Yes, You Deserve Good Sex: Emily Morse’s Five Pillars to Get There

Emily Morse has built her career telling people what they desperately need to hear about sex but rarely do. When the Sex With Emily host dropped by Treated With Dr. Sara, she unveiled her new governing philosophy about how to make sure you’re having the best possible sex: the five pillars of sexual intelligence.

According to Morse, the pillars are parts of your life or “areas to troubleshoot” if you’re not having the great sex you want (and deserve!). “I created these because I realized after 20 years doing this work that people often want a quick fix. But it’s really multi-layered,” Morse explains.

Pillar #1: Embodiment

First question: “Am I in my body during sex, or am I mentally reorganizing my closet?” 

“It’s really about the mind-body connection,” says Morse. “What am I actually feeling? What am I sensing? What’s our body’s wisdom? And I think a lot of us override that, no matter what our gender.” 

Focus on being present during sex, instead of worrying about how you look or if you or your partner are approaching orgasm. 

Morse suggests bringing meditation or breathwork into the bedroom. Learning “to breathe and be present during sex,” says Morse, allows you to experience more pleasure, ask for what you want, and have better orgasms—which seems like a pretty good ROI.

Pillar #2: Self-knowledge 

Self-knowledge is similar to embodiment but focuses more literally on physical sensations instead of mental presence. “How well do we know our bodies? Do we know what turns us on? Do we know what’s a requirement for arousal?”

Morse recommends “mindful masturbation” to help with your self-knowledge. 

“I’m going to take some time, lock the doors, and turn off my phone,” she says. “I’m going to get into my body. I’m going to breathe and slowly learn to touch. Look at secondary erogenous zones. You don’t have to go right to your nipples and your vulva and your clitoris, but like the nape of your neck, your inner elbow, your inner thighs. Tease yourself and think, ‘What actually feels good to me? What do I like? What kinds of pressures? What kind of motions?’”

Pillar #3: Health

One of Morse’s biggest frustrations is that sexuality and pleasure are not typically considered when assessing a woman’s health. “So many women were, at a young age, put on birth control pills and an SSRI,” she says. There’s nothing wrong with taking birth control or anti-depressants, but many women are not made aware of the sexual side effects that the medications may have. 

Vaginal dryness, decreased libido, and decreased ability to orgasm are all potential side effects from the pill, according to Morse. “It can even shrink the clitoris by up to 20 percent.” And yet, the pill is used “as sort of a knee jerk response to the dysregulation of perimenopause, but there’s a lot of other ways that we could be working with that.”

Exercise and diet can also impact your sex drive. “So much about arousal has to do with blood flow. So if we’re not moving our bodies, we’re not eating foods that make us feel good, our desire and our drive to actually have sex might be waning,” Morse explains. 

Pillar #4: Collaboration/Communication

We’ve all heard communication matters, but Morse is specific about the questions we should be asking ourselves and our partners. “Do we feel comfortable even talking about sex and asking for what we want? Do we know what we want? Do we have any limiting beliefs around sex, perhaps from our childhood, our environment, society, religion?” 

When Morse first became sexually active, she believed the myth that “sex should always be amazing and we shouldn’t have to talk about it, and if you do have to talk about it, there’s a problem.” At that time, her sexual experiences were so “performative” that she genuinely didn’t think she would ever enjoy sex.

“Then, I started having partners where I was actually trying to communicate and slow everything down,” she says. “For me, a lot of the delight was in the making out, the kissing, the slowness. I learned to just say, ‘We’ve got to slow down.’ And I learned that it was okay to take a pause in the middle of sex.” 

One of the most common problems in heterosexual couples is a mismatch in the pace of pleasure: “It takes a woman, typically, between 20 and 40 minutes to orgasm. It takes a man between five and eight minutes.” And the busier couples get, the more common it is to lose focus on that slower pleasure. “You’ve got people with young kids and they have jobs and they have things. They’re like, ‘I don’t have 45 minutes,’” says Morse. Those limitations are very real, but it’s important to work around them once in a while. “Even if it’s once a week on your date night or your time away, and you just say, ‘This is an hour for our sex life,’ … Build in time to discover your erogenous zones, to play with each other, to do massage, to do mutual masturbation.”

Pillar #5: Self-acceptance

“This one is more about our confidence in our bodies,” Morse says of the final pillar. “Do we accept our bodies where we’re at today? Do we accept the experience we’ve had to date?”

Exploring your sexuality is an inherently vulnerable act, especially if you and your partner are used to having sex in a particular way. But Morse says that any awkwardness will be worth it.  “The men I know who have been involved with these practices start to understand that female sexuality is really a beautiful thing to witness. It’s so expansive. We open like a flower. We blossom when we’re really in our energy and our orgasm and our vibrancy.”

When you accept your body and your sensuality, you open the door to something truly transformative—a sex life that’s actually worth having.

For more of Morse’s great insights into sexuality, listen to the full episode of Treated With Dr. Sara.