Seduction and sex as positive relationship and life skills

As Jane Langton says (below in her TEDx video), we need to be able to laugh at ourselves and we need to have fun in life and in relationships. One more thing before we get started. If you have a pet, when you walk by it at home, do you smile at it?

When you see something pleasing, do you take a moment to smile about it? Do you smile enough throughout your day? Even if you have little to smile about, if you try to find things that are lighter throughout your day, that has a lot to do with enjoying life. If you think about how often the number 23 comes up in life, once you consider that, you tend to start to notice that number. The same can be true about other things. Like beauty and humor, compassion and affection.

Chen Lizra

Okay, let's start by watching the first minute of this video from a TEDx with Chen Lizra on seduction. Watch at least the first thirty seconds. There will be a few TEDx videos shared in this blog today just for support and background, and for further (and better) explanation of the specifics of the overall topic.

But not to worry. They are are pretty short, interesting, entertaining, educational and very useful. If you don't know TED or TEDx, they are pretty awesome. TED stands for "Technology, Entertainment and Design" and the "x" is for the independently community versions of these.

"TED is a global set of conferences run by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, under the slogan "Ideas Worth Spreading". TED was founded in 1984 as a one-off event; the annual conference series began in 1990." -Wikipedia

I've been surprised by two things first and foremost in this area. One is how this is abused by some in the public sphere to get ahead and that is fine, but sometimes it does get out of hand. The other is how they will use it in their public and professional lives, but not at home with the person that is their partner in life and the one most central to their life.

This goes for both men and women but I've seen it more in my life obviously (being male) with women. Once in a relationship, they seem to think it's wrong to use it on their mate. Why is that?
I suspect it is because they know how they use it in public and they may not want to bring that into the privacy of their home, for whatever reason. That it is in some way, disingenuous, questionable to use on someone close to you, or simply unfair in some way. It's not, if you have both of you in mind.

This also has to do with self image, how one views oneself.

And in America, how self conscious we are, how we associate sex with everything but then disassociate it from so much where it really should be associated. We are a curious tribe, mixed and varied as we are. We seem mostly to associate sex in negative ways (advertising, reactions to it, pornography, etc.), but is it sometimes not used in ways we may mistakenly consider it to not be positive, where we really should be using it?

We're twisted sometimes, and not in a good way. And not in ways we think, making it somewhat counter-intuitive for many.

We are at times stunted by our over Puritanical, over religious ways and, we need to get over ourselves.

Of course there are other issues, as Tracy McMillan points out in her TEDx. Tracy McMillan is a television writer (Mad Men, United States of Tara) and relationship author who wrote the book "Why You're Not Married".We need to marry, or to be in a relationship with the right person. First and foremost that person needs to be, you.

This brings us to the next issue once we are in a relationship as explored in the Sex Starved Marriage by Alisa Vitti. You can watch the video, but one of the things to consider is that sometimes you just need to have sex, even when you don't really feel like it. Remember the comment above about smiling? Similar issue.

And not just even sex. If your partner just wants to be with you but the frustration, or anger, or the bitterness keeps you from wanting to also, well....

Two things to consider here.

One is that doing is practicing doing, and not doing is practicing not doing. Our reality guides our future.

The other thing is something she mentions about those (mostly women in her therapy experience with clients) who finally do have sex when they didn't at first want to and, that once those women have had sex, usually she says that they report that they actually did in the end enjoy it after all.

This is somewhat similar in many ways to the suicidal bridge jumper who leaps from a bridge and then three quarters of the way down decides that they really do want to live after all. Or if they were stopped from jumping, years later are then so glad that they didn't kill themselves after all, even though they had badly wanted to at the time.

Sometimes we just have to do what we don't want to do, in order to realize what we really did want to do, or that we would later be glad we didn't do something irrevocable, like death.

This is also very much about achieving: losing weight, starting a new project, cleaning the house (maintaining a relationship), or whathaveyou. It is that first step that we are so unmotivated to do, that we most need at times, to do.

One of the things some women (and men) have problems with are issues with it their own bodies.

Between advertising, male oriented just about everything, and puritanism (or religious diatribes against things like healthy sex), women (and some men though that's not as much the issue), need to feel comfortable in their own skin, with their female sexuality and related body parts, as Jane Langton explains in her own TEDx video where she says masturbation is the basis for all human sexuality.

Masturbation. Especially, female masturbation, is important.

Familiarity basically is the issue. To know yourself, to know what you want, what you want your sex partner to do to you, really does help.

Alisa Vitti

In Loving your lady parts as a path to success, power & global change (yes, that is the title), by Alisa Vitti at TEDxFiDiWomen, she says there are many women who need to learn that, in order to move outward to their relationships with others.

In order to make sex what it should be for them and their partners. Life, is not just something you start out in and can expect it to be what it can be. That only happiness through luck and good decisions, knowledge and trial and error. Information certainly enhances our success rates and decreases unnecessary risks.

Then we have to consider, Is it lust or love, a TEDx by Terri Orcuch. This, is an important one in maintaining relationships. So many relationships dissolve because one is in a love relationship with someone who is in a lust relationship with them. And there are other issues about this. Is one partner seeking love through sex? Are both? Because that is only going to eventually fail.

Finally, Make Love Not Porn (makelovenotport.com) from Cindy Gallop at TEDxOxford. This relates to the premise that porn is sanitized and idealized and not real life sex. Because of that and because some people watch it and think it's real or watch it so much they expect reality to reflect that, it has become (long ago really) a consideration and with her web site, she has done something about that.

Debby Herbenick

I lied. Finally we have, Making Sex Normal, by Debby Herbenick | TEDxBloomington. Sex, is normal. We should treat it as such. We should have some ethics about it and we should treat it like a benefit and certainly not as either a weapon or something to be used lightly and without any thought about it. If you ever use sex as a tool or a weapon, use it with you and your partner both in mind and not just yourself.

What are you doing to make sex normal?

Here's the thing (summation) and it's really fairly simple. We have a wide variety of things available to us in our lives as human beings that we need to know about, to think about, to address correctly and to incorporate properly into our lives.

Live your life, enjoy your life but make it work for you, not against you. Because not infrequently, we are our own worst enemies.

And it just doesn't have to be that way.

#sex #love #seduction #relationahip #TED #TEDx

Innovation Requires Being Innovative

We need innovation. The usual way of doing business is killing us. We need more quality in life, more time to ourselves. One example is the less than five, or six day work week, the less than ten or eight hour day. Here is an example from Salon magazine that I've been calling for going on decades now: 5 Reasons it's time for a Four Day Work Week.And no, not ten our days but four day work weeks and six hour days. One mentioned in this article was calling for three day work weeks but hey, I'm reasonable.

What's holding America back from advancing into the future with innovation and progressive forethought? According to (myself and) Robert Reich, corporations (big surprise, right?). Even Henry Ford believed he needed to pay his workers enough to afford the products they were producing. Corporations today are pushing to squeeze every last dollar in a counter-intuitive effort to simply take every last dollar.

As if one day soon, there will simply be no more money. And there won't, if they keep taking it all for themselves and their shareholders.

Diana Kander at a TEDxKC titled, Our approach to innovation is dead wrong, talks about her experiences in martial arts. I had my own experiences through the martial arts. When I was a kid taking Isshinryu Karate, we fought in tournaments and we kept losing. Why? Because we were trained to kill quickly in our style.

Budokan was a local style around the Pacific Northwest that was consistently beating us in tournaments. It's Karate Ka strutted around like they had the better martial art, when we knew we were the better style. So why did they hold that position?

It was because they could beat is in a controlled environment, and that their style was perfect for tournament style fighting. But on the street, in a life and death situation, I would give it to us.

This situation simmered for some time until a Tacoma tournament...

During the finals, the main event was between our heavyweight fighter and theirs. The fight happened, it was a good fight, then finally our guy had had it and pulled out all stops. There guy ended up going to the hospital.

Finally we had proven that if we were pushed, we could clean the mats with these guys. There was no more question, no more strutting around town and no more claims of their being better. But to be fair, the black belts all started saying it was not something that should have ever started up in the first place and they felt bad about what had happened.

Especially our black belt who had won that fight. He had let it get to him too. It had been a brutal fight.

I remember being one of the last people at the tournament, after the finals night was over. The field house was almost empty, they were starting to turn off lights, two of the other style's black belts were walking the loser from the main event out, between the two of them as he couldn't walk out well on his own. He was hunched over a bit and walked slowly from the three rapid fire punches he had received in the chest and that had ended the fight.

We see similar things in schools where we are trained not for real life but a specialized view of real life. Then when we sometimes fight back, we feel bad about it. If we had been trained for the real world in the first place, we have to hold back because we can't do otherwise in a controlled environment.

Life usually doesn't set us up for it properly. Life is usually different than what you expect when it happens to you. So we need to be versatile, creative, ingenious and compassionate in all the right places and against all odds.

It's not that easy and much of the burden is laid upon us when it could have been corrected by those whose charge we had been placed in, in the first place. One of the things that could help us along our way is actively enhancing the quality of life for everyone and not just the rich elite few and those at the top of corporations and... nations.

By this point in human development and history we should be turning our thoughts to increasing luxury time wherever possible for recreation, the arts and sciences. We are wasting so much human endeavors on corporations when we need to be expending it on humanity.

The more luxury personal time people have the more people will turn to innovation, rather than spending all our time decompressing from work, work, work always worried about money and working. Part of the reason we don't have money, don't have enough personal time, is how we have been pushed down as a race of beings (at least in the so called first and second world countries) to where we have to work more and more for less and less for the fewer and fewer in control of all of us.

Guesswork, guts, instinct, all these things we need to cultivate before we need them, along with the teaching and training we receive, whether we want it or not in the course of our growing up and throughout our lives. We need the time to expand on these things and we can't do it if we are always working and always under duress from work, bills and lack of personal space and time.

When we do need to act in using those types of things, we need not to go into shock, but to act. To act appropriately for whatever the situation is which will most likely not be what we were trained for. But instead we have too little time to do anything but stew in our own juices, to stress, to see only the crest of the next hill and not over it into the next valley.

So be ready. Be ready for what will actually happen, and not necessarily what you were trained to expect to have happen. And strive to push those in charge to give us more and not trick us into thanking them for giving us less and less.

And best of luck.