Welcome to the libido lounge. We focus on all things love, lust, and libido. We believe that fabulous sex is important to health as exercise and good food. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode on the lounge. I'm your libido expert, Doctor. Diane Mueller, and I'm so excited to invite Doctor. Eveline Dacker to our show today. We're gonna have a great conversation.
I was really inspired to get doctor Dacker on the phone with me today because of so many areas of her work, but in particular, her work around communication and how we talk about sex. She has a really great acronym and process for what she teaches about. We're gonna get into that today.
And a lot of the episode, we're gonna see where this goes as always, but a lot of the orientation today is going to be on communication, on sex, on how do we talk to our partners, on how do we talk to each other about this very important topic. So thank you so much for being here with me today. Yeah. Thank you. I'm excited to be here as well. I'd love before we jump into the the juiciness of the story.
I'd love to hear a little bit of the nuts and bolts of you from a standpoint of you've gone such an interesting direction as a doc in your career to really bring so much communication and so much of the conversation around healthy sexuality and not just to focus on, say, the physical components of human sexuality.
So I'm curious about your story, if we can lead with that around, like, what what really happened or what transpired to help you understand that this is such an important thing to talk about and then to, you know, take it pretty big and get on, you know, TEDx and really be getting your word out. What was what was the initial, say, the process of that? Oh, okay. It was roller derby. For real or figurative? No, honey. We really like I joined the roller derby team when I was like 44.
And all of a sudden, like being in a group of women who were in this like place in their life of wanting to express themselves and like with avatars and dressing up and just like being in a community of women really made me realize how little we know about sex, how little we know about our own sexuality, and how little it's talked about. So I was not a good roller derby player, but I was kind of like the team doc. And people just were asking me questions.
And at the same time, I was in the process of getting a certification in functional medicine, which I kind of called natural empathy for MDs. And, I realized, darn, I'm learning about all this root cause of illness and disease, but we're not talking about what something that's so important and that's pleasure. Yeah. That's your connection. What makes our life yummy. Right. And, and that's kind of where I started going into sexuality, but not sexuality.
It's like something is wrong, but like, how can we actually make things great for ourselves? I was also 44. So I know as being a doctor, you know, I work, I've been working with menopause and periadipause for the last twenty, thirty years. And I had this story in my head that, oh my God, I'm going to hit 50 and I'm going to be dead sexually. Right. Because that's kind of the story that we're given. And I decided that that didn't have to be true.
And I went deep into like studying sexuality, but not from the lens of medicine and dysfunction, but from the lens of like, what are people actually doing? And, so, you know, I like to laugh, like I took up my first people ask me, so how'd you get into this? Like, what, what, like, what continuing education did you do? And I'm like, oh, I took some classes at a, at a sex store and there's an adult store. There's a late store in Portland, Oregon called she bop and they used to teach classes.
So I went and I started learning from people who were sex educators. And, I realized that there's some really important things out there that is not known in the mainstream. Stream. And I just felt like the worlds could be so different to the way we navigate sexuality could be so different if we take these lessons from, you know, these sex positive subcultures and actually bring them to the mainstream, which is kind of where my work is. I love it. And definitely similar soul missions.
I I often say pleasure is not just about desire. It's something we require. And it's for exactly what you said. It's like so much I think of motivation in medicine and society is like away from pain, which is important. But I really appreciate what you're doing because, like, there's it's like changing the orientation from moving away from pain to actually, like you said, like, making life more yummy. Right? Bringing in more of that pleasure.
So it's such a great orientation to health of, like, towards pleasure versus, like, chasing away the bad thing, even though we wanna get away with that bad thing too. So in these years of study, what have you found to be some of the core things that are important for healthy sexuality and sexual expression? Well, of course, communication. Yay. We got Yay. And then and we had to talk about like, oh, we gotta talk about sex.
But one of the things that I realized is that we don't have a framework to talk about it. So so I came up with one. I came up with a framework and it's called the SARS talk. And I'll get into this in a minute. Please. But the other thing that really I noticed is that we need to understand ourselves, especially people who are raised as women. Like we're not taught how to own our own sexuality and our own, like, pleasure and our own for us. Right?
Yeah. And so much of what we're taught about sexuality is like reproductive sex, penetrative sex, heterosexual sex. And if we could step a little bit away from that and relearn what sexuality means, then we're able to talk about it. We're able to ask for it. We're able to keep it alive for us. And so that's what the STARS talk is. It it actually is not only a framework to have conversations, but it's a framework for us to understand our to create our sexual self awareness.
Yeah. It's so important because I think that's one of the the biggest things is, like, where to get started, how to get started. And you're right. Like, so many times, it's, like, such a taboo thing to talk about sex. And another thing I hear in so many of my female population, so much of my female population is, like, this sense of, like, I'm doing it wrong. Right? There's almost this feeling of, like, because we're not taught that women and men, our processes are different. Right?
That that oftentimes there's this this sense of, like, doing it wrong that I see in in my female population. And it's really just, like, this lack of communication and this lack of understanding and this lack of awareness of, like, there there's really no right and wrong in this. It's it's about consent and exploration and communication. And so let's get into Yeah. Your STARS framework. I wanna make sure we get, you know, thoroughly into that city. No. Let's talk in.
Okay. So the very so it's an acronym and each one stands for something. I'll just say what the acronym is really first. I will go into each other. So it stands for safety needs, turn ons, avoids relationship values or retentions and expectations, and then our sexual health STI disclosure.
So it starts out with safety needs because, you know, I've been working on this framework for many years, and I realized, like, the fundamental thing that we need to know is how to stay safe because we cannot open our heart, our mind, or our body if we're not really safe. So then what if safe, what does that even mean? Right. And so I'd like to take that even a step back into like, what does our body tell us? What is the somatic safety?
Could we tune into like, oh, when I feel safe, this is how my body is acting. And when I don't feel safe, this is how I'm acting. And like, then you could decide to realize like, oh, I need like, for me personally, I don't feel safe if I'm with somebody and they're drinking a lot of alcohol. Like, I don't feel like I could really have consent in that situation. So one of my safety needs that I tell people is like, I count drinks.
If you're gonna have more than two alcoholic drinks, then, you know, it's gonna change our, our encounter. Some other things that could be safety is like, where do I feel? What location do I feel safe? Is do I feel safe getting into a car with somebody that I haven't met yet? No. So, you know, like, let me just tell that to somebody upfront so that we could make plans in a way that we could come together so that we're both safe? Like, what do we both need? And it's not something we talk about.
It's not even something we think about, but it's so important. So I like to start with safety needs. Safety needs also like sometimes the whole sex talk is about safer sex. So we think it's about like condoms and reproductive. But I like to put that to the end and really start with, like, what does our body, our mind, our sex, like, what do we need to feel safe with a person? So that's the first one. The second one is turn ons or things we like. Like, what do I like?
One of my turn ons is I love good conversations. Like, that helps me feel safe as well. Like, having a good conversation with somebody before I would even consider getting address. I know there's people that are really into hookups, and that's good. That's what their turn ons are. That's what they like. So let's bring it out. Like, how we'd like to be touched. I like to be touched really slowly and softly. So I let my partners know that.
So if they're not touching me, you know, softly, I could always say just now a little softer, a little slower, and they don't feel bad about it. I'm just telling them the way that I like. I also love to know what my partner's like. How do they like to be held and touched and, and what turns them on? The, the counter of that is our avoid what we don't want. And, you know, these two could go back and forth and they're, they're very mad.
They go together, turn on to the void, but our avoid our boundaries, the things that we don't want, the things that may cause us to be going to trauma response. If we're going really deep into that, like how do I, what is my trauma response? How do I look? How do I show up? And can I tell a partner that beforehand? So if it happens, they're aware of it.
That's a little deeper into the conversation, but I like to bring that up because I think, consent has to happen from a trauma aware embodied attuned space. And the stars talk is a talk, it is a conversation, but it really involves being trauma aware, embodied, and leaning into learning attunement with one another. So our turn ons and avoids are really, they could be very powerful for us to actually explain them.
And I know, when I teach this to a lot of people who are raised as girls and raised as women, a lot of them don't even know what they like. I didn't even know what I liked. It's like, what do I like? I don't know. I'd like to like turn my partner on. I like to like orgasm proof this or that. I don't know what I like. I like to make him happy. You know? But, really, it's about owning ourselves and, like, knowing what do we want and not censoring them, not censoring their orgasm.
But, you know, this is how we're gonna close the orgasm gap. So those are my turn ons and avoids. And then, there's our relationship expectations and intentions. This is kind of like summed up in like, what does sex mean to me? What do I want in a relationship? What am I looking for with this person? Am I looking for someone distracting? Am I looking for fun? Am I looking for sex? Or am I looking for partnership and love?
And knowing that and being clear within ourselves, help us navigate this whole dating world or put in a relationship with somebody to be like, oh, you know what? I'm feeling like we're doing the domestic thing really good, but I am missing a little bit of that, that spontaneity and juice. So like bringing that to our conversation with our partners. And, you know, when I say expectations, people are like, oh, we shouldn't have expectations, but it's human to have expectations.
So that's all that we have them and let's say them and let's just be clear with one another. And then the, you know, so that, that, and with part of our expectations, I got this from the sex positive communities, because one of the things that really like made such an impact from with me is when I kind of learned a little bit about kink and BDSM and how people go into this as a scene. So they, they create a scene, they actually communicate what they want, what they don't want.
And then after they're done, they have aftercare. Yeah. And I loved that concept. I'm like, why doesn't why don't we all have aftercare? Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. I love pee. Like, you know, being in a sexual, dynamic with somebody or intimate dynamic, it takes energy and and and I want aftercare. So, like, I'm gonna ask what I need, and I'm gonna figure out what it is I need, and I wanna know what my partner needs. So expectations is kind of that. It's kind of like the aftercare.
Do I I wanna be texted. I don't like it when I text somebody and they don't respond to me, you know, in a day. I don't like ghosting. And if you're, I, I look out for that. Like, are you somebody that ghosts? Because that's going to be something like that's on my no list. That's on my avoid list. Yes. So, so that's the relationship.
And then the last death, like, oh, you know, I also want to mention that most of the time we start with the, our, we don't start, you know, we start with the safety needs in our body. Then we start with the R of what our intentions and expectations and our values are. Then if we're fairly comfortable, we'll go to more turn ons and the blades, but you know, the acronym doesn't work in that direction. Yeah. We're gonna start and we're done.
And so then at the very, very end is when we talk about our sexuality and our sexual health and our STI.