Afleveringen

  • "Hi Justin

    my favourite episode of yours and Meg-John's is 'disagreeing with people'. I've listened over 10 times. Despite this I still find myself getting into pointless heated discussions/arguments that leave me very upset specifically about trans issues but could be any marginalised group. This is in person one to one, not online, I don't respond on social media. How can I stop getting drawn in to doing this? I'm wasting my energy, but find certain things people say draw me in I can't help challenging it. I have multiple marginalised/intersectional identities and am gender non conforming but not trans myself. Thanks for all the work you put in to the podcast- its part of my self care."

    https://megjohnandjustin.com/relationships/disagreeing-with-people/

    Why it’s pointless
    You’re not engaging in the discussion for the same reason (you might want to change their mind, they might just want to get you riled)
    People rarely change their mind right there and then
    Challenging is different from disagreements
    (How to challenge without locking horns)
    Who is the subject and who is the object or other? Who is who’s mommy / daddy
    How your role as the other might actually be making things worse?
    Thoughts on materialism and what disagreements vs challenging does. Do we need to challenge or disagree? What does it do?

    Why you’re getting drawn in
    Perhaps in some way they are your object or other?
    You might want to think about times when you haven’t been drawn in (eg on social media), what have you done instead. What else might you do or be?

    Advice on how to just notice when we become conscious through affect/feeling : emotion : thoughts : actions

    Here’s the podcast about Jacob Johannsen’s excellent book
    https://soundcloud.com/culturesexrelationships/jacob-johannsen-fantasy-online-misogyny-and-the-manosphere

    https://linktr.ee/culturesexrel

  • Just a quick advice episode this week as I feel like I've talked a lot about orgasms lately on the show. But first there's some really lovely correspondence about when you, the assemblage, feel like the body without organs. More of this is particularly welcome! https://linktr.ee/culturesexrel

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  • “I often struggle with unpicking what of my feelings is really 'mine' and what's internalised homophobia/transphobia/sexism/sex negativity etc. As a result I really struggle to trust myself, and become anxious, worrying that I'm unconsciously repeating harmful patterns. I know that identities aren't fixed, that we're all constantly evolving and all in relation to one another. I suppose really, with this all in mind, my question is: how do we work towards being authentically ourselves and trusting ourselves around sexual/gender identity? How do we hold space for our own feelings (both physical and emotional) whilst also combatting all the crap that we are imbued with by society?”

    Here’s A Thousand Plateaus (free pdfs are available online)

    https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/a-thousand-plateaus

    Here’s that really interesting podcast episode I think I mentioned by Jeremy Gilbert https://culturepowerpolitics.org/2024/02/03/introducing-affect/ His book Common Ground is really great

    Here’s more about Antonio Damasio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Damasio

    The name of the theorist I’d forgotten was Vicki Kirby and her idea about nothing being outside of nature is in this piece I think

    Here’s an article I wrote at BISH the other day which explains the different ways of thinking about the self https://www.bishuk.com/relationships/how-to-impress-someone-you-like/

    Here’s more information about my coaching service https://justinhancock.co.uk/#coaching and you can contact me and find other resources here https://linktr.ee/culturesexrel

    Hope we all found this useful and become the body without organs at some point this week. Let me know if you do!

    Justin

  • Sex Ed in the UK and Me

    Our wonderful Patrons have had this for a few days already. Why not join them from just £1 a month? Suggest shows, join the Patreon, DM me directly and get 10% off my coaching service ... patreon.com/culturesexrelationships

    This one is about a brief history of sex ed in the UK over the last hundred years or so. Part way through I tell my story of how I got into doing this job in 1998 / 1999 in order to tell an autoethnography which illuminates the problems which sex ed, sexual health services, and youth services have faced over the years. I think it reveals something interesting about what culture war and austerity have done and how this may result in a doubling down on a narrow sex ed which doesn’t seem to serve anyone.

    Here’s the Department for Education 1943 document I read from https://education-uk.org/documents/boardofed/1943-sex-ed.html

    I relied on ‘School sex education: policy and practice in England 1870 to 2000’ by Jane Pilcher
    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14681810500038848

    The Politics of Sex Education Policy in England and Wales and The Netherlands since the 1980s JANE LEWIS and TRUDIE KNIJN

    https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-social-policy/article/abs/politics-of-sex-education-policy-in-england-and-wales-and-the-netherlands-since-the-1980s/8913118BB205C133930FED2E05240864

    Seventy years of sex education in Health Education Journal: a critical review
    Padmini Iyer and Peter Aggleton

    https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0017896914523942

    Here’s a useful document about sexual pleasure in RSE and that Pleasure leaflet debacle I was talking about

    https://shura.shu.ac.uk/16764/1/Pleasure%20Evaluation%202017%20FINAL%20final.pdf


    And you might be interested in this blog of mine I did last year about the state of RSE in the UK

    https://bishtraining.com/the-state-of-rse-in-the-uk/

    Send in your questions / support the show / find things to buy here

    https://linktr.ee/culturesexrel

  • I have a safer sex protocol that consists of a set of good communication tick boxes and a set of medical/testing disclosure tick boxes and a spreadsheet for my partners to record their partners and activities they practise with each, testing status, barrier use, etc I then use some approximate quantification of risk for each partner.

    While I find my protocol helpful in making this usually sensitive and difficult discussion more matter of fact and clear, I have experienced a lot of push back and hurt feelings by partners.
    I am reaching out to you because you mentioned in your episode this week that some people feel repelled by safer sex discussions.

    Could you help me see a way forward towards finding a consensus or a creative solution that works for everyone in case a partner refuses to engage with my protocol?
    Thank you for creating your content! I find it really valuable and fun to listen to!

    Resource / discourse
    When one becomes the other
    What's a good resource? Heterogeneous, open, kind,
    Resourcing our bodies
    Towards collectivity, away from the individual risks

    It's not working right now, why not?
    Sounds like it's only resourcing one person
    Which means that it's not actually resourcing you
    For this approach the process and the content have to be flattened. It's the process for reducing risks which is the relation, which produces the outcome

    Trust
    To get trust we have to give it. It's a mutually constructed thing
    But saying it isn't it. Also running the risk of people rejecting doing it because they are made to say it.
    Privity of contract
    How does trust feel? How do other people know? How would you respond? Can you use that to work backwards to find out how you might resource yourselves (or your whole assemblage)

    Here’s the podcast I was recommending here https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-119-trust/

    Joy and love is only ever a result of the relation
    As I've been saying lately, consciousness, becoming, can only happen in relation.
    Spinozan joy is just that if by increasing our capacity to act, we are reducing someone else's, it's sadness
    "Love means precisely that our expansive encounters and continuous collaborations bring us joy...without this, love, we are nothing." Antonio Negri

    So you need a resource, not a discourse, which you all can collaborate on
    Allows for volume levels (both in terms of the actual risks and how they are individual)
    Allows for different risks
    Gives people autonomy over how they manage their sexual risks (privity)
    Creates openness and the possibilities of persevering over time
    Gives everyone an out
    Just conversations
    A Google doc of affects, emotions, thoughts, doings
    Not just about safer sex but also increasing the possibilities to act

    https://www.bishuk.com/safer-sex/sex-infections/
    https://www.bishuk.com/safer-sex/chances-getting-sti/
    https://www.bishuk.com/safer-sex/sti-quiz/

  • [If you have a question of your own, or would like me to give a Second Opinion of someone else’s advice, get in touch via the link tree here https://linktr.ee/culturesexrel ]

    “My question is about (changing) feelings of disgust in sexual contexts. My sense of disgust can change rapidly depending on context. For example, most of the time I really don't like kissing, even the idea is repelling to me.”

    It’s okay.

    We shouldn’t have to find any kind of sexuality to be normal, or okay, or expected. Doesn’t matter what kind of relationship we’re in.

    Some things we are told are ‘normal’ part of sexuality are deeply weird when we think about it! Polymorphous perversity. (Here’s that episode https://soundcloud.com/podcast-co-coopercherry/three-essays-on-the-theory-of-sexuality )

    Navigating discrepancy is the normal (there are tips about this in our book A Practical Guide to Sex). https://megjohnandjustin.com/relationships/sex-discrepancies/ https://megjohnandjustin.com/sex/enjoy-penis-vagina-sex-want/ https://megjohnandjustin.com/sex/enjoy-non-genital-sex/

    Perhaps think about the different ways of doing them. Maybe you need more mutual sex where you are both doing something with each other at the same time, or you might need to go one at a time. There’s some really great stuff about this in Cyndi Darnell’s book https://cyndidarnell.com/book/ (we did a podcast earlier this year, check it out)

    (Though I still think we are actively having sex with each other even if one person is receiving pleasure and the other ‘giving’ it. If pleasure was only about this giving and receiving mode, the giver gives and the taker takes, then how come I enjoy touching other people’s bodies?)

    Disgust and consciousness. How things become conscious and how we might pay attention to other affects.

    The exceptions. Kissing is great. Enhances sexual pleasure. What’s the difference? What do you notice?

    Things change rapidly, this is really useful. Can things change in the other direction? I didn’t talk about Epicurus, Lucretius and The Swerve, but I probably should have because that would have been fun. Here’s a good podcast about it https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/who-was-lucretius-with-thomas-nail/id1512615438?i=1000575225008

  • I thought I'd do a reading of a couple of my articles from BISH that I've written about orgasms and then have an adult and theoretical rambling about them. They demonstrate really nicely how gendered sex discourses have produced orgasms in a very narrow (territorialised) way, and how unlearning our sexual knowledges is the key to enjoying it a bit more, but also has some micropolitical implications. Here are the articles
    https://www.bishuk.com/bodies/how-do-i-know-when-ive-had-an-orgasm/
    https://www.bishuk.com/sex/what-is-gooning/
    If you do have any questions for me, here are the links you need https://linktr.ee/culturesexrel
    Justin

  • I was joined by Greg Wolfman to talk about his excellent book 'Masculinities in the US Hangout Sitcom'. https://www.routledge.com/Masculinities-in-the-US-Hangout-Sitcom/Wolfman/p/book/9781032426211 (it's an academic book, so expensive, but there's a 20% off voucher at the website. Also Routledge sometimes have really huge sales on. They also published Meg-John's Rewriting The Rules. Also, ask your library to get it)

    After a brief tribute to Matthew Perry / Chandler Bing, we
    - chatted about whether it was possible for us to enjoy Friends
    - Greg situated Friends in the socio-political context of neoliberalism, the 90s, and the long 90s (a term by Jeremy Gilbert which is usefully explained in his book with Alex Williams called 'Hegemony Now')
    - Greg helpfully walked us through the 'chrononormativities' of career, relationships, settling down (and we also chatted about how they show us a glimpse of queerness in the show but always shut it down)
    - Then we talked about the episodes in series two when Joey moves out and when Joey moves in. What this says about how masculinities are performed, the idea of 'the closeness in the doing', and whether we really are living in a more homosocial era of masculinities. Pivot!
    - And what does it say about Friends and us that it's still such a popular show? Why isn't there a sitcom for the luxury automated gay acid communism conjuncture? Call it 'Comrades'. Hire Greg as your script consultant!

  • I was thrilled to be joined by Jacob Bloomfield to talk about his excellent new book, 'Drag: A British History'. It tells the story of drag from 1870 to 1970 and I found it to be super entertaining and informative. I came to this as someone who was ambivalent about drag and I learnt so much.

    You can buy it from this affiliate link and then I get a small commission (and helps support the show) https://uk.bookshop.org/a/10660/9780520393325 or get it direct from the publishers https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520393325/drag

    The article Jacob mentions is here https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/drag-surprising-mainstream-history/

  • I was delighted to be joined by Yvette Taylor to talk about her fascinating book Working Class Queers Time, Place and Politics.

    You can buy it from here https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745341026/working-class-queers/

  • Patrons have had this show for a few days already. Sign up at patreon.com/culturesexrelationships from just £1 a month and support the show :-)

    My last advice show was popular. Send your questions through via the link in the bio and I will answer them! :-)

    The UK are having a round of allegations against public figures which centre around sexual ethics, consent, power, and bullying. These are all very different cases with their own particularities, yet the discussions surrounding them reveal a lack of nuance, lack of curiosity for critiquing sexual ethics, binary assumptions, carceral justice logics.

    As it seems we’ve learnt nothing about sex, consent, and justice, I thought it would be great to invite Tina Sikka back on the show to talk about this and to apply her framing of a ‘pleasure and care-centred ethic of embodied and relational sexual Otherness’ and see what might become.

    Here is that first conversation from a year ago

    https://soundcloud.com/culturesexrelationships/tina-sikka-sex-consent-and-justice

    You can pre-order the paperback of Tina's book here https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-sex-consent-and-justice.html

  • What if you have no problem making connections with people who are cute and engaging, but they are unavailable? My advice about how else we can see these moments of emergence and what we can do to bring reason and new stories into meeting people.

    I guess this is a companion piece to this podcast https://soundcloud.com/culturesexrelationships/how-to-get-a-girlfriend-boyfriend-themfriend

  • This is a reading from my article I wrote for RSE folk but I think is relevant for CSR folk. I'm also really sick of hearing the bad takes about A***** T***.

    This article is in response to the questions I get about ‘what should we do about toxic masculinity influencers’. I complexify the idea of an individual having a singular ‘effect’. I argue that there are potential harms of uncritically accepting a common sense ‘cause and effect’ discourse of toxic masculinity. How paying attention to those discourses ‘covers over’ failings which are closer to home. Lastly, how the solution has been there all along, but it’s our own embedded institutional toxic masculinities which prevent us from accessing them.

    Here's the article https://bishtraining.com/the-effect-of-toxic-masculinity-influencers/

    Sign up for the Patreon to see what I'm up to with this new zine. patreon.com/culturesexrelationships

    And here's that link I talked about at the end https://forms.gle/AVkYLaL4srDunrHC7

  • I was delighted to be joined by Laura Scaronne Bonhomme and Dr Michael Beattie who (together with co-author Skye Davies) wrote Gender Affirming Therapy.

    We talked about the need for this book right now. How trans and trans non-binary folk face such scarce resources and also an increasingly hostile and transphobic government. But also how the discourses around gender diversity may have produced an anxiety for health care providers in 'getting it right' and how this doesn't serve clients or themselves.

    We also talked about what [else] gender affirming therapy does. How their gentle affirming approach allows for gender to emerge (rather than putting clients on an A to B gender journey). The importance of allowing for indifference, ambivalence, and existential unknowings. How they bring an openness and fuzziness to discursive framings of gender together with a grounded understanding of the body, the material, and how this can help trans and non-binary and cis clients to emerge.

    Their book is out very soon so buy and review it here https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0335251544?ref_=k4w_embed_dp_err&tag=kpembed-20

    Or here (where I'd earn a little affiliate commission too) https://uk.bookshop.org/a/10660/9780335251544

    Also join their club at affirm.lgbt (as I have just done)

    I hope you enjoy the show. You are as much part of this as I am. So if you can support it on patreon.com/culturesexrelationships with £1 a month for a bit I'd be super grateful. It helps pay me to do the show. Or you could perhaps share the show privately or publicly and say a nice thing about it. Maybe you could give it a nice 5 star rating on your podcast app too. Ta!

  • I was delighted to be joined by Sophie K Rosa for a chat about her excellent new book Radical Intimacy. We chatted about some of the emerging themes from the book:

    - the neoliberal self as produced by society and culture,

    - reflecting on Covid and how the lockdown policy reproduced common sense ideas about the nuclear family, mononormativity, and safety

    - we critique the common sense idea of monogamy and link this with Fordist capitalism

    - even under it's own terms what kind of society do we need to allow for even monogamous relationships and the nuclear family to emerge and thrive

    - what are the possibilities for more queerer intentional, relational, and consensual ways of relating

    - how those doing radical relating might also benefit from a more radical politics (as well as how those with radical politics might benefit from reflecting on radical relating)



    You can get the book from here https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745345161/radical-intimacy/



    And you can read Sophie's excellent journalism work over at Novara Media https://novaramedia.com/contributor/sophie-k-rosa/

    Please support the show so that I can a) be paid and b) pay fellow freelance guests. If everyone listening donated £1 a month at patreon.com/culturesexrelationships I'd be able to treat this like a part time job and thus more podcasts.

  • I've done a reading of and around an article I've written for BISH this week about How To Get A Girlfriend, Boyfriend, or Themfriend. I've read it out but also talked around it to complexify it, chat a bit about some of the theory, and also why this isn't neoliberal advice but a line of flight to become 'other'.


    Could you please help me share the hell out of the article https://www.bishuk.com/relationships/how-to-get-a-girlfriend-boyfriend-or-themfriend/

    If you want to support the show (even just for a bit) there's a Patreon patreon.com/culturesexrelationships

    Thanks for listening!

    Justin

  • Renowned sex therapist and educator Cyndi Darnell joined me to talk about her amazing book ‘Sex When You Don’t Feel Like It’. We critiqued the idea of libido itself, the importance of curiosity, the new three word model you should be using instead of GGG on Feeld, the importance of allowing the body to speak, why talking about problems is often not helpful, the possibilities for the body to show the path to freedom and connectedness, and the difficulties of being saturated in discourse and how to become resourced.

    Here’s a link to the book (I earn a small commission if you buy it from this link but it is widely available)

    https://uk.bookshop.org/books/sex-when-you-don-t-feel-like-it-the-truth-about-mismatched-libido-and-rediscovering-desire/9781538161708?aid=10660

    The paper that Cyndi mentioned is here https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14681994.2021.1882672

    And her website is

    https://cyndidarnell.com/

    Please support the podcast if you can via Patreon and unlock bonus episodes and some other extras (Patrons have had this episode for a week ahead). Just £1 a month for a bit would be great and would pay me to make these shows patreon.com/culturesexrelationships

  • Here's an interview with Eleanor, about her amazing new book 'The Once and Future Sex'. We discuss the key themes of the book

    - about how the story of what it is to be a woman was told (and how this connects to power and hegemony),

    - where the beauty standard first came from and how women faced a double jeopardy of following them / not following them

    - how the story of what it is to be a woman meant creating stigma around sex and relationships

    - the role of the medieval mother and why motherhood was central to medieval life (yet women were still seen as inessential 'Others')

    - and why all of this matters for the present day, for feminism, and also why learning from this should be an important, central, part of post-capitalist politics


    Her book is out on 17th January 2023 in the US https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393867817 and here in the UK on 3rd March 2023 https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-once-and-future-sex-going-medieval-on-women-s-roles-in-society/9780393867817

  • A listener asked me (via Patreon) to chat about Covid. The restrictions might be over, but Covid is still very much with us (and with others more than some). Why do we want to turn away from Covid? Why do we want to think we've 'beaten' the virus? Masks have gone, but does that mean that we've simply learnt nothing? I asked podcaster and storyteller Dave Pickering along to tell their story of Covid and help me put the personal in a cultural and political context.

  • This week I am grabbing some hashtag content from my other Patreon for BISH (https://www.bishuk.com/)and introducing you to my 'Train Yourself in RSE' resources. You can see this (and read the resource) here for free https://www.patreon.com/posts/train-yourself-1-70736726

    If this is the kind of thing that you might be interested in doing here, I could do special CSR versions which are aimed at you the individual (rather than educators). So you would receive really in-depth, adult, sex and relationships education in this way.

    We could also do monthly zoom meetings to chat about some of the activities with each other, and I could even facilitate actual workshops with you. Sign up for the Culture Sex Relationships Patreon to register your interest (from just £1 a month) patreon.com/culturesexrelationships

    Hope you find this useful!

    Justin