Pleasure Mapping: An exercise to expand your sexual communication
How to know what touch you want
image: Mehran Djojan
In sex therapy, there are often similarities in the therapeutic goals set by clients after our initial assessments. The most common, is wanting to improve sexual communication.
But to communicate, one needs to know what it is they like. And this is often where people seem to get stuck. Most clients will say something like, “I want to know what I like!”
One exercise clients are encouraged to do is called Pleasure Mapping. This involves exploring sensation by stimulating erogenous zones with touch. To begin with, this is a non-sexual exercise, and requires using various pace, pressure, rhythm, temperature, and texture on various body parts. Clients then notice what feels good, and what doesn’t.
The main barrier to Pleasure Mapping, and pleasure in general, is a busy mind. A busy mind will tell you everything wrong with different body parts, judge you for not knowing sooner, tell you this is dumb, or that you’re doing it wrong. This is worthy of documenting and unpacking in therapy.
A key component to the Pleasure Mapping exercise is attention retraining. This means noticing when your busy mind has wandered, and deliberately bringing it back to the sensation of the present moment. It’s essentially sexy meditation.
Check out our blog on building sexual arousal which unpacks the difference between primary and secondary erogenous zones before you undergo this exercise. Be sure to explore body parts such as neck, earlobes, lips, chest/breasts, back, waist, stomach, inner thighs, anus, perineum, vulva, mons, testicles, foreskin, glans of the penis, along the groin crease, feet, toes.
Here’s a step by step guide to pleasure mapping:
Set aside time (roughly 30 minutes), and resources for your pleasure mapping
exercise. Include a mirror, a notebook and pen, any sex toys or objects you’d
like to stimulate yourself with.Start with something slow and sensual. Moisturise yourself slowly, notice
where it feels nice. Give yourself some loving touch, the way you might want
someone else to stimulate you.Place a mirror in front of you, and start to look at your body. Notice any
judgemental thoughts that arise, and write them down. Allow yourself to
move on from them. Start to notice the things about your body you feel
neutral about, or like.Genital mapping. Use your mirror to explore your anatomy, and label each
structure out aloud.Notice out aloud the features of your genitals, where hair grows, how the
texture of skin changes, the colours of your complexion.Pleasure map. Softly stroke along the skin where hair grows, notice how it feels. Change the pace or pressure or rhythm and compare. Repeat this process for other areas, all the while noting down what feels good, what is neutral, and what you don’t like.
Write down what you notice you like, and don’t like.
image: Mehran Djojan
You can repeat this process whenever you like to notice how your preferences change. If you feel comfortable, pleasure map with partners to see how the experience differs.
You’ll notice that orgasm, lubrication, or ejaculation are not a priority in this exercise. And that is deliberate. Slowing down your pleasure with your self or others will allow the space away from goal-oriented sex, and toward maximising pleasure.
