Felt Pleasure Recap

Pleasure Recap · from a conversation between Sage & Izzy

What does arousal look like when nobody is chasing penetration or orgasm? And how slow is slow enough?

Those questions come up in this conversation between Sage, a board-certified sexologist, embodiment coach and certified cuddlist, and Izzy, afterglow’s head of production and the intimacy coordinator on Felt. Sage saw the film at its premiere at the Sexual Health Alliance conference, which is where the two of them met.

Felt grew out of sensate focus, an exercise where partners explore touch with penetration and climax off the table. They might happen. They don’t have to. What’s left is two people exploring touch and finding new ways to connect with each other.

communication · implied

Sage We’re so quick to touch the body that we don’t touch the heart first. That’s why I start every session with eye gazing. The film gives it a good thirty seconds, and if you’ve never done it, a minute feels like thirty years. It’s okay to go this slowly.

Izzy I did eye gazing with the performers on the day of the shoot, and it always gets emotional. When I tried it myself, it felt uncomfortable at first. How do you prevent someone from spacing out when eye gazing?

Sage Yes, it can sometimes feel uncomfortable. If there’s laughter, laugh. If you need to look away, look away and come back. Those are cues that you’re nervous, and that’s exactly what your partner needs to know. Instead of trying to force a specific way of eye gazing, honor what is happening in the moment. My couples often start giggling, and then the giggling turns into crying.

Izzy I’d have thought, you shouldn’t be laughing, this is intimate. But who am I to say laughing isn’t intimate for them? We all know funny things happen in bed.

Sage Sex is funny sometimes. It’s supposed to be playful. In Felt you’re seeing two people in real time go through the ebb and the flow of feeling. And what is feeling if it’s not being human?

connection · tender

Sage I believe touch is meant to heal us, but for many of us, touch has been harmful. In the interview that goes with the film, the performers said they had recently overcome some discomfort and distance in their own relationship. That’s who I use this exercise with most, couples rebuilding trust around touch, because it lets you move at the pace of your own nervous system. I think this practice brings us back to that basic belief that touch can be healing.

Izzy What does that look like, moving at the pace of your nervous system?

Sage On screen, touch escalates fast. You kiss, it builds, it goes straight to penetration. So I ask clients: when does your body tell you, I’m a little anxious? And how much do you override that to keep going? Every time you push past it, you teach your nervous system that you won’t listen to it.

Izzy I also think it’s for people who were never taught to listen to their body or sit with their emotions, or who never had anyone model intimacy for them.

connection · tender

Izzy At the conference I did Betty Martin’s three-minute game for the first time. I’ve worked with intimacy for a very long time, and I was still nervous to let someone I’d just met touch my hand.

Sage The first question I ask every client is, how do you like to be touched? Most of them say, I don’t know. A lot of people don’t ask themselves that, because they’re more focused on what they’re willing to say yes to than on what they actually want done to them. We’re socialized to receive touch. Hardly anyone teaches us to desire it. One of the reasons I love this film is that the touch both people receive is driven by their response to it, by their pleasure in it, by their desire for it.

connection · tender

Izzy Before the shoot Jane June told Emanuel she feels safer when touch is firm. That’s why he holds her thigh a little more firmly.

Sage That’s how I start couples off. In the first round, the person receiving names the touch they want, and the other person does only that. That’s how you start mapping what you like.

Izzy And can the one receiving change their mind, or stop it?

Sage Yes, and that’s the skill I most want couples to build. I call it the capacity for disruption: “hey, I don’t actually like this, I need this to change”. If I can’t trust that you’ll stop when I say stop, my body has to push past its comfort to keep going.

presence · vanilla

Izzy I love the goosebumps on the skin in these close-ups. You can almost feel them breathing. We wanted the viewer to feel like they were in the room with us.

Sage In most porn, arousal is shown as wetness or hardness. Here it can be goosebumps. It can be the fingertips gripping the thigh a little harder, or the breathing getting deeper. Porn shapes what we believe sex is, so it matters that this film gives us something else to believe in. None of it feels forced. Watching it, I kept thinking, I’d really like to have this experience.

presence · kinky

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Sage I love it so much. It’s one of my favorite moments in the entire film. When I saw it in person, I had to catch my breath. If you feel uneasy watching it, that’s natural. But ask yourself what you’re actually grossed out by and what you’ve been taught to be grossed out by. The armpit is hidden most of the time, so opening it up is erotic in itself, and smelling your partner is about as intimate as it gets. Watching it at the premiere, it was a moment of shame release, for me and for the audience. Pulling shame away from the idea that smelling your partner, or having this intimate moment with their armpit, is somehow disgusting. I felt us collectively shed that shame in that moment.

Izzy I’ve been through that myself. My whole life I was told that armpits weren’t particularly interesting. But seeing it in porn films, something in my head flipped. And here they do it in such an adorable way. Their bodies say, I’m safe, and they turn toward each other.

Sage That’s the buildup paying off. First eye gazing, then touch with clothes on, a little bit more touch that’s focused on the face and the shoulders, right? And then you see them slowly start to become more receptive and more open. That’s when the exploration really begins. Curiosity is a sign the nervous system is open. When you’re overwhelmed you don’t want to explore. You just want it to be over.

Izzy The feather was their idea. They showed up on the day and said, we brought this because Jane June likes being touched with it. I loved that this came from them.

Sage Anything that plays with the senses works. A fan, a back scratcher, food, a blindfold to take one sense away. Watch her head turn into him while he uses the feather. The sensation makes you want to get closer to the person giving it.

authenticity · cinematic

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Sage She has an orgasm, and we never see an erection or penetration from him. That left me feeling relaxed. Men carry so much pressure around their performance. For couples dealing with erectile dysfunction or performance anxiety, this could be a powerful film.

Izzy If we only counted erection and penetration as sex, our intimate lives would be super boring.

Sage That scene brought me almost to tears at the screening. There is nothing more beautiful than a climax that comes from a place of safety, when your body is so relaxed and open that it catches you off guard. People think confidence in bed is looking hot or saying something hot. I think it’s being so in your body that you can feel pleasure without any shame. Watching her, I thought, I would love that too.

connection · tender

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Sage The afterglow is the number one thing my clients don’t do. One goes to shower, one gets dressed, or they high-five and move on. If you’ve moved faster than your nervous system, you come out of it unsettled and go off to calm down on your own. Eye gazing is the front end. The afterglow is the back end. And she’s the one who climaxed, and he looks just as satisfied as she does.

Izzy That high five you mentioned. On film sets, sometimes actors high-five to snap out of character after a staged intimate scene.

Sage Which tells you it was a performance. That I wasn’t really with you, I was performing for you. The afterglow is how you keep it from feeling like a performance. Ask each other what you loved about it, and how you’re feeling in your body right now. It’s not the act that makes us intimate. It’s how we hold each other before, during and after.