Dr. Kelly Neff – The Future of Love and Intimacy
Dr. Kelly Neff is a Social Psychologist, Author, Professor, Futurist, and Talk Radio Personality who has electrified the transformational media world with her unique focus on the intersection of psychology, consciousness, and human sexuality. An academically trained research psychologist, she spent almost a decade teaching thousands of people in her online and in-person psychology of human sexuality courses at Saddleback College, California.
An Interview with Dr. Kelly Neff on the Future of Love and Intimacy
To listen to the full interview of Dr. Kelly Neff by Sandie Sedgbeer on the radio show What Is Going OM on OMTimes Radio, click the player below.
After the last few years of struggle, anger, and purging prompted by the #MeToo Movement, the time has come for a new narrative that embraces sexual diversity, freedom, and autonomy. Redefining sex and love as a constructive, harmonizing experience is a crucial part of how we move forward as a human collective.
Sandie Sedgbeer recently sat down with Dr. Kelly Neff to talk about her new book Sex-Positive – Redefining our Attitudes to Love and Sex which epitomizes her desire to empower sexual freedom, inspire healing, and improve people’s relationships by fusing cutting edge scientific findings with Eastern philosophies and her own deeply personal insights.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Dr. Kelly Neff, Welcome! Congratulations on producing such a fascinating book with such deep, broad, and thorough research.
Kelly Neff: Thank you so much. This book has been many, many years in the making, and it feels good to get it done.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Yes. It’s a subject that has been many, many years in the making, too, as well as in the unmaking.
Kelly Neff: Yes, absolutely. We’re seeing things that we never thought could happen as far as the disintegration of categories. Just the changes in the way people understand their sexuality and define it has been quite incredible. Kind of like a new revolution.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Particularly when you think it’s only 100 to 120 years ago that we had all the Victorian strictures and constraints, and the conditioning that came down from that. You write about having been slut-shamed at school. Was that experience the catalyst for you becoming a millennial disruptor with a big desire to empower sexual freedom? Or did that come later?
Kelly Neff: I realized as a bisexual, very free-spirited woman growing up in the 90’s that it wasn’t OK to express that, at least not in America, and rather than becoming the champion, I internalized a lot of the pain and frustration that I felt and I thought that maybe society’s right and there is something wrong with me. From there, I kind of shut myself off sexually for a long time and it made me physically ill. My Uterus actually got sick. I believe, but I can’t prove it, that in a metaphysical-Louise-Hay-kind-of-sense that all of that repressed energy really did affect my body, and it manifested in the physical and made my life hell. I had multiple surgeries and, finally, around the age of 30, I ended up in emergency surgery and the uterus had to come out and I almost died. I kind of awoke in a new timeline and a new version of life and nobody could explain to me what had happened. There was no explanation as to why I had all these tumors inside of me, and I think something clicked in my head and that’s when I decided OK this is real and I now do want to reclaim this empowerment and autonomy over my sexuality because it almost maybe cost me my life.
Sandie Sedgbeer: We know now that our thoughts and emotions affect our physical health. Nothing is separate. Reading about the incredible number of tumors you had in your uterus and all of the problems you had, I drew the same conclusion. When we shut down parts of ourselves, when we are trained, conditioned to believe that parts of ourselves are shameful, or we neglect them in some way, I think it does make a difference to our health.
Kelly Neff: I really believe so, and there is so much evidence of this, too, across different fields of the sciences and metaphysics. I think that’s why I decided I didn’t want anybody else to go through this, and if I could share this story, maybe I could inspire other people so they don’t have to feel ashamed, and they don’t have to repress their sexuality. They can reclaim and take ownership and be sex-positive.
Sandie Sedgbeer: You describe the sex-positive movement as a socio-political and philosophical movement that promotes and embraces sexuality and sexual expression with an emphasis on safe and consensual sex. Can you explain what a sex-positive relationship looks like?
Kelly Neff: When you’re in a sex-positive relationship, you can be whoever you want to be sexually, and do whatever you want to do so long as there’s consent involved without feeling judged, guilted, or slut-shamed. This is a relationship where partners support each other’s decision-making and choices rather than questioning them. It’s something that, again, takes people a long time to get here. I know and have worked with so many people who get into a relationship and then their partner is very judging and controlling over their sexuality. That is not a sex-positive relationship. If you want to experiment, if you want to try something new, if what your partner is doing in the bedroom isn’t giving you the type of orgasm you’re looking for, you need to know that you can communicate that in a safe place without being judged for it.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Many people, especially women, are brought up to believe they don’t have the right to demand or ask, or complain about anything and this is the sadness of how, over millennia, the true purpose of sex, what I believe to be the sacred union, has been so compromised and corrupted, for men as well as for women.
Kelly Neff: Yes. I’m glad you brought that up. I think we’ve all been buried under these Victorian-era, post-Christianity stereotypes about the genders and what they should expect. Almost to the point of men shouldn’t even want commitment. All men want to do is have one-night stands. So, a man has a commitment or wants commitment, or if a woman wants a one-night stand, it violates the stereotype. At least, that was the narrative growing up with “Cosmopolitan Magazine,” for example, in the ’90s. It was always like “lock in your man” and “sex tricks to keep him around.” Basically, society was telling us he’s going to leave you, you’re not worthy if you don’t do some really amazing things. Of course, I think now we’re starting to realize what a load of BS that was.
When we’re talking about culture and society and trends, we’re talking about millions, billions of people all living in different places around the world, so they’re going to experience things in different ways. So, there’s no one right way of looking at any of this. I’m trying to look at the trends of where it’s going and where it’s been, and from where it’s going, it’s interesting because I do believe we’re now realizing that we don’t need to be in a relationship. Like Emma Watson recently saying she’s self-partnered. I love that. We’re realizing that women – your self-esteem and your worth – is not Disney. It’s not that you have to have a man, or you’re nothing, and the whole goal of your life should be getting married and having kids. I think that is really starting to fall by the wayside. The roles of society are starting to crumble, and they’re being replaced by something that is much more fluid.
Sandie Sedgbeer: The pendulum has swung so far in opposite directions over the last few millennia. It really interests me today how the young are rejecting all of the stereotypes and saying don’t peg us down. We can be anything we want to be, and I love the idea that they’re saying love is love. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s love.
Kelly Neff: Identity is identity, and I think that when we’re talking about fluidity, this whole queer culture, non-binary, non-cisgender – cisgender means you demonstrate your gender identity as either masculine or feminine – is a topic that has led to so much confusion. I’ve been teaching it for many years, and now it is different even from when I started teaching it back in the early 2000s.
For gender identity, your psychology of how masculine or feminine you feel, and how you want it to be perceived by the world, has nothing to do with your biological, physical anatomy. It’s a social construct, and what we’re seeing now is the social construct being flipped on its head, and people, saying, “Great! Since this is a social construct and it’s my psychology about my identity, I don’t want to be exclusively male or exclusively female. Maybe I want to be something completely different. Maybe I want to pick certain parts of each one. Maybe I’m a combination of a bunch of genders.” The possibilities here are endless, and they keep changing, so who knows where it’s going to go? But I, personally, am a big fan of this idea. It’s hard to say whether this is a form of resistance against all of the stereotypes about “a woman is this, and a man is that.” It is. In part. A political-social act, and it also has to do with people’s true feelings that they’re finally now able to express. I mean, when I was growing up, being gay was a huge deal. We had Matthew Shepherd, and gay people being killed for being gay. Now it’s happening to trans people, but trans visibility is now becoming a major movement and we can thank a lot of popular cultures, too, for pushing this into the mainstream and giving people a voice and visibility that they’ve never had before.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Yet, in so many countries, the line, the hard-line, seems to be getting harder. Interestingly, you’ve got both ends of the spectrum. In the West, there’s a lot more compassion, acceptance, and inclusion, but in other countries, it seems that people are clamping down and women are being even more oppressed. Children are being repressed. You look at the sex trafficking, the whole underbelly of it seems to be becoming more pronounced as if we’ve got this push-me, pull-you going on.
Kelly Neff: It is. Well, they say the capacity for light is only equal and equivalent to the capacity for dark in all of us, and I just wonder if we can look at our earth and our society as a whole through the same lens. As the awakening is happening so, too, does the shift to darkness happen to balance it out? It’s not the most uplifting thing to think about, but it does make you wonder at what point is this also just like the Tiger in the corner of the cave lashing out, right before we finally take it down. That’s how I want to see it.
Sandie Sedgbeer: The last gasp.
Kelly Neff: Yes, I think it is. It doesn’t seem like the sexual awakening is spreading and growing and pushing quite fast if you think about it.
Sandie Sedgbeer: In researching this book, was there anything in particular that got you excited or really looking forward to seeing what comes next?
Kelly Neff: There were tons of things in this book that surprised me, that got me excited, that confused and scared me, and most of them have to do with technology. In particular, the robotics sex partner thing. The findings are incredible. The Pure Research Centre said that by 2025 we might be marrying our highly intelligent sex robots.
Click HERE to Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with Dr. Kelly Neff
