Michelle Dovey spent twenty years as the painter of oak trees. Then, sketching classical statues in Florence, she looked down and found she had drawn an entire male figure except for one region, left blank without meaning to. The next afternoon she drew nothing but the genitals of Michelangelo's David. Within a year she had drawn more than seventy naked men, in a project she designed as an act of permission.

In this episode, the internationally exhibiting artist and author talks with existential sex therapist Dr. Emma Smith about what that year taught her about shame, and about the skill at the center of her work now, the shameless ask: sensing what you want, trusting it, and naming it clearly.

The conversation starts with the blind spot, the thing in plain sight that your conditioning won't let you see. From there it moves to the friends and family who begged her to stop, and to the men who told her it was the first time they had ever felt seen. Its hinge is a question the models kept asking her: how would you like us to pose? Michelle found that asking made her feel fantastic whether or not she got what she asked for, and that not asking left her irritated and tired. Dr. Emma brings it home to long-term couples, for whom asking is harder precisely because their partner knows them, and to the men in her practice who want, more than they can say, to feel desired. They also talk about the female gaze, a tantric gazing practice, and Michelle's retreat in Venice this November.

If the person you love asked you tonight how you would like them to be, would you have an answer, or would you hand the pencil back?

Full show notes

Michelle's Venice retreat, November 4–8: https://venice.michelledovey.com/unedited

More from Michelle: https://invitation.michelledovey.com

Support for the show: Nine to Kind Planners, the planner Dr. Emma actually uses. Code EMMA20 for 20% off → https://ninetokind.com/

If this one stirred something up, tell Dr. Emma: http://forms.gle/sS7z5AFH1DohJjAU6

On the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, a plaque explains that it was once called the Big Canyon. Somebody upgraded the marketing. Dr. Emma read it at the end of a month spent trying to name the size of two losses that arrived at once.

Her cousin died after major heart surgery. In the same weeks, a business partnership she had believed was also a friendship ended, with the departing partner labeling her, essentially, a liability. She expected grief to sort itself by rank. Instead, the business breakup landed with a sucker-punch quality the death did not, and this solo episode asks why.

Her answer is authorship. Death is universal; it says nothing about you except that you are human and that you loved. A loss with an author arrives with a verdict attached. From there, Dr. Emma moves into territory she works in every day as an existential sex therapist: what happens when you can feel that something is off and keep hearing "it's fine," why insight offers no exemption from pain, why any relationship, romantic or professional, means accepting some liability, and the sentence she wishes she had used: "I hear you saying you're fine, and it doesn't feel fine to me. Are you willing to explore this with me?" If the answer is no, that is important information.

It is also an episode about perspective you prescribe for yourself: hiking just far enough into a canyon to feel caught between above and below, and a new deal landing in the inbox while a draft obituary sits open on the screen. Grief and good news keep arriving in the same week. Nobody gets to choose the order.

Who in your life has told you everything is fine, and what would it cost to say it doesn't feel fine over here?

Full show notes

Support for the show: Nine to Kind Planners, the planner Dr. Emma actually uses. Code EMMA20 for 20% off → https://ninetokind.com/

If this one landed, tell Dr. Emma: http://forms.gle/sS7z5AFH1DohJjAU6

There is a version of you that meets new people first — agreeable, quick, easy to like. Laura Desirée has a name for it: the representative. It shows up so someone can be liked before the actual, more complicated self risks the room.

In part two of her conversation with Dr. Emma, Laura — erotic architect, intimacy professional, and the force behind the immersive erotic salon Eros Unbound — talks about the burnout that finally forced her representative into retirement, and what she learned about honesty during her years as a full-service sex worker, where strangers told her things they couldn't say at home. Why does distance make confession easier than intimacy does? What would it take to make the person who already loves you as safe to tell the truth to as someone you'll never see again? They also get into her mother's last years — a freezer packed with a year of meals, built by hand before the end — and the poem Laura returns to when she needs permission to be exactly who she is.

The question this episode leaves you with: who is the representative standing in for in your life, and what would it cost to send yourself instead?

Full show notes:

This episode is supported by Nine to Kind Planners — code EMMA20 for 20% off at ninetokind.com.

Have a question you've been almost afraid to ask? Submit it here: http://forms.gle/sS7z5AFH1DohJjAU6

Registration for the Reignite Desire Experience masterclass (September 18th) is open now: www.reignitedesire.com/masterclass

Laura Desirée's job is to invent new sex every month, professionally, for a stage. She reports that she runs out of ideas. She also reports that her first session as a professional domme involved blindfolding the client as fast as she could so she could get her written notes out — a step-by-step playbook for conducting an erotically charged power exchange. Every commanding presence you have ever assumed was effortless started somewhere near a laminated agenda.

Laura is an erotic architect: fifteen years across burlesque, adult media, sex work, intimacy coordination, and now creative direction for the members-only erotic theater SNCTM, where what appears on stage is real rather than simulated. She is also the host of Eros Unbound, a monthly erotic literary salon in New York where six to eight writers read confessional work about sex they have actually had — and where, at intermission, two hundred and fifty adults in evening dress are handed notepads and twenty-five anonymous minutes. Laura describes them writing furiously, like an exam they have to pass in order to graduate. The pages get read aloud at the end. Nobody knows whose is whose, and everybody's is in the room.

What she and Dr. Emma trace from there is the seam between talking about desire and having it. Laura reads the present as a social sex revolution — we may be the most articulate generation ever to discuss ourselves as sexual beings, and possibly the most over-analytical. Emma presses on the obvious cost: sex has to be felt, and we may have made it too cerebral. Laura's answer is her own phrase, an intellectual erection — the thinking brain aroused, but only worth something if the arousal routes back through the body.

She declines, throughout, to be an expert. She will relay her findings. She will not tell you what to do with them.

So: if the paper were anonymous and you had twenty-five minutes, what would you write — and what would it cost to say the same sentence out loud, with your name on it, to the person already beside you?

Part One of two.

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Full show notes: [here]

Something this hour unlocked? Tell us → http://forms.gle/sS7z5AFH1DohJjAU6

Reignite Desire masterclass, September 18 — registration open → https://soliloquie.myflodesk.com/mcsept

Support the show: Nine to Kind Planners, code EMMA20 for 20% off → https://ninetokind.com/

By the time someone who runs a company sits down across from me, they have read the book, watched the talk, asked the chatbot, and run the experiment twice with modifications. If the answer had been available anywhere else, they would have found it and implemented it by Tuesday. What they bring instead is a question they find humiliating to say out loud: I have solved harder problems than this.

They have. That is exactly the trouble.

Before Dr. Emma was a sex therapist she was headed for public accounting — a business-club kid who went to nationals in sales and marketing, got handed a slip of paper with a scenario on it and ten minutes to move a couple off the stroller they came in for, and later spent audit season walking through the guts of other people's companies. Which means she learned, early, how a person gets taught to run a business. Clubs, mentors, internships, a first job where somebody senior tells you what you did wrong. Later, masterminds and coaches and advisory boards. Nobody is expected to figure it out alone.

This week she and Alivia go looking for the equivalent on the other side of the ledger, and find a five-pound sack of flour. An egg, then flour, then an animatronic doll with a key strapped to your wrist. A curriculum built end to end to make teenagers afraid of pregnancy, and nothing whatsoever about how two people who have decided to stay build something that survives the staying.

They get into why the resistance these clients bring is not stubbornness but success — the strategy has been reinforced for twenty years and it works everywhere except the one room it was built to protect. They get into what happens when decisiveness reads as dismissal at your own kitchen table, and why that moment tends to arrive feeling existential rather than tactical. And they get into the difference between what a skill set can fix and what actually requires the basement.

You would never have run the company on instinct plus whatever you absorbed watching your parents do it. So what convinced you it would be enough at home?

Full show notes

Reignite Desire masterclass, September 18 → https://soliloquie.myflodesk.com/mcsept

Supported in part by Nine to Kind Planners, code EMMA20 for 20% off → https://ninetokind.com/

Tell us what landed → http://forms.gle/sS7z5AFH1DohJjAU6

Ask a man where he learned to have sex and he will point at a girlfriend, a movie, a website. Kirsten Trammell's answer is earlier and lonelier: behind a locked bathroom door, at speed, in secrecy, listening for footsteps in the hall. Fast. Silent. Finish. The nervous system is an excellent student and a terrible editor, and it files that entire sequence under this is what arousal is.

Kirsten is a psychotherapist, a tantric sex coach, and the host of The Naked Connection — a top-twenty sex show on Spotify with listeners in more than 140 countries. She went looking for the men's version of the bookshelf every woman in this field has read, found nothing there, and built it herself.

This week she joins Dr. Emma to talk about male arousal patterning and what it costs a man decades later, when he is forty-five, has revised nearly everything else about how he lives, and is still running a script he wrote at thirteen. They get into tantra as a working frame rather than a mystique, why the toys are not the center of it, how to introduce a desire without a different person simply appearing in the bedroom unannounced, and Kirsten's term for the skill she teaches instead of technique: erotic vigilance. Rather than asking a goal-driven man to abandon the goal, she moves it.

And late in the hour, almost by accident, the question that stayed with us. Many men are fluent in function and illiterate in pleasure. They can read one signal in their own bodies and have never been asked to read the rest. Which means a man may not believe he is the expert on his own body at all.

So who has he been consulting?

Full show notes

Support for the show: Nine to Kind Planners — ninetokind.com, code EMMA20 for 20% off.

Say something back: http://forms.gle/sS7z5AFH1DohJjAU6

Kyle Reynolds spent fifteen years as a megachurch pastor — the well-articulated man on the video screens, rewarded for certainty, until a single Facebook comment ended it in a week. What followed wasn't the deconstruction story we've all heard before. It was something harder to narrate: a marriage that survived the collapse of the framework it was built on, a wife who appealed to his humanity when his theology couldn't be argued with directly, and a counseling breakthrough that started with one unbearable question - do you think Laura needs you?

This week, Kyle joins Dr. Emma to work through what happens when the structure organizing your identity, your marriage, and your community stops holding. Not the burn-it-down version of leaving a belief system, and not the muted performance of staying inside one you no longer believe. Something closer to what Kyle calls transcending and including — keeping what was true, releasing what wasn't, and learning, at forty-eight, to be chosen rather than needed.

They talk about privilege recognized too late, about a text thread called "Just the Girls and Kyle" that has outlasted a fifteen-year career, about the walks that replaced the fights, and about a high-dose mushroom trip that sent Kyle back to a Bible-college stage to tell a scared nineteen-year-old he was enough all along.

The question worth carrying out of this one: when a belief system, a marriage, or a version of yourself stops working, what do you actually have to reject - and what were you always allowed to keep?

Full show notes

Registration for the Reignite Desire masterclass (August 14th): https://soliloquie.myflodesk.com/mcaugust

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