In session, I sometimes ask whether someone has tried something. A lubricant, a toy, an article of clothing they would have to carry to a register. The answer often arrives before the question has finished landing, and it arrives in multiples. No. No, no. Not for me.

One no is information. Four in a row is a position being defended.

This month I gave a talk at Stimulate, the sexual wellness symposium and trade show that runs here in Nashville, on the main exhibit floor, delivered through silent disco headphones — which meant a crowd of people were having a conversation about desire that was inaudible from three feet away. The argument I brought them: every brand names a competitor, and in this industry the named competitor is another store, another site, another product line. The real one never appears in the deck. It is the story the customer is already carrying about what it means to want.

Alivia and I take that argument off the trade show floor and back into the office, where it started. We get into the gas pedal and the brake, and why most people who arrive with low desire arrive convinced the accelerator is broken when something is usually standing on the inhibitor instead. We get into why an industry organized around more cannot reach a person whose parking brake is jammed to the floorboards. We get into the difference between a preference and a prohibition, and how to hear which one just left your mouth.

And we get into what neither of us expected from a trade show: a hall full of designers and retailers who wanted to talk about meaning, who cared in granular detail about what it actually feels like to use the thing they made, and who were relieved to hear the podcast is not about inserting tab A into slot B. That was Alivia's favorite part of the event. Mine came the night before we recorded, at dinner with a former guest, over how completely sex and death are wound around each other and how strange it is that we are not having that conversation everywhere.

What do you want is the easy question, and mostly a useless one — people produce an answer to it under mild social pressure every day. The harder one: what would you have to believe about yourself for the answer to be yes?

Full show notes → [here]

Reignite Desire masterclass, August 29 → https://soliloquie.myflodesk.com/desire

Supported in part by Nine to Kind Planners, code EMMA20 for 20% off → https://ninetokind.com/

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