Your Brain as a Sex Organ with Dipsea’s Gina Gutierrez

CW: Sex and Intimacy Content Warning

Hey everybody. Jen Hatmaker here, your host of the For the Love Podcast. You guys, welcome to the show. That was me licking my finger and doing the fire hot symbol because right now we’re in a series called For the Love of Sex. We just don’t talk about this enough, or we don’t talk about it, we don’t parse it out enough. We do sort of a cursory treatment of sex just at the highest level. But I’m like, “Let’s dive in here. Let’s give this some attention. Let’s spend some time on something that really matters to all of us and we just don’t talk about enough.”

So, this week’s episode, we are leaning into pleasure, and I wanted to get a little bit of a different take on this topic related to sex. So, I don’t know what you think of when you hear sexual pleasure. I think a lot of us immediately go to, let’s focus on our imaginations, or we think we need to consult an instruction manual about the anatomy and where’s the G-spot and what are the techniques and what are the tactics and what are the positions, some mechanical aspects of pleasure. But, I think there’s some really important stuff to unpack here, particularly for women when it comes to the mind-body connection and sex.

So, if you’ve ever been at a loss for words, if anybody ever asked you, “What turns you on,” just stick around. If you’ve ever felt, maybe even a lack of agency in bed because you can’t figure out why everything feels like some sort of pre-orchestrated dance somebody else wrote, just stick around. Or if you’ve ever just been scared or nervous or embarrassed to look at what makes you experience desire, I mean, I’m going to say it again, stick around.

So, according to a study done by OMGYES, which is a sex education platform and The Kinsey Institute, 90% of women use their imaginations to get aroused. Well, I mean that’s a pretty decisive percentage. Our guest today likes to say it this way. She says, “The brain is the biggest sex organ and everyone can benefit from expanding their sexual imagination.”

So, when we say we want better sex or more connection with ourselves and our partner, it can begin and actually does begin with allowing our minds to deliver the framework and the safety and the fantasy even of what that might look like. I mean, it’s a pretty incredible entryway into feeling more pleasure in your body and in your bed and with your partner.

And so, I want to take this idea of pleasure one step further today and examine what is the erotic, how does embracing the erotic give us power, particularly women who feel disconnected from their joy and even intuition, all the mind and imagination stuff that really matters. In this interview, we reference actually the essay of Audre Lorde, the Uses of the Erotic and that has influenced writers and thinkers of the last five or six generations. I mean, really though, how does embracing our individual preferential eroticism make us better lovers, but also better caregivers and friends and partners and leaders? If the brain is the biggest sex organ, why would we only assign it to the logistics of our lives like child care and emails and life management when it exists for so much more and is the engine behind a much more satisfying sex life.

It’s not just a computer to keep our lives running. It is the gateway toward the deepest possible sexual pleasure we could have. So, I think we have it in us to enter a different relationship with our imagination that serves ultimately like our deepest selves and our partners. Our guests this week has spent tons of time researching women and how they’ve experienced and expressed their sexual pleasure. And what she found led her to create a company with her business partner that delivers audio erotica in absolutely consensual and affirming ways for sexualities across the spectrum.

So, let me explain what I mean by this. Today we have Gina Gutierrez. She co-founded a company called Dipsea, D-I-P-S-E-A, with her friend to address a gap that she saw on how women interacted with their own sexuality and pleasure. So, after tons of research, and we’re going to talk about this, she began to see an opportunity in helping nonbinary and female-identifying people bridge the gap between their minds and physical pleasure through erotic audio stories like the quickest shorthand I could give you right now because she said this a few minutes into the interview. “It’s essentially taking the power of sexy romance novels,” like our moms read that we still read, that whole genre of books that women have absolutely loved for decades and innovating that into sort of today’s modern world.

So, that’s kind of the idea. If you can get into your brain kind of sexy romance novels, what does that look like in a completely different format? So, that’s sort of where we’re at with erotic audio stories. So, Gina presented these ideas actually at a TED Talk last year that Bill Gates also presented that, by the way, which we’ll link to over at jenhatmaker.com, and it was in her TED Talk, she’s illuminating the connection between imagination and arousal in women’s minds. And then obviously Dipsea, her app has been highlighted in major publications and documentaries including Netflix’s The Principles of Pleasure. And what it does is it offers a safe and ethical way for all of you, but particularly women, but all people alike, to find out what turns you on and to fire up your imagination knowing that that is the greatest engine to a really satisfying sex life.

I love this conversation, you guys. You are going to be really interested to hear everything she has to say and teach us and offer us, and I would just love to see this normalized and demystified and even celebrated and championed that we get to prioritize our own pleasure. Isn’t that great news? So, you guys, I’m so excited to introduce you to Gina Gutierrez. Enjoy our conversation. You’re going to love this one.

Mentioned in this Episode: 

Dipsea
Website with Jen’s Link
(dipseastories.com/jenhatmaker)

Ted Talk by Gina Gutierrez

A Billion Wicked Thoughts

Come As You Are
by Dr. Emily Nagoski

Dr. Emily Nagoski – For the Love Podcast Episode

Dr. Emily Nagoski: Podcast

Audre Lorde reads Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power on YouTube

Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” Essay Text

OMG Yes – The Science of Women’s Pleasure

Jen’s FTL Enneagram Series

Stay Connected with Jen Hatmaker: 

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Thanks for listening to the For the Love Podcast!

XO – Team Jen