I found it difficult to decide whether to take up the invitation or not, mainly because so much has changed – in the world, and in me/us internally – since those books were published. In the end it felt important to revisit the books – to add something to them which would recognise and honour those changes, while not altering them too much – to recognise and honour the originals, the person who wrote them, and their continued usefulness to many, including myself.

New covers!

Here’s a preview of the two new covers. Regular readers may understand why I am particularly excited about them both (the new colour of The Psychology of Sex, and the new central image on Rewriting the Rules).

I’ll say more here in the coming months about the process and content of the new edition of Rewriting the Rules, which is out in September. It’s a huge one for me, given that it was the first edition of Rewriting the Rules that started the journey of becoming a non-fiction writer, including this website.

The Psychology of Sex

For now, the new edition of The Psychology of Sex is out this month.

Like Rewriting the Rules, the main changes that I made to The Psychology of Sex involved adding a new foreword, and a major new chapter at the end of the book. I also made some minor tweaks throughout to update references and reflect how things have shifted, particularly in relation to ever more polarised debates around sex and sexuality.

Un/Conscious Sex

The new final chapter is called ‘un/conscious sex’. It reflects my main areas of learning since 2018, particularly around trauma, plurality, the processes of bringing unconscious material into consciousness, and the role of sex and the erotic in all of this. This chapter also reflects wider cultural concerns around the prevelance of non-consensual sexual behaviour, and how we might address that at both a personal and collective level.

Particularly, the ‘un/conscious sex’ chapter explores how relational and cultural trauma massively constrain all of our capacities to navigate consent. It suggests ways in which we might use our erotic imaginations to become more conscious of all of our selves, and so approach sex – and everything – more consciously and consensually.

It felt very helpful, and meaningful, for me to bring all of this material together in one place, to convey my current understanding of: how our erotic and relational lives relate to trauma, how challening consent is for all of us under these conditions, and what we might therefore do to expand our capacity for care and connection with ourselves, others, and the world.

These are themes that I return to – beyond sex – in the final chapter of the new edition of Rewriting the Rules. They will likely be at the heart of all my work in future.

Check it out

Check out The Psychology of Sex, for more information about the book. The full contents of the third edition is as follows:

Foreword to the new edition

1 Psychology and sex

2 Sex and sexuality

3 ‘Proper’ sex

4 ‘Normal’ sex

5 Sex debates

6 Un/conscious sex

Further resources

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In the interview we explore the myths and misconceptions about sex and sexuality which we wanted to confront in the book, the problems with the idea of sexual ‘dysfunction’, and what Jules and I are hoping to achieve with our contributions to Icon’s graphic guide series.

You can find the full interview here.

Between the Pages: ‘Sexuality: A Graphic Guide’

Author Meg-John Barker explains why the comic book medium is perfect for exploring sex.

Written by

David Hopper

From the creators of graphic books, “Queer: A Graphic History” and “Gender: A Graphic Guide” comes “Sexuality: A Graphic Guide.” Published in 2021 by Icon Books, the 176-page comic book offers an informative and inclusive look at sexuality.

Writer Meg-John Barker and artist Jules Scheele, who both use they/them pronouns, take the reader on a Scooby-Doo, gang-like journey as the book’s four main characters encounter monsters like patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism and white supremacy. The book is packed with quotes from (and illustrations of) leading sex researchers and theorists, helping make academic topics more accessible and fun.

Barker is the author of various+ books on sex, gender and relationships, including “Life Isn’t Binary,” “How to Understand Your Gender,” “Enjoy Sex (How, When and IF You Want To)” and “Rewriting the Rules.” You can read their blog at www.rewriting-the-rules.com.

In this exclusive interview with Giddy, Barker discusses the common sexuality myths they wanted to dispel, why a focus on sexual “dysfunction” is problematic, Scheele’s eye-catching illustrations and more.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What would you say is the purpose of the book as well as the intended audience?

Barker: Our aim was to provide a friendly, accessible guide to the various ways of understanding sexuality that are out there. Particularly, we wanted to highlight how the normative ways of understanding it in our culture at the moment are only one possibility, and often a not particularly helpful or accurate one. Read more…

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It’s good timing, then, that our episode for The Erotic Philosopher podcast, with Cyndi Darnell, just came out. In this episode Alex and I draw on the book we wrote, via zoom, during the pandemic: How to Understand Your Sexuality. We cover how erotic, like other kinds of, pleasure is heavily constrained by both cultural and relational forms of trauma. These include the social norms and messages we receive about sex, and the patterns we develop to relate with others and ourselves (including our bodies and feelings), growing up.

You can listen to the podcast episode here. You can buy How To Understand Your Sexuality here. There’s more on trauma in my free book here.

Alex and I are hoping to spend most of our time together relaxing (Hell Yeah, Self-Care!), but it seems highly probable, knowing us, that we’ll also be starting to plan and scheme for our next book together, How to Understand Your Relationships. This book will explore how we can relate with others (and ourselves), expanding our capacities against a backdrop of so much cultural and personal trauma around relationships. I’ve written a bit about some of these themes in my new zine, Relationship Struggles.

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Do mismatched sex drives have to be a dealbreaker?

Not at all, in fact it would be highly unusual if any two people did not have differences – often significant differences – in terms of the amount and kind of sex they want. It would be great if we could assume, going into relationships, that this would be the case and talk openly about how we’d like to navigate these discrepancies. Unfortunately there’s a huge cultural mythology that if a relationship is ‘right’ we’ll be matched in terms of our sex drives and desires. This means that people find it very hard to acknowledge, and get support around it, when that’s not the case.

How can a compromise be reached without the partner(s) with the higher sex drive feeling unwanted and/or the partner(s) with the lower sex drive feeling coerced?

It’s very useful to untangle sex from other things where possible. Instead of thinking, or saying, ‘I want sex’ we can tune in and identify what we really want, and then assess whether sex is the only way to get there. In your example it sounds like somebody wants to feel wanted by their partner. Can they explore where that ‘wanting to be wanted’ comes from, and what range of experiences give them that feeling? It’s very helpful to tune into what we really want and need, so we can take the pressure off sex being the only thing that can fulfill those wants and needs.

It can also help to make a sexual venn diagram, of overlapping circles for the people in the relationship, where we include all of our sexual desires in the circles, with the ones we share in the overlapping part. Then we can have conversations about how we might connect in ways where we can enjoy those overlapping desires. We can also talk about the ways in which each person might be able to explore and enjoy the desires they have that are not in the overlap. In consensually non-monogamous relationships that might be with other people, in monogamous relationships it might be in giving everyone time and space for solo sex of various kinds, for example.

What about situations where there is a kink vs vanilla compromise to be made? 

This is no different to the previous example really. Again if we assume that there will always be differences in desires, then kink/vanilla is just one of the ways those differences might show up, and it’s up to each relationships to keep returning to the ways in which each person might explore and enjoy those desires which aren’t compatible. 

In this case, however, it is probably worth unpacking more what’s meant by ‘kink’ and ‘vanillia’. Rather than assuming, it may be more helpful to list all of the erotic desires and fantasies each person has and mapping them on the venn diagram. It may be there are some compatibilities that show up when we don’t assume what counts as ‘kink’ or ‘vanilla’.

How common would you say this issue is, especially in LGBTQ+ and poly relationships?

It is extremely common among everybody. Given that all our sex drives and desires shift and change over time, even if we were 100% compatible at one point in time (unlikely!) then that won’t be true for the whole length of our relationship. It’s way more helpful to assume that we’ll fluctuate over time. There can be some more acceptance of sexual fluidity in LGBTQ+ communities, but there can also be a carry-over from mainstream heterosexual culture that sexual discrepancies are a problem.

One big question is how we can untether sex from other aspects of a relationship. A key reason that people often feel that they have to have sex when they don’t want to is that they assume that other aspects of a relationship are contingent on them continuing to have sex. If we want to be truly consensual we have to accept that our partners may stop wanting sex with us for a while, or even forever, and that this should not mean they would lose, for example, our love, respect, financial security, family, or anything else. Asexual and aromantic communities are perhaps at the forefront of navigating relationships in this way.

Struggling with sexual discrepancies can be less common in poly groups given that there is a built in possibility that people can meet different desires and needs in different relationships. However, there can still be an assumption in poly communities that for a relationship to ‘count’ as a relationship there needs to be sex involved, or that being sexually ‘compatible’ is better or ideal. Again, the more we can question such assumptions, the better.

What kind of resources would you recommend for those facing this sort of issue?

BishUK and Scarleteeen are two excellent websites for young people (but really useful to everyone), and School of Consent is brilliant. In terms of my own books, hopefully How to Understand Your Sexuality, Sexuality: A Graphic Guide, and A Practical Guide to Sex do a pretty good job at covering these issues. There’s also a free book about consent on my website, and the zine Justin Hancock and I created to Make Your Own Sex Manual helps you to communicate overlaps and mismatches in desire.

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One in eight women and one in twenty men say they lack enjoyment during sex.
For all the conflicting messages we get around sex, most of us know that on some level we’re supposed to enjoy it. But there are a lot of things that can stand in our way. 

Further resources

• A Practical Guide to Sex.
• Sexuality: A Graphic Guide.
• How to Understand Your Sexuality.
• Make Your Own Sex Manual Zine.

The post The Second Circle with Franki Cookney: Why is it so hard to feel good? appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

I worked at London Friend as a volunteer counsellor there for several years, and it has a very fond place in my heart, so I was glad to be chosen – along with 49 other people – to offer my words of celebration. I said…

London Friend is where I learnt most about therapy – as well as a good deal about myself – from my amazing supervisor, from the other counsellors, and from many extraordinary people I worked with, who I still remember with much fondness.

I’m sure you’ll hear this over and over again, but London Friend is deeply special for its friendliness! Every time I popped in, I was warmly greeted by staff who made it their business to learn about, and value, every single person who walked through the door. Read more…

Check out the words of all 50 London Friend-friends here, as they accumulate over the year.

You can also see me visiting London Friend and talking about it in this video by James Marcus Tucker and Michael Urwin from Peruvian Tree Productions.

Thanks again to London Friend for being such a wonderful home to me and to so many others. Do support their work, and get in touch with them if you’re an LGBTQ+ Londoner looking for support and/or somewhere to volunteer.

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If you want to delve into all things consent-y around sexuality then check out Alex Iantaffi and my new book, How to Understand Your Sexuality.

For a bunch of my writings around consent, there’s my free book on consent.

To support young people learning more around consent, Justin Hancock‘s amazing BishUK website is one of the most respected and widely visited resources for sex and relationships education, advice, and information, and is now fully supported by Patreon. So please send some funds his way if you can, and check out other ways to offer your support. You can also still get the book Justin and I wrote about consensual sex, A Practical Guide to Sex.

The Consent Collective are currently on the road travelling around the UK, so do also follow them to see what they’re up to, and check out their amazing consent and trauma resources.

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In this vid, Alex and I chat about what this book means to us, what it covers, how our trilogy may or may not relate to the Star Wars trilogy, and some of our plans for the next book…

The post Vid: How to Understand Your Sexuality appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The idea with all these books is to be a gentle, friendly guide to how gender, sexuality, and relationships work, and how to understand your own relationship with these aspects of ourselves. So this time we cover:

• What sexuality is and the different relationships people can have with it, encompassing diverse forms of asexuality and allosexuality
• How the world around us generally understands sexuality, and the impact that has on us
• Our experiences of sexuality growing up
• Our experiences of sexuality now
• How we can live our sexualities, in terms of identifying, expressing and practicing them
• How we navigate our sexualities in relationships of various kinds
• Finding support and community around our sexualities, if we want to

In this book, in particular, we recognise that our sexuality or asexuality can take us towards delight, pleasure, belonging, and freedom, and it can also be a place where we experience trauma, shame, isolation, and restriction. For most of us there will be elements of both, especially given the stigma around diverse sexualities, and the commonality of non-consensual sex. Hopefully one of the strengths of the book is that it encompasses how all of these things impact our relationship to our sexualities, and how we can engage with them.

We were very pleased to have Jules Scheele contribute a wonderful cover, and several drawings, to the book again. And this time another wonderful comic creator, Erika Moen, contributed a lovely forward. We hope you enjoy it

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How much does social acceptance or rejection define our sexual identity and orientation? It’s curious to see that Generation Z is the one with most LGBTQIA+ members, and, going back, there’s less and less in each generation. What’s the correlation between the two factors? 

Social acceptance has a big impact on how open people feel able to be about their sexual attractions and how free they feel to act upon them. It’s likely that shifting proportions of LGBTQIA+ people across the generations reflects how socially acceptable diverse sexualities and genders are in wider culture, as well as how possible it has been to act upon them without stigma, discrimination, or restriction. Another factor is how important it has been seen over the years to identify your sexuality and gender.

It’s also important to remember that the proportion of people who identify with a particular sexuality is the tip of the iceberg. For example, with bisexuality, far more people will have sexual experiences with more than one gender than identify as bisexual, and even more will experience attraction to more than one gender which they don’t act upon.

Are sexual orientation and identity biological or a social construct?  

Both! Our sexuality is biopsychosocial, which means that – like most aspects of human experience – it comes down to a mixture of the social context we grow up in, the experiences that we have through our lives, and the ways in which our body and brain function. All of these things interact with each other in complex ways that we could never really tease apart. For example, the ways in which our body and brain function impact how we’re treated by others in our particular culture, and also the wider culture shapes the experiences that we’re able to have, which – in turn – shapes our bodies and brains.

You might think about the ways in which certain body shapes and sizes, and mental abilities, are deemed ‘sexually attractive’ in our culture, leading those who have them to have radically different experiences of sex and relationships. Or you might think about the ways in which culture enables and restricts certain forms of sexual expression, meaning that we’re more or less likely to have access to those experiences, which will impact how our bodies and brains will respond to those possibilities (e.g. with pleasure, joy, fear, shame, etc.).

What impact does fear of child sexuality have on how we develop our sexual identity and preference? 

Fear of childhood sexuality has a massive impact at the moment. Few children receive anything like a good education around sex and relationships because there is so much anxiety about talking with kids about sex. Tragically this actually results in more young people have abusive, unwanted, and risky sexual experiences, not less, because they are so ill-equipped to talk about sex or to navigate sex consensually. Certainly most sex education and advice assumes that people will be heterosexual, or only includes LGB sexualities very briefly. This restricts how able young people are to explore the full range of possible sexual and asexual identites and experiences.

It is often said that everyone is bisexual or that no one is, which are biphobic expressions. Why does society have trouble accepting bisexuality specifically. Could it be a human need to categorize everything in extremes? (black and white/ good and bad)

This is an idea that my co-author Alex Iantaffi and I explore at length in our book Life Isn’t Binary. It certainly seems that humans – particularly in western cultures – are drawn to these kinds of binary polarisations when, of course, so much about human life is diverse rather than binary. It wouldn’t make sense to divide people into short and tall – clearly height is a spectrum. A similar thing could be said about various mental capacities, we can’t divide people into a binary of unintilligent or intelligent, rather we can locate people in different places on a number of spectrums of various abilities (mathematical, linguistic, spatial, etc.). So why, when it comes to sexuality and gender, do we assume a binary?

You’re right that, many times over the years, people have tried to argue that either nobody is ‘really’ bisexual, or that everybody is bisexual. Both of those extremes risk erasing actual bisexual experience, as well as limiting human sexuality to one dimension (the gender of the people we’re attracted to), when really there is a lot more to it than that.

It is often said that putting labels on ourselves or others can be damaging, but by not calling something by a name, you can deny its existence. Do we really need labels to identify ourselves and what we’re attracted to? Why?  

This is another non-binary! There are many arguments for and against people labelling their sexuality. I find it more helpful to ask what labels open up, and close down, for people, assuming that they probably do both. For people whose sexual attractions – or absence of attractions – are marginalised, labels can be important in claiming their experience, communicating it to others, and finding supportive community within a world that harms them. At the same time, labels can come with a set of expectations which can be limiting and rigid, and it can be difficult to let go of labels – and all that they bring – if things change for you.

Culturally we’re in a place where the only accepted way to fight for equal human rights is generally on the basis of identity labels. It’s very hard to fight for the rights of a group to be treated in just ways unless that group identifies under a label and can prove, through research, the negative impact that marginalisation has upon them. This has been a key tension in discussions of the labels around attraction to multiple genders. Some argue for the dropping of labels entirely, or embracing multiple labels like pansexual, queer, omnisexual, plurisexual, and so on. However, most governments and organisations only recognise the ‘B’ for bisexual, so there are strategic reasons for people to use that term, even when it may not feel the best fit for them.

At least in the United States, bisexuals comprise more than half the LGBTQIA+ collective, but that’s not what it looks like. It seems that they’re actually a minority. Why could that be?   

There’s a long history of bisexual people being treated with suspicion in the wider LGB movement and community. This dates back to the fact that ‘gay rights’ were often fought for on the basis of the idea that sexuality was binary (straight or gay) and that gay people were a minority group who were marginalised and oppressed within that binary. Anybody whose sexuality didn’t fit that binary model were seen as ‘muddying the water’ and potentially jeopardising the fight for gay rights. 

Many theorists and scientists now recognise that human sexuality is actually diverse and fluid across many dimensions, and that the proportion of people attracted to the same gender or more than one gender is probably at least equal to the number of people who are attracted to the ‘opposite’ gender only. However it is taking a long time for this way of seeing things to find its way into mainstream culture and governmental policies.

Have the different definitions of bisexuality through history influenced biphobia and formed misconceptions on what bisexuality is?  

Yes certainly they have. The most widely accepted definition of bisexuality within the bi+ community today is ‘attraction to more than one gender’, with some also using ‘attraction regardless of gender’. However, early definitions of bisexuality mixed gender and sexuality and saw bisexual people as people who had more than one gender. Later definitions assumed that bisexual people were attracted exactly equally to men and women. We see the legacy of these kinds of definitions in the assumptions that bisexual people will also be androgynous, and in the equation of bisexual with attraction to only two genders. As The Bisexual Index points out, if people are concerned about the ‘bi’ in bisexual meaning ‘two’, they can understand it as ‘attraction to both people of the same gender as themselves, and to people of different genders to themselves’.

It’s not common to hear about bisexual characters on the history of LGBTQIA+ rights although they’re there. Why are they not that visible?  

This is particularly striking when you think that one of the most famous sexologists of all time (Alfred Kinsey) and the woman who co-ordinated the first Pride march in 1970 (Brenda Howard) were both bi! However people who identified as bi or had attractions to more than one gender are often erased from LGBTQIA+ history. I suspect this is for the same reason that I mentioned above: that a lot of gay rights has been fought for on the basis of a straight (majority) / gay (minority) binary, and the existence and prevalence of bisexuality seems like a threat to this.

What is the reason that bisexual women are the ones to experience the most sexual violence? 

Bi women seem to experience higher levels of both sexual and relationship abuse than straight or lesbian women. One reason for this is the stereotype of bi women as hypersexual and sexually available, which means they experience higher levels of sexual harassment of all kinds. Another reason is that so many people find the idea of bisexuality threatening, and sexual violence can be used as a way of policing and punishing that. In relationships, the stereotype of bi people as promiscuous, suspicious, and lying means that bi people are often wrongly assumed to be more likely to leave – or cheat on – a partner. This can lead to biphobia in relationships where bi people are encouraged to hide their sexuality, and may be treated in controlling – even violent – ways by partners who are insecure about their bi-ness.

How do we work towards ending biphobia? 

I’d like to see far better awareness and education in wider culture, and for young people, about the diversity of sexuality, moving away from binary models which see it as being all about the gender of the people we’re attracted to. In my book Sexuality: A Graphic Guide I draw together lots of theories and research which suggests that there are many dimensions to sexuality, including the amount of sexual attraction that we experience, the kinds of erotic desires we have, the other features of a person that we find attractive beyond gender, and much more. We need to get to a point where we see all forms of erotic experience as equally legitimate and beautiful, so long as they are acted upon consensually.

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