Sex Gets Real 246: Supporting an asexual teen, healing from trauma, & #SurvivingRKelly

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Time for your emails!

Heidi wrote in with some thanks. I hope it’s clear that what I share on this podcast is an invitation, not a prescription. Take what works and leave the rest.

Amanda the Ace Mom wrote in because her son came out to her as asexual on Christmas Day. How can she support him?

Here are a bunch of asexuality resources:

• AVEN – the biggest resource on asexuality I’m aware of.
• AVEN’s FAQ for Parents
• Asexuality Archive – A Parent’s Guide to Asexuality
• Teen Vogue: “What Being Asexual Means to Me”
• Booklist of YA Books with asexual characters (there are many of these, so this is just a starting point)
• Everyday Feminism: “5 Things You Can Do to Support Asexual Youth of Your Life”
• Trevor Support Project’s page on Asexuality

Jenny wrote in with a really touching and personal story about her experience with sexual assault, PTSD, and healing.

I got an update from Anonymous who wrote in last year with a question about not being able to have vaginal intercourse. Well, things have changed a lot for Anonymous and now she has a new problem. She can’t get enough intercourse and her fiancé misses their old methods before intercourse was an option. What can she do?

Finally, let’s talk about #SurvivingRKelly.

Dr. Sami Schalk wrote an awesome, thought-provoking piece for Bust called “A Call-In To White Feminists About ‘Surviving R. Kelly'”. For those of you who have not yet see the docuseries or who aren’t aware of all the conversations happening about the violence black women and girls face, read it now.

Also, let’s talk about centering survivors AND finding ways to accountability and healing that don’t include prison. Because feeding the prison industrial complex helps no one.

Follow Dawn on Instagram.

About Host Dawn Serra:

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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 of Sex Gets Real. I am ridiculously excited to be here with you. I’ve got a bunch of emails over the past couple of weeks, so we’re going to do some listener questions and listener emails today. And over the next couple of weeks, I’ve also got some exciting interviews coming up, adrienne maree brown on her new book, Pleasure Activism. I’m going to be talking to Leonore Tjia all about rewilding our sexuality, especially for women and queer trans folks. Investigating the ways we’ve been domesticated and reconnecting with our wildness. I’m also going to be talking with Sage Hayes who was one of the most popular talks at last year’s Explore More Summit. So many of you have written in about my Staci Haines episode including one of the emails I’m going to read today and Sage is going to help us build on that work. We’re going to be talking about embodiment and trauma and building our capacity for pleasure and connection and I think it’s going to be rich and nuanced and beautiful. So today you and me, and your emails and then some awesome interviews coming up. 

I also want to remind you if you’re listening today when this episode drops, which is January 13th, 2019 it is not too late to enter the giveaway, celebrating New Years 2019. I am giving away a copy of Allison Moon’s Girl Sex 101 and Allison Moon’s Bad Dyke. If you want to throw your name in the hat to potentially win that you can just go to dawnserra.com/NY2019/ for New Years 2019. You put your name and your email address in and a random winner will be selected on January 15th, 2019. Also, several of you have written in saying that you’re loving the book list, so if you want to grab the official recommended book list for the Podcast, that’s at dawnserra.com/books/ So make sure you go to dawnserra.com/NY2019/ to enter the giveaway and had to dawnserra.com/books/ if you want to sign up and get that recommended book lists. There’s lots of amazing books on that list.

Also, if you support the show on Patreon, there is another bonus this week. You can head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast for Sex Gets Real. I had to change the URL recently because of all of the FOSTA and SESTA bullshit that’s going on. But if you support the show at $3 a month and above, you get exclusive weekly content you can’t hear anywhere else. From new year’s rituals to extended interviews with guests, to erotica and poems, and self reflective journaling prompts, all kinds of stuff. Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to either support the show or to check out this week’s bonus. I’ve also shared a couple of new listener questions. If you support at $5 a month and above, you can help me field listener questions. You can put on your sexpert hat or your relationship expert hat and give me your thoughts and then they may end up on the show. Thank you so much. To all of you who do support the show, it means so much. 

Dawn Serra: Here is the first email for this week. It comes from Heidi and it says, I just wanted to thank you. I started listening to your podcast about a year ago and really loved it. I don’t keep up on any shows, really, but I listen here and there. Hearing your end of year New Year request for feedback motivated me. 2018 was a year of ups and downs for many of us. I honestly found myself more at peace, calm, able to take a step back and look at my journey with fresh eyes when listening to your show, and when watching some of the segments from explore more summit. I may not always agree 100% but the topics and approaches you take have given me perspective and helped me grow. Thank you, Dawn. 

I really appreciate you writing in Heidi so much. Thank you for listening when you do. And thank you for sending me a little note and letting me know. I hope everyone listening knows that what I offer here is my perspective, which is to say all of us get to have our own perspectives and ideas, our own experiences. I can never ever be an expert in your life. That it’s just not possible. All I can do is learn and grow and listen and share all of the things that I am learning from people much smarter than me. I try to have really rich, deep, challenging conversations with both my mentors and my colleagues to constantly encourage myself to confront my stories and to grow into new thoughts and connections. I will certainly never know what it is to be in your life and your story. So when I offer advice, I encourage you to take what works and leave the rest.

Dawn Serra: I know there’s a lot of things that I offered that don’t work for a lot of people and that is a-okay. This is just me offering my best guess and some thoughts based on my experiences. But even when I talk to lots of people and get thousands of emails, it’s still such a tiny, tiny, tiny drop in the bucket that is humanity. So not agreeing with me 100% is great. We all get to move through the world with all of the resources and stories that we’ve got. I’m just hoping to stimulate some new thoughts and new questions, and everyone who tunes in, maybe a little bit of permission and space to heal. But certainly, again, take what works and leave the rest. That’s why there’s so many of us with sex podcasts and we would all offer such different things around the exact same question.

My favorite thing to do is to really dive into culture and systems and think about the ways that it’s influencing us and impacting us, and not everybody is ready to do that. Not everybody knows how to do that. Not everybody is comfortable doing that. So that also might bring up feelings and that’s okay too. We all get to be at different places in our journeys and our stories. I appreciate, Heidi, that you keep tuning in and that I’ve offered some perspective and to help you grow. I appreciate that very much. That means so much.

Amanda, The Ace Mom wrote in with a subject line of An Ace Mom. I found your podcast about three months ago and had been trying to catch up. I listen to it daily in the car and at work. That’s a lot of my voice. I have a question for you. On Christmas Day, my 16 year old son told me he is asexual. Based on previous episodes I’ve listened to, I know a little about the asexual spectrum. We discussed where he feels like he fits in on the spectrum. But now I don’t know what else I should do to support or guide him. I also don’t know where in our city I can direct him to if he has questions or anything along those lines. Can you provide me guidance on this? Thanks a bunch. 

Dawn Serra: Amanda, first, I just want to say the fact that your 16 year old son was able to come to you on Christmas Day of all days and share with you that he’s asexual sounds like a pretty incredible thing. That he would see you as a trusted adult in his life. To be able to share this with you and hope that you’re able to hold it with him and to see him and validate him, I think is a wonderful thing. There are lots of teens in the world who absolutely do not feel like they can go to their parents or their family with things like their identity for fear of all kinds of repercussions and judgements and shame. So just first of all, yay you on him trusting you with that. And the two of you being able to have a discussion around where he feels like he fits on the spectrum. 

As far as how to support or guide him, the first thing I want to offer is if you go to a dawnserra.com/ep246/ for episode 246. So dawnserra.com/ep246/ I have a bunch of resources that I’m going to link to for this episode that you can check out. They’re also in the show notes, but sometimes people find it’s easier to go to the website. I am going to link you to AVEN which is the biggest asexuality resource that’s on the web. It’s The Asexual Visibility and Education Network. I highly recommend heading there to learn all about asexuality. There’s also a Wiki (wiki.asexuality.org/FAQ_for_parents_of_asexuals) that they’ve created that’s specifically for parents of asexual folks. It’s a FAQ page for parents and I will include that link so that it’s nice and easy for you to find. I also found a whole bunch of other articles and links and discussions around parenting an asexual teen asexuality. It might be stuff you want to send to your son.

I also found, there’s lots of these so don’t think this is the only one, but I found a book list of young adult fiction featuring asexual characters. So that might be something to just talk to your son about. Would it be interesting to read books, if he hasn’t already, that feature asexual characters because representation of asexuality and folks who are aromantic is woefully sad in pop culture and mainstream media. It can feel very invisibilizing to be asexual and/or aromantic in the world because you’re not seeing yourself represented in the media. Finding some books that feature really awesome characters who are asexual might be a really great thing too]o just feel less alone. I also found, it’s an older post, it’s about four years old on Asexuality Archive: A Parent’s Guide to Asexuality and it’s a list of the best things to say and also a whole bunch of things to avoid saying or asking, which can be a nice resource to have in your back pocket. But basically all of the resources agree, the most important thing to do is to just be there for him. If he wants to talk, be that beacon of permission, that safe place, be supportive. Let him take his time and figuring out what it means. Remember that this is a spectrum and so it might change for him and that doesn’t invalidate anything. He can feel very asexual now and down the road he might feel more demi-sexual and then that might change again, and he might come way back into asexuality. 

Dawn Serra: We all exist on a spectrum and we slide up and down it all the time. It’s just for those of us who are more sexual, that experience has been a lot more normalized than for asexual and aromantic folks. And this is just one small aspect of his life. It might feel really big for both him and you if it’s new or if he’s trying to figure out a coming out process. If he’s trying to find language, you’re trying to find ways to support him. But in the grand scheme of things, there’s so many other things that he’s also going to need support around and love around which you know, and asexuality is just one small part. 

As far as resources go, I don’t know what city you live in because you didn’t send that, which is totally okay. But I would check AVEN and see if they have any local resources. If there’s a Planned Parenthood or a feminist sex shop near you, it might also be helpful to call them and ask if they know of any asexuality meetups or even support groups for parents; where you can go and meet other parents from the asexual community and queer communities and just to feel supported. He may have already spent lots of time thinking about this and reading resources that I’m pointing you to and following all sorts of ace thought leaders on social media. So he might be in a very different place than you. My suggestion is just for you to ask yourself what do you need so that you can show up for him as resourced as possible when and if he’s ready to share more and have resources in your back pocket that you can offer. I would avoid trying to push too much or a demand answers, but it doesn’t sound like you’re doing that. It sounds like you just want to be able to support him and that’s the most important thing. So please head to dawnserra.com/ep246/ and check out all the links that I’m going to share there for you just so you can do a little bit more learning and find some more support. And thank you so much for listening to the show and for writing in and for trusting me with this.

I so appreciate that your son was able to come to you with this and I hope the two of you find a really wonderful, supportive, collaborative way forward. Thank you so much Amanda. If you could use a little bit of support like Amanda and you want someone to just help hold something with you, someone to help you brainstorm and find resources. I do one on one and couples coaching and that’s a fantastic way to use a coaching session. Asking for support to just say, “I don’t know what to do. Where can I turn? What are some resources? How do I talk to somebody about this scary thing that feels like coming out? How do I let a spouse know that I want something different?” How about, “Things are really great and we’d love to make them even more amazing.” I’ve got a couple of couples right now I’m working with and that’s where we’ve started from and it’s so much fun. If you could use a little support, all you need to do is go to dawnserra.com and check out my resources about working with me one on one for some coaching. 

Dawn Serra: This next email comes from Jenny and it touched me so deeply that I wanted to share it here with everyone. Jenny says, subject line, Your Podcast Means So Much To Me, Thank You. Dawn, I’ve been listening to Sex Gets Real now for about 10 months and I need to give you my heartfelt thanks. It has helped me immeasurably and I look forward to every new episode. I always learned something new about myself or other communities. In this bizarre world, people like you and your guests give me huge amounts of hope and help me remember to love myself. I want to explain a little of my experience to really communicate the power of the work you and all your guests are doing through the podcast.

My journey into the realms of pleasure is very recent, about as long as I’ve been listening to the podcast. When I was 18, I had my first kiss and first sexual experience on one night and both were assault in a public place. I was on holiday with friends celebrating end of school exams and I could never have imagined what would happen to me. The experience itself was highly traumatizing. The local police retraumatized me the next day by treating me like a nuisance, forcing me to hire my own interpreter, and failing to take an accurate statement or pursue the case further. The UK police couldn’t help without the cooperation of their counterparts in the other country. I felt abandoned by the institution I had been led to believe would be there in a crisis. Having parents that have never felt comfortable discussing emotions or sex, I never told them and still haven’t, and run as far away to university as I could without leaving the country just six weeks after the incident.

Needless to say, I have PTSD and I was sort of aware of it but still in denial that one event could make me feel so utterly lost. Rather than processed the emotions for so long, I was pushing it down, destroying my own sense of self and pursuing academics ahead of my own wellbeing and sanity. I earned three degrees, started a job, and set up my own business within the space of eight years. In some ways, that is what I wanted. But fundamentally all achievements felt empty and were never enough proof that I’m worthy as a human being who deserves love. To me, it was an extreme form of hiding and attempting to find acceptance from the outside in place of the lack of safety I felt within. I was always running, always feeling at threat, but never able to understand or communicate that. I knew I had anxiety, but I thought that if I felt the fear and did it anyway in quotes, it would fade.

Dawn Serra: Unfortunately, generalized anxiety wasn’t really the problem and running head first at my fears was destroying me and taking away opportunities for pleasure. I just hated myself and felt scared, ashamed and guilty. Until my current partner, I was mostly avoiding potentially sexual situations, but was coerced in a number of occasions and felt too scared to stop the sex from happening. On a few occasions, this was actually after getting drunk, emotional and explaining my story to a man. I don’t know if they were exploiting my vulnerability or felt that they would be the one to heal it, but Staci Haines’ interview with you helped me understand that my stress response is to appease and dissociate. This has helped me frame my experience considerably. Whilst I have been able to rationalize what happened to me for a while, I hadn’t been able to reunite my emotional and rational experience for true healing.

I felt like sex and pleasure would always be off the table for me. With the love and support of my current partner, seeking and really being open to psychotherapy and finding the love, support and resources that emanate across your podcast. I am now, for the first time, actually feeling like I love and respect myself. Hearing you and your guests talk so openly about sexual pleasure, pain and the hope still out there has helped give me the strength I need to heal. In many ways, working out that pain and pleasure go hand in hand for me and losing shame around that was the holy grail. I’m now 27 and glad I found this solace while I’m still young. You, all of your guests, and all of your listeners give me hope. I think I felt some of the worst pain there is to feel. But now I am also embracing and have felt some of the most intense pleasures available in life. Please keep doing what you’re doing and standing strong against oppression with deep respect, admiration, and sincere things. Jenny.

Dawn Serra: Jenny, thank you so much for trusting me with your story, for listening to the show, for finding some help and some healing in the tiny little corner of the Interwebs and podcast worlds that I do. And thank you so much for writing in with this. It means more than you’ll ever know and it touches me so deeply. I think one of the things that all people who survive sexual violence, specifically, wish is, if this thing has happened to me, then hopefully I can help someone else either prevent it from happening at all or if they’ve been through it to help them feel less alone. And knowing that this has helped you find some healing and some permission I think is the best that any, any survivor in any educator could ever ask for.

I also love, too, how you noted that the busyness was a form of hiding and trying to find acceptance from the outside because of how you were feeling on the inside. I was just talking to someone for the Explore More Summit, actually, for 2019 about how keeping ourselves busy is a form of avoiding ourselves. It’s a form of avoiding our feelings, our grief, our anger, our trauma, our anxiety. The busier we are, the less connected we tend to be to our bodies and to our inner emotional landscape. Because that is a wild place that can bring up such a big feelings and so so many of us stay busy all the time because we can’t tolerate being with ourselves. So sometimes some of the most productive and most successful people that we see in the world are doing what they’re doing from a place of not being able to really sit with themselves and slow down. Not always. But for many of us either because we don’t have the skills or because we don’t know how to do the healing, but I appreciate that you named that. That is absolutely something I have done in the past and I know lots of people listening can probably really resonate with that. If I stay busy, it helps me to stay numbed out so I don’t have to face the thoughts that scare me or the fears that scare me or deal with the stories that really need to be reckoned with. Thank you so much, Jenny, for sharing yourself and for being here part of the podcast community and I am beyond delighted that you are experiencing these intense pleasures and that you are finding your way towards healing and integration and resilience and delighting in all of the things that your body is capable of. I hope that for so many more of us. 

Dawn Serra: This next email comes from Anonymous. Now I posted this on Patreon for $5 supporters. If you want to weigh in, it is not too late. Feel free to hop over to patreon.com/sgrpodcast and to share your thoughts, your advice, your perspective, your experiences. I am always happy to circle back and to share more. Your perspectives are really important and I would love to feature your voice. Here’s the question that came from Anonymous. The subject line is Unconventional Sex One Year Later. Hello again, Dawn. I was the Anonymous unconventional sex question from episode 200. First, I have to say thank you so much for that. As usual, the advice was perfect and it opened a whole new level of communication and intimacy between my fiance and I. It’s almost been a year. 

So in recap, I was the one that was born a preemie and as a result, some things developed and some things didn’t. Doctors told me I developed very small internally and that sex would forever be painful. There was even one that said he felt bad for my future boyfriend, which certainly didn’t make the situation better. I didn’t need doctors to tell me that it would be painful. However, as my fiance and I had to adjust our sex life to exclude vaginal penetration entirely. I was worried that I wouldn’t be enough for my fiance. But now I have a new question that’s almost the complete opposite of my last. In the last year, my fiance and I have worked very hard on correcting the problem with new doctors, medications, dilators, and lots of lube. Despite what they told me, we can finally have pain free penetrative sex and I’m just obsessed. I can’t get enough and I guess it’s like making up for lost time. 

The issue I’m having however is that my fiance is so-so about the experience. He’s still the most supportive partner and as accommodating anything I ask. But he says our old methods are more freeing for him. He can let go a little more and enjoy the moments. I think he’s so in his head about causing me pain that he’s not relaxing even when I try to tell him I’m fine. After so much work and making such progress, I’m trying not to let this damping experience, but if he’s not 100% satisfied at all times, my anxiety takes over, and that’s not fun for anyone. Where should I go from here? How do I talk to him so that we can both feel fulfilled and confident? Thank you so, so much Anonymous . 

Dawn Serra: First of all, thank you so much for writing in with an update. A whole year and look at all of the things that have changed. I so hope everyone listening takes this in. A year later and so much has changed. If that much can change in one year, imagine what’s possible to change in 5, 10, 15 years. So often when we’re deep inside of a problem because it’s really painful and we feel a lot of distress or shame or discomfort, it looks like there’s no way out. It can feel catastrophic, like this is going to be the only truth. But one of my favorite things to ask clients when they say, “I feel like nothing’s ever going to change. I feel like I’m going to be the same forever,” is to ask, are you the same person now that you were a year ago? 5 years ago? 10 years ago? Always, the answer is no. Because we have different experiences and new perspectives, new people and new conversations. Our bodies are constantly changing. I love that you gave yourself the opportunity to find some doctors that were supportive, and you and your fiance had some really important conversation, found new ways to engage sexually in the meantime, and then did these things that helped your body to change.

Dawn Serra: I think one of the things that I most want everyone to know is you don’t have to change your body in order for you to be worthy and for your pleasure to matter. So if vaginal penetration was off the table for Anonymous for the rest of their life, they would still be deserving of delicious, wonderful sexual erotic connection and experiences. That said, Anonymous wanted to change things and so went through a process that enabled some change. Now this sex sounds so exciting. I think a couple of things about your question are really intriguing. The first is you said that he says, “Our old methods are much more freeing,” for him. And that’s the thing I want to zero in on. For so many of us, we go long periods of time in our life thinking that there’s only one real way to have sex. Everything in TV shows and in movies and so much of what’s in mainstream porn is all about this very kind of traditional arc of sex. That masturbation is just kind of a stand in for quote unquote real sex and that oral sex and hand sex are quote unquote for play before the quote unquote main event, which is almost always some type of penetrative activity, whether it’s vaginal sex or anal sex. 

People who are in queer communities and trans communities often feel endlessly grateful that they had the opportunity to break that script and find so many other ways to engage in Sex. Hand sex can be fucking amazing. Sometimes hand sex can be better than anything else, in my experience. Sometimes, for people, oral sex is like the thing and other people or could take it or leave it. Sometimes using toys is the hottest thing ever or blindfolds or kink. So I really am interested in your boyfriend saying you’re old methods are more freeing for him. Maybe what he found was because of the experience with your body and what you needed at the time, all of these creative work arounds and creative explorations that you found really worked for him. Maybe he didn’t realize that there was something outside of what he had been doing up until that point. And now that the two of you have experienced intimacy and sexuality in so many other ways, maybe he really did find something that just felt incredible for his particular body and where he is in life. I would trust that. Maybe he’s in his head and maybe he’s worried about causing you pain and maybe some of the other sex that you were having outside of vaginal penetration really, really, really worked for him. I would allow both of those things to be true and trust his words, trust what he’s saying. If the two of you have such great communication because you’ve had to navigate all of these explorations and changes, then him saying the old methods really felt freeing for him. Maybe he felt lot less pressure in making sure that his body performed in a certain way, which is such a thing for folks with penises.

Dawn Serra: There’s so much expectation on whether or not this one body part is going to do this one thing for a certain amount of time in order for everyone to get their rocks off. That’s a lot of pressure. The thing that I think is interesting is now you want to make up for lost time, have all of this delicious, delicious intercourse. What’s the way forward? I think one of the things is trusting him. The other thing is, and you know this, because you wrote it, “If he’s not 100% satisfied at all times, my anxiety takes over.” That is also something that I think needs a little bit of tending. What do you need so that you can let that story go a little bit? Maybe goes from 100% to 99% or 98% or 95% satisfied. Can you create a little bit of space around that? Because it’s an awful lot of pressure for everyone to always be 100% satisfied all of the time. It’s not realistic. As bodies change, as life gets in the way, as all kinds of things unfold in your lives. 

Sometimes we want to have sex with a partner or someone in our lives because we know it will make them feel good and our pleasure is in making them feel good. Maybe we’re just in a place where for our body we could take it or leave it, but we know that this thing is going to totally make their day and so we do it because we want that for someone. That’s a legitimate reason to engage in sex. And it doesn’t mean that the person who’s choosing to do that is going to be resentful or it doesn’t really want to do it. There’s a generosity of spirit there. It’s a different story if that becomes expected and becomes the norm, the lack of mutuality. But for your boyfriend or your fiance to be able to say, “I’d love to do this thing for you because I know you really want to do it. Great, let’s do the thing.” Even if it’s not his first pick. The two of you get to negotiate that and change. Sometimes you might really, really, really want to get fucked. And if he’s not into it that night, okay, you can want to get fucked and have all that delicious energy and do something totally different like an erotic massage. Maybe that’s what really gets his socks off. So it’s a dance and I think the thing is creating some space for you around that anxiety. He’s allowed to have mediocre experiences and it still makes you worthy. It still makes the relationship great. 

Dawn Serra: We put so much pressure on ourselves to have mind blowing sex all of the time. And I adore Cory Silverberg and the way he talks about, “Let’s embrace average sex.” It takes so much pressure. Sometimes average sex is great. Sometimes we just want to do the thing because we know it’s going to make us feel a little bit more connected or it’s going to help us get in our bodies a little bit, but we don’t have the time or the space for all the things that would make it feel really, really special. That’s okay. Nobody is doing anything wrong. Nobody is going to fall out of love with anybody or leave anybody. And if they are, certainly has nothing to do with that. Working through how you can support yourself to have a little bit more space around him having different types of satisfaction experiences and also for you to have different kinds of satisfaction experiences. How can the two of you turn this into a more collaborative dance where sometimes you get all this delicious vaginal penetration and sometimes you do all kinds of yummy things that are just your old methods and maybe even new things the two of you haven’t explored yet with other toys, other body parts, other positions, other places. There are absolutely endless options for the two of you creating things that work in this space. 

I think the most important thing is for you to validate, “Yes I can do this thing and it is awesome and I want it all the time.” That being true and also it being true that maybe your fiance liked some of the other stuff better. It doesn’t mean that vaginal penetration isn’t still hot. It’s not still something he enjoys that he doesn’t want to do it with you. It’s an and. I can like chocolate ice cream and you can like vanilla ice cream and sometimes I’ll eat vanilla and sometimes you’ll eat chocolate and everybody is still going to be having this yummy collaborative desserty experience. Talk to him, trust what he shares, ask him what would feel like some really, really yummy things to do in the coming weeks and months. Let him know what would be really yummy and fun for you in the coming weeks and months. And then get really creative around that. Play, be curious, and tend to your anxiety the best that you can. It’s okay to ask him for reassurance and it’s okay to offer yourself a little bit of reassurance too. “He still loves me. I’m still worthy even if he is choosing to do something for me from a place of generosity, but maybe it was on his first pick.” And sometimes you can do the same in return. 

I am so excited for these new adventures for you. I am so touched that you wrote in with an update. Thank you so much, Anonymous. One other thing I want to offer is if he’s interested, there is absolutely nothing stopping him from getting a strap on and a dildo and pounding the heck out of you and/or engaging in gentle, wonderful, beautiful slow, healing penetration, whatever feels good for you and your body,and what you’re wanting. But there’s no reason he can’t use a strap on if maybe he’s feeling a little bit of pressure around his body or maybe he’s just not feeling like that’s what he wants to do right now. A strap on is a totally valid choice for someone with a penis to use and can be a really wonderful fun way to play with; different sizes and different positions and different motions and movements to really be able to watch rather than feel can tickle other kinds of senses. And also what kinds of toys, I know you’ve got the dilators. But do you also have toys that are really, really fun for the two of you to use? What if it’s a magic wand with an attachment that he gets to use while you’re blindfolded? There’s a lot of space in here for the two of you to create some really fun stuff and for you to get all the penetration that you want and that feels good. 

Good luck. Enjoy. Have some courageous conversations, which you both clearly know how to do because you got through this past year, doing all kinds of that courageous communication and delight in your body and all of its forms, how it is today and however it’s going to be tomorrow. Thank you so much for listening to the show.

Dawn Serra: The last thing that I want to do on this week’s episode is talk about surviving R.Kelly. So the docu series came out on Lifetime. I do not have lifetime, so I haven’t had a chance to see it yet. But I have seen lots and lots and lots of people posting about it and just wanted to take a few minutes to say a couple of things. If you’ve had a chance to watch it, feel free to share your thoughts and certainly share your support for survivors using the Hashtag surviving R.Kelly on all the social media channels. We need to make visible our support for the harm, for the healing of black girls and women who have been the victims of R.Kelly. 

So for those of you who haven’t seen everything that’s going on, if you read the Hashtag surviving R.Kelly on Twitter, I think you’ll learn a lot. And I read this incredible article by Dr. Sami Schalk in Bust called A Call-In To White Feminists About “Surviving R.Kelly.” And I want to share just a couple of tidbits from the article. I’ll also link to the article in the show notes for this episode and of course at dawnserra.com/ep246/ The first thing that I want to say is I absolutely 100% believe and support the people who are reporting violence and/or who have experienced violence at the hands of R.Kelly, whether they’ve come out about it or not. 

Dawn Serra: One of the things that has been mentioned to me several times by colleagues on Facebook and also here in this Bust article is that most of the folks who are really talking about R.Kelly are black and that there is a lot of silence in nonblack communities around this. And I think it’s worth noting that when Dr. Blasey Ford was talking about Kavanaugh, it took the world by storm and everyone was talking about it. We need to also be really talking about muting R.Kelly and support supporting the survivors. Because it’s not just about R.Kelly, but about the ways that we invisibilize harm to black girls and black women, and the ways that we don’t believe the pain and the stories of women, queer and trans folks, but particularly women, queer and trans folks of color. 

Dr. Sami Schalk goes on to say a couple of the things that we can do is read up on Hashtag Surviving R.Kelly, watch the docu series, completely stop listening to his music, talk to people in your networks about this long standing well documented and continued abuse of black girls and young women; and why people haven’t been doing things, specifically folks that are really high up in the industry and the people who consume his media.

One of the other things that Dr. Schalk talks about is what can we do instead of demanding prison time for R.Kelly. And I think that’s a really interesting question because for so many of us, we have only ever known prison to be the thing that people who commit violence get. And there’s this very retaliatory response that we have in our culture around imprisoning, quote unquote, the bad people. So Dr. Schalk offers some new questions that I thought would be helpful for all of us to sit in because whether we’re talking about R.Kelly or Bill Cosby or Jian Ghomeshi or Brett Kavanaugh or anybody that’s in our communities. God, how many times have leaders inside of local kink communities and tantra communities been revealed to be long standing abusers that were being protected by those around them. Because people didn’t want to rock the boat or upset the system or send people to prison. Anyway. 

Dawn Serra: Here’s some of the things that Dr. Schalk is asking. What could we imagine would hold R.Kelly accountable for the harm he has done that isn’t or isn’t just prison time? Maybe it’s paying for his victims to receive lifelong therapy and to attend school or get job training. Maybe it’s a ban on contact with any human under 21 years of age, maybe it’s required therapy. What would it take to have a full divestment from his music by platforms like Pandora, iTunes, Spotify and Amazon music as well as having his record label drop him? How can we refuse as a culture to let him continue to have so much financial and social power? We also need to talk about all of the people who facilitated and supported a system that allowed him to continue doing this stuff that was abusive. Why weren’t we listening when people were coming forward? Why did it take so many in this docu series to really get more people paying attention? So many of the musicians who have worked with R.Kelly, and Lady Gaga was one of them, ignored all of the stories and allegations and rumors.

Doctor Schalk is recommending maybe all of these musicians and producers and record labels who have worked with him over the years can donate their royalties from that music to organizations that specifically focus on supporting black women and girls and/or survivors of sexual and domestic assault. How do we address the devaluing of black girls and women? How do we look beyond this particularly bad instance around R.Kelly and look at all of the other people that are abusing and invisiblising the pain of young girls and women who are people of color. I’m also thinking about all of the indigenous women and girls who have been murdered and who have disappeared, and how so few of us pay attention to that. So my ask is, if you’re listening to this, that you educate yourself on the thread, the hashtags surviving R.Kelly, that you talk to other people about it. And that we sent her always, always, always the survivors. How can we provide them with more resources for healing with more of what they need, whether that’s some space or maybe that’s more microphones and a bigger platform. How can we start talking about ways to shift the culture so that this doesn’t continue happening. Because R.Kelly isn’t the only one. He’s just a very visible one. And what has enabled this kind of abuse and this kind of fetishization of young girls to happen. As soon as you start asking that question, it takes you some really interesting places. 

So I just want to say I believe the survivors and I feel complicit that before now I had never paid attention. And that I really didn’t know about this and there’s some of my whiteness showing up that I have the privilege to not know something that was impacting and causing so much pain and harm to a community.

Dawn Serra: I hope for all of us that we can do some educating and have some deep conversations, share survivors’ stories when they’re shared. Let’s have more interesting conversation about how we can all contribute to a culture of, one, that doesn’t automatically seek prison time. And, two, that does some restorative and transformative justice to not only help the people who are being hurt, but then to question, how can we prevent the hurt from happening in the first place? 

For all of those resources on asexuality and for this piece in Bust by Dr. Sami Schalk on Surviving R.Kelly, head to dawnserra.com/ep246/ Don’t forget to enter the new year’s. Give away. You’ve got two more days to put your name in the hat, grab that book list. And, of course, if you could use support that’s a little bit more personalized, if you want some new tools, some new skills, or just to be witnessed and the things that you’re going through. Head to dawnserra.com for coaching. And, of course, now it’s time for the Patreon bonus. Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and to grab your goodies.

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?