In the transsexual community, it seems to me,  being as close to a genetic girl as possible is the privileged position. I understand this. Gay men only have to come out once, when they tell their friends and family. Transexuals on the other hand come out every time they go out. No wonder passing as a woman is so important. The closer you look to a genetic girl the easier it is.  But what I have got to say and I want to say it really clearly is that it’s time for trans cool politics.  Personally, I love gender play, gender bending.

Linda Karen in this photo also looks fabulous, yes it’s a totally girl look but even without the hair and make up the pleasure of expressing herself in an appropriate gender position I am sure would shine through.  I guess what I am trying to say is that gender is more than how you look and my trans friends can be totally fem without even lifting a mascara wand.  It’s time those old hierarchies were laid to rest girls.

Linda Karen doing girl in Boy Mode

What do you girls think?Is there more to doing girl than genetic girl mode? Is there more to being a girl than walking the walk, talking the talk and wearing make up?

Dr Michelle Mars is a free lance sexologist living in Sydney. You can contact her on 0415768084 or Michelle@sassi-inc.com

Sexual experience is so intimately connected to our sensuality but I think that in a busy world, where lives are moving fast, we often lose sight of our bodies aside from a quick bonk when the time is right (and its Business Time) . Sometimes it can be hard to let boundaries go and explore, it’s just not a big part of ‘western’ culture.  In fact we’re culturally programmed to be suspicious of sensuality. When I was first invited to a group massage experience I was vaguely creeped out!  Was this going to be some kind of weird cult-ish experience? So it was with a sense of mild curiosity and the hope that I wouldn’t scream ‘get your hands off me’ and stomp off that I entered the room.

I didn’t freak out and the first experience was interesting in a weird kind of way. I walked into a room of about 20 people I didn’t know, candles glowing, heaters blowing, it was warm and friendly right from the start. People of different ages, sizes and shapes all together in one room with the purpose of getting naked and massaging eachother. We sat around and introduced ourselves and talked about what the group was: a few people getting together once a month to practice sensual (not sexual) massage. People said what they wanted and the rules where agreed upon.  Sensual rather than hard massage strokes, ‘my breasts are part of my body but I don’t want to be sexually stimulated’, ‘if you get a hard on it’s not a problem’,’ if you brush sexual organs  inadvertently  just carry on’,  and so on. We had about 20 minute sessions each. 3 people got on massage tables and the rest of us took turns massaging them.  After about the second person when I had relaxed I got into this really cool head space.  It was one of those moments when I felt like I learned something but not in words so putting it in words is also difficult.  But there is something about several people giving you their energy  and about you working with a few people to give someone else a blissful experience that feels good for the soul.  I slept like a baby that night.

I slept like a baby again last night and had amazing sex this morning and I’ve been blissed all day since.  In my experience of being part of the other group it just gets better as the energy builds, the expectations come into line and everyone gets comfortable.  I’m looking forward to more of the same.

Has anyone else had interesting sensual experiences?

Dr Michelle Mars is a free lance sexologist living in Sydney. She can be contacted on +61415768084 or Michelle@sassi-inc.com

http://www.3news.co.nz/The-Sexpert/tabid/371/articleID/167631/Default.aspx Click this link to find out more about my businesss

Wellington’s very own fetish ball will be held for the second time on the 28th of August this year at the Garden Club. The first one, held a couple of years ago was fabulous. The acts held me spell bound and between acts there was plenty to entertain too.

Sometimes we hesitate to try something new because we don’t know what to expect. So I am going to tell you exactly what you can expect to see , hear, experience and feel.

And if you want to see a little more about what kink culture is about you can see a recent 20/20 story…..http://tvnz.co.nz/20-20-news/pleasure-and-pain-kink-3697399/video

First of all, forget all your preconceived ideas about kink culture, people from all walks of life are kinky and for many people it’s a pass time or a hobby with benefits. The benefits being that when you take a risk and dress up kinky you feel sexy and get to enjoy being in the company of other like minded people. My experience of Kink events is that they are less sleazy than your average bar or night club, people are there to have fun and enjoy the event and the people they might meet, not to pick someone up.

Burlesque is bit in Wellington at the moment so expect to see plenty of Dita Von Tease inspired outfits. You will also see plenty of leather, every kind of uniform you can imagine, especially firemen, school girls, doctors and nurses, gimp suits, a sprinkling of rubber, latex, lace, lingerie, coyboys, Indians, lots of boys in short tight shorts, fairies, corsets, impossibly high heels, platforms and stockings and suspenders.

Another thing that’s important to know when you go to event like this is what is going to be happening and when:

Doors open at 9am and those with more specialized interests, or a genuine curiosity about the wilder sides of kink might want to be on time.

At 10 30 Angel, who literally ran away with the circus will be there performing aerial acts, think sexy cirque de soliel. Angel will be followed by the ever gorgeous Eva Strangelove with her own brand of fetish, burlesque, striptease cabaret, Morgaine Presser with an aerial silk/tissue dance (a treat in itself), Athena di Lure’s with burlesque and perversion and the final act before the DJ’s come on will be Keller Kinder Live.

Aside from the acts there will be plenty to entertain you throughout the evening.

If you have ever wondered what a dungeon looked like, this might be a rare opportunity to sneak in and see. The Endorphin Society complete with cage and padded leather cross are setting up a play room. Dry ice and a single red light bulb mean you can skulk in a corner and watch surreptitiously, perhaps even learn something about what to do and what not to do, or even join in if you’re feeling adventurous.

The dark room needs no explanation, I suggest you feel your way around this one.

Throughout the evening Mr Dodgy will be wandering around with hand cuffs and a chain inviting you to play with him.

Themes are an important aspect of any fetish even and the theme this year is skin and Greg Wilson the venue will be heated appropriately. There will be a massive coat check so cover yourself up with your duvet and dump it at the door if it’s a particularly nasty evening because this is one place in town where you’re guaranteed it’s going to be warm, nice and above all friendly inside.

If your still not convinced I can take you on a little tour of kink culture in Sydney watch out for the up coming story on NZ TV.

This event will take place in the Garden Bar, 13 Dixon Street, Wellington

Want to know more? Dr Michelle Mars is a freelance sexologist at Sassi-Inc blogging on the subject of sex for Scoop She can be contacted at michelle@sassi-inc.com. 021 979 373  Or you can find out more about us at Sassi-Inc.Com

Sassi-inc taking the stress out of having better sex. We can help you enhance your sex   lives. Consults $120 hour, Essential Sensual Fitness, Personal Training for better sex $60 per      hour  (1-4 people)

Sex and sexy magic has got a bit lost in modern culture but fortunately for us the knowledge is still around. Tantric and  Taoist traditions use noise to move orgasmic energy around the body.

What so great about being noisey? You can tell what kind of sex someone is having, as in where their sexual energy is located by listening to the noises they make. You can make yourself feel sexier by making noise and you can move your energy around your body using sound.

This is how it goes:

A high pitched eeee noise like a little mouse noise can be felt in the head.

A lower pitched aay noise can be felt in the throat

A hawww or ahhhh as in art noise can be felt in the heart

A lower pitched oooh as in open can be felt in the solar plexus (the yellow circle)

A low pitched oooo as in goose can be felt in the sexual centre and the base of the spine

The pitch of the noise gets lower as you progress down the body.

Try it from top down and bottom up

Feeling cynical?  Just try it.  Play around until you get the pitch and vibration right and you will feel it.

How to do it from the bottom up:

Sit, stand or lie down on a flat surface. Your spine should be straight.

Start with a very low ooo sound and feel it in your genitals. As you raise the pitch to an ahh sound think of your solar plexus and feel the vibration there. Next make the Hawww or ahhh sound like you are cooing over a new baby and feel it in your heart. Next make a singing ayyy sound and feel it in your throat. Last of all sing the mousey eee sound in your head trying  to feel the sound inside your head.   If you get a headache at any stage make a lower orgasmic type  noise to move the energy out of your head. Your energy will follow the sound.

These sounds work. It’s probably where the whole fake it till you make it genre of sexual thought comes from.

You can also do this as a standing Qigong exercise but it’s a little more difficult to describe

Happy Noise Making

Want to know more? Dr Michelle Mars is a freelance sexologist at Sassi-Inc blogging on the subject of sex for Scoop She can be contacted at michelle@sassi-inc.com. 021 979 373  Or you can find out more about us at Sassi-Inc.Com

Sassi-inc taking the stress out of having better sex. We can help you enhance your sex lives. Consults $120 hour, Essential Sensual Fitness, Personal Training for better sex $6o per hour  (1-4 people), Skype sessions $80 and hour.

There is a moment of absolute ecstasy, your mind goes blank or yellow or blue, it goes on for minutes, you feel it in your heart or your belly or your genitals. It can happen during sex, or after or sometimes even before. You connect with your partner and you begin to feel an orgasm flow through your entire body, through your, spine, into your heart, your belly, your vagina, the tip of your penis.

It is the Valley Orgasm and it is the orgasm that transcends orgasmic sex.  It is an orgasm that goes on and on climbing higher after each peak in a sexual encounter. A Valley Orgasm has to be experienced to be understood and it is something you will want to experience.

A Valley Orgasm is an experience not a sexual technique.

Experiencing the Valley Orgasm requires an open mind and some prior sexual knowledge and experience. In the words of my favourite Kiwi philosopher Rachael Hunter…. it won’t happen over night but it will happen if you do the practice.

Want to know more ask Michelle or Blair.  Dr Michelle Mars is a freelance sexologist at Sassi-Inc blogging on the subject of sex for Scoop She can be contacted at michelle@sassi-inc.com. 021 979 373  Or you can find out more about us at Sassi-Inc.Com

Sassi-inc taking the stress out of having better sex. We can help you enhance your sex lives. Consults $120 hour, Essential Sensual Fitness, Personal Training for better sex $6o per hour  (1-4 people), Skype sessions $80 and hour.

A Sydney client sent me a book called Kink to review.

I waited with eager anticipation for this book. A Sydney  journalist spends  four years of her life talking to people and researching fetish and kink.

Sydney and San Francisco are two of the most sexual avant gaurde places in the world so this book should be fantastic. The voyeur in me licked its lips, Kink was going to be full of the kinds of things that people get off on besides the normal.  There would be no married heterosex in the dead bug position in this book.

People don’t tend to admit to sexual proclivities outside of the mainstream and  kinky pastimes most often remain well kept secrets.  Most non-kinksters would think about S&M Bondage and Discipline, leather and swingers if they thought of kink but there is way more to kink than that and one thing this book does do is explore a wide range of kinky pastimes from whips to cuddly toys.  Somehow I seem to have missed out on the Plushies thing, cuddly toys modified for sexual purposes.
Meet  Meeko, a popular plush toy, now on display at the Museum of Sex in NY City

In the  four years Clifford-Smith spent researching her book, at times putting herself in some risky and uncomfortable situations she seems to have been unmoved by any of the kinky practices and quite surprised by the ordinariness of most of the people she meets.

There is some hilarious and informative stuff in this book and if you want to have a look at Kink culture from the outside it’s not a bad read.  Kink is a birds-eye view of kink culture in that  Clifford-Smith the seems to have managed not to connect with any aspect of any of the kinky pastimes she observes.  The book reminded me of a rather dry article I once read about a lesbian onsite sex party in Canada.  Two lesbian researchers tried to research Kinky lesbian culture.  Dressed in sports gear and sandals , when everyone else was in latex and lace, they didn’t quite fit in and their research results didn’t reflect the joy and energy that people exhibit at such events.

I think if you research and write about something and it doesn’t quite come from the heart you never get a great picture. It’s like a photographer arriving for a shoot without the right camera. The image is never as good as it could be.

I was surprisingly disappointed with Clifford-Smiths book.  Her four year journey seems rather solitary; she neither took friends with her to events nor does she seem to have made friends with any of the Kinksters.  I find this kind of strange given how friendly Kinksters  are when they are dressed up and partying with like minded souls.

The book is full of broken blood vessels, toe talons hanging over the end of peep toe shoes, rubber encasing fat roles and wrinkles.  I recognized some of the more colorful Sydneyside characters in the book and what she doesn’t quite capture is the pleasure Kinksters get from playing with their identities. ‘CEO  in the computer world by day Diva by night’ said one  tall and glamorous cross dresser one evening, admiring my long red gel nails and lamenting for her own nude but perfectly manicured short ones.

Clifford-Smith did not set herself an easy task, it is difficult to capture the essence of what makes something sexy.  I am writing an article on sex in art in New Zealand at the moment and one of the artists I interviewed, Matt Gaudie said something very insightful ‘sexy doesn’t look like anything’ .   You have to look to see sexy and its seems that in four years Clifford-Smith never caught a glimpse.

Kink is the Vanilla Mocha Frappachino of sex books, you can taste kink culture without being moved by it, which is great if you want to stay safe in your comfortable cage. But, if you desire something a little stronger , want to find out something new and maybe get some new ideas or sexy things to think about, then read Wild Side Sex: The Book of Kink by Midori. Definitely more Short Black than Frappachino, sip on it and enjoy.

Dr Michelle Mars is a freelance sexologist at Sassi-Inc blogging on the subject of sex for Scoop She can be contacted at michelle@sassi-inc.com. Or you can find out more about us at Sassi-Inc.Com

Sassi-inc taking the stress out of having better sex. We can help you enhance your sex lives. Consults $120 hour, Essential Sensual Fitness, Personal Training for better sex $6o per hour  (1-4 people), Skype session $80 and hour.

Michelle 021979373

+64 21 979 373
Sex.Scoop.co.nz

The vagina. We are all fascinated by it but we don’t really like to think about much less talk about the ins and outs of our ladies front bottoms. Anything that is forbidden tends to fascinate so perhaps that’s why this week we got to see a documentary that explores that very thing for the second time.  Well actually it’s about the vulva, that is, the bits on the outside that we can see. But that’s just splitting hairs. If there are any hairs there that is.

The vagina has made its way from porn to  the main stream. The more we get a look at the vagina, be it a quick flash from Britney or Paris, or a well lit and carefully rendered scene from a movie, the more standardised and unrealistic our ideas about whats normal become. In the 60′s there was the full bush, in the 80′s the bikini wax, tidying up the bits that poke out of your undies and in the 2000′s we’ve got the Brazilian, usually just a little strip or tuft of pube showing or even the Hollywood, completely nude.

It’s hardly surprising that women are now a little shy of our  baldly exposed privates and turn to surgeons for reassurance. But what women often take on their visits to the doctor are  pictures of pornstar vaginas.  This is where it starts to get a little absurd because  porno vaginas like porno breasts tend to have been crafted by the surgeons knife in the first place.  So if you do go through with it what you get is not normal, as if there was a normal when it comes to the vag.  They are all so different!

It doesn’t surprise me that that women take porn to the surgeon’s office, finding pictures of the non aroused unadulterated vagina is difficult. I know because after hours of fruitless search I had to enlist a graphic designer to illustrate my paper on the designer vagina at the world sexological conference in Sydney in 2007.

I think the lack of images of  vagina’s is part of the reason why vaginal reconstruction has emerged as a business.  We need more vagina pics in the workd in my opinion so the highlight of the Perfect Vagina  documentary for me was the sculptural wall composed of casts of dozens of different vagina’s. The wall beautifully illustrated what feminist sexologist Betty Dodson has been saying for the past 40 years, ‘viva la vulva’, vagina’s are ‘fascinating, unique and beautiful’.

Vagina’s are all very different from one another.No two are the same. Despite this women still want surgery to make theirs look normal. One thing that the cosmetic surgeons blurb or a magazine article is unlikely to tell you is that surgery is painful and it may result in changed or reduced sensation. In fact the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ regard it as dangerous, expensive and unwarranted.

Why change something that is perfect already.

Listen to my interview on designer vagina’s on Triple J

Dr Michelle Mars is a freelance sexologist at Sassi-Inc blogging on the subject of sex for Scoop She can be contacted at michelle@sassi-inc.com. Or you can find out more about us at Sassi-Inc.Com

Blair Bishop is mental health clinician specialising in Sex, Drugs, Alochol and Youth and blogging for Scoop at http://sex.scoop.co.nz. He can be contacted at Blair@sassi-inc.com

We enhance your sex lives. Consults $120 hour, Essential Sensual Fitness, Personal Training for better sex $6o per hour (1-4 people). 021979373