We’re taking a look back at some of our favourite and most popular lifestyle stories of 2023, giving you a chance to catch up on some of the great reading you might have missed this
year.

In this story from February, two experts tell Penny Lewis that New Zealanders should have fun and not see their sexuality as a problem to solve.

Michelle Kasey talks about sex a lot. It’s her job to. The 31-year-old Aucklander is a sex and relationships coach who works with her clients to “co-create connected, authentic and erotically alive relationships”.

She doesn’t love the term “coach”, but it’s a way of explaining what she does to encourage her clients to work towards their own sexual liberation, whatever that means for them.

“When people think of sexual liberation, they might have an idea it’s more sex or more partners, but sexual liberation can be an asexual person owning that about their sexual experience, or someone wanting a threesome. I see sexual liberation as knowing and honouring your authentic sexual needs, wants and desires without burden, shame, and the guilt of what’s morally or culturally expected of us,” she says.

Kasey is a softly-spoken woman who carries herself with a dancer’s grace.

She grew up in East Auckland in a conservative but supportive family and attended high-achieving Macleans College and the University of Auckland before working in employment law and HR.

“I absolutely hated it,” she says about her corporate job.

Wanting to free herself from her “good-girl path”, Kasey had taken up competitive pole dancing at 19, which she excelled at and also taught.

“I dove right into it and started to recognise I was looking for some sort of sexual liberation. I told my family I was doing circus arts.”

At 23, she really did run away with the circus. She moved to New York and travelled around the United States, performing in an aerial circus act.

It’s where she met her juggler and free-running acrobat fiance, Chris Paterson, 34, who now works as a tattoo artist.

Originally from Scotland, Paterson followed Kasey to New Zealand in 2015. Back in Aotearoa, Kasey decided to train in sex education.

“But I couldn’t find anything that felt erotic or playful. It was all very problem-focused, ‘Let’s fix your erectile dysfunction.’ The things that came closest were tantric, yogic, and Taoist traditions.”

Kasey trained online for 18 months under the tutelage of sex and relationship educator Layla Martin, who lives in Venice Beach, California. Martin studied sexuality at Stanford University and spent seven years studying tantra in Asia.

Six years after starting her coaching career, Kasey writes, blogs and hosts her podcast Sex, Love & Liberation, and has private consultations with singles and couples over Zoom.

Between sessions, clients have homework – including guided audio self-pleasure practices, and couple-connection practices.

She also holds group workshops – both in person and online, which include dance and movement.

“I teach people how to feel their turn-on, but we’re never touching genitals in the same space. I am sure there are people who offer that service, it’s just not me – I am not a hands-on practitioner in that way,” she says.

“I had a plumber come over to the house a few months ago to do some work. And he was like, ‘What do you do?’ I told him and I could see he immediately thought that I do some kind of physical sexual healing on people with my hands. He was very uncomfortable.” she says.

What Kasey does do is help her clients get comfortable in how they see themselves and how they relate to their partners.

“The number one foundation is that you can give yourself compassion and accept exactly where you are at. And I always invite my clients into this work by not seeing themselves as a problem to solve. We’re all sexual enough, exactly as we are. It’s also okay to want more for yourself.”

Kasey says people often have expectations of themselves that create a lot of pressure – where somehow all the stress of the outside world is supposed to evaporate once they’re in the bedroom.

“One of my real strengths as a practitioner is my commitment to pulling people out of the intellectual again and again. And that’s very hard to do because a lot of my clients are doctors, lawyers, engineers, and even politicians. Our sexuality largely lives in the reptilian brain, our primal sexuality is there. We spend so much time in the prefrontal cortex, which is the thinking brain. And that’s not where we want to be having sexual experiences from. That’s why so many of us get stuck in our heads.

“Somehow, as soon as we cross the threshold from the hallway into our bedroom, all our habits, our work, all our ways of relating to ourselves and our partners, that’s supposed to just be left at the door, and we should just be able to have this magnificent, transcendent sexual experience. But that’s just not the experience of 99 per cent of people. One of my favourite things about this work is when we do shift things in our sexual experience, it ripples out so profoundly,” Kasey says.

“If you’re someone who really struggles to slow down and you’re always moving really fast, you’re a stress chaser and love working from adrenaline and coffee, then yeah, it’s going to be hard to slow down and inhabit your body erotically. In the same way, if you’re someone who’s a chronic over-giver, and you find it hard to identify and express your own needs and wants, that also shows up in your sexual experience.”

Kasey’s clients’ ages range from the mid-20s to mid-70s.

“I’ve really noticed that especially with Gen Z, but also in my generation, it’s more and more normalised to have therapy, especially in liberal circles,” she says. “It’s become a badge of honour,” she says.

Some clients recognise their sex lives are part of their overall well-being.

“I think the difference between traditional therapy counselling and the work I do is that the older models tend to focus on problems, whereas, with my work, we really focus on thriving as the goal.”

That said, Kasey’s clients do have a range of different goals.

Some want to move past performance anxiety and feel more confident and masterful as lovers.

“I also work with people who want to feel sexually empowered after trauma. I also work with couples who have not had sex for many years, and they want to learn how to have an erotic relationship for the long term. And then I also work with people who maybe can orgasm already, and they have a good sex life, but they want to feel more eroticism. They want to have more soulful, really satisfying kinds of sexual experiences.”

Kasey equates pornography as sex that’s like a sugar high that peters off.

“That’s not a judgment of pornography, it’s just that it’s different. I think of it as fast-food sexuality. When we take so much feeling out of sex, and we relate to sex as an act of doing rather than an erotic state of being, that’s behind so many empty sexual experiences.

“As for changing the way we talk about sex – one more thing I can add is to play more. I think that we have a real over-seriousness when it comes to our own sexual experiences. If you couldn’t fail, what might you be inspired to try out?”

Dr Jessica Maxwell says New Zealanders could do a lot more to talk about sexual pleasure, but she knows communicating about sex is something that can make people feel vulnerable.

“A researcher I follow mentioned this on TikTok yesterday. Communication is always worth it because you’re going to reap the benefits to your satisfaction tenfold. So it’s better to communicate and get the sex you want. A little bit of awkwardness is worth it.”

The Canadian academic was a senior lecturer in social psychology at the University of Auckland until late last year and is now an assistant professor at McMaster University in Ontario.

Her research looks into what factors are the most important to maintain satisfying sexual and romantic relationships.

“There’s research that the quality of our romantic relationships is becoming more important to our identities over time. It’s evident to me that for most people, you can’t really disassociate the sexual part of the relationship from the overarching relationship – they both feed into one another.

“So that’s why I got really interested in the best sexual relationship, because that’s going to bleed over and just make us feel better about our relationship with our partner, and also our well-being.”

Dr Maxwell says it’s really important to have a growth mindset towards your sex life.

“So, it’s realising that sex takes effort and work to maintain and that it’s not just enough to find a good partner to who you’re attracted. To have a successful long-term sexual relationship, you’ve got to put in that effort and work. And sometimes that looks like talking to your partner about maybe changing the time of day you have sex or trying a new position.”

Trying new things in general is good for relationships – and it doesn’t have to be in the bedroom.

“Going to a new restaurant, maybe cooking a new recipe with your partner, doing an activity like a goofy game, or something that brings out a new side of your partner you haven’t seen before reminds us of that falling-in-love phase because we’re getting to learn new pieces of info about them. New Zealand’s Cupla app is good for finding new things to do together.”

It also pays to remember that most people probably aren’t having as much sex as you think.

“Research suggests that sex once a week maximises most people’s well-being, on average. Some big studies have shown there’s a curvilinear relationship between how much sex people have, and their happiness levels. The levelling-off point is about once a week. So, there’s no difference, on average, in the happiness and satisfaction ratings of couples who have sex once a week compared to couples who have sex two or three times a week, or even more. I like to reassure my students about that all the time.”

This story was originally published on February 19, 2023.