Urban Erotika pioneer and poet Mo Beasley is our guest of honor this time. Mo talks about the significance of erotic art and shares about his journey with catalyzing and building Urban Erotika since 2001. He also talks about his activism around complex ideas of manhood and confronting homophobia in communities of color. We collectively address a question about who should pay for the check on a date, which turns out to be more of a doozy of a question than it first seems. Special bonus segment of poems by Mo, and by Regie Cabico and Slam!! And we round things out with a beautiful story from a listener about how YOU SHOULD TALK TO EACH OTHER ABOUT THINGS saved the day.
Episode 12 – Porn, Power Play, and Sex Work, Oh My!
Kink-focused sex worker/educator/sex worker rights activist Sabrina Morgan joins us to unpack society’s discomfort with sex work, sex work vs. human trafficking, sex work as work, and to share stories of helping clients step into their own power. We collectively address listener questions about porn, Stephanie super extra geeks out about feminist porn, and we discuss the quagmire of mainstream porn. At what point, if any, does porn consumption become a problem? How can you make sure the porn you watch was produced in an ethical way? Also, what to do when your partner is more into BDSM than you are? And is it possible for consensual power exchange to be as or more intimate than vanilla sex? Stick around, this is a doozy of an episode!
Episode 11 – The Gentle Honesty Muscle
We really dig into ideas about honesty and the complexity of gender identity with our dear old friend Salty Brine. Salty is a hoot and a writer/performer/educator extraordinaire. Is honesty ALWAYS the best policy- even when being honest might hurt someone? What to do when you want to have sex but shut down when faced with the opportunity… or when you don’t enjoy a sexual encounter nearly as much as you thought you would? And is there really nothing fixed about male-ness and female-ness? Plus, pick-up lines based on famous playwrights, “The Revolution Will Be Polite”, and a shout out to gender outlaw Kate Bornstein.
Episode 10 – The First Ever All-Quickies Episode!
3 guests! So many quickies! Avital Isaacs (burlesque performer/education coordinator at Babeland Brooklyn), Salty Brine (writer/performer/educator) and Adjoa Tetteh (activist/sex educator) join Stephanie and Dave to throw down about various and sundry things including: what straight white feminist dudes are thinking, cheers to finesse and playfulness in sex, the Nine Taoist Thrusts, casual hook-up etiquette, celebrating fat sexuality, time pressure on having kids, the first kid to have three legal parents, herpes and oral sex safety, herpes is not a death knell, the art of masturbation, mutual masturbation FTW, National Condom Week!, five recent studies about female desire, analogous anatomy, the steaminess of getting to know your partner’s whole entire body, and a request to consider the complexity of your own gender. Whoa nelly. It was good for us. Was it good for you? Let us know.
Episode 9 – Jump Right In!
On cunnilingus, jealousy, and fear of the unknown (but not necessarily at the same time). Polyamory/pleasure scholar Antonia Levy joins us to discuss her research into the polyamory movements in the U.S. and Germany, the trouble with poly-normativity, and the complexity of using “polyamory” as a label. We address listener questions about getting comfortable with oral sex, and ways of softening the edges around jealousy when it feels all-consuming. Where is the line between trusting you are just not into something and recognizing a need to work through hang-ups about it? What do you do when you are in a healthy, long-term, open relationship but may never feel comfortable with the thing your partner desires the most? Also, hear Antonia’s thoughts about sex in the context of Muslim culture and Dave’s rant about the book Twilight.
Episode 8 – Empathy is the Sexiest
Drumroll, please… religion, racism, AND pronoun usage!! LGBTQ rights organizer/researcher Cole Parke, who embodies empathy so fully it is practically a superpower, joins us to share about their experience organizing between queer communities and communities of faith, and also about how they work against hate and violence toward LGBTQ people in Uganda, Russia, and elsewhere. We collectively address a listener question about reconciling being gay and being Christian, and we share experiences of learning and admitting we’ve been wrong & the beauty of shutting the fuck up and listening. Is it really possible to hold others in love when they have conflicting or even oppressive views toward us? And if someone you are dating holds some racist views, is that a dealbreaker? Stephanie and Dave share their thoughts on Valentine’s Day. Learn why “Jesus likes it rough”, and “glitter is the herpes of the craft world”! This is a long one, but a really really good one, we promise.
Episode 7 – Relationships Are Something You Do, Not Something You Have
Sex therapist/psychoanalyst Dr. Michael Aaron is our guest of honor this time. Hear his and our perspectives on things like: What to do when you feel less ravenous about sex than your partner feels? Is it really honestly possible to feel coziness/familiarity and also sexiness/mystery/excitement in a long term partnership? How do you begin to talk to your partner about your interest in power play? (Trigger warning, around the half hour mark, we talk explicitly about rape fantasies.) And did you know that *just this past year*, kinky behavior was officially de-pathologized in clinical psychology terms (we think it is about fucking time)? Plus, Dave is super silly and loopy on NyQuil, and he and Stephanie share their favorite pick-up lines.
Episode 6 – The Talking-to-Cute-Strangers New Year’s Jamboree!
Happy 2014! Meet the fabulous sex columnist Twanna Hines, of funkybrownchick.com. We discuss the line between fun flirtation and creepiness, we celebrate the beauty of human connection in general, and we talk about the distinction between open relationships and cheating (spoiler: it’s all about the honesty and communication). Also: role play! There is an actual role play in this one. And Dave and Stephanie check in about the podcast’s mission statement, we share some resources for healing sexual trauma, Dave rants about why ‘Love, Actually’ may be the least romantic film ever made, and Twanna talks about menstruation! Oh yes.
Episode 5 – Are Personal Choices Inherently Political?
We are joined by super wise professor/researcher Laura Portwood-Stacer to discuss the complexity of the idea of the personal as the political, including some unpacking of the hefty concepts of heteronormativity and sex positivity. Where’s the line between a political identity that you should be out about and a bedroom practice that you should be discreet about? Is it ever ok for a woman to choose not to come in the context of a casual hook-up, or is that letting guys off the hook? And if a woman who is attracted to women is in her early thirties and has not yet had sex with a woman, has she completely missed the boat? Also, hear Dave’s extended boat metaphors, a love song from BONOBONOBONOBO, and Stephanie and Laura’s Quickies about Jesus. Yes: Jesus!
Episode 4 – 50 Shades of Safer Sex
Badass sexuality educator/activist Adjoa Tetteh joins us to discuss ways of shifting the culture around talking about safer sex, how to love your WHOLE body (even and especially when it’s hard), what to do if you find our your spouse has recently had unprotected sex with someone else, what the fuck is actually up with HPV, and much much more. Plus Stephanie’s thoughts on 50 Shades of Grey, Adjoa’s mad props to breast feeding, a song about pleasure during childbirth, and our very first crowd source question!
