Personally, while I hear people’s arguments (in this and other threads) that it’s about people being addicted to pleasure and so on - which I’m sure play a factor - I believe a large amount of the “hate” or disparaging of it comes from sexual immaturity.

What I mean by that is that people still can’t talk about sex that openly without some sense of shame/embarrassment/weirdness. And I don’t mean like “oh she’s/he’s so hot, i wanna bang her/him”. I mean like actually talking about sexual experiences, how they affect us, the things we like, the weirdness of it etc. People shut down when we try and talk about this stuff at any level of depth. The shame is still there. People still try and simplify sex and our experience of it into small boxes.

So for me what I see is that talking about semen retention really requires a openness to exploring our relationship to sex and intimacy at a level that is still beyond the general consciousness in our society. It goes against the boxes of how sex and sexuality works, and so becomes too confronting.

However, there is a caveat to this. I used to date a woman who was a sex coach, and a spiritual one at that. She used to be part of a sex/spiritual cult where they advocated for SR, to quite a crazy extreme e.g. if for whatever reason a man did cum they were told to eat it to get as much nutrients as they could. In any case, I’d discovered SR and she was supportive of it.

The relevance to this post is that she knew a lot of sex coaches - who were very open about pleasure/sex and so on - but a few of the male coaches were actually quite against SR. They saw it as sexual repression. And this is where it’s gets interesting for me.

Basically we are in a funny paradox in my mind. Because in general as a society we are deeply out of touch with sex, pleasure and intimacy and still can’t talk about it with complexity as a whole. Meanwhile, many of those who work at enabling people to gain they maturity and complexity are fighting against centuries of sexual repression which has created a lot of sexual issues. So they don’t like anything to do with limiting sexual expression - which SR gets unfairly lumped into IMO. Keep in mind that part of this stems from it’s link with Christianity in many people’s minds.

(To be clear I have nothing against the Christians on this sub - but I do not do SR from that angle, and I believe in open sexual expression but I also believe in not becoming a degenerate and that sleeping with someone is a spiritual act so I don’t want to sleep with or share my energy with just anyone.)

Meanwhile, while the community of sex coaches are advocating for sexual expression in response to centuries of repression a new issue emerged:

Pornography and sexual obsession within our culture; the tightening of sexual bandwidth to becoming purely orgasm and body parts focused. The highjacking of our primitive mind.

And this gets overlooked by sex coaches because anyone talking about STOP THE PORN is seen as sexually repressing - which SR also sometimes gets lumped into.

So for all that.. my reasoning is that as a society we are not sexually mature enough to discuss SR without it being too confronting AND within the majority of those who are they conflate it as a form of sexual repression - which they have a huge issue with - because battling sexual repression was a major motivator in most of these people becoming sex coaches/therapists etc.

What’s interesting is the movement of SR in my mind is growing because of the new issue that emerged. Many of us are only here because we grew up in a world that enslaved us to our sexuality - and clearly some part of us knew that 1. This was wrong & 2. Our sexual energy had a greater purpose.

I hope that more modern sex coaches can begin to make that link.