- Hello everybody.
Welcome back to my channel.
So today I have got a whole bunch
of sex advice for you from various different experts.
We just recently wrapped season six of my podcast "Doing It"
and we had 24 incredible guests
and I've learned so much from the conversations
that I had with them.
And there are just some like standout things
that I wanted to share with you
in case you haven't listened.
But also we are in between seasons right now.
We're working on something big for season seven
so it's the perfect time to catch up.
But I wanted to share with you some of the best
and standout advice that I picked up
from some of my guests
this last season of the pod.
And thanks as ever to my patrons
for making the podcast possible and especially so
with the new season that we're working on.
If you wanna get behind the scenes info
and know a little bit more about
what we're planning
and also help support
to produce the podcast itself,
then consider becoming a patron
and joining the common room.
Right, onto the sex advice.
So the first piece of advice
was that talking about money in relationships
gives you freedom.
And I learned this from Chantel Houston,
who is a producer and director
and co-host of the Money Honeys podcast.
I really loved the way that Chantel talked
about money and relationships in this episode.
She talked about how often people avoid having conversations
about money in relationships because it feels unromantic
but by actually having these direct conversations
about money with your partner, or partners,
can actually lead to more opportunity
for romance and being able to feel free as a couple.
I loved this framing of
actually opening up and talking about money
giving you freedom because so often money is seen
as a taboo topic that we don't talk about
and it being really stressful and emotional
and also deeply personal and that can make us feel trapped.
Chantel spoke about how there are just so many things
in a relationship that money impacts
and so the sooner you talk about it the better.
And if you figure out who is paying for what,
what accounts, what bill is coming out of,
if you do that all before it becomes an issue
it can give you just so much more freedom and time
to just enjoy being together.
The next piece of advice
is that polyamory isn't the only way
for Ace and Allo people to have a relationship together.
And this came from my chat with Cody Daigel-Orians,
A.K.A, Dad Advice.
Cody also has a book that came out earlier this year
called "I Am Ace".
So asexual people can absolutely have relationships
with allosexual people,
but we so often fall into the trap of
using polyamory as a way to explain how.
But Cody gave some great advice on how Ace and Allo people
can navigate having a monogamous relationship.
"All relationships require a negotiation
between the two people in them
and to sort of meet somewhere in the middle
of who they are and what they want.
So that's no different for an ace and allo couple.
If you want to be in a monogamous relationship
and one of you is ace and one of you is allo,
you just have to talk to each other
and see if there is a place in the middle
where both of you can be happy with that.
It's not impossible.
It isn't something that should be automatically
taken off the table."
So for example, the allo person could have a really rich
and satisfying solo sex life
or maybe there's different kinds of kink
that you can play with together because
kink isn't necessarily sexual.
Although he does admit that it can be harder,
he says that it can take some negotiation
and some sacrifice, but what doesn't in a relationship?
So this is another one that I learned from Cody,
and it's how to avoid compulsory sexuality
when raising kids.
So as a parent,
I found this point so interesting and helpful.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to raise Rowan
in a way that allows him to figure out his own gender,
sexuality and identity in his own time.
But the society we live in makes that really hard.
So I ask Cody, what's a good way to bring up things
like asexuality and aromanticism with younger kids?
And Cody said that the best place to start
is to explore ideas around compulsory sexuality.
So you may have heard of compulsory heterosexuality,
which I've done a whole video about,
but it's essentially how we're all
assumed, expected, and in some cases,
too many cases, pressured to be straight.
And compulsory sexuality is the idea that sex is something
that makes you a real human being,
a true adult and a happy and fulfilled person.
And then there's also am amateur normativity,
and I've no idea if I'm saying that right,
but that is the presumption
that everybody wants to pursue love
and that romance is an essential part
of being a human being.
I would highly recommend watching Rowan Ellis's video
about asexual representation in the media
if you want to get a sense of how we generally
view asexuality and aromanticism as a society.
It's essentially a lot of robots and villains.
So Cody said that if we can
from the time that kids are young,
to empower them with the understanding
that whilst love and sex can be great things,
if that's what you want,
not being interested in them
doesn't mean that you are broken,
and that there are lots of other ways
to experience the world
and have meaningful relationships with people.
Another person who gave really great advice
around raising children was educator
and facilitator Ben Hurst.
Ben's advice is that the best thing for boys
and tackling toxic masculinity
is not telling them to be another way
but helping them choose who they want to be.
Again, I think about how to raise Rowan
with a healthy understanding of masculinity so much,
maybe too much.
And it really does feel like these themes of
young boys, masculinity, and misogyny
are on a lot of people's minds right now
especially with the whole Andrew Tate stuff.
Young boys are getting a lot of mixed messages.
On the one hand, it's all men are trash,
boys are the worst thing in the world
and masculinity is toxic.
And then on the other hand,
you have the men should have power over women
and women are inferior
and there is just nothing in the middle for them.
And so it can be incredibly confusing
for a lot of young boys, which makes them more susceptible
and more vulnerable to misogynistic ideologies.
But talking with someone like Ben
who does a lot of in-person work with young boys
and talking about masculinity
really helped and gave me a lot of hope.
He said that it is near impossible
to avoid some of these social scripts
about how boys and men and how girls and women should be
but what we can do is provide young people with alternatives
and critical thinking skills
that allow them to come to their own judgments
and understandings of the world and themselves.
Ben said, "One of the biggest problems
is that the narrative is so prescriptive.
So we tell boys that they are supposed to be this way
and I don't know if the solution
is telling them to be another way.
I think it's more you can decide
who you want to be in the world
and based on what impact you are having on other people."
And it's sad that this is such a revolutionary concept
but in our society it literally is.
Next up, I learned that trauma can show up
in all parts of our bodies
from Jimanekia Eborn,
who is a sexual assault and trauma expert
and trauma media consultant.
Jimanekia talked about how we are full systems
and she described our bodies and minds like a circuit.
So if something happens to one part of your body,
there may be something else that is triggered elsewhere
that hurts, and that's how trauma works.
Jimanekia talked about how if somebody is sexually assaulted
or experiences any other kind of trauma,
then this can show up in different places in the body.
And the most common places that folks notice stress,
anxiety, and trauma showing up
is in our shoulders, chest, hips, and gut.
And I thought that this was really interesting
especially because of the way our medical system works
where we are looking at a very specific problem
in a really esoteric way
rather than taking in the full picture
and seeing what else might be going on there.
And so it's important that as humans
we connect more deeply with our bodies in a somatic way.
And I loved when Jimanekia says
that she often checks in with her friends asking,
have you been pooping?
How are your bowels?
She also spoke about how often people
recommend talk therapy but that isn't for everyone.
And she's noticed more recently
people being interested in somatic work,
which is more based around the body and movement
and incorporating the body and mind in therapeutic work.
And interestingly, that was kind of the route
that I went down when dealing with some
of my stuff that I had going on after birth.
So Jimanekia said that when we are thinking about trauma
we have to take a step back
and go, "Where did the trauma happen?
What's happening in your body?
Is your speech different?
Is the way you walk different?
Is your food intake different?
How's your sleeping?"
All of these things are things that we're holding
in our bodies and that we can navigate and investigate.
And as Jimanekia said,
"Our bodies are our truth tellers.
And I often tell folks,
your body knows before your brain does."
So the next piece of sex advice
is about how the virility myth
messes with our concept of sex
and puts so much pressure on people with penises.
This is something the author
and journalist Sophia Smith Galer talked about
in her episode, and she has a whole book
about sex misinformation and sex myths.
One of the myths that she talked about on the podcast is
one that hadn't really seen explored all that much
in the sexual wellness world
and that is the myth of virility.
It dates back to ancient Greek and ancient Roman times
and it's the idea that manliness
is about strength and energy and having a strong sex drive.
It's an ideal, a fantasy of what a man should be
but it's also become the norm
and what's expected of men.
Erectile dysfunction is not something
that we talk about a lot
and there is a lot of shame around it
when why do we actually put all of this pressure
on people with penises to get and maintain erections?
There's a lot of talk in sex positive spaces
about trying to take the pressure
and expectations off of things
like orgasm or like penis in vagina sex.
But do we still put a lot of pressure on erections?
And I think we kind of do, but we need to change that.
Sophia talked about the immense pressures
that we put on cis men to perform sexually
and the performance anxiety that this causes
and how it's really difficult
to talk about erectile dysfunction.
And she also said that as a heterosexual cis woman,
she's never been spoken to about or educated on
erectile dysfunction, and that's really rubbish.
She made the really great point that,
"I want to be set up to be a sensitive partner.
We should all be set up to understand what people
with different bodies to us experience,
especially if we're going to be in bed with them."
I think a lot of really great
and necessary work has been done
when it comes to cis women and people with vulvas
in terms of destigmatizing sex
and alleviating a lot of the pressure
and expectations around things.
But I think we could be doing a lot more
when it comes to cis men and people with penises.
Next up, I've got some great advice from April and Renee
on how to have a platonic life partnership.
This was a relationship dynamic
that I really hadn't heard anything about
until we got April and Renee on the podcast
to talk about their platonic life partnership, or PLP.
April and Renee described their PLP as essentially
"a best friendship with a commitment
that is kind of akin to a marriage."
So they talked about how their PLP
includes the same kind of commitments around finances,
co-parenting, domesticity,
making life plans and goals together
that people have in marriage or long-term relationships
but they've created this with their best friend.
And I think my main takeaway from this was like,
hello, have you heard of this?
Did you know that this was an option?
That you can live your life exactly as you want it
and what feels right for you,
and that there are no rules?
April and Renee talked about how they just kept wanting
to choose each other
but they still had to deconstruct
a lot of these social values that we learned
from a really young age that our forever partner
has to be a romantic partner.
It was such a great chat with them,
and I just loved hearing about how they were
writing their own rules for their own relationship.
And I think there is a lot that we can take away from that.
The next piece of sex advice
is that kink is a great tool for sex
and managing stimulation for people with ADHD.
We had Kate Osborne on the podcast
who is a neurodivergent certified sex educator,
and she spoke about how for her and a lot of other people
with ADHD, kink is a great tool for sex.
Many people with ADHD can struggle feeling overstimulated
or understimulated and kink is a really great way
to be in control of how much stimulation you are getting.
For example, if you're feeling overstimulated,
you can take away some senses
with things like blindfolds or earphones.
Kate spoke about how because kink and BDSM communities
are rooted in consent and negotiation
and respecting boundaries,
it means that you can explore all of these different things
in your own terms.
She said, "For a lot of people, myself included,
as a person with ADHD
who often struggles with sort of feeling like
I have to overcome all of this executive function
to just function in the world,
being able to come to this space
where you can absolutely do it on your own terms,
you can make that experience
what you need it to be to honour your own needs,
I think that's an incredibly powerful thing
for a lot of people.
Kink is just a really handy tool
for people who are neurodivergent."
I think often we can feel like
we have to go along with things
or follow sexual scripts
but one thing that I really learned from Kate
was that you can get as specific as you like
in terms of how you want your sex
and intimate experiences to go
in order to meet your needs.
And I love that.
The next bit of advice was about how we should reframe
what we think a sex life is.
And I spoke about this with Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah,
who is a podcaster and author
of the Sex Lives of African Women.
Nana talked about how the question of
what's going on in your sex life
is really a question of
what's going on in your intimate life
and what's going on in your body.
She says, it's deeply personal
what's going on in your body,
what your relationship is to your body
and how your body and you relate to other people.
Nana spoke about how you don't even necessarily
have to be having sex in order to have a sex life.
It's more about being in touch with yourself.
She said that,
"Having a sex life means being connected to your body.
It means touching yourself.
It means feeling joy in your body.
It means feeling pleasure in your body.
It means being aware when you are off balance
and maybe being proactive to do something about it."
I love this so much because I think that as a society
sometimes we talk about having a sex life
in ways that is actually external to us.
So having a sex life,
proving that you are desirable to other people
or it being about how much sex that you are having,
or how many people you've had sex with,
but the way that Nana talks about it
is that it's just much more about you and your body.
Nana also talked about that
depending on what is going on in your life,
it can be very easy to forget
the sex and pleasure part of yourself.
It can be easy to forget that you are a sexual being.
And she spoke about when she first became a mother
that she actually had to actively think,
okay I need to find myself again.
And she said that "in this busy world,
we do need to make time for sex and intimacy
and pleasure in our bodies."
And I think that that's a really nice piece of advice
and a reminder, because I don't know about you,
but for me sex has definitely been
somewhere near the bottom of my priority list lately.
Okay, so these next few ones aren't exactly sex advice.
It's more like fun facts.
Did you know?
Because I didn't before interviewing these guests,
and so I wanted to share with you,
and of course it goes without saying
I'd highly recommend you listening to the full episodes
of these if you really wanna like get into the meat of it.
So I had Emerson Karsh on the podcast
who is a Jewish kink sex educator.
And I'm Jewish,
although my knowledge of Judaism
doesn't really go beyond, "they tried to kill us.
We won, let's eat."
So I learned a fair few things
about Jewish values in this episode.
One is that women can divorce their husbands
if their husband is not pleasing them.
And another that Emerson shared with me is that
reproductive rights is a Jewish value.
I loved hearing these things
and they made me very proud to be Jewish.
If you're interested in learning more
about sex workers' rights,
I highly, highly recommend the episode with Stacey Claire.
Stacey is an author and an activist
and the co-founder of the East London Stripper Collective.
And her episode is just full of so much detail
around the history of policies,
around strip clubs in the UK
and sex workers' rights,
and the whole worker's rights movement in general.
And oh my God, it's fascinating.
I learned that strippers
have had a misclassified workers' status
and a lot of sex workers are becoming unionised.
And in 2009, the Policing and Crime Act
that was an attempt to clean up the stripper industry
and introduce a licencing regime for strip clubs
actually made life a lot harder
for strippers and sex workers.
Taking away strip clubs
makes it harder to fight for workers' rights.
Yes, there, there is so much in that episode.
Would highly recommend listening.
And then if you want to learn more about trans rights
and especially trans rights in sport,
then I highly recommend listening
to the episode with Dr. Veronica Ivy.
She is a queer trans athlete
and a scholar and the world leading expert
on trans and intersex athlete rights.
She talked about how the Olympic guidelines and rules
actually state that trans people can compete in the sport
of the gender that they identify with.
And that this has been the case since 2003,
and it's actually more recently
that people seem to be having a problem with this.
And she called sport the final frontier of transphobia.
She talked about various different studies
that have gone into hormones and sport performance
and about how actually the connection
between testosterone and sport performance is a myth.
It's a myth, guys.
It's a myth.
And she posed a question
of something that is yet to be measured
because we are so obsessed
with measuring biological differences
and that is the social differences
between genders when it comes to sport performance.
Does the socialisation of children
have long-term impacts on how good a child is
at throwing a ball, kicking a ball or running?
We don't know.
People need to be asking these questions.
So there we have it,
a whole bunch of different pieces of sex advice,
sex fun facts,
reframing of how to think about sex and relationships.
I hope that you found this interesting.
If you are a listener of the podcast,
I'd love to hear in the comments
what have been some of your biggest takeaways
either from the last season or older episodes too.
Thank you so much to my patrons
who make the podcast possible.
There's a link in the description if you want to join.
There's also a whole bunch
of bonus exclusive Patreon podcast episodes there
for your liking
if that interests you.
There's a behind the scenes of the making
of some of the episodes of "Doing It" called,
so how was that for you?
And then also me and my husband Dan, sometimes sit down
and have an old natter and the HanDan podcast.
Thank you so much for watching.
I hope you enjoyed this video.
I hope that you are well,
and I'll see you in the next one.
Bye.
(upbeat music)