Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra

tl;dr JoEllen Notte is here to help us explore depression, relationships, and how depression and mental health can impact sex and desire, plus connecting during a pandemic.

Explore More Summit is happening NOW! Grab your free ticket by registering today for this free, entirely online conference that happens April 20-29th featuring 28 delicious, timely, intimate talks. Head to exploremoresummit.com and register. We've got Pleasure Mechanics, Rachel Cole, Prentis Hemphill, Andrea Glik, Jennifer Mullan, Kai Cheng Thom, and so many others. Don't miss it!

Patrons who support at $3 and above, this week you get to hear a bonus chat between JoEllen and I on this cultural idea that people with depression are essentially asexual, desexualized humans and what JoEllen actually found in all of her research plus looking at sex as an a la carte menu versus a buffet. (And Eeyore masturbating totally gets talked about.) Hear it at patreon.com/sgrpodcast.

In this episode, JoEllen and I talk about her new book, "The Monster Under the Bed" which is all about sex, depression, and relationships.

We talk about how the entire world is coping and struggling with depression, anxiety, panic, and trying to survive the unknown. How normal it is to be feeling numb and disconnected while also feeling more emotional and tender.

We explore how being in close quarters with a partner can lead to a reckoning with our relationships, important questions to ask ourselves during these times when we're wondering if our relationship is the problem or just how terrible things are in general and how to tease out whether it's the person or the relationship.

JoEllen and I share some of the catastrophizing stories our brains like to tell us and ways we cope, plus communicating our mental health needs with a partner and why context matters SO much when it comes to our libido and pleasure.

JoEllen also cannot stress enough how important it is to read Emily Nagoski's "Come As You Are" if you haven't already.

Be sure to send in your questions! I would love to hear from you. Use the contact form at dawnserra.com.

Follow Sex Gets Real on Twitter and Facebook and Dawn is on Instagram.

About JoEllen Notte:

JoEllen Notte is a certified sex educator, writer, speaker, sexuality researcher, and mental health advocate. She blogs at The Redhead Bedhead and has been published by the BBC, Glamour, Bitch Media, xoJane, and Kinkly. JoEllen's book The Monster Under the Bed: Sex, Depression, and the Conversations We Aren't Having will be released on March 27, 2020.

Stay in touch with JoEllen at redheadbedhead.com and get a copy of The Monster Under the Bed at your favorite local bookstore.

Listen and subscribe to Sex Gets Real

  1. Listen and subscribe on iTunes
  2. Check us out on Stitcher
  3. Don't forget about I Heart Radio's Spreaker
  4. Pop over to Google Play
  5. Use the player at the top of this page.
  6. Stream it on Spotify
  7. Find the Sex Gets Real channel on IHeartRadio.

Hearing from you is the best

Contact form: Click here (and it's anonymous)

Episode Transcript

Visit dawnserra.com/ep301

Direct download: Episode_301.mp3
Category:Health, Sexuality -- posted at: 6:00am EDT

tl;dr Jaclyn Friedman on believing women, what happens when we disclose our trauma, and why our PERCEPTION of who is a victim impacts how we view all victims. We're talking about her new book with Jessica Valenti, "Believe Me".

Explore More Summit is happening NEXT WEEK. Grab your free ticket by registering today for this free, entirely online conference that happens April 20-29th featuring 28 delicious, timely, intimate talks. Head to exploremoresummit.com now!

Finally, Patrons who support at $3 and above, this week you get to hear a bonus chat between Jaclyn Friedman and I on Tina Horn's fantastic essay speaking to why pleasure should not be the measure for sex work and porn performers. It's SOOOO good and super important for folks who truly want to support those in the field. Hear it at patreon.com/sgrpodcast.

I love every time I get to be in conversation with Jaclyn, and this was no different.

We explore the difference between what it means to believe women versus what it means to believe ALL women, and why that distinction is important.

We dive into what it means that women, femmes, and feminized folks often have a different set of memories than cis men. The ways survivors are retraumatized by courts, lawyers, and our "justice" system.

So much of "Believe Me" demonstrates the ways we would all move closer to liberation if we centered Black women and trans women, and we explore all the ways so many of us are only trusted if we disclose the gory details of our trauma but in doing so we are also seen as discredited and no longer experts in anything except our trauma.

Jaclyn shares what social researchers have long demonstrated: that collectively we not only hold women to much higher standards, but as a woman's credibility goes up, we like her less for it and actively punish her for that growing credibility.

So what can we do about it? Where do we go?

It's such an important discussion about a very important book, and I hope you'll get yourself a copy.

Be sure to send in your questions! I would love to hear from you. Use the contact form at dawnserra.com.

Follow Sex Gets Real on Twitter and Facebook and Dawn is on Instagram.

About Jaclyn Friedman:

Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, educator and activist, and creator of four books Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape (one of Publishers’ Weekly’s Top 100 Books of 2009), What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex & Safety, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All, and her latest, Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World. Her podcast, also called Unscrewed, is paving new paths to sexual liberation, and was named one of the Best Sex Podcasts by both Marie Claire and Esquire.

As an undergraduate, Jaclyn thought she was too smart to become a victim of sexual assault – until another student proved her wrong. That experience eventually led her to become a student and instructor of IMPACT safety training. At IMPACT, she helped bring safety skills to the communities which most need them, including gang-involved high school students and women transitioning out of abusive relationships.

Friedman’s work has popularized the “yes means yes” standard of sexual consent that is quickly becoming law on many US campuses. In her book, Unscrewed, she calls on the movement for women’s sexual liberation to move past individualistic “empowerment” messages (for which she coined the term “fauxpowerment”) to focus on collectively transforming the systems and institutions invested in keeping women sexually servile. Kirkus called it “a potent, convincing manifesto,” and Kate Tuttle, president of the National Book Critics Circle, called it “the book we need right now.”

Friedman is a popular speaker on campuses and at conferences across the US and beyond. She has been a guest on the Today ShowNightlinePBS News Hour, Call Your Girlfriend, and numerous other audio and TV shows, and her commentary has appeared in outlets including The New York TimesVoxRefinery 29The Washington PostGlamour, and The Guardian. Friedman is a founder and the former executive director of Women, Action & the Media, where she led the successful #FBrape campaign to apply Facebook’s hate-speech ban to content that promotes gender-based violence. More recently, she has been active in the Jews Against ICE movement, with whom she was arrested at a protest this summer. 

Listen and subscribe to Sex Gets Real

  1. Listen and subscribe on iTunes
  2. Check us out on Stitcher
  3. Don't forget about I Heart Radio's Spreaker
  4. Pop over to Google Play
  5. Use the player at the top of this page.
  6. Stream it on Spotify
  7. Find the Sex Gets Real channel on IHeartRadio.

Hearing from you is the best

Contact form: Click here (and it's anonymous)

Episode Transcript

Visit dawnserra.com/ep300 for the transcript

Direct download: Episode_300.mp3
Category:Health, Sexuality -- posted at: 11:30am EDT

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