Questions for Sexologist Coral Osborne
Tomorrow I’m interviewing sexologist Coral Osborne on the podcast.
I came across Coral’s work on Instagram a couple of months ago and was struck by the depth in which she spoke about human sexuality and dating and what it reveals about the human psyche more broadly. We immediately started exchanging voice notes and bonding over shared interests and curiosities in this decreasingly taboo field of inquiry.
You can find her most viral Substack essay on female arousal here:
And if you’re feeling extra provocative, here’s another one of her essays:
Just like topics like psychedelics & meditation I tackle on the podcast which are now increasingly being discussed by non-suspect, rational people, human eroticism and sexuality also ought to be explored by non-freaky, sensible people.
If anyone has questions they’d like us to discuss, leave it in the comments below!
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It is critical to the wellbeing of people, to understand what "makes them tick" within the sphere of primary biological urges and psychological expressions reflective of their "internal landscape."
Particularly in the copulative realm, lack of awareness inhibits the ability to form the meaningful, lasting pair bonds that are essential to human flourishing.
"human eroticism and sexuality also ought to be explored by non-freaky, sensible people."
This is truth, and for more reasons than may be immediately obvious. External signalling of "normal" copulative ideation and expression, often belies undercurrents of internalized struggles, and self-destructive behaviors can manifest in response to environmental pressure at any time.
Come on, Rav. With genuine recognition and respect, I have to push back on this one.
This isn't a "decreasingly taboo field of inquiry" so much as a symptom: a sign of a culture growing emptier, reaching outward to squeeze one last drop of release from a pleasure that no longer lands.
By all means let's inquire — not into how much further we can pull it into the open, as though exposure itself were wisdom or freedom, but into why the whole culture is reaching for it harder every year.
For a decade now we've watched it pushed further and further outward: less worn at every gala, the lyrics coarser each year, everything externalized and put on display, all of it dressed as emancipation and sexual freedom. What it actually marks is the loss of intimacy and privacy themselves.
Underneath, it's a branch of a larger pattern: the steady turning of everything lived into an idea about itself. Intimacy stops being something two people share in private and becomes a concept to be theorized, packaged, and displayed: a commodity, and a currency. Once the living thing is swapped for the idea of it, only the representation is left to trade — the definition for pornography.
The sophistication of the language is what sells it. The more articulate the packaging, the more easily it passes for a genuine contribution to culture. The emptier we become, the less inner footing we have to see through it, so the enchantment lands all the more easily.
It's a quiet sadness to watch, and sharper when the one being pulled in is as gifted as you clearly are. There's a particular waste in a rare talent spending itself outward on this, or lending its platform to it. What gets dressed up as revelation and freedom is much closer to its opposite.