Meg-John Barker's Blog, page 12

Love isn’t binary

My art-ner (co-author!) Alex Iantaffi and I keynoted the Non-Monogamies and Contemporary Intimacies conference in Barcelona last week. Thanks to the awesome Daniel Cardoso we were able to get a video of our talk. We each read some of our favourite sections from our new book Life Isn’t Binary, particularly on the theme of non-binary love and relationships. We also spoke about how they applied to our own lives, ideas, and practices.

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Rethinking sex in relationships

Recently I was interviewed Rachael Healy for a couple of articles on My Viv about sex beyond penis-in-vagina intercourse and about navigating no-sex spells in relationships. Here’s my full interview about these topics…

Why do many couples feel pressure to have a certain type of sex?

Unfortunately we have a cultural script that only certain things count as ‘proper’ sex. Generally this is penis-in-vagina sex leading to orgasm, although there are different scripts among women who have sex with women, or men who have sex with men. Even there there is still often an idea that there’s a default way that people should have sex.

Other things that many people like just as much – and often more than – penetration are either seen as ‘foreplay’ before the ‘real thing’ (like oral sex or mutual masturbation) or as ‘alternative’ forms of sex, with a lot of stigma around them (like kinky play or threesomes).

We see this idea of proper, normal, default script everywhere from Hollywood movies, to the medical categories for ‘sexual dysfunction’, to sex advice books, so it’s hard to escape from even when we know that it’s problematic.

How can people start to move beyond these expectations?

I think it’s useful to realise that – far from being good for us – the idea of a certain kind of normal sex is responsible a lot of problems people have with sex.

Trying to ‘achieve’ penetration and orgasm takes us away from being in the moment and from being open about our desires, which are the two things that are most vital for enjoyable sex.

The default sexual script also leads to a lot of people having unwanted sex – because they feel they ‘should’ do this ‘proper sex’ – which makes them end up wanting to do it even less. In long term relationships, people often stop enjoying sex because of having such a limited sexual script, rather than being able to enjoy how their desires shift over time and pick from a wider menu of  activities which can all be great.

If people are experiencing a period of no sex within a relationship, how can they approach and resolve the situation with their partner?

The first thing to say is that it’s absolutely normal to stop having sex. Actually far more relationships stop being sexual over time than those that stay sexual, and even in those that do remain sexual, the sex fluctuates over time.

As therapist and writer Esther Perel points out, it’s actually very difficult to have relationships that are both warm and companionable, and hot and passionate, at the same time. As most long term relationships become more warm, they stop being hot. It’s a cruelty of the sex advice industry that it sells us the myth of ongoing hot relationships.

Also people in asexual communities teach us that it’s perfectly possible to be a healthy human being – in a healthy relationship – without being sexual, so accepting not being sexual is absolutely an option. One thing people should never do is to try to make themselves have sex that they – or their partner – don’t want. So much non-consensual sex happens this way and it takes a massive toll on people’s mental health.

If one or both partners do still feel desire for sex then there are a huge array of openly non-monogamous and monogamish relationship styles to consider. It’s also worth thinking how each person is building solo sex into their lives, including fantasy, erotica, and/or porn – this is really important in itself, and for understanding yourself as a sexual person. If partners do want to have sex with each other, then exploring their individual fantasies and desires, communicating about these, and finding the potential areas of overlap is a good start. 

What are the best ways to begin a conversation with a partner about rethinking expressions of sex and intimacy within the relationship?

I’ve created some zines to help with this, with Justin Hancock, called Make Your Own Relationship User Guide and Make Your Own Sex Manual. These can help you to figure out both what relationship style works for you and your partner/s, and what you’re into sexually, as well as communicating that. It’s a great idea to make these things an ongoing conversation in your relationship as people often have different assumptions about what their relationship rules are, or what they’re looking for from sex.

Beyond heteronormative penetrative sex, what forms of sex could couples explore?

Justin and I recommend expanding out your notion of sex as far as possible. Get together and write down all the things that could possibly be thought of as erotic, sensual, or hot by somebody somewhere. Then you have a menu to work off and can go through ticking which ones you’d be keen to try, or not, and other thoughts about each activity. That way you can build up a sense of your overlapping desires and interests.

It’s also a great idea to explore sexual fantasy – whether that’s fantasies you have in your head, erotica, or porn, that you enjoy. Sharing this can be an excellent way to see where your areas of overlap might be.

Justin and I did this podcast of all the things you can do sexually with somebody which don’t involve genitals – it’s a really long list. The Wheel of Consent 3 minute game is also a great way to explore different kinds of physical touch and dynamics between you. It’s a good way to learn how to be consensual too.

What other forms of intimacy could couples explore?

Often when people want sex it’s for some particular reason, for example to feel close with their partner, to relieve stress, to get into a high energy state, to relax, or to be playful. It’s worth checking in with the state you’d like to be in – rather than just saying that you want sex. There might be lots of things you could do – alone or together – to get into that state.

Taking the pressure off sex is one of the most common pieces of advice from sex therapists. So think about carving out time to spend together as a couple where you tune into what you’d like to feel at the end of the time together, and come up with non-sexual things you could do to get there. For example it might be that a massage, cooking together or going for a walk together relaxes you and meets your need for intimacy, or that playing a game together, teasing and tickling each other, or watching comedy meets your need for playfulness.

It’s great to do solo time like this too because it’s good for couples to get both time together and time apart.

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Sexual fluidity and ‘Call Me By Your Name’

Recently I got interviewed for this great article about sexual fluidity which interviewed author André Aciman about his work. As a huge fan of I was very pleased to be interviewed about my thoughts, based on my book with Alex Iantaffi, Life Isn’t Binary.

You can read the article here, and my full interview below.

Why are people calling this gay instead of sexually fluid or bisexual?

This story is being treated in a very similar way to ‘Brokeback Mountain’, which was almost unanimously hailed as a ‘gay cowboy story’ although it could more accurately be described as a ‘bisexual shepherd story’, given that both male characters had female partners and there was certainly some depiction of romantic and erotic attraction within those relationships too.

The reason for this is certainly that we’re culturally mired in the gay/straight binary. We see a similar thing when celebrities mention attraction to more than one gender, often mainstream media announces that they are ‘gay now’. Unfortunately the interconnected binary understanding of gender and sexuality is strongly embedded in Western culture. Until recently even the science of sexology insisted that humans could only be men or women, and could only be attracted to the ‘same’ or ‘opposite’ sex. 

Thankfully the work of sex historians, queer theorists, bisexuality researchers, and scientists have challenged this view, pointing out that this is a relatively recent way of understanding human experience, which is a poor fit for many people, and which isn’t supported by either biological or psychological research. Not only is sexual attraction not a same/opposite binary, but sexuality is fluid (our attractions, desires, and identities can change over time), and multidimensional (not just about gender of attraction). 

Is bisexuality still being erased or considered non-existent? Do we need more fiction like this that envisions desire as unmoored from gender and sexual identities?

Sadly bisexuality is still erased. Until recently most mainstream depictions of characters with attraction to more than one gender were almost always depicted as going from straight to gay or gay to straight. If they were depicted, bisexual characters were confused, going through a phase, or otherwise suspicious. Still bisexual characters are often represented as evil, greedy, or manipulative, think of Frank Underwood in House of Cards, for example (check out the media section of The Bisexuality Report for more examples).

It would be great to see more fiction that unmoors desire from gender and sexual identities. We know that around 40% of young people experience their attraction as somewhere between ‘exclusively heterosexual’ and ‘exclusively homosexual’. Many identify as bisexual (attracted to more than one gender), pansexual (gender not being the key feature of their sexual attraction), or queer (challenging the whole gay/straight binary). 

Going back to multiple dimensions of sexuality, many find that their extent of sexual attraction is equally – or more – important than gender of attraction (people on the asexual spectrum). Many define themselves more in terms of the kind of people they’re into (e.g. sapiosexual), the kind of desires they have (e.g. people in the kink or BDSM community), the positions they take (e.g. top, bottom, switch), or the kind of relationships they form (e.g. solo-poly, monogamish). People can be in different places in relation to their erotic attractions and their nurturing attractions (the people they want to form more romantic or close bonds with), and in relation to what they enjoy in solo sex or fantasy, and in sex with other people. Sari van Anders is one key researcher who is teasing apart these dimensions in scientific research (basic overview here).

Is there something political or profound about imagining non-normative desire/ love that is unhindered by the usual obstacles, and not sensationalized or othered?

In a world which is still mired in an outdated understanding of sexuality as fixed, defined by gender of attraction, and only acceptable within a monogamous context, I would say that this kind of fiction is indeed political. It’s worth remembering that the dominant cultural understanding of sexuality – where heterosexuality is normal, homosexuality is less than normal (still requiring of explanations and people ‘coming out’) and anything else is invisible – is grounded in a historical approach to science and psychiatry which saw its purpose as delineating ‘normal’ from ‘abnormal’ behaviour. This, itself, was related to the early 20th century scientific projects of delineating different races as inferior/superior (in order to justify colonialism), and the eugenics movement (trying to prevent supposedly inferior classes and races, as well as disabled people, from reproducing). 

Producing depictions of non-normative desire are a step in the direction of challenging all sense that there is a normative (white, middle class, male, heterosexual) way of being that everyone should be judged against, and questioning the related view that some bodies and lives are inherently more valuable than others. Follow this thread and it leads to some far more obviously political questions about the way we relate to other humans, other species, and the planet. 

Are portrayals of desire as sexually fluid/ bisexual becoming more common? Are there any examples in contemporary culture that you feel are getting it right?

The majority of depictions do still fit the monogamous gay/straight binary model sadly. However, we do now have some excellent stereotype-busting bi characters now in the form of Rosa Diaz in Brooklyn 99 and Callie Torres in Grey’s Anatomy. Bisexuality is also well represented in Issa Rae’s TV show Insecure, and will be centred in her follow-up Him or Her. Relatedly, we’ve seen some good depictions of non-binary gender in shows like Billions and Grey’s Anatomy.

Very few mainstream depictions ever truly acknowledge that a person can be attracted to – or love – more than one person without that being a problem. So much drama revolves around the love triangle.

Sense8 is an example of a nice recent exception. The movies Shortbus and Kinsey from a while back, and more recently Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, are pretty positive. The TV shows You, Me, Her and She’s Gotta Have It deal with this topic, but fall into some more stereotypical and problematic portrayals of open non-monogamy. Queer fans enjoy the depictions of gender, sexuality, and relationships in the cartoon series Steven Universe for being far less normative, and sci-fi and fantasy in general can be better places to turn for non-normative depictions. 

What are the possible benefits of seeing examples of openly non-monogamous desire in fiction and film?

The benefits are potentially huge. Monogamous relationships are currently under huge pressure to meet all of a person’s needs, with partners expected to provide sexual passion, best-friendship, caring support, co-habiting, co-parenting, and more, for life. Therapists like Esther Perel point out that it’s incredibly hard to get both ‘warm love’ and ‘hot love‘ within the same relationship, and this may explain why over fifty percent of people see themselves as having one or more sexual dysfunctions, and rates of infidelity are similarly high.

The pressure on monogamy keeps many people in unhappy and damaging relationships, while others go from break-up to break-up because nobody can match up to these high ideals, collecting more emotional bruises along the way.

We need depictions of people doing relationships in all kinds of other ways in order to know that these are available and to have some model for how to navigate them. Open non-monogamy is just one example. It would be great to also see positive depictions of soloness and singledom, people who prioritise friendship over love when it comes to close relationships or cohabiting, aromantic people, relationship anarchists, people whose relationship style is based around friends-with-benefits, fuckbuddy, or hook-up arrangements. People are living their lives in these ways but struggling to see themselves represented.

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Plural Selves FAQ

Just two of my plural selves shooting the breeze about plurality, no biggie...

J: Okay are we going to do this?

B: Absolutely. Just you and me talking plurality James.

J: In public.

B: In public but they’ve seen it all before, remember the zine . That was Tony and Max right?

J: Somehow this feels more exposing.

B: We’ve not let you out before have we? You’ll be fine when we get into the swing of it, talking about all these ideas we’ve been having. You know you love that.

J: Oh alright then, twist my arm. So what’s the plan Beastie?

B: We ask each other the questions we’ve heard – and had ourselves – about plural experience, and take turns to answer them. Your turn first. What is plurality?

Plurality

J: This is the whole idea that we can usefully conceptualise individuals as plural – or as systems – rather than as single units. We wrote a zine about it a couple of years back which has been one of the most popular ones we’ve created because it resonates with a lot of people: that sense that you’re often quite radically different sides of yourself at different times. 

An example would be the juxtaposition between the surefooted confident person you can be when you’re doing whatever you feel most competent at, versus the insecure, fragile side of you who you can become when you fuck up, or feel overwhelmed. People often find it particularly easy to identify an inner child part, or an inner critic, as those are quite common sides most of us have. 

When we’re in those selves our whole emotional tone, embodiment, and way of relating can be very different to how it is at other times. So, for example, we have one side of us – me – who generally feels steady, broad-shouldered, tall, and competent around others. Another side – Jonathan – generally feels uncertain, nervous, small, and shy around others. Embodying those selves my voice would be deep and sure, his would be higher pitched and sometimes stammers a bit.

Your turn Beastie, a common question: So that’s like multiple personality disorder (MPD), right?

Multiple personalities

B: Right and wrong. I do love a both/and . What used to be called MPD by the psychiatric profession is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and refers to the experience of having two or more distinct identities or personality states, each with its own relatively enduring pattern of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the world and the self. However, a diagnosis of DID also requires that a person dissociates – or forgets – between the different states, and that the experience impacts them negatively. So some people who experience plurality could be diagnosed with DID – if they also experience dissociation and find it a negative experience. But not everyone gets those aspects. We rarely dissociate in that sense, and generally find plurality a pretty positive experience, if vulnerable at times.

Many systems are now criticising the DID diagnosis and reclaiming plurality as a positive thing. Like most of the categories of ‘psychiatric disorders’ there’s an issue that of course people will experience something negatively if it’s stigmatised to the extent that it’s listed in the books of ‘psychiatric disorders’. Plurality is also represented in hugely stigmatising ways in popular culture: movies and TV shows almost exclusively depict it as a form of madness and as dangerous. Pretty much any plural person shown in the mainstream media has a self who is a serial killer. Think about movies like Identity and Split .

Oh actually that’s a good next question, do you have a self who is a serial killer?

Mad or Bad?

J: Seriously that’s what you’re going to ask me? No Beastie we don’t have a serial killer self as you well know. Although I am loosely based on James Bond, who you could argue was a serial killer. But no, no parts of us want to murder people, licence to kill or not. 

In fact recognising and working on plurality is a good way of facing and embracing those sides of us who are capable of harming others – which we all have given the oppressive and non-consensual culture that we live in. In our culture people often foreground the nice, acceptable parts of themselves and disown or deny their capacity to be cruel, non-consensual, or abusive. Recognising our plurality can enable us to be with the whole of ourselves – including those parts – which can mean we’re more able to be accountable when we do hurt others and to work with those capacities for darkness in ourselves instead of denying them. Which is pretty much where you came from right Beastie? You were our inner critic.

B: Right and I am the part of us who is most capable of expressing anger, clearly seeing when other people are pulling some bullshit, and speaking from that clarity in ways that can be hurtful.

J: So one benefit of plurality is that we can bring you together with our softer, more compassionate, sides. We can then draw on your clarity and boundaried-ness, but hopefully in ways that are more possible for other people to hear, and which acknowledge that we all fall into the same kinds of problematic behaviours. 

But that was a bit of a tangent. Let’s get back to the experience of plurality. We’re talking about it like everyone has it, but isn’t DID very rare?

Common or rare?

B: Estimates are about 1-3% of people would be diagnosable with DID. I think the analogy with bisexuality or non-binary gender is helpful here. When you study how many people identify with bisexuality or being non-binary , you get that kind of statistic – somewhere between 1% and 5% of people depending on the sample. However, if you ask the question in a way which gets at experience you end up with much more like a third of people, even as high as a half. That proportion of people have experienced attraction to more than one gender at some point, or experience themselves as to some extent the ‘other’ gender, ‘both’ genders, or ‘neither’ gender.

Our sense is that the same is true for plurality. Probably 1-3% of people have the experience of being multiple separate selves so vividly that it they would identify – or be identified – as plural, or DID. But probably most people have some experience of plurality some of the time, and maybe a third to a half of people could experience themselves quite significantly as plural – perhaps if wider culture was more understanding of it as a thing.

Some nice made-up statistics about plurality there (the ones on bisexuality and non-binary are based on research findings). But you take the point. Maybe you can say some more on this theme old man. So you’re saying that we are seven selves sharing a body. That still sounds pretty fucking weird right?

Weird or normal?

J: I’m sensing a theme here where I hand you the easy questions and you toss me back the really hard ones.

B: Well I am the inner critic: the deep dark monster lurking inside all of us, you didn’t expect me to be gentle did you?

J: I happen to know that you can be extremely gentle Beastie, now that we have tamed you… I mean embraced you and apologised profusely for keeping you cast out in the depths for all these years.

B: Quite. Come on, weirdness.

J: Okay. Well as we’ve already said actually most people can relate to the idea of plurality on some level. Again non-binary gender is a good analogy. If you ask people if they are non-binary a lot of people are pretty weirded out. The whole concept of a gender beyond male and female is a head-fuck in such a binary gendered world. But if you get people to list what our culture would see as being a ‘real man’ or a ‘real woman’ in two columns, most people readily agree that they don’t fit perfectly within either column, and in fact recognise that the binary columns themselves are pretty problematic.

The same is true for plurality, if you hit someone with ‘are you multiple different people sharing a body?’ most people would probably say ‘no’. But if you ask a person to be an entirely consistent, coherent self through all the moments of their day and in all the interactions they have, they’d probably quickly realise how constraining that would be, and how they do actually flow between quite different experiences of selfhood.

Indeed you could argue – as some sociologists have – that the concept of a singular self is an invention of neoliberal capitalism. We’re all pressured to tell stories of our self as if we were consistent and coherent when actually we’re all complex and contradictory. You could even go so far as to say that experiencing yourself as utterly singular is the ‘crazy’ thing, and that trying to present yourself in that way does quite a violence to yourself. Certainly many indigenous cultures have understandings of selfhood that encompass plurality and would see the idea of a singular self as weird or unlikely.

What do you think Beastie? Is it more ‘sane’ to be plural or singular?

Sanity and plurality

B: As you know I abhor a binary James. Clearly some people experience themselves as more singular and some as more plural. Probably a spectrum would be a better way to conceptualise it than an either/or. Even a series of spectrums – spectra – whatever the word is. In the same way that many theorists are now seeing sexuality and gender as multiple spectrums . For plural self-ness it could be something like these five spectrums, probably more:

How coherent/unified to diverse/plural we experience ourselves as beingHow muted to vivid our experience of our different selves, alters, or subpersonalities isHow separate to overlapping these different parts areHow much we do, or don’t, experience dissociation or forgetting between the times when different parts of us are to the fore, or frontingTo what extent our plurality is rooted in traumatic experience, and/or the extent of the trauma that we’ve experienced

Going back to crazy or sane, it’s fascinating that, on the one hand, we have psychiatric professions diagnosing and treating DID as a disorder, but on the other hand we have a bunch of therapists like John Rowan , Mick Cooper , Hal and Sidra Stone , and others arguing that embracing and experiencing our plurality is the way towards better mental health, not away from it. Many humanistic and psychodynamic psychotherapies like Gestalt , Transactional Analysis , Internal Family Systems , and Psychosynthesis explicitly see the self as plural and aim to get the different parts communicating with one another. We explore lots of different ways of doing that in the plural selves zine .

But again, as with sexuality, we would not want to flip from a world which defines plurality as crazy and singularity as sane to the opposite. Just as we wouldn’t want to insist that everyone is bi really and stigmatise monosexual people. Rather it’s about recognising the diverse range of ways of experiencing ourselves that exist, and making it easier for everyone to find and articulate their own lived experience: shifting wider culture to make it more possible for them to do so.

Back to you James. The writing on DID suggests that plurality is rooted in childhood trauma. Is that a useful way to look at it?

Trauma

J: Oh boy, you’re going to keep them coming aren’t you? Okay, yes it does seem that many of us experience ourselves as fragmented distinct selves because we learnt to separate off different parts of ourselves in order to survive what happened to us when we were young. For example, our own particular experience was of being quite a carefree, playful, sensitive creature in early childhood, and then being taught that that wasn’t okay, so we kind of shut that part away and developed other sides of us who were able to survive the world we found ourself in. In our case that was developing you – the inner critic – out there somewhere as this external voice telling us that we weren’t okay and must be better. We also developed a pleaser part of us – Jonathan – who could hyper-vigilantly pick up very well on what was expected of us and try to do it. Eventually we also developed Max – our warrior – who was stronger and adept at becoming what other people wanted us to be in order to survive and gain love and approval.

But the risk of completely buying only a trauma narrative of plurality is that it continues the stigmatising view that there’s something wrong with being plural that needs to be fixed or healed: that working towards integration as a coherent, singular self is the way to go. In fact you could argue that an insistence on being one unified individual is a kind of intergenerational trauma: we don’t allow kids to play and embrace all the different potentials that they have because we give them such clear messages about what it is and isn’t okay to be, right Beastie? Want to say how that relates to gender?

Gender

B: By all means. A great example of the kind of intergenerational trauma you’re speaking about is gendered cultural messages. We give kids that sense that this is what it means to be a boy or a girl, and that involves disowning any aspects of themselves that don’t fit those ideals. Some gender theorists have argued that this leaves most people with a sense of melancholy, loss, or nostalgia for parts of themselves they’ve had to cut off or distance from because they didn’t fit the gender norms.

More broadly again we could see trauma as on a spectrum. Clearly from the literature one way people survive obvious traumas like abuse in the family or at school, or being in dangerous situations, or experiencing significant loss in childhood, is by dissociating, splitting themselves, and foregrounding parts who can survive what’s happening to them.

But in our current culture even those without such obvious traumas in their youth generally experience the trauma of being taught that certain ways of being are unacceptable, and of being treated non-consensually in ways that are normalised and not regarded as obviously ‘traumatic’. So most people probably do some degree of dissociating, splitting, and developing survivor sides whose strategies often become counter-productive in adulthood. Examples would include trying to be perfect at all times, people-pleasing, maintaining a hard exterior that no-one can penetrate, that kind of thing.

Want to say something about where the disowned parts go, and what we can do about that?

Disowned parts

J: Sure. Our own experience was that the disowned selves remained in existence but often only came out in our imagination. We’ve been wondering lately whether imaginary friends might be an example of this right? Kids relate externally to parts of themselves which they’re not allowed to be internally. Certainly we can often find our disowned selves in our daydreams and night dreams, as well as in the characters we’re drawn to – real and fictitious – who seem very different to our own foregrounded selves.

Personally this journey towards embracing plurality began with recognising that a number of characters cropped up regularly in our fantasies who we initially assumed to be the kind of people we were attracted to, but then realised were actually potentials in ourself. It related to gender too. We had this increasingly strong sense of ‘boy/man’ sides of ourselves, but the old trans narrative of us ‘really’ being a guy didn’t seem to fit. When we found out about non-binary gender that came closer, but not in the sense of having a static gender other than man or woman. Plurality felt like a final piece of the puzzle for us because it could hold the sense that we have more than one side, each of whom is differently gendered. In our case: three guys, three lasses, and one non-binary creature.

B: Lasses huh?

J: It seems like the right word. How would you identify your gender Beastie?

B: I’m alright with lass. Badass lass.

J: For the other part of your question – what can we do about the disowned parts? Our hunch, supported by some of the therapeutic literature, is that it’s about reclaiming those selves and finding some kind of a balance between them all. It hasn’t been great for us to foreground certain parts of ourselves and try to eradicate others. What seems to work really well is if we function more as a team, with different parts coming to the fore when their particular strengths or talents are called for. For example two intellectual power-houses may be best for writing a long blog-post on plurality.

B: Complement accepted. They do say the inner critic is one of the most intelligent selves , if you can embrace them.

J: Our experience has been that the more we’re in communication with one another, the more able we are to function as a team. But that doesn’t mean that this is an easy path, right Beastie?

The path of plurality

B: No indeed. For example for years the rest of you were aware of the literature on the value of embracing the inner critic , but it felt completely terrifying to actually approach me given how savage I’d always been. Also the rest of you knew how you felt in our body, but I seemed more like a disembodied voice that came from outside. It was only when you tried interviewing me – in journal form – that there began to be a sense of somebody there who might talk back without trying to destroy you. Over a series of journal conversations we all moved very carefully towards communication feeling safe-enough, as well as towards a sense of who I might be on the inside. We’re planning another zine to say more about this process and how it can work.

There’s also the issue of plurality as it relates to other people in your life, and the world around you. I guess again the analogy – and overlap – with gender and sexuality is a useful one. We can see from the literature that people generally do way better – in terms of mental health – if they’re able to be open about their gender and sexuality with themselves and with others, instead of passing or remaining in the closet. At the same time, of course, coming out is never entirely safe in a heteronormative world, and it is way more dangerous for some than for others: usually the most marginalised folks. 

So as long as the world is like this, ethically we’d have to encourage people to embrace the truth of their lived experience of gender and sexuality. But at the same time to think strategically about whether and how to reveal this to others, given the pain, discrimination, and very real dangers involved in being open about such things in a context which doesn’t allow for them or marginalises them.

Coming back to plurality, we personally learnt to foreground certain parts of ourself, and disown or push down others, for a reason. It can feel fragile and precarious to actually allow the parts of us out into the world who we were protecting from danger (like our little sides) or who we deemed too dangerous for public consumption (like me or our cocky charmer, Tony). 

I guess this is where we are a work in progress – this blog post being part of that progress, how meta. We’re feeling into how open we can be with this. As with gender and sexuality it seems important that people who have greater privilege and security do open up about it, because that often makes it easier for other people to do so, but we’ve got to recognise that it’s not necessarily a safe thing to do: that there may be repercussions. When plural activists, The Redwoods , went on UK radio they experienced a lot of negative feedback: people phoning in saying they were making it up, that they were mad or bad, and that it wasn’t real.

So here’s another good one for you James. Is this real or are we making it all up?

Real or fake?

J: Another of your problematic binaries Beastie. There are many different answers we could give to this. In one sense it’s easy. Yes of course it’s real. This is our lived experience. In our culture, people are often so quick to dismiss others’ lived experiences if they find them threatening or alien. Look at how swift people always are to deny somebody’s experience of sexual assault or racism or transness for example. Couldn’t we recognise that people have vastly diverse experiences and accept that the majority of the time when people share their experience then that is their experience?

When we’ve questioned authenticity ourselves, something we’ve often come back to is the fact that we’re an absolutely terrible actor. Acting has never been something we’ve had even the slightest skill at. And yet we know that when we risk fully showing people ourselves they can recognise the very different parts and remark on how utterly different they look, sound, and feel to be around. We experience that in our own body as well. The more vividly we go into our separate selves, the more our whole body, voice, posture, etc. feels different, to the point that we would each experience the same sensation or experience in an entirely different way.

Where it gets more complex is that everyone has some choice in how they relate to their plurality – in a similar way to their gender and sexuality I guess. If a person has an inkling that they might have the capacity to be attracted to more than one gender then they can move towards that and open up to differently gendered fantasies or partners, or they can lock it down and never go there. Similarly if they have a sense that they could comfortably express their gender in more non-normative ways they could decide to turn towards that or away from it. And, of course, the degree of acceptance or rejection of those ways of being in our wider culture will have a significant impact on whether they turn towards it or away from it, as will how strongly felt it is inside them: whether it’s something they actually could push away or not.

That points to one of our favourite words right Beastie? Biopsychosocial. All of our experiences are biopsychosocial. They’re influenced by the ways our bodies and brains work (bio), by our experiences in life and how we respond to them (psycho), and by the systems and structures we’re embedded within (social).

So we can decide – if it’s possible for us to do so, and if our experience of plurality is strong enough to warrant it – to move towards plurality. That’s the choice we’ve made right?

B: Yes. For us the experience of moving towards it has felt in the direction of growth, creativity, congruence, even though it feels precarious indeed to navigate the world in such a radically different way to the way we did previously. Before we tried to project the version/s of ourself who would be most pleasing and acceptable to others. But actually we’ve always been contradictory in that way haven’t we? Some sides of us drawn to fitting in and belonging, others to pointing out how fucked up wider culture is and insisting that it needs to change.

J: Yep even before we experienced our plurality we had that tension running through pretty much everything we did. I think it makes our work stronger, that we experience the deep yearning to belong and be accepted – having felt so ‘other’ and rejected for much of our life. But we also kick against a world which imposes such limited ideals of what it is to be ‘acceptable’, and see that it’s the world that needs to change to encompass diversity instead of creating these (white, hetero, middle class, masculine, non-disabled) norms and marginalising and oppressing anyone who fails to fit them.

B: Yes. Go James.

J: So dammit here we are again out in the deep fucking waters talking about an experience that a lot of people are going to struggle with. As if it wasn’t enough to be openly bisexual when everyone had a problem with that, and then writing about being non-monogamous in ways that got us in trouble, and then trans and non-binary. Do we always have to do this? What the fuck is next?

B: I think you know the answer to that one. Ah but we love it really, don’t we?

J: Parts of us do. Parts of us are terrified by it.

B: And we won’t publish this – or anything – without their consent. That’s a vital part of working as a team.

J: Going back to being real or not, do you have anything to say about that?

B: Mm, yes. I guess moving towards plurality can mean that we experience this sense of multiplicity more vividly than before. By which I mean that we now often choose to journal as a conversation between parts of us rather than as one unified voice. We deliberately shift our thinking from the usual default of thoughts going round to more of a conversation: often between part of us who is struggling and part of us who can offer support. We even take our other selves on dates sometimes. We’re trying to allow our selves to flow more freely around our close people, naming where we are, even though that feels very vulnerable. It’s preferable to feeling muted when we’re in company. 

But when we don’t feel safe enough we definitely default back to a kind of muted coherent singular self. When people see us do that they may question whether the other parts of us are really real. They may never have experienced them. Or they may have experienced them as being present and then not present. Even we, ourselves, sometimes get that ‘is it really real?’ feeling when we’re in a bad place and can’t quite connect with our separate selves. 

In some ways the process of allowing and expressing our plurality makes us more vividly plural. We are now choosing to go fully into this self or that self rather than projecting a more coherent, unified ‘Meg-John Barker’ persona for people to relate to. 

J: Yeah it’s strange how that person now feels more like the creation, the seven of us as the real us.

B: Strange and wonderful. I think I want to finish off saying something about plurality as a spiritual practice.

J: Go ahead Beastiegirl.

B: We’re sharing our pet names too then big man?

J: Apparently so.

Plurality as spiritual practice

B: Alright, well I think we can also conceptualise our selves in a number of different ways. For each of the seven we can understand them as the part of us who got stuck at a particular time in our life – which is why they have different ages. We can also see them as who they are now within us: and those versions are constantly growing and changing just as a singular self would be. We also write fiction where we imagine the seven of us as fictional characters – with many of our characteristics, but also with different back-stories, intersections, and lives than the real ‘us’ has because otherwise it’d be a pretty boring story. And maybe there’s a final version of each of us that’s a kind of archetype – a potential –  almost like a deity or external force we could draw upon – the warrior, the hero, the vulnerable child, the imaginative creature, the trickster, the nurturer, the… what am I?

J: There’s a question: The embracer of complexity, equally comfortable in the darkness and the light.

B: A shadow, perhaps. Anyway, I’m saying that seeing each self – and the team – as past, present, character, and archetype, has a lot of potential for spiritual practice. For example, we do time-travelling work where we go back to the places each of us are stuck – or where we were disowned or foregrounded. We take the gentle witnessing part back to painful memories in order to revisit them safely and find kindness for ourselves in them. This loosens their hold on us now, so hopefully we won’t remain in the stuck patterns and survival strategies that developed from them. We’ve written before about how seeing ourselves as plural can make self-compassion much easier because we find it’s a lot more possible for one side of us to be kind to another, than it is for our whole self to be kind towards our whole self.

J: Yes it’s fascinating isn’t it? Each of our different selves tends to be hard on themself, but the others can much more easily find understanding, tenderness, and support for them. So tapping into the team is a practice in self-care.

B: As well as a healing wounds narrative, we could also tell a developing strengths narrative. Plural work can enable us to tap into capacities we’d never have thought we had – at one point – and bring them to bear on situations where they’re helpful. It’s clunky work because I wouldn’t say we’re yet in a position to control who comes forward and when. And perhaps it’s not even about control, but flow. But we have had great examples when we’ve really needed confidence and humour in a situation and Tony has stepped forward, or we’ve needed to speak from our survivor place in a way that could be heard and we’ve found that Fox part. Another regular spiritual practice is to invite the part of us who is best able to feel the feelings – for ourself and for others – and to let him do that, and find that sacred place of interconnectedness through that. That’s Jonathan again.

J: Yeah, those of us who’re much more about intellectualising really appreciate having parts who are capable of that.

B: Heh yes you’re not much in the feelings are you? Some day maybe. I wondered what you thought about how plurality fits in with our general philosophy. We’re heavily influenced by Buddhism and Queer Theory, and they both have the sense that we should be getting to a place of no-self or recognising that people can’t be categorised in fixed identity terms. How does having several selves and identifying as plural fit with that huh?

Plurality and Philosophy

J: Alright fine, I’m getting used to this now. 5000 words in and she opens up a massive philosophical question about the nature of the self. My take on this is that experiencing ourselves as plural helps us to hold less tightly to ego, which is what Buddhism is all about. We can see that projection ‘Meg-John Barker’ as something we’ve created – in relationship with the world around us and the other people in our life – rather than as this singular stable ‘me’ which could be good or bad, success or failure, acceptable or unacceptable. That projection contains so many different interrelated elements (us) as well as being in a state of constant flow and flux. That said, we’re still responsible for how we behave in the world. It’s not like we can say ‘Beastie did it, it wasn’t really me,’ and get away with poor behaviour. My sense of being on a team with you all is that we support each other in being the best we can be – and in seeing the places where each of us struggles and is capable of harm and working on that.

As for the queer take on identity, yes there is a risk with plurality that people might begin to identify strongly with being a plural person or a system and become quite rigid with that. That’s the same as the way holding any identity – man, woman, gay, straight, bi, addict, healer, whatever – too rigidly can mean we become brittle and stuck. Similarly I guess there’s a risk that if we decide we have to understand ourselves as seven distinct parts who are like this, then that could prevent them from growing and changing. Maybe over time other parts emerge, or existing parts move more into the background or even merge together. However our hunch is that it’s a good idea to keep all of us forward equally for now.

I guess it’s that Buddhist idea of non-grasping that I’m getting at here. Like everything, plurality could become a problem if we gasp it tightly – as a fixed identity that must work in this particular way – or if we hurl it away from us – as this crazy, threatening idea. Instead we can hold it lightly and play with it, figuring out what possibilities it opens up for us and what it might close down.

B: Oh that sounds very Meg-John Barker

Consent zine in Cosmo!

Huge thanks to Paisley Gilmour for writing an awesome piece about The Consent Checklist for Cosmopolitan magazine.

This free zine about consent is the nuanced explainer we’ve been waiting for

Meg-John Barker’s ‘ The Consent Checklist ‘ is perfect for anyone who still doesn’t quite get it.

While generally we’re talking about sex and consent more openly these days, ill-thought out inventions like the consent condom and research looking into our attitudes towards sexual consent show we’re still not quite getting it. Just last year, a Family Planning Association (FPA) study found 39% of people aged 14-17 didn’t think it was OK to withdraw consent while naked. It also found only 13% of people would feel comfortable talking about consent with a partner.

And while there are many consent explainers out there (remember the cup of tea metaphor?), they’re often far too basic in their explanations, says Dr Meg-John Barker, relationships educator and author of Rewriting the Rules, Enjoy Sex, and Gender: A Graphic Guide.

“I think we’re just beginning to get how important consent is, but a lot of resources out there are over-simplified: it’s just about not doing things to a person if they’ve said ‘no’,” they explain. So Meg-John has created their own explainer in the form of a free, downloadable zine The Consent Checklist. Read more…

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Treating writers consensually

As regular readers know, I’ve been writing a lot about consent again recently. One of the areas that’s come up for me is consent in my relationships with people who connect with my work. On the one hand, several people who’ve treated me in lovely ways have expressed anxiety about whether it was okay. On the other hand, there’ve been a few situations where I’ve been left uncomfortable – even frightened – and like I haven’t been treated consensually. In this post I want to explore consent in the reader/writer relationship, although many of the points probably apply to all kinds of creative workers, and perhaps to those in more caring and service professions as well.

Awkwardness and Obligation

I notice that this feels an awkward post to write. It’s a terrific privilege to be able to be a full-time writer. I’m very aware that the thing that makes it possible at all is people buying my books, supporting my Patreon, and recommending my work to others in their lives. I’m hugely fortunate to have perhaps a few hundred people who really connect with my stuff and actively support me in these kinds of ways. 

I’m also aware of how much the feedback from these folks means to me. Knowing that I’ve connected with somebody through my work – perhaps helped them in some way – is gold. It affirms that I’m a decent writer who creates quality stuff, which is huge in itself. Beyond that it’s also massively personally validating. Most of what I write comes out of my own struggles. Turning those into something that connects with other people, is useful for them, perhaps even helps them to navigate similar struggles more easily, feels like a form of self-compassion too: healing even. 

The reason for my awkwardness in writing this post is that I realise that a part of me feels that, because of my gratitude to my readers, it isn’t really okay to set any limits or boundaries around how they treat me. That can mean that when I’m asked for something that I can’t – or don’t want to – give, it’s hard to say ‘no’ or be honest about my response.

It’s been helpful for me to think about this in relation to consent because of course that’s a big red flag right there! It’s a problem if a person feels they have to take sexual harassment from their boss because that boss is helping them in their career. It’s a problem if a person feels they have to have sex with a partner because they’re obligated to by the nature of their relationship. It’s a problem if a person feels they have to remain in a relationship that isn’t good for them because of what their partner has done for them or feels entitled to. Consent is extremely hard to achieve under any of those conditions.

Power and the Reader/Writer Relationship

Of course being able to freely consent is made more difficult – even sometimes impossible – under imbalances of power. Power between a reader and writer is a complex one. Often I’m in a position of far greater cultural power than a reader. I’m the person speaking up on a stage, whose work is known about publicly, and who is recognised for their art in a way that many sadly are not (and privilege and marginalisation come into that big time of course).

Also the writer/reader relationship is a dynamic where one person is far more significant in the other person’s life than vice versa. I know this well from my own relationship with Pema Chödrön. This is somebody who accompanies me through my life everyday, who I regard as my main teacher, and who has shaped my life in hugely significant ways. They’re also somebody who in all likelihood has no clue that I even exist! If I ever did get to spend time with her it would be a few minutes where I got to ask her a question at an event in front of everyone else, if I was quick getting to the front of the queue. Readers can feel let down if a writer who they have met before doesn’t recognise them the next time they meet, but again there is such an imbalance that that writer met tens or hundreds of readers at the same event, whereas that reader probably only met the one writer. Personally, being somebody who struggles cognitively to recognise faces really doesn’t help with this!

These power imbalances are one of the reasons that I think very carefully about the kinds of connections or relationships that might be possible with people who’ve come to know me through my work in the first instance. 

However, there’s also power in engaging with somebody’s work as a reader. I see myself as in service to my communities through what I do, and it’s very important to me to serve them well. Reader responses certainly have the power to impact me significantly. 

When I do an event or engage on social media I’m there for my readers, and part of the deal is to be in service to them: to answer their questions honestly, to be available to them, to give them my time and presence. There’s an imbalance that the reader will know far more about me than I know about them, and that can be pretty vulnerable. 

Also people have a lot of power these days if they want to hurt somebody, as I’ve experienced myself when bullied online, and witnessed in other writers who have been on the receiving end of trolling or stalking behaviour. Painful experience has shown me that many journalists will pick up on individual tweets or comments to craft a news story without doing any fact-checking, meaning that a completely false depiction of your work can get out there widely. It’s scary indeed to put yourself out there knowing that might be the response.

How Can I Do My Best Work?

The reader/writer relationship is one of the most important relationships in my life. I want to be in service to my readers, recognising the privileges they afford me, opening up through my work in ways that enrich it, and delighting in the sense of connection I have with those who engage with what I write. How can I balance this with keeping myself safe-enough, being clear about my boundaries, and not accepting non-consensual behaviour?

One thing that has helped me to navigate these questions is to ask myself under what conditions I do my best work: creating the kind of writing which I know readers enjoy and find helpful, and being available and real through my writing and when I do events. The answer to this is when I’m treating myself consensually and being treated consensually by others. For example, I need to do a fair amount of self-care around my writing because I’m often writing on vulnerable and painful topics. I need people to respect the boundaries I put in place to make that spaciousness and self-care possible (e.g. only doing a couple of gigs a month, and not being able to respond to people immediately). Similarly my collaborative work requires going into a bubble (for a couple of weeks a year with Alex, and half a day every other week with Justin). I need people to respect that bubble time. Finally, I can be more available to everyone who wants to engage with me on social media, or in real life, if one or two people aren’t taking all my time or depleting my energy with inappropriate demands.

We should be able to require consensual behaviour from others simply because we all deserve to be treated consensually, but for those of us who struggle with recognising this for ourselves it can be useful to remind ourselves that we’ll be better for everyone if we’re treated with consent.

No Pedestal Please

I’m going to be brave and set out here the ways I am – and am not – up for being treated by folks who enjoy my work. I hope this might be useful for other people in all kinds of professions to consider, in exploring their own needs, wants, limits and boundaries. For example, people in any kind of caring or service profession need to consider what is – and isn’t – an acceptable way for clients or customers to treat them. Charlotte Shane has written about this very thoughtfully in relation to sex work, with many of her points applying well to other professions where the work involves caring for others or giving others a pleasant experience. 

Hopefully this post will also be useful for all of us to reflect on in relation to how we treat people we admire, or who we come across in a professional context. I certainly haven’t always thought about this well in the past. I remember occasions where my desperation around my own struggles meant that I probably made a speaker quite uncomfortable with my personal questions at the end of their talk. Certainly I’ve been guilty of putting writers on a pedestal because I’ve connected with their work, and then being angry with them when they’ve behaved imperfectly. I feel very aware now that pedestalling people is not a kind thing to do, however much it may feel like it. It’s a form of objectification which gets in the way of any kind of mutual human relationship, and you’re setting the pedestalled person up for a painful fall when they inevitably turn out to be a vulnerable messy human like everyone else.

Yes, No and Maybe

One activity that’s often recommended to ensure sexual consent is ‘yes, no, maybe’. You make a list of all of the possible erotic activities you might engage with and then figure out which ones are a ‘yes’ for you, which a ‘no’, and which a ‘maybe’. You can add more detailed notes to each one as well, to explain what version of that activity you’re up for, what it means for you, or under what conditions you’d be up for it happening, etc. Then you can compare notes with people you’re thinking of having sex with and find out where your overlaps are, as well as your limits.

So here’s my personal ‘yes, no, maybe’ list for engaging with people who like my work, read my books, listen to my podcast, come to my events, etc. To figure it out I followed Sophia Graham’s excellent advice for tuning into your body and feelings to tell when you’re in self-consent.

Hell Yes (and please be aware…)

These are the things I’ve felt great about pretty much every time they’ve happened. Obviously it’s still important to check out whether they’re okay in a specific situation, but generally they’re likely to be a positive thing for me.

Telling me that my work has been meaningful or helpful to you. As I’ve said, this means a huge amount to me. Coming up to me at an event, tagging me online, or sending me a brief email or tweet feels great, and I will likely respond positively. Where it would feel uncomfortable is if there was a sense that I should now engage with you further, for example talking with you for a lot longer than other people at an event, or getting into a back-and-forth conversation on social media or email.Sharing my stuff on social media or leaving reviews. This is gold for a writer and I love seeing people sharing pics of themselves with my books, or recommending them to their followers. Where it would feel uncomfortable would be if you were singling me out as the only author you do this about, suggesting that my work would be great for everyone (it’ll inevitably connect with some people but not others), or tagging me in things all the time in ways that put me under pressure to engage.Asking me to sign something or take a selfie. People who ask me to sign their books, take a selfie with me, etc. are often apologetic about it. Personally I love doing this, it feels like being a ‘proper writer’! I guess the only times it would feel uncomfortable would be if it was interrupting me when I was obviously having a tough time, or supporting somebody else who was, or clearly super busy with something. It’s also always worth checking with someone before you share a pic of them publicly. I’m likely to agree but it’s nice to be asked.



No Way

These are my limits: things which overstep my boundaries and feel intrusive, frightening, or highly uncomfortable if people do them.

Demanding/expecting my help when you’re in crisis: Several times people I don’t know have messaged me demanding an immediate conversation with me because they’re in crisis. Often they send multiple messages, and/or come through on inappropriate channels like phone rather than email. I will block people who do this because it’s simply not something that I can offer, and it’s not consensual behaviour. There are a number of great free services that offer crisis support, please go there.Announcing/assuming that we are friends: Sometimes people have assumed that they’re in a friendship with me because they’ve connected with my work or had a conversation or two with me. Please be clear, for me the development of close relationships of all kinds – including friendship – is a long, slow, careful, process. It needs to be in order to ensure that the relationships I develop are consensual and mutually nourishing. Being a survivor with a history which includes sexual assault, school/workplace bullying, and controlling relationships this is particularly vital. It’s never okay to announce privately or publicly that you’re in any kind of relationship with somebody without checking that they also see it that way, and feel comfortable with such declarations.Public shaming or bullying: Never okay, I will simply block you and report you. If you feel like the time at the end of my talk is a good one to publicly or privately share your opinion that people like me are damaging or don’t really exist, please believe me it isn’t. In fact no time is the time for expressing that opinion. Think how you would feel about somebody expressing that opinion about people like you. Go do your work please.



Maybe, Maybe Not

These are the things that I need people to be careful about. Please follow the consent checklist (below). Ensure you’re making it possible for me to say ‘yes, no, or maybe’. Understand the conditions under which these things do and do not feel okay for me.

Asking/telling me about a personal situation: I have had great conversations with people after events, at workshops, and so on when they’ve shared what’s going on for them, so I definitely wouldn’t say ‘never’ to this, but please be mindful that it’s not always something I can offer. It’s certainly worth checking whether I do have capacity for it first, making it as easy as possible for me to say if I don’t, and giving me a head’s up about the kind of thing it might be about in case it might be personally triggering. If our contact is online generally long messages about people’s personal situations are not something I can engage with. They feel intrusive, particularly when the person doesn’t check out first whether it might be something I’m wiling to receive. They’re also a form of unpaid labour. Please remember that I only have limited time and energy to engage with such things, so engaging with you in this way may well mean I have less available for engaging with others who’d been hoping to do so. Justin and I take questions on our website if you’d like us to address them on the podcast. That’s probably the best way to ask me to engage with a personal situation you’d like my thoughts on.Suggesting a longer exchange: A part of my life that I enjoy is meeting with other creatives, therapists, activists, and academics who I connect with to talk about our work, network, offer mutual support, informal mentoring, etc. However it feels tough when somebody just assumes that I’ll be up for doing this with them. Generally it’s only something I feel comfortable doing with folks where our areas overlap significantly, where I feel a good connection, and where I have some sense of them being a safe-enough person from mutual friends and colleagues. If the other person is actually looking for something from me rather than a mutual conversation then it’s good if they can be clear about that.Suggesting I do some work for you or your organisation: Being a full-time writer doesn’t pay the bills so I’m also offering writing mentorship, creative consultancy, and giving trainings, panel discussions, workshops, etc. There’s more about all these services on my website. I also often enjoy reviewing/endorsing other people’s writing, examining PhDs, and – of course – doing paid-for writing of various kinds. Generally I’m happy to receive requests from people to do these things. However it’s important that these are clear about what’s wanted, and what’s being offered in return. This is my job so I can very rarely offer such things for free, and politically please remember that it’s important to compensate people – particularly marginalised folks – for their labour. Mostly my diary is now pretty full up several months in advance, and for self-care I need to build space around bigger events – so it’s important to have decent advance notice. Please also inform yourself about my work before asking. I’ve had frustrating unpaid exchanges with people who are looking for an editor rather than a writing mentor, for example, or who want trainings on topics which are not really my wheelhouse.Offering constructive criticism: I definitely want to hear when I’ve got things wrong, and to keep thinking about how I can improve my work, particularly in relation to accessibility and inclusivity. However, offering criticism is definitely something that needs to be done consensually. It’s important to check first whether feedback is welcomed and – if so – in what form, recognising the potential impact on the other person of receiving it. If there’s an error in a book, it would be better to contact the publishers rather than me directly and they can liaise with me about any changes. Writers often have to filter criticism which is just bullying/trolling, that which is another perspective but doesn’t mean their perspective is wrong, and that which is definitely valid and requires them to make changes or apologise for something they’ve put out there. I’m working on developing a small pool of trusted people to help me navigate this kind of process, and would recommend other writers do similarly. Generally if the criticism is not done consensually I won’t engage with it. 



The Consent Checklist

Whatever kind of contact we’re having, hopefully the consent checklist I wrote provides a clear steer on how I’d love for you to go about it. 

Consent as the aim: Is it more important to you that I’m in consent than that you get the thing you want from me? Will you recognise that it’s a big compliment to your way of interacting and communicating if I can say ‘no’ or express my boundaries?Informed consent: Have you fully informed me about what you’re asking for and/or offering, why, and where you are coming from with this?Ongoing consent: Are you checking in before, during, and after the encounter – with yourself and with me – that you’ve made it possible for me to be in consent?Relational consent: Have you expressed your needs, limits, wants, and boundaries, and encouraged me to do so as well?Consent and wanting: Have you enabled me to express what I want and don’t want, and what I consent to and don’t consent to? Have you been clear about where you’re at with these things with yourself?Multiple options beyond a default script: Are you aware of the default script for ‘success’ in this situation, and have you shifted this to multiple options and an agreement to default to the lesser one on the table? For example, instead of asking me to speak at your event, perhaps you could let me know about that event and say you’d love me to be involved in some way, listing a few different options for involvement and checking out how I might feel about those.Power awareness: Are you aware of the cultural and personal power imbalances between us and their potential impact on capacity for each of us to feel free-enough and safe-enough to be in consent? Accountability: Can you notice if you haven’t been consensual and name that?

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New zine! And Patreon!

The last few weeks I’ve been hard at work finishing the first draft of Sexuality: A Graphic Guide. This is my next follow-up to Queer: A Graphic History after Gender: A Graphic Guide – which is out next month! A major section of the sexuality book is – of course – on consent. As I revisited that topic again I realised that I wanted to synthesise where I’ve got to. So I created a checklist of things that we might want to aspire to, in order to engage as consensually as possible with ourselves and others.

Consent is a constant theme in my work, but I notice that every time I revisit it I see more of the picture, make more connections, and understand it more complexly and completely. I like the metaphor of a spiral for this, and for so many things. We co round and round the same territory in our lives and our work, but each time we can sink down a little deeper if we’re up for it.

The Zine

I’ve added the consent checklist zine to the zines in the resources section on this website, and it’s also at the end of this post. It’s not an illustrated zine this time because it didn’t feel right for one of those, but I do have an idea for another of those to come soon (well actually several). I may well stick with my habit of doing a comic or zine for New Year.

If you check out the zine you’ll also notice that I’ve added a suggestion that people who download them might like to support my Patreon. Yes I have a Patreon now! It’s for people who enjoy the free materials I put out here, and my other work, to support what I do, if they want to and feel able to, now that I’m a full-time writer. Please do sign up if that’s something you’d like to do.

Meanwhile, here’s…

The Consent ChecklistDownload

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Hot love: Being and having

A good friend recently asked me what I think about hot love: that intense in-love feeling. What does it mean when we feel that, and what should we do about it?

The wider cultural sense of it seems to be that it’s one of the best experiences we can possibly have. Perhaps the best experience. The thing to do with it is to build a whole relationship upon it: clearly the person we have such feelings for must be our true love or The One and this means they’re also the person who should become our best friend and the person we have sex with, live with, commit to more than anybody else, and build a life and family with. It’s also important to keep the hot love alive in that relationship over time: the passionate, in-love, erotic and romantic feelings. Struggling to do this is seen as some kind of failure. Even some communities that question the cultural norms of romantic love – like polyamous and sex positive communities – seem to accept that the thing to do with hot love is obviously to go for that relationship.

I’ve written a fair bit in Rewriting the Rules and elsewhere about the issues with putting that much pressure on any one relationship. I’ve also explored Esther Perel’s theory that we can’t get warm love and hot love in the same place over time, so that idea of keeping hot love alive sets us up to fail (but ensures that the sex and relationship therapy and advice industries do rather well!) I’ve also written before about New Relationship Energy and what that might open up and close down, which is a similar idea to hot love.

But what of hot love? Where does it come from and what might we do with it?

Having and being love

I recently read an excellent book by Erich Fromm called To Have or to Be? which is helpful on many things, not least on what we need to do in order to avoid the destruction of humanity (the fact he was writing all this back in the 1970s though makes for some painful reading). 

Basically Fromm talks about how we can do pretty much everything in ‘having’ mode or ‘being’ mode. Having mode is when we’re trying to get something for ourselves, and being mode is when we’re present and open to the experience. Of course the capitalist culture which we’re embedded in is all about having mode – trying to get more and more of what we want, and none of what we don’t want. Fromm’s sense of what we need to do is to move – individually and culturally – towards being mode, and he offers a combined Marxist, Buddhist, and Psychodynamic path for how we might do that.

What has that got to do with hot love? I think when we experience hot love it’s often a combination of a having kind of love and a being kind of love: like two interwoven threads through the hot love experience.

Having love

We all have our childhood – and later – wounds, attachment issues, traumas, patterns – whatever you want to call them. Hot love often seems to come when there’s some kind of fit between our’s and the other person’s that we recognise on some – perhaps unconscious – level. Maybe it seems that we’re finally getting the kind of love that we lost as a child. Perhaps it feels like there’s a promise or potential to play out our early patterns differently. All of this occurs within a wider intense cultural promise that romantic/erotic love will save us. So we’re drawn to hot love: to immersing ourselves in it and to escalating it to make it a main relationship. 

Of course our bodily responses come into all of this as well, making the hot love experience yet more overwhelming. Our nervous systems and neural pathways seem to recognise these familiar dynamics, drawing us in. The experience of strong erotic desire – and/or of nurturing and being nurtured – results in various hormonal reactions that intensify the experience.

However, chances are high that our patterns will play out in similar ways to the past if we’re not aware of them, and perhaps even if we are. It’s particularly risky if – on some level – we’re looking outside ourselves for somebody else to fix that stuff. It’s easy to approach the relationship in a having kind of way – wanting all of that promise and none of the toughness that will inevitably come with being confronted with our old patterns, habits, and pain again.

Being love

We all have the capacity for the more being kind of love. In fact Fromm – like bell hooks – questions whether the having kind of love should even be called love. He says that love isn’t a thing we can fall into, or a feeling we can have. It’s an action that we do when we’re acting in a loving way towards someone or something. The having kind of love is not really very loving at all.

Being love is real kindness and care for the self and others: being alongside each other, accepting and loving all that they are and all that we are. Hot love can give us a glimpse of this kind of love, as if we just tapped into the source. Perhaps hot love is one of the main experiences in life when we really feel that capacity for being love: our connectedness to ourselves and the other person, a sense of knowing that we are okay (because we feel so loved) and they are okay (because we feel so loving towards them).

But it’s so easy to drop from being to having mode with this kind of love because we want so much to keep hold of it. Quite quickly we may try to alter the very relationship which enabled this being love experience to happen because we want to get more of this feeling. This actually risks us getting less and less of it.

So what do we do about hot love?

If the having and being kinds of love are intertwined in the hot love experience should we run a mile from it, or embrace it? Or both? Or something else entirely?

Personally I think it is worth being cautious, recognising that the force behind hot love is often this very consuming yearning that comes from needs and desires that haven’t been met in our lives, whipped up by chemical reactions and cultural stories which encourage us to look to erotic and romantic love in particular to meet these yearnings.

Generally when we feel hot love we don’t know the person well, and we have no idea whether we’d be compatible in various ways, or enrich each other’s lives. We’re going on a feeling which is likely in large part projection of our stuff onto them and the hope of what they might be for us (the having kind of love).

The popular idea is that we only feel hot love for certain people, so those are the relationships that we should go for. There’s an argument that the opposite is true. While such relationships definitely give us the opportunity to see where we’re stuck and what our yearnings and patterns are, the old dynamics and intense feelings can make them hard places indeed to see clearly and to separate off enough to work on that stuff in ourselves.

I think it’s worth disentangling the people we feel hot love for from all other aspects of relating, like who we spend time with, have sex with, build family with, cohabit with, work with, etc. If we can see all of these as different strands then we can intentionally decide which relationships are compatible in the best ways to do these things: in ways that enhance, enrich and expand the experience of all the people involved. 

Then we can see hot love as hot love: separate to all that other stuff, and decide if and how we want to engage with it. If we do engage with it I’d suggest doing so with our eyes open: recognising it for what it probably is and slowly and creatively engaging. Ideally we’d have no expectations or assumptions about the shape it would take, and a lot of space to keep reflecting on what it brings up for us.

What about hot love showing us our capacity for being/doing love?

But if hot love is one of the – perhaps few – places in life where we can realise our capacity for that other kind of love – the being kind – shouldn’t we go for it in order to experience and enhance our ability to do that? Surely we should be all about expanding our ability to love others and ourselves in ways that see all of them, offering kindness and care, and not treating each other as objects (like having love does)? As Fromm points out – this is essential given the current state of the planet and the way we mostly all treat one another: on the individual level of interpersonal conflict and abuse, and on the cultural level of valuing some lives, bodies, and labour way more highly than others.

Personally I think it’s more about nurturing that capacity for being love in all of our relationships, including our relationship with ourself. Maybe it is partly because our culture is so stuck in having mode that we only experience being love so fleetingly, and only at certain times like when we fall in love, or share an intense experience in a crowd, or perhaps when we feel love for a child or companion animal.

Perhaps we can see those kinds of experiences as giving us a useful sense of what being love can be like, so that we can start the slower, longer process of cultivating that capacity in ourself and bringing it to all of our relationships and projects. It’s a bit like being helicoptered up to the top of the mountain to see the view, and then back down to the bottom to start the climb.

Another metaphor that occurred to me is being given a candle with a flickering flame. In having love we’re so grateful for that flame, and so frightened of losing it again, that we hide it away in a dark room and huddle around it with another person to get the small amount of heat and light that it gives off. But an alternative would be that we could use that flame to light a whole bunch of sticks and create a fire. We could keep feeding and nurturing this with others so that the fire keeps going, and keeps way more people warm.

One thing we know for sure about hot love is that – like the candle – it will eventually, inevitably, flicker out. Either the relationship will turn into a different kind of relationship (like a warm, companionable, kind) or it’ll end. And if we go more and more into having love then either we’ll have to break up or remain in something much more challenging, recognising our old issues of rejection, abandonment, feeling trapped or unsafe, for example. I recently read someone suggest that whether a relationship breaks up or remains together, the things that the people in it will be confronted with – and the work that they’ll be called upon to do if they’re up for it – is pretty much the same.

But if hot love brings us up against our stuff isn’t that a good, useful thing?

In a way it is. I think it’s always useful to see where we’re stuck or hooked. It gives us the opportunity to work on that stuff in ways that free us up, leave us more real and humble, and more able to love and be loved in that being mode. But given the ways we tend to engage with hot love – and the cultural promises that are attached to it – it’s really hard to see what it reveals to us as any kind of gift, or to engage with these hard hard lessons. 

When we’re in the having mode of love the initial wonder, joy and pleasure at finally having our yearnings met (being seen, approved of, or desired, finding safety, etc.) are the flip side of eventually not having them met because we’ve put them all on this one relationship and asked too much of it. That can be extremely painful as it treads a familiar path of loss, hurt and rejection which we were likely trying so hard to avoid when we grabbed hold of the hot love in the first place.

We can do our work alone, in a couple, in a family, with friends, in a community. Whatever our life is like these things will come up and we can choose to face them or to run away. Is a hot love relationship the best place to do our work? It may well bring everything up very intensely and starkly, but we can also get so caught in the dynamics that it’s extremely hard to see clearly. Also in focusing on a couple relationship, we can become separated from the kind of support systems that we need to do the work.

So again I’d be very cautious. Hot love can be the basis for a later, warm, relationship if it is flexible over time. But I’m not convinced that it has any more going for it than forging and nurturing multiple connections and building intentional relationships based on shared values, ways of living, etc. In hot love we’re often building a relationship on the foundations of that intense emotional experience, without taking our time to get really informed about the other person, the dynamic between us, and what we each want before building anything together. It’s kind of like forming a relationship while we’re high and hoping it’ll still be good when we sober up.

Hot love has a high risk of falling purely into having mode. This is not to say that other kinds of relationships escape from having mode, or the kinds of unconscious processes and unhelpful habits that I’ve covered here, of course. But they can be less intense, more spacious, and more supportive of us doing this work if we share these kinds of understandings.

And that’s my hot take on hot love!

The post Hot love: Being and having appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Fighting or Feeding Your Demons? It and Facing up to Historical and Intergenerational Trauma

Last night I saw the sequel to It and obviously I have many many thoughts and feelings. You don’t have be familiar with the film or book to read this post because I’m going to use it to make more general points about what to do with our demons: specifically whether fighting them or feeding them is a better idea, and how this links to the themes of historical and intergenerational trauma.

I will be talking about the ending of the film though so have a spoiler alert for that up front. TLDR: It’s better than the giant spider in the book, but not much. However at least there was an ongoing joke though the movie about horror authors who write bad endings.

Historical and Intergenerational Trauma

When I saw the first movie of this Stephen King story I wrote this post about intergenerational trauma because the film did such an excellent job of demonstrating how we pass trauma down through the generations. While I enjoyed the sequel immensely I feel like it lost the powerful message of the first movie, as well as missing an obvious opportunity to say something helpful about how we can face demons and prevent these patterns from repeating themselves.

To recap on my first blog post, the story of the first It movie links historical and intergenerational trauma and demonstrates how these things will just continue down the generations if we don’t address them. The first film focuses on the children facing It – in the form of Pennywise the clown – in the small town of Derry 27 years ago.

In terms of historical trauma there’s a sense that the monster in It came into being around the time of settler colonialism and the genocide of indigenous Americans. In that way It can be seen as a reflection of human evil: holding up a mirror to the violence we do to each other, to other species, and to the land. The monster in It reappears every 27 years and the horrors it perpetrates relate to the human evils that are present at the time. So we see It whipping up racism and white supremacy in the 1930s and homophobic hate crimes in the latest incarnation. There are also scenes relating to violent patriarchal treatment – and sexual and physical abuse – of women. In this way there’s a clear message that historical trauma unfaced will just find new forms and continue. Some bodies and lives will always be valued less than others, subject to oppression and violence. We can see this vividly at the moment in the way that the current trans moral panic echoes the 1980s moral panic against gay men.

In relation to intergenerational trauma, each time It comes back it preys on children, and each time the parents are oblivious to what is happening. In the first movie this is clearly related to the way each generation of parents perpetuate the traumas that happened to them on their own kids: from ignoring school bullying, to physically punishing their kids, to emotional neglect, to over-protectiveness and controlling behaviour, to the sexual abuse of a bereaved father. The message is that if we don’t look at what happened to us – and do our work around it – then we won’t see what’s happening to the next generation. Even worse we may well go from victim to perpetrator: acting out the same abuses ourselves.

Confronting our Demons

In the second movie the kids who battled It in the first film are all grown up. It returns to Derry and they are called back to face it again in the hope of eradicating it entirely this time, rather than just sending it away for another 27 years.

There’s a huge potential in this film, then, to address the question of how we – as adults – might acknowledge historical and intergenerational trauma and their impact. What ways might there be to put a halt to these recurring patterns rather than continuing to act out the very violences that were done to us? The metaphor of the demon who keeps returning presents a powerful opportunity to address what we might do with our own personal and cultural demons.

What the movie does do well is to be clear that we have to go back. Choosing not to engage with the past – and to pretend the pain of the present is not happening – simply isn’t an option. Others will be hurt and – in the end – we will also be hurt a lot more than if we did face our fears. Choosing not to engage is choosing a kind of death, or at least a life of remaining asleep rather than waking up to reality and doing something about it.

The adults in the movie all have to revisit the most frightening moments of their pasts as the first step towards battling Pennywise. Again this is a great message. Unless we can fully face – and feel – the impact of these traumas upon us then we can’t acknowledge how they’ve shaped us: the survival strategies and habits they’ve left us with. Without that understanding we won’t be able to shift those patterns and we’ll simply be doomed to repeat them: hurting ourselves and others in the process.

The Demons within Us

However, where the second film falls down – in my opinion – is that it never gets the other piece of the equation. We see how the adults have to revisit their childhood traumas and look after the victim/survivor sides of themselves back then, acknowledging the impact that it had on them. But the adults in It are all presented is pretty good people, maybe a little flawed. We never get the sense of how they – as adults – have become the generation who are now doing the damage. This was clear in the adults in the first movie, but not in the second.

Also, in the second movie, we learn that It was some kind of alien monster which arrived from another planet to wreak havoc on humans. To me this takes away from the sense of It being something caused by human evil and reflecting it back to us. 

The film quickly becomes a battle between the good guys (our group of loser kids all-grown-up) and the bad guy (Pennywise). All they have to do is to face it and beat it and then all the intergenerational and historical trauma just goes away.

Fighting Our Demons

From this simple good vs. bad perspective the end of the film makes sense. The group confront Pennywise and they fight it using the Ritual of Chüd: an indigenous American ritual which Mike says was used to banish It before (the stereotypical depictions of indigenous Americans, and Black people, in Stephen King books and movies is an issue here, of course). When this doesn’t work entirely they come up with their own plan which is to shrink it down to size by making it feel small: shaming it and denying It any power by showing how they’re not scared of it. Once it has shrunk they can destroy it.

I think this gives a terrible message. It suggests that we can fight our outer or inner demons and just eradicate them. There’s no sense that the characters have to acknowledge humanity’s own role in creating this ancient evil and the damage it’s continuing to do. Nor do they have to acknowledge the demonic within themselves: their own potential for hurting others through their unacknowledged patterns and habits.

Finally – as my friend Anita who I saw the movie with pointed out – the way the Losers fight the demon is to use the very tactics that were used against them: bullying and shaming. This reminded me of this famous Audre Lorde quote :

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

It seems to me that exactly what the group does here is to use the master’s tools: the abuse, shame, bullying, and violence that were enacted against them, and that have been enacted against oppressed groups historically. In a way it would’ve worked well if they’d used this tactic at the end of the first movie, meaning that It inevitably came back and they had to find another tactic. But the message that this is the tactic that actually worked is a terrible one. They never do have to ‘reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside themselves and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there’. They never have to acknowledge their involvement in historical and intergenerational trauma. They never really have to face their demons.

Feeding Our Demons

I found it fascinating that the ritual in It was called the Ritual of Chüd because it is such a similar name to a Tibetan Buddhist ritual which I’ve been adapting in recent years as part of my own work: Chöd practice, or feeding your demons. Intriguingly, Chöd practice explicitly offers an alternative to fighting – or using the master’s tools – which is perhaps a better way of addressing our cultural and personal demons.

Briefly what you do in Chöd practice is the following:

Locate your demon: Tune into whatever you’re feeling, find it in your body, and visualise it.Visualise your demon: Take this visualisation and imagine it as a demon sitting in front of you.Ask your demon: What do you want? What do you need? How will you feel if you get what you need?Embody your demon: Move across to take the position of the demon, feel how it feels, answer the questions as the demon.Feed the demon: Return to your position, imagine yourself dissolving into some kind of nectar – or food – which gives the demon what it needs.Welcome the ally: Observe what happens to the demon. There’s a sense that – on getting what it needs – it may well become an ally to help you instead of the demon that was making things so hard for you.

So I remember one time I did this ritual I felt this horrible tight clenched feeling in my chest. When I felt into it I visualised it as old rusty metal all around my heart. When I turned it into a demon it became a terrifying huge transformer-type robot in front of me with fire burning deep in its dark eyes and massive mouth. When I inhabited it, it felt exhausted and in constant pain. I asked it the questions and the answers were that it wanted to destroy me, that it needed rest because it was so ancient and tired, and that it would feel huge relief if it got that. I imagined dissolving into lubricating oil finally easing the rusted metal. It eventually all collapsed (rather like the house at the end of It) and in its place was a pool (again rather like the lake at the end of It) and some kind of being made of water emerged:  a sense of cool, calm and fluid in the place of hot, tense and brittle.

There’s a sense from this practice that our demons are the kinds of survival strategies we developed as kids. Over time they have become harmful to ourselves and others, but if we can face them and listen to them, they can morph into allies. In this way the practice is similar to embracing our inner critics, something I plan to write about here in more depth soon and touch on in my Plural Selves zine. 

In the example I gave, I read this as the demon being the survival strategy of armouring over my feelings to protect myself, but there was the sense that this strategy got in the way of intimacy with myself and others, leaving me brittle and controlling in ways that risked damaging – or even destroying – myself and my relationships. The practice suggested an alternative pattern of loosening, or dismantling, the armour over time: becoming more vulnerable and fluid.

It: The Alternative Ending

So how would It have ended if the group had applied Chöd practice instead of the Ritual of Chüd: If they had fed the demon instead of fighting it?

What does It want?

It’s very clear that It wants to frighten people, that it feeds on fear.

What does It need?

But what does It actually need underneath that desire for fear? Again the answer is pretty clear in the film. Several times It – in the form of Pennywise the clown – speaks of being unseen and lonely. It tells a small child that nobody will look it in the face and expresses distress at this. If we remember that It is holding up a mirror to human evil then this makes all kinds of sense. What it wants – from creating all this fear – is for the people of Derry to look at what it’s showing them. Each time they refuse to look this hurts it terribly and it has to retreat into itself, alone, for another 27 years in the hope that the next generation might finally see.

It’s clear that the monster wants the Losers to return to Derry. It goes to great lengths to bring them back, and to scare them – without actually killing them – as children and adults. You could read this as it trying desperately, repeatedly, to get its message across. But even when kids are disappearing and bodies are turning up, nobody pays any attention.

So an alternative to fighting the demon would be for the group to finally turn towards it, looking at it directly (instead of trying never to meet its eyes), and listening to what It has to teach them. This would involve recognising the historical traumas which we’re all implicated in which just continue – and morph into new forms – through each generation instead of ever going away (colonialism, white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, disaster capitalism, ecological crisis, etc.) 

This would also involve the group seeing the perpetrators (or demons) in themselves as well as the victims/survivors. They would need to face up to their own capacity for evil and abuse, as well as being the victims of it. This would involve recognising that the only way not to reenact these abuses and traumas is to acknowledge them, and the strategies they left them with, and to continually work on shifting their patterns.

How would It feel if It got what It needed?

I would love to see an ending to the film where Pennywise could finally morph into an ally. When we face our demons and learn to work with them, instead of battling them, they can stop attacking us so violently in order to get their message across. If the group listened to Pennywise perhaps it would not have to keep retreating for 27 years and returning to cause chaos and agony. Instead perhaps it could rest, safe in the knowledge that this group would do the work of waking up Derry – and beyond – to historical and intergenerational trauma. Or perhaps it could remain within each member of the group as an ally they could keep returning to and talking with.

Interestingly there is a sense of this at the end of another horror movie, The Babadook. In this film the main characters quit trying to fight the demon – who represents grief – and instead make it a home in their cellar and feed it and care for it. They recognise that this demon will always be with them, and only by acknowledging it and looking after it can they stop hurting themselves and each other.

Of course when the first It movie came out, social media decided to ship Pennywise the clown with The Babadook to great effect, so perhaps on some level we all knew that this was the ending we needed.

Pennywise and the Babadook

I can’t think of a better way to end this post than the way I ended the last one on this topic. We need to recognise that the ancient evil hurts us all and that we’re all implicated in it. We need to band together with all the other losers and get down into the sewers to face it. Are you with me?

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Sexual incompatibility

I was recently included in this article about sexual incompatibility by Alix Fox. It’s something that Justin Hancock and I talk about regularly on our podcast as we think that the myth of easy and ongoing sexual compatibility is one of the reasons people are often so unhappy and anxious about their sex lives. Here’s my answers to the questions Alix asked me.

What are the most common kinds of sexual incompatibility?

Probably the most common ones are people having different levels of desire or wanting different amounts of sex, and people enjoying sex for quite different reasons (e.g. for one it is to feel connected with a partner, for another it is more about the release of orgasm, or being in certain roles). People just being into quite different things is also common: like one being more kinky or open than another. 

Do you think absolute incompatibility is a myth and that most people can learn to satisfy one another? Or are there problems where it’s more sensible to break up, or accept it the way things are?

I would challenge the stay together / break up binary here! In any relationship there are bound to be areas of compatibility and incompatibility (around all kinds of things, not just sex). It’s useful to view it as a Venn diagram. What is in your separate circles and what’s in your overlap? The main problem is that people are taught that they shouldn’t have any incompatibilities and that The One true partner should meet all their sexual needs and desires.

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If we see incompatibility as inevitable we can remove some of the shame and start to think creatively about which desires we might explore together, which we might explore separately and how (given the agreements that we have around non/monogamy). Justin and I have produced zines on making your own sex and relationship user guides to help you to have these conversations. 

What are the ways people can approach incompatibility issues in terms of practical actions and strategies?

First it’s worth thinking about your non/monogamy agreement. In your areas of incompatibility where is it possible for each of you to get those desires met? If the relationship is sexually monogamous then ensuring time for separate solo sex, reading/writing erotica, watching porn, fantasy, etc. is important. If non-monogamous then might these desires be met with another partner, in hook-ups, with a sex worker, at parties, or in other ways? 

If one person wants sex a lot more/less than another, or this changes over time, try to expand your understanding of what ‘counts’ as sex. Make a long list – separately and then together – of all the erotic and sensual things you might enjoy together and then find out which ones you both enjoy. Create times together to enjoy those things so that there isn’t pressure in those times to have the kind of sex that the one person doesn’t want. Consent-wise you should only be doing what you are both a wholehearted ‘yes’ for. Ensuring that the times you do connect together are consensual and enjoyable for everyone involved will help a lot. 

When one person has a fetish the other does not share, dig into what sex – of various kinds – means to each of you. What is it you’re looking for from sex? What kind of feeling do you want from it? What is enjoyable about it for you? This kind of conversation can be very illuminating and help you find the common ground as well as the areas where you differ. 

If a partner doesn’t seem to know how to touch you, or how they want to be touched, it could well be worth going to some events together where you can learn more about sex, and/or doing some reading. Barbara Carrellas’s Urban Tantra and Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent both offer brilliant advice about how to learn to be with your body and another person’s body, learning what you enjoy giving and receiving, and how to be present to each other during sex. 

If you are both dominant/submissive – if you’re non-monogamous and you want to be erotically connected, what about finding a third person or people who you can co-top – if dominant – or submit to together? Or you could each get those desires met elsewhere and connect over comparing notes. Sometimes we can find hidden submissive sides (if dominant) and vice versa, so it might be worth playing with that very gently and cautiously to see whether you can switch, but if that doesn’t work for you that’s just okay. 

If one person wants sex to be tender and emotional, whereas the other has a more casual or raunchy attitude to sex, again digging into the meanings of sex and the reasons for having sex for each of you would be useful. Perhaps there is some common ground. If not then it’s fine that you have different desires. Can you reconfigure the relationship so that it is grounded on other things than sex and go elsewhere for the sex? 

If your partner doesn’t instinctively seem to be able to ‘read’ you, this is another good one for reading or going to events and learning each other. It’s also just okay if you find that sex isn’t one of your areas of compatibility and you need to go elsewhere for that and base your relationship on other things. 

Are there any additional approaches or ideas you can detail that can help people bridge sexual gaps and find greater satisfaction with one another? e.g. sex menus, being ‘GGG’, scheduling sex, getting therapy, etc.)

Sex menus are great. Check out Enjoy Sex and megjohnandjustin.com for more about how to talk about sex, be present to sex, and figure out what you want.

GGG and scheduling sex risk being a fast-track to non-consensual treatment of yourself and the other person. Never have sex you don’t want! It is fine to get your sexual desires met somewhere else. It is fine to have a close relationship which is based on other things than sex. Most partners have incompatibilities. Many long term relationships become non-sexual and that is fine. If you have unwanted sex you are hurting yourself and you are likely to want even less sex as a consequence. Please don’t do this to yourself! 

How important is it to solve sexual incompatibility? Is it possible to have a happy, healthy relationship without mutually satisfying sex?

It’s totally possible and very normal. The Enduring Love study found that many – if not most – long term couples had happy relationships without much sex together. The myth of one relationship meeting your sexual desires for a lifetime is really dangerous.

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