Sex Gets Real 243: Chronic pain, erotophobia, and community only spaces with Cameron Glover

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If you’re looking for support around healing your relationship with your body, deepening your relationship with a partner, unpacking your desire, and finding more pleasure, I’d love to work one-on-one with you. Learn more at dawnserra.com.

Chronic pain, erotophobia, non-romantic love, and community-only spaces

Andrew Gurza was kind enough to connect Cameron Glover and I recently, and I have to admit as soon as I started diving into the work Cameron is doing, I was excited.

Cameron is unbelievably rad and our conversation was so organic and fun. We talk about sex work, SESTA and FOSTA laws, centering the most marginalized, staying in our lane, the diversity of sexual experience, creating community-only spaces that allow for rest and healing, emotional labor and what happens when it is not equitable in a relationship, chronic pain, and why sometimes it takes time to learn that a partner can hold our truths and the ways we cope in the meantime.

Cameron also talks about transitioning from a polyamorous relationship to a monogamous relationship and how that was navigated generously.

You will not want to miss this geek-tastic conversation. Plus, how can we accept more care and help loved ones to better support us?

Check out that Beyoncé Feminism Rihanna Womanism here.

Follow Dawn is on Instagram.

In this episode, Cameron and I talk about:

• Unpacking whorephobia & erotophobia and recognizing the privilege sex educators who do not do sex work have compared to our sex working colleagues.
• How the recent news around SESTA & FOSTA have significantly affected the way we navigate social media, the way we talk about sex, and how we continue to dismantle that.
• Centering sex workers in these conversations and how sex education ties to many other social movement.
• Creating room for the variety of ways that we experience pleasure and sexuality.
• The politics of pleasure and examining what it means to be sexy.
• Shame around sex and speaking openly about our experiences.
• The importance of community-only spaces that allow us to feel safe without having to constantly feel threatened or pushed aside.
• Cameron’s experience in a conference of ableism and having her pain invisibilized. Plus, accessibility issues.
• Having different kinds of support systems in your life, especially relationships that allow you to share your boundaries and what works for you.
• How non-romantic relationships are positioned as secondary relationships, and why we disagree. We know non-romantic and platonic relationships can be just as rich and as nourishing as romantic relationships.
• The value of emotional labor and how all relationships require it, and what it really means when people complain about the amount of emotional labor they’re doing in a relationship.
• Unpacking the gross trope that being emotionally present for others is considered feminine or emasculating.

About Cameron Glover:

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Episode Transcript

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra, that’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships, from a place of curiosity and inclusion. Tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love, as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here in service to joy, connection, healing and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.

Dawn Serra: Hey, you welcome to this week’s episode. I have one of the best chats ever with Cameron Glover who has a podcast called Sex Ed in Color. Andrew Gurza connected us a couple of weeks ago and wow, did I love this conversation. There was so much chemistry and delight. I felt like I could have kept talking to Cameron for hours and in fact, our Patreon bonus content goes on quite long. Usually those bonus chats are 8 to 10 minutes and this one’s about a half an hour because we just kept going deeper into all of our thoughts and the places we wanted to explore. I think you’re going to really enjoy it. 

I also just want to remind you that having you on the newsletter for the podcast is becoming crucial. If you want to stay in touch with the show. As social media cracks down, as websites are getting turned off and banning sexuality content, there is a chance that finding any information about the show and what’s going on could become really challenging. So in addition to voting different elected officials in office, if you go to dawnserra.com/books/ you can grab the official Sex Gets Real book list that has all of my most recommended books for bodies and sex and relationships. It’s a really wonderful resource that I’m so proud and excited to share. It’s totally free. And when you sign up to get it, you also get added to the podcast newsletter. So that way as things happen, milestones, live tapings, really exciting giveaways because I’ve got a whole bunch of giveaway plans for 2019, you’ll get to be the first to hear about it. So again,  dawnserra.com/books/.

Also, if you’re looking for support around healing your relationship with your body, deepening your intuitive eating and your body trust. If you’re looking for new ways to connect with a partner to unpack your desire and define more pleasure, I would love to work with you. I do one on one work and couples work and you can find out more about all of my coaching opportunities at dawnserra.com Those links, of course, are in the show notes and at dawnserra.com/ep243/ for this week’s episode. 

Dawn Serra: Let me tell you a little bit about Cameron and then we’re just going to go right in because I love it, especially towards the end of our conversation. We have this awesome discussion about chronic pain and asking for more support. Cameron and her partner transitioned from a polyamorous or a non-monogamous relationship to a monogamous relationship and how they’ve been navigating like non romantic friendships as a way to continue to feel seen and supported. There is so much in here about community only spaces and all the bullshit that’s happening with FOSTA and SESTA. We have fun. 

Cameron Glover is a sex educator, writer, podcaster, and bath witch from New Jersey. Her expertise in sex and culture has been used to write for publications such as Playboy, Glamour, GQ Mag, Them, and many others. Cameron co hosts, a podcast, Nerds of Prey, hosted by four black women as they talk about nerd culture and Cameron hosts her own show, Sex Ed in Color, shedding light on how sexuality professionals of color navigate the field. Here is my conversation with Cameron and then don’t forget to hop over to patreon.com/sgrpodcast There’s a new URL because I can’t say that scary sex word a lot of places anymore. So patreon.com/sgrpodcast Hear our awesome bonus chat, pledge to support the show. And on we go.

Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Cameron. I’m ready to geek out with you. 

Cameron Glover: I’m so excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me. 

Dawn Serra: You are so welcome. So you’re out in the world doing amazing work around sex education and Pop culture and writing and thinking about all the things. We’re going to have a really good time talking about chronic pain and whorephobia and my list is luscious. 

Cameron Glover: Yes. And I’m also thinking of the things that just will make themselves known as we…

Dawn Serra: Yes. Okay. So here’s where I’d like to start, when we were talking about what we wanted to talk about today, the thing that you said you’ve been really rolling around in and sinking your teeth into is unpacking some of the privilege in some of the experiences that you’re having around whorephobia and the ways that – everyone who listens to the show knows I’ve been talking a lot lately about FOSTA and SESTA and all of the censorship that the show is experiencing on social media. You’ve been thinking about that and specifically the privilege that you have as a sex educator compared to people who are sex educators and also do sex work and/or just sex workers. I’d love to hear a little bit about what you’ve been really trying to get into your bones and unpack around that.

Cameron Glover: It’s interesting because a few months ago I did a workshop locally with the group and we really dived into – it was supposed to be focused on just porn, but I ended up including a lot of stuff with erotophobia and whorephobia and that because, to me, I see everything I do holistically. Everything is really interconnected for me. And I didn’t think that I could have a conversation a bout porn without talking about SESTA-FOSTA, without talking about how we live in a culture that’s very sex negative and oppressive. Also the ways that that plays out specifically with whorephobia and the way that we treat sex workers. And that really, was important for me to do as well because it really was an active way for me to really start addressing how I benefit from these systems as well as somebody who does sex education but I don’t do sex work. And even though SESTA-FOSTA still impacts my work, it impacts the ways that I’m able to navigate social media, how I’m able to reach clients, how I’m able to interact with folks when I literally can’t talk about. I can’t even type out sex on certain platforms. But in that way still, that doesn’t compare to the experiences that sex workers are having. 

I think that it’s really important that, in the same way that I talk about my other identities, it’s important for me to both acknowledge and actively work to dismantle the privileges that I have as a civilian; make sure that I’m doing my best to pass the mic to people who are sex workers to really do that kind of work and feel heard, and feel seen and support them in the best ways that I can.

Dawn Serra: When the Tumblr announcement came out a couple of weeks ago and then quickly followed by the Facebook community, a guideline updates that essentially neutered any kind of talk around sexuality, gender. There was this huge uprising and, of course, I was part of that,of realizing, “Wow, listeners aren’t going to be able to find news about the show on social media platforms.” A couple of friends of mine who are sex workers really laid into all of us and it made me sit up and pay attention to this, too, of like, “We’ve been telling you for years what it’s like to be us.” And back in April when these laws were up for signing and everyone was doing the campaigning, people tweeted and talked about it and then moved on with their days and now here you are being impacted by the very thing that we’ve been dealing with for forever.

It was like, “Get over yourselves. Welcome, here’s our reality.” And that really hit me of realizing I really do have a lot of privilege in this space and have benefited from it for a long time. There’s still a lot for me to really open my eyes to and learn about this. 

I love that we’re having this conversation because this is not new for a lot of people who have been in very vulnerable situations and who are trying so hard to survive and make money and thrive and not being able to see that is literally the epitome of privilege.

Cameron Glover: Yeah. I think that it’s especially important that we’re having this conversation now because neither one of us identifies as a sex worker and neither one of us does sex work. So I think it’s really important that people stay in their lane and are talking to their communities. So for me, that really means reaching out to most of my client base. Most of the people that I know are not sex workers. I feel like it’s important that I’m able to go into those circles and if I can undo some of that labor that’s put on other people’s shoulders, I’m more than willing to do that because that’s something that I expect of other people in my life, too, where I maybe hold less privileges. And also, too, I think it’s really important to recognize that there’s still actions steps that we can take and there’s still things that we can do in our circles as well.

For Sex Ed in Color, from the beginning, I was really adamant about putting marginalized identity at the forefront without it being the central focus. So for me, I felt like I can’t have a show where I’m talking about sexuality professionals of color, which is already super broad and super encompassing of so many different people without actively including sex workers in that. Because sex workers are really at the forefront of sex education. And it’s really just enrages me how often they’re pushed aside, how they’re just erased from the field. I don’t know. It’s really interesting because like you’re saying too, I’m still doing a lot of work to unpack that and I do want to recognize the ways that I still hold a lot of privileges. Maybe some of the things that I’m saying is like, “Okay, well, people have been saying this.” But at the same time, that’s still valid. It’s still important. And I think that as long as we’re recognizing that and actively putting action behind dismantling that, then that’s really important. It’s not just saying, “Oh well, there’s nothing that I can do,” when there’s so much that we can be doing.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. Some of the things that over the years have been revealed to me are things like colleagues in sex education who have wanted to go into doing porn or erotic film and felt unable to because they would lose their opportunities to speak in schools, or sex workers who are also doing sex education and could not get booked to speak at university groups because sex workers just plain aren’t allowed. They’re completely seen as not valid educators. Thinking about the ways that even within our sex education communities and within sex positive communities, there’s this stratification of who gets listened to, who gets paid, who gets booked for workshops and brought back, who gets to run groups; and then who doesn’t and who’s been saying these things the longest and whose voices we keep ignoring and turning away from.

Cameron Glover: Exactly. It’s such a layered nuance conversation as well because I keep thinking about a post that I made a few months ago. I was resharing something that someone posted from their Twitter and it was essentially saying that we don’t live single issue lives. So the idea that sexuality is separate from all these other social justice topics and things are… That’s not true. You can’t separate sexuality from climate justice, and gender equality and dismantling white supremacy. All these things aren’t intrinsically part of this. When I think of how we’re having a conversation about SESTA-FOSTA and including sex workers – not just including but like uplifting and actively being behind sex workers. I think about that a lot too. 

Dawn Serra: That’s one of the things that I think so many people who listened to the show have struggled with and to just be really transparent with listeners, my listenership over the past two years has gone down significantly. The show is still very popular. I’m so grateful for everyone who listens and for who writes in. But there has been this dip because I think people are really uncomfortable with tying talk about sex and pleasure, and relationships and joy, and these things that people almost treat as entertainment, which they absolutely can be. But tying that to disability justice and racial justice and all of these other social justice movements, fat activism. 

I think a lot of people feel a lot of tension and discomfort with getting confronted with those things as they tie to sex because so many people just want to be able to say, “I just want to fuck and I just want to learn how to get off better. And I don’t want to think about these other things.” But this point in time is revealing why that’s so important. For those of us who have the privilege of opting out of those justice conversations, the censorship that is long been coming for sex workers and trans folks and people of color is now coming for more mainstream educational entertainment shows like all of ours. And it’s not new. It’s long been in the works and it’s going to continue.

Cameron Glover: Yeah, exactly. I’m thinking about when the news of the Tumblr ban first came down and majority of people that I follow on social media were pretty much like, “Where am I going to get my free porn now?” And I was like, “Do you realize like how backwards that is?” So instead of supporting a sex worker directly and buying a $4 clip that they made, you’re going to complain that you can’t get access to stolen work on a free site. There’s a lot of things to dismantle here before we get to that conversation. 

It’s also like really frustrating, too, because as somebody who has multiple, marginalized identities, I never had the option to opt out of any of them. When I talk about sex, even for my own personal pleasure, it’s always rooted in the ways that I navigated the world. So I’m always thinking about it from the perspective of somebody who’s queer, someone who’s black, somebody who has chronic pain. All these different things go into that and go into my experience. So the idea of being able to opt out and just saying, “Oh, I just want to fuck,” that’s cool because I want the same thing. But we can’t just assume that everyone gets there at the same way and gets to the same point. It’s making room for all these different experiences to coexist. And I think that’s what is so great about sex education and the sexuality field at large. 

There’s so many people doing incredible work coming from so many different vantage points. There’s something for everyone. But if we are shutting people out because they don’t fit certain experiences or certain ideas of how we should be experiencing pleasure and how we should experience sexuality, then we’re really harming ourselves and we’re doing more harm than good.

Dawn Serra: I think it’s so important, too, to be able to name all of these things because I felt really sad this week. A friend of mine wrote to me and said, “I don’t know where to go to see hot, sexy black bodies engaged in sex in a way that feels erotic to me as a really fierce feminist.” Tumblr had some stuff, but now that Tumblr is going away, I don’t know where to go. I reached out to the amazing folks at Afrosexology. 

Cameron Glover: Love them. I love their work. 

Dawn Serra: Love them. And they wrote back with essentially, “There’s not a whole lot out there and that makes us sad. Here’s two things that your friend might want to look into. But really, there’s not much.” That’s not to say that there aren’t people out there creating that maybe we just don’t know about. But when you think about the kind of content that’s really easy to find pre Tumblr getting shut down with sex stuff or if you go to Pornhub or if you go to any of the sites people go to for their freebie stuff – hell, even if you go to the paid feminists sites. If you go to Erika Lust…

Cameron Glover: I was just going to say that. That doesn’t necessarily guarantee that what you’ll find what you’re looking for. 

Dawn Serra: Right. I’ve had the same problem when I’ve had men write in and say, “Where can I find sexy fat men engaging in great sex so I can see it on screen?” And the answer is if you want something that’s ethical and feminist, I honestly don’t know of any and that’s a really sad thing. So even just thinking about it from the perspective of who’s getting represented as sexy starts to reveal so many of these issues that you’re naming around truly the politics of pleasure and why it’s radical, specifically for certain people in certain identities, and at certain intersections of identities to step into pleasure and to say, “I deserve to take up this space,” because nobody else is really giving that space to a lot of different types of identities.

Cameron Glover: Yes. Yes. It’s so interesting, too, because even with my work with folks individually or in workshops, what often comes up is this feeling of permission and folks feeling like they are allowed to be sexy because they don’t fit this ideal of what is sexy. I’m really interested, especially in the new year to work on helping people unpack that and re navigate that. Not looking at what is the societal expectation of what sexy is, but realizing that we’re all individually sexy. There’s all these different ways and how do we uncover that? How do we do work to bring that forward and embody that in a way that feels good for us and also acknowledges our other lived experiences as well?

Dawn Serra: Yeah, I’m really interested looking ahead to 2019 at these two concepts of Leonore Tjia who is an amazing sex educator and she does coaching and she’ll be speaking at the Explore More Summit again this year. But she does a lot of work around reconnecting with our wildness and unpacking the ways that so many of us have been domesticated.

Cameron Glover: That’s so fascinating.

Dawn Serra: Women, specifically, but also people of color and the ways that our ability to just exist in our wildness, whatever we want to do to express ourselves, to move the noises we want to make, the ways we experience pleasure, how can we release those and let them take up as much space as possible rather than performing all the things that we’re supposed to do. I’m really captured by that idea and I’m also captured by how that ties into both of the work of Audre Lorde and then Octavio Paz around eroticism. And what does it mean to tap into the erotic, to express the erotic? The deeper I go into these thought leaders and these philosophers who have done all kinds of work, Octavio Paz – I think is how you say his name. Esther Perel quotes him all the time, but he’s done all kinds of research about the history of eroticism through the ages, around the globe. 

The ways that we experience and express eroticism across millennia and continents really comes back to poetry because words can’t capture the energy and the ways that we move and the ways that we exist in our skins and relate to our flesh. Just thinking about that permission that you mentioned around who gets to feel and what does that even mean takes me back to those concepts of how have we culturally by systems of oppression and institutions; even within pop culture and media been taught to be small and taught to be performing what we thought would make us lovable and sexy, and desirable versus expressing ourselves fully even if that makes us really different.

Cameron Glover: Yes. Oh, I love that. And I love that you mentioned Audre Lorde, of course. Because Sister Outsider is one of my favorite books of all time. But I also cite it as a sexuality text even though it’s not explicitly so. I’m also thinking about a new book that I just got. It came out last month, I believe, but I finally got my hands on it. It’s called Beyonce in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism and it’s by Dr. – I’m going to take a moment because I want to pronounce her name right, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley. Yes. She led basically a whole undergrad course in 2015 about… It was basically titled, Beyonce Feminism, Rihanna Womanism, and taking the music that both of these women were doing and linking them to the cultural history of black feminism. It was actually expanded on into a book and it’s a mix of – I haven’t read it yet and I’m really excited to. It’s a mix of looking at specific albums. Specifically around the Lemonade album that Beyonce came out with and weaving in parts of her own story and her own identities. 

But I think that it’s really important that in the field of sexuality, too, we’re looking at the ways that people are putting out their lived experiences as part of sexuality. Because I really do believe that we are all experts of our own experiences. Having texts like this, thinking about the works of other black feminists that I really look up to and respect in a field. Brittney Cooper does amazing work. Lara Witt. All these really fascinating and provocative, and expansive thinkers in the field, even if they’re not explicitly talking about sex, I think that it’s still important to think of that as part of the larger conversation of what is sexuality and how do people experience it. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. Because I think when I think about expressing ourselves erotically, I’m thinking about creation and what’s generative. Creation means art and music and movement, and relationships and spoken word and all of those are expressions of the erotic. So I love what you’re saying about, “Let’s tune into the lived experiences that are being shared by people,” because even if they’re not explicitly talking about sex or genitals or positions or those kinds of things, the power and the creativity and the art that’s getting created by people are the expressions of their erotic selves. And there’s so much juiciness in there that we can learn around ways of being, which I think is when you really boil sex down, it’s ways of being and ways of connecting.

Cameron Glover: Yes, yes.That’s why sex is such – one of the many reasons it’s such a fascinating topic, too, because when you break down the question of, “What is sex?” You’re going to get so many different answers. Because people have different experiences, different interpretations, and it’s important that, I think as sexuality professionals, we’re doing our best to make space for all of that. 

Dawn Serra: One of the things that you had mentioned to me via email when we first were setting up our little date was that you’re really interested in community only spaces within sex ed. I think that fits in really nicely with this conversation we’re having. So can you talk a little bit more about what you’ve been thinking about are creating around that?

Cameron Glover: Yes. First what I mean when I say community only spaces, I think that it’s really important that there are spaces that are created for specific communities and are exclusive to those communities. So tying a little bit back to the conversation we were having about SESTA and FOSTA, how I think it’s important that I’m specifically talking to other civilians about SESTA-FOSTA and the impacts as well as other civilian sexuality professionals. That’s an example of community only spaces. Really in my practice, I’m open to working with folks, but I really hone in what I can offer and bring into the field on marginalized identities. So really focusing on my talking with other black folks, talking with other people of marginalized genders, people who feel that they haven’t really been… They haven’t felt seen in the sexuality space. 

When I think about the ways that – I’m thinking of a specific example of sexual empowerment. Sexual empowerment is something that I’m really interested in and diving more into an a new year. Doing my research, it was really frustrating for me to see that there’s so many spaces that are very binary, that are very gender essentialist.

Dawn Serra: God, it makes me so mad.

Cameron Glover: Yeah. Even as somebody with a vulva, I’m turned off by the idea of being in a space where someone wants me to stroke my yoni and using very specific language. That doesn’t resonate for me. I’m like, “Wow, this is super frustrating.” But also, how frustrating must it be for somebody who is gender nonconforming or someone that’s trans? It was like, “Oh, these are my only options?” Of course, I’m going to opt out because this isn’t safe for me. And even thinking about who’s leading these spaces as well because there’s a very specific idea of leading these spaces, I will say. 

Particularly as a black person, I think that there is a shared experience of when we enter into a room and we see both who is in the room and who is leading this space, there’s a moment that we can have some times or that I will have some times of just checking out because I know that what is going to be said and how it’s going to be said will not apply to me. And I’m automatically seen as the other. I have to do the additional work of both being in the space and also navigating what serves me and leaving out the rest. Essentially, this is kind of wasting my time also because I feel like there’s so much that is universal to sexuality, but also things that are important for people to feel like they individually are being centered and talk to. So having community only spaces I think is really important because if we’re thinking about these different themes in sexuality, it’s important that people are feeling seen and heard and that their experiences aren’t other and they’re not pushed aside. They’re all important. I think that everybody deserves that. So really dedicating my time and my energy, and my skills to cultivating those spaces is really important to me.

Dawn Serra: All I want to say is yes. I noticed immediately when I walked into this space, if I’m the fattest person there and if there’s any other fat folks, and that immediately tells me whether or not I feel even remotely safe to open up. I’m also thinking too, so much around sexual empowerment and so many of the things we talk about with sex. I mean, God help anyone that goes to a medical conference around sex. It almost killed me. But we put these bizarre gender labels on so many things that don’t need it. I’m thinking there’s a lot of power and creating a for people who are going through menopause and the invisibility and the confusion that creates. Let’s talk about creating spaces for people with menopause. It’s not about women in their fifties. And if we’re talking about like struggling with erectile issues or impotence, let’s create spaces for people with erectile issues and impotence. It’s not men and their dick problems. 

Cameron Glover: Yes, exactly. 

Dawn Serra: And so I think we see a lot of that, too, in sexual empowerment, especially the ways that it’s culturally appropriated so much from Tantra and like God don’t even get me started… 

Cameron Glover: Is that the Patreon bonus content I hear?

Dawn Serra: Perhaps it will be. Because we’ve got opinions.

Cameron Glover: Yeah, I mean that’s been like my gripe since day one of doing the certification program. Just, what is this? Why are we doing it? Why are we doing it like this? And I think it’s important that I’m not… I want to be very clear that I don’t want all spaces to be community only spaces. Having the option there alone can be so powerful because then it gives people permission, again, to opt in instead of the default being, “I have to opt out.” And also what you’re saying, too, about the necessity of community only spaces, too, is really making me think of a conference that I went to recently where I did not have a good time. I felt all those feelings come up of, what happens when your existence is an afterthought? And it was not great. I did not feel good, but it also really reminded me the power of the work that I’m doing and the importance of it too. 

Essentially what happened was, I went to this conference and I asked somebody that has chronic pain, bodies or bodies. It just happens. I just wasn’t having a great health day. It was really hard for me to do a lot of moving around and I was very uncomfortable. And there was a moment in the first session where I was like, “I’m in so much pain I need to lay down,” but there was no space for me to do. There were no accessibility accommodations to my knowledge at all in any of the rooms. So I had this moment where I was like, “Do I get up and I’m going to be disrupting the entire session? or do I try to deal with it as best I can because I don’t want to inconvenience to everybody else?” Having that thought was so frustrating for me because I’m not an inconvenience and any space that makes me feel like that is not a space I want to be in. it was essentially like going to the sessions with that and not really feeling like I was having my needs met or that I was even welcomed in the space. Because in addition to the chronic pain I was feeling, I also felt alone and isolated as the only or one of the few black folks in this space. It was just not a fun time. So eventually, I was able to track someone down that was part of the planning committee and I’m like, “Listen, I’m having a horrible time. This is why…” It’s really unacceptable that I have to do all this additional work to have my needs met when it’s clear that this wasn’t considered even a possibility that anybody that attends with… need additional accommodations for anything.

Cameron Glover: It’s just so frustrating because I feel also, in telling this story, there’s a feeling of, I don’t know, is it my place to really say that? But, no, these are my experiences, right? It’s important that we talk about it and break away from this stigma that if we feel any kind of chronic pain or have a disability, our pain is not a burden and that we are not burdens, and that spaces should be thinking about us from the beginning and not waiting until we’re in the space to be like, “Oh wait. Maybe we should set something up so you’re actually able to participate and focus on what’s being said because you want to be in the space.”

Dawn Serra: Oh my God, there’s so much I want to say. So first of all, I’m so sorry that happened to you because you’re right. That shouldn’t be an afterthought. That should be from the moment somebody conceives the event. They need to have people who understand disability and bodies as part of the planning committee to help with that. Oh my God, there’s so much. There’s so much. One of the things that’s coming up for me is when people are in spaces where they feel pain, they feel unsafe, they feel isolated, marginalized, they’re having to do a lot of labor. There’s a lot of microaggressions. I’m thinking even beyond conferences, a lot of people who listen to this show run and participate in play parties, are members of communities, put on workshops for masturbation and book groups and all those things. When people aren’t feeling good, one, think about– I just want everyone listening, think about how magical Cameron is. 

Cameron Glover: And I’m very magical.

Dawn Serra: You are magical! You have incredible experiences, really thought provoking perspectives. When you’re not feeling good, and all the other people in the space who aren’t feeling good, you’re not bringing those experiences, your perspective, your really thought provoking and provocative questions and hopes and dreams to the space because you’re trying to take care of you so you’re not participating. That’s a loss for everyone. But even beyond that, thinking back to my conversation with Staci Haines a couple months ago about abuse and trauma, and somatics and embodied consent. Consent can’t exist in a space when people aren’t present and embodied, when they’re disassociated, when they’re checked out. Whether it’s a conference where maybe you’re doing work related stuff or it’s something really pleasurable, like a dungeon night or a play party. If people are feeling othered, they’re in pain, they’re accessibility needs aren’t being met, then how can they possibly really be present enough to check in with their bodies and say, “Yeah, this is something that I really want. At this point, I’m just trying to survive and I’m probably going to start going along with things or not really offering full answers being my full self.” I mean, there’s so many layers to what gets lost and the potential for miscommunications and consent violations to happen because people don’t have the ability to just be there.

Cameron Glover: Oh, man. And I have, well not as intense, but now I’m thinking of times that I’d been in play party situations, too, and thinking about my own accessibility and safety and I’m like, “[sigh] A lot of overlap.”

Dawn Serra: I also think that culturally we have so much ableism that there’s a lot of shame for people when pain comes up around sex and pleasure. So I really appreciate that you are sharing your experiences and helping to remove some of the silence around that. I get so many emails from people who feel desperate and alone and isolated. Not only because they’re feeling pain and they don’t know what to do about it, but often because partners and doctors have dismissed pain. So I think this is definitely a place where we need to be talking about it and sharing stories and offering support. Because only through being able to reveal those things and make those troops more known, can we then normalize all the things that go with that like accommodations and changes…

Cameron Glover: Yeah. And boundaries too. The thing that I’m thinking so much about. I’m in a monogamous relationship and I’m so lucky because my partner is the actual best. We have a lot of conversations about this, too, because I don’t know when pain is going to pop up and sometimes it’ll come up when we’re trying to have sex or during sex and it’s like… We have this thing where I can, I feel open and honest to talk to them and also they do really well at checking in very often. So it never feels like I’m interrupting anything, which is great. A really good practice that I think that we have, but I don’t know, I feel because we have this space where we both feel safe enough to express if we need to change something or we need to stop all together. We also both know that it’s not personal. This is part of care, this is part of a relationship. And I think those are really important practices to carry. Even if you’re not in a romantic relationship. The people in your life, the support systems that you have, how can you start to have conversations about boundaries and what your actual limitations are. Not as a way of saying, “These are all the things I can’t do.” The kind of giving other people a guide to how you need to be cared for. Starting to think about it in that way has really shifted my relationship with my own body and my relationship with sex and pain. And I feel like I accept a lot of these things a lot easier now than I did before.

Dawn Serra: Speaking from personal experience and assuming that this is going to resonate with a few other people listening, I was in enough situations over the course of my life were sharing things got shut down or resulted in rejection; that I trained myself it wasn’t safe to say, “I need something different,”and instead I’d better play along and do the best that I can with this situation. Because I don’t want to be abandoned in the middle of sex or have a really derogatory remark made about my body and what it can or can’t do. Ending up in a relationship with someone who really, truly cares about my comfort and my pleasure, and who wants to be able to make space for the things that I need so that we can have more fun took time for me to trust that. And I’ve had so many people write to me saying, “I’m afraid to speak my truth because I’ve been going along or pretending with something for years.” The response inevitably is going to be this feeling of betrayal of, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” 

So I just want to offer, too, that this open communication you’ve established with your partner is such a gift. And for some people, it takes time to feel safe enough to trust that the person they’re with does have the capacity to hold their truth. So if someone hasn’t been telling you something for months or years that something doesn’t feel good. I think we need to have a little bit of gratitude when someone does have the courage to say something, even if it feels like, “God, I didn’t know I was doing something you didn’t like or that this wasn’t fun for you for so long. Those feelings are valid and thank you so much for telling me. Let’s make it better from now on starting now.”

Cameron Glover: Yes, yes, definitely. And I do. That really resonates with me as well. Because it’s also – it’s such a process. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. There’s so much to unpack around that. 

Cameron Glover: There really is. That can be its own episode in and of itself. But yeah, it takes time and it takes many conversations. But I think if the person is willing to listen and hold space and those can be great starting points. But also if not, how can you be heard in other ways with different people in your support system is something that I’ve also experienced and had to think a lot about as well outside of this relationship.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. Something else that you have written about and that I’ve been really excited about for the past year – year and a half to explore is the ways that we devalue non romantic intimacy and platonic love.

Cameron Glover: I love this topic.

Dawn Serra: Me too. When I think about some of my richest most joyous moments, it’s when I’m with friends with whom I have deeply intimate connections and we’re just being ourselves and thinking huge, heavy thoughts and messing up. But it’s okay. And laughing and touching and making food for each other. What are some of the things that you’ve been considering around non romantic intimacy and friendship?

Cameron Glover: Oh, it’s so interesting because I feel like this topic has come up more for me now. A bit more personal like context. Me and my partner, we were both dating non monogamously when we met. And then we transitioned into a monogamous relationship. So we both kind of had a really good – I would say a pretty healthy establishing of we need personal time, we need time to spend with other people in our lives and time together and that’s all valid and that’s all cool. I think that transitioning into a monogamous relationship with all that, it was interesting seeing what got carried over. So for me and my partner, we’re both very much an introvert so having alone time is really important. But I feel like I was anticipating having non romantic platonic friendships be challenging to recenter as important, but it wasn’t.

I think that it’s really important to have these conversations because as a cultural narrative, we tend to see non romantic relationships as just secondary and other to romantic relationships. But it’s … that’s not – that couldn’t be farther from the truth. My friends are probably some of the most important relationships in my life. It didn’t stop when I got into a romantic relationship. It didn’t stop with other relationships in my life. And I think that it’s also important to recognize the work that goes into them as well because across the board, when we think of what makes relationships work, it’s communication. It’s being present, it’s holding space for other people. I’m trying to not go into a tangent about what is and what isn’t emotional labor. The short version of it is, I think there’s a lot of conflation with emotional labor, which is a valid concept and a very valid thing, but not everything is emotional labor. Or rather, I think that emotional labor is a necessity for any relationship that you have with anyone. There’s going to be a certain amount of emotional labor involved in it. And I think that it’s important that people recognize what they are and what they are not willing to do. For example, if one of my friends – I don’t know – was having a horrible time and they’re like, “I just need to vent about what’s going on with me.” If I’m able to, I’m willing to hold space for them and hold them even if… If I can’t, I will do what I can to establish that boundary and also validate how they’re feeling. But that’s part of emotional labor, right? It’s not that I don’t want to engage with it, but that’s just a natural part of any relationships.

Cameron Glover: I think that unpacking some of these cultural ideas of what is reserved for romantic relationships and what’s reserved for everything else. There’s more overlap than we think there is. And I think that it’s – no, platonic relationships or not. They’re all really valid and important and I think that we can all do more work in being present and just making the people in our lives to feel good and feel like, “I really appreciate you and I see you. Thank you for being in my life and like holding space for me.”

Dawn Serra: Yes, and I’m so glad you bring up that emotional labor is always required when we’re in relationships with other human beings because we have totally unique experiences and totally unique needs. And so being able to meet each other and offer support as life ebbs and flows takes labor. But often where we get skewed is we have relationships in our lives, many of us, where the emotional labor is just so mutual. There’s so much reciprocity that it doesn’t feel laborious most of the time. Unless someone’s in crisis after crisis, after crisis after crisis, and we start to like, “This is starting to feel heavy. This happens to you all the time.” That’s often an indicator that we’ve been putting out a lot and not getting as much back as we might need or want. But I think we ended up talking about emotional labor so much is often within the context of heterosexual relationships.

Cameron Glover: Yes, I see that a lot too. And I think it’s really interesting because, to me, it weave back to that are you giving a lot and not getting any back? And also, how do we have these conversations with – how do men have this conversation with other men as well? Because it’s not our responsibility to do it for us because community only spaces. How do men talk to other men about emotional labor and begin to unpack being emotionally present for someone is not something that is gross or feminine or whatever, or emasculating. That’s just what you do in relationships with people. So how do we do it?

Dawn Serra: Yeah. And I think one of the things that’s really important of what you just mentioned around unpacking was when we’re talking about staying in our lane, being in community spaces with people who have shared experiences and shared identities or when we’re talking about really focusing on the people with whom we have shared truths. It’s not to get together and to bitch, essentially, right? I don’t know if I want to use that word. But it’s not like men getting together with other men and complaining about what nags their wives are. It’s men getting together with other men and really spending the time to unpack and investigate, and support each other in growth, and to do some learning and sharing and educating in the spirit of, “We want to get better and we want to make the world a more equitable place. So let’s share that burden so that it doesn’t feel like something we have to carry on our own.”

Cameron Glover: Yes, yes, exactly. It’s also making me think of the examples of non toxic masculinity and that video Terry Crews painting a picture and it’s like, “You know what? Yes, more of this please.”

Dawn Serra: Yes. Oh my God, yes. I love that more and more people are talking about tender masculinity, nurturing masculinity, non toxic masculinity. I mean we can also have a whole episode on just what the fuck even is masculinity. But since it’s a thing that’s important to a lot of people right now, let’s talk about the non toxic ways of having a relationship with this nebulous thing. But oh my God, yes. Terry Crews is so wonderful in so many ways and I think there are some really awesome man. Imran Siddiquee is amazing and doing all kinds of work for men about unpacking masculinity in Pop culture and Jonathan McIntosh who runs Pop Culture Detective, who puts out the best video essays in the world about masculinity in pop culture. I mean there are people having these conversations in really, really awesome ways. It’s just we need to help make sure that they’re accessible. So that other folks can find them. 

Cameron Glover: Yes, yes, yes, for sure. I know, I know.

Dawn Serra: I feel like I could talk to you for three more hours. But in the interest of honoring everyone’s time, you and I are going to go record a little bonus chat for Patreon. I have a feeling in what we’re going to talk about but we’ll check in. And before we do that, can you share with everyone how they can find you online, find your podcasts, stay in touch and get more of you?

Cameron Glover: Yes. So you can find me on Twitter and Instagram. That is BLKGIRLMANIFEST. If you would like to listen to my sexuality podcast, Sex Ed in Color, you can also find that on Twitter and Instagram. You can also listen to this show through simple cast or on Google play or on iTunes or whenever podcasting app you’re listening to. Don’t forget to rate and review if you enjoy the show and – What else? You can also find more information about my sex education work, my writing, all that fun stuff at cameronglover.com and you can also sign up for my newsletter there at linktree/blkgirlmanifest.

Dawn Serra: Yay. I will of course have all of those links to all of the things in the show notes and dawnserra.com for this episode. Thank you so much for being here with us, Cameron. I delighted in this conversation and I can’t wait for more. So, thank you for being so generous with all of us.

Cameron Glover: No, thank you, Dawn. This was such a treat and I can’t wait to hopefully come back and talk about more things with you.

Dawn Serra: Yes. I co-sign that immediately. 

Cameron Glover: Yay. 

Dawn Serra: Well, to everybody who tuned in, be sure you had to patreon.com/sgrpodcast. Remember, I changed the URL for both the Facebook page and the Patreon page because we can’t say that scary sex word anymore in a lot of platforms. So please go to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show. If you support at $3 a month and above, you get access to exclusive, can’t find it anywhere else in the world, weekly content. And Cameron and I are going to go record a little chat for you there, so we’ll see you there. And until next time, I’m Dawn Serra. Bye.

Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured in this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and to get awesome weekly bonuses. 

As you look towards the next week, I wonder, what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?