Sex Out Loud with Tristan Taormino

The hosts of the Multiamory podcast Emily Matlack, Jase Lindgren, and Dedeker Winston join Tristan Taormino to talk about solo polyamory, relationship anarchy and sex positivity. We talk about what solo polyamory means, why people chose it, how they practice it, and what it looks like during a pandemic. We get into the basics of relationship anarchy as a philosophy and style and what it's like in the real world. We have a discussion about sex-positivity, sex negativity, and how COVID-19 has affected attitudes about sex and dating. Plus, we address the current controversy over swingers going back to holding in-person events. Because this foursome has extensive experience with nonmonogamy, this is an in depth conversation where everyone shares some really personal stuff. This episode is possible because of the generosity of Calm (calm.com/tristan) and Dipsea dipdeastories.com/tristan.

Emily Matlack is a relationship mediator, specializing in jealousy management, an actor, and a proud vegan. She is the funny bone of the Multiamory trio. Oh, she'll also kick your ass at Mario Kart. In addition to laughing and crying about polyamory on air each week, you can spot her singing and dancing in a play, trying to look sexy while striking a yoga pose in a photo shoot, or serving every vegan who ever lived at the plant-based restaurants at which she works.

Dedeker Winston is a relationship coach, writer, and advocate for polyamory and non-traditional relationships. She has been consulted as a polyamory expert for Newsweek, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and many other news and media outlets. She is the author of The Smart Girl's Guide to Polyamory: Everything You Need to Know about Open Relationships, Non-Monogamy, and Alternative Love, published by Skyhorse Press.

Jase Lindgren is a non-monogamous dating coach, healthy masculinity educator, and sex-positivity advocate. He has trained in positive psychology, Emotional Freedom Technique, consent education, and Buddhist mindfulness practice. He has worked with the government and celebrities on HIV public awareness in Russia, is a long-time fan of podcasts, and is excited to share this new and unique content with the world. By teaching people how to suck less at communication and define each relationship on its own terms, Jase is sought out as an authority on modern dating.

Tristan Taormino gives you her 2020 Holiday Gift Guide that highlights independent, POC owned, queer owned, woman owned, and sex worker owned small businesses. She's got something for everyone, including sex toys from Satisfyer (Satisfyer.com) and FemmeFunn, a box of sexy goodies by Like A Kitten, biodegradable glitter, cocktail mixers, leatherwork from New Orleans you can find at Dynamo Toys, botanical oils, candles, sexy clothes, and revolutionary art. Plus, therapist Kate Loree joins us to talk about tools and strategies and self care for surviving this holiday season.

Kate Loree, LMFT is a sex positive licensed marriage and family therapist with a specialty in non-monogamous, kink, LGBTQ and sex worker communities. In addition to her Masters in Marriage and Family Therapy, she is also a registered art therapist (ATR) and has a second Masters in Business Administration (MBA). She has been practicing psychotherapy for seventeen years and has additional training in EMDR and the Trauma Resiliency Model (TRM) for the treatment of trauma, such as sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. She has written her first book due to be published at the end of 2021. Special thanks to Calm for their support.

Comedian, actress, writer/director Melanie Vesey digs deep in her soul and covers a lot of ground in this interview with Tristan Taormino. Her experience with intimate partner violence just as her acting career was taking off was heartbreaking, and she talks about how she recovered from the trauma (and turned it into comedy 20 years later). We talk about what it's like to co-parent her son with his dad, and her description of talking openly about sex with him is inspiring and hilarious. We also talk about Promotional Rescue, her promotion coaching business for artists and small business owners. Plus, we listen to an excerpt from her stand up special Wild Animal (video on Amazon and RevrtTV, audio on all major streaming platforms). Special thanks to Sakara and Intensity by Pour Moi.

Melanie Vesey is an accomplished comedian, actress, writer/director, and owner of Promotional Rescue. Her comedy special/album Wild Animal is available to watch on Amazon, Revry TV and to listen to all major streaming platforms. She hosts the Promotional Rescue Talk Show where she has real conversations with people about how they deal with self-promotion. Throughout Melanie's career, she's been seen in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Paper Magazine, Playboy, Time Out, and Vanity Fair. In addition to her TV comedy spot on Laugh After Dark for Amazon, she's opened for Marc Maron, Tweeted for Tig Notaro, WON round 4 of the U.S. Comedy Contest, and been comedian of the week on the Jackie Kashian & Laurie Kilmartin podcast.

Notably, she co-starred with Jim Carrey in the Andy Kaufman bio-pic "Man on the Moon" and has been seen at the Burbank, Motor City, Palm Springs, and the Ladies Laugh Comedy Festivals. Melanie also co-produces The Antidepressant Comedy Hour for Comedy Hub on Twitch and Make It Rain Comedy. Trained at the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center, Stella Adler Conservatory in New York City, and The Interlochen Arts Academy, she has a strong foundation for her body of work.

Ashley Manta, Kiana Reeves, and John Renko join Tristan Taormino to talk about cannabis, sexual health, and pleasure. We talk about how cannabis products, including arousal oil, lubricants, and suppositories can treat sexual pain, inflammation, and trouble with arousal. We go over the difference between a CBD product and one with CBD and THC and how to be an informed consumer in a market that has been flooded with unregulated CBD products. As medical professionals often invalidate, pathologize, or simply have no solutions for pelvic pain, vaginismus, and vulvodynia, cannabis is a natural, plant-based medicine that offers real relief. Special thanks for the support of Dipsea, Care/Of, and Calm.

Ashley Manta is an award-winning sex educator and coach and has become a sought-after authority on mindfully combining sex and cannabis as part of her CannaSexual® brand. She is the author of The CBD Solution: Sex, published in conjunction with Merry Jane and Chronicle Books. She also writes for Playboy as a Playboy Advisor. Ashley appeared on the cover of Sexual Health Magazine in January 2019, along with the designation, "America's High Priestess of Pleasure." She completed her certification as a Bodysex Facilitator after studying with legendary pleasure pioneer Betty Dodson. She is a brand ambassador for Sybian and Foria.

With a lifelong passion for sexual wellness and plant-based medicine, Kiana Reeves has been practicing in the field of sexual wellness, birth work, and holistic health for over 10 years. She is a pelvic health practitioner, full-spectrum doula, somatic sex educator, Chief Education Officer at Foria, and mama of two wild sons.

John Renko's passion is figuring out how things work. He employed his engineering skills to grow California-legal high-grade medical and recreational marijuana, creating an ultra-clean product to the highest purity standards. John developed GoLove CBD Naturals with sex educator Dr. Sadie Allison. GoLove is a body-safe, fully tested, CBD-based intimate lubricant designed to help alleviate vaginal pain, inflammation and anxiety.

Tristan Taormino welcomes Intactivist Georganne Chapin from Intact America to educate listeners on the anatomy and sexual importance of the foreskin of the penis. No professional medical association in the United States or the rest of the world recommends routine circumcision, yet it's incredibly prevalent in America. We discuss the debate surrounding routine circumcision in male infants. What are some of the arguments about why circumcision is necessary, and how many of them stand up to fact-checking and science? Does opposing circumcision devalue cultural and religious practices? We talk about what role the foreskin plays in solo and partnered sex and how leaving the penis intact affects people's sex lives. There has been a global outcry about female genital mutilation (FGM), but not about penile circumcision, a similar procedure—why is that? How does the Intactivist Movement to end child genital cutting intersect with efforts to end FGM and activism to stop doctors from medically intervening when someone is identified as intersex at birth? How does the everyday person bring up the subject with a loved one, a spouse, a sibling, or a close friend? This episode is made possible by Calm and Intensity by Pour Moi.

Georganne Chapin has dedicated her life to promoting human rights and fighting injustice. Georganne is a leader in the growing national movement to end routine circumcision of baby boys. Twelve years ago, she co-founded and became executive director of Intact America, the largest national organization working to end child genital cutting in this country and to ensure healthy sexual futures for all people. Prior to that, she founded the Hudson Center for Health Equity and Quality (which she also currently heads) and is the former president and CEO of Hudson Health Plan, a large nonprofit Medicaid managed care organization in the Hudson Valley. She has her MPhil in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University and her JD from Pace University School of Law.

Lydia X. Z. Brown, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Katie Tastrom join Tristan Taormino to talk about disability justice, sex, and relationships. We explore the question: what does it mean to apply a Disability Justice lens to sexuality and sex-positive culture? What are the effects when Black and Brown disabled people are hypersexualized, desexualized or degendered? On an interpersonal level, desexualization assumes disabled folks don't have agency or skill when it comes to their sexuality and can put pressure on them to perform a kind of hypersexuality. We discuss desirability and undesirability, strength-based approaches to disability and sexuality, disabled sex workers, and the overwhelming amount of sexual violence disabled people face. We also delve into ableism, politics, and representation in the legal case of Marjorie Anna Stubblefield who had a sexual relationship with D.J., a non-verbal man with cerebral palsy. This episode is sponsored by Calm and Dipsea.

Lydia X. Z. Brown is a disability justice advocate, organizer, educator, attorney, strategist, and writer whose work has largely focused on interpersonal and state violence against multiply-marginalized disabled people living at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and language. They are Policy Counsel for the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology; Adjunct Lecturer in Disability Studies for Georgetown University; and Director of Policy, Advocacy, and External Affairs at the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network. They are also founder and volunteer director of the Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color's Interdependence, Survival, and Empowerment. Currently, they serve as a founding board member of the Alliance for Citizen Directed Supports, presidential appointee to the American Bar Association's Commission on Disability Rights, and chair of the American Bar Association's Section on Civil Rights & Social Justice, Disability Rights Committee. In 2015, Lydia was named to Pacific Standard's 30 Top Thinkers Under 30 list, and to Mic's list of 50 impactful leaders, cultural influencers, and breakthrough innovators. In 2018, NBC featured them as one of 26 Asian Pacific American breakthrough leaders for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and Amplifier featured them as part of the We The Future campaign for youth activism.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is just another middle aged mixed-race rust belt autistic aging queerpunk, and a queer disabled and autistic nonbinary femme writer, performer, educator freedom dreamer, and disability and transformative justice movement worker of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Roma ascent. She is the 2020 winner of the Lambda Literary Foundation's Jean Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, and is the author and co-editor of nine books, including Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon), Tonguebreaker, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice,Bridge of Flowers, Bodymap, Dirty River, The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities (coedited with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani), Love Cake and Consensual Genocide. Their work has won the Lambda and been shortlisted four times for the Publishing Triangle Award. A lead artist for the disability justice performance collective, Sins Invalid, since 2009, Leah also co-created the collectives Performance/Disability/Art, Mangos With Chili, and Toronto's Asian Arts Freedom School and is currently on the programming team for the Disability and Intersectionality Summit. They believe in the power of storytelling and witnessing, being an everyday-ass human being, the power of disability justice to create an abolitionist present and future, crip and Crazy person brilliance, and the unpredictable future. Raised in Worcester, MA, they currently live in South Seattle, unceded Duwamish territories.

Katie Tastrom is a writer and sex worker based in Upstate NY who focuses on disability justice, sexuality, and abolition. Her most recent article was in HuffPost.

Therapist Jessica Fern joins Tristan Taormino to talk about her new book Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma, and Consensual Nonmonogamy. We talk about the basics of attachment theory and how to challenge the inherent mononormativity in it in order to apply it to nonmonogamy, especially polyamory. There is an in-depth discussion of childhood and ongoing trauma and how it relates to our relationships as well as the effects of larger societal systems on our sense of identity, safety, and security. We explore the co-regulation of our nervous systems, the difference between secure connection and a securely attached relationship, tools to help people and their partners learn about their attachment styles and become polysecure. Polysecure is the first book of its kind to look at nonmonogamy through the lens of attachment theory expansively without pathologizing it. Special thanks to Dipsea and Intensity Pour Moi for making this show possible. Jessica Fern is a psychotherapist, public speaker and trauma and relationship expert. In her international private practice, Jessica works with individuals, couples and people in multiple-partner relationships who no longer want to be limited by their reactive patterns, cultural conditioning, insecure attachment styles and past traumas, helping them to embody new possibilities in life and love. Learn more at JessicaFern.com.

This show is all about sexual fantasies! Tristan Taormino talks to Dr. Justin Lehmiller about his book Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life and his research which includes the largest study of Americans' sexual fantasies. We review the seven broad categories he divides them into: multi-partner sex; power, control, and rough sex; novelty, adventure, and variety; taboo and forbidden sex; partner sharing and nonmonogamous relationships; passion and romance; and erotic flexibility. Plus, we discuss other findings about gender, sexual orientation, body image, and what percentage of people want to make their top fantasy come to life (hint: it's surprising!). How do we shape our fantasies and our fantasies shape us and why do fantasies matter?

Dr. Justin Lehmiller is a social psychologist and Research Fellow at The Kinsey Institute. He is author of the blog Sex and Psychology and the popular book Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life. Dr. Lehmiller is an award-winning educator, having been honored three times with the Certificate of Teaching Excellence from Harvard University, where he taught for several years. He is also a prolific researcher who has published more than 50 academic works, including a textbook titled The Psychology of Human Sexuality that is used in college classrooms around the world. Dr. Lehmiller is a much sought-after voice in the media on sexuality research and education. He has been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and CNN, and he has appeared on dozens of international radio, podcast, and television programs. This show is possible because of the generosity of Calm and Trivia Star by Super Lucky.

Historian Jen Manion joins Tristan Taormino to discuss her new book Female Husbands: A Trans History. How did some people assigned female at birth began living their lives as men in the 18th and 19th Centuries? Manion did extensive research on primary source materials including marriage certificates, census records, court documents, local and national and newspapers. In their book, Manion introduces us to the lives of U.K. female husbands Charles Hamilton, Henry Fielding, James Howe, James Gray, Samuel Bunday, William Chandler, Robert Shurtliff, James Allen, and Henry Stoake. We learn about George Wilson, John Smith, Albert Guelph, Joseph Lobdell, Frank Dubois, Samuel Pollard, Leroy Williams, and John A. Whittman in the United States. What did class and wealth have to do with the ability to trans gender? What do we know about the women who married female husbands? What happened when female husbands were discovered to be assigned female at birth? What role did the institution of marriage, medicine, the legal system, and the media play in shaping their lives and the narratives about them? How did their communities make sense of them trans-ing gender? How did attitudes during this time take root and influence ideas about sex, gender, and sexual orientation that persisted? How does this book fit into the study of LGBTQIA+ histories?

Jen Manion is Associate Professor of History at Amherst College. She is a social and cultural historian whose work examines the role of gender and sexuality in American life. Manion is author of Liberty's Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America which received the inaugural Mary Kelley Best Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Their most recent book, Female Husbands: A Trans History was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Manion has published dozens of essays for popular and scholarly audiences and serves on the editorial boards of Amherst College Press, Early American Studies, and The William and Mary Quarterly. She is currently chair of the OAH Committee on the Status of LGBTQ Historians & Histories.

Author Farzana Doctor sits down with Tristan Taormino to discuss her latest novel Seven which revolves around the practice of khatna, a ritual female genital cutting in Dawoodi Bohra communities. According to the World Health Organization, more than 200 million girls and women alive today have been cut in 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where female genital mutilation (also called female genital mutilation or female circumcision) is concentrated. They discuss what it means when religion attempts to control women's bodies and sexuality, and the devastating effects of silence, secrecy, and trauma. Her novel explores themes of family, loyalty, generational trauma, and the shame that persists for women to talk openly about their own sexuality. Throughout this riveting story, she offers models for resistance, activism, hope, and healing.

Farzana Doctor is a writer, activist and psychotherapist. She is the author of four novels: Stealing Nasreen, Six Metres of Pavement (which won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award), All Inclusive (a Kobo 2015 and National Post Best Book of the Year) and Seven which Ms. Magazine says "is fully feminist and ambitiously bold; this is an important book for our changing times." Farzana volunteers with WeSpeakOut, a group that is working to ban female genital cutting in her Dawoodi Bohra community.

This episode is sponsored by Intensity by Pour Moi and Trivia Star.