This week we do one of the best Sex Jams of all time Sexual Healing, by the incredible Marvin Gaye. We love this song so much but have you ever read the lyrics? Marvin is really ill and should not be having sex with anyone, in our opinion.

Anyway the song still rocks and the video is amazing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjlSiASsUIs If you would like to hear our commentary on the video check out the extended Patreon version of this episode at patreon.com/culturesexrelationships Pay whatever you can afford.

Justin

In this episode I’m joined by my pal Sara, to review the Netflix show Bridgerton. Over 63 million people have watched it and apparently it’s the 5th most popular Netflix show of all time.

We chatted about race briefly but we focussed on the relationships and sex themes, as the multi-racial casting and inadequate treatment of racism has been covered by others in more detail already. For example this piece https://gal-dem.com/bridgerton-racism-netflix-post-racial-britain/ and this one https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2020/12/10244616/bridgerton-review-blackness-representation

We covered:

Romance novels and sexist criticisms of their readership

Romance tropes (fake relationship, big misunderstandings)

Shame and purity norms

Patriarchy

How characters did or didn’t have agency in a system with such unjust and scarce capacity for freedom

Masturbation and agency

Painful first time sex tropes

The hegemony of reproductive sex

Sexual harms and violence vs legalistic readings of consent

Hope you enjoy it! To hear the whole discussion head to patreon.com/culturesexrelationships

Justin

PS I'm going to start doing some more advice shows again soon. So please send me your questions about sex and relationships to the new email address culturesexrelationships at gmail dot com

This week I chatted with Cassie Thornton and her work 'The Hologram'. The Hologram is a viral, social technology to help us to give and receive peer to peer support for our health. Health here being the biopsychosocial model of health that we've covered in previous episodes.

It's such an excellent, simple, and radical idea and is rooted in solidarity and community building. A workbook for how to create your own Hologram, and why it's necessary, has been published by Pluto Press https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745343327/the-hologram/ I read it a few weeks ago and found it really interesting and wanted you to know about it.

Join us in our Patreon to hear the full version of this conversation (another 25 mins) where we talk about consent, friendships, masculinities, and self-care and podcasts.

patreon.com/culturesexrelationships

Let's all watch the video to Last Christmas by Wham! together. It's definitely not a sex jam, but there's an *interesting* relationship dynamic in the video that we talk about. We explain how you can watch this along with us and when to pause, so we can chat about the various meaningful looks, the brooch, and how beautiful George is.

https://youtu.be/E8gmARGvPlI

Support us on Patreon!

patreon.com/GoingMedieval

patreon.com/Culturesexrelationships

Have a Christmas!

Justin and Eleanor.

This week I chatted with Elsie Whittington about consent education. We've both been working on this a lot recently so it was a mutual chat rather than an interview. We chatted about how consent should be embedded rather than being a discrete subject. The problems with binary and legalistic models of consent. How continuums and spectrums can open up the topic and allow for people to understand how it might work in real life scenarios. The importance of embodiment and agency and how structures (schools, unis, workplaces) can make consent harder.

Elsie is a lecturer and youth worker at the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University. She is one of the leading voices in consent education as part of sexuality and relationship education for young people. Her excellent paper Rethinking consent with continuums: sex, ethics and young people, is published in the journal Sex Education by Routledge.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14681811.2020.1840343

My book, Can We Talk About Consent? A book about freedom, choices, and agreement. Written for young adults, it aims to go beyond basic, binary and legalistic notions of consent and expands the definition to talk about agency, power, choices, social scripts, collective agency, solidarity, privilege and empowerment. Lots of practical advice about how to put consent into practice using everyday examples.

https://www.bishuk.com/can-we-talk-about-consent/

To hear the full show, sign up to patreon.com/culturesexrelationships from just $1 a month.

First of all, there's an announcement about the show and why we've re-branded from 'Meg-John & Justin' to 'Culture Sex Relationships'

Then we have episode 3 of Sex Jams! This one is about 2 Become 1 by the Spice Girls. We discuss consent, heterosex gender norms, courtly love, intimacy vs sex, intentional relationships.

In the extended Patreon cut at patreon.com/culturesexrelationships we discuss how it's our first safer sex jam. Also, is it really a sex jam? Is it a Christmas song? Is Christmas sexy?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA5jsa1lR9c&list=OLAK5uy_nrV_8KYy40fx7MwiJuvbWEprzZEs2UfDY

Hope you like it!

Justin

In episode 2 we chat about One Minute Man, by Missy Eliot, featuring Ludacris and Trina. We discuss the narratives around premature ejaculation, desire, masculinities, objectification, and oral. Eleanor raps the Ludacris verse, which is amazing. Justin soberly reads out the Trina verse, which is perfunctory at best.

The video for the 'dirty' version of the song is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-CJXwQJZaM

The official music video has all of the rude words taken out which also removes all meaning from the song and our podcast would make no sense, but that's here if you want to see Missy dancing and Ludacris doing something strange with bed pans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XayUCLgxS5c

A new podcast as part of the Meg-John & Justin universe!

'Sex Jams' is where a sex educator and a sex historian discuss songs to do with sex. Justin and Eleanor this week start with George Michael's 'I Want Your Sex'. There is some singing and one of us is clearly better at that than the other.

If you want to familiarise yourself with the song first, the full 'monogamy mix' is on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz-EBKHOfWc You're welcome.

This time on the podcast we attempted to normalise the tough feelings that most of us are having at this phase of the Covid-19 pandemic (going into Autumn/Fall 2020). Using the ‘Phases of Disaster’ model we framed our current moment as the long ‘disillusionment’ phase which may last months or even longer. We talked about why it’s really okay to not feel okay right now, and what we might do with our feelings of not-okayness. patreon.com/culturesexrelationships

Here's us chatting about consent in romantic relationships. We originally did this for our Patreon feed, so they've been able to listen to this for ages now. Lucky them! Join now from just $1.20 a month patreon.com/culturesexrelationships