In the run up to publication Alex and I made this podcast about the book and why non-binary thinking is such an important theme for us.

We discussed the trans umbrella, colonial thinking, bi-gender people and plural selves, sexualities, queerphobia, Disney Pixar’s ‘Inside Out,’ binary governing of our bodies and emotions, labels, intersectional identities, hierarchies, marginalisation, policing identity boundaries, prioritisation of different relationships, growing up in Italy, Capitalism, the importance of reflection, and being kind to yourself.

Check out the podcast here.

If you like this you can also follow Alex’s awesome podcast, Gender Stories and my regular podcast on sex, and relationships with my other amazing co-creator Justin Hancock – Meg-John & Justin.

And, of course, you can pre-order the book here.

The post Podcast: Life isn’t binary! How non-binary thinking can help us to understand ourselves appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

1. How would you respond to common accusations of “snowflakery” within the LGBTQ+ community?

The snowflake insult tends to conflate a few different things. If you look into the meaning it includes the idea that ‘snowflakes’ believe they are particularly unique and special (like every snowflake is different), as well as the idea of being particularly fragile – and therefore in need of protections like safer spaces.

Teasing these things apart I wouldn’t say that LGBTQ+ people are especially unique, but I do think the snowflake metaphor is useful for thinking about gender and sexual diversity. When we consider intersectionality, and how every person is positioned in relation to multiple intersecting aspects including gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, age, generation, nationality, etc. then snowflake is about right. There won’t be any two people where this constellation of aspects is identical. That helpfully draws our attention to the ways in which all of us are privileged in some ways, marginalised in others, and how we need to hold our similarities and our differences simultaneously. Snowflakes all look similar, but in fact they are unique.

Are LGBTQ+ people particularly fragile? Again it’s more complex than that. We live in a culture which is rooted in hierarchies whereby some people, bodies, and lives are regarded as – explicitly or implicitly – more normal, healthy, or highly valuable than others. All of the groups on the more marginalised end of those hierarchies have less power and privilege and face more discrimination and hatred on a daily basis. This takes a toll as we can see when looking at statistics on mental and physical health. LGBTQ+ people – like women and BAME people – have higher rates of mental health problems than average because they’re disadvantaged – and often traumatised – in a society that sees heterosexuality and cisgender as the normal, superior, way of being. This can make us more fragile. It can also make us more resilient. George Takei’s comment about snowflakes being powerful when they take the form of an avalanche captures that duality.

2. How would you respond to those who accuse, for instance, trans people requiring safe access to spaces appropriate for their gender of being “snowflakes”?

To my mind this is not about trans people saying we are particularly unique, or particularly fragile. It is more about recognising the unequal power dynamics in wider culture and trying to even the balance. If we can agree that no people, bodies, or lives are inherently more valuable or ‘normal’ than others, then everyone should have equal access – for example to bathrooms where they can pee in safety, to media which represents people like them in positive ways, and to daily interactions with others where their identity isn’t constantly called into question or they have to answer intrusive questions about their genitals or medical history. If there’s no media debate on whether cisgender people’s genders are real or whether they might be misguided in believing they are the gender that they say they are, then there shouldn’t be a media debate on that in relation to trans people. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all be having interesting conversations about how gender works and the impact it has, but don’t focus that on trans people.

3. Even some members of the LGBTQ+ community say that many of these accusations are valid, and that sometimes we try to move too fast and harm our movement in the process, for example by quickly attempting to introduce non-binary genders into common parlance. How would you respond to this?

I feel like we’re starting from the wrong place if we take for granted that there is some kind of a normal group in society that we’re gradually working to add all the marginalised or minority people into. That’s the model here. It’s like the norm could just about cope with adding in lesbian and gay people twenty years ago, but bisexual people were told they had to wait their turn because they were confusing and they muddied the water. Now there’s a sense that maybe we can begin to open to trans people, but perhaps only trans men and women because non-binary people will be too complicated for ‘normal folks’ to get their head around.

Instead we need to question this whole model of normal versus abnormal that we’ve been fed. It’s not that LGBTQ+ people – or trans and non-binary people – are snowflakes. The point is that we are all snowflakes. Everyone is diverse in terms of their gender and sexuality. There is no norm. For example, over forty percent of young people are somewhere on a spectrum between heterosexual and homosexual. Over a third of people feel that they are to some extent ‘the other gender, neither gender, or both genders’. Well over two thirds of people have some form of kinky fantasies, and a similar number are non-monogamous at some point in their life. Add all this together and the number of people who are some kind of pure heterosexual, cisgender, only into penis-in-vagina sex with a monogamous partner is actually pretty low.

So I don’t think it’s about gradually adding new identity categories to the group of people who is seen as normal or valid, with each new group having to somehow wait their turn for grudging acceptance. Rather it should be about shifting the whole understanding of gender and sexuality to one of diversity – or snowflakes – rather than a normal/abnormal binary.

4. How would you respond to the idea that those who object to things such as two men holding hands in an advert are in fact guilty of being “snowflakes” themselves?

I think it’s clever how people have turned the snowflake accusation around on the accusers. If people become so upset and offended about LGBTQ+ rights then aren’t they being just as ‘fragile’ as the people they are accusing of being too-easily upset and offended? Again though I would question an ‘us and them’ approach as any kind of long term solution to this. As long as we remain in separate camps accusing each other we won’t get very far, and a lot of people will be hurt in the process. What’s needed is an end to the attempt to categorise people into more or less normal, or more or less snowflakey, and a recognition that we’re all diverse across multiple spectrums of gender, sexuality, and much else. Then we can work to redress the balance whereby some of been valued less than others on the basis of such spurious distinctions.

Find out more

Check out my books Queer: A Graphic History, How to Understand Your Gender, The Psychology of Sex and – coming soon – Life Isn’t Binary.

The post The snowflake generation appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Have activities that fall under “vanilla sex” changed over time? Is something that was once considered kinky now considered vanilla?

Absolutely there has been some changes with a couple of cultural shifts that have happened in the last few decades, often called ‘sexualisation’ and ‘subjectification’. Sexualisation means that sex has become a big story in wider culture and there’s a lot more sexual media out there, easily accessible, and including more diversity of sexual practices. Subjectification means that people are now expected to be sexual subjects or entrepreneurs: learning tools and techniques to make them good at sex, and maintaining ‘great sex’ in relationships.

The combination of these two means that the kind of sex people are expected to aspire to has a broader range, and includes some things that would previously have been thought of as kinky. For example most sex advice books include light bondage, role-play, and sensation play these days. However there is still a strong sense that these things are an add-on to sex rather than sex itself (which is still generally seen as penis-in-vagina intercourse). Also there’s a strong sense of a boundary between ‘kinky-fuckery’ (as Ana calls it in Fifty Shades of Grey) and proper BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, and Sadomasochism). Proper BDSM is still seen as deviant and people are warned against it as if it was somehow inherently abnormal, dangerous or only for broken people (it’s not!)

But from these shifts you could argue that ‘vanilla sex’ now certainly includes oral sex, anal sex (man penetrating woman), and some light kink, in addition to penis-in-vagina sex.

More on this in my book with Ros Gill and Laura Harvey, Mediated Intimacy.

Do queer and nonbinary communities use the phrase “vanilla”? Or is that kind of construct less prevalent, and if so why?

I’ve heard it mostly used in kink communities to describe non-kinky sex, and even then there is often an awareness that none of us should really be judging people negatively for their sexual desires – whether those desires are kinky or non-kinky – and there can be concern that ‘vanilla’ sounds like a derogatory term (bland or boring). Queer people can use terms like vanilla, normal, mundane or muggle to describe non-queer people. It can be a way of reframing things so that the people who are often stigmatised, marginalised and pathologised are presented as in some way better than those who often do the stigmatising, marginalising, or pathologising. But again it is usually tongue-in-cheek with an awareness that reversing a hierarchy where one sexuality is seen as superior to another is still problematic.

It’s also worth remembering how few people actually tick all the boxes of being a completely vanilla, heteronormative, person. If you count up the numbers of people who are openly or secretly non-monogamous, with the number who have kinky desires, and the number who have attraction to more than one gender, or very low or high sexual attraction, actually that leaves very few people in what we’ve been taught to believe is ‘normal’.

More on this in my book The Psychology of Sex.

How do you think tech/apps have changed the way we view what falls under “vanilla sex” and how we view sex in general?

They’ve been part of this sexualisation and subjectification that I mentioned earlier – they make us more aware of the diversity of things that people can find hot, and the sense that it’s good to be open about such desires and to be able to offer to meet them. There is a risk that we go the other way in that people feel pressure to be up for anything and to offer things on hook-up apps and the like that they’re not really into. There’s nowhere near enough cultural consideration of how we do this consensually.

This is something we talk about a lot on my podcast with Justin Hancock megjohnandjustin.com.

The post Vanilla Sex appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

1. The ONS research out this week finds a rise in people picking “other” out of a choice of straight, gay or other. Are people more willing now to embrace the idea that they might not be exclusively heterosexual? If so, what do you think is driving that?

Yes, since the famous Kinsey studies in the 1940s and 50s we’ve known that a large proportion of people experience some attraction to – and often sexual experience with – people of their own gender (either in addition to other genders, or exclusively). However, those numbers are rarely reflected in national surveys because many of those people don’t feel able to be open about this. Year on year more people say they are something other than heterosexual – probably as prevailing cultural attitudes become more open, and people see more positive role models in the media and their everyday lives.

2. If the increase is among younger people, does it reflect generational differences from growing up in a less homophobic culture?

It seems likely that it is that generational shift and change in wider culture that’s responsible, although it’s important to remember that there are still significant barriers to people saying they are anything other than heterosexual. The very fact that people need to ‘come out’ as being LGBQ+ reminds us that heterosexuality is the assumed norm, and therefore being anything else still holds the stigma of being perceived as ‘other’ than the norm. For many people identifying as LGBQ+ still carries risks including hate crime, discrimination, and loss of vital family and community.

3. Do you think it’s likely that as the years go by the number of people identifying as exclusively, never-could-be-anything-but heterosexual will continue to fall?

Certainly, especially given that in terms of attraction and experience a significant proportion of people are not heterosexual (far more than identify as LGB or ‘other’).

4. Does the question you ask about sexual identities affect the answer you get?

Yes, this is the key point really. In my book The Psychology of Sex I point out that YouGov found that 88.7% of adults identified as heterosexual, 5.5% identified as gay, and 2.1% as bisexual. However when they were asked to place themselves on the Kinsey scale in terms of attraction, 72% of all adults, and 46% of adults aged 18–24 years, put themselves at exclusively heterosexual; 4% percent of all adults, and 6% of young adults, put themselves at exclusively homosexual. That means that around quarter of all adults, and half of young adults, placed themselves somewhere between the extremes. This suggests that being attracted to more than one gender is becoming a majority, not a minority, position. But wider culture is taking a long time to catch up to that fact, still tending to assume that people are either straight or gay, and presenting non-binary attraction as confused, a phase, or somehow suspicious.

5. In the past many people have (mistakenly) assumed that bisexual necessarily meant equally attracted to men and women. Is that idea now being dispelled?

It certainly has been dispelled in the bi and queer communities! Even the Kinsey type scale from attraction to the ‘same sex’ to attraction to the ‘opposite sex’ doesn’t actually make a lot of sense. A good analogy for that is liking coffee and tea: just because you like one more doesn’t mean you necessarily like the other one less. Of course now we’re grudgingly recognising the existence of non-binary people too, any kind of binary – or spectrum – model for sexuality won’t really work. That’s why the most accepted definition of bisexuality is ‘attraction to more than one gender’.

5. Millennials seem to be using a proliferation of labels for neither-exclusively-gay-nor-exclusively-straight, e.g. pansexual, or sexually fluid as well as bisexual. Is it right to see these as subsets of bisexual identity, separate to it, or is it not that simple?

If we take bisexual to mean ‘attraction to more than one gender’ then it can be a useful umbrella term for all of those identities – especially because it is a word that the general population understands and the government uses, so it’s helpful in fighting for rights and recognition. However, millenials (and many of us who have been thinking about these things for rather longer!) are also pointing out that sexuality is about way more than gender of attraction. Just as assuming a gay/straight binary has been problematic, so the idea that sexuality is all about the gender we’re attracted to is problematic. Scientists and social scientists alike agree that there are multiple dimensions of sexuality including amount of desire, roles we enjoy taking, other features of a person we find attractive, etc. There’s a zine about this here.

6. What do you make of the argument that people’s sexual identities can change over a lifetime?

Yes the evidence is compelling that many of our sexual desires and attractions change over time: the amount of desire we have, the kinds of things we enjoy doing sexually, what we fantasise about, and the kind of people we’re attracted to. We tend to accept that for some dimensions of sexuality but strangely not for gender-of-attraction – why would that one aspect remain static while everything else changes? Lisa Diamond is the go-to researcher who has found that sexuality is fluid for many of us.

7. The idea that sexuality is not as cut and dried as we once assumed is obviously welcome, but does it have any downsides for LGBT rights?

Well it also means that straight people can change and become gayer too. But yes much gay rights has, unfortunately, had to argue for fixed identities: that people are born gay and remain gay. Part of the reason bisexuality and sexual fluidity are so erased and rejected is because they’re seen as muddying the water on that argument. But research suggests that believing that sexuality is fixed and biologically determined doesn’t actually make people less homophobic. The way forward is a model of sexual diversity that recognises that actually a majority of people are something other than heterosexual, monogamous, and into only penis-in-vagina sex, and that people have a wide range of sexualities all of which are fine so long as practised consensually.

8. Are there any lingering myths and misconceptions about bisexuality that you’d like to put to rest for good?

All of them please. Also, as Shiri Eisner argues, we need to go further and put to rest the assumptions behind the myths. For example:
Bisexuality is a phase – for many people it is a static identity – also what’s wrong with going through phases?
Bisexual people are promiscuous – no more than any other sexual identity – also we can question the sex negative assumption that it’s seen as bad to be sexually desiring (especially for women)

Find out more

Check out my books The Psychology of Sex and Queer: A Graphic History.

The post The pansexual revolution? appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Let’s talk a little bit about definitions of sex positivity. How does the mainstream definition of sex positivity differ from the definition used in kinky or queer (or otherwise subcultural) spaces?

I think that part of the issue here is that ‘sex positive’ is used in two different ways. Sex positive lite (if you will!) is when sex positive is just used for any space or event where sexy stuff is going on, such as events selling sex toys or mainstream sex parties or kink events. They’re generally using ‘sex positive’ to mean the opposite of ‘sex negative’. We live in a culture which generally sees stigmatises sex and these spaces are different to this in that they are positive towards sex. However, just because sex is happening there doesn’t mean it’s being done any better than anywhere else. Often sex positive lite spaces haven’t thought enough about issues like consent and power, or about norms around what counts as sex and who counts as sexy. That’s why – in such spaces – you’ll often experience people pressuring you into certain activities, and many people will feel excluded by assumptions about who is attractive. In fact these kinds of spaces can be particularly bad because the sex positivity can give people implicit permission to be creepy and non-consensual, suggesting that everybody in those spaces should be ‘up for it’.

The other way ‘sex positive’ is used is more thoughtful. In these – often queer, BDSM, and/or feminist – spaces there is more attempt to do the whole thing differently to the way sex is done in mainstream culture. This means things like having groundrules and boundaries, teaching the basics of consent to everyone attending, ensuring that all bodies are welcome in the space, providing places within an event that aren’t sex focused, etc. Of course this doesn’t mean that everything is perfect in these spaces, and post #MeToo there has been increased awareness about how the assumption that everyone will be consensual in such spaces can be a veneer under which some people abuse their power.

Have these definitions changed over time, do you think?

Yes definitely. I think there’s increasing tendency to use sex positive in the second way – like with the new Sex+ zine that Kim Loliya and others are putting together which is explicitly BDSM-friendly, queer-friendly, disability-friendly, sex-worker-friendly, etc. However some are still using it in the first way, which can make it confusing when trying to find safe-enough events and spaces to go to.

In what ways can sex positivity end up having negative effect on people in the mainstream and subcultures?

The mainstream version of sex positivity – which is put forward in mainstream sex advice – insists that ‘great sex’ is a necessary part of being in a healthy relationship – or even being a healthy human being. The risk of this is that people feel pressured to have sex when they don’t want to have sex, and to do sex acts which they aren’t really into. Indeed many sex advice books implicitly or explicitly encourage them to do so. That’s a problem for consent, and it’s a problem for pleasure because forcing yourself to do something you don’t really want to do is an excellent way of turning you off sex completely.

In subcultures the risks of sex positivity are that it creates a pressure on people to be sexual in other kinds of ways. Instead of the limited version of sex present in mainstream culture (mostly penis-in-vagina in different positions) there can be pressure to do diverse kinds of sex with multiple people. Again this is great if it’s what you’re into and you only do it when you really want to, but power imbalances and subcultural scripts mean that people often feel pressure to do things when they’re not really interested – perhaps because it’s intoxicating to feel desirable, because they want approval, because they think that’s what everyone else is doing, or because they think it’s the only way to maintain a relationship, for example.

Is anyone excluded from sex positivity and in what ways? Also would you say sex positivity is more or less inclusive than it once was?

The excellent zines ‘fucked’ and ‘too fucked too furious‘ point out that it’s easy for anyone who struggles with sex – which is probably most of us at one point or other – to feel very excluded from sex positive spaces, especially if those spaces have implicit norms that everyone should be up for sex – or at least up for something. Also, even very good sex-positive authors can easily give the sense that it is better – or more healthy – to be sexual than it is to be asexual. It’s really important for the consent and comfort of everybody that we develop a culture where it is just acceptable not to feel sexual as it is to feel sexual – some or all of the time.

In the Meg-John & Justin podcast episode on sex positivity, you and Justin Hancock talk about how non-consensual things can easily happen even in sex positive spaces. Can you elaborate a bit on this?

Yes. The problem has been that sex positive spaces have the veneer of consent: people are encouraged to behave consensually. Paradoxically that can make it harder – not easier – to call out non-consensual behaviour. If everyone assumes people will be consensual, it is a really big deal to say somebody has been non-consensual, and you might even struggle to see the non-consent because you’re not expecting it.

Also people are painfully aware of how rare such spaces are, and how precarious given the risks around holding a sex positive event. People in positions of power – such as charismatic organisers – have got away with extremely non-consensual behaviours because people have been so reluctant to see non-consent, or to report it. That’s why we need to have #MeToo conversations within sex positive communities as much as outside of them.

How might we do a better job of defining and “practising” sex-positivity?

One of the best examples I’ve personally seen is the Koinonia event – and there are several other events and spaces following similar approaches now. What I like about this event is that there are four spaces, only one of which is explicitly sexual, so the culture there is that it’s just as appropriate to go with the aim of chilling out, dancing, chatting with people, or having less erotic touch. Also, as well as a talk about consent and a set of written guidelines (which other events also have), the event begins by taking people through three group activities where they practise consent, tuning into what they would like, and communicating it verbally and non-verbally. That’s a great way to show people what consent actually feels like, to normalise consent practices, and to ensure that people have already met a lot of other people in a kind and open way before the event proper begins.

Justin and I feel that the way to go with being sex-positive (or sex-critical which is the phrase we prefer) is to ensure that no form of sex is being presented as better than any other, that all bodies are welcome, that it is really okay to not be sexual in the space, and that consent is practised explicitly – including considerations of how power and social scripts can make consent more difficult. We’ve done a video about consent that might be helpful on this. We’ve also got several podcasts about consent and sex positivity on our website.

The post Sex positivity appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Check it out if you’ve always thought your sexuality was a bit more complex than gay, straight, or bi. This zine takes you through multiple dimensions of sexuality and helps you to map where you are, where you’ve been, and where you might be going.

MappingYourSexuality

The post New Zine: Mapping Your Sexuality appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Why this means the world to me

Hi. Thank-you so much for having me here today. When Ruby approached me last year saying she would like to subtitle the conference this time after my book Rewriting the Rules I was blown away.

Partly this was because that book has been such a labour of love for me. It was the first self-help style book I wrote and I spent a decade longing to write it but unable to believe in myself enough to do so. When I finally did manage to battle through my inner critic I had to distill years of painfully finding my own way with relationships onto the page. The second edition – which just came out – was no less difficult. It felt like I was co-authoring it with an older version of myself and that was not an easy collaboration by any means.

Also it is a huge deal – as a European writer – to be welcomed to a US conference. A bunch of us have been studying and writing about polyamory in Europe for some decades now, but it often feels like the – often more recent – work coming out of US academia and activism eclipses what we’ve done, and are still doing. Of course this is even more the case for Europeans who sometimes or always write in languages other than English.

This is particularly challenging for me now that I’m working towards making my living as a writer. It’s extraordinarily hard to make any money from that line of work, and it can feel tough knowing that I am – I think – saying something new and important, but that few folk on this side of the pond will know about it. This recognition – and potential to speak to an American audience – means the world to me.

So it was already a huge deal to be invited to speak at this conference. And then I checked out the event online. It quickly became clear that here, finally, was an intersectional non-monogamy conference. For years I’ve been frustrated by the lack of coverage of power dynamics and social structures, privilege and oppression, in polyamory communities, and now I was being invited to an event where these were foregrounded.

It also felt intensely vulnerable. The main reason by far that I wanted to write a second edition of Rewriting the Rules was because when I wrote the first edition back in 2010 I had barely engaged with intersectional feminism. This has been something I’ve done my absolute best to address since then to the point that the vast majority of the thinkers I now engage with come from this approach, but I realise I still have a hell of a lot to catch up on. As a white British author to be invited to speak at a conference alongside the likes of Kevin Patterson, Dalychia Saah, J Mase and Feminista Jones is a huge honour and one I really hope I can do justice to.

This is why I haven’t taken the easy road with this presentation. I could’ve given you my standard hot take on non-monogamy talk that I’ve been giving the last couple of years, but you deserve more than that. So I’m going to heed the words of one of my heroes – Mollena Williams-Haas – from the incredible talk she gave at the Non-Monogamies and Contemporary Intimacies conference in Vienna last year (available here if you haven’t seen it – please do check it out). She said that the gift we need to give to the world is to go into the places we are most vulnerable and to work – whatever our work is – from that place.

I’ve been holding those words close ever since then. It is why I’m finally dropping my academic and therapy work to focus on writing. It is why my writing now includes memoir and erotic fiction as well as self-help: so that I can be transparent about where these ideas come from and why they mean so much to me. I guess it’s about showing my workings instead of just the polished advice that comes out of all that painful experience.

Because if I hide that part of it away I can be just another shitty self-help author holding themselves as a point of comparison to the rest of the world as somebody who has it all together and is going to lecture you on how to get it right just like them. This is one of the things I hate most about self-help and I’m committed to doing something different. A major theme through all my work is that relationships are extremely fucking hard and we all struggle in our relationships with ourselves, with our loved ones, and with the world. I’ve heard it said that your mess is your message. Perhaps the message is stronger if you also share the mess.

So I’m going to give you a short introduction to the key ideas of Rewriting the Rules, and then spend the rest of the talk telling you about what I’ve learnt about relationships since the first edition: by going into the mess.

Rewriting the Rules

Most relationship self-help books make a lot of assumptions about what a ‘successful’ relationship looks like, and how you go about having one. They sell the reader the dream of happy-ever-after, and put the blame on them if they can’t achieve it. That’s why I called Rewriting the Rules an anti-self-help book. Instead of locating blame in the individual it starts with the shitty cultural messages we all receive about relationships, suggesting that they are primarily responsible for the difficulties we come across. Messages like the idea that you have to find The One perfect person who will complete you, that you must hide any relationship conflicts from the rest of the world and pretend like everything is awesome all of the time, that you should have hot sex with this person for the rest of time, and that that must be in a monogamous relationship.

For each theme in the book – love, sex, gender, conflict, etc. – I asked four questions:

• What are the rules that we learn about this aspect of relationships?
• Why might we question them?
• If they don’t work for us, what might we put in their place? and
• What if we went beyond rules to embrace the uncertainty of this thing?

So, for example, in the monogamy chapter I look at the rules that suggest monogamy is the one true way of doing relationships, and how we can question that by looking at the statistics on non-monogamy globally, and on secret non-monogamy in countries like the UK and US. I explore the pressures that the monogamy ideal puts on relationships, and the diversity of monogamish and non-monogamous relationship styles that now offer alternatives to this. However, I also explore the tendency we have – when stepping away from mainstream cultural rules – to put new rules in their place and hold onto them just as rigidly. I suspect we’re all very familiar with varieties of poly-normativity and polier-than-thou tendencies to put forward the one true way of polyamory – or the poly grail, as I call it. Unicorn hunting, treating ‘secondaries’ as lesser human beings, and becoming so poly-saturated that you have no time for friends or self-care are three examples that spring to mind (not that me or anyone else in this room would ever do anything like that I’m sure!)

In Rewriting the Rules I try to steer clear of suggesting that any way of doing relationships is inherently better, more normal, or morally superior. It’s more about appreciating that different things work for different people, and in different relationships. We need to start by unpacking all the cultural rules that impact us all – whether we’re inside them or outside of them.

What I’ve learn about relationships since Rewriting the Rules

So that’s where I got to in the first edition of Rewriting the Rules, and I am still proud of that book because that cultural piece is missing from so much self-help around relationships – even polyamorous relationships.

However it could be argued that I went too far the other way. Focusing on wider cultural messages is also a good way of avoiding looking too carefully at closer-to-home reasons for your own relationship struggles.

Also, while I wrote a lot about the need to look at wider culture to inform our close relationships, I didn’t make enough connections in the other direction. How can going into the mess and vulnerability of our relationships help us make a better contribution to wider society? In the last five years this seems to me the most urgent question as we all try to make sense of a world of Trump and Brexit, to deal with the vital questions raised by – for example – #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and the current moral panic around trans.

Here are four key ideas that I’ve woven into the new edition of Rewriting the Rules which I want to share. Obviously there’s only time to touch on them here – what they are and the implications they have for our relationships with our close people and the wider world. Hopefully they might be a jumping off point for more conversations and reflections though. There are free zines on my website covering most of these themes in a lot more detail if you find them useful.

1. Relationship patterns and intergenerational trauma

The first thing I wanted to include way more of in the second edition was relationship patterns: how they get formed, how they impact us and the people around us, and how we might be able to shift them. That involved taking a long, hard look at my own relationship patterns which have been something like this…

Did you see this show? It was one of my favs growing up. Every week this dog finds a new person and home, he helps them with whatever they’re struggling with, but once things are sorted he can’t stay and he has to head off down the road again. He’s basically a manic-pixie dream dog.

This was what I was doing in relationships of all kinds my whole life. I tried to figure out what people wanted me to be, and then I gave it to them. Initially that resulted in huge validation – I was good, and I was good for people. Once I was polyamorous I could be good for many people. What a good Littlest Hobo! But it’s unsustainable. And it hurt people and it hurt me, a lot. I’ve lost so many homes, people, companion animals. Too much loss. While I definitely don’t think the only relationships of value are the ones that last, I wouldn’t mind the chance at a relationship, home, family, or community that lasted longer than five years.

The cultural piece was part of this of course. The promise of being – and getting – The One definitely had a role to play in my struggles, as did the Hollywood promise that true love is the path to lasting happiness – whether in its monogamous or polyamorous form.

But – as with all of us I suspect – my history was also a big part of the picture. Perhaps the major piece of work I’ve been doing the last couple of years has been on this. Interestingly #MeToo was a huge part of it. My sisters and I started by sharing our experiences of sexual assault – growing up and in more recent years, including in polyamory communities. This opening up led us to sharing stories of our upbringing and identifying the impact of intergenerational trauma and how it had left all of us feeling that we were unacceptable unless we covered over our emotions and pretended to be something we were not. We now talk on Google hangouts between San Francisco, LA, and London every few weeks, committed to building a different way of relating, at least between the three of us.

2. Self and other consent

How can I challenge this pattern – which I suspect many others share – of trying to be what others want me to be? Self-consent is the key here. One of the main books that I drew on in the second edition of Rewriting the Rules was bell hooks’s All About Love.

My main takeaway from this was that love can’t happen – isn’t even love – unless we value ourselves and each other equally. That’s where you get to if you apply the same thought processes to social justice and to interpersonal relationships.

Learning self-consent is every bit as hard as learning how to – really – treat others consensually in a world of massive power imbalances and insidious social scripts, as Zach Budd highlighted at the Poly Dallas conference. It’s still a work in progress for me: a lifelong process I suspect. But it includes noticing when I let desire for approval, fear of failure, or a deep-down belief of my unacceptability override what I really feel. It requires cultivating kindness and practicing self-care: not the neoliberal capitalist bubble-bath kind of self-care but the Audre Lorde long-hard-look-at-yourself self-care that we all need to make a daily practice if we want to stop harming ourselves and others on an interpersonal – and a global – level.

3. The drama triangle

The other idea I brought into the new edition was Stephen Karpman’s drama triangle. If you’re not familiar with it it looks like this.

The idea is that, in relationships, we often get drawn into stuck dynamics where we go round and round this triangle. For example my Littlest Hobo dynamic easily puts me in the role of rescuer – coming in and making somebody’s life all better so that maybe – in the immortal words of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman – they will ‘rescue me right back’. The problem is if you get invested in the role of rescuer you easily put the other person in a double-bind. They must get better so that you can feel you’ve been a good rescuer. Also they mustn’t get better because then you’ll be out of a job. It’s easy then to shift from rescuer to persecutor because you’re actually treating somebody pretty badly. And easy to shift again into victim because rescuers really don’t like people pointing out that they’re actually being persecutors.

Sound familiar? I think that this triangle has so much to offer what we’re grappling with in our wider communities. When #MeToo 2.0 hit some of the polyamory communities in the UK it took a familiar form. One individual abuser was highlighted, survivors shared their stories of his behaviour, and others aligned themselves with two different forms of rescuing: either becoming saviours for the ‘victims’, or bystander-apologists for the persecutor.

If we’re going to get to grips with the abusive dynamics that inevitably show up in our relationships and communities – in a culture founded on oppression and unequal valuing of different bodies and lives – then I think we have to stay with our capacity to occupy all three positions on this triangle. We need to get to know our inner victim, our inner persecutor, and our inner rescuer. That involves a whole heap of self-kindness, as well as the intensely vulnerable self-care work of staying with feelings.

4. Staying with all the feels in all the relationships

Learning our part in drama triangles – interpersonal and social – involves staying with how it feels to be in all of those places. For example, the work that my sisters and I are doing involves going back into our intensely vulnerable victim/survivor places: recognising that the various kinds of experiences we went through at young ages was not okay, and that the strategies that we developed to survive them made all kind of sense. It also involves recognising how much of that intergenerational trauma came out of us being on the receiving end of other people’s survival strategies, and how our own survival strategies have also now hurt other people.

Staying with our persecutor potential is hard as hell of course. It involves being with the guilt and shame and fear of our potential to harm others and to harm again. It involves going beyond the temptation to focus on obvious forms of abuse and non-consent – that we may not have engaged in – to the micro level emotional gaslighting, manipulation, and non-consensual pressure that we all take part in our day-to-day relationships, and the macro level dynamics of oppression that we all benefit from and are implicated in whether we like it or not.

Staying with our rescuer involves recognising our tendency to focus on obvious abusers and villains to avoid looking at the damage we do – for example by setting ourselves up as saviours, by not addressing our privilege and power, or by failing to acknowledge our limits and taking on too much only to let people down.

It’s hard fucking work, but we have to do it. And it involves developing our capacity to stay with all of the feelings in all of our relationships. So many of our survival strategies, relationship patterns, and non-consensual tendencies comes from endeavouring to avoid feeling the feelings that scare us: shame, anger, fear, sadness, loss. And of course, like a hamster on a wheel, most of these tendencies will fetch us right back where we most wanted to avoid. As Anita Cassidy puts it: ‘Feeling shit doesn’t kill you, but the shit you do to stop feeling shit might.’

An important caveat to this is, of course, with all these things (being present, staying with feelings, being vulnerable) they have to be done in a container of huge self-kindness, self-compassion, and self-care. Those things always have to come first and foremost. It’s easy to do these things because you think you  should, and for them to end up being far too much. So taking it slowly, prioritising kindness over all else, and getting support with it, are all vital.

I think we all have to do this work, and I think that doing this work will look different for all of us. For me it has included a combination of journaling about the hard stuff, sitting with my feelings by the Thames, reading people who challenge me on social media, deliberately practising showing close people my vulnerability bit-by-painful-bit, and – perhaps unexpectedly – tuning into my erotic fantasies and writing erotic fiction.

Right now it involves the painful messy work of acknowledging my relationship patterns with existing – and new – partners, and how far I may – or may not – be able to shift them given how strongly entrenched and sneaky they are. I’m convinced though that this can be a joyful process as much as it is an excruciating one – often both of those things simultaneously. And if it’s going to make any difference it’s one we have to do together in our relationships, in our families, and in our communities.

Further Resources

• Rewriting the Rules.
• My zine on self-care.
• My zine on staying with feelings.
• Meg-John and Justin podcast on staying with other people’s feelings.
• Love Uncommon posts on how to do self-consent.

The post Four things I’ve learnt about relationships for Poly Dallas Millenium appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

I wrote my book for Routledge’s Psychology of Everything series before the #metoo movement hit the headlines. However, consent was a central theme of the book, both explicitly in the chapter on how psychology has delineated ‘normal’ from ‘abnormal’ sex over the years, and implicitly as a thread running through all of the other chapters. In this post I want to explore some of the main things we can learn from studying the psychology of sex to inform the current – vital – conversations that we’re having about sexual consent.

A key point to make before we start is that while non-consensual sexual behaviour is a huge problem affecting huge numbers of people, the question of how we should go about having consensual sex – and wider relationships – has been notable in its absence in both psychology and popular discourse. Mainstream psychology and sexology textbooks rarely include this topic in any depth, although it has been a key area of study in the more marginalised areas of critical and feminist psychology. Similarly coverage of consent is shockingly lacking in sex advice literature. When I studied the most popular sex manuals, websites, and newspaper columns I found that consent was rarely ever even mentioned, and when it was this was generally only in the context of kinky sexual practices, as if other forms of sex were somehow immune from the risks of non-consensual behaviours.

From my reading of the research, and the psychology of sex more widely, I would say that we need to turn this on its head. The conditions that make sex most likely to be non-consensual are all frequently present in what we might call normative sexual encounters, such as sex within ongoing heterosexual relationships or hook-ups. While kink communities are certainly not immune from non-consensual behaviour, the understandings and practices around consent within those communities often make it more likely that people will have consensual encounters.

What are the conditions that make sex less likely to be consensual? Here are some key ones:

‘Proper’ sex

• The assumption that people must have sex in order to be healthy individuals and to maintain relationships
• The sense that there is a set sexual script that must be followed, and that only that counts as ‘proper’ sex
• The feeling that if this script is not followed then the encounter – and the individuals involved – are failures

‘Normal’ sex

• A high level of fear and shame about ‘getting it wrong’ or being ‘abnormal’ which makes any kind of open communication feel dangerous
• Rigid ideas about the gendered roles in sex, and the ways in which bodies should perform

How Consent Works

• A ‘no means no’ understanding of consent where it’s assumed that people have consented if they haven’t actually said ‘no’ to what is happening
• The idea that consent is given in a one-off conversation – or implicit interaction – that happens at the start of the encounter
• Imbalances of power between those involved which make it very hard for one or more to communicate what they want and what they don’t want before, during and after
• A wider culture of non-consent in relationships of all kinds

Sound familiar? These are actually the conditions under which the vast majority of sex happens in our culture, and the psychology of sex itself has – over the years – contributed to many of these conditions rather than endeavouring to challenge or shift them.

These are the conditions under which it becomes easy for those who want to engage in predatory sexual behaviour to do so and to get away with it. They are also the conditions under which the rest of us who would never want to act non-consensually towards another person – or towards ourselves – might easily find ourselves doing so.

Let’s explore what we can learn from the psychology of sex to inform our thinking in each of these areas. You can find out more about them all in the book too of course! Read more…

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I can’t recommend reading over 60 sex advice manuals. I spent several months doing this and it results in a particular combination of sadness, anger and frustration that I’d rather never repeat.

The reason for my painful few months was my new book, Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture with Rosalind Gill and Laura Harvey. The book explores the changing forms of “sexpertise” and how they influence ideas and practises around sex. In addition to sex manuals, we studied blogs, magazines, reality TV shows such as Sex Box (which actually gets people to have sex in a box), newspaper problem pages, websites, apps, and more.

We emphasise throughout our book that it’s rarely a matter of any sex advice being all good or all bad. Rather, sexpertise often opens up some things – in terms of ways of understanding or experiencing sex – at the same time that it closes down others. And the same text has the potential to be read in different ways by different readers. For example, somebody might read sex advice to get ideas, to enjoy sexual images, to find humour in it – or a combination of these.

But it’s also important to acknowledge just how deeply problematic the vast majority of mainstream sex advice is. Especially in this moment of #MeToo, and greater awareness of intersecting systems of privilege and oppression, it’s most concerning how few texts even mention consent, and how many assume that sex equates to penis-in-vagina intercourse, often depicted by endless images of young, white, slim, non-disabled, normative male/female couples.

When the panic around the messages young people receive about sex so often focuses on sexually explicit material, it’s about time we turned our attention to the insidious and disturbing messages that people are receiving from materials which are supposedly designed to educate, inform, and advise about sex.

So – in true sex advice “top tips” form – here are the top five problematic messages that we’ve found are perpetuated by the majority of sex advice. Read more…

The post Poor sex advice piece in The Conversation appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

This is a clip from my interview…

And here’s the trailer from the conference as a whole…

Do sign up if you fancy it here.

The post Sex, Power and Leadership Conference appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.