Intimate Interactions

Kat Stark is an author, podcaster, and blogger at https://onthewetcoast.com. They talk about their marital renaissance, slut shame, slut empowerment, overcoming non monogamy shame through consensual nonconsent fantasy, swinging, how the book “Come As You Are” helped them, the book “Opening Up,” and their own book, “Yelling in Pasties: The Wet Coast Confessions of an Anxious Slut.”

It’s one of my most on-task sessions yet.

content warning: harm, sexual assault, and repair

Intimacy can become interrupted in relationships for a lot of different reasons. One reason that is hard to deal with is Intimate Partner Abuse. It’s heavy, and often a situation where one party tries to control the narrative and exercise information control, often through repetition of one narrative or other insistence on a One True Story sense of what happened. Erasure and minimization happen. While these things tend to happen along gender lines, that’s not always the case. Accordingly, I try to stay as neutral as possible in these matters and my focus is typically two questions, “what’s going to be different moving forward?” and “how do we want to get there?”

These situations are very complicated and teasing apart what harmful behaviours we choose to call abuse is hard. It’s also even harder when in out-of-balance relationships, it’s rare any one person is completely innocent. 

Deciding on focus and priority in a multitude of narratives is challenging and often our “gut feeling” in influenced by traditional power dynamics and in-group bias. That means we tend to favour people who look like us and we internalize society’s view of who “us” is meaning we disproportionately favour dominant culture individuals (read White folks, straight people, men, and/or cisgendered people).

I’ve often said it’s not what someone has done so much as what they are doing with it. When there are allegations of some event in the past, as a third party it’s hard for me to staunchly throw myself in any direction and I’ve found in the past many communities fall into the same place of indecision that looks like apathy - yet many care about their communities and whether or not folks are harmed.

If you can’t just believe survivors as being very likely honest about their personal narrative or their experience of events, ask yourself if the other person is behaving like a traditional abuser who has just been called out. It’s not that we expect people to be harmless in community; but we do expect them to be improving themselves.

Someone caught in the trap of minimizing, denying, or erasing others’ - someone caught up in informational warfare, blaming the other party, or centering themselves as the truly harmed party, rather than acknowledging when we stub our own toes we can be at fault and be hurting - someone like that probably doesn’t need or deserve your support. Just my two cents.

Please note I’m sick again in this episode so I might cough my way through it. Content warning if it isn’t clear already, we’re going to be talking about intimate partner harm including things like gaslighting. I think the content is useful for healing, but it’s my opinion that should be an informed personal choice. Let’s go to the session with Chelsey and hear her perspective on Accounting for Intimate Partner Harm.

Resources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellblade:_Senua%27s_Sacrifice

https://victorsalmon.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/window-of-tolerance.jpg

 Today I’m recording another session with my mother who was born in India in 1954. We dive deeper into her relationships with her parents, talk a little more about the early parts of her marriage, and about her university exams. Some of this information is also new information for me.

We get side-tracked a bunch and my mother’s words can be non-linear due to her intense anxiety.

I have sent the recordings to my mother, sister, and brother to get their approval before publishing and to ensure anything they wanted edited out got edited out.

As always if you like the episode, please tell your friends or better still, take a few minutes to just write us a quick review to help other relationship and intimacy lovers find us.

My mother also gestures wildly with her hands at times which I find quite charming but it does result in the mic getting frequently bumped so please bear with us.

Please keep in mind, this is experimental content for me. My relationship with my mom is complex and *riddled with intergenerational trauma*, and it is still a relationship between a child and their mother.

As a relationship, it’s still critically important in understanding where I come from and how I relate to intimacy. It informs my anxiety and how I struggle to experience strong family connections. In the absence of those strong relationships, it makes sense to have found so much peace in relationship anarchy, giving me the permission I needed to forge intense or intimate relationships with nonsexual and nonromantic partners. In a sense, Relationship Anarchy is a recipe for building Found Family for me.

Content warning: we briefly touch on my grandmother’s suicide attempts involving hanging and fire and the consequences that had emotionally for my mother.

Today I’m practicing great vulnerability with my mother who was born in India in 1954. We touch on what her family relationships were like and how she built intimacy in those relationships. We get side-tracked a bunch and my mother’s words can be non-linear due to her intense anxiety

She was always cautious when I was young of what she shared with the greater world. Truthfully, our relationship hasn’t always been the best. There was the rare instance of physical discipline like a slap across the face or the much, much more commonly the threat of violence. My mother and I have a complicated past and I’m mindful not to disclose too much so as to hold space for her emotional safety even if you don’t know her.

It was a very hot and sweaty summer day when we recorded this meaning there were planes flying overhead but we decided to keep the window open. At a certain point someone turns on a leaf blower and I just closed the window. I’ve tried to edit it all out but you might still hear some of it. 

My mother also gestures wildly with her hands at times which I find quite charming but it does result in the mic getting frequently bumped so please bear with us.

I have sent the recordings to my mother, sister, and brother to get their approval before publishing and to ensure anything they wanted edited out got edited out.

Contraceptive conversations with your mother - the conversations we all love having. Whelp, that topic came up. We mentioned the rhythm method of birth control, a type of calendar-based contraceptive strategy so I’ve included a link to effectiveness. According to Wikipedia, “when used to avoid pregnancy, the Standard Days Method has been claimed[18] to have perfect-use efficacy of 95+% and typical-use efficacy of 88%.[17] However, independent researchers have shown that these figures are probably too optimistic and its efficacy is likely to be much lower.[19]” I share the concern of researchers that it’s optimistic to expect it to regularly work if only because humans are so fallible and are easily influenced by desire to have sex. I’ve also included a link so you can do research on it. If you can afford it though and it isn’t medically harmful to you, please consider just using a condom. They are very effective when used correctly and while effective at preventing pregnancy they also offer some protection against most STIs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar-based_contraceptive_methods#Types_and_effectiveness

Sometimes between trauma and anxiety and depression and dissociation, I can’t make heads or tails of my own story, but hopefully knowing that I’m seen still helps with healing. I’ll let you know. It’s not easy to be transparent like this but sometimes I think it’s part of who I am as someone who wears their heart of their sleeve, and part of healing. If not part of healing, at least part of my desperate need to be seen and validated, part of my fear that I am not rooted in reality, part of that anxiety that comes from gaslighting - is this really happening? Did I really speak those words? Would the world be an easier place to live in if those things didn’t really happen? Is it really worth the effort to try to make sense of these events? I think it is worth that effort. If you choose, bear witness to two traumatized people trying to make sense of seemingly nonsensical events. Truthfully, I think we do a pretty good job as a mother and child team, only rarely struggling with each other.

Content warning for:  burns requiring hospitalization, gaslighting, siblings dying in childhood

Status and shame stick with each of us differently and follow us through life. Today we meet Lisa and Paula, two monogamous, vanilla, heterosexual women of colour in their 40s. They’re both successful entrepreneurs and mothers and wives who met during their MBA programs at UBC. We talk about the issues that suburban housewives face such as wives and mothers putting their own needs last as well as assumptions they’re successful because of their husbands.

As with most relationships, long term ones follow seasons of intimacy and connection. While there are many paths to intimacy, Lisa and Paula talk about their use of cannabis edibles to bridge across sexual shame through to a rich intimate exchange with their monogamous life partners. They put their MBA degrees to use started their own company selling microdoses of cannabis edibles called Trufelle, marketing to suburban housewives. For clarity, I wasn’t compensated for any podcasts with them, but they did gift me a box of Trufelle. 

Today we’re talking about shame, but in our next sessions we’ll talk about attraction, arousal, orgasm, and non monogamy. To be honest, I find their radically different experience of the world refreshing and interesting, and thought you’d enjoy sitting in on that conversation.

Resources

I mentioned the Vancouver improvised partner dance scene. There's also http://metrovancouverkink.com if you decide you want to explore more in the BDSM realm. You can also find content on my website to have conversations about open relationships or introduce the idea to partners at: https://victorsalmon.com/relationships. 

For non monogamy events, there are two pages (though both call polyamory "poly" which may be unfair to Polynesian people who prefer we use PolyAm or another shortening rather than burying their pre-existing use, their groups, and visibility of culture (under an avalanche of middle class white folks flocking to a new lifestyle).  It’s a complex issue involving the word Polynesian being a colonial word and the complicated experience of internal Racism, something BIMPoC folks tend to understand in my experience and non racialized folks tend not to understand. My advice, it’s not inconvenient to just change your language, especially if you don’t understand the experience of being part of a struggling diaspora that is marginalized): https://www.facebook.com/VancouverPoly101 and http://www.vanpoly.ca/

I spoke about the awesome drag kings at Man Up. Here’s an article about them. 

Here’s the BDSM, Paraphilias, and Paraphilic Disorders Article from The Atlantic.

Trufelle is a high-end cannabis edible created by the two entrepreneurs from today’s episode. They host events if you’re interested. 

Had the pleasure of sitting down with Adele Barclay

- Stranger to me so we take some time sussing each other out

- Queer femme 

- Poet focusing on intimacy and power

- Published: “If I were in a cage, I’d reach out for you” is already out

- Has a grant for her second book “Renaissance Normcore”

We talk about

- The ethics of vulnerability

- Articulating vulnerability and the ways we protect ourselves in the process

- Speaking plainly and the intimacy that brings in written art

- The intimacy of domesticity

- Authenticity when living with people who know you (like partners)

- The way we mask intimacy when living with strangers

- Performance of intimacy

- Stuff sometimes gets in the way

- Ways of performing intimacy authentically

I’m excited to share this grant-writing, money-winning, queer femme poet’s ideas with you on Intimate Interactions!

Tillie King is a local queer femme bootblack. She describes herself as someone with mental illness. Some would say she’s one of the community matriarchs. Her perspective on intimate violence both consensual and non consensual is nuanced and interesting. I discuss the intersections of service, bdsm, and trauma. We make it accessible for new folks by discussing the differences between top or bottom roles and dom or sub roles. We also explain terms like feral, flagging, and mommy. We also talk about public displays of service and vulnerability. I hope you enjoy listening to our discussion as much as I enjoyed having it. 

- content warning: white supremacy

- Ranting and off topic is usual and can help with rest

- What's your trigger plan for today? What do you need if you get triggered?

- calm harm app

- Do you use inappropriate jokes ever to cope with the awkwardness or anxiety surrounding trauma?

- How does poverty intersect with trauma in your experience?

- How do you feel white supremacy intersects with poverty in your experience?

- How does white supremacy intersect with trauma?

- What has healing from white supremacy looked like for you?

- What does shame surrounding healing from white supremacy look like?

Elle and I chat about relationship anarchy and finding baby-raising nesting partners. Non monogamy and coparenting are definitely things that can work together. Enjoy our lively conversation and possibly the dulcet sounds of my trying to discreetly eat an orange while recording. We talk about time allocation and how hard these issues can be to navigate as a woman. 

We briefly discuss how the gender pay gap is getting to a point where it’s almost entirely due to motherhood. In equal partnerships where both share domestic duties rather than assuming it’s the woman’s job (think “I have to go do some dishes rather than I have to go help my wife with the dishes”), even in those equal partnerships, the man will go to work and if it’s known he’s a father, he’ll make a little more than men and women in the workplace. The mother, however, will go to work and make significantly less than her non mother female coworkers. I’ve included a link as I find it both horrible and fascinating.

We also recorded a session about dream living arrangements and forming intentional non monogamous communities, and we’ll tackle that topic in a few weeks if you’re a patreon. For now, I’m excited to have Elle back to discuss non monogamy and how it intersects with parenting.

Resources

NYTimes: The Gender Pay Gap is Largely Because of Motherhood 

See the study below, page 39 figure A vs figure B of this study from Denmark. Look at page 39 figure D to see the wage rate and how mothers 20 years after having their first child are paid less even when you take into consideration hours worked and that motherhood in its immediate demands are behind them. It’s also possible that when paid less, people choose to work fewer hours; so it’s a bad assumption (especially 10-20 years later) that working fewer hours is necessarily why people are paid less, especially when they proportionally more hours as evidenced by page 39 figure D.

“if a college-educated woman has one child, she will lose about a million dollars in lifetime earnings. I didn't have my child until I was over 40, and I already had a number of years working. But my Mommy Tax is close to a million.” - Ann Crittenden 

Needs Inventory

Feelings Inventory

Gottman’s Sound Relationship House