These are scary, challenging times. I’m writing this statement from my apartment, on a two-week self isolation after cutting my trip to Europe short. This is a self-imposed measure, since no one at SeaTac told me I had to self-quarantine. But we’re all facing a global pandemic the likes of which hasn’t happened in a hundred years. People are dying all over the world, and there’s no end in sight. I don’t know a happy way to spin these realities, and I don’t know that it’s fruitful to try to come up with a silver lining for us all to focus on right now.
It’s hard right now. For all of us. And for those who started with less, it’s even harder.
Overall, I’m pretty fortunate. My work pays me pretty well right now, I have healthcare through the VA, and because I’m disabled I get monthly pay from the VA as well, For lots of folks, their work is evaporating. Businesses are closing, cities are issuing shelter-in-place orders, everything that drives this economy is falling apart and that means a lot of fear and struggle and hardship.
Lots of folks in sex education are struggling right now too, because our work often relies upon the disposable income of the kinds of folks who are being hurt right now. The three conferences I was scheduled to speak at in April were all postponed or cancelled, and that means a lot less money for those who were supposed to be there. We’re working on helping each other out, but there are very few folks in this field who have an abundance of resources.
All this is to say that we’re all facing a collective trauma. Illness, death, limitation, helplessness, threats to security, this is becoming our daily life. I don’t know how we get out of this. I don’t know how we turn things around. I do know that many of us will need some bright lights in the middle of this storm. We need something to think about and focus on that isn’t doom and fear. I encourage all of you to find something to be that bright light for you.
For me, I’ve been reading the new book by Kevin Pattereson and Alana Phelan, For Hire: Audition. I’ve been listening to podcasts from American Sex and Multiamory. And I’ve been watching shows and movies and videos that make me laugh, even if for just a few minutes.
As for my work and my business, I’m going to keep putting out new videos and doing work on projects to help folks with their relationships. Is this work frivolous right now? I don’t know, but I think we could argue about what is and isn’t worth doing right now. Helping people, thinking that just maybe my work is making things easier or better for others, is one of the things I can hold onto now while things are hard, while I’m stuck at home unsure when I’ll be able to leave again or when things might ever get back to something even close to normal. I’m also going to be letting all of my clients know they can renegotiate the rates they pay for services if their income is impacted by the pandemic. This applies to you reading this too – if you’ve wanted to take one of my online classes but it’s been out of reach financially, let me know and we can work out something for you.
If there’s one thing I want to leave you with from this statement, it’s that this is a time to work with each other, to support each other and love each other. We can do that through social distancing, we can do it through sending money or food or resources to those who need it, and we can do it through loving each other as much as possible. With this much trauma and fear, we need love and kindness, so spread that goodness around as much as you can.
With love,
Dr. Liz
Shownotes:
Ashlee Cain can be found @RoseGlassPhotos @RoseGlassIntimacy (FB/IG/Twitter)
This video first appeared on SDC.
Dr. Liz Powell: What is bi-erasure? Hi!
Ashlee: Hi!
Dr. Liz Powell: I’m Dr. Liz with Sex-Positive Psych.
Ashlee: And I’m Ashlee Cain from Rose Glass Photography.
Dr. Liz Powell: And I’m so glad that Ashlee joined me today because we’re going to talk about bi-erasure. Such a thing. So Ashlee, how do you define bi-erasure?
Ashlee: I think bi-erasure is anything that in general either invalidates, creates I guess – should I look it up? But I want to collect my thoughts.
Dr. Liz Powell: No, it’s OK. No, it’s OK to collect your thoughts. I think bi-erasure is a tough thing to define in a lot of ways.
Ashlee: Yeah. That’s why I was like …
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah. So like for me when I think about bi-erasure, I think about the ways that we – like for instance, I’m bisexual. If someone sees me with a man partner, they’ll often say, “Oh, you’ve gone straight.” Or like if someone sees me with someone who is a woman partner, they’ll say, “Oh, you’ve gone gay.”
There is this way in which we assume that people are always monosexuals, so only attracted to like one gender or one gender kinds of presentation that ends up causing a lot of problems for folks who are polysexual or multisexual.
Ashlee: Right. Yeah. And specifically, those examples I feel a lot and I also feel as though there are a lot of kind of myths about bisexuals that feed into bi-erasure.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.
Ashlee: Not just the midst of like, “Oh, you’re just confused or you haven’t picked a side yet.” But also, midst about like, “Oh, if you’re bi that means you inherently don’t like certain other genders. You are committed to only cismen and ciswomen or something like that.”
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah. If you’re bisexual, you’re reinforcing the gender binary.
Ashlee: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: Not true. Not true.
Ashlee: Yeah. And it’s frustrating because a lot of those myths were why I didn’t realize that I was bi until in my 20s. I went through my whole life being completely attracted to women and dating boys. Well, boys at that time, men now.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.
Ashlee: And I assumed that I didn’t count as bi because I was under the impression that bisexual people either were equally into men and equally into women in the exact same ways, at the exact same time all the time. I was under the impression that like or bisexual people are like just kind of like really, really slutty. And none of the ideas I had about bisexuals fit how I felt. So I was kind of like, “I guess all straight girls really love looking at women and watch the kind of porn that I watched and fantasize about women.” That’s like a straight thing, right? Oh my God! Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: Totally. Totally straight. Yeah. I think for me, I read this great article recently that talked about kind of the origins of bisexual as a term and that for a long time up until even like the ‘80s, there wasn’t really a term for bi. And so, you are just loved under like gay or lesbian or queer.
Ashlee: That explains a lot.
Dr. Liz Powell: And that’s why there’s not like a really rich bi history even though there are a lot of bi people throughout history. And I think the most recent thing I’ve seen is that reinfor – the statement of like if you’re bisexual, you’re only attracted to cisgender people, which is weird for me to hear because a lot of the people I know who identifies as bi including me are people who are gender queer or trans or who are non-binary in other ways. So it doesn’t make sense to say that like we’re people who are against our own selves.
Ashlee: Right. And I mean even in my particular situation like I am not gender queer. I’m not trans. I am a cisgender woman. But my sexual preference has never in any way excluded someone on the basis of gender. If I’m attracted to someone, finding out that they are trans or finding out that they are in any way, their genitals were not what I was hoping or expecting them to be has never made me decide, “Oh, never mind. You are off my list of people that I’m attracted to. I’m only attracted to this list of types of genders.”
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah.
Ashlee: I don’t really know that many people who fall in between straight or gay have that feeling.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah, I don’t. Like I don’t know of any people except people who are like fairly transphobic or who went through their own like transphobia feelings who would exclude someone because they aren’t like a specific gender. Like I don’t of a lot of folks who identify not as completely straight or completely gay who would say, “Oh well, you’re at this place on the gender spectra so I’m not interested.”
Ashlee: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: I think that that’s not an experience I’ve had within the bi community.
Ashlee: Yeah. It’s not for me either. And I find it really frustrating. I think the particular I guess brand of bi-erasure that I experienced the most is the assumption that once you are partnered and not only partnered but like committed in a partnership like I have a long term partner. He is a cis male. We’ve been together for a long time. We are poly. We are open. But he is my nesting partner.
Dr. Liz Powell: So you’re straight now.
Ashlee: Yeah. And so, what I – yes, I’m straight now. But what I specifically experienced was when I came out is as queer, as bi, I was already with him and I’ve been with him for a number of years and I had so many people ask me like, “So what is – like why are you – what does this mean? Why are you telling me? You’re with a guy so why does the fact that you’re bi matter?” kind of thing. Maybe not in those words. A couple of times but in those words.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah. No, I’m totally – yeah, it’s really rough. And I think what has been challenging for me too is that there is not the same kind of bi community as there is like a gay community or a lesbian community.
Ashlee: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: And I don’t know if this is still the experience but when I was younger even up until like probably 8 years ago, when I would try to date lesbian-identified women, a lot of them would refuse to date me because I was bi. That there was – there were a lot of lesbian women who thought that if I’m bi it means that I’m just going to leave them for a man or I don’t really mean that I’m into women anyway.
So even within queer communities, that’s hard for bisexual folks to feel like they belong. And I noticed this interesting assumption that if you’re bisexual and you’re someone who the people read as a woman that obviously you’re into men. And if you’re bisexual and someone who people read as a man, obviously, you’re into men.
Ashlee: Right. No more fun. [Laughter] Don’t you know that dicks are magical? And you know, you experience …
Dr. Liz Powell: I mean some dicks are magic. Let’s not lie. There are some dicks that are magic.
Ashlee: That is true. We can talk about that another time.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yes.
Ashlee: But yeah, the assumption is that like if you’re a – actually, what you said. I didn’t mean to repeat that, the idea that like the dick if you’ve experienced dating men and dick then like clearly, that’s your preference. For some reason, it goes either way.
Dr. Liz Powell: Misogyny. The reason is misogyny.
Ashlee: No secret. The reason is misogyny. And yeah, I’ve also – that was another really surprising thing to learn because obviously realizing I’m bi later in life, coming out later in life, I had to catch up to a lot of things about being bi.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah, I will just pause for a second.
Ashlee: OK. Makes sense. Let’s pause.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah. No, it’s OK. Just close the door. Yeah. And then we’ll continue. All right. So just take a breath.
Ashlee: So yeah, realizing I’m bi later in life, coming out later in life, I had to catch up to a lot of things that perhaps other people who realized earlier have been dealing with their whole life. So one of the most surprising things I realized is like, OK, I already knew clearly we have a lot of like straight people have a lot of biphobic and bi-erasing ideas. I didn’t realize that the queer community also had those.
So when I first started, when we became poly and everything and I started seeing women and they would find out I’m bi, especially that I’m bi and partnered with a male, they had assumed, “Oh, so this is like a game or this is like a phase or you want me to sleep with your boyfriend.”
Dr. Liz Powell: Yes! Yes! You try to bring me in for a threesome.
Ashlee: As a bisexual woman, I’m like, “I don’t want that either. That’s what I face all the time.” So it’s like you know, I’m not – it’s surprising and I’m sure these people get this all the time. I’m sure that’s why that happens.
Dr. Liz Powell: I’m sure. I mean look, [0:08:22] [Indiscernible]. It happens a lot.
Ashlee: And people use it in a really like objectifying and dehumanizing way. I understand that. But – and I don’t try to hide the lead that I’m bi or that I’m partnered. I usually put that right on the profile. But I guess people don’t read them all the time. So when we start actually talking, I get ghosted when people are like, “Oh, I don’t date bi.” I’ve been told flat out, “I don’t date bisexuals,” by queer women. And it’s like …
Dr. Liz Powell: Yup. Yup.
Ashlee: OK.” So that was surprising. Just catching up to all of that like OK, well, I get the straight people don’t get it but the queers do, right? And then it was like …
Dr. Liz Powell: No.
Ashlee: Maybe not.
Dr. Liz Powell: No. Often the queers do not.
Ashlee: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: I mean that’s frustrating because I think – when I came out, I came out at 17. I was the first person I knew like in my high school to come out. And then when I went to college, I was like very involved in our gay-straight alliance and I kept thinking that like eventually I was going to find this queer community that like accepted and understood bisexuals. And I still feel like outside of the community of people who are all like bi-pan queer. I still don’t find that, right?
Like these days, a lot of my friends are poly sexual. I don’t have many friends who are strictly straighter, strictly gay. But when I meet people who do, there’s still so much misunderstanding.
Ashlee: Right. Yeah. And I feel that thing you mentioned earlier about feeling like you don’t have that community quite, I get really excited when I meet other queer-identified or bisexual or pansexual people like you said. But I feel like just culturally, we don’t have that.
Dr. Liz Powell: No.
Ashlee: If I want to find something, if I want to find a shirt that says something about being bisexual, one of my bisexual friends has to make it. I don’t go – during Pride, I don’t have, “Oh look! That says – rainbow stuff, that says gay as hell. That says whatever.” I don’t have something that says bisexual or like it’s just not there.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah. It’s not our serving lines [0:10:26] [Phonetic].
Ashlee: Yeah.
Dr. Liz Powell: So what would be like if you could give people like your top takeaways of how to make sure that they make space for bi people or they make bi people feel more welcome, what would your top tips be?
Ashlee: I think A, in the same way that culturally we’re trying to really, really push, you cannot assume what someone’s gender pronouns are just by looking at them. You cannot assume what someone’s sexuality is just by seeing them with a partner, just by seeing them moving through the world.
So yes, seeing me snuggled up on a cisgendered man, “Oh wow! I guess she’s straight.” Seeing me snuggled up with a cute girl, “Oh, I guess she’s a lesbian.” It’s not fair. You can’t do that. It’s not how it works.
And I guess the other big thing for me would be working through being able to let go the feelings of something has to be one or the other. Again, I feel like we’re working through a lot of this as a society when it comes to gender. And I think the idea of working through that when it comes to sexuality and preferences is a little bit less of a priority. But I often feel like they go hand in hand honestly. Just like there is no gender binary, there is no sexuality binary. You’re not either gay or straight.
Even people – I’ve met plenty of people who identified as gay or straight and then in talk and me getting to know them say, “Oh, I’m a little homoflexible or I like the right person.” So – and it’s fine that they identify as gay or straight but it’s just not true, the idea of you’re one or the other. We are both.
Dr. Liz Powell: Yeah. I mean I think that sexual orientation is likely to be a bi-model distribution, which means that there are clusters around more straight or more gay. But I think that there’s a lot more flexibility and mobility between them than we think there is.
I think my biggest tip for folks would be if you notice yourself having thoughts about people who are polysexual about like choosing teams or greediness or sluttiness or any of those things, just like asking yourself where did I get this idea? How did I learn it? Is it still serving me? And is it real? Like is this still in line with the experiences of the people that I’m meeting?
Ashlee: Yeah. That – spot on. Very great.
Dr. Liz Powell: Right. Well, thank you so much …
Ashlee: No problem. Thank you for having me.
Dr. Liz Powell: … for doing this video with me. And I hope that I get to shoot video with you again sometime soon.
Ashlee: Yes, love to. Thank you for watching.
Dr. Liz Powell: All right. Oh, what’s your website? Where can people find you?
Ashlee: OK. So you can find me on pretty much everything as a Rose Glass Photography. I’m on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can also find my intimate photography which includes like kink, boudoir, nudes. You can find that at @rose.glass.intimacy. I’m on Instagram for that as well.
Dr. Liz Powell: All right. Awesome. And I’ll put links to that in the show notes so that you can find those and find Ashlee easily.
Ashlee: Thank you.
Dr. Liz Powell: All right. Thanks.
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!
What are you doing when you love someone and it’s just not working?
Hi, everyone! I’m Dr. Liz and I am talking to you today about love and about what love means and about the new definition of love that I’m going to start using in my life.
So I want to start by bringing an old quote from bell hooks. bell hooks is an amazing feminist scholar, a womanist scholar who does amazing writing about anti-oppression work and also a lot of different facets of life. And so, this is from her book, All About Love, “When we are loving, we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust. To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. We are often taught that we have no control over our feelings. Yet, most of us accept that we choose our actions that intention and will inform what we do. We also accept that our actions have consequences.”
I recently read this quote in an article from The Rumpus, from their advice column, Mixed Feelings. And when I read it, it hit me really hard. When I look back at the relationships in my life that had caused me some of the most pain and I apply this definition of love to them, I realized that what we had in that relationship was not love, not as a verb. What we had was love as a noun, that love is a passive experience. Love is a thing that you feel. Love is something that informs your intentions but that doesn’t necessarily come out in your actions, in your impact.
I think one of the greatest disservices we do to folks in this country is teach them about love as a passive experience rather than something that entails a lot of work, something that creates accountability and responsibility. I think about one of my most recent relationships with someone who I thought I loved really deeply and who I tried to show up for in loving ways as an action verb and who struggled to show up like that for me. And when I think about this definition of love, I have to consider whether what we had fits that definition. I think I was really committed to this person. I think I really wanted them to love me. I think that they really wanted to show love to me but I think that in the end, real love wasn’t there. This person didn’t show up for me. They didn’t find a way to perform love as an action verb for me.
When love includes having to, refrain the definition again, “openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust,” I think I did some of those in this relationship but I think I also didn’t necessarily hold my partner responsible in the ways that I should have for the ways that they were hurting me. I think I tried to shrink myself down to a palatable enough size package so that their inability to follow through wouldn’t hurt me anymore rather than standing up for what I needed and standing firm in that knowledge. I think that this person cared about me a lot and I think they just weren’t in a place where they could show up with commitment, they could show up with respect, they could show up with responsibility. I think that we had was a lot of affection and a lot of desire and I think that we both wanted to show love to each other but I don’t think we were able to.
I really appreciate this framing because it reminds us that love isn’t just a thing that you get to feel and then consider your job to be done. Loving someone is not the end. Loving someone is the start. Realizing that you feel that emotion for them is the start of how you show up for them to express that love, to show that love, to be accountable to that love. Love is the start of a journey. Love is the start of a process. Love is what informs that decisions we choose to make about how we can show up for that person. You don’t get to just feel it in your heart and then stop and be done. Love is something we have to work at. Love is something we have to display and challenge ourselves to rise to.
And so for me, I’m taking this as a step to focus on as I move forward in my relationships. I want to work on love as a verb rather than love as a noun. I want to figure out how I can show love in ways that are kind, not just nice. I want to figure out how I can show love to myself by standing up for what’s important to me and by standing firm in what I know that I want and need rather than shrinking myself to be some ideal of what a perfect poly person should be.
I wonder if all of you feel this challenge too. Leave me in the comments questions or thoughts you have. Let’s get the discussion started about what it means to have love as a verb.
And for those of you who love my videos, who love this content, please consider clicking on over to Patreon and becoming one of my patrons. I want to find ways to support all of you in education and growth and learning and to help support folks who can’t afford my one-on-one services get the help that they need.
Patreon is going to be a way for me to help keep up the quality of this education, keep up the quality of my work so that all of us can benefit from it. So click on over. Link is on the show notes. And tell me about how you are going to use love as an action verb. Bye, everyone.
Hi, everyone! I’m Dr. Liz and welcome back to my Polyamory 201 Series. Today, I’m talking about jealousy. Now, I’m sure those of you who have been doing polyamory for a little while have run into several times where jealousy has popped up for you. And I’m also sure that when you talk to your monogamous friends about what it is that you are doing, you got the same question I get asked every time I talk to a monogamous person about my non-monogamy, “But what about jealousy? Don’t you feel jealous? I could never do that. I’m just too jealous.”
I’m being melodramatic. I get that. But also, I feel that jealousy is this weird emotion that we treat completely differently than literally any other emotion. There’s no other emotion within relationships that we avoid literally everything for because we want to avoid that emotion. We would never say, “You know, I don’t want to feel angry ever. So you’re not ever allowed to do anything that will ever make me angry.”
We assume that anger is going to come up at some point in relationships that we are going to have to talk about it and deal with it and we hope that they don’t make us angry super regularly. But we don’t ever say that a relationship is a problem if you ever feel angry or that if you’ve ever felt angry once, they can never ever, ever do the thing again. It’s so complicated in relationships.
Jealousy is a normal emotion. It is perfectly normal to feel jealousy. And I’m like a lot of folks who write and talk in the non-monogamy sphere. I don’t believe that it’s a worthwhile goal to try to get past jealousy altogether forever and ever amen. Jealousy happens. Jealousy is real. For some folks, there is a greater predisposition towards jealousy than there is for other folks. And that doesn’t make you wrong or bad or not good at this or not suited to non-monogamy. It just means that you’re going to have more work to support yourself when you’re feeling those feelings. And that you may have to make different request of your partners to help you deal with those feelings.
I think of jealousy and what is often called opposite compersion, which for those of you who don’t know, compersion is joy for another person’s joy. A lot of folks in the poly sphere talk about these as opposites that you can feel jealousy or compersion. You’re either upset about what someone is getting or you’re happy about it. And I find that those are actually separate emotions that combine for a lot of folks. It’s not as simple as, “I’ve stopped feeling jealous, now I feel only compersion.”
It’s often more, “I’ve trained myself how to find compersion even when I’m feeling jealousy.” So let me give you an example. One of my more recent partners had an interaction with someone that changed her agreements about their areas and he didn’t talk to me about it before he made that decision. After that point, I started noticing that when he told me about playing with other people, I was feeling a lot more jealousy. It was much harder for me to find my compersion. And that’s weird for me because compersion is my super power. I’m so good at being happy for other people getting super laid and having all the hot dates that they want.
So what I had to do in that situation was notice my jealousy, find a way to accept it and honor that that’s a feeling that I’m having and then find ways to choose compersion so that I can build that behavior in addition.
Ways you can choose compersion are about finding out like phrases or key terms or mantras that you can say to yourself to help remind you to be compersive. These could be phrases like, “When my partner gets more love, there’s more love to go around. I value my partner’s autonomy and support them in their decisions. My partner loves me and I know they’re always coming back for me.”
Or to ask questions that are going to help you understand their experience and see their joy so you can be a party their joy. And I think a large piece of jealousy is also about unpacking where that jealousy comes from for us.
For me, the jealousy in this situation was about feeling like my wants and needs weren’t being considered when he was out with other folks. Part of a tacit agreement of non-monogamy is that if I’m not going to tell you want to do with your body and police your body, it’s important that I can trust that when you’re making your decisions, you are considering how those decisions are going to affect me.
And my partner in this situation explicitly said that he hadn’t even thought about how it would affect. He hadn’t considered how I would feel about it or it might affect our relationship. And knowing that I hadn’t been considered was for me the trigger of the jealousy. Sure, it was kind of funky that he had made a change to our barrier agreements like that happens. It was much more that he didn’t think that I would want to talk with him about it first. It was much more that he didn’t even consider that I might make a change for me in terms of how I approach our relationship. So for me, one of the jealousy triggers was feeling like I wasn’t being considered, feeling like I was forgotten.
I think when we feel jealous, a lot of times what we are feeling is a mix of other things in addition to that simple jealousy. We are feeling the insecurities that we have. For instance, the person that that partner changed our barrier agreements with is someone who is a lot thinner than me. And even though I think I have a great body and I get a lot of positive reinforcement on my body, I was raised in a thinspiration, thin-focused, fat-phobic culture.
And so when my partner plays with someone who is thinner, there are pieces of me that worry that maybe the fat I have on my body is a problem. This partner in particular talked a lot about how hot certain of his current or former partners were but all the ones he talked about in that way were thin, really thin, and I’m not. I mean I’m not problematic in my body. My body is beautiful. But think is not a thing that I am and think is not a thing I’ll ever be. That’s just not how my body works.
My insecurity was driving a piece of that jealousy. My insecurity that this person was prettier or better or that someone that will make my partner like me less was driving a piece of that jealousy.
When we think about what it is that’s pushing that jealousy forward, what’s driving it, what’s underlying it, we start to have the power to examine, explore it, and change it. And that is so helpful and so essential.
And again, when we choose compersion, when we are offered the opportunity to choose jealousy or choose compersion and we decide to find joy in our partner’s joy, that gives us a boost. It gives us the ability to change how we are feeling and to move forward.
I’ve got some great stuff in my book about how to build compersion and I’ll put a link here to where you can find the worksheets and where you can purchase the book as well. And if you have questions about jealousy or how to overcome jealousy or how to – overcome isn’t necessarily the goal. But how to make friends with your jealousy, how to dance with it, and rather than letting it run you, please put them here on the comments and I will respond to you as soon as I can.
I’m loving this Poly 201 Series and I totally want to know what you all want to hear about in my Polyamory 201. So if there’s a topic that you’ve been thinking about that you’re not sure about or that you would want to hear a video on, please let me know. I’m always happy to take your suggestions.
And finally, I am in inviting all of you to come join me on Patreon so that you can help support videos like this and help me put out high quality content to education folks from all walks of life about how to have better relationships and great sex because great sex can change the world.
All those links will be on the show notes. As always, I’m Dr. Liz and I’ll see you next time. Bye!
Hi, everyone! It’s Dr. Liz back at you again. Today, I am talking about masturbation and mental health. I’m recording this video in May and May as you may or may not know is masturbation month.
Masturbation is something that a lot of us don’t talk about openly or publicly and something that a lot of folks feel a ton of shame about. So I want to talk about how beneficial masturbation can be for your mental health.
For so many of us, the pleasure that we get to experience is often tied to what we do with other people. So if you’re single or if you’re having problems with a partner or if your partner just doesn’t feel up to it, your entire sex life can get tanked really quickly.
Masturbation is a great way to get to know yourself, to help improve the way that your body responds, and also to improve your mental health as you do it. Masturbation for me has always been a really important tool for winding down from my day. I don’t know about you all but sometimes when it’s really, really stressful and when I get to the end of it, it’s hard to turn my brain off when it’s time to go to sleep.
When you masturbate, what happens when you have an orgasm or when you experience that kind of pleasure is it helps pull you back down into your body. After an orgasm, most folks’ bodies release chemicals that induce sleepiness and relaxation and calm so that also helps you wind down and calm down.
Masturbation is also something I recommend to a ton of folks for self-discovery especially people who are socialized as women. Most folks who are socialized as women or folks who have vulvas and vaginas or who have atypical anatomy, they may not learn how to play with themselves because it’s generally thought of as like, “Gross or disgusting. Those genitals are round. They are not as good to play with as a penis,” which is bullshit. But here we are in this culture that tells us these messages.
If you don’t know what works well in your body, it’s going to be really, really, really hard for anyone that you end up playing with to figure out what works well in your body simply because they are so much variety out there and so many different options.
The Netflix series, Sex Education, actually had a great episode looking at this where one of the characters who was a cis woman had been having sex with lots of boyfriends but none of it was particularly satisfying and so the main character recommended that she masturbate to see what it is that she likes. After that, she goes into her next sexual experience and tells her partner exactly what it is that she wants him to do. And he does it and she has a fantastic time.
Masturbation empowers us to discover our own bodies and our own pleasure and to take control of it for ourselves. And that makes you a better lover with other people because you know what to ask for, you know what works for you, you know what doesn’t, and you can help them help you have a great experience.
Masturbation has also been shown to help with symptoms of depression and anxiety because it releases endorphins. It releases chemicals like serotonin and dopamine into your system, giving you a little temporary boost in your mental health.
And having a regular masturbation routine helps you check in with yourself regularly and get back into your body. For a lot of folks in our culture, getting into your body is really challenging. We live lives that are all up here in our heads that aren’t about what we are noticing or feeling. We eat when we are supposed to eat based on the clock, not based on our bodies. We eat what’s in front of us or what’s easy rather than what our body is craving. We engage in sex because it’s bed time and that’s when you do sex, not because it’s when we are feeling turned on.
Masturbation gets you back into your body and noticing those signals from your body. You can notice your desire. You can notice, “Today, am I turned on quickly or is it taking a longer time? Are there certain stories or images or thoughts that I’m responding more to now than other times? Does watching pornography feel good for me or does it feel not good for me? What kinds of porn do I like?”
It gives you time to experiment and explore and to be with yourself, with your pleasure, with your body. It’s something that everybody needs.
So, I hope that this May, you, like me, have been taking full advantage of masturbation month. And if you haven’t, maybe this is an opportunity for you to start exploring masturbation and see if it can help lift your mood if you’re struggling with some symptoms right now.
Thank you all so much for tuning in. This one is going to be a pretty short video and I’m trying to vary out the lengths. I know a lot of my videos are pretty, pretty long so I have some short ones that are there easy for you all to watch.
Also, as I’ve been talking on all my videos lately, I now have a Patreon. So if you want to support me in making videos like this and providing high quality sex education and encouragement to jack off to even more people, please head on over to my Patreon. There’s a link down below in the show notes and become a patron supporting the work that I’m doing here.
All of you all, I’m happy to see you. And hopefully, I’ll see you next time. Bye!
Dr. Liz, why do you insist on talking about all of this social justice crap and not just sex and relationships?
Hi, everyone. I’m Dr. Liz. And today, I’m going to talk about why I’m willing to piss people off on this channel in order to just talk about things that are important to me.
Social justice is basically the striving of creating a world of equality and opportunity for everybody. And if any of you all think that we already have that world, you’re wrong. There is no other way about it.
We, in the United States and in Canada and in many other countries live in nations that are founded on white supremacy, on cis hetero patriarchy. We live in countries that were designed to meet the needs of cis straight, rich, white man and no one else.
In fact, it’s 2019. We can’t even get the equal rights amendment passed which would put women in the Constitution. Yes, still an option.
The thing is I have a few folks say to me, “Liz, you should be less up in their faces about this stuff. You shouldn’t talk so much about social justice. Why do you keep talking about white supremacy or racism or capitalism?”
And the reason I talk about them is that these problems, these axes of privilege and oppression, they come into our relationships. They come into our bedrooms. They come into our sex lives.
None of us are raised in a culture absent these forces. These forces are present everywhere. And so, to think that we could somehow have relationships and sex that doesn’t pull on these axes is fooling ourselves. Every time that I, a person assigned female at birth, engage with someone who is a cisgender man, there are elements of sexes around patriarchy inherent in the way that we interact.
If I’m lucky, that cisgender man is someone who has done a lot of his work, he has unpacked his stuff and figured out how he can be a better accomplice and show up in that relationship in a way that as much as possible dismantles patriarchy. But he is not going to be perfect at it and I’m not going to be perfect at unpacking it either.
When I have friendships or relationships with people who are black, I’m going to fuck it up. I’m going to say and do things that reinforce white supremacy, not because I want to, not because I think white supremacy is a good thing, but because that’s the soup that I was cooked in.
We live in a country founded on the enslavement and murder and rape and torture of black bodies and of indigenous folks and of people who are not white just kind of general. White supremacy is there all the time. And anti-practice is there all the time and we have to work hard at unpacking them, at stopping them.
What this means for me is that it’s important to me to be a voice about those things. I work really hard to elevate other educators and therapists and folks doing this work who are black, who are disabled, who are brown, who are indigenous, who are trans and non-binary, people who are from these oppressed classes that don’t get as much of a say in our culture, because I know that with my white skin, there are a lot of you all who are going to listen to me and who may not listen as much as those other folks and I want to help all of their voices be heard.
The reality of unpacking privilege is that when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Those of us who have benefited from structural privilege, those of us who have benefited from these systems of oppression are going to have to give shit up in order for things to become equal. They are not going to become equal on their own. We are going to have to eat a lot of shit.
I fuck up all the time. I fuck up with my friends, people who I care about, and every time that I fuck up, I have to try to be better. I have to figure out, is this something I apologize for? Is this something I just learn to do differently last time?
You’re going to fuck it up and you’re going to have to apologize and you’re going to lose some opportunities. There are folks who reach out to me all the time for quotes in different media outlets and I try every time I honor those requests to refer them to a person of color who could answer their questions too. If it’s not, my absolute like wheel house area of expertise, I’ll try to find a person of color to refer it to you instead of me.
When I speak at conferences or as parts of events or seminars, I check the breakdown of the folks who are there. And I ask them about why it’s a sealed white faces if it is?
There are times that I have not done things because I wasn’t OK with the way that they were putting that plan or that webcast together because to me, it is so much more important that we do this work at unpacking white supremacy.
And I want to address really quickly this thing that comes up a lot when we start social justice conversations is that someone like me who is gender queer will say, “We live in a world that’s really unfriendly to folks who are gender queer and someone who is cisgender will come in and say, “Well, how do we fix it?”
When you are the person benefiting from the system of oppression, it is your job to figure out how to dismantle that system. It is not the job of the person being oppressed. It is not black folk’s job to tell us how to stop being so racist. If you want a black person to tell you how to start being so racist, you need to pay them cash, money, for that time and effort.
If you are cisgender, you need to figure out how to start unpacking those systems that privileged cisgender folks above trans and non-binary folks. If you are white, you need to figure out how to start unpacking racial oppression. If you are a man, you need to work on unpacking patriarchy and sexism and misogyny.
If you are abled, you need to figure out how we start getting over this abled privilege.
If you are someone who is hetero, if you are straight, you need to figure out how we stop privileging straightness.
All of us have work to do in this realm, every single one of us. And all of us have to work to do better because it’s not OK that we live in a world that causes so much harm to folks just because of who they are. It’s not OK. It’s not OK at all.
And so yeah, I talk a lot about social justice. I talk a lot about working through this shit and unpacking these systems because it is important and because I need all of you to join me on this journey.
So I’m hoping in the comments that I hear from all of you about what you are doing to unpack your privilege and to start dismantling your systems.
For those of you who love this work, who want to help support this kind of work and who want to help support me in spreading sex education, I’ve got a Patreon. Click on over. Throw me some donations. You will get access to outtakes, special videos just for the patrons.
And if you want some resources, I put some here for different folks who offer programs to help white folks unpack their privilege. We can do this. We can all work on unpacking these systems. And I hope I’ll hear more from you all next time. Bye!
How are all of these new abortion bans going to affect sex and dating over the next several decades?
Hi, I’m Dr. Liz and welcome to a video on my channel that’s about a really important issue right now. I’m recording this video on May 28, 2019 and as I record this, there are several states that have recently instituted new laws that would effectively ban abortion. Alabama has outright banned abortion completely with sentences of up 99 years for anyone performing or did an abortion. Georgia has banned abortions after six weeks. There is Ohio getting in on the fun, Texas jumping into it. State after state after state is passing laws to regulate what people with uteruses do with their bodies.
The thing is, these laws aren’t about children. They are not about protecting kids. They are not about protecting life. They are about reinforcing systems that oppress those who are not cis white man.
In reality, when abortion was legal before, rich white folks were still able to get abortions. When abortion is illegal, the people who suffered the most are those who don’t have money, are those who are black and brown people, are those who are poor, are those who are already struggling, those who were in abusive situations, those who can’t talk to the people around them about why they need an abortion.
People are going to die. Full adult humans are going to die because of these laws. And a lot of people I see on the internet say, “Well, but about those babies? Don’t they have lives too?” The thing is, if I were to die today and I had not already registered myself as an organ donor and I hadn’t communicated in my will or to the people who would have the say for my body when I died that I wanted to be an organ donor, no one could take my organs even if they were perfectly healthy, even if it would save countless lives. If I had a rare blood type, people can’t force me to give up my blood even if I’m dead.
When we regulate abortion in this way, we regulate people with uteruses to have less rights than corpses do. When someone becomes pregnant, the comp of cells growing inside of their body relies on them for everything. It relies on them for air, for nutrients, for support, for everything. And pregnancy is not a benign condition. A lot of people have this misconception that pregnancy doesn’t hurt the person who is pregnant, but it does. It causes huge health complications. People die giving birth to children particularly black women.
Pregnancy is harmful. It affects your ability to get or keep a job, to stay in school. It affects your ability to eat and get enough food. It affects your energy levels. It affects your brain and your comprehension. It’s hugely taxing on a body. It’s not easy.
And when we tell people that their body has to agree to be hijacked for 9 months because of a potential being that would be hurt if they decided not to have that hijacking happen, we create a system that says that some people get to tell other people what to do with their bodies. There are no laws out there that tell people with penises what they can or can’t do with their bodies except for us that affects other fully formed adult humans. We only create this legislation for people who have uteruses.
And for those of you who are wondering why I’m saying people with uteruses rather than women, I’m gender queer. I have mixed feelings about the label of woman for me. Sometimes it feels good and sometimes it doesn’t. But I have a uterus. I am not necessarily always included when people talk about the women who will be affected by these laws.
Trans men can get pregnant. People who are into sex can get pregnant. It is not just women who can get pregnant.
And in reality, we are creating a system that is going to harm especially people who are racial minorities and people who are trans and non-binary because these laws that are outlawing abortion create a system in which if you go to the hospital for a miscarriage, you can be questioned to make sure that it was actually a miscarriage not an abortion. And who do you think they are going to view as suspicious? The rich white lady with a nice family or the black woman who lives alone, who doesn’t have a partner? Who do you think they are going to view as suspicious? The person who has lots of money or the person who is poor, the person who doesn’t have fancy language to explain what’s going on with them?
I am scared for what is happening in this country. I am so lucky that I have access to good healthcare because I’m a veteran that the ID that’s inside of me that I need to switch out in about 5 months for a new one will last for at least another 5 years after that. There are so many people who are not that lucky. There are so many people who cannot get access to birth control that works for them. There are so many people for whom access to contraceptives is impossible or really challenging. And when we create these laws, we are saying that for them sex is damnation, that you deserve to suffer for a minimum of 9 months for choosing to have sex ever.
We don’t live in a country that makes it easy for people who have kids. We don’t live in a country where adoption is easy. Even if you decide to let your baby go for adoption, you still have to pay all of your medical costs. You are still paying a ton of money and dealing with the physical ramifications on your body.
Not everyone can access these other options. And the thing is, some of these states are going so far as to make anyone counseling someone about how to get an abortion or providing monetary support or transportation to an abortion, accessories to murder. Those of us who have uteruses, I’ll again, don’t have the same rights as a corpse right now.
And when I think about dating in this kind of a time, it makes me want to stay as far away from anyone who has sperm as I possibly can because sperm is the necessary component of a pregnancy. All of those folks who are pregnant, all of those folks who we are deciding deserve to sacrifice their bodies for a potential that doesn’t even exist yet. They wouldn’t be pregnant if it wasn’t someone whose sperm made them so.
We don’t police sperm. We don’t police people who ejaculate. We don’t tell them that their ejaculations make them accessories to murder. We only police the people who want to get their bodies back.
And the reality is these laws are all just building up a challenge to go back to the Supreme Court so that we can go back to a time where anyone who has the ability to get pregnant has to spend so much of their time and energy avoiding pregnancy.
Ever since I started having sex at 17, every time I have sex with someone who has sperm, I have to worry about whether it’s going to make me pregnant and what would happen if I got pregnant and who could I have taken me to get an abortion, who would I trust enough to tell it, would I have the money to be able to afford an abortion, if not, who could I get to help me with the money? It is a huge mental load that we carry when you have a uterus.
And it’s a clear sign that so many folks in this country don’t give a shit about the lives of those people that have the uteruses. They care about the potential life inside because maybe it could be a guy, right? Maybe that will come out a man. Maybe that will be a cisgender straight man.
But the person with the uterus, their life doesn’t matter nearly as much. And I think this is going to have big ramifications for how sex and dating look because I can’t imagine a world where abortion isn’t an option, where people feel like they can still find sexual freedom and sexual empowerment. We are living in a culture that wants to beat us all down, that wants to prove to us how little those of us with uterine deserves equality and freedom.
And the reason that they want us to have all those babies is that it will keep us down. You can’t continue fighting for equality if you’re feeding a bunch of kids. You can’t continue talking out against the oppression and racism if you have to stay pregnant and you can barely afford the food that you need to survive.
It’s a scary time right now. And if you are someone who doesn’t have a uterus, you need to start doing the work of reaching out to those around you who do have them and supporting those people. You need to do the work of figuring out how to challenge these laws and support the organizations that are working against them.
In the show notes, I’ll have links to a bunch of those groups in different states that are working to keep abortion legal and safe and easy to access for everybody. And I will also have links to articles that I found that talk eloquently about what is happening right now and why we need to fix it.
But overall, I just hope that most of you can take away from this that even these laws happening in places that you don’t live are affecting the people around you because every one of those laws reminds me that I’m not a full pledge human in this country even if I don’t live in any one of those states.
Thanks so much for joining. I know this is a tough topic. It’s hard. It brings up a lot of feelings in me. I’m sure it brings up a lot of feelings in all of you.
In the comments for this video, I’m not going to get into a debate about whether abortion should be legal. I’m just not. If you want to talk about your reasons that abortion should not be legal, take them somewhere else. I’ll be deleting all comments to that effect.
In addition, if you engage in any kind of stuff in these comments that I think is going to be harmful for the folks who are watching this who need it, I’m going to delete your comment. I don’t generally police my comments really heavily here in YouTube but this one, I’m going to.
Thank you so much for joining me. If you appreciate this kind of work, the kind of sex education that can actually help us reduce the rate of abortions, feel free to click on over to my Patreon. I’m accepting patrons right now to help fund these videos to make sex education as accessible and free as I possibly can.
Thank you all for your time. I’ll see you next time.
Hi, everyone! This is Dr. Liz and I am back with you again. I am excited today to talk about a book that I just finished reading and it is by a friend and all-around fabulous human, a dear to my heart, Kevin Patterson and his co-author, Alana Phelan and it is called For Hire: Operator.
Now, this book is not an educational book. It’s not about self-help. It’s not going to tell you how to do your non-monogamy or your relationships. It is instead a wonderful exciting book of fiction about queer, polyamorous superheroes of color. This book, I wish I had had a book like this when I was younger because I think seeing examples of folks who are like me, who are super queer, who are into sex, who are into sex with lots of folks would have been so, so helpful for me.
One of my biggest issues with a lot of mainstream media is the trope of love triangle where our hero or our heroin is really into one person or in a relationship with one person and they meet another person and, “Oh no! What would they do? How will they choose?” And it’s just so disgusting because like what if they just choose polyamory instead. It’s always a theme of like they can only actually love one of those people or only one of those people is actually worthy of their love. And I’m so tired of that trope.
What I love about this book is that it has variance on that relationship triangle that don’t end with the solution being only one of them is the real love. This book has a lot of fascinating relationship problems, relationship conflicts, issues with the ways that different people understand and receive how someone is showing up for them in a relationship, both friendship, lovers, long-term relationships, work relationships. And it doesn’t paint any of those as wrong or bad. The conflicts that come up are the kinds of conflicts that I see in my real life relationships about the ways that we do things differently that we end up then seeing or reading into in ways that we didn’t intend.
This is also a really fascinating book because it’s told from the perspective of the operator. So spoilers ahead, if you want to read this and not be spoiled, pause the video now. Go to somewhere else. We are going to give you a second in case you’re like watching this from across the room and you need to ditch on over and pause the video.
All right. So spoilers. Our story is about – primarily, this one right here, JC, who is an operator, in the world that they have created, they are super powered humans. So they are people who have developed super powers from a variety of different routes. One is genetic variants syndrome which is called GVS. Another is through science and technology which is how both JC and MM have developed their powers. And then the third is through magic.
So as folks with super powers were coming to be known that they existed in the world, they kind of developed them into two different camps. One is heroes. Heroes are big in public like MM right here. They do work for governments. They take contracts. They train up each other. It’s very much in the public view.
The other group is the operators. The operators are the ones who do dark work, who do things behind the scenes, who take care of things in a far less public way.
When they started out, both JC and MM wanted to be heroes. But eventually, JC found that she much better suited to doing kind of the more operator type work. As you can imagine, I’m sure having one hero and one operator in a relationship causes some conflict. JC can’t really talk to MM about what her job is or what she has been doing and MM feels like she is not going to connect with JC in some ways because of that necessary secrecy.
JC in general as a character was really lovely to read because she is someone who struggles with how to connect with others in a way that feels authentic to her but also someone who has worked kind of by nature. She is someone who is quieter, more inward, and she is in a partnership with someone who is much more external, who is much more public, who is much more vocal about things and talks about things more easily, who gets along with people more easily.
And getting to see from inside of JC’s perspective about the challenges she is facing trying to manage this relationship and trying to manage the new conflicts that come up that she takes a very specific contract showing all the troubles we see in polyamorous relationships between folks who are more introverted and who are more extroverted that the kind of things MM is looking for from JC, JC just can’t provide. And the way that JC wishes that MM would just like trust in them and accept them, MM struggles with because they are not getting that information.
Another thing I really enjoyed about this book was the descriptions of the different characters are rich but they don’t rely on typical tropes. So there’s no like typical slender, beautiful woman, love interest figure. There was in fact a fantastic non-binary character who I was hella curious about and I want to see illustrations of. There are powerful folks of all different kinds of body shapes and sizes. There are people who look at different ways of presenting themselves as operators and as heroes. There is just a beautiful diversity to the way that the characters show up in this book.
I’m not going to give away the plot of the book because I think that you need to read it but I will say that I really understood the ways in which the decisions that we make about what to involve our friends and what not to involve our friends in, about what to tell people about versus what not to tell them about is a lot of what undergirds the conflicts and the drama of this book.
When we are brought into this world, we all have to balance our privacy with our intimacy, the ways that we keep some things private for ourselves for any variety of reasons or private with one or two select others versus the ways that we share openly with either the folks that we are closed to or that around us or with the larger world or community. And that balance can be so challenging sometimes.
As a semi-public figure in the field of non-monogamy, I talk a lot about my life. There is a lot of sharing that I do about who I am and how I do things and I’m really happy that I do that. I think that sharing my stories is something that’s important to me and something that I hope helps all of you connect with the experiences that I talk about and that I’m trying to help people improve themselves with.
But it can feel a lot of times like there is not a lot left for me like the elements of my life that are not shared with a huge audience are relatively few and far between. And when I have them, I worry, is this me being dishonest or not being genuine with my audience or is this me like making a good decision about what to keep private for myself? And it’s a daily struggle of what do I share? What do I keep private? What do I put on Twitter versus what do I only tell my close friends?
And I saw through this book the ways that both JC and MM and all of the characters struggle with that kind of exposure. When you are in the public eye, how do you decide what is yours? When you’re in relationships, how do you decide what things to tell your partner and what things you need to keep for yourself? And how do those decisions affect the ways that we see each other and interact with each other?
I love Kevin. I love everything that he does. And I was excited for this book. And no small part because selfishly or I guess to feed my ego, Kevin decided to name one the characters with my middle name. And so, it was really exciting to see like that little piece of me in this book. He also include the names of some of the folks who help back, the Patreon and other people in our communities’ names in the book as either psych characters or people being quoted in the fictional magazine for hire.
But also, seeing so much of that struggle of what it is to be in the public eye. Feeling seen in that way is so rare and I appreciated it. And I appreciated that this was a book about polyamorous folks who weren’t struggling with being polyamorous. They had other struggles but it wasn’t like dealing with internalized shame or slut shaming. It wasn’t about there is something with dating multiple people or can’t even actually love multiple people. It was much more about again, those real world issues some people run into in relationships.
I’m so happy that this book exists and that they are working on another book and they are going to keep releasing ones in the series because I’m so just stunned and feeling the beauty of our presentation and seeing people like me represented in work like this. I am here for all of the future polyamorous fiction that happens and I’m here for these characters and for anyone else that gets introduced. I totally want to see more of me magisterial. Kevin if you’re watching, Alana if you’re watching, more magisterial please. They are like perfect.
But if you have not read this book yet, you should get yourself a copy. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to where you can buy it. If you happen to run into Kevin and Alana at one of the events they are attending this year, I’m sure they will sign it for you as they signed mine. And I hope that you all get to feel seen in this kind of book as well. We all need more representation. We all need media that helps us see ourselves and other people. And I am so thankful for this book.
Other pro tip. There is actually like a secret chapter, a bonus chapter that’s available through Amazon that they released shortly after the book came out that covers one of the very minor time gaps in the book. So if you want to find out about that chapter, I’ll also link it here.
If you have questions, let me know. If you have thoughts on this book, please share them here. Go and review it on Amazon. If you’ve read it, you should always review books on Amazon because that helps boost their ratings so that come in searches for folks who are looking for these kinds of books for themselves.
And I’ll see more of you all later. As I’ve mentioned in all of my videos now, I have a Patreon. And I would love for you to come and support me on my Patreon. I’ll put the link in the show notes as well.
I love you all. I hope you’re having a fantastic day and a fantastic week. And I’ll talk to you soon. Bye!
Hi, everyone! Welcome back. This is Dr. Liz and I am excited today to talk to you about a dating app that I am happy to be a community ambassador for, #Open. I know that for me, one of the reasons I don’t do a lot of online dating is because there is just a lot of gross, garbage-y stuff out there.
I recently did an experiment and went on Tinder while I was in Europe over this past winter and I’m pleased to report that cis straight men are the same kind of gross over in Europe as well. I got a lot of like weird headless torso pics or dick pics or someone being like, “Yow, wanna bang?” And look, I am not on Tinder because I’m not open to casual sex. I’m totally down for casual sex. However, if the best you have is what to bang, I’m just – I’m not feeling it. It’s like I want something more from you.
#Open is an app that is specifically for folks who most of these dating sites and dating apps are not for. They are for folks who are non-monogamous, folks who are kinky, folks who are queer and trans and non-binary. And it’s all – they’ve got a great mission about centering people whose voices are often not centered, centering the voices of people of color, centering the voices of people who do sex work, centering people who keep getting booted from these other apps or having terrible experiences in these other places.
#Open has a really fascinating way of handling your profiles and handling the ways that you find and match with others. A lot of dating apps, you put up your picture and your description and then there is like swiping that happens or maybe some searching that happens but there aren’t a lot of really easy ways to filter down the people who are going to be into the things that you are into.
So friends, this is someone who is non-monogamous, there has been a chrome plugged in for a while that can make OkCupid a little easier for you to find folks who are more likely being non-monogamous. However, it’s not perfect and it’s still a lot of waiting through that you have to do.
For folks who are kinky, finding people through Tinder or OkCupid who are kinky can be really challenging and lead to a lot of strange questions that you get from folks.
And for people who are queer, there are ways that the visibility settings in terms of who you are visible to can make it really challenging.
#Open has the option for you to create either a solo profile or a couple’s profile or both. And they are working and I’ve been told on functionality for you to be able to create multiple partner profiles. You profile whether it’s a solo or a partner one will have photos, description, all of those kind of normal things but they also have these lists for hashtags. And these hashtag lists are there so that you can help narrow down what it is that you are looking for, what it is you are not looking for and what kinds of things you are into or open to trying.
So these hashtag lists give you a ton of flexibility. Let’s say that you are like really looking for someone who wants to play with a femdom, someone who is fem, who is the top, you can search for everyone who has the #femdom in their profile.
Let’s say you want to find other friends who are bisexual bi community can be really tough to come by. You can search for everyone who has hashtags related to bisexuality. You can really narrow down your field and find like-minded people in a way that is so much easier and simpler than any other dating app I’ve seen before.
In addition, they have really fantastic rules for how you engage on the app. One of the things I really like about #Open is the rules of the game. They have a policy that you have to follow these guidelines in order to be allowed to continue to be on the app. The acronym is NICE. It stands for Negotiation, Include, Consent, and Experience.
The idea is for you to negotiate and communicate honestly with anyone you are talking with on this app about what your intentions are, what it is you are looking for, and use clarity and honesty.
For include, it’s all about making sure that you treat everyone with respect. This is an app that is focused on getting a diverse user base and so anyone who brings in hate language or hate speech or who uses things like “no fats, no fun” on their profiles is someone who is not going to be welcomed there.
Consent. They want to make sure that all of their users are obtaining affirmative enthusiastic consent from everyone that they play with. And that’s on and off the app. And so, if you send unsolicited Nazi-forward pictures or display those publicly on your profile, you will be asked to take them down or asked to leave the app.
And finally, the experience. It’s all about being open to new experiences and the experiences of others, allowing yourself and everyone else to experience without shame or judgment. This creates a much safer space than a lot of the apps.
Their rule is you get three strikes before they will remove you from the app. So three strikes and you’re out. If you have three people say that you send them unsolicited dick pics, you are off the app. You’re done. And because it is linked to your phone number, it’s much harder to create a bunch of extra new accounts than it would be if you are just using an email address and you just need to get a new Gmail address.
With this app when you are looking through for folks, there are definitely ways that you can do it. They’ve got a card swipe view that’s kind of like Tinder, they’ve got a layout view that shows you pictures of a bunch of different profiles that you can scroll through, and on that layout view where you’ve got a grid of different folks, you can sort it by either people that you’ve said yes to, people you’ve said no to, people with whom you’ve matched or folks who haven’t seen before.
So it’s a really easy way to look over all of your matches and see if there’s someone you haven’t been messaging who you want to message again or to see if there is someone who you haven’t sent a message to that you want to make sure you do send a message to. And the option to view only folks you haven’t matched with before in a grid format, I absolutely love because that way, I don’t have to keep searching through the same profiles over and over again.
Some features that I’m hoping that they will update, right now, you can set your settings about who you are available to based on the gender or genders of those involved and you can also set your sexual orientation.
Something I would like to see as a way to limit by combination of like genders of the folks and sexual orientation. So for instance, because I play with folks of all genders, I selected all of the available genders for me to match with. But that ended – that method I ended up getting a lot of gay men who I’m pretty sure aren’t looking to match with folks like me.
I mean I’m non-binary but the way that I present is generally pretty fem and for the most part, most of the game that I have interacted with aren’t looking for folks who are non-binary in the that I tend to love non-binary.
So I kind of wish that there was a way for me to filter out like homosexual men or men who identify as gay just as a way to kind of save myself some space and time. But they have a bunch of gender options so you don’t have to just identify with male or female. They’ve got different choices for you to select, which is wonderful.
And for a lot of the fields in the profile about things like your gender or your sexual orientation or your relationship style, if you don’t see what fits for you, you can actually fill in your own information, which is a beautiful feature. It makes me super happy.
Overall, I’m really happy with #Open as an app. The biggest complaint that I have is that there aren’t so many people on the app because it’s new, well, that’s partly why I’m doing these kinds of videos is I want to make sure that all of you, all who are watching this, get on #Open and experience my dating pool.
I’m hoping as I keep working with them to have more videos about things like this and to also maybe have some of my own success stories from dating on #Open. Let’s see what happens. But until then, if you have questions about the app or if there’s anything that you want to know about it, please feel free to leave it in the comments below.
As I’ve mentioned in all my videos now, I now have a Patreon. If you want to support videos like these, a free education for everyone, as well as support folks who need some help in terms of affording really informed, well-educated, well-prepared therapy and coaching, you can go on over to Patreon and help me do this work.
And finally as always, if there’s a video you would like me to do, if there’s a question you want answered or something that you think I would be great fit to talk about, please leave it in the comments and I will try to get to that as soon as possible.
Thanks all for watching and I’ll see you next time. Bye!
