This is an advice episode for someone who is feeling a little fresh and inexperienced in a relationship with someone who has relationship baggage. How can she feel a bit more secure? How can a different way of relating to relationships and even 'the self' help all of us to create the size and shape of relationship that can do what we need it to do?

You can book a one to one session with me and also ask questions for the show via the link below.

https://linktr.ee/culturesexrel

’m back with another Second Opinion. I’m doing another one of the Sexual Healing columns from the Guardian. Mostly because it’s so short but also it’s not pay-walled. I’m not going to reproduce the whole thing here, so you might want to click on the link to read the whole thing (it’s 340 words in total, for the question and answer)

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jul/08/my-boyfriend-is-almost-perfect-but-hes-too-vanilla-in-bed

But the tl;dr is that the question is from a woman feeling bad that she’s dissatisfied that the sex she’s having with her lovely boyfriend is mundane. In the past she’s had sexy, experimental sex with men who weren’t as nice. The answer is that it’s understandable that she’s found herself in this relationship but is ‘endowing her boyfriend with fatherly attributes’ which makes it much less hot. So she should work on her unconscious to make the relationship work and try to use the relationship to find ways of attaching like an adult.

For the full version of this head to https://www.patreon.com/culturesexrelationships Where you can also find the Make Your Own Sex Manual and Make Your Own Relationships User Guide resources I mentioned in the reading https://www.patreon.com/culturesexrelationships/shop

From Series 3 Episode 1 of Sex and the City

"Later that day I got to thinking about fairytales.

What if Prince Charming had never showed up?

Would Snow White have slept in that glass coffin forever?

or would she have eventually woken up, spit out the apple, gotten a job, a healthcare package and a baby from her local neighbourhoud sperm bank?

I couldn't help but wonder. Inside every confident driven, single woman is there a delicate, fragile princess just waiting to be saved?

Was Charlotte right? Do women just wanna be rescued?"

In this episode of I Couldn’t Help But Wonder I discussed the idea of our insides (unconscious) and outsides (conscious) and whether our fairy stories entirely exist within us (as a Jungian archetype) or throughout us in a more Guattarian ‘machinic unconscious’ (within/without in an assemblage). Instead of asking what kind of archetype we are, we could ask ‘what would that do, and what else?’ In this way can we use these stories as part of our becomings? Might our Prince Charming and delicate fragile princess be with us in molecularised forms every day. How in our processes of our own becomings we have to learn to be our own primary caregiver in order to become….

I couldn’t help but wonder

While women are certainly

no strangers to faking it...

...we faked our hair color, cup-size.

Hell, we've even faked fur.

I couldn't help but wonder,

has fear of being alone...

...suddenly raised the bar on faking?

Are we faking more than orgasms?

Are we faking entire relationships?

Is it better to fake it than be alone?

Faking it implies that you know what ‘it’ is. The way that we talk about faking something is that it’s bad. An inauthenticity. That we are not being our true selves.

Miranda’s orgasms in the episode is a good example to draw on

Faking it till you make it. Maybe faking can be a potential line of flight? A becoming?

In this blog I try to use Deleuze & Guattari's ideas to help us to understand the current awful transphobia. Hopefully you'll find it useful (and easy enough to understand) with some hopeful / helpful ideas. Free at my CSR Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/posts/molar-and-gender-127351062?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

This one is a (very) extended reading of my advice article How Can We Have a Better Relationship With Our Phones over at BISH. https://www.bishuk.com/relationships/how-can-we-have-a-better-relationship-with-our-phones/

Here's the podcast I was on discussing Adolescence https://praxiscast.podbean.com/e/e333-dudes-dont-rock-ft-justin-hancock/

Let me know if you have any questions or if I've missed any links.

Justin

Ask Justin: Why are they unavailable to me and then magically available with others by Justin Hancock

Here's a shorter version of a longer chat (by myself, but with you) about dating apps. Why people might be fed up of them some of the micropolitics at play and how we might actually make use of them. Here's a really interesting podcast from the Centre for Sex, Love and Relationships https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/homepage/420/centre-for-love-sex-and-relationships and here's a piece I contributed some ideas for at the FT https://www.ft.com/content/17fb28ae-1e0c-4a32-8c26-59e15c821a48

I was delighted to be joined by friend of the show, esteemed historian, and GF Dr Eleanor Janega to do another Sex Jams episode. We decided to do two Chappell Roan songs to do a compare and contrast, one a song about sex but not a sex jam, the other a relationship song that is a sex jam (in our humble opinion).

Anyway, here are the songs

Red Wine Supernova https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS6ixn2berk 

Casual https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfSjnsYiY_A

And I hope you enjoy our conversation! Here is Eleanor's website where you can find all of her excellent work https://eleanorjanega.com/ You can also go back through the feed to find a conversation we had about her book, The Once and Future Sex.

Justin

It was about how to go about dating when in a committed relationship anarchy (RA) / non-hierarchical / abundant relating arrangement and when you are planning on having a kid with someone from that arrangement. I asked the listener to listen to the recording before I published it to make sure that it was vague enough and they okayed it and said it was helpful :-)

If you have a question let me know! culturesexrelationships at gmail dot com or via link.tree/culturesexrel