You Are Allowed To Feel Good

“Good in bed” sounds flattering until you notice what it’s really measuring. We’ve all heard it used like a performance review: skilled, enthusiastic, attentive and focused on someone else’s experience. But what do we call a woman who is obviously having a great time, who is fully enjoying her own body? The fact that we don’t even have easy words for that says a lot about how women’s pleasure has been treated, especially when you’re dating after divorce and trying to trust yourself again.

In this episode I dig into why wanting more can feel uncomfortable or even “wrong,” and how many of us learned to equate self-denial with being a good woman. I talk a little tiny bit of the science of female anatomy but more about the history of the science of the clitoris as this human body part was largely left unlabeled or omitted in major anatomy resources for decades, shaping what gets taught, studied, and prioritized. We also look at the orgasm gap and the research that points to scripts and habits, not “complicated bodies,” including what actually predicts orgasm for women.

Finally, we talk about receiving. If compliments, help, or attention feel like something you have to repay, that pattern shows up in intimacy too. I share a simple permission practice you can start this week plus journal questions to help you reconnect with desire in a grounded, shame-free way. If this hits home, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a review wherever you listen.

Citations: 

Elise Loehnen, On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good (2023). https://www.eliseloehnen.com/blog/on-our-best-behavior

Orgasm gap — Frederick, D. A., St John, H. K., Garcia, J. R., & Lloyd, E. A. (2018). "Differences in Orgasm Frequency Among Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Heterosexual Men and Women in a U.S. National Sample." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28213723/

O’Connell, H. E., Sanjeevan, K. V., & Hutson, J. M. (2005). "Anatomy of the Clitoris." Journal of Urology. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16145367/ 

Laurie Mintz, Becoming Cliterate - coined the popular framing of the "orgasm gap" . 

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DISCLAIMER: THE COMMENTARY AND OPINIONS AVAILABLE ON THIS PODCAST ARE FOR EDUCATIONAL, INFORMATIONAL AND ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY AND ARE NOT FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROVIDING PSYCHOLOGICAL, COUNSELING OR PROFESSIONAL HEALTHCARE ADVICE. 

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Transcript

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Rethinking “Good In Bed”

Karin Nelson 0:00

I want to start with a phrase you've heard your whole life. Good in bed. Think about what that actually means. When we say a woman is good in bed, we mean she is good at sex. She's skilled. She's enthusiastic. She's attentive. Maybe she's even attractive while doing it. It's a performance review, and the person filling out the review is not her. Now try to think of the phrase we use for a woman who has a great time, who is thoroughly, obviously, selfishly enjoying herself. There isn't a word for that. We do not have a word for that when it comes to sex because we are not really building a vocabulary for it because we don't, as a society, as a culture, actually care. So the question underneath this whole episode is one I think a lot of women have never actually let themselves ask. It's am I allowed to want more than just a fine time in the bedroom? More than fine, more than pleasant, more than close enough, more than, oh, it was just really nice to be held. And the answer is yes. Today we're talking about pleasure, and I'm gonna tell you why it has been so hard for you to actually believe that you deserve more in the bedroom. Welcome to Becoming You Again, the podcast where you learn to step into your power as a woman in this world, where you learn to reconnect to your wholeness, your integrity, and bring into alignment your brain, your body, and your intuition after divorce. This is the podcast where you learn to trust yourself again and move forward toward a life that you truly want. You are listening to Becoming You Again, and I am your host, Karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast, all of you amazing women. Last week we talked about sex and intimacy in this four-part series on dating

The Hidden Rule Against Wanting

Karin Nelson 2:00

after divorce. And today I'm talking about pleasure and why it is okay for you to enjoy it. So let's talk about why this has been hard for women to actually enjoy sex over the years. It's probably not what you think. It's not that you don't know how to enjoy yourself or that you don't want to enjoy yourself, but it's that somewhere along the way you have learned that wanting things makes you a worse person. I've talked about a book before on the podcast. I've recommended that you read it because it's amazing. I'm still recommending that, but the book is On Our Best Behavior by Elise Loehnen. And her whole argument in this book is that women have been handed a checklist for what makes us good. And that checklist is the seven deadly sins: sloth, envy, pride, greed, gluttony, lust, and anger. Those seven deadly sins were codified back in the fourth century. But the thing is, is they are still running in everything that we do in society, whether or not we grew up religious, because those are points of culture right now, today. It is not doctrine anymore. It has like seeped into every part of society at this point. And Elisa's point is that women end up equating self-denial with virtue. We feel good about ourselves when we don't eat the thing that we're not supposed to eat, right? We feel good about ourselves when we don't say the angry thing. We like praise ourselves for like, oh, I'm so glad I didn't lose my shit right there, right? We feel good about ourselves when we put everybody else first and then we finally go last. We treat wanting less as evidence of being good. So let's look at that list again of the seven sins and notice something. Two of those seven are appetites: gluttony and lust, hunger and desire. The two sins that are just about wanting to feel good in your body. So we grew up inside a system where the wanting itself is a big problem for women. Not what you do with it, but the wanting. And let's talk about something else that literally makes no sense, which is why women can tell me in detail what their partner liked, but they can't tell me one thing about what they liked about the experience of sex or being intimate with their partner. That is a permission problem, and you were never given a reason to give yourself permission or to keep track of what you liked. So I've done in the past an episode on jealousy and envy. And in that episode, I say that envy is like this gateway. It is information about a want that you have not let yourself say out loud before. This is the same type of thing. We're just pointing it at your body instead of at your life. Carl Jung has a quote that I think is really important and I think it fits in perfectly in this episode. He says, Nothing is more influential in a child's life than the unlived life of a parent. And I think about that in terms of this topic, too, because the woman who taught you what a good woman does was probably your mother or your grandmother or the church that you grew up in, or the magazines that you read, or the movies that you watched, or the books that you have read. Those were all passing down what they also got. And so you get to stop the cycle. You get to stop passing it down to your children.

Self-Denial As A Virtue Script

Karin Nelson 6:02

All right. So here's the history part of the podcast. This is really like becoming an angle where I talk about the history of so many of my recent podcast episodes. Cause I think that it fits in nicely here, right? And so here is the history that we're gonna talk about. The clitoris. It's like funny to just like drop that word, right? Okay, so roughly 90% of the clitoris is internal. Now that's a little bit more like science-y than history, but I am gonna get into the history in just a second. So the clitoris, it's not like just a small button on the outside. It is actually a large branching structure of the erectile tissue that extends into your body. Most people have never even been told that, including many doctors, which you might find surprising. But here is why doctors were never even told, and here's the history part that I want you to know. For much of the 20th century, the clitoris was left unlabeled or left out entirely of standard anatomy textbooks. Gray's Anatomy, the anatomy book that every medical student uses, removed the clitoral label from its diagram of female genitalia. The first fully labeled clitoris to appear in Gray's since 1947 didn't show up until the 40th edition, which was published in 2005. I know. Your jaws might be dropping to the floor. Mine did when I read this stat. I was like, what the actual fuck are we doing here? So here's more. Here's more. Let's dig into it. The first detailed modern anatomy of the clitoris was published in 1998 by, of course, a woman, an Australian urologist named Helen O'Connell. She went looking for accurate information. She was a young doctor, she's looking for accurate information on female genitalia, on the female clitoris, and she discovers that it just literally does not exist. So she followed that, she did some research, and she followed it up with a comprehensive review in 2025. And in that work, she pointed out that researchers they actually started describing the clitoris correctly back in the 1840s. But then textbooks decided to leave it out until 160 years later. I want you to hear this. That is not a science problem. That is someone literally deciding it did not matter enough to print it and it's still going on because the science was there. They understood in the 1840s how to actually like accurately describe the clitoris. They just left it out of works because they just didn't fucking care. And this bullshit is still going on today. And I'm sorry that I'm like, if it's offending you that I'm using these strong words to describe what's been happening scientifically for the last 160 years plus, but it pisses me off to know that the men's anatomy has been studied countless times. And women are just like, we don't give a fuck what happens to you in the bedroom. We don't give a fuck. All we care about is if you give us babies and like clean our homes. And it's infuriating. But when I said countless times men are studied, I'm actually gonna give you the numbers of how much men have been studied in terms of our sexual organs. A search of the medical literature in 2025 turned up somewhere around 2,780 published studies on the clitoris. Guess how many were published on the penis? Around 56,443. Yeah, can we just sit with those numbers for a minute? 2,780

The Clitoris Erased From Medicine

Karin Nelson 10:05

versus 56,443. So you can see why as I'm doing this research for this podcast and I'm going into the history and I'm digging into the studies that I'm getting furious over the fact that society does not fucking care about you, about your pleasure, about your wants. And I'm done. And that is why I have this podcast to tell you that it's okay for you to want. It's okay for you to enjoy sex, for you to enjoy your time in the bedroom. And that is why I'm talking about it today. Because you have spent your life quietly wondering whether something is wrong with you, whether you are broken, whether you are difficult or too slow when it comes to sex, when it comes to pleasure, whether you take too long, or whether anybody even cares if you come or not. And I want you to know that that wasn't your fault. It was literally baked into society, it's baked into the medical practice, it's baked into what men are taught, it's baked into what you are taught, and it is not something that you had failed at. So let's look at some more numbers. There's a large study by Frederick and colleagues published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2018, and more than 52,000 adults in the United States participated in this study. They asked a question of how often people usually or always orgasm during partnered sex. Heterosexual men said 95% of the time. Heterosexual women said 65% of the time. That was the lowest of every group in the study was heterosexual women.

The Orgasm Gap Is Not Biology

Karin Nelson 11:56

And when these numbers come up, somebody will always say something like, Well, I mean, women's bodies are just more complicated. It's harder for us, or it's harder to make a woman orgasm. That's just biology. But this is the number that I want you to understand that is going to literally end that conversation and maybe change your perspective. Because in the same study, lesbian women reported 86% orgasm. Same bodies, same anatomy, same alleged complexity of the biology, and yet 21 points higher on reported orgasms during sexual encounters with their partner. So this is not a body thing. This is the societal script that we have been handed. It is what we have collectively decided sex is, which activities count, how long it lasts, and who finishes first. And the research clearly backs that up. The strongest predictors for women in having an orgasm in that study that I just talked about were longer encounters, deep kissing, oral sex, and direct genital stimulation. And they also found that fewer than half of people who have sex usually include oral sex at all. So this gap in women who are not finishing to an orgasm is not a mystery. It's a set of habits that nobody questioned and then handed to you and then handed to your partner as well. Now, I do not want you to turn this into homework. I don't want you to take what I'm talking about and be like, okay, so now my homework is I have to orgasm every time. That's not the measure of sex, okay? I don't, I want you to take that out because I'm not just handing you another manual, another rule, another thing that you have to check off of your list. What I want you to see is that it's proof that when women's pleasure gets deprioritized across a culture, across a society, that this is not personal. This is not a personal failing. This is something that our patriarchal structure has just baked into society as a whole, that you're not allowed to have pleasure, that it doesn't actually matter. But I'm here to tell you it does. You do. You are important. Your pleasure and desire is important and worthwhile and deserving. So here's what I think is really important. Most women that I work with are not bad at giving to other people. In fact, every woman that I've ever worked with, that's forefront of their mind is how can I give to other people? They've been living that way their entire lives. And I'm sure you too can resonate with that. Most women are extraordinary

Learning To Receive Without Debt

Karin Nelson 14:46

at giving, but what they have a harder time doing is receiving. Let's step outside of the bedroom for just a minute and test this. I want you to think about what you do when somebody gives you a compliment. Do you take it? Do you deflect it? Do you downgrade it? Do you hand it back immediately so the attention moves off of you? Like they say something and then you're like, oh no, but you look so beautiful, right? What about when someone helps you? Or do you ask for help? Like, do you accept that help? Do you start apologizing? Do you calculate how you can repay it before they've even finished? Do you even ask in the first place? So the same reflex to turn away or to not be able to receive in regular parts of our lives, that's also going to show up in the bedroom. Because it doesn't, you don't just automatically turn off that reflex, like when you're naked with whoever you're going to sleep with, right? It's like a pattern that we have for ourselves. And so as long as you continue to think that you are being a burden, it doesn't matter what the situation is. You're going to keep thinking that about yourself. Because being on the receiving end means you have to be still, you have to be attended to, you have to not be producing something. And if you were raised on the punch card, meaning if your sense of being a good person is built on how useful you are, then being given something else when nothing is asked in return of you, it does not feel like a gift. It feels heavy. It feels like a debt that you now have to repay. And so I want you to hear this. If pleasure makes you feel uncomfortable, that is not evidence that there's something wrong with you, that you're damaged, that you're too cold, that you're not, it's not possible for you to have and experience pleasure. It is just evidence that you have learned very well what society wanted you to learn, that you were not deserving of it. And this is a skill that you've learned over your lifetime. And because it's a skill, it means that you can practice receiving as well in all the areas of your life, including sex. And you can start with the other areas of your life if you want, if you're not ready to have sex. You can start with learning to take a compliment without bouncing it back or without adding any apology or whatever to it. You can let somebody bring you coffee and not immediately feel like you have to repay the score. You can sit still for somebody telling you how amazing you are without apologizing or shrugging your shoulders or brushing it off like it's nothing. That is the act of learning to receive. And you can start by learning how to do it in all the other parts of your life and then learn to open up to it in the bedroom as well.

Permission Practice And Journal Prompts

Karin Nelson 17:46

Okay, so here's the practice since we're gonna get practical as usual. And the practice is giving yourself permission. I talk about this in other podcast episodes. It's something that I literally would say to myself when I was going through my divorce about, I would say this in all areas. I would literally say, I am giving myself permission to do this thing, like whatever it was. I am giving myself permission to feel this. I am giving myself permission to rest. I am giving myself permission to be a mess. I am giving myself permission to feel sad. I am giving myself permission to say no, like whatever it was. I would literally say those words. And it worked. It worked in a way that was very surprising to me because there was a part of my brain that had spent 20 plus years waiting for somebody to like give me the authorization to enjoy my life, to do life my way. And it turned out like the only person that I needed to authorize that was me. And so I just started giving myself permission to do it. Even though I didn't actually need it, there was something in my brain telling me I actually did need it. Hopefully that makes sense. So this week, I want you to give yourself permission for things, actual sentences, write them down if you have to, and make at least one of them something about your body. Okay? So I am giving myself permission to want things. I am giving myself permission to find out what I like. I am giving myself permission to say what feels good out loud. I am giving myself permission to take up space, to take up time, to slow things down, to find out what feels amazing in my body. I am giving myself permission to enjoy without earning it. Any of those, you can use any of those that you that I said. You can come up with whatever works, whatever resonates on your own, but do this because it's really important that you recognize you are allowed to have pleasure, to feel desire, and to follow through with that. And if you want to even go further, here's a few journal questions that you can start to ask yourself and get curious about. You don't have to answer them all right now, but just get curious about yourself. What did I learn about what a good woman wants? Who taught me that? Where else in my life do I refuse or am I refusing to receive from other people? What is one thing that I have wanted and never said out loud to anybody? Why have I not said it out loud? What do I think it will cost me to say it out loud? And if nobody would ever judge me and nobody would ever know, what would I be curious about in terms of my pleasure, my sexual desire? All right, my friends, that is what I have for you today. Your pleasure is yours.

Next Week Preview And Coaching Invite

Karin Nelson 20:48

It always was, it always has been, and it's not outrageous for you to step into figuring out what pleases you and where your desire is, and then following through and giving yourself permission to experience it. All right, I hope you come back for next week because it is the final in this dating series where I'm going to be interviewing Jenny Young. She is the creator of Burned Haystack Dating Method. She is a professor of rhetoric and women's and gender studies, and she teaches women how to decode what men are actually saying in their dating profiles so that you can stop second-guessing yourself and start trusting what you already notice. If you are getting ready to date or if you are wanting to date, this is the perfect place to start. And I hope that you will check back for that episode. That is what I have for you. You are all amazing. I love you so much. Thank you for being here. I will be back next week. Hi, friend. I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life with weekly coaching, real life practice, and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to Karin Nelson Coaching.com. That's www.karin, N-E-L-S-O-N coaching.com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. And for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married, make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.