Smart Sex

When was the last time you thought about your sex life as a reflection of your emotional intelligence? In Smart Sex, Dr. Emily Morse challenges the cultural script that views sex as something instinctive, taboo, or secondary to “real life.” She argues that sexual pleasure isn’t a fleeting indulgence—it’s a vital act of self-awareness, health, and productivity. Building a satisfying sex life, Morse insists, requires education, intention, and what she calls “Sex IQ”—a set of skills that combines emotional intelligence, self-knowledge, communication, embodiment, and acceptance.

At its core, the book is an invitation to think about pleasure differently—not as self-indulgence, but as a birthright and a form of wisdom that connects you more deeply to your body, your partners, and your own energy. Our society treats pleasure as lazy, shameful, or secondary to achievement. Morse flips that idea: pleasure is productive. A life that includes regular joy, sensuality, and connection, she argues, leads to more confidence, creativity, and resilience.

Why We Need Sexual Re-Education

Morse recounts her own story of sexual confusion and frustration—faking orgasms, lacking body awareness, and feeling disconnected from her own pleasure. Like most of us, she was taught virtually nothing useful about sex beyond abstinence and risk avoidance. As an adult, this left her wondering if great sex was even possible beyond the early days of a relationship. Her curiosity led to candid conversations with friends, which grew into her now-famous podcast Sex with Emily—and ultimately to the realization that the problem isn’t individual competency but cultural silence. We are, as she puts it, a pleasure-starved culture.

By reframing the conversation, Morse proposes that reclaiming sexual pleasure begins with reclaiming all forms of pleasure—from savoring a good meal to enjoying laughter or the warmth of sunlight. These micro-moments of enjoyment train the body to recognize and receive sensual information. In this way, developing your Sex IQ starts with a complete life reset around the practice of presence and joy.

Introducing the Five Pillars of Sex IQ

The conceptual anchor of Smart Sex is Morse’s model for Sex IQ—a sexual equivalent of emotional intelligence. It’s not about prowess or performance but the ability to be aware of, communicate, and integrate pleasure holistically. She defines five interlocking pillars:

• Embodiment – the reconnection of mind and body through breathwork, movement, and self-touch so you can actually feel what your body wants.
• Health – understanding how overall well-being, hormones, medications, and stress shape libido and arousal.
• Collaboration – co-creating sexual experiences through communication and curiosity rather than performance or assumption.
• Self-Knowledge – awareness of your context, triggers, desires, and core erotic feelings, including an understanding of what fosters your own arousal.
• Self-Acceptance – releasing shame, body judgment, and cultural conditioning to fully inhabit your worthiness of pleasure.

These pillars form a framework for sexual development that is broad, practical, and deeply psychological. Readers move from understanding how desire and arousal actually work in the brain, to identifying pleasure blockers—what Morse names the “Pleasure Thieves” of stress, trauma, and shame. By addressing these internal saboteurs, you clear the path to embodied desire. Each of the following chapters expands on these themes with tangible tools: mindful masturbation, communication scripts, and exercises that link sexual growth to emotional healing.

Pleasure as a Guide to Life

Morse’s thesis resonates with the likes of Esther Perel (Mating in Captivity) and Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism): that loving your body’s capacity for pleasure translates into better relationships, creativity, and presence in daily life. When you learn to follow pleasure, you become more authentic and compassionate—not less productive or responsible. Pleasure tunes your intuition, helps regulate stress, and improves communication because it keeps you connected to curiosity rather than fear.

In essence, Smart Sex argues that better sex is not a goal in itself—it’s a mirror of your overall well-being. When you grow your sex intelligence, you also grow your emotional intelligence, your relational empathy, and your power to inhabit joy. The remainder of the book builds a toolkit for living this truth: identifying your pleasure blocks, expanding your solo and partnered pleasure practices, improving communication, exploring sexuality playfully and without shame, and, ultimately, using pleasure as a spiritual practice of self-trust and wholeness.

Morse introduces Sex IQ as a revolutionary framework for sexual understanding. Think of it like emotional intelligence, but tuned to desire, embodiment, and connection. High Sex IQ means you know your body, grasp the psychology behind your arousal, and have the tools to communicate and collaborate effectively with partners. But it’s not a “score”—you never graduate. It’s an evolving practice across five pillars that reinforce one another throughout life.

Desire Begins in the Brain

A key insight is that sexual desire is primarily mental, not mechanical. “Our brains are our biggest sex organs,” Morse reminds us. Pleasure starts in the nervous system, where desire sparks and turns into physical arousal. She distinguishes two desire types: spontaneous desire (that out-of-nowhere libido rush often seen early in relationships) and responsive desire (when arousal grows through connection, touch, or emotional intimacy). Recognizing which pattern you tend toward helps you stop blaming yourself—or your partner—for differences in libido.

For example, vulva owners are often more responsive, needing a “runway” of emotional or sensory stimulation, while many penis owners experience more spontaneous desire. This explains why one partner may “never be in the mood” unless foreplay builds it. Understanding this dynamic reduces miscommunication and replaces guilt with practical empathy.

The Pillar of Embodiment

Morse describes embodiment as “remembering that your brain and body are one organism.” Our culture lives in its head—racing through to-do lists even while being touched. Embodiment reverses that by calming the mind and anchoring awareness into physical sensations. She offers tangible practices: body scans, mindful movement, meditation, and breathwork. Simple techniques like 4–7–8 breathing retrain you to feel rather than think during sex. She likens embodiment to kids on a playground—completely absorbed in the moment and their sensations, unselfconscious and joyful.

Health as a Pleasure Foundation

Sexual energy depends on body vitality. Hormones, medication, sleep, and diet all influence libido, and Morse connects them through accessible science. Hormonal balance—estrogen, progesterone, testosterone—shapes arousal in all genders. Likewise, medications like SSRIs can dampen orgasm potential, while poor gut health can imbalance hormones and reduce energy. Her advice echoes holistic experts such as Jolene Brighten (Beyond the Pill): tend your gut microbiome, exercise, and manage stress to boost your desire naturally.

Collaboration and Sexual Energy

Collaboration is the relational side of Sex IQ—building erotic connection rather than technical perfection. Morse explores sexual energy and polarity: the interplay of masculine and feminine forces (which exist in all people regardless of gender). She compares it to electricity—opposing charges generate spark. To maintain that spark over time, she offers tantric-style breathing, intentional eye contact, and role reversal exercises to rebalance energy between partners. Erotic polarity, she argues, revives long-term desire.

Inner Mastery: Self-Knowledge and Self-Acceptance

The last two pillars turn attention inward. Self-knowledge means identifying what environments, emotions, and sensations ignite your desire—or block it. Morse’s “Desire Inventory” asks questions like: Do you need emotional connection first? Does mystery turn you on? What distracts you? Her framework empowers you to engineer arousal. Self-acceptance, meanwhile, heals the shame that keeps pleasure trapped under judgment. By practicing body gratitude and compassionate self-talk, you stop seeking validation and start trusting your own cues. “Neutrality, not perfection,” becomes the mark of sexual confidence.

Through the five pillars, Morse reframes sexual growth as an act of self-integration. You become your own best lover first—then a better partner to others. Cultivating Sex IQ is lifelong work, but its reward is immense: a grounded, confident, playful approach to pleasure that enhances every part of your life.

If Sex IQ clarifies what builds pleasure, Morse’s concept of the “Pleasure Thieves” names the forces that steal it away: stress, trauma, and shame. These emotional saboteurs—collectively STS—keep you from inhabiting your body and block desire at its root. This trio explains why so many people want more sex but feel too anxious, numb, or unworthy to enjoy it once they get there.

Stress: Public Enemy Number One

Chronic stress is pleasure’s biggest rival because the nervous system can’t be in fight-or-flight and arousal at the same time. When cortisol spikes, oxytocin and serotonin plummet, flattening libido. Morse teaches readers to identify stress patterns—like rushing from a deadline straight into bed—and replace them with parasympathetic rituals: movement, laughter, social connection. She invites you to measure your “Pleasure Percent,” the proportion of your day spent in joy. A healthy goal is 25%, or four hours of pleasure states scattered throughout daily life. That might mean morning walks, afternoon naps, or masturbation breaks treated as legitimate stress medicine.

Trauma: Healing Through Pleasure

Trauma—big or small—creates hypervigilance and shuts down receptivity. Morse openly shares her history of childhood abuse and how it showed up later as people-pleasing and disembodiment. Many trauma survivors confuse safety with control, fearing vulnerability even in loving relationships. Her insight, echoed by Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score), is that pleasure can actually heal trauma by retraining the nervous system toward trust and safety. She recommends therapy (especially EMDR), breathwork, and self-touch as exposure tools to create new associations of comfort with receiving.

Shame: The Oldest Pleasure Thief

Shame, she writes, is “I am bad,” while guilt is merely “I did something bad.” Sexual shame runs deep—from religious repression to body shaming media. Morse identifies four common shame types: rejection shame (fear of being unloved), exposure shame (fear of being “found out”), self-blame shame (over-responsibility), and internalized judgment shame (belief your desires are wrong). Naming them is radical self-awareness. Her “Flip the Script” exercise helps convert inherited scripts like “sex is dirty” into affirmations such as “pleasure is joy and self-care.” Over time, confronting shame builds resilience and compassion toward both self and partner.

By dismantling these thieves, Morse restores pleasure to its natural state: a current running freely through body and mind. You can’t think your way into desire, but you can create conditions where desire feels safe enough to emerge. Killing off STS transforms sex from a stressor into an anchor of healing and vitality.

For Morse, masturbation isn’t merely about orgasm—it’s a self-care ritual and a cornerstone of self-knowledge. She renames it “solo sex” to emphasize intention and reverence. We live in a society that shames self-pleasure, seeing it as a substitute for the real thing. Morse argues the opposite: without learning to turn yourself on, you can’t guide others to please you. Solo sex becomes the lab where you explore anatomy, sensation, fantasy, and emotional release.

Mindful Masturbation

Most people do what she calls “maintenance masturbation”—a quick, routine release. Mindful masturbation slows things down to rediscover curiosity. Create a sensual atmosphere—candles, music, touch. Start by exploring your whole body before genitals, mapping sensations like a lover would. When intrusive thoughts arise—“I look weird,” “this is silly”—use breath to return to feeling. The goal isn’t climax but presence. Like meditation, mindfulness builds pleasure capacity through awareness.

Understanding Your Body

Morse’s educated yet friendly tone shines as she becomes the sex-ed teacher you never had. She walks readers through detailed anatomy for vulva and penis owners: vulva, clitoral network, G-, A-, and U-spots; and for penis owners, frenulum, perineum, and prostate. Learning these maps dismantles myths (like “the vagina is the source of all pleasure”). She highlights how orgasmic potential expands when you know the geography. Her exercises—like “Vulva Cupping” or quadrant mapping the clitoris—turn study into play.

Fantasy, Toys, and “Meditate, Masturbate, Manifest”

Fantasy, Morse insists, is a creative engine, not a moral problem. Thinking about taboo ideas doesn’t mean you want them in life—it means your brain loves novelty. She recommends ethical porn, audio erotica (like Dipsea), and journaling fantasies to understand deeper needs. Her trio practice—“Meditate, Masturbate, Manifest”—links post-orgasmic relaxation to manifestation. In the afterglow, visualize goals and feel them as already real. The dopamine surge anchors confidence and gratitude.

Solo sex, in Morse’s philosophy, is liberation. It soothes stress, boosts hormone balance, and strengthens self-acceptance. It turns private pleasure into empowerment, proving that knowing—and loving—your own sexual self is the smartest act of care you can perform.

Perhaps Morse’s most famous mantra—“communication is lubrication”—captures how honest talk fuels both physical and emotional connection. Most sexual issues, she says, aren’t about technique but silence. We avoid discussions about desires, preferences, and frustrations because we’re afraid of awkwardness or rejection. But the absence of words dries up intimacy faster than anything else.

The Three Ts: Timing, Tone, and Turf

Morse coaches readers to plan sex talks like emotional check-ins, not crisis summits. Timing: choose moments when both partners are relaxed, not mid-conflict or mid-coitus. Tone: lead with curiosity and reassurance instead of blame (“I love when we touch like this—want to try more?”). Turf: skip the bedroom, which can feel loaded with performance anxiety. A walk, drive, or coffee chat works better.

How to Talk About Sex

Using tools from Imago Relationship Therapy, she recommends mirroring (“What I hear you saying is...”), validation, and empathy. This slows reactive thinking and ensures both partners feel heard. Her Compliment Sandwich makes feedback gentle—praise, suggestion, reassurance (“I love your enthusiasm. Let’s slow a bit—it feels amazing when we build up. You turn me on so much.”). Framing requests as team experiments transforms critique into collaboration.

Morse also turns erotic negotiation into play: creating a “Yes/No/Maybe” list of activities to share, crafting a Sexual Bucket List together, or having a monthly Sexual State of the Union date to reflect on what’s working. By gamifying it, she normalizes ongoing dialogue instead of one nerve-wracking conversation.

Flirting, Feedback, and Consent

Flirtation, she argues, shouldn’t end after dating. It keeps attraction alive through humor, anticipation, and appreciation. Sexting, when consensual and creative, becomes modern foreplay. On consent, she dismantles myths like “If you started, you have to finish.” Instead, she models language that centers embodiment: “Check if your body’s a ‘hell yes.’ Anything less is a no.” This reframing—consent as presence rather than a checkbox—encourages agency and empathy equally.

In Morse’s view, language makes or breaks erotic trust. Every “I feel...” shared replaces guesswork with intimacy. When transparent talk flows, so does everything else.

Having gone from faking pleasure to twenty-three orgasms in one night, Morse claims her authority through experience. She reframes the orgasm not as a test of worth but as a biological and emotional feedback system. The more you understand how orgasms work, the more skilled you become at cultivating—not chasing—them.

The Science of “O”

Morse distills decades of research from Masters & Johnson and beyond. Orgasms are rhythmic muscle contractions in the pelvis triggered by nerve and blood flow coordination. They release a hormonal cocktail—oxytocin for bonding, endorphins for pain relief, dopamine for reward, serotonin for satisfaction, and prolactin for closure. These neurochemicals explain post-sex calm, the famous “afterglow.”

Demystifying Orgasm Myths

Freud’s outdated claim that clitoral orgasms were immature still haunts sexual expectations. Morse shatters it with modern data: up to 80% of vulva owners need external clitoral stimulation to orgasm. She urges partners to stop measuring “good sex” by penetration. Knowing anatomy frees everyone—penis owners included—from shame. Multiple types exist: clitoral, G-area, blended, nipple, prostate, even “coregasms” during workouts. None are superior; all are part of human potential.

Amplifying Orgasmic Energy

Morse shares tools to make orgasms more powerful: edging (teasing before climax to build intensity), breath orgasms (achieving climax through breath and muscle control), and pelvic floor training via Kegels. These strengthen the body’s capacity to feel waves of pleasure. She even reframes masturbation toys as “training partners,” not crutches. Vibrators, lubricants, and positioning experiments become creative allies.

Letting Go of Goal-Oriented Sex

At its deepest level, her orgasm philosophy is spiritual. By releasing performance pressure (“Did I come yet?”) and focusing on process, you rewire desire for presence. Orgasms stop being destinations and become discoveries along the path of pleasure. In Morse’s world, owning your orgasm means claiming authorship of your body’s story—one sensation at a time.

Across all her teachings, Morse’s central mission is liberation from shame—toward erotic curiosity and self-acceptance. For her, sexual freedom isn’t about endless novelty or constant arousal; it’s about the absence of fear. When guilt and comparison fade, desire can be playful, fluid, and authentic.

Pleasure for Every Body

Morse dismantles narrow ideals of who “deserves” sexuality. Pleasure, she repeats, belongs to every body—young or aging, thin or thick, cis, queer, disabled. She uses inclusive language (“vulva owners,” “penis owners”) to center anatomy not gender, making her vision accessible to all. Her advice normalizes using lube, exploring kinks, or redefining “sex” beyond penetration. To be “smart about sex” means expansive thinking—not moralizing, not binary.

Pleasure as Presence, Not Numbing

Culturally, we confuse pleasure with escape—bingeing Netflix, scrolling, drinking. Morse distinguishes true pleasure as embodied engagement, not avoidance. She encourages mindfulness in every sensory experience: savoring flavor, music, nature, and touch. This builds neural rewiring toward joy, the same rewiring needed for lasting erotic satisfaction. “I want you to feel more,” she writes, “not numb yourself into feeling nothing.”

In her final message, Morse reframes productivity itself. If productivity means moving efficiently toward goals, and our goal is fulfillment, then pleasure is the most productive act imaginable. Each kiss, laugh, orgasm, nap, or indulgence in beauty is an investment in vitality. When we own our pleasure, we own our energy, creativity, and voice.

Smart Sex ultimately delivers a manifesto for living intelligently through desire. It’s not about being sexier—it’s about being more awake.