Meg-john And Justin

This week I chatted with the critically acclaimed, and multi award winner and nominee, podcaster Dave Pickering about podcasts. You will hear: - Dave doing an intro about their podcasts and history with them - why people might listen to them, what are the motivations - the danger of neoliberalism 'self improvement' and podcasts - the parasocial relationships that we have with podcast hosts and guests and how much that is part of why we listen (atomised, alienated from those around us we might turn to these kinds of relationships maybe?) - recommendations for good shows Dave’s own projects are Getting Better Acquainted Stand Up Tragedy The Family Tree Down to a sunless sea: memories of my dad (I’ve listened to the first of these, it’s really moving and excellent. Current (Client) projects: Who Hurt You (formally Made of Human) (I sort of mentioned this) The Restart Project Race Reflections AT WORK The Breakup Monologues Check all those out via Dave’s website http://dave-pickering.squarespace.com

As many of us are getting used to opening up our lives again in the middle of a pandemic, we might start to feel different kinds of feelings and thoughts about how safe and comfortable we might feel. Being at the pub, cafe, theatre, cinema, meetings, conferences or protests now has a very different set of concerns or anxieties for many of us. Also over the last couple of years the protests around the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sarah Everard, and also the Kill the Bill protests have been a reminder to us that our capacity to feel safe and comfortable in public spaces has been extremely unfairly distributed in the modern era. And furthermore we maybe now have a greater awareness how people’s experiences of systemic oppression might show up in people’s bodies in the context of complex post traumatic stress disorder. So I thought it would be timely to talk about the body and to invite Kim Loliya onto the show to talk about her work as a therapist, particularly somatic therapy, and for us to learn mor

We're back with another Sex Jams. This time it's the classic of the genre, Je t'aime (moi non plus). I love you (me neither). Dr Eleanor Janega and I (Justin Hancock) analyse it to death and ruin it for everyone. You're welcome! Dr J's blog is here https://going-medieval.com/ her Patreon is here https://www.patreon.com/GoingMedieval and her other excellent podcast We're Not So Different is here https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/were-not-so-different/id1551657923 Hope you enjoy it.

I've written a blog post to accompany this one which you can read over at the now unlocked Patreon post https://www.patreon.com/posts/56188508

We're back with a Meg-John and Justin episode We chatted about: Why we haven’t talked about kink as different to any other erotic / sexual / sensual activity. How common kink is. How kink is still positioned as ‘not normal’ despite it being incredibly common. The weight of should stories of what is kink and how kink should be practised (and how this might be an over correction to the messages about kink being not okay). The challenge into tuning into what we want. How do we create our kink subjectivities? Communication and consent. What familiarity with all the terms and knowledge might open up or close down Different meaning and motivations for taking part in kink Different kinds of activities and the different things we might get out of it (and how this can be really different depending on context). The importance of being slow and avoiding pushing people / being aware of being pushed. Solo / partnered. Erotic / nurturing/ power. In the rest of the conversation (on the Patreon feed) we cover:

As we’ve covered recently in the episodes with Katherine Angel and Joy Townsend, the on-going journey to sexual subjectivity for women is often difficult and fraught with harms, violence, degrees of unwantedness, coercion, and a lack of consent. The narrow, legalistic, framework we have for understanding these harms are geared towards identifying (or perhaps not identifying) perpetrators. This often stifles the voices of survivors of violence. In a society where sex is still so stigmatised how do we find the spaces, and the vocabulary to talk about sex and make sense of our own experiences. Where we are given such strong messages about what sex is, who is allowed to have it, and who should do what to whom. How as individuals can we navigate sexual encounters when society unfairly distributes agency and gives us few tools to allow for the possibility of collective agency and joy. Rachel Thompson’s book Rough - How violence found its way into the bedroom and what we can do about it, is a timely and wide rangi

As we covered in a recent podcast Her Sexual Self, drawing and redrawing our sexual or asexual subjectivities is something that we are all in the process of doing - whether we know it or not. How do we come to know and understand and become our sexual selves? How do we do this when discourses, or should stories, of how we should do our gender and sexuality are so powerful and all around us. What happens in communities, or at an interpersonal level when these stories can be told and retold to others Scott Burnett has written an excellent paper on how men who abstain from masturbating make sense of their sexual subjectivities and how this is produced and reproduced in online communities. Some of this is quite everyday and benign, but some of it is quite troubling. So here’s a warning that some of what we might talk about might refer to racist tropes and sexist and potentially violent views of women. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1097184X211018256# Here are the notes I made before the sho

I'm doing things a bit differently this week as my 'Ask Justin' episode is just me reading out advice which I've written in a column, over at the patreon. I thought I'd try this approach out. I'm more used to writing for young people over at BISH but I might do more of this kind of thing for adults here too. I also thought this would be a nice complementary episode to the last one with Joy Townsend called Her Sexual Self. To read it head to https://www.patreon.com/posts/54220897 (where you can also sign up to get more benefits)

I’m afraid the audio of this episode isn’t as good as usual because we had to rely on the back up recording. Sorry about that. I’m also going to give you a content note here in particular for Natalie’s story where there is a description of a rape. There aren’t graphic details and in the story Natalie has ambivalent feelings about it, but I just wanted to give you a heads up in case you want to skip it. It’s around 28 minutes in and if you skip ahead for 2 minutes from when you first hear Joy mention Natalie’s name then you will miss it. Her Sexual Self: A narrative investigation of young women’s sexual subjectivities Listeners to this show will know that we have always tried to grapple with questions of the personal and the political, the structural and cultural messages that we receive, and the possibilities for agency and freedom to choose within this. It’s hard to articulate and sometimes it means that we have to treat them separately or as things happening in parallel, or by simply just pointing out

Before we start here's some housekeeping. This show is inspired by Time, the drama on BBC 1 that concluded last week and is available on iplayer. It’s not a review of the show but there are a couple of spoilers. We also mention self-harm but don’t go into any detail at all. As you’ll hear Jazz Tehara works in a prison environment with offenders with highly complex and challenging behaviour but with a NHS led pathway strategy in place. So this conversation raises some of the possibilities of what a well funded and resourced prison service, focussing on mental health outcomes and work on masculinities, could look like. Also if you would like to support this podcast please consider becoming a Patron of the show. Just £1 a month will help to pay me to make this show as well as to pay an appearance fee to fellow freelance guests. There are also occasional bits of bonus content for Patrons as well as access to the Discord server where you can chat with other listeners. That’s at patreon.com/culturesexrelationshi

I was delighted to be joined by Juliet Jacques, who is a writer, film maker, and one of our leading cultural commentators. We talked about her latest book Variations which is her debut short story collection. She uses uses fiction inspired by found material and real-life events to explore the history of transgender Britain. Juliet very kindly agreed to do a reading for us where she tells the story of a press intrusion into the life of Laura, a model and actress in the 1950s. We also talk about the transphobia and 'trans discourse' in the mainstream media (and how stupid and reductive this often is) and how the role of fiction and story telling might be a compelling and creative alternative. Variations is out now on Influx Press https://www.influxpress.com/variations Her excellent podcast Suite 212 can be found here https://soundcloud.com/suite-212 and the Patreon for that is here https://www.patreon.com/suite212 If you like this interview and would like to support us, from just £1 a month, please consid

I was delighted to be joined by Jamie Hakim and Ingrid Young to talk about their project ‘Digital Intimacies: how gay and bisexual men use their smartphones to negotiate their cultures of intimacy’. We chat about intimacy and why it’s not just what happens in private between two people but actually the connections we depend on for living - be that public or private. The loss of the possibilities for public intimacy was felt keenly by gay and bisexual men, where, as with for a lot of queer folk, counter public spaces were some of the few places they could 'be'. Interviews with participants reveal how smartphones could open up new avenues of intimacy during a pandemic, just as others are closed down. The opportunities for pause and reflection and new relationships, as well as the possibilities for negotiating safer covid safer sex practices. All of this as a counter to the ‘common sense’ and reductive stereotypes about gay and bi men, technology, and sex. This was a super interesting chat and there’s so much

We did a live stream on our new twitch stream twitch.tv/culturesexrel just now about Eurovision. Here's the audio!

This weeks' Culture Sex Relationships is the 3rd Ask Justin. You send your questions and I try and give great advice. There are three questions this week. One on sex discrepancies and opening up a relationship to non-monogamy. Second is about BDSM and the risks of practising it when you have a straight laced job. The third one is about disentangling arousal and desire and the role of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. This last one contains a mention of sexual assault but I don't go into any detail or specifics. If you like this show and would like some more of it, please considering supporting the show on Patreon. patreon.com/culturesexrelationships From just £1 a month would be a great help. If you can afford more so that I can keep as much as this free for others that can't, that would be even better. Thank you! Here are some links I mention For the user guide zines check out megjohnandjustin.com/publications Here's our book https://uk.bookshop.org/books/a-practical-guide-to-sex

I chatted with Sarah from Decrim Now about the laws around sex work and why it's an issue at the moment. We cover the current position (which is partial criminalisation), the Nordic Model (which criminalises the client), and full decriminalisation (which is what sex workers and many big unions and charities are calling for). As I mentioned in last week's show we would please encourage you to use this template to email your MP about it https://decrimnow.eaction.org.uk/nonordicmodel and if you have clout or belong to an organisation that does, please sign the open letter https://decrimnow.org.uk/open-letter-on-the-nordic-model/

Meg-John and I did a show about how we might slowly begin to open up again. How we might be able to make it easier for others. The importance of good consensual processes (and how we can pay attention to those). Here's the excellent infographic we talked about https://twitter.com/CounsellingKaz/status/1381200139839225856?s=19 Here's the link to the open letter put together by Decrim Now for the decriminalisation of sex work https://decrimnow.org.uk/open-letter-on-the-nordic-model/ Support Meg-John's Patreon https://www.patreon.com/MegJohnBarker and please sign up to the Culture Sex Relationships Patreon to help support the show https://www.patreon.com/CultureSexRelationships

This has been out and available on the Patreon feed for a few days now, so you've been denied the freshest of takes until now. If you want to hear future episodes early and in full, then please support the Patreon. I was delighted to be joined by Katherine Angel to chat about her latest book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again. We had to rely on the zoom recording so sorry about the occasional blip in the background. We chatted about the main themes of her book: consent, desire, arousal, and vulnerability. We also chatted a little bit about my book Can We Talk About Consent and compared notes about how a more bottom up approach to understanding sex might be possible. We covered the topic of sexual violence but we didn't go into any detail. It was a really interesting and engrossing chat and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Katherine's book is on sale wherever you get your books. You can also buy direct from the publishers here where it's on sale atm. https://www.versobooks.com/books/3743-tomorrow-sex-

This week we do Freak Nasty: which is both a jam and a bop according to Eleanor. It's an extremely interesting sex jam which flips subjectivities and desire whilst also being extremely interested in non-reproductive forms of sexual activity. As with all the Culture Sex Relationships episodes, this is for over 18s. We swear in this one. In the extra version for Patrons there is a few more minutes chat about the song and also we watch the video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNVuhP8ehdo Hope you like it! Justin

Here are the questions and some of the links I mentioned "Everyone I know and everyone I follow on social media is very pro-vaccines and so I kind of go along with the crowd on this one, without really knowing much, something I’m not proud of and want to change. All of the discourse I see online is very loud and angry and - I’m sure it’s with good reason - but I struggle to build my own stance on it based on this. I was wondering if you could answer something along the lines of ‘How can we practice consent in discussing and making choices around vaccines whilst also protecting each other and especially the most vulnerable in our society?’ I know it’s a big and sensitive topic (especially at the moment) so totally okay if it’s not something you want to tackle right now but thought I’d put it out there just in case." Freedoms and Covid https://www.bishuk.com/relationships/freedoms-and-covid/ Herd immunity https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/herd-immunity-lockdowns-and-covid-19 Vaccine hesistancy https:

It’s a Sin Review This week I was delighted to be joined by Silva Neves to talk about It’s A Sin, which is a very popular mini-series on Channel 4 (available to watch here) https://www.channel4.com/programmes/its-a-sin What did we think about the show? As viewers and also our thoughts about the show from our perspectives: psychosexual therapist, sex and relationships educator. Here’s my sex education guide to the show for young people https://www.bishuk.com/your-call/a-sex-and-relationships-guide-to-its-a-sin/ You can get in touch with Silva at: www.silvaneves.co.uk If you want to train in clinical sexology: https://www.theinstituteofsexology.org/ Here are the rough notes that we followed for the show. HIV and homophobia (as I say at the beginning of the episode, we focused on homophobia because that was the focus of the show, but clearly there was also explicit biphobia and racism in the reporting of and handling of the pandemic in the 80s and now) Homophobia increased during the 80s, HIV weaponi