Please don’t misunderstand me – I love sex and intimacy. I have also had a driving curiosity to know how we become individuals, develop group consciousness and cultivate deeper connections inwardly and outwardly. As a male heterosexual who felt the full force of my sex drive upon its arrival, I couldn’t find any useful information to help me make more sense of what it meant to be alive in a body that had been so intelligently hardwired for sex. I could only find pornography and caricatures of sex or medicalised explanations of it. I felt as if I were—we were—left alone to beat our paths through the jungle of incomplete or inaccurate information.

Being left alone is fine to a point, except that for us men, sex will be a calling—at least for a time and often a very protracted time. Sex sets the stage and translates how we make sense of our world, our relationships and the meaning in our lives.

A calling? Perhaps you are thinking—“c’mon, aren’t you referring to sex or love addicts or something like that?” In fact I’m not. I’m talking about us—all men. If you have given some thought to your own sex-hardwiring I am sure you will have a good idea of what I am talking about. If you are a woman reading this – well – then I am sure that you, too, will have suspected men’s “hardwired for sex” nature all along.

So what occurs to me, if we are looking to develop, to master our lives and relationships and discover a brave and evolving expression of manhood—as well as to help our boys to do the same—is that garnering a more complete understanding of our relationship with our sex bodies and sex minds must be deliberate and very near the top of our “to do” list. Getting beyond the old worn out conversations and caricatures about being “hardwired for sex” must become the essential part of our enquiry.

I wrote SEXED with precisely this exploration in mind.

I have organised and geared the book as a self-navigating enquiry through a series of guided steps that follow a map through each chapter, its objectives, key insights, and exercises—all to a degree that matches your own curiosity, desire to grow and longing to discover new terrain of extraordinary sex and intimacy.