Now it's playful and it's oh, let's try this and let's try that.

Or ooh, have you ever thought about this?

And yeah, I think it's the combination of don't give a fuck what anybody thinks of me and just more education and being open to new experiences.

Welcome to the taboo to Truth podcast.

Unapologetic conversations about sexuality in midlife.

I'm your hostess, Karen Bigman, certified life and menopause coach and sexual explorer, your trusted guide through the realms of dry vaginas, hot flashes, and the enigmatic orgasm journey.

I'm here to bring the often quiet into the light to create a safe space where no question is too awkward or taboo.

Whether you're experiencing changes in libido, concerned about navigating your menopausal life, or simply seeking to understand your body better, we are going to share this journey and it will be brave and open hearted.

And yes, it's okay to talk about it.

And yes, it's okay to ask.

So grab your favorite drink and put me on speaker.

It's time we broke the silence.

Hello and welcome.

Today I am joined by Jennifer Raynor.

Jennifer is a certified sex ologist and sexuality educator.

She is changing the way we discuss sexuality one brave conversation at a time.

Embracing her identity as a queer, polyamorous and kinky person, she they create a welcoming space for honest discussions.

Her teachings, rooted in vulnerability and authenticity, aim to deepen understanding about our sexuality, explore the richness of sexual narratives, enhance communication in relationships, and shed shame and embrace body positivity for everyone.

She's also a writer and an educator.

She's been in Cosmo, Us news, amongst other well known publications, and I'm so grateful for her to be here today.

Thank you, Jennifer.

Thank you, Karen.

Thank you so much for asking me.

Tell me about your work, your passion, and kind of what brought you to this area.

I like to start to tell this story from about eight years ago.

I was turning 45.

I woke up one day and realized that the work I was doing was not only not making me happy, but making me sad.

And as you approach that milestone of 50, you start to think about the next half of your life.

And I went, oh my gosh, I don't want to be doing what I'm doing.

I had worked in it for about 25 years and built a pretty good little career for myself in it.

I was working from home, good pay, lots of.

Lots of ability to build my time and everything.

I was being paid primarily for being available to answer questions and happiest when nobody was asking them.

I realized that it just wasn't a good fit for me.

I used to listen to Doctor Ruthen on her syndicated radio show, and I remember the neurons connecting one night and I went, this is a job that you can do.

Like, you can be a person who talks to other people about sex.

And my 15 year old brain, I was just like, this is something I can do.

And I really like, I realized at that moment, I want to do this.

This is what I want to do with my life.

And then, of course, there's no clear path to do that, right?

At least not back then.

It's easier now.

But back then, I started to look around, and there's no majors in sexuality.

There didn't seem to be a way forward that was clear to me.

And then life picked me up and ran off with me, and I got married and got divorced and had my other career and full circle.

30 years later, I went, and that's what I've always wanted to do, and that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Even though I knew I wanted to talk to people about sex, there's so much in that topic that I wasn't exactly sure which direction to go.

So I started taking workshops and classes that appealed to me.

And one of the first ones, one of the first directions that I went was I found out that Betty Dodson, who wrote the book sex for one, and that book's all about masturbation and self pleasure.

And I remember when I first found that book, thinking it's not just me.

Within her consciousness raising group, she started teaching women about their bodies, about orgasm and about masturbation.

When I found, I found out that she was still teaching.

She was 88 years old, still teaching workshops in her apartment.

So coming up on 50, me worried about how my sex life is going to change in the next few decades.

I knew for sure that I wanted to go, and I wanted to work with Betty, and I wanted to witness an 88 year old woman still embracing her sexuality, still having orgasm.

To me, that was going to be like, proof that there was life after 50.

That was the first thing I did, and I was hooked.

It was an absolutely amazing experience for anyone who's not familiar with body sex, which is the name of her workshop, it's an intensive deep dive, typically done over a weekend, 10 hours, with a small group of other people with vulvas.

And it covers anatomy, sexual anatomy.

It covers embracing our bodies, loving the skin that we're in to.

It covers.

We talk about all of the things in our lives that have kept us away from pleasure.

And then we learn practical techniques to help us have better orgasms.

And the thing that Betty's most known for is that then this group of women in a circle masturbates.

So you're all masturbating in front of each other?

Yes.

It's just vulva owners in the room, and you're just touching yourself.

The workshop starts out, you walk into the apartment, and the first thing you do is take all your clothes off.

I've been in nudist spaces a ton over the course of my life, but still, somehow walking into that apartment, knowing what I was going to be doing for the next 10 hours and dropping all my clothes felt really created a lot of anxiety.

So that was the first indication that I was like, wow.

Like, maybe this is not going to be as easy as I thought.

But at the end of that weekend, I knew that I wanted to be part of bringing this work to other people, because it has helped me so much.

Not just that first weekend, but at each subsequent time that I've participated in a body sex, whether I'm simply a participant or whether I'm leading a group, it helps me learn something new about myself.

So you mentioned body sex.

Yes.

What's that?

Is the workshop that Betty created.

Okay.

And I am now a certified body sex facilitator.

Okay.

Unfortunately, Betty passed away in 2020 during the pandemic.

But there is the Betty A.

Dodson foundation that continues her work.

And there's.

I'm thinking we're up to about two dozen certified facilitators worldwide.

It's something I'm really proud of, and it's the work that I absolutely love to do.

But on my journey, figuring out what I wanted to do, I realized that it's really difficult to convince people to come to your house and take their clothes off right away unless they know you a little bit.

So I do teach across a number of other topics.

I teach a class called the anatomy of pleasure, which is basically just the anatomy education that you did not get in school, with an emphasis on pleasure and ways to experience pleasure.

I used to teach this with a focus on vulvas.

Now I teach it for all genders and genitals.

And I love talking.

I love, love teaching that class so much, because I always, no matter what, get somebody who tells me, I never knew that.

And it's information that we now have, but that maybe we didn't have 20 years ago, particularly around the clitoris, because so much of that is new.

And the field of sexuality itself really is only about 70 years old, which is young in the grand scheme of things.

What's the number one thing that people say?

Oh my God.

I didn't know that typically that a lot of people don't know that there's more to the clitoris than just the little tip that sticks out.

Many people don't know that vulva owners have a gland that is very similar to the prostate that also produces fluid.

Everybody asks me about squirting.

I haven't done an episode on it yet.

Feel free to give some explanation.

That's one.

I haven't gotten into the nitty gritty, but there's no question it's like a badge of honor for heterosexual men.

I got her to squirt.

I don't know if I've ever experienced it.

The thing is, most often you're not going to get her to squirt unless she wants to.

Isn't that true in general with women?

I can go into that really briefly.

There is so that the area that we know is the g spot is actually an area called the urethral sponge that's on the top wall of the vaginal canal.

And it feels a little different from the other tissue inside your vagina.

It feels a little spongier, it's got some texture to it.

And it's in that area that you also have these skeins glands, which are very similar to the prostate and they produce a fluid.

Female ejaculation is another name for it.

I like squirting cause it's gender neutral.

If you stimulate that spot, the urethral sponge, which in turn is stimulating those skeins glands and is stimulating the bulbs of the clitoris which wrap around your vaginas, everything comes together in that one little area.

If you stimulate that, then you can one get the Skeins gland to expel that fluid.

And that's a milky color, very similar to semen.

And if you keep doing it, you can get this person to expel more fluid from their bladder.

So the next question I'm asked, is it pee?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the answer to that is yes and no.

Yeah.

So they've done studies.

There's one study in particular that I really like, a small study of vulva havers who are able to make themselves ejaculate.

They had them all empty their bladders first and then did a vaginal ultrasound, showed it empty, had them start to manipulate themselves in the way that they know they can get there, had them stop though, before they got there, did another vaginal ultrasound, showed that their bladders had now filled, had them finish the job, squirt all over the place, took a sample of what came out, and then one more vaginal ultrasound to show that the bladder was now empty.

That showed that there's something about the manipulation of that spot which will cause your bladder to fill very quickly.

Now, typically, your bladder is filling with urine.

Right?

But when your bladder is filling quickly, is it.

It seems to be pulling in more water along with it.

So while they're.

While they do find trace amounts of urine and how much depends on when you last emptied your bladder, they do find also this fluid from the skeins gland, and they find a lot of water.

Whether or not it's pee depends on the last time you peed or how much of it is pee depends on the last time you.

But it's an interesting phenomenon, and of course, very popular in.

In porn these days.

I tend to believe that it's something that mechanically we can all do, but mechanically is only part of it, because one of the, one of the tricks to doing it is to be able to relax your muscles and even push out a bit, which I think most people raised female, we're terrified of peeing on our partners during sex, and the last thing we want to do is push out.

Yeah.

So.

Well, I think we can all mechanically do it.

For some of us, it takes a little more to get through the mind block of this and to be able to relax and push enough to be able to expel fluid.

And it's supposed to be a better orgasm than just your basic plain old orgasm.

I think it's a different orgasm because I.

And just penis havers, ejaculation and orgasm are two different things.

You can ejaculate without an orgasm, and you can have an orgasm without ejaculation in both cases.

I did not know that.

Yes.

I didn't.

I knew about women.

I didn't know that about men.

Oh, yeah.

There's a.

It can ejaculate without an orgasm.

Yes.

Yes.

And the way that.

The way that a penis haver can ejaculate without an orgasm is typically through prostate stimulation.

If you stimulate the prostate, you can.

It's also called milking.

You can get fluid to emit from the end of the penis without any sort of orgasmic sensation.

Is it, does it feel good for the penis owner?

I suppose it depends on the penis owner.

Try that experiment sometimes.

Many of the penis owners who like this, also someone who's in a bit of their orgasm.

What I've heard is that the pleasure is largely psychological, like most, in that they feel like this is being taken from them and they can't stop themselves from ejaculating.

It's a little bit of mindfuckery, as Midori would put it.

Okay.

Okay.

That's great.

That's great.

No, I love.

I'm going all over the place.

We're just.

That's fine.

That's fine.

The audience hasn't heard this yet, and I'm sure this is, like, probably much more titillating than menopause 101.

Oh, largely when people take that.

That one class, it's things about the clitoris, things about squirting, primarily things about vulva anatomy.

Although there are some surprises with penis anatomy, too, in terms of sensitive spots and things like that.

So one thing that makes a lot of penis havers cringe is finding out that some.

You can see this in porn, too, but that some penis havers really like their testicles.

I was going to say man handled, but that's gendered handled roughly.

And most penis havers will go when you say that, but it's just another dimension of how we find pleasure and how we come to pleasure, which really is different for everybody.

Such a combination of physical sensation and our brain.

Yeah, it's really interesting.

When I started to learn about kink and bdsm and understand that you can separate it from sex.

It's a form of pleasure.

It's not necessarily a form of sex.

That was a huge learning for me.

I had no idea.

And, oh, by the way, I've said this before, but I didn't know that this.

What vulva was.

I thought I had a vagina my whole life until I started doing this work.

And now I know it's a vulva and I'm 60, so it's pretty sad that I didn't know that.

I love that you're doing this.

It's so great.

And every person listening should be going to Jen's workshops, because we all need this education.

All it does is help us feel better.

Absolutely.

The more you learn about sex, the more you learn you're not alone, and there's nothing new under the sun, and there's nothing weird or strange or odd about what you like.

Yeah, someone else has probably done it before, and if they haven't, you should trademark that shit.

I hope you're enjoying this episode of Taboo to truth.

Do you have any burning questions about sex in midlife menopause, dating after divorce, or exploring the spicier side of things.

Like polyamory or kink.

I want to hear from you.

Head over to my website, taboototruth.com, and fill out the form with your questions.

I'll answer them anonymously in upcoming episodes so you can get the scoop without revealing your identity.

It's like having a secret hotline to all your midlife sex questions.

Whatever it is, I am all ears.

So jump over to my website, tabutotruth.com, and let's keep the conversation going.

Now back to the show.

I love it.

I love it.

I've interviewed a bunch of doctors and listened to a lot of podcasts, and a lot of them say, it's usually either they say, look, I'm sure you've never heard this before, or it's the doorknob question people are so embarrassed about, and it's so true, and our missions are aligned in that way, is that I want people to be able to talk about it and feel safe about it and not be embarrassed about it.

So society is not doing a good job of helping us with bodies.

We're taught from such a young age to be embarrassed about our bodies, to keep things private, to keep things hidden, not to touch ourselves.

And all of that persists with us throughout our adulthood and affects our ability to experience pleasure.

So body sex was the beginning of that journey for me.

And I was coming at this from someone who'd always been curious about sexuality, so I'd always sought my own knowledge and done a ton of reading.

And we just do such a disservice to people by not openly talking about this.

And there's a way to openly talk about it while instilling your own values.

I'm talking to parents out there.

You can talk about the myriad past possibilities and say, and this is what I believe, and I hope that you find what you believe to be similar to your upbringing, rather than saying, do this or else.

Right.

I think people are more open to accepting a particular idea if they're given a choice in the matter.

And that's parenting 101.

That's one of the things they tell us with toddlers, is give them an innocuous choice to teach them how to make choices when they're young.

Age appropriate information.

This is your body.

These are the parts of your body.

And use the real terms for the parts of their body.

You own your body.

If someone else touches your body in a way that upsets you, then you need to tell somebody that you trust you start with things like that and teaching them bodily autonomy and teaching them that they are allowed to give their own bodies pleasure and whatever that means, whether it's scratching your arm because you have an itch or touching your genitals because that feels good.

And then, of course, up through the years, giving them more information.

And I would look for opportunities, right?

Watching something on tv.

And there'd be a part where my daughter would be like, not because it's violent or scary, but because she's like, oh my God, there's sex on screen.

And I'm sitting right next to my mother.

I would say, hey, do you have any questions about that?

And she'd be like, no.

But then usually a couple days later she'd come back and go, I do have a question about that.

I just heard a comedian on Instagram.

She said, if I catch my son watching porn, I'm going to sit down next to him and tell him that's not the way it's done.

I'm going to shake and get him so embarrassed that he'll never watch porn again.

But that's also good information, right?

Yes.

It's unfortunate.

I do love the accessibility of information that the web has brought, but there's also an accessibility of misinformation and disinformation.

And porn is performance.

And it's typically, unless you're actually looking for porn that is made to be real and look real, then most of what you're going to see is an actor playing a role and not somebody actually experiencing pleasure.

How do you as a parent now, who's in your forties, fifties, sixties, sixties?

Probably your kids, chances are your kids are a bit older, really start to have these conversations in a way that they will go on and have healthy relationships because it's hard for us to talk about it.

It is hard.

And I look at my, I look at my own upbringing where my parents were actually pretty good about talking to me, but there's still all of these shame messages from the culture I remember.

I was like, I was one of the only people who, like, knew a lot about the mechanics of sex and got shamed for even knowing.

So I think it's an ongoing battle.

Obviously.

I think things are better now than they were when I was growing up, but they are different now because there is, because of the access to porn and the access to misinformation, everything comes back to communication for me.

And like you mentioned, it's sometimes, even if we're educators, even if we do this work, it's really hard to talk to our own partners.

But that's the skill and the muscle that we need to exercise in order to really have, really have a say in our sexual experiences.

I refer to the wisdom of Betty often.

She was fantastic.

And one of her sayings was that as a vulva haver, if you want to enjoy sex, you need to learn how to run the fuck.

And that means, this is what I like.

This is what I want to.

I'd like to do this.

I'd like you to do this for me.

Like, you have to be vocal about your desires.

So many of us go, we're just going to feel our way around and see if it works.

And ultimately that really, it can work.

Every once in a while, you have the harlequin romance.

Sweep me off my feet.

Everything goes right.

But more often than not, if somebody sweeps me off my feet and pushes me up against a wall, I'm going to backhand them and go, what the f are you doing?

And I know that we were talking about as parents, but it's really a message for all of us, is learning better communication skills.

So the one question that I always ask people in my workshop is like, what are you afraid of if you say the thing that you want to say?

What are you afraid will happen if you say the thing that you want to say?

So you can turn that to your partner as your kids, if you talk to your kids honestly and say, these are the things that I want you to know about sex so that you can have a happy, healthy, fulfilling sexual life, what are you afraid would happen that keeps you from saying it?

That they'll tune out.

Yeah, kids tune out.

That that happens, that they'll think differently of you?

Probably not with 2030 years experience of having you as a parent.

If they didn't like your parenting style, that happened a long time ago, come up a long time ago, and that they won't listen.

What I found is that most often kids do not listen.

They do not listen right away.

And then a few years later, they go, huh, mom had something there.

And I said, and I still find it with my daughter.

She comes back, she's, you know that time you said.

And I'm like, yeah.

She's like, I should have listened to that.

And it's interesting with the partners that I've had, for the most part, I like to talk during sex.

I like to tell them.

And it's hard in the beginning, but what's really interesting is certainly at middle age, they want to know.

Yes.

Although I did, I was talking to someone about this.

The other, I have had a couple of times where I've said things and they don't hear you, and then they go, what?

The moment was just ruined.

You're down a little to the left.

What?

I can't hear you.

My face was in vulva.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I think that monogamous, we need to take lessons from the king community, the homosexual community, so that we can talk and communicate about all this upfront.

So then you go in, and the experience is so much.

You know what you're getting, and you know you're gonna get what you want, and everybody's just relaxing into it, theoretically.

Because of the societal expectation that you're going to be in a hetero monogamous relationship, we have so many assumptions about what that should look like, and we all tend to operate on those assumptions rather than just asking or just telling.

And that's one of the things.

I am polyamorous.

I have.

I have a nesting partner of 13 years.

I have another partner that's fairly new, six months or so.

And the new relationship stuff, so much fun.

Anyway, so I often get asked, like, how do you do this?

Like, how can you do this?

And I'm like, with a lot of talking, honestly, a monogamous relationship is way easier because you have all of these, like, there are all these cultural scripts for how you do things, and you don't have to talk through every little thing, but it's the talking through every little thing that really gets you to a point where you can communicate about anything and you can ask for what you want and need.

There is a steep learning curve for getting started on talking.

I'm not just.

I'm not even talking about polyamory.

Put that aside.

Just communicating with your partner and saying, this is what I want.

This is what I need.

This is the kind of relationship I want.

Are we aligned on this?

This is the kind of sex that I want to be having.

Does that, is, does that sound interesting to you?

Especially when you get into stuff like fetishes.

And that's the one place where I'd say, okay, I understand what your fear is in telling the truth, because you might think that your partner will reject you for having a certain fetish or fantasy.

So I would urge everybody who wants to have these deeper conversations to learn more about how to have a conversation in a way that is non judgmental.

There's a technique, nonviolent communication.

Look into nonviolent communication, and it's all about how to communicate so that you are not acting from your biases and the things that you don't understand and instead are open with empathy to hear what your partner has to say.

I think that's the biggest thing I've gotten out of this work, is coming from the world that I came from, is just taking away my judgment and learning, meeting so many people from who practice different gender fluidity, sexual fluidity, relationship fluidity, whatever it is.

I didn't think marriage for whole life was a reality, but I didn't know what that meant.

I didn't get married thinking I was gonna get divorced, but there was always this kind of.

There's something on the other side.

I was 26.

I think there's something.

I think there's something more.

And perhaps had my husband at the time been more creative, we could have made that more together, but it didn't.

We just.

We don't communicate in general.

And now that I do this work, every person I speak to, I can tell if they're willing to talk to me about sex or not, and when they're really not.

I asked this one guy I went on a couple of dates with, and I said, you seem embarrassed or you don't want to talk?

He said, no, I'm fine.

I said, did you listen to my podcast?

I said, yeah, I don't really listen to podcasts.

I get the sense he's just not comfortable with it, which is also giving me a cue that I don't need to have wild sex right away.

In fact, I don't want to.

But I do want to be able to talk to you about it.

Certainly at this point in life, I want to find somebody where we can talk about it, and whether that means inviting other people in or not.

What's your take on it and really trying to get those conversations early on, because I'm going to be talking about sex.

That's what I do.

And if that bothers you or you're uncomfortable with it, then I can't be with you.

I used to be a divorce coach.

I say, if you can talk about sex and money, those are the two hardest topics to talk about for people.

Absolutely, absolutely.

And professionals still struggle with both of those things.

Although I'm not.

I am not a money professional by any stretch of the imagination, because if I was, I would have stayed in it.

But it's a whole other podcast about talking about my.

That's another code.

It's not my lane, but, yeah, those are hard, tough conversations.

Definitely.

Absolutely.

So how did you introduce your daughter to your lifestyle?

Or was it how she grew up?

She did not grow up that way.

In fact, when I met my partner.

He was coming out of a very traditional relationship.

He was very active in his somewhat conservative christian church and as a liberal agnostic from the northeast, was probably the last person he thought he'd be.

That's funny.

And ditto with him.

I remember looking at his Facebook profile and thinking, I can't fuck him.

So different.

But this is one of those areas where I can say that actually having the conversation changed my life, because I think I actually said that to him.

I think I actually said, I'm not sure if we can fuck because we're just so vastly different.

And I don't want to get a couple weeks or a couple months into this and realize how different we are, and then we've got feelings, and then it's a whole mess.

And that's when we started talking about, like, our different points of view on things and found that we were way closer than we thought, than the labels that we put on ourselves made us think, yeah, and I like to say I've converted him.

No, he's.

I think he's become more the person that he always wanted to be, but was afraid to be in, in the culture he grew up in.

But we, we initially, in our relationship, emulated the relationship that he had with his ex in terms of it being monogamous and married.

Focus on the kid.

And that was.

It was my pleasure to do the first five or six years of our relationship.

We looked very traditional, even though, like, my life prior to that hadn't necessarily been very traditional either.

I was ready.

I slid right in there and I started going to church, and we got married.

And I even took his last name, which I swore I was never, ever, ever going do.

But it just made it so much easier raising the child to have the same last name as her.

That first five or six years together, there was really nothing.

We were just model family.

And then once she was more independent and she was driving, and then we started exploring non monogamy.

I will never forget the first time we had dates.

Right.

Of course we're not.

We didn't, we weren't gonna tell her before we had dates.

We were trying it out to see if this was gonna work for us.

So my first date was someone I'd met online, and we talked quite a bit, and I went out of town to meet him.

So my husband took that opportunity to go on a date with someone that he was in school with at the time.

He was doing his grad degree, but he was at home at the end of his date.

They came back to our house, and he did end up entertaining his date in our bedroom that night.

But they came home after my daughter was already in bed and opposite ends of the house.

Really, they were very careful and didn't think there would be any repercussion from that.

But apparently my daughter is very observant.

And the next morning when she saw a car parked outside, she thought to herself, that car wasn't there when I went to bed.

Whose car is that?

Why is that here?

And immediately proceeded to call me.

And I was on my way home at this point, and she said, mom, if I knew something that maybe you should know, but maybe you wouldn't want to know, should I tell you?

And I just, I said, take a breath.

I'll be home in an hour and we can talk about it.

And she's okay.

In that hour, she pounced on my husband as he walked through the door from school.

And she's, what did you do?

Who was over here?

Were you cheating on mama?

And he's, whoa, wait a minute.

So I come in and she's already standing there with him, and she's looking, and he goes, I told her to wait.

And I'm like, Kyla, it's okay.

Like, we, it's all okay.

We knew.

I knew he had a date.

He knew I had a date.

And she goes, oh, that's all I was worried about.

Once we told her, we decided to see other people.

But our relationship is great.

We still love each other.

We're not going anywhere.

Nothing's gonna change.

And, and there might be more people in our life in the future.

And she's, oh, thank goodness.

So we didn't plan on telling her that first night.

We planned on making sure, but she figured it out.

Smart kidde.

I just read a book about a woman, an autobiography about a woman.

Her and her husband decided to open their marriage.

One of her teenage boys saw the father's okay Cupid profile open and calls his mom and says, oh, my God.

Dad has an okcupid profile.

And she, I can't believe.

And she said, I didn't want you to, like, now we're open or something, to the effect he goes, you too.

So that's how her kids found out eventually.

But I think certainly the teenagers, and I know with my kids, you can talk about it a lot more.

These are conversations that kids are having.

Relationships.

Relationships that kids are having that we never, at least certainly I never even entertain.

I knew that there were a couple people that were probably gay.

That was the extent of it.

My son has a couple of friends who are in open, long term relationships, and they're now in their early thirties.

And I'm like, how does that work?

And one of them is divorced, interestingly, but I think they got married so they could deploy together.

But I think it's a thing.

I guess your daughter was probably at least aware of the existence of such a thing.

Yeah, at least.

Well, and she was, because we had friends.

We had friends who were poly and who were practicing that, so it wasn't something foreign to her at all.

And it's.

And I don't think it's foreign to most people these days, particularly within the last year.

It seems every time you turn around, there's an article on polyamory.

That's what's become the big talking point of the year.

In that, though, I'm part of a number of groups surrounding consensual non monogamy.

And, wow, are some people doing it bad?

And that's not to say people at all, but it seems like, because it's the it thing, people are like, oh, let's try it, and they dive right in, and they don't really think about the repercussions or if they're really ready to do something like this, especially since it, there is still so much societal pressure towards monogamy and heteronormativity.

But on that note, that is the next thing I'm teaching is I'm teaching a class on July 16 called designer relationships, an introduction to consensual non monogamy.

It's going to be.

It's gonna be on Zoom, so you can join from anywhere in the country, and I'm really excited to teach it.

My partner and I and other members of our polycule were just interviewed for an article that's coming out here locally in western Massachusetts.

So in talking with the reporter about it, I said, oh, okay, I guess I'll teach in case we get some interest.

So I will definitely put a link in the show notes to all your work.

I can send you a link to the.

Specifically to the.

To the event, too.

Yeah, I love learning.

I tried to dig really deep.

There was an article in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about a 20 person polycule, and I'm like, how do you even put your arms around that?

Like, that sounds.

That's like a commune.

I don't know what that is, but.

I actually, I had a friend who, like, posted the link and commented and said, I have enough trouble with one person.

I don't know how they do it.

And then there were maybe half a dozen, like, negative comments.

But she's my friend.

She's been my friend for 30 years.

So I come in there and I say, yeah, I know it's not for everybody, but if it's for you and it works for you, it can be a really wonderful thing.

And I listed out some of the reasons why it can be so cool.

And my friend came back and said, wow.

Like, I hadn't even thought about those things.

Thank you for sharing.

So I guess I'm always looking for ways to shift the conversation.

I really tried to dig deep, and like, the guys I've been talking to most recently, the conversation comes up and I don't know is the answer because I've never been in a situation.

I know that I have.

I'm an anxious attacher.

So someone who is anxious attachment, though, it's very hard.

If he doesn't call, if he doesn't say I love you, if he doesn't help me with the dish or whatever, I'm that person.

So I don't think that it would be easy for me to do.

But I probably.

I think, like, guys like, it would be okay for me to do, but I don't want him to do it.

So that's not exactly polyamory or.

Yeah.

I don't know.

It's consensual, but it's not there.

That's more cuckolding.

That's David lay's territory.

Only if he's watching, then it's cuckold.

Not necessarily.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

They don't have to be watching some cuckolds.

Just helping you get ready and knowing that you're going out to have sex with someone else and then want to hear about it when you get back.

Like the compersion thing.

Like it's compersion when you enjoy that your partner's having pleasure?

Yes, that's.

And that is certainly what compersion is.

I don't know.

I don't know that compersion necessarily is playing a part in that.

Cuckolding tends to be a fetish.

So they are getting satisfaction out of knowing that their partner is having sex with someone else and don't necessarily feel the need to do it themselves.

What I hear is that a lot of guys say they're in open marriages, but they're not really.

I had that happen with me once, and I could tell this guy was just saying it because we were on a plane for 6 hours next to each other and we got to New York, and he was from here, from California.

We end up sharing an uber.

And I'm sure that we could have gone up to his hotel room, and I don't do that with strangers, but we had to try to set up a date further in the week.

And he's like, my wife and I have an agreement.

And I'm like, yeah, I don't think I hear that.

I hear that an awful lot, too.

Dating is openly polyamorous, and it's tough because there are some people.

There are some people for whom, like, the don't ask, don't tell policy really works.

Polyamory.

Right.

That's what Dan Savage calls it now.

Is that what he calls it?

But from the perspective of somebody who's very open and outd, it makes me nervous.

It makes me very nervous if I can't at least meet the other partner and know that that is something that is okay within their relationship agreements.

Yeah.

And particularly as an educator who teaches on this, the last thing I would want to do is be involved in a situation where someone's not being 100% honest with me.

Yeah.

But, yeah, it happens all over.

Yeah.

Because there are a ton of telltale signs when that's happening.

Oh, yeah.

And that.

But usually the part.

Usually, a lot of times, the partner does not want to see it.

Yeah.

They can't believe that it would actually be happening.

And that's.

Again, that's that whole socialization, the monogamous relationships are what you're supposed to be in for the rest of your life.

And it's just, we weren't meant to live this long, so it's just like menopause.

Menopause didn't happen because people, women were dying in their forties, early forties, and so they didn't get menopause.

I was really concerned about, like, how is my.

How is sex life going to change?

How's my body going to change?

How's my desire going to change?

And there are.

There's times when I'm not feeling very sexy, but, like, that's been my entire life, but for the most part, my libido is intact and I still want to do the things.

And my biggest advice to vulva havers is that even if you're not necessarily feeling doing the things, your vagina is truly a.

Use it or lose it.

So even if you're not wanting partnered sex or penetrative sex with partners, please go fuck yourself.

Yes.

There's so many options now for figuring out.

Though I had a great time in my forties, like, my forties were fantastic and I'm like, there's no way my fifties are gonna beat it.

And now that I'm, like, nearly halfway into my fifties, I'm like, oh, my God, this is even better.

Like, I've been having.

I've been having so much fun with sex and exploration and I remember when I thought 50 was old, right?

I actually remember when I was a kid telling my grandmother, when my grandmother turned 55, the witticisms of a five year old.

I said, grandma, you're as old as the speed limit now.

She spanked.

Very funny.

But yeah, I used to think of 55, just turned 54.

I used to think of it as ancient.

And honestly, like, I feel the best that I have in 30 years now.

It's great.

Yeah, I guess I'm having my twenties again.

I get so upset when I meet women who are in long marriages that they may be happy with their partner, but they either tolerate sex or they just gave up on it and they don't understand how important and how it would change their lives if they had a.

Even just a little bit.

It didn't have.

Doesn't have to be penetrative.

It's just, it's a really sad existence, I think.

And, like, what you just said touches on my whole perspective, is that sex is not limited to penetration.

And so many people think of that as, that's the thing, that's the it.

We did it.

We did it means we had penetration.

So much of the sex I have right now does not involve penetration.

Or if there's any penetration, we're talking just like fingers and toys and stuff.

But the sex I'm having now is so much more playful than it used to be.

It used to be like, oh, we're going to do the thing.

And it was very serious.

Right, we're going to have the sex, but now it's playful and it's, oh, let's try this, and let's try that.

Or, ooh, have you ever thought about this?

And, yeah, I think it's the combination of don't give a fuck what anybody thinks of me and just more education and being open to new experiences.

Yeah.

I just did an interview with Doctor Batsheva Marcus, who is like a doctor Ruth.

She was my doctor sex therapist, and that's exactly what she says, is that we don't.

We're not playful anymore.

So given what you just said, what is your definition of sex?

My definition of sex would be anything that we do to find pleasure in our bodies.

And whether that's solo or with a friend or two.

There are, there's all types of sex, but it is about discovering the ways that your body can give you pleasure.

That's great.

That's great.

Anything else you'd like to add?

This was great.

I thought we would talk all over the map.

Yeah.

I feel like we could talk for three more hours, too.

Sure we could.

We will have to do this again.

We'll have to do this again.

Nothing else to add except come find me@jenniferronner.com.

if you want to talk about all.

This stuff, thank you very much.

Thanks so much, Jen.

Thank you, Karen.

Thanks for joining me on the taboo to Truth podcast, where I'm spicing up midlife one episode at a time.

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