Meg-John Barker's Blog, page 15

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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Using New Relationship Energy (NRE) to Open Up rather than Close Down

I thought I’d write a bit about New Relationship Energy (NRE) here (no particular reason, nothing to see here). It’s a topic that the wonderful Sophia of Love Uncommon has been writing some very useful posts on recently. She covers what NRE is, and what to watch out for when you’re in it. I’m going to summarise her points here for people new to the concept, and then explore another theme of how we might use NRE to open up to our other love/s rather than closing down.

What is NRE?

Sophia describes NRE as ‘the emotional experience at the beginning of a sexual and/or romantic relationship (which) includes heightened emotional and sexual excitement, and sometimes obsessive thoughts and urges to be intensely connected with the other person’. In her first post she talks about where NRE comes from in terms of chemicals and emotions.

I particularly appreciated Sophia’s reflections on how profound it is to be seen by a new person. In the new edition of Rewriting the Rules (out now people!) I reflect on how, in the past, my relationship pattern was to try to shape myself to fit what (I thought) other people wanted me to be. My last few experiences of NRE have been perhaps even more profound then, as they have involved an intentional revealing of myself – even the vulnerable parts. To be seen and found loveable in those places is an intense and wonderful experience indeed.

Sophia also draws on Esther Perel and Barbara Carrellas to explore eroticism in NRE: how that can be much easier with new partners who we haven’t established patterns with, than with older partners with whom we might not have the spaciousness needed for eroticism. Sophia suggests that erotic encounters often need a balance of risk and safety which can be easier to find in NRE.

What to watch out for

In her second – hugely helpful – post, Sophia comes up with nine things to watch out for during NRE. I love the idea of balance between embracing NRE (which, let’s face it, is an incredible feeling and offers so much in terms of the potentials of this new connection) and approaching it intentionally, or consciously, in this way.

The nine things Sophia lists to watch out for are:

Losing interest in our passions
Spending less than half the time we used to with our other close people
Stopping doing things we need to function (e.g. eating, sleeping, washing, physical activity)
Massively changing our life to accommodate the new person in a way that interferes with things like our work or sleep
Using the majority of our productive and creative energy on the new relationship instead of things like work, study, hobbies
Spending most of our conversations with other people talking about them to the point where it receives desperate eye-rolls rather than fond teasing
Making non-negotiated changes to how much time we spend with other close people
Making life-changing commitments to the new person even though we’ve only known them 3 days/weeks/months
Lying to our close people about the degree of connection we have with the new person

 

I encourage you to read Sophia’s post for the details on each of these – but what a useful checklist right?

Opening up and closing down

If you’ve read my other stuff you’ll know that opening up and closing down is a big thing for me. Whatever I’m talking about I’m always asking ‘what does it open up?’ and ‘what does it close down?’ Most things have the capacity to do both.

Reading Sophia’s list I was struck that I’ve definitely had the experience of NRE doing those things, but for many of the items I’ve also had the opposite experience. There have been times when NRE has left me feeling way more creative and energised about my projects, for example, or making life changes which have been part of an ongoing trajectory that’s taken me closer to what – and who – I want to be, not away from it.

However, there’s certainly a big risk with NRE that it does result in us spending less time and energy on our existing relationships and/or feeling the love that we have in those places diminished in comparison to the new shiny love feelings.

So I got to thinking, how might we intentionally draw upon our NRE to open us up to the other relationships in our lives rather than to close us down? Here’s a few ideas I’ve come up with so far.

Looking at other people with our NRE eyes

There’s a Buddhist meditation where you imagine a friend, a stranger, and an enemy and cultivate feelings of loving kindness towards them, perhaps by picturing each of them from the moment of their birth through to the moment of their death, and touching on the things that are meaningful to them in the same way that the things you value are so meaningful to you.

I thought that we might use NRE in a similar way. One common experience during NRE for me – and I suspect many of us – involves waiting in stations. When waiting for the heart-stopping sight of my person walking towards me I’ve started to do a type of loving kindness practice. I try to look at each person coming towards me with those NRE eyes, imagining that I’d connected with them in the same way: that it was them I was about to spend the afternoon with them finding all about each other. It’s a great reminder that each of those people is a precious, complex human being, worthy of love.

Being present to all of our people

Turning to the close people in our lives, a similar thought experiment can be helpful. How can I be present to this person and see them anew, rather than only seeing them through the lens of everything I already know about them and all the assumptions I have based on this?

Our delight in learning about the new person can exacerbate a sense of stuckness around older relationships, or it can be a helpful reminder that – like the new person – everyone in our lives is constantly shifting and changing, and has many facets to them. Can we take this opportunity to connect in older relationships in new ways, and/or to open up to new aspects of each person.

Bringing all of ourselves to older relationships

Relatedly, one thing that’s easy to do in NRE is to bring newly emerging sides of ourselves out in the new relationship because it’s less risky to do it there than it is in existing relationships where we could face surprise, or rejection, if we start acting differently.

A useful challenge here is to reflect on the sides of ourselves that we’re bringing to the new relationship – perhaps more playful, sexy, or vulnerable sides – and intentionally try to bring them out in our older relationships too. We might notice when we struggle to do that, and withdraw. We could talk about this openly and/or deliberately cultivate situations in other relationships where we can most easily bring those sides of ourselves.

This is not to say that all sides of ourselves need to be expressed in all our relationships, but it can be useful to think about which sides we express and where, especially if we’re tending to bring out newer, shinier selves in NRE only (more on this in my Plural Selves zine).

Appreciating older loves for what is precious in them

Cultivating appreciation is another useful practice that can follow from some of these other suggestions. What is it about our existing close relationships that are so precious? Looking at them through NRE eyes can help to remind us of those things. For example, it is wonderful and intense to be seen and met by somebody new, and how utterly wonderful that this person who has been in our lives for X many years still sees us and loves us even though they’ve probably seen us at our worst.

We might also appreciate, for example, comfortable companionship, the capacity we have to be vulnerable with this person, the conflict intimacy we’ve developed through getting through tough times together, or caring and being cared for. We could reflect on how each relationship in our life has changed over time and appreciate ourselves, and the other person involved, for supporting each other in the people we’re becoming.

It can be great to share these appreciations with the other people in our lives when we have them, and also perhaps reassuring for those who may have fears around our NRE and the impact it will have on our other relationships. Also we might consider having some of the conversations of the ‘how are we going to do this relationship?’ type – which we’re having with our new person – in our other existing relationships too, given that relationships change over time and ongoing consent is always a good idea.

Appreciating different kinds of love

Something I write about a lot is the value of different kinds of love – beyond sexual and romantic – in our lives. I’ve just finished reading Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton, which includes some great reflections on the tendency of people to prioritise partner relationships over close friendships in NRE, and how painful that can be. I love how the book calls into question what we even mean by romance, in the intensely romantic descriptions of some of Dolly’s friend relationships.

I think it’s worth reflecting on the NRE we can experience when connecting with all kinds of love (friendships and collaborations, and relationships with companion animals, great new authors, and new projects are some of the ones that jump out at me as having similar features).

Also, again, can we draw on this NRE to cultivate appreciation of all our relationships? One thing we might share with our new person is a description of all the other important relationships in our lives. That can be a great time to remind ourselves what’s so precious about those people and to tell the stories of those relationships. Again we might then go back to those relationships with new appreciation.

Loving ourselves

Finally, NRE offers a brilliant opportunity to cultivate love for ourselves. Check out this amazing person who is finding us hot and exciting and delightful and wants to make space in their lives for us. We must be pretty awesome right?

The closed down version of this, as Sophia points out, is where we get into craving that feeling and believing the new person is the only person who can give it to us, so we close down to other relationships and place all our energy in the NRE.

But the opening up option is available to us as well. If we can draw on the NRE to challenge ourselves to really start believing that we might be loveable, or at least acceptable and deserving of love, then that can make us more able to give and receive love in other relationships as well. If the new person is loving us even in the places where we’re vulnerable, maybe we can feel a little safer sharing that vulnerability with other people in our lives, and so build greater intimacy with them.

Of course part of this love of ourselves is self-compassion. That means not beating ourselves up when we do make mistakes, close down, or flail around a bit in the intensity that is NRE. Sometimes we’ll surf it like a wave and sometimes we’ll fall off and find ourselves underwater for a while, and all of that is okay. It’s a good time to check in with yourself about your preferred self-care practices and to put them in place to help you through.

 

Find out more

You can find Sophia’s posts on this topic on the Love Uncommon website.
Justin Hancock and I have done podcasts about related topics like dealing with crushes and romance over on megjohnandjustin.com. We will, no doubt, do more on this theme.

 

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