Welcome to Conversations with Dr. Jennifer, a collection of interviews on the topics of relationships, sexuality, and more, all featuring Dr Finlayson Fife.

Today we get to talk once again with my friend Jennifer Feenless in Fife.

We're going to talk a little bit about masculine sexual shame, which is something years

ago that was never even really researched or studied or thought to be a necessary

problem or experience for men.

So Jennifer, as we get started, I know a lot of my listeners know you already, but can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing right now and how things are going?

Sure, let's see. So I did a course actually on this, so I'm a therapist. I do a lot of teaching and

coaching of couples around self-development and sexual development and

and I started with my dissertation research on

LDS women's experience of sexual shame.

I mean that's not the way I posed the question but it was really looking at this

question of agency and how free women felt to be sexual in marriage and so on.

So my initial focus of my work was very much around LDS women's experiences around sexuality because they're more overtly

challenged often. But as I kept doing work with couples I started

realizing more and more like men are struggling in their own way even if they're often presenting as the higher desire person it doesn't mean they're reconciled or at peace with their sexuality.

And often men struggling in sexuality

would drive some of these desire differences.

What I mean is men and women would often get polarized in desire differences

because they were both struggling with the question of whether or not

sexuality is okay. So as I became aware of that more through my work I

decided to do a men's course for LDS men called the art of loving in which I'm

really helping men on the same questions of how to think about themselves

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