33. Let's talk about sex

What kind of voice do you find attractive? What happens to your voice in the bedroom? What is the role of voice in sex? Join a world renowned sex therapist for this open, free, absolutely fascinating discussion about voice and sex.

Transcript

Sally: Don't call me shallow, no matter which way you slice it - voice is part of sexual attraction. So for episode 33 of That Voice Podcast, let's talk about talking and sex.

I'm Sally Prosser. You're listening to That Voice Podcast. No matter who you are or what you do, your voice matters. So unless you've sworn a lifetime vow of silence, this is the podcast for you.

Does my voice sound sexy? Okay, maybe not. But you and I both know that someone's voice is a big part of how sexually attractive we find them. And today I'm super excited to be chatting to world renowned sex therapist, Cindi Darnell. Cindi, thank you so much for joining me. Welcome to That Voice Podcast.

Cyndi: Oh, you're very welcome. It's a pleasure.

Sally: So my first question is always the same and it's, could you do your job if you lost your voice?

Cyndi: No, I rely on my voice for the majority of it. I probably rely on my sight even more. But my work involves explaining a lot of stuff to people and especially when it comes to sex, most people have very limited sex education or probably or none at all. So explaining things is crucial. And also I think the tone of my voice really makes a big difference to people's levels of comfort in talking about sex. And one of the pieces of feedback I've had over the years has been how calm and soothing people find my voice, which is lucky given that I talk about something that can often be quite scary for people.

Sally: Yeah. Tell me more about that. Because sex is still something that's quite taboo and I'd imagine that people are coming to you. There's a little bit of apprehension.

Cyndi: Yeah. By the time folks I've made an appointment to work with me, they've already at least acknowledged that there is a sex problem and or a relationship problem cause I cover both areas. So sometimes the harder part, the scarier part has already been addressed before they get to me, which is I think we need to go and see somebody. Often even being able to just admit that there is something wrong can feel more confronting than actually doing something about it. That said, once people do start working with me, they're often surprised at how straightforward it is and how not really nearly as scary as they think it's going to be. That it's almost like the idea of something is actually scarier than the reality of it because we're just so unaccustomed to talking about sex out loud.

There are no role models for this kind of stuff. There are no places really that you, I mean these days I guess there are podcasts and things where people can go and they can hear information about sex and see, you know, what's possible. So that's good at a broader access level, people are able to get information now that even five years ago they weren't able to get. But the part that is still difficult and possibly has been made worse by the abundance of information is the fact that folks don't know how to integrate the information. So it's one thing to have it, it's another thing to apply it. And that I think is the bridge that I offer people between here's the information that you're supposed to have and now what on earth do I do with it?

Sally: It's so interesting that could apply to so many different things. The same with what I do. I think a lot of people know the theory behind how to be a confident speaker, but it's about bridging how they apply it.

Cyndi: Right, exactly.

Sally: So you were introduced to me by a client of my lovely clients, Susan Jarvis, the Maven, and she talks about this as well. She says, you know, sex is as natural as the air we breathe, but why do we choke on it? And so would you say that the fact that you can talk about it so freely and so calming has a big part in making people feel like it's not something they should be afraid of?

Cyndi: Mmm. I think that that is potentially my superpower, but I wasn't born with that super power. I had to develop it. I had to cultivate it. Sorry, I thought my phone was on silent and it's not! Yeah, I thought my super power as it is now is something that I've had to learn. And I've been doing this work for 20 years now. So it's something that comes with practice. I mean, granted I was always very vocal about my curiosity about sex, so that made it a little bit easier. But knowing what I know and being able to speak about it is still something that I have to practice doing every day. And just because I am comfortable with it doesn't mean that the people around me are necessarily. So I'm still fighting shame and stigma every day. Even just in social situations when people are like, Oh, so what do you do? And I tell them, I don't always get the warmest, friendliest reception. People are still confronted by the fact that I am a woman, that I speak about this stuff out loud and I'm quite unapologetic about it. That's still in 20. Where are we? 2020. It still makes people very uncomfortable. So we still have a lot of work to do.

Sally: Yeah. And what would you consider to be a sexy sounding voice?

Cyndi: For me personally, and this is - no one else has to agree with this, this is just my own personal opinion. If Barry White read the back of a packet of chips, I could just go into heaven listening to him. In fact, I was actually Googling Barry White's soundbites the other night and I found an old clip of him on the David Letterman show and they had him just reading out random stuff and it was hysterical. Yeah. One of the things was like, he said, you know, Duvalaki or something like that and the women in the audience were just going bananas. It was hilarious.

David Letterman Show Excerpt:

From the home office in Sioux City, Iowa, tonight's category top 10 words that sound romantic when spoken by Barry White. Number Two. (Barry - Big Ass Ham). Big Ass Ham sounds romantic regardless of who's saying it. And the number one romantic word when spoken by Barry White, here we go. (Barry - OPRAH).

Sally: I love that. And what do you think the role of the voice is in sex?

Cyndi: I think it has a multitude of responsibilities. The voice is, you know, because there's one of those statistical things that we don't actually listen to the words that people are saying, we're listening to the way that people speak to us. So I think that this is really, really true in sex. I mean, some people enjoy dirty talk and the explicit language and all that kind of stuff, you know, fine - there's nothing wrong with that. And then for others it doesn't even have to be word formation. It can just be the sounds, the moans and groans and the pitching. And this is where as soon as you hear somebody moaning and groaning, you can tell automatically if that's an erotic sound or a sound, that is a sound that is a pain sound. Sometimes it can be both, you know, because sometimes maybe you can't really tell, but there is something almost embedded in us intuitively that we are able to tune into the sounds of eroticism without actually even really knowing what they are. Like, we just have this inbuilt intuitive human wisdom and those sounds more or less sound the same across cultures, which is really interesting. They're more exaggerated in different cultures, but the actual sounds themselves tend to be similar. Some variation of low pitch to high pitch that tends to shift with orgasm as well.

Sally: Yeah, that's really interesting. And I guess in the same way that sounds can be a turn on, they can also be a turnoff for a lot of people. Do you have any couples where they have this issue where they can't handle the sound or maybe lack of sound coming from their partner?

Cyndi: Generally if there's going to be a complaint, the complaint is usually that one person wants the other one to make more sound. I've never encountered a couple where the sound has been too much. I'm sure it exists, but I just haven't met them. They've not come to me for help with that. But certainly the complaints that I see overwhelmingly about sound is that there's not enough sound. The one partner wants the other one to make more sound. Because otherwise if they're just lying there, you know, like a pair of chopsticks and there's just no expression, no sound, nothing. It's not much fun, you know?

Sally: So I guess it's about that feedback.

Cyndi: Yeah. And there is something to in, you know, sort of when we're looking at sex through a slightly more esoteric lens. So when we're looking at it through, you know, tantra and that kind of full bodied erotic practices one stream of those meditative practices is about sound meditations. And we know from the research that they've done into mindfulness and making sounds like the OMMM that humming sound tends to enhance groups of people. It activates the vagus nerve, which is the nerve that helps us regulate our emotions. So even though I don't know of any research explicitly regarding the sound relationship to sex, we can sort of take a little bit of a bow and stretch it and go, well, if the research has been done on making sounds in meditation, it's not too much of a leap to go. I imagined that this would also apply in a sexual context too, to allow some sort of regulation or allow connection and also allow arousal within the body of the person who's making the sounds that that sound will lead the way for the body to follow through.

Sally: Yeah. I guess that explains why the voice changes during arousal because I'm sure for most people you're making sounds, I guess in the same way of meditation that you do not normally make in your day to day conversation.

Cyndi: I mean, no one's walking around going OMM all the time, you know, but when you do do it, even if you're a beginner, you feel the impact of it immediately and up until fairly recently it didn't make sense and people dismissed it as just, you know, 'woo woo' whatever. And now the research is really coming in thick and fast that practices like that actually do have an effect on our brain waves. And because as we're starting to understand more and more about the effect, particularly the brain in relationship to the vagus nerve, which also is one of the nerves that innovate certain parts of the genitals, not all of the genitals, but particular parts of it. And it certainly regulates our capacity to relax, which is crucial to good sex. If you're not relaxed, you're not going to have good sex. And sound is very much a part of that. So, you know with my sex therapy work, I take a very holistic view of this obviously. So it's not simply about going, well, you know, this applies in sex and nowhere else, whatever is true in life is also true in sex. Most of the time. There are a handful of exceptions, but most of the time it's true across the board. And so learning how to use your voice during sex, whether it's to give instructions or to give feedback or to simply turn yourself on, you know, to get your body turned on so you're not laying there like a chopstick is a very useful thing to do.

Sally: Yeah. And I guess, you know, you can't have voice without having breath flow.

Cyndi: Yeah. And breath is crucial to good sex. People who don't breathe, don't have good sex.

Sally: There you go. You heard it here first. What great advice. So you mentioned that you like a bit of Barry White. Why do you think that lower, slower kind of voice is generally what people find attractive? Or have you heard somebody come in and, you know, be attracted to the voice of a chipmunk?

Cyndi: Yeah, I don't know that everybody finds the Barry White thing attractive. I wonder, I mean certainly it seems to be a thing among women among a particular group of women. I don't know, for example, that gay men would resonate with Barry White so much that said, Barry White comes on at a party and everybody just starts, you know, gyrating around. But I don't know how much of that is sort of culturally inherited that you know that that's what you're supposed to do or if it is a direct response to the voice or, you know, a little bit of both. But I think, I mean I think some people also can have an equally strong response to that sort of high pitched moaning, orgasmic sound that a woman might make, which is often very exaggerated in porn for a reason because some people, you know are gonna respond to that in a really affirmative way. Is it everybody's cup of tea? Not necessarily, but there are going to be people who really, really get into that in the same way that there are going to be people like me who get into the sound of Barry White reading the ingredients on the back of a packet of biscuits.

Sally: So with the work I do, I'm a big believer that you can control your voice. It's something that you can use in different ways. But I'd imagine the bedroom is one area where it's probably best just to lose control and just see whatever sound comes out. Would you agree?

Cyndi: Yes, but I think that that's easier said than done because a lot of people carry a lot of shame in their bodies around sex. And one of the areas that shame will manifest is in the throat, which means that we, you know, we can't speak at all. We get stuck, the sound gets trapped there. The body goes into collapse around sex for example. Especially, I mean, I'm not exclusively, but if there's a history of sexual trauma, then that's definitely going to happen. But I would also go so far as to say, I think all of us live with a degree of sexual trauma, not violence necessarily - that's a very specific kind. But sexual trauma in so far as we live in a culture that is very dysregulated around sex. So we have all grown up in very sexually dysfunctional cultures, which means that we find it hard to, to make room for sex as a normal function.

And that's, you know, going earlier to why when people get horrified that I'm at the dinner party and I tell them what I do and they're just, Oh, you know, because we're still uncomfortable talking about sex out loud. So this is the kind of shame that I'm talking about. And that kind of trauma that I'm talking about. It's not necessarily violence, it's just real day to day stuff. We're just so not accustomed to talking about sex the way that we talk about football and because of that we can go into shutdown, we can be small, we can be little and that doesn't help sexual expression.

Sally: When I mentioned to a couple of people that I was doing this episode, I even had the same response. Oh Sally, no, you can't have a sex therapist on the podcast. And I found that quite unusual because I've always been quite open about things. Do you think that would be the advice you would give that it's okay to be - I mean not going out in the street and shouting from the rooftops about your sex life - but generally creating more open conversations around it?

Cyndi: Yes, but I would say that because that's what I do for a living. Like that is my job. That's, you know, I get paid to facilitate complicated erotic conversations and it's never too weird for me, but again, I've been doing this for 20 years and it didn't come naturally to me. It's something that I had to learn how to do. And when people say, Oh, I can't do that, I'm like, well, have you tried? If you invested as much energy into it as I have, you would be able to do it too. Not that I think folks should invest as much energy into it as I do. I think I've kind of gone above and beyond the average person. But if you are a person who has sex, you are behooved to learn how to communicate about it a little bit.

Sally: Behooved. What a fantastic word.

Cyndi: It's a great word, isn't it? You don't get to be part of, you know, a sexual union of some description with yourself or another person and feel like you can get away with not having a conversation about it. If you're going to have sex, you're going to have to learn how to talk about it. Not with the intensity and frequency that I do, but enough to be able to sustain and nourish your erotic connections to at least make sure that all parties involved are having a good time. Cause oftentimes that's not what's going on. People tolerate mediocre sex all the time because they don't know how to talk about it.

Sally: So if people are feeling in that situation, how could they work with you potentially?

Cyndi: Me specifically, they can go to my website and they can book in a session. I work with clients all over the world. So yeah, I'm originally from Melbourne, Australia but I live in New York now and I have clients all over the world because sex is a universally complicated problem and I really, I facilitate these conversations and you know in an online format it works just as well as face to face. So I would encourage folks to go to my website, www.cyndidarnell.com and they can find me there.

Sally: Cyndi, thank you so much for joining That Voice Podcast.

Cyndi: You're very welcome. It was a pleasure.

Sally: Next week I'll take you through step-by-step how to sound sexy in the bedroom. Just joking, I think Cyndi is the person to go to for that. Next week. I'll be answering a pretty frequently asked question. How do you nail that news voice? I'll see you then. Oh, actually, before you go, I'm about to launch a brand spanking new course called Free your podcasting voice in seven days. If you'd like to register your interest head to www.sallyprosser.com.au/services.

Thanks for listening to That Voice Podcast. I would love if you could leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.