Born in 1995, I’m painfully (re: existentially) aware that I sit squarely on the edge of the young millennial/geriatric Gen Z-er divide. I take my hot girl walks, hair claw-clipped back, all the while aware that my passion for pumpkin spice candles discounts any shred of trendy social capital I try to amass. But as I toe the line between the two generations, there’s a consistency split between them that I adamantly support: an unapologetic, ardent defense of sexual freedom. Put simply: love who you love (and never, ever fake an orgasm).
Unfortunately, my adolescent sex education pushed a narrative of fear—and a fear of my body developed. So, when I started college, the idea that sex could be pleasurable and passionate was foreign and far from the reality I’d been presented with. Thankfully, times have changed, and while the political powers that be are trying to limit women’s sexual empowerment, my social feeds and chosen media outlets are still fully in support of rewarding sex.
Featured image from our interview with Goop editor, Megan O’Neill by Belathée Photography.
And that, dear readers, marks my segue into how I came to uncover my erotic blueprint. No, Sex, Love, & goop wasn’t the catalyst for my discovery (though I have watched the Netflix show since). Instead, I came to the topic through a funny sort of digital word-of-mouth, when a friend shared on their Instagram story that learning their erotic blueprint changed not only their sex life for the better, but their relationship with their body, sexuality, and the world around them. Of course, I was intrigued.
It was my curiosity that brought me to Anne More, an International Sexologist whose mission is to support couples and singles along their journey to sexual self-discovery, build healthy relationships, and lean into erotic pleasure. Her approach is inclusive, compassionate, and led by empathy—so naturally, she’s the perfect person to share all the deets on the different erotic blueprints.
Below, Anne dives deep into the history behind the erotic blueprints, provides a comprehensive breakdown of the five types, and shares how learning your own erotic blueprint can change your sex life—and life entirely—for the better.
As a Master Trainer in the Erotic Blueprints™, an International Sexologist, and a professional speaker, Anne has helped hundreds of couples and singles to find their way to sexual self-discovery, great relationships, and the adventurous erotic life of their dreams. She understands the issues around erotic evolution from every angle. As a practitioner and speaker she is accepting, funny, wildly engaging, and a truth-teller who makes sexuality approachable and fun.
What is the erotic blueprint?
Great question! Everyone has an Erotic Blueprint™ that explains your sexual preferences, needs, and desires. Together, the Five Erotic Blueprints™ give couples and singles a menu of how turn-on works in your body, how you can please your partner and ask for what you want, and how to expand your definition of “sex” into a whole new world of play and erotic possibilities.
The Erotic Blueprints were created by Miss Jaiya out of her more than 20 years of work as a somatic sexologist. They are based on the ways that different bodies respond to pleasure, touch, words, and energy in erotic exploration. Since their creation more than eight years ago, they have helped thousands of couples reignite their sex lives, and thousands more singles find and create the love lives and sex lives of their dreams.
I believe sexual incompatibility is a myth. The Erotic Blueprints help to provide a framework to understand that being different isn’t a problem. Rather, it’s an opportunity to enjoy learning from each other and finding all the new wild and wonderful places you can meet erotically, so you can deepen and expand the ways you connect.
You can see more about the Erotic Blueprints on the Netflix show Sex, Love, & goop.
How do each of the five erotic blueprints differ?
It’s important to know that there’s no hierarchy in the Five Blueprint Types™. It’s not better to be Energetic vs. Sexual, or Kinky vs. Sensual. It’s just the way you are wired for pleasure, and you are not wrong, broken, or bad because your desires may look different than “normal” sex, or even different than your partner’s.
In bringing this work to the world, we in the Blueprint Community want everyone to know, that your desires are good, and your turn-on is sacred, and a gift, just the way you are. There’s nothing to change or fix. That said, here’s a basic overview of the Five Blueprint Types.
Energetic Types
Energetic Types are the sensitive, intuitive empaths of the erotic world. If you’re Energetic, you love tease, anticipation, and longing. You need to feel your lover’s full presence, and you find deep and even cosmic meaning in sex. Sex to you starts way before any physical touch: with presence, breathing, eye gazing, and feeling one another’s energy.
Energetics can have orgasms without touch, and can feel everything that’s happening in their partner’s body as well as their own. They are like the Jedi of the sex world! They can often tap into sexual energy at will, and tend to love learning and experiencing everything about tantra, kundalini, yoga, crystals, sound baths, and erotic energetic vibration.
Sensual Types
Sensual Types bring the beauty and romance to sex. If you are Sensual, you can have full body orgasms when all of your senses are ignited: taste, touch, sound, smell, and sight. You love kissing, cuddling, sensual feasting, skin-to-skin contact, slowing down and savoring every move. Sensuals often dress beautifully, celebrating textures and colors and clothing that feels delicious on their bodies; they enjoy beautiful surroundings, live music, art, and great food, all of which can be orgasmic experiences for these heart-centered hedonists.
If you are a Sensual, you need to relax to have sex; you are delighted by massaging touch, warm oil, candles, beautiful and harmonious settings, sunsets, sexy dancing, music, and opening your lover’s heart as well as your own with slow, attentive, romantic lovemaking.
Sexual Types
Sexual Types are all about naked bodies, penetration, genitals, and orgasms! They want directness and certainty. Sex, to them, is often about intercourse and genitals, and anything else doesn’t really count. They tend to speak and approach sex with very clear and direct language: Are we going to do it? Want to have sex with me? Is it going to happen tonight? When?
Sex, for them, is a real need for regulating their nervous system: they have sex to relax. It’s like food or air or water; it’s what makes them feel loved and alive with a sense of belonging. When they are having regular, fulfilling sex, all is right with the world, and they can approach life with a sense of resource, generosity, and joy.
Kinky Types
Kinky Types love everything that is taboo, forbidden, naughty, and off-limits. They love breaking rules and playing erotic games that bend and challenge what is “normal” and “acceptable.” There are two main types of turn-on, in the Kinky realm: Sensation Kink and Psychological Kink.
Sensation kink is all about exploring taboo sensations in the body: intense sensations like impact or scratching or being tied up; wrestling, being held down, and primal play (biting, wrestling, pouncing). Psychological kink is the wide world of mind games and role play: domination and submission, fantasy play, erotic body worship, surrender, BDSM.
Kinky Types have a million ways to play, and a million ways to ignite arousal and orgasm, especially when sensation and psychological adventuring are combined in creative ways. The most important words in the Kink world are play and consent: approaching everything with openness and curiosity, making sure everyone is enthusiastically agreeing to both desires and boundaries in any given play session, and being clear about what is wanted and not wanted.
Shapeshifter Types
Shapeshifter Types love adventure, novelty, and contrast. They are sophisticated lovers who have access to easily playing in any of the other four Blueprint Types. They can please partners in any Blueprint.
They are sometimes the people pleasers of the erotic world. It’s easy for them to give their lover what they want, but sometimes that means their complex and changing needs aren’t being met. Their challenge is to ask for all of what they want, including variety and erotic adventures beyond what their lover’s Blueprint might imagine.
What is a shadow? What are the shadow sides of each type?
Each Erotic Blueprint Type has superpowers—the places for that Type where sex becomes exciting, arousal amps up, and orgasms are easy, accessible, and abundant. Each Blueprint Type also has
shadows: unconscious places where your body and any sexual connection may suddenly shut down or go offline and arousal disappears. It’s often the flip side of the superpower.
Let’s look at some examples:
Energetic Types
Being super sensitive and empathic as an Energetic can mean great, connected, mind-blowing sex where you feel fully merged with your partner, body and soul. But sometimes, it can means struggling to have boundaries or feeling overwhelmed and shutting down if your lover rushes in to grab or touch you without taking time to get present, ground, and connect. Energetics can sometimes be hierarchical and judgy, as well. They can feel like their preferred kind of sex is superior to other Types because it’s more spiritual or more meaningful.
Sensual Types
Sensuals can have full body orgasms when all of their senses are delighted. Their Shadow is that if anything feels “wrong” in the environment or the experience, they can get stuck in their heads and struggle to feel anything, including pleasure and arousal.
If you are a Sensual, you may get stuck in thought loops if the music is too loud, the “wrong” song came on, the room is messy, you’re worried that you or your partner didn’t shower, or your to-do list takes over in your head. You may also need to give yourself time to transition from everyday life into “sexy time.” Your body needs time to relax and reset; you can’t just shift on a dime from doing your taxes to doing wonderful sensual things.
Sexual Types
Sexual Types LOVE sex and generally find penetrative sex and orgasms to be easy and obvious. Their Shadow is that because that directness is easy and works for them, they may have a narrow definition of sex, and feel that anything that doesn’t go straight to genitals and penetration, doesn’t “count.”
Other Blueprint Types may experience Sexuals as demanding or overly direct. If a Sexual Type is partnered with a different Blueprint type, they may struggle to understand why their partner seems so complicated and why it’s worth their effort to learn to please in new ways. But their love of frequent, satisfying sex and love for their partner generally wins out, and Sexuals can learn to expand into any and all of the Blueprints and become masterful lovers in any erotic adventure.
That’s true of all the Blueprints: the great thing about learning all Five Erotic Blueprint Types is that your erotic possibilities expand exponentially, and you can play and please in a whole world of new ways, with any kind of partner.
Kinky Types
Kinky Types have the superpower of being able to play in almost limitless ways, but they often carry deep shame about their desires, because of our society’s narrow definition of how “normal” and acceptable sex is supposed to look. It’s a common misconception that people who like kink are somehow mentally ill or deranged. All kink is a perfectly normal thing to be into, as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult (just like in every other kind of sex!).
If you are Kinky, you may never have told your lover about your kinky desires, because you may have been afraid they would judge you or even leave you. You may not ever have admitted them to yourself, or you may have done so only after years of trying to bury or deny them. The great news for Kinky Types is that once we acknowledge and accept our kinkiness, research shows that we are among some of the happiest and most well-adjusted erotic explorers on the planet.
Most recently, a 2020 study published in the Sexuality Research and Social Policy journal shows that people who participate in BDSM “score similarly on most measures of psychological health, have similar levels of trauma and childhood experience as the general population, and relationship health.”
Shapeshifter Types
Shapeshifters are complex, intricate, and sophisticated as erotic beings; once they embrace this, it becomes a superpower, but until that time they may feel like it’s wrong to ask for so much. If you are a Shapeshifter, you may feel like you are too much and too complicated. You may feel like you can never ask for what you truly want, because no one will want to give it to you.
The opposite is true: once a Shapeshifter learns to own how big they are, they become an erotic playground all by themselves. Shapeshifters bring the party everywhere they go, and doing so unapologetically with joy and confidence gives permission for everyone around them to do the same.
How can you learn your erotic blueprint?
The first step in learning your Erotic Blueprint is to take The Quiz! It gives you a quick overview of your primary Erotic Blueprint Type, which is a road map to how you experience pleasure, and the kinds of touch, intimacy, and sex you like best.
Once you have that overview, if you want to dive deeper, you can join our community or you can look through a directory of Certified Erotic Blueprint Coaches. And if you already know how life-changing and groundbreaking this work will be for you and you want the deepest dive possible with an Erotic Blueprints Master Trainer, you can apply to work with me.
How can you communicate your erotic blueprint to your sexual and/or romantic partner(s)?
When we introduce something new into the sexual conversation, we can create excitement by starting out with the intention of invitation and curiosity. So, rather than saying how bored you’ve been, what isn’t working, and how your partner needs to change, try instead to feel what’s important to you about this, and share vulnerably with your partner from that place.
If you can learn what their Blueprint is, then you can do this even more effectively by using the kind of words and body language that their Blueprint responds to. Some examples:
- For a Sensual partner, you can talk about how you want to slow down and savor sex with them, how beautiful and romantic sex is with them, and how you want to feel even more swept away when you make love together.
- For a Sexual partner, you can speak to their desire for certainty and frequency by assuring them that learning about your desires and how to please you in your Blueprint, will actually mean that they will get more sex with you, more often, and it will be even hotter and more orgasmic for everyone (including them).
Before you begin the conversation, ask if it’s a good time to talk about something fun and important. Make sure you both are calm, resourced, and that you have uninterrupted time to talk. Be curious about what may be coming up for them, and if they have concerns about not feeling good enough or that they have been disappointing you by not knowing this before, assure them that this is new for you, too, that you care about them and the relationship with them, and you’re sharing this now because you’re excited about finding new ways to play and explore, together.
How can learning your erotic blueprint improve your sex life?
Knowing your own Blueprint helps in so many ways! It means you have a language to describe what you want and need sexually, in a way that’s not judging or shaming, but simply invites new understanding. The more you know about your own Blueprint, the more you know about what your body loves.
So many of us grew up thinking that it’s not okay to talk about sex or ask directly for what we want—which means we’re often left feeling like we’ll never get what we need. Learning the Blueprints changes all of that. Knowing your own Blueprint means you can tell your lover what you want and set them up to win by being able to give you exactly what you most crave.
Learning your partner’s Blueprint helps even more, because then you can offer them exactly what they want, in the way they want, and then you feel like a Sex God/dess Rock Star because they think you’re the best lover they’ve ever had!
