasn't made for you.
Okay. Let's talk about how we ended up with this tired ass idea of sex as a straight line, desire, arousal, penetration, orgasm critical. The belief that the sequence is how sex is supposed to be. Is so deeply ingrained in our culture that most people have never even stopped to question it.
But this wasn't handed down by some divine being from a vulva shaped cloud. This was manufactured, constructed, assembled from a very narrow and very male focus lens. So to figure out how we got here, we need to roll back the tapes and know this isn't going to be some romantic candle lit stroll through history.
This is a behind the scenes tour through the dusty patriarchal archives of Western medicine, psychology, and power.
So our first stop is the Victorian era, AKA, the original pleasure police. Welcome to the 18 hundreds when people were choking on corsets and colonialism, and sexuality was under strict moral lockdown. This was a time when women were expected to be pure, pious, and painfully self-sacrificing. The ideal woman was delicate, asexual, and emotionally repressed unless she was crying in a Chis lounge.
Because her uterus was supposedly wandering around her body, which doctors genuinely believed was a thing. If you were a woman who ever expressed desire, you were a threat. If you were a man who didn't, you were suspect, and if you were queer, trans, kinky, or non-monogamous, you were erased or punished or pathologized.
This is when the diagnosis of hysteria came into vote. Hysteria was a catch all diagnosis for any woman who was too emotional, too horny, too angry, or God forbid, uninterested in her husband's advances.
Symptoms included anxiety, insomnia, irritability, and oh yes, wanting sex. The treatment pelvic massage performed by a doctor to induce hysterical heroism,
eism in plain English, A medicalized orgasm performed on the woman. For the doctor to calm her down. Consent, pleasure, or agency, not even part of the conversation. The vibrator was literally invented to make this process more efficient so doctors wouldn't get tired. Yes. Really. So from the jump, Western Medicine wasn't interested in exploring women's pleasure.
It was interested in controlling it and taming it and turning it into a medical problem to be solved. Fast forward to the early 19 hundreds, AKA, Freud, and friends ruin everything. Let's talk about Freud for a second. Sigmund, tell me about your mother Freud. Now, Freud did give us some good stuff about the unconscious mind, but when it came to sexuality, especially female sexuality, he really went off the rails.
Freud believed there were two kinds of orgasms. Clitoral and vaginal clitoral orgasms, he said, were immature real women. Mature women. Were supposed to grow out of them and graduate to vaginal orgasms. Were just supposedly more evolved and fulfilling despite not having a vagina. Freud believed that mature healthy women should orgasm from vaginal penetration alone.
No clitoral stimulation needed. If you needed external stimulation, you were considered infantile in erotic development, infantile. Let that sink in. He thought that clitoral orgasms were for immature women, which is hilarious. Considering Clits have over 8,000 nerve endings and zero function.
Besides pleasure. Freud didn't even know where it was. By the way, so thanks to Freud. Not only was pleasure misunderstood, it was pathologized if it didn't align with penis centric logic translation. If your orgasm doesn't happen from penile penetration alone, you are developmentally stunted.
And this idea still haunts us today despite the fact that the clitoris is the only human orgasm whose sole purpose is pleasure, and that most people with vulvas require clitoral stimulation to climax Freud's hierarchy of orgasms still lingers, and sexual scripts, porn plots, and hetero bedroom shame spirals.
Freud also believed that women's sexuality was inherently passive, that they received desire rather than initiated it. He wasn't interested in curiosity or complexity or the emotional intelligence of actual arousal. Nope. He wanted a system that could be charted and ranked, let's.
Move to the mid 19 hundreds with the rise of sexual science, but let's make it patriarchal. Now we get to the era where researchers tried to quantify and standardize sexuality. I. Enter Alfred Kinsey, masters and Johnson, and a bunch of people in lab coats holding clipboards and watching people have sex under fluorescent lighting.
Let's start with Kinsey. Kinsey was a biologist and sex researcher who in the 1940s and fifties. Published groundbreaking reports on male and female sexual behavior. His work shocked the public and revealed that people were already living more sexually diverse lives than mainstream culture allowed.
But even Kinzie for all his data collection wasn't immune to bias. His team primarily studied white, middle class educated people, often excluding anyone who didn't fit that mold. Then we get masters in Johnson, who in 1966, published human sexual response. Their goal. To document and pleasure the phases of sexual arousal using observable physiological responses, and voila, the four phase sexual response cycle was born.
Excitement, plateau, orgasm and resolution. Just like the narrative arc, literally a bell curve, a sexual rollercoaster that starts low, builds tension, climaxes, and then coasts to a stop, linear, measurable, and meet just like a corporate workflow. But here's the problem. They studied people and lab environments that were deeply unnatural and often still prioritized male pleasure.
Penetrative sex was the gold standard. Orgasms were the end goal. Emotions not measured. Trauma, not accounted for. Cultural pressure completely ignored. And if your body didn't follow this arc, if your turn on came after touch, or if you needed emotional intimacy first, or if your orgasm didn't look like the ones they charted, they were labeled dysfunctional, low desire, non orgasmic, sexually difficult.
Not the good, difficult, just the kind that doesn't fit the machine. Meanwhile, in pop culture, magazines like Cosmopolitan and Playboy were running sex advice based on these same outdated models. Women were told how to please their man and how to be sexy, but not slutty, and how to get their body back into compliance with the male gaze.
Porn exploded in the seventies and eighties with scripts that mimic the exact same trajectory. Arousal is incident. Sex is penetrative. Climax is required. Anything else, edit it out. Even sex ed in schools, focused on reproduction disease and fear, not desire, not consent, not exploration, and definitely not pleasure.
Meanwhile, over in medicine and media land, doctors were pushing a one size fits all model of sexual health. Magazines like Cosmopolitan, were serving up 237 ways. A please your man, none of which included asking what you want or checking in with how you feel. Hollywood was writing sex like a Marvel movie, big buildup, fast action, climactic explosion roll credits.
We were being trained to see sex, like a performance, not a process. And it always ended the same way with someone, usually a man finishing and everyone else pretending it was fulfilling. So what does that mean for you? It means you inherited a model that was built by men. Built for men based on male bodies performed on focus, on performance, over connection, and deeply suspicious of emotions cycle and nuance.
It means your experience of desire, especially if it's cyclical, emotional, delayed, layered, spiritual, or requires trust was never even considered. You weren't broken. You were unaccounted for. And here's the kicker. If your body didn't match that arc, if you didn't get aroused first, or needed connection before horniness or didn't climax with penetration, you were labeled disordered, having low desire, dysfunctional, frigid, and orgasmic.
They had lit literal clinical categories for women who didn't orgasm during intercourse, because obviously the problem couldn't be the model. It had to be you. And guess what? This logic didn't stop at sex. Let's zoom out for a second, because linear obsession with bodies performing on Q, it shows up everywhere.
And the medical model, especially in birth, you've heard of the one centimeter per hour cervical dilation rule. That tidy little metric that's used to measure whether labor is progressing fast enough. If you don't dilate according to schedule, you're labeled as stalled, too slow, not progressing.
Cue the interventions. Pitocin Epidurals emergency C-section. But here's the thing, that whole one centimeter per hour thing, it's based on a study from the 1950s by a man named Emmanuel Friedman. He charted the average labor curve based on a very narrow group of women, white, middle class, and wait for it medicated.
Most of them were sedated, lying on their backs. Hooked up to IVs. Their labors were already being managed and manipulated by the system, and yet that became the gold standard for how birth should organically unfold. So if your cervix and its infinite wisdom wants to dilate two centimeters, then hang out and vibe for a few hours before rocketing to 10 in a sudden burst of glory.
That's not wrong. That's nature. That's you. But medicine doesn't like spirals. It likes graphs, linear graphs, just like the sexual response cycle, just like the sexual response cycle, the medical birth model was built on the idea that body should be linear, predictable, and efficient, that if your body doesn't perform on someone else's timeline, it's faulty.
It needs to be fixed, pushed, controlled. Sound familiar. Because it's the same damn logic, the same system that says if you don't get wet fast enough, something's wrong, is the one saying if your cervix doesn't dilate fast enough, something's wrong. In both cases, the underlying messages, you are too slow.
You are too complicated. Too hard to manage. What's actually true is that your body is wise, cyclical, responsive, and operating on a timeline that makes sense for you. But when the system is built to treat you like a broken machine, not a miraculous organism, the solution is always more control, more pressure, and more shame.
So yeah, this linear sex model, it's not just messing with your bedroom. It's part of a bigger story of how bodies, especially female and femme bodies have been studied, measured, and manipulated by systems obsessed with control. Even modern sex education, if you got any at all, is still largely based on these outdated linear models.
Your doctor probably trained in it. Your therapist, unless they specialize in sex therapy, probably echoing it. Your partner absolutely influenced by it, and you might be unconsciously living it out every time you shame yourself for not being in the mood.
let's go to the modern day and the legacy of this linear model.
Today, most of us are still internalizing this history without even realizing it. We judge our desire if it doesn't show up on time, we perform sex instead of feeling it. We worry that something's wrong with us if we don't crave penetration or climax the same way every time. But here's the thing. You are not broken.
The model is this entire framework was built without your body, your culture, your emotions, or your pleasure and mind. It was engineered for efficiency, observation, and control, not connection, curiosity, or complexity. If your desire feels messy, cyclical, relational, or mood dependent, if your pleasure blooms slowly or arrives midway or skips the orgasm altogether, that's not dysfunction.
That's real, that's valid. That's you. And you deserve a model that actually knows how to hold that. Who got left out of this model? Short answer. Pretty much everyone but the lab coded penis, Havers. So now that we've unpacked the dusty, stiff hetero history of linear sex, let's talk about what really matters.
What happened to all the people who didn't fit. Because it's one thing to say, oh, the model's outdated. It's another thing to realize that entire populations were never even considered human enough to include that people were studied pathologized and then gaslit into believing their bodies were broken.
This wasn't just a case of, oops, we missed a few perspectives. This was full blown erasure. Entire ways of experiencing desire, arousal, and intimacy were excluded because they didn't match the straight white male performance based sex fantasy. Some guy in a lab decided was normal, so let's name it.
Let's shine a light on all the brilliant, complex, beautiful humans who are left out of the old model and who are still being told they're too much, too slow, too complicated, or not sexual enough because this next part, this is for you. People with Vulvas, let's just start there. If you have a vulva, your pleasure was quite literally not the subject of early sex research.
When researchers built their models, they studied what they could see, AKA erections, ejaculation, on other quote, observable phenomena. The clitoris barely mentioned, misunderstood. Some early anatomists thought it was a mini penis. Others ignored it altogether, and yes, we didn't fully map the internal structure of the clitoris until the 1990s.
Sit with that.
The truth is most people with Vulvas experience what we call nowadays, responsive desire, non spontaneous desire. In my work, I often see that all bodies and all genitals. Generally experience responsive desire, not spontaneous desire, because our bodies live within an ecosystem and a system, the environment that we're in, our emotional system, our relational system, and that means desire often shows up after arousal starts, after attunement happens after closeness, after the touch, after vibe, under the linear model.
That's not how it's supposed to work. If you're not in the mood before sex starts, the model says you are not sexual enough. You must have a low libido or trauma, or a hormone imbalance, or you're not attracted to your partner, or you need to try harder. So people with vulva spend decades trying to fix themselves when really the model just never made space for how bodies actually work.
Okay. Who else was left out in this linear model? Queer people. Linear sex assumes a penis and a vagina. Walk into a room and have one kind of sex that ends in one kind of orgasm. But what happens when there is no penis, no vagina, or they don't match the standard pairings, the model breaks, or more accurately the model erases.
Queer sex is non-linear by nature, doesn't follow a predictable arc. It's creative, contextual, co-authored. Built on communication, experimentation, and mutual discovery, and that terrifies the system designed to control our bodies. So instead of being studied, celebrated, or taught queer sex was pathologized erased from textbooks labeled deviant, criminalized, and even shoved into narrow stereotypes or in sensationalist porn tropes.
Even today, queer folks are often left out of conversations about desire. Arousal and anatomy unless they go looking for specialized resources, and that's if they're lucky. Neurodivergent folks, were also not included in this LEN model. Sensory processing, timing, emotional regulation, attunement, and the beautiful chaos of non-normative brains.
All things that were ignored by the linear model. If you're autistic, A DHD, or otherwise neurodivergent, you might experience arousal differently. You might need different kinds of stimulation, pacing, or communication. You might find the pressure to get there totally shuts down your desire altogether, but the linear model doesn't care.
It says start here and there, preferably within 20 minutes. Or less. Anything outside that gets labeled as too much, too sensitive, too complicated. But what if your way is actually a gift? What if your neurodivergence isn't a barrier to pleasure, but a map to deeper, more honest, more attuned intimacy? The linear model will never ask, but I will.
Trauma survivors are another big one that are not included in the linear model. This one makes me want to throw the whole model in the trash, fire and dance on the ashes. The linear model assumes the body is a machine and frankly, how dare it, you press desire, an orgasm comes out the other end.
But if you have trauma, especially sexual or intimate trauma, that line gets jagged. Desire may come with fear. Arousal might trigger memories. Touch might feel overwhelming even if you want it. Consent might be there, but your nervous system hasn't caught up. Trauma rewires the body and healing requires slowness, spaciousness, and safety not get turned on fast.
And don't make it weird. Linear model has no capacity to hold that. It shames you for not wanting it fast enough. And medicalize your freeze response. It labels your beautiful, adaptive nervous system as broken. But what if you're not behind? What if you're just healing in the way your body needs to heal?
What if your pleasure is still possible, but it's going to take a new map and you know who else? This model doesn't include men. It doesn't even include men. It screws them over to, it tells 'em that desire is always spontaneous, that their value is measured by their erections, that sex is a performance and their job is to deliver.
So if they experience stress related erectile issues or performance anxiety or emotional numbness, the model says you are not a real man. It doesn't give them language for slowness, softness, connection, or pleasure. Beyond penetration, the model takes men's humanity and shrinks it down to a dysfunction.
That's not intimacy, that's machinery. And lastly, , the model does not include anyone who doesn't like being on a timer. Let's be real. The linear model isn't just exclusionary. It's boring. It reduces sex to a checklist, a race, a predictable pattern, and it leaves no room for spontaneity, messiness, nuance, or evolution.
Where's a slow build? Where's the stopping and starting where's the, let's just line naked together for an hour and see what happens. Where's the play? The answer is not in the model, but it's absolutely in your body, your relationship, and your lived experience. So the TLDR, linear Sex Left behind Anyone who has a clitoris experiences desire relationally has trauma.
Is queer, is neurodivergent, is emotionally complex? Does an orgasm on command? Likes variety, has ever felt pressure to perform pleasure or simply needs a little more goddamn foreplay. So basically everyone. 📍
Okay, so you've just learned that the model most of us inherited about sex and desire is deeply flawed, unscientific, exclusionary, and honestly a buzzkill.
So what now? What do we do with all of this knowledge? Do we just sit here bitter and betrayed, clutching our vibrators and whispering? It was never about the orgasm? No. We build a new map and that's exactly what the body compass method is. This isn't just about throwing out the old model. It's about returning to you your rhythms, your body's truth, your pleasures natural intelligence, because your body isn't broken.
It's brilliant. It just needs a model that was actually designed to listen to it. After all this, you might be wondering, okay, if the linear model is trash, then what the hell do I do instead? Because it's one thing to tear down the system. It's another thing to walk into the wilderness of your body without a map.
The body compass method isn't some trendy new hack or rebranded sex tip disguised as empowerment. It's a fundamental reorientation away from performance and back towards presence, away from scripted sexuality and toward the deep living language of your body. Because when I say your body already knows how to do this, I really mean it.
Your body was never linear. It was never designed to sprint towards orgasm like it's clocking in for a shift. Your body is responsive, cyclical, contextual, brilliant. It's not a problem to be fixed. It's a compass to be followed. But when you've been told over and over that your pleasure should look like a straight line, when you've been made to feel like you're behind broken or too complicated, you start to doubt your own signals.
You stop trusting the very wisdom that was built into you from the beginning. The body compass method is here to change that. It's a framework, yes, but more than that, it's a return to the truth of how desire actually works for most people, to the organic, non-linear rhythms of turn on safety, sensation and joy to the sacred circuitry of your erotic aliveness.
This method is what happens when we stop asking, how do I fix my body to match the model? And start asking, what if my body has been the model all along? The body Compass Method says, you're not linear, you're not a problem to solve. You're not too much or not enough. You're just not a machine. You are a body.
A body with tides, with timing, with a language of sensation that goes beyond performance and productivity. In this method, we stop asking, how do I get turned on faster? And we start asking, what is my body asking me to feel? Right now? We stop pushing for orgasm like it's a deadline. We start listening for the quiet yes of safety, the slow build of trust.
The deep thro of real turn on this method was designed with all the left outs in mind. If you've ever been told your desire is low, if you've been blamed for not wanting sex the same way your partner does. If you're healing trauma and feel like your body's response doesn't make sense, if you're neurodivergent and traditional sex advice makes you wanna scream, if you're queer, trans, non-binary, or simply uninterested in playing by the norm, this method is for you.
It's not a five step formula to fix you. It's not a checklist for becoming a better sexual partner is a framework for coming home to yourself. So how does it work? We follow the body's natural language, which spoiler not made up of words like should hurry or just relax. We use tools like somatic awareness because your body's always telling you something, even when your brain is buffering.
Pleasure mapping, not the, here's your GS spot kind. The what makes your whole self feel alive, kind. Seasonal , cyclical frameworks because your body has seasons not just on a fertility chart, but in your moods, your energy, your access to turn on. We use consent and communication that starts internally.
No more betraying yourself to preserve the vibe, and we use pleasure practices that build capacity over time. Not pressure to perform, but space to explore. You learn to track what opens you, what closes you, what pulls you deeper into presence and what kicks you back into dissociation. And then you learn to trust that wisdom to build a relationship with your body where you are no longer the project, but the compass instead of a staircase.
Think spiral in the linear model. You climb the stairs, start a desire march through arousal, end at orgasm. In this method, you're walking a spiral. You circle back, you deepen, you spiral inward, you expand outward. Some days you're in the realm of safety. Some days you're focusing on your genitals. Some days you're focusing on your growth.
There's no wrong place to be, no deadline to hit. There's just your unfolding, your curiosity, your aliveness, because the truth is that pleasure is not a reward for performing sex correctly. Pleasure is a birthright. Your body is not a machine. It's an ecosystem, a landscape, a living archive of wisdom. And your pleasure.
True unforced, deeply rooted. Pleasure is not linear. It's wild, relational, and sacred. So if you're ready to stop trying to fit the model, if start letting your body lead the way, then welcome to the Body Compass Method. This is where we remember that healing can feel good, that intimacy can feel safe. The desire can feel like home.
And before you go, here is a practice to break the script called what happens when you Don't Chase? Pleasure. So let's try something radical. Let's do nothing, not forever. Just for now. Let's pause the performance. Drop the goal, set down the chase. Because you've been taught the pressure is something you achieve.
The desire is something you summon and that sex is something you perform. But what if pleasure was never a pursuit? What if it was eliciting? Try this. Find a quiet space. No music, no vibe, just you and your body. Lie down. Sit or lean against a wall. Close your eyes or keep them soft and unfocused, and ask yourself gently like you're speaking to something sacred.
What happens in my body when I stop trying to feel good? Not what do I want? Not what should I feel? Just what's left when I stop reaching for sensation. Let the silence stretch a little longer than you normally would. Let the boredom come. If it comes, the impatience rise. Let the numbness speak. Don't rush it.
Your body has been waiting a long time for you to stop performing and just be with it. And then if something, anything arises. A flicker of sensation, a thought, a temperature shift, a memory, a subtle ache, a tingle, a tear, a breath instead of running toward it or away from it. Ask, what if this was enough?
This practice is not about feeling good. It's about feeling real. It's a practice of breaking the habit, of chasing, fixing, improving. It's where the body compass method begins. Not with a goal, but with a reckoning, because pleasure can't be forced, but it will rise organically. Naturally when the conditions are right and one of those conditions is not needing to be anything but what is.
So this week, instead of chasing the orgasm, the vibe, the peak moment, try chasing nothing. Instead feel everything. Even the quiet. Even the ache. Even the stillness. Especially the stillness. This is what it means to come home to your compass, not just to feel good, but to feel true. If this practice moves something in you, you're ready to stop outsourcing your sexuality to a broken script and start building an erotic life that actually fits your body.
You're already on the path. Your body is the method. I'm just helping you remember.
