Hi, everyone! I’m Dr. Liz and I am here today to talk to you about a movie I recently got to see a preview screening of, which is To All the Boys I Love: P.S. I Still Love You, a Netflix original movie. I got to see it about a week before it was released on Netflix here in Portland where they do a lot of filming for the movie and I wanted to talk about the parts about this movie that I really loved and the parts about this movie that I was a little bit disappointed by.
So for anyone who doesn’t know me, I freaking love love movies. I love a movie about love. I love a rom-com. I love a drama. I love a dramady. Like if it is about love and it’s going to make my heart swell and sing, I am here for it.
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before was one of my favorite Netflix movies in the last couple of years. It was a really tightly shot film. It was beautiful in the way that it used the different scenes and the different character developments to create a really compelling story about what love is and how people find love and feel love.
So I was excited to see the sequel because first of all, the talents, the performers, are really, really excellent. The lead actor or lead actress put in a phenomenal showing in the first movie and I had a lot of faith in her ability to carry a second one. The romantic leads were all great as well, the father. It was just a really nicely done movie.
And the second one had a lot of elements from the first that I really enjoyed. The acting performances were still very strong, very well done, a lot of interesting components about the cultural differences between Lara Jean and her dad. Lara Jean’s dad is white. Her dad – or her mom was Korean but had died. And her dad keeps trying to keep the culture alive so there’s a bit of a way that the three sisters Lara Jean, Kitty, and of course I’m spacing on the oldest sister’s name, it will come to me, all interact with the way that their dad tries to preserve their culture through cooking them food that he doesn’t do very well or having them wear traditional outfits.
This movie overall, spoilers ahead, if you don’t want spoilers for this very important Netflix movie, I would stop watching now. This movie is essentially a classic love triangle movie. And I think that part of why I didn’t enjoy it as much is that love triangles in my opinion are a very lazy device for movies, particularly in a world where polyamory exists.
In this movie, the love triangle is one between her romantic interest from the previous movie and the person whose letter we don’t actually see delivered or received in the first movie, who just happens to end up at the same internship that she is doing during senior year for her community service hours.
What’s interesting about the movie is that the new interloper of sorts, the letter receiver, is someone who in a lot of ways is better suited to Lara Jean. They have more similar interests. They think about things more similarly. However, she seems to have a better connection in a lot of ways with the person she has been dating.
I think that this love triangle was an interesting idea and I think that it was a lazy way to explore Lara Jean’s own assumptions about what relationships are or are supposed to be or how she finds herself as a person in relationship and figures out what that looks like for her. I think that there are other ways they could have explored those same themes that wouldn’t have been about this, is it this person or this person? Do I actually really like my boyfriend or do I like someone else more?
I think that it reinforces this idea that if you are attracted to someone else or like someone else, it must mean that there’s a problem in your relationship rather than just showing that there are problems in the relationship that have nothing to do with this other third person.
Some things that I really did enjoy about the movie were the ways the characters eventually communicated, when they finally did get around the communicating, they did a pretty good job of it. Noah Centineo’s character does a good job overall of trying to communicate openly with Lara Jean even when she struggles too.
I also really enjoyed that there was a lot of spot line about the competition between women or friends and like how to heal those wounds. And it was really interesting to see how they handled that conflict and brought some new resolution to it over the course of this movie.
My favorite character in the movie was Stormy, the glorious older woman at the retirement home where Lara Jean volunteers, who really helps her come into her own power and explore who she is.
Overall, I would say that this movie was good. But I don’t think that it fulfilled the promise and the level of expectation that I had based on the first movie. So I would recommend seeing it and I would say that it is not as good as the first one.
So no like necessary judgment there, just like not as solid of a movie. It’s still a better movie than a lot of like the original love movies that come out in a lot of ways. I think I just have higher expectations for it.
And movie people out there, polyamory exists! Polyamory exists. Liking two people doesn’t mean you don’t actually like the first one or that you need to break up with one of them especially in high school. Shouldn’t we encourage people to date multiple folks to see what it is that they like?
Being in one relationship for all of your teenage years sounds like a terrible idea and a really bad way to learn about yourself, to learn about dating, to learn about who you are when you date, and what kind of people you like to date. I just wish there are more movies that didn’t rely on is it A or B as like their key source of dramatic tension.
Anyway, I hope you all watch it. If you have seen it, give me your thoughts. If you loved it, awesome. If you hated it, I hear you. Again, I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love love it. I thought it was good. I didn’t think it was great. But I love to hear what you think. So please leave a comment down below and let me know your thoughts. And I’ll be back with you again soon. Bye!
Hi, everyone! It’s Dr. Liz coming back at you. This video is probably the first one that you’ve seen from me in a long while. And in this video, I wanted to talk about where I’ve been and why I haven’t been doing videos as much lately, and also talk about giving yourselves space to be imperfect and to struggle.
So, as some of you know, if you know me personally or if you’ve been following some of my stuff online, last year in March, I had a really hard breakup. It was a breakup that just really rocked me deeply for a whole bunch of reasons.
In addition last year, one of my two cats had to be put to sleep and there were just a lot of different losses, a lot of different hits to my system.
In early October of last year, so it’s like four and a half months now, I got diagnosed with a bulging disk and I developed this sinus issue that you can probably hear on this video that has been ongoing since then. So I’m at four and a half months of chronic sinus infection now.
In addition, I was moving into my place, getting settled in Portland, joining this amazing new community, The Perlene, which is where I’m recording today.
And with all of that, I just – I didn’t have it in me to record new content. It’s hard for me to talk about struggling. I’m someone who for most of my life has been the person who gets it done, who manages to do things, who is exceptional, who achieves, who is wonder woman, who everyone is like, “Oh my god! How can you do so much?”
And in 2019, I decided instead to take a year to just breathe and take space and heal and take care of myself. And one of the results of that is that I just, in listening to where I’ve been at, have not been in a place where I felt like I was ready to record new stuff.
Those of you who aren’t in this kind of field, who don’t put out content for people may not understand the amount of energy and time that can go into this. For me last year, I also finally got diagnosed with ADHD and started stimulant medication for that. And when you combine my health issues, the losses I was facing, and executive dysfunction, it makes sense that I just didn’t get to recording any content for a long time.
For me, I love the chance to have these videos where I get to talk to you about things that are important to me. At the same time, recording video is hard for me. Part of what I love about talking to people and doing education work and doing all of the work that I do is getting to see the people I’m talking to, see how it reads for them, feel their energy, interact with them, build on something in the room together.
And when I’m recording these videos, it’s just me and that camera and I’m just staring it down the whole time. And I try to imagine faces of people I care about. I can try to imagine what this will be like as a conversation. But it takes a lot out of me to get this stuff done. So I haven’t.
Now, could I have? Could I have forced myself through it? Maybe. I think a lot of what I’ve been wrestling with is the balance between fulfilling promises or things that I’ve said I do to my patrons on Patreon or to those of you who follow this channel with like listening to my body and my intuition and trying to peck apart like when am I just genuinely not up for a thing and when is this executive dysfunction or procrastination or something else that I can push through?
It is hard and there have been a lot of times over the last several months where I’ve asked myself if I’m like just fucking around or if I should be doing more or if I’m like letting myself off too easy?
And I think a big realization for me has been that the lesson capitalism teaches us is that our value is our productivity. What we do is what we’re worth. And that means that people with disabilities or with neurodiversity are often framed as less valuable because they can’t do as much as reliably. And that’s bullshit!
I love being able to talk to all of you. I love knowing that my videos helped people. I love being able to talk about sex and relationships and love and all of this fun stuff. And I don’t like feeling like if I’m not putting out a video every week, I’m somehow failing.
So this video is me coming back to say first of all, hey, I know it has been a while. I’ve missed you. I hope you’ve missed me too. And also to say that I’m going to try to put out a video a week and there are probably going to be periods of time where I just don’t have new content coming out. And that’s just going to have to be okay for all of us.
I want to be able to live in a world where folks understand that life is more complicated than something that can be scheduled out every week, and where we all work to give ourselves the grace and the care to do less and to take steps back when we need to. I love putting out content but I love myself more. I love being in a home now that I love. My place is so good. I promise I’ll shoot videos at my place so you can see it. But I love my new place. I moved there a year ago and I’m so happy there.
I love being a part of this community, at The Perlene. This is an amazing community of badass women and non-binary folks who are doing phenomenal things with their work and their personal lives and they’ve been so supportive and an amazing landing place for me here in Portland.
And I love a new relationship that I’m in that has been going me tons of joy and I love that I have spent the last year in change, really giving myself space to feel things, space to experience things, space to explore things, and space to do less.
And so, I’m hoping that all of you can find your space to be okay with doing less, to be okay with whatever it is you have to offer being enough, to be okay with your worth not being about your productivity or how many tweets or posts you put out, because I’m working on that too.
So, I’m happy to be back and I hope to be here more and I hope all of you will understand when I can’t be. Sending you all of my love and hoping for grace for all of you. And I’ll talk to you next time.
Bye!
How can I do non-monogamy but not be a jerk about it?
Hi, everyone! I’m Dr. Liz and I’m here to you today to talk about great ways to get into healthy patterns in non-monogamy. So non-monogamy encompasses any form of relationship in which there is not exclusivity related to something like sex or dating.
For me, I am polyamorous. That means that I have multiple loving relationships with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved.
In polyamory, I think a lot of people wonder like, “How do I do this thing?” Because most of the things that we learned about how to date and be in relationships, we learn from a very mononormative model, a model that says that exclusivity is what makes someone special, that if you care about someone you only want them, that what makes someone worth dating is if you don’t want to date anyone else.
So like how do you then figure out how to do dating and sex stuff when most of the messages you learned about it aren’t designed for when you are dating multiple people? The easiest answer is, unpack your assumptions about what sex and dating mean.
In my book, I talk a lot about unlearning the monogamy mindset, this mindset that says that being the only is the only way to be special or that being the only is the most important thing or being the best is the best part.
What if instead we can find ways to be happy and feel special and feel seen and cared for without that kind of exclusivity being necessary?
What if we can unpack what love looks like to us?
What are the ways that someone can show us love that don’t rely on them not showing it to someone else?
What are the ways that we can show love to other people that they will be able to hear and receive that don’t have to do with not dating anybody else?
Another element important in doing non-monogamy and not being a jerk is, understanding how power works within your relationship. Who holds the power in different ways and at different times?
For me, I’m white. That means that if I’m dating a person who is not white, there is a lot of societal power that I yield that they don’t have access to. And I have to be aware of how that impacts our relationship.
In addition, I am non-binary. So if I’m dating someone who is cisgender, they have to be aware of how their gender and their being cisgender might give them power societally that I don’t have access to.
When we are in relationships, there is never going to be relationship where power is completely equal. So what’s important instead is to just be aware of how are we balancing the power, being aware of what power dynamics are present, and making sure that we neutralize them or handle them with as much care as possible.
Another thing important to doing non-monogamy and not being a jerk is having the boundaries, being able to communicate what your boundaries are, being able to hold them, being able to respect someone else’s boundaries. Related to that is good communication and ways of handling things like jealousy.
If this sounds like a lot, it’s because it kind of can be. This is why I wrote my book, to give people resources that are practical and usable when navigating these situations.
I’m also now about to offer a really fantastic web series with my friend, Kevin Patterson, the award-wining author of Love’s Not Color Blind and co-author of the For Hire series, which is a series of books about queer polyamorous super heroes of color.
We wanted to give folks a way who are getting into non-monogamy or newer to it a way to make sure that they are setting things up in a way that is as healthy as possible. And so, Kevin and I have decided to start offering this class, Unpack Your Polyamory.
I’ll put a link to it down below. But this class is a 6-week live webinar and you can buy any single class in this series or the entire 6-week series. And we wanted to create a really great toolkit for people to have so that as we do non-monogamy, they are able to do it in a way that is as ethical as possible and that treats everyone as well as possible. That’s what’s going to make you feel better about the way you are doing non-monogamy.
If you want to know more about it, please check out the link below or you can ask me questions in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer them.
I’ll also be tagging Kevin in any of my social media shares of this so that you can ask him questions too about his perspective and like what he wants to make sure everybody gets out of the class.
Most of all, I’m hoping that I will see some of you in this class. The class starts April 1, 2020 and will be every Wednesday for an hour and a half for six weeks. After the class is over, we will have recordings available for sale as well. So if you can’t make stuff live, just let us know and we can figure something out.
But I’m hoping that this will be a really useful tool for everybody moving forward. So I’m looking forward to seeing you live soon in Unpack Your Polyamory.
Bye!
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Unf*ck your polyamory webinar with me and Kevin Patterson of Poly Role Models is coming April 1st! Be sure to sign up at Bit.ly/unfuckpolyam and reserve your spot today!
Order your copy of Building Open Relationships.
Dr. Liz and Carly talk about body positivity, and what that means in a sex-positive world. This was first seen on https://www.sdc.com/?s=Dr.+Liz+Powell.
You can find Carly @Makeupandsin on Twitter and elsewhere! She blogs at dildoordildont.wordpress.com
Dr. Liz Powell: What is body positivity and why does it matter? Hi! I’m Dr. Liz Powell from Sex-Positive Psych.
Carly: I’m Carly. I blog at DilDoorDilDont.Wordpress.com.
Dr. Liz Powell: Very cool. And Carly is joining me here today to talk more about body positivity. So Carly, for people who don’t know, what does body positivity mean?
Carly: Body positivity is really just being comfortable in your own skin and like not allowing other people or outside influences to affect how you feel about yourself.
Dr. Liz Powell: That is so hard.
Carly: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: That is so hard.
Carly: Yeah. For as much as I talk about it, even I struggle with it. Like there are days that like I’m like, oh, I’m self-conscious about this thing or like I’m not feeling good about this other thing like even I struggle with it.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah. I mean I – throughout the course of my life, I don’t know that I could remember a time since like in middle school that I felt good about my body on any kind of consistent basis and like I’ve been a variety of different sizes and shapes over a lot of different years. I’ve been varieties of more fit and strong versus kind of more focusing on restoration and healing. And I don’t know that there has ever been a time where I looked at my body and I was like, “Yes, this one not like - oh, but these things could change and I want to change this bit.”
Carly: Yeah. Even now, like I feel very confident in my body like it has gotten me to where I am like I’m able to do the things that I do. And of course, it’s like one or two things that I would love to change.
Dr. Liz Powell: Sure.
Carly: But like overall, it’s about just feeling confident in myself and like if someone is going to say something negative to me, to not let that really like dig in to me.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.
Carly: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: We live in a world that is so saturated with beauty messages and with messages about like what kind of bodies are acceptable or beautiful and what kinds of faces and what kinds of skin tones and what kinds of presentation from like master femme. And there are just so many messages about who we’re supposed to be and it’s hard sometimes to figure out ways to get yourself away from those messages.
Carly: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: What has been helpful for you in like working on body positivity for yourself?
Carly: Honestly, what has really been helpful for me is like I’ve done sex work for a long time. I started out in not the most fun way like I had a pimp who like took advantage of me. But now, like I produce my own content. I cum [0:02:27] [Phonetic]. I have control over every ejaculation [Phonetic] out of me. I only do the things that I want to do. I don’t have sex with people I don’t want to have sex with. And like that has been really, really great about reclaiming my pleasure, my time, my money, and my body.
Dr. Liz Powell: That’s amazing. I think it’s so great to have narratives about sex work that aren’t this like shitty name stream like sex workers are these poor victims that we need to rescue or these terrible soiled women [0:02:54] [Phonetic] who are irredeemable. But there is this way that sex work for a lot of people is very healing and it gives them a lot of feeling of like empowerment.
Carly: Yeah. Even through all like the terrible things that did happen with him and like he did abuse me and like take a lot of my money and things like that like he is in jail now so like he got his karmic retribution.
Dr. Liz Powell: So glad he did.
Carly: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: So few do.
Carly: But like even during that time like I felt very powerful because like you’re giving people like this very sensual, intimate experience and like it was how I kind of learn about pleasure and my own body and I learned a lot from clients too like I learned about like a scrotum orgasm from someone that like yeah, you would never would have thought. And like I had great times. There was like – there is always a couple of shitty stories but like I had a good time. It was great. I made a lot of money. I looked hot doing it.
Dr. Liz Powell: Awesome.
Carly: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah. And I think that’s so cool that sex work for you as a way to start coming to accept your body. I think a lot of people have the misconception that like all sex workers look the same or that like most mainstream porn has a very particular look that it’s going for, right? That that has somehow for all of sex work, the one look, and it’s not.
Carly: No.
Dr. Liz Powell: I have met people who are sex workers of all different shapes and sizes, of all different – like people who use mobility aids versus people who have different impairments or who need different accessibility.
Carly: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: It’s just …
Carly: Porn really lets you see the beauty in everybody because like there is going to be someone who is into that thing like even the thing that you’re super self-conscious about like I used to be really insecure about my belly and now, like there are so many people that are into like my round belly that like I love it. My belly is adorable. It’s super cute. People pay me to like rub my belly and show them my belly and like it’s wonderful. It’s like really helped me accept it and like if there is like something that you have like a weird toe or like you’re missing an arm, someone is going to be into that thing.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.
Carly: And like it can really help you feel good about yourself.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah. It’s funny you said that because I have had a lot of insecurity about my belly lately because when I got out of the – like when my disability was first diagnosed and I had to change those for working out and I came back from my deployment in Afghanistan and just hadn’t kept fitness in the same way since that, I felt really subconscious about my belly. And so two days, yesterday maybe it was, I was in this hotel room. And one of the people that I’m dirty texting with, I had promised him some naughty pictures after my panel. And so, one of my roommates was in the room when I came in here to take them and I was like, “Can you just take some pictures of me?”
And she did this whole set of photos and the last set was these ones where I was kneeling naked on the bed and like doing this kind of thing. And I thought I looked so sexy as I was posing and then I looked at the photos and all I could see was my belly.
Carly: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: And then I showed it to a few people and they’re like, “Oh my God! I love these ones. You look so good.” I’m like, “But my belly!’ They’re like, “No, your belly is great.”
Carly: Yeah. Right?
Dr. Liz Powell: And it’s just so fascinating the things that we think are broken and wrong but really, like there’s no right or wrong body.
Carly: Exactly. And like when I was growing up, I did – I actually have my degree in Music Performance.
Dr. Liz Powell: Oh, that’s awesome!
Carly: Yeah. I play euphonium, which is like a smaller tuba.
Dr. Liz Powell: Oh, cool!
Carly: And I did a lot of drum and bugle corps. So like growing up, I have this one very pronounced muscle because the horn is very heavy.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah. And you get to hold it.
Carly: Yeah. So growing up holding the heavy horn just made my body developed that way and like no matter how much weight I gained, I still have that muscle. And my body has always been very muscular and broad and strong and like.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah, you have broad shoulders I see.
Carly: Yeah. And I used to be very insecure about that because I was like, “Oh, it’s not like feminine enough.” And now I’m like, “You know what? But like I’m as feminine as I want to be.”
Dr. Liz Powell: I mean you look super femme.
Carly: I mean I like to think that I’m high femme.
Dr. Liz Powell: You look really femme.
Carly: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: Like as someone who presents very femme, I’m like, you look really femme.
Carly: Yeah. Glitter, lipstick like all my Instagram and social media stuff is @makeupandsin like I love makeup. I love glitter. And like for someone to tell me that because my shoulders are broad I’m not feminine is like ridiculous.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.
Carly: So like it’s coming to terms with stuff like that that really, really helped.
Dr. Liz Powell: Amazing.
Carly: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: Well, thank you so much for coming on and talking about body positivity with me.
Carly: Thank you.
Dr. Liz Powell: For folks who want to find you, where can they find out more about you?
Carly: Yeah. So all of my social media is @makeupandsin. I’m there on Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter like that’s just the screen name that I love. My blog is DilDoorDilDont.Wordpress.com where I also write a lot about body positivity as well as like toys and fun things like that.
And if you are within New York City, I teach at the Pleasure Chest. My name is Carly again. So if you see Carly in New York, that’s me. I talk about like wands [0:07:52] [Phonetic] and blowjobs and all these fun things.
Dr. Liz Powell: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
Carly: Yeah. Thank you for having me.
Dr. Liz Powell: All right.
Dr. Liz is joined by Kenton from FunkItToys.com to talk about how he got into manufacturing and designing sex toys. This was first seen on https://www.sdc.com/?s=Dr.+Liz+Powell
You can find Kenton on all social media @FunkItToys
Transcript
Dr. Liz Powell: What should we know about sex toys and how they’re designed? I’m Dr. Liz from Sex-Positive Psych.
Kenton: And I’m Kenton from Funkit Toys.
Dr. Liz Powell: I’m so excited to have Kenton on. So Kenton runs his own sex toy company. And do you want to talk to us about like what Funkit does and how you got started?
Kenton: Yeah. I got started – I kind of just fell first face first into sex toy design like I was pursuing like I got the Plan Parenthood Sexuality Education certificate and I was just going to all the conferences and learning about sex stuff. And then I had this partner, I like had opened up my relationship and I had this play partner who is into butt stuff, be it like spanking or renal or whatever. And I didn’t have any toys for that. So I did some research and I found one and I was like, “Stripping time, 7 days.” And I went, “I don’t want to wait that long.”
Dr. Liz Powell: [Laughter]
Kenton: So I made – I cut a lot of wood and then I got an idea and I made another one, figured out how to like make them with less material waste and put the handle on the side like how you hold kitchen knives as like this or you’re pinching the blade here.
Dr. Liz Powell: Right. Right.
Kenton: And the handle falls into your hand like that.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.
Kenton: And so I started making the handle on the side because that felt good and [0:01:08] [Indiscernible] to me and how I hold things. And that partner since left because I was new to poly and very interested in like how we were going to define what this relationship was and they just didn’t really want to be a part of that and very rookie mistake.
And so, I kept that paddle thing and for a while I did wooden paddles and I really wanted to work with silicon. So I started messing with silicon in November of that year and then my main partner broke up with me and I suddenly had all sorts of free time. [Laughter] And was like let’s …
Dr. Liz Powell: The breakup project.
Kenton: It was not a good relationship like it was kind of emotionally abusive so I suddenly like had all this energy from not maintaining a whole another person’s mental health on top of my own.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.
Kenton: And I threw that at Funkit Toys and design stuff and got that started that April.
Dr. Liz Powell: Amazing.
Kenton: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: And I have – I don’t own yet a Funkit toy and I have looked at the website with lust in my eyes many a time.
Kenton: We should get a custom one to match your hair.
Dr. Liz Powell: Oh my God! A custom – well, but which hair though?
Kenton: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: Because I had all the different hairs, right?
Kenton: So you just keep coming back.
Dr. Liz Powell: Just keep coming back. [Laughter] There would be lots of new ones.
Kenton: You tend to keep like kind of a blue and purple and some green …
Dr. Liz Powell: That’s true. Yeah, blue and purple, some pink, like that’s – yeah, I’m a cool person, definitely a cool poly. Yeah. Yeah. And so, Funkit does high quality silicone toys.
Kenton: Yeah. It’s FDA certified through Grade Platinum Silicone so that’s tested in ethyl alcohol, acetone oil, and water. If anything leeches out then it wouldn’t be good for your digestive system so you can’t make like food grade molds out of it. All the silicones that you encounter, there’s not like a special blend that I know of any way that’s for sex toys. They’re blended and tested for specific purposes, be it – a lot of the softer silicones that people use in sex toys are tested to be skin safe because they are for special effects, makeup, and prop making. Like the same stuff that you’ll see like DamnAverage or like Xenocat Artifacts, those kind of companies making their toys out of. That’s the same thing like if you saw the Harry Potter movie where he breaks his arm and it’s all fluffy, same material.
Dr. Liz Powell: Oh my gosh! I have no idea.
Kenton: Yeah, probably the exact same company.
Dr. Liz Powell: I have no idea.
Kenton: Does a whole lot of that stuff.
Dr. Liz Powell: Wow!
Kenton: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: Wow! That’s so cool. So something that I don’t know that I don’t know that I’ve talked about in my channel is the importance of body safe toys. And I think that’s such a scary phrase in some ways because it implies that there are like body unsafe toys.
Kenton: And there are.
Dr. Liz Powell: And there are, right.
Kenton: And it’s not great.
Dr. Liz Powell: So, why are there sex toys that are not actually safe for your body? Like how does this come to be?
Kenton: Sex toys are not regulated by any government and industry which on the one hand means that people can make them out of whatever they want. But on the other hand means companies like mine can produce products without paying like 5 to 100 to $300,000 for testing. So there are some benefits and drawbacks of that. Regulation comes with other issues. But for a long time, we haven’t known about the safety of materials. And a lot of people who make toys out of unsafe materials like at this point, they know. They’ve pretty much moved away from phthalates as a plastic softener. But plastic science is pretty new and there is still a lot of stuff that we’re figuring out.
So I’m sure a lot of it initially was like there is a new material that’s soft enough and it can replace the latex rubber dildos that were reinforced with a spring and kept stabbing people in the vagina. Like the whole – it’s …
Dr. Liz Powell: No!
Kenton: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: Oh God!
Kenton: No. Those were a thing.
Dr. Liz Powell: Oh God!
Kenton: For a long time. It would be like weird like PG tone [0:05:02] [Phonetic] latex with like a metal spring in it and over time, the latex would degrade and it would come apart and there’s that little point metal spring in there.
Dr. Liz Powell: So gross.
Kenton: So yeah, having crappy like PVC, soften jelly rubber was for a time an upgraded but now we have silicone and silicone is decreasing in price and I don’t see a reason why we need to continue with that.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.
Kenton: There are more and less safe plastic softeners. They’re even more in less safe phthalates. But in general like TPR GB thermoplastic rubber or thermoplastic elastomer, they mean the same thing. Toys are porous and can absorb moisture and can absorb like fungi and bacteria and stuff. So …
Dr. Liz Powell: Gross.
Kenton: … silicone is going to be better.
Dr. Liz Powell: I don’t want that in my body.
Kenton: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.
Kenton: So it’s a consideration that has become more and more popular and is really, really catching on. And I’m happy to see way more companies doing fun silicone stuff because one of the cool things about silicone for me is it’s really easy to like pick up and work with. You can mix two parts together and as long as you have a scale and a spatula and a bucket basically, you can make silicone. There’s going to be like more skills and stuff to make a good toy like you have to know the anatomy and stuff and what you like and how to design for that. And that’s just like going to conferences and taking sex ed classes and all that stuff that I was doing before I started this. But it’s like – it’s relatively accessible to like start doing. Whereas …
Dr. Liz Powell: And I think the classic example of that is like to Clone-A-Willy or clone a pussycat.
Kenton: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s very …
Dr. Liz Powell: That like they gave you some dental alginates and like you just like get a mold of something and mix up some silicone and toss it in.
Kenton: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.
Kenton: Yeah. Alginate is a really easy, smooth on, makes a good safe one that doesn’t have any like loss un-fun silica which can be not so great for your skin.
Dr. Liz Powell: That would feel not good. Yeah.
Kenton: Yeah. But yeah – no, it’s pretty doable to get into like I am – I definitely had some advantages going in. I had been messing with 3D printers and my dad was a 3D printer hobbyist before I got started with this. So I perverted that device before getting my own.
Dr. Liz Powell: I mean perverting things is what the game is all about, right?
Kenton: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: It’s all about perverting different things.
Kenton: Yeah. And like I’ve been doing digital design in one form or another free stuff like I started messing around with 3D design programs when I was 13. So …
Dr. Liz Powell: Wow!
Kenton: Yeah!
Dr. Liz Powell: Awesome.
Kenton: So that’s 15 years of relative experience. But there are free programs where you can download the program online and like coders who just really love the idea of being able to code anything and just having project. Just either donate their time to making like a Photoshop analog or other like free design programs.
Dr. Liz Powell: So cool.
Kenton: And you can download them for free and like donate if you want to. And yeah, it’s relatively inexpensive to like really figure out how to do. You just have to put the time into like learning the program and stuff.
Dr. Liz Powell: And I think one of the biggest misconceptions people have about like silicone toys or high quality body safe toys is that they’re all expensive. And that was true for a while. Like getting a silicone toy for a while was really expensive. But there are a ton of affordable things on the market these days like you have the NoFrillDos.
Kenton: Yeah. Yeah. When I first like really got really started designing the toys and realized how much I was going to have to charge for them to make it like reasonably profitable and make a living on it, I really wanted to figure out how to make a super low budget silicone toy because like I did the math. I knew it was possible just like the blended silicone I used. It’s clear and if things go wrong, you can tell. So there is like a failure rate problem. There is the cost of that silicone. So I found a less expensive silicone like the one I usually work with, the FDA certified food grade. The other silicone I make the NoFrillDos out of, it hasn’t gone through any of that testing. It’s just – it’s designed mold making and you don’t need to put it for expensive testing to just make a mold out of it.
But in my previous career as a chef, I learned to read eating material safety datasheets so I go through all that stuff. There’s no OSHA warnings that aren’t like don’t get it in your mouth. It’s weird. No like, “This is known to the State of California to cause cancer or birth defects.” There are no ingredients in it that are known to be unhealthy so it’s fine and I can get it for cheaper and it cures way faster. So using what I’ve learned about mold making and the style I do, I 3D print the molds inside of a hard plastic mold that everything comes out of, which is different from how most people do it.
Dr. Liz Powell: That is really different. Yeah.
Kenton: Yeah. Most people do a silicone mold and use a mold release to keep it from turning to each other.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.
Kenton: So I figured out how to design toys that would be easy to pull out of that mold. So the silicone cures on half an hour. I can pour six of them at a time and then mess around on some phone game or do my accounting and then 25 minutes later I mix up another batch, pulled the toys out while they’re in the vacuum chamber and pour more silicone in.
So like most of it is like I can keep with the demand of a lower budget thing. It doesn’t have the same failure rate. It’s a less expensive silicone. It’s just that perfect storm of like me figuring out over like two years how I was going to be able to make something that would be affordable.
Dr. Liz Powell: So cool! And what is the price on your NoFrillDos?
Kenton: $24.
Dr. Liz Powell: $24! Amazing.
Kenton: Yeah, for all three. They’re all about like roughly 5 inches long, a little bit around like 1.2 to 1.3 inches wide. And yeah, it’s like a fairly reasonable size for an intro dildo for someone who liked would go into a store and maybe buy a jelly rubber toy but then look and see instead of the safer toy being $40, $50, $70, if it’s $24, that’s less of an upsell.
Dr. Liz Powell: I mean I have a $150 dildo.
Kenton: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: Because sometimes I want a Cadillac in my pussy. [Laughter] Just saying. So Kenton, where can people find more about Funkit? Where can they find more about you?
Kenton: I was covering [0:11:35] [Phonetic] all the branding research before I did the naming so I’m @FunkitToys everywhere. I have FunkitToys.com. My logo is a little bit deliberately misleading. The hand is turned sideways in it. So I also have FunkitToys.com registered. It will take you the same place.
Dr. Liz Powell: Nice.
Kenton: Yeah. All those places. I’m on Twitter. I’m on Instagram. I’m @TugandPlay [0:11:55] [Phonetic] on Tumblr but I don’t go there.
Dr. Liz Powell: OK.
Kenton: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: All right. Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
Kenton: Yeah, thank you for having me. This is awesome.
Dr. Liz Powell: Happy to. All right.
Dr. Liz and Rachel Rose from Hedonish.com talk about what it takes to open up a previously monogamous relationship. This was first seen on https://www.sdc.com/?s=dr.+liz+powell
You can find Rachael on social media under @Hedonish.
How do you get into non-monogamy when you are already in a monogamous relationship and you don’t want to end it?
Hi, everyone! I’m Dr. Liz. And today, we are talking about opening up relationships. Now, I personally have some issues with the terminology of opening up a relationship because when we move from monogamy to non-monogamy, we are doing more than just adding in more people. We are changing the nature of the relationship that we have in some very profound and fundamental ways.
The relationship that you have when you were monogamous in some ways has to die so that you can begin a new relationship in non-monogamy. One of the biggest things I see folks do that causes them problems when they come from a monogamous relationship and start exploring non-monogamy with that partner is they assume that there are all kinds of things they are going to be able to keep from their old relationship. They don’t examine what in an old relationship has to change other than how many people they are allowed to date or sleep with. And that runs into a lot of problems.
When you move out of the monogamous mindset, you also have to determine how you are going to start challenging mononormativity. So mononormativity is the cultural structure that privileges monogamous relationships over other kinds of relationship structures. And in particular privileges, sexual and romantic monogamous partnerships over other kinds of relationships.
We see this in a way that it makes sense if you’ve been dating someone for four months to date trans that you have with someone you’ve been friends with for five years because obviously, your partner is more important to you than your friends.
We see this in a way that a lot of events allow you a plus one, not a plus two or a plus three for however many partners you might have. Just plus one because we assume that’s going to be two people.
We see this in a way that a lot of dating sites allow for a couple’s profile that is only two people.
We see this in the ways that our culture assumes coupledom and assumes that coupledom is a normal step towards adulthood.
When you move into non-monogamy, you are doing more than just dating more folks. You are changing the way that you interact with a culture that expects you to be in a committed, romantic, and sexual partnership. And you are engaging with folks who have done some of that work maybe more than you have.
A lot of folks when they open their relationship assume that they are going to be able to keep everything else the same in their relationship. That they are going to find some way to create their rules or their agreements such as there’s no risk of their original relationship having problems. That they are going to somehow structurally prevent anything from substantially changing in their original relationship.
That’s not possible. In reality, when you move from a monogamous relationship to a polyamorous or swinger or otherwise non-monogamous relationship, you’re by definition exiting the relationship that you had and entering into a new one. And what this might mean is that the two of you don’t get along well in a non-monogamous relationship. It may mean that the kind of non-monogamous relationship that fits for one of you doesn’t fit for the other one. It might mean that for one of you, non-monogamy is something you’re willing to try but not sure that you actually want to commit to whereas for the other one of you, non-monogamy is an absolute fundamental need.
And folks find this out the hard way because when they are opening, they talk a lot about what they are going to be allowed to do with other people and talk a lot less about how they are going to handle the changes that are happening for those too.
I understand the desire to protect your existing relationship. I understand the desire to not rock the boat and to be able to have some kind of solid, safe haven when you’re beginning this journey. And I think that it creates more problems than it solves.
While it is much more scary to move boldly into non-monogamy from a position of understanding that it means the death of your old relationship and the building of an entirely new one, I think this sets you up for a much better possibility with this person moving forward.
When you’re negotiating non-monogamy with your existing partner with whom you’ve previously been monogamous, sit down and take all of your relationship out and put it on the table and see which pieces each of you wants to actually keep and which ones you don’t want to keep moving forward. A lot of folks end up in relationships where there’s stuff going on that they aren’t actually a fan of but they don’t ever really bring up, and that kind of stagnation is a problem and will get magnified as you move into non-monogamy.
In addition, if you and your partner can’t sit down and talk about your relationship and talk about how things might change and what kinds of changes you are or aren’t OK with, you’re going to struggle a lot dealing with multiple different partners who all need to have those conversations with you.
The mindset that I will recommend you take is that the transition to non-monogamy is about beginning a new non-monogamous relationship with this person. It’s not about a continuation of your old monogamous relationship but now just has like this added feature. The relationship that you have is likely going to have to change in some ways that may feel scary or intimidating. But if non-monogamy is what you want to do, it’s going to be so much more helpful for you in the long run.
If you got questions about this or you want to work on opening up your relationship, I am still taking new clients. You can find information about that at my website, which is DrLizPowell.com.
And if you love these videos and want to help support sex education and relationship education like this, you want to help me support spreading this great sex message to the world, you can go on over to my Patreon and become a patron. I’m excited to have backers so that I can help create high quality videos and high quality education for everybody who needs it and help fund folks who want to work with me in coaching or therapy but who may not have financial ability.
Thank you everyone for watching. I look forward to hearing your questions. And I’ll talk to you soon. Bye!
Kevin Patterson blogs at www.polyrolemodels.com and can be found on social media @PolyRoleModels. He's recently published a new polyamory book and his book Love’s Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities is always popular.
Dr. Liz Powell: Hey, everyone! Welcome back to Poly 201. I’m Dr. Liz with Sex-Positive Psych.
Kevin Patterson: I’m Kevin Patterson. I do the blog Poly Role Models and I wrote the book, Love’s Not Color Blind: Race and Representation in Polyamorous and Other Alternative Communities.
Dr. Liz Powell: Mouthful. So I could think of no one better to give me a Poly 201 tip than Kevin here.
Kevin Patterson: Oh, thank you.
Dr. Liz Powell: As a poly author and poly superstar …
Kevin Patterson: Oh, stop!
Dr. Liz Powell: … and the person who interviews all of the poly role models, right? I figure you must have a great Poly 201 tip.
Kevin Patterson: I think I do.
Dr. Liz Powell: So what is your Poly 201 tip?
Kevin Patterson: All right. Remember that you’re – remember that two separate people are separate people. And that sounds very simply but a lot of us get caught up in this trap of trying to compare time with person A, with person B or trying to measure up bits of time or carving out different activities like we only – me and you only do this together but me and this person only does that together.
There’s a lot of compartmentalization that happens. You really don’t need to do that something old. I mean do like do what you need to do. I’m not going to tell anybody what to do. I’m telling you what I’m not going to do. And what I realized is that a lot of things even if I do like if I go see a movie with you and I go see up that same movie with somebody else, the experience changes. The movie might be the same but the company changes, the dialog changes. You create a culture around your individual relationships that you don’t really need to force by compartmentalizing and like stipulating this thing is for person A and this thing is for person B.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.
Kevin Patterson: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: And it can be so easy sometimes to feel insecure about that stuff.
Kevin Patterson: Yes.
Dr. Liz Powell: And worried about like, well, if they go to sushi with this person then our sushi isn’t special anymore.
Kevin Patterson: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: And I think it comes from this like need that we all have to feel special as a form of like validation.
Kevin Patterson: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: That is really hard to do a non-monogamy without going down toxic roads because special implies only to a lot of us.
Kevin Patterson: Yeah. And yeah, and that’s the thing. Like everyone is unique. Everyone has a different experience. I remember times where I’d be driving around in the car listening to music and I’m listening to say, ‘90s hip hop because that’s the hip hop that I grew up under. I’m listening to ‘90s music and next thing you know, I’m spitting verse per verse with the person in the passenger seat, and that’s one partner. Or I had somebody who didn’t grow up with a lot of hip hop. So now, I’m explaining like this is who had been with who, this is the history of this song.
Dr. Liz Powell: East Coast, West Coast.
Kevin Patterson: Exactly. Just sort of like giving a history lesson because they don’t understand where now, we’re sharing one another’s culture or something like that. So just the activity, the thing itself is about the people and people really lose sight of that and it’s really easy to do. Like I know I do it myself.
Dr. Liz Powell: It’s not what you do that makes you special. It’s who you are.
Kevin Patterson: Yes.
Dr. Liz Powell: All right. Well, thank you, Kevin.
Kevin Patterson: Yeah, thank you.
Dr. Liz Powell: And stay tuned for more Poly 201. Bye.
[End of transcript]
Show Notes:
You can find Kenton on social media & the web @FunkitToys.
The Franklin Veaux map of nonmonogamy is here.
Transcript
Dr. Liz Powell: Welcome back to Poly 201. I’m Dr. Liz with Sex-Positive Psych.
Kenton: And I’m Kenton from Funkit Toys.
Dr. Liz Powell: So Kenton, what is your Poly 201 tip?
Kenton: For me, like polyamorous doesn’t quite work for how I do relationships. I have like – I run a business. It’s my primary partner. I want – like what I want over relationships is like an internet relationship where I can get a lot of that fulfillment and also to be able to have fun at conferences and have like little flames in play parties and stuff with people I meet there and like occasionally go to a play party or some like orgy event and have fun at those. But like I don’t – I don’t have time for multiple like very committed, emotionally in-depth relationships but I also like meeting people and figuring out how they get off and turning that into sex toys.
Dr. Liz Powell: Right.
Kenton: So like monogamies doesn’t work for me and like polyamory and the broad like loving many people also doesn’t fit. So like for me, figuring out like a non-monogamy thing was figuring out what it meant to me and what I wanted out of it because there are so many like images of this is what poly looks like and it’s a bunch of like white feet sticking out from under the bed.
Dr. Liz Powell: Thin, white, mostly had their own feet.
Kenton: Yeah, yeah, like …
Dr. Liz Powell: Super hot. It’s like one dude, two ladies.
Kenton: Yeah, one straight man and some bi-woman and yeah, it’s like so and they are like generally cisgender. And it’s like that’s not what it has to look like for you. Like if you look at this thing and you don’t see yourself in it like Poly Role Models has some great examples and stuff. Kevin is awesome and runs a wonderful blog. And like find out what you want out of it and express that to people and see if it works for them like you don’t have to be like this polycule or this hierarchy or this random spread of a whole bunch of intimately knit sort of a small community of people who all bang each other like you can do whatever you want with it as long as you figure out like how you relate to people or honest with yourself and like know what you’re doing. Just figure out how you want poly to be for you and then do that.
Dr. Liz Powell: That’s so awesome. In my book, Building Open Relationships, I have a worksheet that’s all about what do I want and need from this relationship.
Kenton: Oh, awesome. Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: That’s a really good clarifying tool for going through like in these different areas about what relationships might or might not entail, what am I open to, what am I not open to, what’s necessary for me, what is it an absolute no go so you can really clarify that for yourself and it makes those discussions a lot easier.
Kenton: You can fill that out for each individual relationship you have.
Dr. Liz Powell: You should fill it out for each individual.
Kenton: Scan that. Copy it.
Dr. Liz Powell: It’s going to be so different. You get all worksheets for free at BuildingOpenRelationships.com.
Kenton: Oh, cool.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.
Kenton: Nice.
Dr. Liz Powell: So all of my worksheets are downloadable for free. You don’t even have to buy the book. I mean you should buy the book.
Kenton: You should definitely buy the book.
Dr. Liz Powell: It’s a great book. You should buy the book. They’re selling it here. I can send it for you.
Kenton: Oh, awesome. Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.
Kenton: Where is it?
Dr. Liz Powell: At the bookseller over by the entrance to the other – to the hallway where you’re selling.
Kenton: Oh, cool. Yeah, I’ll wander down there on my way there.
Dr. Liz Powell: Awesome. Cool. Well, thank you so much for your Poly 201 tip.
Kenton: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: And your Poly 201 tip is like you don’t have to be poly. Non-monogamy can look however you want it to.
Kenton: No. There is – what was that? Like really wild Venn diagram someone made of like all the various non-monogamies and it was …
Dr. Liz Powell: Oh, Franklin Veaux, yeah.
Kenton: It looked like a map of a city.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah, it’s bizarre. So Franklin Veaux has like a really fascinating map of all the different ways relationships can look. And I’ll find the link for that and put that on the show notes.
Kenton: You know what it reminds me of? It reminds of the map of that town in on – it’s like on the border of what was it? Belgium and the Netherlands that like because of a bunch of dukes would bet with parcels of land, it looks like the town was picked up and dropped. And like you can never tell where you are like what country you’re in when you’re standing in this town except for like some markings on the streets.
Dr. Liz Powell: Oh, white folks.
Kenton: No. It’s – and like the laws are different. It’s a real interesting place.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you so much.
Kenton: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: I’ll put links to your stuff at the bottom of this one as well. All right. Thanks. Check out the next Poly 201.
Kenton: Have fun.
You can find Rachael Rose on social media & the web at @Hedonish.
Transcript
Dr. Liz Powell: Hey, everyone! Welcome back to Poly 201. I am Dr. Liz from Sex-Positive Psych.
Rachael Rose: I’m Rachael Rose from Hedonish.com.
Dr. Liz Powell: And Rachael, I’m so excited to hear what is your Poly 201 tip.
Rachael Rose: So something I run into with my long-term partner, and opening up a relationship has been a lot of timing issues, trying to figure out how we spend time together and then something like negative feelings when one of us has plans and the other one doesn’t. I think it has been really helpful trying to figure out a couple of next week that we can spend time together for just the two of us. We try not to make plans unless something urgent comes up on those nights.
Dr. Liz Powell: Sure.
Rachael Rose: And then taking maybe a couple of nights a week where you can have plans with other people with the ends that the other person has some time to plan things for themselves to do.
Dr. Liz Powell: Awesome.
Rachael Rose: So that has been really helpful.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah. Calendaring is one of the biggest things of like establishing monogamy.
Rachael Rose: I love Google Calendar.
Dr. Liz Powell: God! Google Calendar is so good. I almost wish there was a different tool like there have been a bunch of apps that I’ve tried to have like other tools like there was one where you could put in your polycule so you can all share your calendars together but it just didn’t work very well from other reviews that I read. And I – Google Calendar can also be really complicated like I find sharing my Google Calendar to be like a very vulnerable step with someone like I don’t have any current partners who I’ve shared my Google Calendar with. And I’m coming up on my one year anniversary with one of my partners and then like almost four months with another and I don’t think any of them have my Google Calendar.
Rachael Rose: I think outside of my roommate and my nesting partner, everybody else gets like the blocks that I’m available but not the descriptions or the time. So if there weren’t plans, they can see that.
Dr. Liz Powell: Got you.
Rachael Rose: So they can be like, “Hey, are you free Thursday night? I don’t see anything on there but maybe you have. And I have like five calendars because I have too many projects.
Dr. Liz Powell: Right.
Rachael Rose: But the advantage is they have at least an idea of where to start of trying to make plans with me.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah. And you can always make like a separate calendar that’s just you’re like scheduling in daytime calendar.
Rachael Rose: Right.
Dr. Liz Powell: Another thing that you said about like this time management was like time for the two of you, time for like stuff with other people. Do you work on finding time for you? Like setting aside like your own date nights?
Rachael Rose: I am personally very bad at that.
Dr. Liz Powell: I’m personally bad at it too, which is why I brought it out. [Laughter]
Rachael Rose: I don’t need time. I can do all the things. My body is a machine and I don’t need sleep or food or water.
Dr. Liz Powell: So here are my things with time. Number one, when you work for yourself, you can theoretically never be not working.
Rachael Rose: That’s my problem.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah, that’s …
Rachael Rose: That’s our problem.
Dr. Liz Powell: I’m kind of theoretically always working and like I’ve been trying to be better about setting aside days and times that are for like me to do fun things or for me to do nice things for myself or like have self-care or rest and recovery. And I found that for me in particular, if I don’t put it on my calendar, something else will get scheduled.
Rachael Rose: It’s true.
Dr. Liz Powell: So I’ve been working on like trying to put stuff in my calendar to take care of myself as well so I can think about it as like dating myself, dating my established partners, dating new people, dating my business.
Rachael Rose: That’s a huge relationship right there.
Dr. Liz Powell: Business is my primary relationship. [Laughter]
Rachael Rose: It really is. I find that I tried this because I work myself as well, a schedule that works for me and specifically also my chronic illness which I have some – a handful of them [0:03:02] [Phonetic] that I need to deal with. And so I know that mornings are not always great for me. So I try to start my day later in the day and I really – I have a couple of hobbies including – one of them is pole dancing. I love it.
Dr. Liz Powell: I miss doing pole.
Rachael Rose: It’s a lot of fun.
Dr. Liz Powell: It’s so good.
Rachael Rose: And I have classes that are couple of mornings a week so I make sure to like I get up on those mornings. It gives me a good reason to get out of bed because I’m not a morning person. And then when I get home, it’s like around lunchtime so eat and then I get to work.
Dr. Liz Powell: OK.
Rachael Rose: So like I think I have to maybe without consciously realizing it built that into my schedule a little bit because it works better for me and my health.
Dr. Liz Powell: Super cool.
Rachael Rose: And it’s fun.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah. Awesome.
Rachael Rose: Cool.
Dr. Liz Powell: Well, thank you so much for sharing your Poly 201 tip.
Rachael Rose: Thank you.
Dr. Liz Powell: I’ll put a link to all your stuff in the show notes. And stay tune for more Poly 201 tips.
Rachael Rose: Yay!
Dr. Liz Powell: Thanks.
Rachael Rose: Bye.
[End of transcript]
Hi, everyone! It’s Dr. Liz, I wanted to do an impromptu Facebook live today because I had a client canceled last minute. So I had a little bit of extra time and I just wanted to chat with all of you. So, I was sitting here and I was thinking what is the best thing I could talk about today on my Facebook live? And I realized that some of you may not have seen my amazing new business cards, so I wanted to share them with you and talk about them. So this is my new card, the headshot on this card the beautiful, beautiful picture is by Regina Feliz Garcia, who does amazing portraits of badass women. And the design for the card, there’s the back with like the info.
The design for the card was done by my business coach, Lisa Robbin Young, who, if we’re talking about badass women is one of the most badass women I know. And, she has been a huge inspiration for me and helped me really start growing my business. But, if you see on the front side, it has my new phrase, my saying, “Great sex can change the world.” So what the fuck do I mean when I say great sex could change the world? On the like surface level, that phrase for me is about how fantastic I imagined the world would be if everyone was getting the sex that they wanted with who they wanted to have it as often as they wanted to have it whether that’s every hour or never.
But just imagine how satisfied and excited and full of energy and life people would be, if they were all having the sex that they wanted without shame, without fear, without judgment if they were getting those things to feed those needs. So when I talk about how great sex could change the world, there’s that element of how amazing would this world be if we were all getting our sexual needs met. If we weren’t people who were in relationships that weren’t working or if we weren’t people who were struggling gets shamed to even think of asking for what we want. But on a deeper level, the more that I’ve thought about this, the skills that you need to have great sex, I think mapped almost completely to the skills you need to have great relationships in every area of your life.
To have great sex you have to be good at communication. You have to be willing to be vulnerable and honest about what you want. You have to be communicative, you have to be upfront. You have to be willing to go with the flow. The ways that we bring our skillfulness to negotiating and creating great sex are the ways that we show up as a great co-worker or a great employee. They are the ways that we show up as a great friend or a great sibling or a great parent. The skills that we need are the same, it’s not some radical new skill set that helps us have great sex, it’s showing up and being present with the person that we’re with. It’s listening to what they tell us and making sure that we’re both on the same page. It’s using our words, we’re taking the risk to say, “Hey, I actually really want this thing.” That’s what makes great sex. It’s taking those risks, it’s being real, it’s being vulnerable.
And so when I talk about like great sex can change the world, there’s the obvious like if we’re all getting laid or not getting laid as is our preference, we’re going to be much happier people. But that deeper level of how do we bring this skillfulness to all of our relationships? How do we take a topic that’s exciting and fun like having hotter sex and actually help people build the skills that they need to be better humans in all the others areas of their lives? Having great sex is about showing up as your best self. It’s about being the person that it lives up to your values. It’s about being brave and courageous. It’s about being the best person you can be. And so when I talk about how great sex can change the world, I’m talking about how the skills that I work with people on may seem like flippant and unimportant when they’re framed in terms of getting hotter sex but they have so much more meaning to them.
If you can say no to sex, it’s probably more likely you can say no to that person who always keeps bothering you for your time. If you can say yes for the sex that you really want, you can probably also walk in and say yes to a raise and a promotion. If you are someone who is willing to be vulnerable about what’s important to you, you’re someone who can then connect more deeply with your friends, with your kids, with your parents, with the people around you. So all of those things that make sex great are what makes us great as people. And that’s why I feel like those of us who work in this field of sexuality, we don’t get the credit we deserve. We’re not just talking about fingers and orifices. We’re not just talking about genitals, we’re talking about people becoming the kinds of whole vulnerable, interesting, honest people that this whole world needs.
So, I’m happy you all are here. Hey, Ashley, I’m glad you like the card. Jackie, I’m glad you kind of look radiant today. I was feeling a little sweaty right before I started so I did it quick like Kleenex wipe off but it’s amazing what a little bit low light will do to impose that soft filtered look. Magdalena, I am so glad you love this message. What I would love is if you all are watching, type a question or a comment. I would love to talk with you all. I want to hear what it is that is inspiring you. I want to hear what it is that you get from great sex. Is it– I know for me great sex recently has been hugely helpful in processing the grief that I’m experiencing over my lover who died. I was able to find someone in my life who I trusted, who could hold me in that space of sex and grief together.
The act of creation with the act of loss and it was amazingly helpful to be able to have my feelings while I’m in a sexual moment.
Magdalena, addressing and engaging and embracing the whole person, yes, we have all had sex where you can tell that they’re just having sex with a piece of you as someone who has a vulva the vagina. I can tell when they are just basically treating me like a flashlight versus when they’re engaging with who I am as a whole person I have, as most you all know, a fair amount of casual sex. But the casual sex that I have, I want to have it that real person because that’s when it can be great sex. If I’m trying to pretend they’re not there, if I’m being selfish, if I’m not paying attention, I’m not going to able to have great sex with them because we’re going to be disconnected. There’s going be too much a distance between us. When you are engaging and addressing and embracing that whole person, you’re so right, Magdalena. That’s what makes great sex and that’s what makes great relationships and great friendships.
It’s hard to be a good deep friend with one part of a person. We need more, we more of each other and we need to all brave and show up. Jackie, that can be hot if you want to be treated like a flashlight. Yes, objectification is super hot when it’s what you want. And, I would say for me and this is different for everybody, the older I’ve gotten, the more that I like objectification when I know that it’s cops and robbers for grown-ups with your pants off rather than real. When I’m having sex these days as someone who has genuinely objectifying me, not objectifying me as part of a scene or as something that was pre-negotiated, it feels different to me than it did in my– in earlier parts of my life. I know that I when I was younger I had a lot of sex for validation to feel sexy to have some fun or to blow off some steam and there’s nothing wrong with that kind of approach to sex and I think that these days I like it much more when even if we’re being casual even if we’re engaging in consensual objectification, there’s still a genuine connection and I know that they still genuinely respect me as a human.
Magdalena, yes. The sex partner doesn’t feel present. Yeah, we’ve all been there, where you’re with someone who it feels like they’re a million mile away. Jackie, for sure. Yeah. If I think that I will never ever be someone who tells folks not to have casual sex. Because casual sex can be fan-fucking-tastic! I have probably more than my fair share of it. And, I don’t know if you’ll have read there, I’ll put it in the comments. There’s this great blog post that Carsie Blanton wrote called, Casual Love that looks at how we treat love with the seriousness of like telling someone that you’re dying of cancer but you have to like sit them down and have a very serious moment of “I need to tell you something and it’s OK if you don’t mean it to. But, I just need you to know something important from me, I am in love with you.”
And yes, love is important and love is a big deal. And how fantastic would our world be if you could hook up with something to be like “Man, I fucking love you in this moment. And that doesn’t mean you need to get married to me that doesn’t mean we need to date. Like, let’s just enjoy this casual love we’re having right now.” And I love that concept of being able to casually love people. So when I hook up with people, when I have my casual hookups or I meet someone at a sex party and fuck on the first date. It’s just part of who I am. I still want to have love for them even if it’s just for them in that moment, even if just for how they interact with me and make me feel, I want to find my space of love for them because, for me, that makes everything feel much better.
What other questions do we have? How else does great sex show up for you all? There are so many amazing people in my comments right now and like sending me likes and hearts how does great sex show up for you? All right, bye, Magdalena! Oh, I’m so glad you got some love with no strings. I love you. I hope you’re having a great time. I’m going to see you soon, I think. Who else how does great sex show up for you? Does great sex mean like you got a super hot moment with your doxy wand at the end of the night? That’s been my great sex recently. [Laughing] What is great sex for you and how does that translate to your life? For me, I know over the last couple of years, I have been working much harder on being vulnerable and upfront my relationships and I found that that actually communicates directly to a better sex. Because the more that I’m able to be my real self and– and worry less about their judgment and about shame, the more I’m able to get what I want in a way that feels really great to me.
So, Bethany, it’s so hard for you and your community– this is shameful, yeah. Look, I’m really lucky but I live in an area where there are lots of us weird sex folks around. And so it’s not as shameful here as it would be other places. So I get that’s struggle of what is it like when you live in a place that you’re ashamed of having a great sex. Caroline, I’m so happy to see you! I’m so glad you can be here. Great sex and pleasure help me to step into my power and be my badass self in the world. Ooh! Yes, preach it! I mean there is nothing like that feeling of having had this amazing engaged hot fucking sex to make you feel like you are on top of the damn world. Caroline again, great sex also helps me to get my refueled so I can go out and support other people’s pleasure. OK, that is such an important point and I’m so glad you brought it up.
We live in this culture right now that is like this race to deplete ourselves. You should work as much as possibly can all the time. You should be the busiest person. People brag about how little they slept how few meals they ate that they were just too it work– too busy with work and too busy with blah, blah, blah, blah to take care of themselves. If you are empty, you cannot fill up other people. And I see this all the time where these people who are working so hard, who are emptying themselves on a daily basis have this resentment towards people who haven’t also emptied themselves. And it’s that crabs in a barrel thing where we’re all pulling each other down because we’re miserable and exhausted and empty. When we fill ourselves up, we have so much more to give to others. It’s like they tell you on airplanes you got to put your own oxygen mask on first. If you put your own mask on first, you can help someone else. If you try to put on everyone else’s oxygen masks on the plane, you’re going to pass out from lack of oxygen.
We can’t run on empty all the time. We have to take care of ourselves. And great sex can be one of those things that fuels you, that fills you back up so that you can get out and help other people. Thank you so much for that great comment, Caroline. I Love you too! All right, I think I’m going to sign off soon but again remember great sex can change the world. All of us, we can all work together to keep changing this world. And again, great sex isn’t just about getting some genitals hot and horny with each other. Great sex is about bringing who we are in our best most real most true ways into this world. So how are you going to do that today? I know for me, I’m about to go sing with my friends, have some fun singing in Italian madrigals and chance which is– I know I’m weird. Bethany, I’m excited to see you too. Camp is going to be great!
If anyone watching this is going to sex geek summer camp, I will be there. I’m so excited to see everyone. It’s going to be a great time. If not, I hope I get to see all of you all soon. I was sending you all so much love. Most of you know I’ve been going through a tough time recently with losing my lover and then my recent battle with the VA and having all of your love and support is just– it means so much to me. And I’m so thankful to have all of you in my world. I am so thankful for the love that you give me and for the support you send me even from far away. You all are fantastic and I am so thankful for you. So thank you for everything that you do to be a part of my support team and keep having great sex you all. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye!
