Dr. Laura Berman Launches 'In the Bedroom' on Oprah's OWN Network
The sex therapist Dr Laura Berman at home with her children. Photograph: Chris Lake/RapportOne of my most memorable moments in TV talk show, was the day Dr. Laura Berman was on the Oprah show, calmly telling women to get out a mirror and see what we look like ‘down there’.
Dr. Berman, who does speak frankly about sexuality, wasn’t being cute but rather encouraging women to have a positive confrontation with our genitalia.
About seven years later from that profound moment — one of Oprah’s best shows ever — Dr. Laura Berman’s new show ‘In the Bedroom With Dr. Berman’ debuts this week on the Oprah Winfrey Network.
OWN Sneak Peek: In the Bedroom with Dr. Laura Berman
Dr. Laura Berman has also released a new self-help book, ‘It’s Not Him, It’s You! How to Take Charge of Your Life and Create the Love and Intimacy You Deserve.’
AOC in promotes a frank discussion around female sexuality. I’ve read all Dr. Berman’s books and find her understanding that most sexual ‘problems’ are about the power exchanges of relationships spot on.
“I work with heads of companies who can boss people around all day long but wouldn’t dare mention what they wanted in the bedroom,” Berman says. She believes that in subtle ways, women have been taught that they are “at the effect of everything,” waiting for men to propose or take the lead in their sexual lives. “It doesn’t occur to us that we can hold of the reins to our lives,” Berman tells the Washington Post.
Dr. Berman’s focus, like mine, is not on men’s performance in the bedroom. Without suggesting for a moment that men do everything right, they cannot give women permission for her own sexual satisfaction and pleasure.
We also believe that men at least in America — and surely in many countries in Europe — are trying much harder to be good lovers, often with little credit from American women who blame men for our lack of sexual satisfaction.
While we do hold culture and especially monotheism responsible for promoting women’s guilt about our embrace of sensual pleasure of any kind, only women can demand the right to be fully-integrated sensual creatures.
A Life-Sustaining Sensual Embrace
At Anne of Carversville, our top goal is for women to embrace sensual pleasure as life-affirming and a path to a more productive, caring human person. The very words sensuality and female sexuality have been condemned for centuries.
Reality is that many women like Dr. Laura Berman and myself believe that that women’s refusal to say “get out of my way, I WILL be a sensual creature” keeps us from reaching our full life potential as caring, productive, smart and spiritual women.
Our goal stated continually at AOC is that women — and especially American women who are mired in the muck of religious guilt in a way very different from most European and even Latin American women — say ‘no more!’
We stop blaming men for our lack of sexual gratification, get out the mirror and get going in a positive embrace of our own sexuality and power relationships with husbands, partners and lovers.
I am very positive about 2011 being a fruitful year for the global embrace of female sexuality. The Internet is bringing us together as a strong force of many voices. Let the European women help us understand how they embrace both body and soul in a way American women can’t.
Dr. Laura Berman has devoted her life to this issue, and it is my top priority as well. I will be writing more about my own confrontation with my body, not getting out the mirror because I did that as a younger woman, but getting out the camera.
Confronting the disgusting physicality of my own body with a camera was the only way I could finally love myself.
Years of abusive words and blows — the crowning event coming from a priest who refused me communion and hung a scarlet letter around my neck in public, because he believed my attacker who was also his drinking buddy, rather than me who was sexually attacked — left me hating my body as much as the Bible says I should.
When a priest denies you communion in public at age 15, passing you by because the day before he chose to believe your attacker and not you, is just one more example of the global boys club in action.
Luckily, this man’s next victim was a 45-year-old woman who didn’t go to her priest or clergyman for guidance. She gave this bastard 24 hours to get him and his family out of town, before she filed attempted rape charges.
The male-dominated clergy is not the source of solace for women who are struggling with identity and self love issues. There are exceptions, of course, but let the male clergy prove to women in words and actions that they are positive about our sexuality and sensuality.
The men who demonstrate they are worthy of our support as spiritual leaders will get it.
Anne of Carversville stands up for Smart Sensuality women around the world. You are smart, sensual, spiritual and have big hearts.
The Allyson Mitchell: Ladies Sasquatch exhibition at the McMaster Museum of Art is shown in a recent handout photo. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-McMaster Museum of Art-Cat O’Neil)Women Are Sexual Creatures
Let’s join hands in 2011, agreeing that women are sexual creatures and that responsible pleasure is life-enhancing, not life-denying. We are better women to everyone, including ourselves, when we stop believing that our sensuality is the work of the devil.
With two-thirds of American women believing in a male God who knows our every move, no wonder we have difficulty accepting sensual pleasure as a human right. Science is increasingly examining sexuality as a life force, a center of our human vitality.
I fully believe that American women’s obesity epidemic is partially anchored in our ambivalence about our sexual selves. When French, Italian and Brazilian women — who love their physical, sensual selves — are as obese as American and British women, I’ll refrain from making this argument.
We have lots to do this year, and I’m thrilled that Dr. Laura Berman’s show will give us lots to talk about. Anne
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Share Article Posted on Sun, January 2, 2011 4 Comments | in Female Sexuality, New Eroticism, Pleasures, Religion and Women, Sex & Culture, Smart Sensuality, Women's Bodies tagged 'In the Bedroom with Dr. Berman', Dr. Laura Berman, OWN Network, Oprah, religion in America
Reader Comments (4)
Anne, someday I'd love to read your formal definition of the word "sensual." Clearly you are using it well beyond the scope of meaning information, sensation, delivered by way of the tactile, the input signal a hedonist will use like heroin to fill a mind in the (ultimately futile) effort to block and displace the other facets of reality. In reading your words often it would seem you want to extend that word-thought beyond the realms of the shared, and therefore verifiable, common reality to refer to what might perhaps be called an intuitive emotional simulation/emulation of another human's current state of being, a perception of empathy not explainable by the five senses traditionally recognized, an ultimate state of companionship, of not-Aloneness. Such would be my best guess, working from what I've read. Am I close?
Yes, you're close Cyranos. But I do believe that when ones allows ourselves to hear music, smell flowers, taste different flavors of food, we are well on our way to being a sensual person in a simple definition. Absolutely I believe that empathy emerges as a result of being open to receive with our senses.
It isn't that sensual is irrational, for we both know there's extraordinary logic in nature. The emerging field of biomimicry is based on the applied design of nature to human problems and needs.
The very word 'sensual' is disgusting in the orthodox wings of monotheism. And it's disgusting in the dictionary, associated with a wide variety of words that I'm not as a person. When I read the definition of sensuality, I was thunderstruck.
I've written quite a lot about new brain scan research on differences among people who embrace different ideologies and values systems. Our brains are functionally different, and I believe that sensualists perceive their surroundings differently due to brain structure, as well as culture. Conservative brains and liberal brains are functionally different. As well read as you are, Cyranos, you probably know that.
When I was a young woman I read Wilhelm Reich's theory of orgone energy, and I believe in it conceptually. Reich -- who was jailed by conservatives and died in disgrace -- believed that humans possess in varying degrees, a quantifiable sexuality energy that can be measured.
Fifty years after his death, Reich's papers and machines are now being investigated at several leading universities. I'll not make a case for sensual vitality energy because the technology exists now to prove Reich's theories one way or the other in the next decade.
Working on a new meaning of sensuality is critical to me, because of the influence of monotheism and especially Catholicism and Christianity in condemning it. Islam actually embraces sensuality in a positive way within the private sanctuary of a couple's relationship.
Strict Christianity considers sensuality and being in touch with our senses to be the work of the devil. It leads to no good under all circumstances, and it's woman's fault that humankind must deal with the burdens of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, singing.
I strongly believe in intuition or the sixth sense, but it too is considered bad and the stuff of witches. Personally, I believe that sensuality breeds compassion and connection to people that transcends nationalities and religion. Basically, we are aligned with nature, although that leaves plenty of room for critical thinking, too.
As always, thanks for sharing your thoughts Cyranos. Anne
Ah, but of course. The classic "take time to smell the flowers" as it was expressed by the folk my age.
In the Britannica the definition of sensuality seems accurate for the first and second offerings, literal and factual, only in the third does it reference religion's perspective, a perspective I would point out derives from an antique assumption of polarity later politicized into a lie impacting the development of ethical structures, a lie easily defeated once other and more rational concepts are introduced to support the same elements of the personality.
I'd not heard of Reich, but I have heard the theory of biases being a matter of genetic differences in the brain, a theory I stand aloof from based on observation and deduction. I hold that theory as at best incomplete, more likely a misinterpretation of data acquired by immature technology. Until the brain strainers can explain the initial "formatting" of the human mind* I'm going to set their results off to one side in the "interesting but unconfirmed, below minimum validation " category. I do recognize there are distinct differences in the structures of thought to be observed between the different social archetypes mentioned, but I am more inclined to believe those a matter of formatting or firmware (of the mind) rather than the actual hardware (of the brain).
Anne, has it ever struck you as strange the physical structures of Christianity were so heavily influenced by Paul, a man Jesus never met? Has anyone ever pointed out the distinct possibility that when Jesus said "where ever two or three are gathered in my name there shall I be also..." he was actually setting the upper limit on a congregation rather than the lower, desiring to be remembered by believers organized in a flat cellular structure rather than organized into a vertical hierarchy mimicking the political structures of the Roman empire, the structure a one time tax collector would have known best? Heretic that I am I've no doubt God would have an open and shut case against religion on charges of slander and defamation of character, what I don't know is what could be awarded for damages. Oh, wait... might that tie in somehow with the prophecies of judgment day? Anyway, for your own sake Anne be fair, don't blame God for what is easily seen as the deeds of men. That path leads into contradictions of the same sort crippled the very men you chastise and condemn. All three of the religions descended out of the tent of Abraham acknowledge the same God, perhaps what can be learned by the differences in how each approaches the teachings of that God are one of the greatest gifts to those children brave enough to seek the truth rather than accept a dogma designed to support the geo-political forces of their lifetime.
*I do believe every human is quite telepathic until the onset of symbolic communication, speech, the communication link primarily mother to child and for the most part well below the conscious threshold for both, a means for Momma to help her baby with the immense task of configuring and formatting (for lack of better words) a brand new brain to begin the task of building a personality. I believe the open channel of sensitivity created to support such a bond go a long way to explaining many things, from the differences seen in the energy signature of a conservative compared to a liberal to the consistent differences seen between a Scorpio and a Gemini. But, that's just my odd guess. *grin* Most folks hear that one and figure I'm crazy as bullfrog singing ballads to a box turtle.
Well Cyranos, you always make me think. You are a good intellectual companion. I don't blame God for the attitudes of men. I hope I am fair on that topic, because I understand that for so many of my readers, God is a very significant force in their lives -- literally there every minute. I have many Conservative women readers all around the world who trust me to be fair, while they try to sort out a private point of view that may take them against the institutions that govern their lives. They may not alter their behavior so much, but they come to AOC for another approach to thinking. We have many of those readers, and I honor them very much. I share my experiences so they don't think I'm just an ivory tower academic of some kind.
Re the brain scan research, I agree that it can't be oversimplified. But the new studies on visualization rang really valid to me. I absolutely see images much more intensely than many other people. This is my gift as a design person. So when I wrote a couple weeks ago that an area of the brain dealing with visualization is three times the size in people like me (I wasn't scanned, so we don't know about my brain), it made sense to me. I did not get my visualization capabilities, or my love of beauty, from my home, my parents or my upbringing.
Mind you, Cyranos, I will read your comment a third time, because they are always very rich reads. Thank you. Anne