Meg-John Barker's Blog, page 15

Trans: Adventurers Across Time and Space

This is a piece I wrote for the Gendered Intelligence conference and to celebrate Trans Awareness Week.

Introduction

This past year it was confirmed beyond all doubt that Dr Who is trans as Jodie Whittaker began playing their latest incarnation. During the same year we’ve been in the midst of an unprecedented moral panic where trans people have been treated much like the mutant characters in the X-men, echoing similar treatment of gay people in earlier decades.

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Here I want to play with the idea that trans people can usefully be regarded as time travellers and shapeshifters – or shifters of space. Given these impressive superpowers it’s sad indeed that we tend to be regarded as threats to time and space, rather than as heroes who may be able to transform both time and space for everybody’s benefit.

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This is – for me – a reaction against the unremittingly horrible onslaught against trans people that we’re going through. It’s an onslaught that I feel the visceral impact of on a daily basis, like most trans people. It’s one which has come close to home many times over, requiring levels of heroism from myself and the people I love which has left us exhausted and shredded, retraumatised and barely able to continue.

As we head towards trans day of remembrance on November 20th we remember the lives of those – mostly trans women of colour – which have been lost to anti-trans violence: a list which this year includes Naomi Hersi who was murdered in London last Spring. Those of us in the trans community are also painfully aware of the toll that the past year of virulently anti-trans media reporting has undoubtedly had on the already high levels of distress among our trans siblings; how many young people in particular have likely been pushed over the edge by the prevailing climate and the impact it has likely had on the reactions of their family and friends. And yet we continue to be used carelessly by journalists, politicians, researchers and others who feel entitled to take our stories, to make decisions which impact our lives for their own gain, and to get money and recognition on the back of our struggles.

In the face of all this violence and suffering I wanted to write something unapologetically celebratory about trans people. I know that the picture is more complex than this. I know that the world is a bleak place to be trans right now and getting bleaker all the time with the news from the US and Brazil. I know that trans people don’t really have magical superpowers (don’t we?) But humour me: we all need a bit of gender euphoria right now.

Trans Time Travellers

Two excellent colleagues of mine, activist-academics Kat Gupta and Ruth Pearce have been exploring the concept of trans time in their work. They point out that the way trans people are treated often denies us vital experiences of time that other people can easily access and take for granted. For example, the way that the media often continue to misgender trans people when reporting about us can be seen as refusing us the possibility of a future in our gender. At the same time, popular trans narratives may mean that we feel we have to erase our pasts to be granted rights and recognition.

There is what CN Lester calls ‘cultural amnesia’ around trans past, where anything trans related is always reported as new and therefore shocking and sensational, even when it has happened many times before: like a trans man being pregnant, or recognition of genders beyond the man/woman binary for example. The strong trans movement going back decades which Christine Burns documented in Trans Britain is written out of history as trans is presented as a new and fashionable threat to young people.

Policies and practices often expect trans people to be clairvoyant: promising to remain a certain way forever if we are to access services or obtain a gender recognition certificate, for example. Finally, the lack of sufficient services for trans people means that those seeking physical transition often feel like their life is delayed – or on hold – while they wait for treatment.

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Quiet, I’m trying to think. It’s difficult. I’m not yet who I am. Brain and body still rebooting, reformatting.

Right now, I’m a stranger to myself. There’s echoes of who I was, and a sort of call towards who I am, and I have to hold my nerve and trust all these new instincts. Shape myself towards them. I’ll be fine, in the end. Hopefully.

But Ruth and Kat suggest that trans people respond to such challenges in skilful and smart ways, finding many ways to travel, trick, and transcend time. For example, trans folks often experience non-linear life-courses which include disruption, disjuncture, and discontinuity of time. We might go through more than one puberty, with the second adolescence occurring later in life, which we experience in diverse, creative ways. Many trans people also look younger than we are. Some talk of our age in terms of ‘trans years’: the number of years since we came out or transitioned. So trans people of the same chronological age who came out at different ages are likely to have vastly different trans time experiences, which belie our apparently similar ages. Like Dr Who many of us find ways to regenerate over time as we find our ways to bodies, identities and expressions which feel like a better fit.

Another common form of time travelling is that of revisiting past versions of ourselves. For example, in her anthem for trans and gender non-conforming people, Black Tie, Grace Petrie sings to the younger version of herself, letting her know that she will find her way to a version of herself that fits. At the same time there’s a sense of a future version of Grace holding out hope that we’ll get through the current tough trans times.

I’m in black tie tonight

Get a postcard to my

Year 11 self in her year 11 hell

Saying everything’s gonna be alright

No you won’t grow out of it you will find the clothes that fit



And the images that fucked ya

Were a patriarchal structure

And you never will surrender

To a narrow view of gender

And I swear there’ll come a day

When you won’t worry what they say

On the labels, on the doors

You will figure out what’s yours

Grace Petrie, Black Tie

My own experience of trans time is of returning to sides of myself that I lost – or disowned – along the way because they were deemed inappropriate or unacceptable on a body like mine. Each shift and change becomes a way to reclaim part of me that was left behind, leaving me with a sense of being many different selves, ages, and stages all at once.

Trans Shape Shifters and Space Shifters

This brings us on to being a trans shape-shifter or space-shifter.

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Again, most trans people have pretty negative experiences of space. We’re deeply unsafe in many spaces, risking discrimination, ridicule, and even violent attack if our transness is read off us. At the same time we’re called snowflakes and dismissed if we point this out or try to fight for spaces to be safer for us to occupy along with everyone else.

Cruelly, despite our own deeply unsafe experiences of public spaces – and domestic spaces – the only images we tend to see of ourselves in the media are of being a danger to other people’s safety. It is a deep irony to see the battle being fought over our assumed threat in public toilets, when most of us have experienced bullying, attacks, and violence in such toilets. We all know about the strong ‘trans bladder’ that we develop to avoid using restrooms when we’re out and about, or at school or work. We do a violence to our own bodies because such spaces are so unsafe to us.

Many of us, particularly non-binary trans people, also have the disorienting experience of moving through space and being read differently at different times: but in ways that rarely mirror the ways we experience ourselves, even when we’ve repeatedly told people what that is. The affirming experience most people take for granted of having themselves correctly reflected in the important spaces they occupy day-to-day is unavailable to many of us.

So, as with time-travelling, we find ways to shapeshift in order to survive dangerous spaces, as well as ways of shifting space itself to turn it into a better fit for us, despite all the resistance to us doing this.

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Like Mystique in the Xmen many of us learn to use our shapeshifting powers to present in ways that enable us to navigate the spaces of our lives. Perhaps on the street we learn to present as more feminine when we might be perceived as a threat to others, but more masculine when we might be at risk of harassment. Maybe we learn in which spaces it is safe to foreground our transness, and which we need to background it or pass as cis. As H Howitt points out, we may well learn, for example, that the only way to access vital gender services is to foreground certain versions of transness, and the only way to access services for our disabilities or physical/mental health conditions is to deny or downplay our transness. It is another cruelty then that these vital survival strategies are turned against us in accusations of inauthenticity and deception.

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Like Magneto in the Xmen we also find ways of shifting the space around us to make it safer for ourselves and other trans people. For example during this moral panic trans people have found creative and innovative ways of making the online and offline spaces where we support each other safe-enough to occupy in spite of the frequent attacks and trolling we receive there. We may use certain platforms rather than others, curate our friend-lists, employ transphobe blockers on Twitter, or – as @1queer1 does – use algorithms to fill transphobic hashtags with cute animal pics or similar. We organise events of all kinds where we can support each other and share our experiences, or just know that we’ll be mirrored accurately by the people around us for once. Some of us take it a step further to make our whole lives more like these spaces.

In shifting space we often create something that’s better for everyone. For example the practices developed by Open Barbers to develop a hairdressers that is safer for trans people are ones that would be useful everywhere: not gendering customers or haircuts, creating a space that is also available for the community to use in other ways, and putting accessibility and consent at the heart of the project with diverse staff, sliding scale payment, options not to talk or look in the mirror, and more.

Conclusions

Travis Alabanza’s beautiful chap book Before I Step Outside [You Love me] brings together these themes of trans time and space. Travis speaks back to the older version of themselves that they were before they stepped outside into the risky space of the street and – in so doing – speaks to all trans people – particularly femmes and trans people of colour – who have to face this fear and uncertainty every time they step outside. Through their work they offer themselves – and the reader – the love that can give them the strength to step outside and to feel as though they matter.

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Trans people are repeatedly presented as threats to time and space. In relation to time, we’re accused of taking the world back to older versions of gender that threaten equality while simultaneously being accused of taking the world forward towards new versions of gender that will hurt the next generation. We’re perceived as threats to spaces such as public toilets, refuges, prisons, and schools. We’re mutants who threaten others through gender contagion and supervillains who hold ridiculous amounts power in some mysterious trans cabal.

But maybe we shouldn’t reject this perceived power. Travis suggests that rather than being pitiable people who rely on others’ benevolent generosity, trans people should be seen as a gift to those around us. We invite our friends and family into new ways of thinking about themselves, their genders, and their relationships, which can ultimately be just as liberating for them as it is for us. Imagine if families could celebrate finding out that one of their kids was trans instead of being horrified or sad.

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How to Understand Your Gender with Alex Iantaffi was our attempt to write the book we wished we’d had when we were young. In a way it’s a love letter to our former selves and also an attempt to contribute to changing the space of gender for the benefit of everybody. Nobody is served by the current rigid gender system: not men, not women, not non-binary people, not trans people or cis people. All of us suffer from it.

The normative check-box life which is set out for people from the moment of the first scan or gender ‘reveal’ party hurts all of us, and will inevitably be painfully disrupted at some point because it’s an impossible task to follow it perfectly. Trans people remind us not to make any assumptions about how a person’s future will unfold, and to prioritise shifting spaces to enable each person to find their own ways rather than imposing any ideals or assumptions upon them.

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Sex positivity

A while back I did an interview with Franki Cookney about sex positivity, which became this excellent article. It was great to read that, and this other great piece by Fancy Feast exploring sex positivity critically in recent weeks. Franki was kind enough to let me include the whole interview that I did here:

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

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

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

Have these definitions changed over time, do you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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New Zine: Mapping Your Sexuality

Over the last year my co-author Alex Iantaffi and I got together with top feminist scientist Sari van Anders to make a zine exploring her ‘Sexual Configurations Theory‘. With my awesome illustrator from Queer: A Graphic History, Julia Scheele, on board we think we’ve come up with something pretty special.

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

MappingYourSexuality

 

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Four things I’ve learnt about relationships for Poly Dallas Millenium

This year I was invited to speak at the Poly Dallas conference. The organiser, Ruby Boie Johnson, generously decided to subtitle the conference after my relationship self-help book Rewriting the Rules – also out in it’s second edition this year. Here is a written version of the talk I gave – about what I’ve learnt about relationships since I first wrote that book.

Why this means the world to me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rewriting the Rules

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

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

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

 

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

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

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What I’ve learn about relationships since Rewriting the Rules

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

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

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

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

Relationship patterns and intergenerational trauma

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

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

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

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

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

Self and other consent

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

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

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

The drama triangle

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

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

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

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

Staying with all the feels in all the relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Resources

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

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What Can We Learn About Consent From The Psychology of Sex?

I recently wrote an article about #MeToo and consent based on my new book The Psychology of Sex.  I wanted to consider what we can learn from psychology and sexology to inform our thinking about consent. Here’s the article…

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

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

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

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

‘Proper’ sex

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

‘Normal’ sex

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

How Consent Works

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

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

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

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

 

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Poor sex advice piece in The Conversation

The Conversation just published a piece by me about poor sex advice messages. It’s based on the analysis that Rosalind Gill, Laura Harvey and I did for our new book Mediated Intimacy, and it also includes some of the resources that Justin Hancock and I created for our ongoing sex advice project: megjohnandjustin.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Unrequited love

The lovely Kitty Drake recently asked me to answer some questions about unrequited love for a piece she was writing for VICE. Your can read her whole article here, and I’ve put my thoughts on the topic below. Having spent my entire adolescence in this painful state it felt good to revisit the topic with what I know now.

Meanings of unrequited love

Like pretty much everything in life unrequited love will mean different things to different people, and at different times in their lives. However it can certainly often function as a distraction from the difficult stuff of life, as well as being a projection of something of ourselves – or something that we long for – onto another person.

In this way unrequited love is quite similar to erotic or romantic fantasies more broadly. These frequently stem from the difficult times of our past, and reveal a lot about what we fear and long for. We often use them as a way to distract ourselves from the hard stuff of our lives. But, like unrequited love, they offer another possibility – we could tune into them and use them as an opportunity to learn more about ourselves: what we value, what we dread, and how we relate to others. There’s more on how to do this in my zine about erotic fantasies with Justin Hancock.

Treating people as things

The risk with unrequited love is that we treat it as something that ought to be requited, and focus on pursuing the object of our affections instead of tuning in to what these strong feelings have to tell us about our selves. Unrequited love is rarely actually about the other person – frequently we simply don’t know them well enough to really know that they are all of the things that we think they are. Also there is generally a large amount of objectification going on – we want them to be something for us, rather than loving them in their full humanity (more about the dangers of this approach in my book Rewriting the Rules). Putting people on pedestals is rarely kind – they often end up falling off and being hurt by the experience. Why would you do that to somebody you love?

There’s also often something in unrequited love about hoping for a rescuer or saviour: ‘The One’ person who will come into our lives and make everything better: A manic pixie dream person. Again this isn’t a cool thing to do to someone, and if somebody does requite that kind of love then it’s worth being very careful because you may well find yourself in the drama triangle (playing out the roles of rescuer, victim, and persecutor – not a good recipe for happy relationships – again see Rewriting the Rules for more on this).

Tuning into ourselves

However hard it may be, I would encourage people feeling unrequited love to leave the other person alone and to tune into themselves – perhaps with the help of a professional and/or self-care practices. It may well be that this person represents important sides of yourself that you have disowned or repressed in your life. What the love feeling is telling you is that you need to embrace those parts of you in yourself, not in another person (see my zine – Plural Selves). If you can do this then you may well find that you feel a lot better in yourself, and that you’re capable of better relationships because you’ll be bringing your whole self to them in future.

It’s a hard path for sure, but the way to go with this is to try to stay with these heady, intoxicating feelings and to tune into what they’re telling us about the ways in which we’re unhappy with our lives. Then – ideally – we can start the slow process of shifting and changing those things ourselves – with the support and help of friends, communities, and others – instead of wishing for somebody to land in our lives and do that work for us.

 

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Sex, Power and Leadership Conference

I’m taking part in Amy Jo Goddard‘s awesome online conference about sex and power on May 1st. There’s an excellent line up of talks and panels including the topics of intersectional feminism, #metoo, kink and power exchange, masculinities, and more.

This is a clip from my interview…

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

Do sign up if you fancy it here.

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My queero: S. Bear Bergman

I was so grateful recently to be asked to write a piece for The Queer Bible: a website that invites queer folks to write about the people who have inspired them. Check out these amazing pieces on Laverne Cox by Paris Lees, Kate Bornstein by Juno Dawson, Lola Flash by Juno Roche, and Karamo Brown by Timothy DuWhite, for example.

For me the choice of who to pick was an easy one. S. Bear Bergman is an inspiration to me as a gender warrior and as a writer, but more than either of those things, as a person who values – and embodies – kindness in their life and work.

The Queer Bible invited me to write a personal piece about what Bear means to me, so I wrote about kindness, and about writing and gender, and about how the relationship between writer and reader can be another kind of vital relationship which challenges conventional ways of understanding and valuing relationships (a theme that both Bear and I both write about).

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On a grey London day in March 2014 I took my seat in a small theatre above a pub to see S. Bear Bergman talk. I wasn’t familiar with Bear’s work: a partner had invited me along. I was accepting every social invitation I received at the time because I’d just relocated to London and knew that I had to start the long, slow work of building up some kind of friendship network. I was coming out of several years of self-imposed isolation following a tough experience of media shaming and the collapse of relationships and community that followed. I’d just gone through yet another painful break-up. Things with my family were strained. I didn’t have many close people at all.

Bear was reading from his new essay collection. Like all of his books this includes stories which are funny, thought-provoking, poignant, and frequently all three together. This time, following the birth of his son Stanley, the focus was on relationships with family of all kinds – biological and logical – including people – as he puts it – who share bonds of blood, of marriage, of wine, and of glitter. Read more…

 

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Rewriting the Rules: Second Edition!

The second edition of my book Rewriting the Rules is out now. Look – here’s the cool new cover and everything!

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This is pretty huge for me because – as you can gather from the title – I set up this website around the time I wrote the first edition. Back then I had no idea that it’d do well enough to warrant a second edition, nor that I’d get to write several further anti-self-help books on the topics of love, sex and gender, on the back of that one. This year I even get to talk at an international conference which is subtitled after this book (so much gratitude to the amazing Ruby Bouie Johnson and Poly Dallas Millenium).

In the second edition it was great that I got to use the ‘anti self-help’ phrase in the subheading (more on that in a mo), that I got to publish it under my new name (marking one of the shifts I’ve gone through since writing the first edition), that I got to include new comics, more subheadings and pauses, and more intersectionality throughout. Hopefully it shows what I’ve learnt – about myself, about writing, and about the world – in the last few years.

The folks at Psychology Today did an interview with me about the new edition. If you want to find out more about it, read on, and do pick up a copy if you’re interested.

There’s a lot of information out there about relationships, and much of it implies that when things aren’t working, you are the problem. Maybe it’s time to revise the ways we all think about relationships.

Why do we need new rules for love relationships?

We don’t necessarily need new rules, but we do need to think carefully about the rules we’ve received and whether they work for us. There’s a strong idea out there that there is one “right’” or “normal” way of doing relationships that everyone should aim for by following certain relationship rules. Actually there is no “one size fits all” way of doing relationships, and it’s important for all of us to find the way that works best for us. The current rules of relationships can lead to a lot of pain and suffering—for example, if somebody so fixed on finding ‘”The One” perfect partner that they don’t invest in all the other important relationships in their life, or if the pressure on long-term love makes someone stay in a relationship that’s damaging for them, or if attempts to find love mean somebody ends up being bruised and battered by breakup after breakup.

Do we need any rules for them?

Not necessarily. One point I make is that any set of rules can become rigid and constraining if we hold it too tightly. This is true for conventional monogamous coupledom, but it’s also true for any kind of alternative relationship style. The approach of embracing uncertainty, which I explore in the book, is about moving away from the desire for a clear set of rules that will hold forever and instead embracing flexibility and being present to relationships as they are in the here and now. That doesn’t mean that we won’t communicate and negotiate about how we want to do our relationships, but it does mean a move away from rules that are set in stone.

Why a self-help guide that claims to be anti-self-help?

What I mean by “anti-self-help” is that a lot of self-help books locate our problems and difficulties in life in ourselves, as individuals. They suggest there’s something wrong with us that needs fixing, and they sell the book on the basis that the “expert” can give you tricks or hacks to solve all your problems. My view is that many of our struggles—particularly around relationships—are more due to the rotten cultural messages that we receive than to any kind of individual ‘flaw’ we might have. So Rewriting the Rules is a self-help book in that it gives you lots of ideas about how to navigate the wider cultural ideas about relationships, but it’s anti-self-help in that it doesn’t see you as the problem that needs fixing. In fact it sees that whole idea as part of the reason we struggle so much. Read more…

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