Intimate Interactions

This Valentine’s day, I bring you a special interview that I got with Reid Mihalko. Normally new episodes publish on Patreon first and come out for free 9 months later. This episode is an exception and will air for everyone on Valentine’s day. If you find the quality better than my free episodes, maybe try out Patreon for a month and see if you like it. I have sessions with Sophia Sky at Pan Eros Foundation in Seattle and in a week am recording with the podcast hosts of Escape Pod about intimacy in being a podcaster. Escape Pod has been running about 12 years though the hosts haven’t been with it since inception, and is part of Escape Artists, a thriving podcast community. Finally, at Westcoast Bound, I was able to get Mollena Williams to agree to do some podcast episodes with me. If you don’t know Mollena, the content that human puts out is incredible. Alright. Enough promo - let’s talk about this episode.

So, I was invited by Jazz Goldman, a comet partner of mine and sex educator living in New York to Reid Mihalko’s birthday party in his home. After picking Jazz up and driving to Reid and Allison’s place, we enjoyed hot tubbing and an afternoon orgy with some fellow sex educators. I spent the night with Jazz in Reid’s spare room. While I’m failing at making breakfast sounds, Reid comes into the kitchen and offers me some coffee.

Most of us have probably experienced burnout. It can look like feeling tired, empty, sad, resentful, angry, used, or hurt. It can run from the first signs of resistance or hesitation around an activity to full, impassioned non compliance.

When we play on edges like we do in BDSM sometimes or play with really intense feelings like emotional sadism or emotional masochism, there is a lot to think about in terms of what health looks like in this lifestyle and how we hold our own truth while trying to do things like service. We don’t always choose the things in our lives that will be feeding for us and sometimes those things are very complicated. Still, it’s nice to have people like Tillie in our lives to chat with about these things. Today, Tillie and I struggle towards clarity on these issues and hopefully leave you with a lot to think about in terms of service, burn-out, and self-care. Thanks for listening.

content warning: we briefly discuss blood play

Content warning for those of you who struggle with white supremacy, racism, stripping, toxic monogamy, shame...I feel like whenever I tackle really hard topics this entire intro is basically one big content warning.

We continue the interview with Robyn Beatch today. We mostly don't talk about the KKK and spend a lot of time distracting ourselves talking about stripping, squirting, and teaching about sex. We then continue to touch a little bit on Robin’s childhood experiences and shame surrounding her estranged KKK father. We talk about relationship anarchy and solo polyamory and our frustration with media’s “polyamory dilemma” where two relationship options are presented as an impossible situation. Robyn shares some thoughts on jealousy.

Van Dwelling is for some a matter of necessity. For others, it’s a choice. What is it? Exactly what it sounds like: living in your vehicle. In some communities, housing is quite expensive. In some lives, being functional long enough to produce the employment opportunities and or funds to pay rent is quite challenging. Some organizations count van dwellers as homeless and what they mean by that word may be true for some van dwellers; yet why then would some choose this lifestyle?

Selena is an educated former junior engineer who currently works as a sex worker at an agency - if you missed that episode, I interview her about her sex work earlier in the series. She’s pleasant, smart, and soft spoken - apologies in advance for the background noise. Sex work to her has nothing to do with why she chooses to be a van dweller. So why then is she so passionate about this lifestyle? Let’s find out on Intimate Interactions.

Van Dwelling Tips:

Irene is newish to kink. She started a sex and feminism blog where’s she's currently an avid blogger (thedesivibes.com) and hopes to be an educator one day. For a South Asian woman, that's not really a thing for our community yet for a variety of reasons, but I'll let her speak her own truth.

Over her journey into kink, she has learnt a lot. Now it’s time for her to share some of that knowledge about getting started with you on Intimate Interactions.

Olivier creates community by creating events. Often those events involve playing various kinds of games. When he first came into the Vancouver kink scene, he created the Vancouver Geeky and Kinky munch which he has since moved on from.

Today, the VG & K as it’s known is a thriving event on its own where people get together to play board games. While the underlying idea is that everyone playing is at some level curious about or interested in kink, my experiences there have been ones primarily about playing board games. There’s something relationship building in our brains when we experience fun, excitement, and curiosity. In a sense, there’s something relationship building about problem solving with someone even if you’re not on the same team.

I’ve been thinking about relationships: how are they fun and exciting? How are they about solving problems? If you know you’re on the same team, even when you’re not trying to solve the problem the same way, to what extent can relationships be opportunities for problem solving rather than suffering?

Let’s talk about intimacy with Olivier on Intimate Interactions.

https://www.publicmedievalist.com/schrodinger/

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/02/07/swastikas-raiments-create-uproar-among-society-creative-anachronism-fans

Orientation is for some, a lifelong struggle. Others rarely question it beyond their teenage years. I define orientation as the gender presentations to which one is attracted. Others might define it as the gender identities to which one is attracted. Others still might define it as the sexes to which they’re attracted. The distinction here is: are you attracted to what their internal idea of their gender is, to how they present their gender - the shape of their secondary sexual characteristics, or to the sexual organs themselves regardless of the shape of their body or their idea of what their gender is.

I’ve had people on Intimate Interactions like Gavin, Levi and others who I think have had many years of reflection to make decisions about their gender and have been actively exploring what a non-binary space looks like for them.

Today I bring on Irene, someone just beginning her journey into sexuality, orientation, kink, non-monogamy, and gender. Let’s explore what that looks like for her, here on Intimate Interactions.

Relationship Milestones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRtVV4iY4GE

https://polysingleish.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/non-escalator-landmarks.jpg

Relationship Anarchy with Kale Gosen (and she has a podcast now!)

http://relationship-anarchy.com

Irene’s Blog

http://thedesivibes.com

Are you curious how intimacy and sadism relate? Sometimes being seen and accepted doing something that is so vilified can bond you to a person.

What would you do if something like sadism were a core element in you? What if it were a core element in your sexuality? How would you ethically go about being a sadist?

I think of reducing the stigma in society around ethical sadism as work producing an inclusive society that leads to greater freedom, less mental illness (think depression and anxiety due to shame), and more production as more people will function more fully.

Some may make the argument that it also makes society safer as more sadists have an outlet, and while they might have an outlet, I’m always cautious not to suggest sadists who are ethical by nature would act unethically on those drives.

I haven’t yet seen any research that suggests sadism and criminality are at all linked and while I haven’t thoroughly looked at primary literature on this topic, I’d highly caution against making huge leaps like that. I think sadists without an outlet are more likely to experience depression because they aren’t given the freedom to have consensual interactions that would feed them. Who are we to judge which consensual interactions are okay if everyone is safe?

The bigger problem I would suggest is that we don’t have a functioning legal framework for consent surrounding consensual sex or physical violence that later becomes non consensual during the act, though of course some might have a lower bar for what counts as functioning and may disagree with me.

In any case, Starship Jones is back today to talk about consensual ownership of humans, dominance, gangbangs, intimacy with strangers, submission, service, ethical sadism of course, and more.

I look forward to sharing this conversation with you on Intimate Interactions.

Starship Jones Photography

http://instagram.com/starshipjones

http://fetlife.com/users/181660

Vancouver Kink Events

http://westcoastbound.ca

http://metrovancouverkink.com

In this session, Professor Meow is back to talk about hierarchical polyamory and bdsm.

As a relationship anarchist, I often make a distinction when talking about hierarchical poly. There are hierarchies of obligations: that’s sharing child care, mortgage payments, etcetera; and there are hierarchies of control. For clarity: a hierarchy of obligations can be characterized as prioritization or of special privileges related to those obligations. For example, facilitating vacation time for another parent of one’s own children might take priority over dating that same weekend. That’s more life management and prioritization rather than the other parent demanding you not date at all.

Hierarchy of control is a more grey area and is the realm of exercising power, punishments, cutoff-all-ties-vetos. My experience with power dynamics informs my personal opinion that control hierarchies work best when we hold them suspect, that it’s ideal to ask a lot of questions before they’re set up, while they are ongoing, and even after the fact.

Why do we set them up? What purposes do they serve? Who benefits if anyone? Is it temporary or long term? When is the exact date we revisit this agreement? Who is inconvenienced or hurt if anyone? What would happen if there were less control or more control? Would anything meaningful change? How will this accomplish the underlying goal?