Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Junzi

This episode is all about our relationship to kink and BDSM. We begin by sharing what we think we know about each other’s kinks and BDSM practices, which leads us into a discussion about why Benzi resists calling herself “kinky,” even though she would be considered very kinky by any definition. We talk about the distinction between kink and BDSM, kink and “vanilla,” our very different relationships to the wider kink community, and the role that consent plays in our practice of kink (or not). We also get into our mutual love of rape roleplay, or consensual nonconsent, as bottoms, and how those experiences can be incredibly helpful for processing past trauma, and our struggles with finding tops who are willing to be as sadistic as we’d like them to be. Eventually, Juno brings the discussion to her sexual incompatibility with Benzi, the challenges with navigating consent they’ve had in the past, and their desire to be sadistic with Benzi. We also talk about the danger of strangulation and how normalized that’s become in sex, our views on the potential harm of engaging in kink (specifically with feederism and 24/7 dynamics), how blurry consent can be in long-term power-exchange, trad wives and devout religious practice as unacknowledged kink, discovering our kinky sides in childhood, and our belief that everyone is really a freak.

💖 Support the Show: If our conversations resonate with you, consider supporting our independent production! Check out our membership tiers (including exclusive content and monthly community video calls) or send a one-time tip at https://ko-fi.com/junzipodcast

In this episode, we dissect the story published in the Boston Globe about a COVID-conscious lesbian bar in Western Massachusetts (Last Ditch) that lifted its mask mandate for one night a week to stay afloat financially, and the backlash they received from the COVID-conscious community. We start by addressing the disdain that COVID-conscious people and mask-mandatory spaces receive in the first place, the way critics have labeled ongoing COVID caution as “contagion OCD,” and how COVID fits into our belief that people have a right to “clean air.” We also share our understanding about why so many people felt angry,  hurt, and betrayed after Last Ditch announced the change to their masking policy, and the complicated nature of the bar as both an accessible community space and a business under capitalism. From there, we seriously examine the critical comments that Last Ditch received from its patrons and people online, which contained accusations of “hatred and discrimination,” killing disabled people, eugenics, fascism, and white supremacy. It leads to a discussion about what eugenics and discrimination actually are, the weaponization of identity politics in the discourse, and our problem with accusations that deprioritizing masking is specifically a problem with “white or white-adjacent leftists.” At one point, we focus on making fun of the extreme “wokeness” of a particular commenter who said they hoped the bar would be firebombed, their insistence on masking their newborn baby, and their ridiculous posts on X. We move into talking about our differing responses to the way the Boston Globe, and the public, have made fun of our queer, polyamorous, leftist, weirdo culture, in what ways we find our own communities humorous, and how we personally know people who have gone to clown school. Finally, we start dissecting what we think went wrong with the community meeting that Last Ditch hosted for conflict mediation with some of their patrons, and why it’s important not to tolerate self-righteous identitarians in social justice spaces (like Soe Noir) from the very beginning of organizing! We close out angry and sad about how purity-politics pile-ons scare people out of ever trying to build anything good in community, our belief that the news cycle was more "profitable clickbait" than psyop conspiracy, and reminding each other that the loudest people online are never the whole story.

💖 Support the Show: If our conversations resonate with you, consider supporting our independent production! Check out our membership tiers (including exclusive content and monthly community video calls) or send a one-time tip at https://ko-fi.com/junzipodcast

In this episode, we’re talking all about gossip: the damage it can cause, its social utility for establishing personal and collective values, a way of openly sharing information in community, and how to engage in it responsibly. We start by confronting our longheld “pro-gossip” position, and Juno’s inner conflict about engaging in gossip since starting her Cancel Culture Support Group and hearing so many stories about how gossip ruined people’s lives. Benzi shares some personal history about the anonymous gossip website that she ran in high school, and that eventually got her suspended. Benzi also describes some of the community practices and relational skills that need to be in place for gossip to be constructive rather than destructive, such as strong conflict communication skills and the expectation that our gossip will eventually be shared with the person we’re gossiping about. We also discuss whether or not we should have to get consent from people before sharing our own experiences that involve them with others. 

💖 Support the Show: If our conversations resonate with you, consider supporting our independent production! Check out our membership tiers (including exclusive content and monthly community video calls) or send a one-time tip at https://ko-fi.com/junzipodcast

This is our second comments and reactions bonus episode, covering your comments on the agreements, Relateful Immersion, making requests, and having kids episodes. A preview of this episode is free to everyone, but the full conversation is exclusive to our Ko-fi members.This time it's just the two of us, getting into fluid bonding and whether agreements are secretly about punishment, whether you can really be friends with anyone (a Daryl Davis and the KKK tangent), the etiquette of offers versus requests, paying for friends, and anti-natalism, free will, and the selfishness of having kids.Want to listen to the whole thing? Join us at ko-fi.com/junzipodcast for access to the full episode. 💖

Recently, Lindsay Clancy was on trial for killing her three children during an episode of postpartum psychosis. The case has gotten an enormous amount of attention from people on social media, a big chunk of whom are women and mothers who feel they can relate to Clancy’s struggles with mental illness and who don’t want to see her go to prison for murder. We start off this episode of Junzi by talking about the failure of the mental health system, family, and community in supporting mothers who are prone to developing postpartum depression or psychosis, as well as the fraught legal distinction between “criminal insanity” and mental illness. This leads us into discussions about prison abolition, how inpatient psychiatric hospitalization is just another form of incarceration, the ways the medical system dismisses women’s pain, suicidal ideation, and community-level responses to parents who have thoughts of harming their own children. We also touch upon people’s obsession with true crime, the way some people in the spiritual community insist that Clancy’s husband is the killer, and why it’s so hard to face the reality that mothers can be violent toward their own children.Note: neither of us are lawyers, psychiatrists, or otherwise experts on this case, postpartum psychosis, or the law — this is our reactions, opinions, and feelings, not researched analysis.💖 Listen on audio streaming platforms and Youtube. Support the Show: If our conversations resonate with you, consider supporting our independent production! Check out our membership tiers (including exclusive content and monthly community video calls) or send a one-time tip at https://ko-fi.com/junzipodcast

In this episode, we talk about the new film The Drama and the can of worms it opened for us: violent fantasies, school shootings, and what happens when someone you love confesses the worst thing they've ever done. We dig into the gap between fantasizing about violence and acting on it, how one new piece of information about someone else can cause us to rewrite their entire story in our minds, why other people's deviance so often triggers our own unexamined shadows, how our own histories of childhood abuse and ostracization shaped how we each handle violence now, and the term “brain play” that Benzi coined to reference the place that violent fantasy occupies for her. During the episode, Juno also discloses her fear that Benzi might try to hurt (or even kill her), and why she's willing to take that risk anyway. 

💖 Support the Show: If our conversations resonate with you, consider supporting our independent production! Check out our membership tiers (including exclusive content and monthly community video calls) or send a one-time tip at https://ko-fi.com/junzipodcast

In this episode, we tell the real story behind one of the most painful chapters of our relationship: years-long emotional conflict, identity politics gone extreme, and the role that Juno played in getting Benzi pushed out of the relationship anarchy Unconference she helped found. We start by unpacking the difference between identity politics and identitarianism (drawing on Clementine Morgan and Jay LeSoleil’s Fucking Canceled), then walk through the whole saga: the autistic attendee kicked out of the Unconference for comparing desirability politics to incel discourse, the BIPOC and Spoonies caucuses that got created but never actually integrated into the planning, Benzi's push to make the group's PhD-level academic language more accessible, and the accusation that doing so amounted to erasing anti-racist and anti-colonial work. We talk about the underlying emotional wounds that led Juno to turn against Benzi on seemingly political grounds, and how embarrassed Juno feels about her past actions now. We also talk honestly about Juno's discomfort with being deferred to as a Black woman in a majority-white organizing space, the real meaning of intersectionality versus its popularized use, and the apology letter that helped bring us back together as friends.💖 Support the Show: If our conversations resonate with you, consider supporting our independent production! Check out our membership tiers (including exclusive content and monthly community video calls) or send a one-time tip at https://ko-fi.com/junzipodcast

In this episode, we talk about the fear of putting our real opinions out into the world, sparked by an essay Juno published on her experience with sex work and the backlash she's received. We dig into how differently this fear shows up for each of us. For Juno, it’s about strangers online seeing her as the villain, and misunderstanding her in ways that hit a core wound around not being believed or heard. We trace Juno's fear back through childhood trauma and her natal chart (Chiron in Gemini, in the twelfth house). For Benzi, it’s more about the people she actually knows in Detroit and Tucson, and the specific discomfort of being blunt online in a way she'd never be face to face. We also talk about Benzi's fear of seeing herself as special and that people will try to knock her down a peg, the strange terror of saying something you're proud of publicly, the online permanence of opinions you've outgrown, and the pain-avoidance she's decided to stop indulging. We also explore tangents about men who proclaim to love their cats but don’t feed them wet food, and the idea that none of us are actually good communicators. 💖 Support the Show: If our conversations resonate with you, consider supporting our independent production! Check out our membership tiers (including exclusive content and monthly community video calls) or send a one-time tip at https://ko-fi.com/junzipodcast

In this episode, we dig into the emotional, philosophical, and practical sides of having children, a topic Juno brings in after a conversation about it came up during a circling immersion in Tucson. Juno opens up about why she's never wanted to give birth, even though she'd love to be a deeply involved co-parent to other people's kids: it comes down to the outsized power a birth parent holds over a child's primary attachment. Benzi pushes back and shares that she does want to give birth, largely because of the singular closeness she has with her own mom and her wish to create that bond in the other direction, and Juno gently prods her on whether that connection can ever be guaranteed. From there we get into Juno's long-held anti-natalist leanings, the selfish gene theory, and why she thinks most people's reasons for having kids are really just evolution talking, versus Benzi's belief in unconditional love as a motivator and her skepticism of free will and "reasons" in general. We open up about our pretty different baseline views on whether life is worth living (Juno's is that we're mostly suffering and DNA's slaves to it, Benzi's is that heaven is a place on earth), get delightfully weird talking about vessels, experiencers, and Existential Kink, and land on Benzi's vision for communal parenting, day mothers and night mothers, wet nursing, and shared night shifts, as the antidote to the isolated, miserable motherhood we both witnessed in our old community. We also talk about our fears of being overstimulated or emotionally checked-out caregivers, how that connects to our own childhoods and abuse histories, the inherent powerlessness of being a child, Benzi's grief about becoming an older mom, and why taking kids' emotional experiences seriously (Wife Swap included) matters so much to us.

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If our conversations resonate with you, consider supporting our independent production! Check out our membership tiers (including exclusive content and monthly community video calls) or send a one-time tip at ko-fi.com/junzipodcast.

In this episode, we dig into our relationship to making and receiving requests. The topic is inspired by Juno’s frustration with people who happily offer to do things for her unprompted, but grow irritated and hesitant when she asks directly for what she wants. We talk about how an offer can feel like a gift, while a request for the same thing can feel like a demand, the emotional labor of processing people’s requests, and pathological demand avoidance (PDA). We end up tracing our sometimes conflicting ways of communicating needs and desires back to our childhoods. Juno talks about having had to suppress her needs for most of her life, and the tendency now to express them at maximum intensity as a way of advocating for herself. Benzi shares her fear of disappointing people and how much she cares about Juno’s specific needs, which sometimes comes out as frustration. We also talk about our growing sensitivities as we reconnect with our bodies after abuse and trauma, how we each gauge the costs of saying “no” to someone we love, and the way children are denied real autonomy.

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We recorded this the morning after a three-day Relateful Immersion in Tucson. We start by describing what Relateful is (a verbal relational mindfulness practice) and how it compares to a psychedelic trip, and how inspired we are by the playful, self-strusting leadership style of the founder, Jordan Myska Allen. We move into talking about the overwhelming sense of unconditional acceptance in the group, the flow of change, rupture and repair, trauma reactions, learning to connect with and love people regardless of their politics, creating more closeness in relationships, the shame of wanting attention, the way nothing is personal (but also everything feels personal), and so much more. We also discuss the fear both of us noticed around being loved so easily in that community, especially when compared to the anger and us-versus-them energy that was such a big part of our past relationship anarchy community.

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This is our first comments and reactions bonus episode (covering the first three episodes of the podcast).The first 40 minutes are free to everyone, but the full 3-hour episode is exclusive to our Ko-fi members.We’re joined by our long-time friend Clara for a sprawling convo in response to comments we received about our political ideologies (specifically anarchism), the value of philosophy, communication skills, our relationship to gender identity and gender roles, non-monogamy, codependency, cheating, voice memo guy, the meaning of coercion, dating litmus tests, considering men’s feelings and humanity in feminism, and our faulty pronunciation of words. Want to listen to the whole thing? Join us at ko-fi.com/junzipodcast for access to the full episode. 💖Note: This is just part 1. Part 2 is coming out soon as well, and it contains our reactions to comments about episodes 4 (on veganism and the ethics of eating) and 5 (on Queer Collective Podcast drama).

In this episode, we talk about our views on agreements within relationships. We start by describing the way our past involvement with relationship anarchy community influenced our thinking, and our shared rejection of promise-like contractual agreements. Throughout the episode, we discuss monogamous agreements, fluid-bonding, cheating, abusive relationships, best practices for communication, the special status we assign to sexual agreements, accepting human fallibility, and planning how we are going to handle inevitable broken agreements. At one point, we focus on a story Benzi brought up about a stay-at-home mom whose husband keeps cheating, apologizing, and cheating again, and end up in real disagreement about how much agency and responsibility she has in that situation versus how much is about power and entrapment. We also talk about how people can be good or bad predictors of their own behavior, how neurodivergence plays into that, some of our differing and overlapping needs in socializing, how we manage our expectations of each other, and the ways we’ve both grown in our ability to navigate making and breaking agreements. True to the topic, we end the episode by making (and keeping) an agreement about exactly how long Juno gets to thrift before lunch in Tucson.

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In this episode, we dig into the online controversy surrounding the Queer Collective Podcast and its hosts, Emily and Karbon, who are currently facing accusations of lesbophobia, biphobia, and transphobia. We talk about the claims they’ve made that political lesbianism is the root of biphobia against bisexual women, lesbian insecurity about bisexual women is “male-centered,” sexual identity can be a choice, lesbians can occasionally have sex with men, the “bi-cycle” is representative of bisexual experience, and trans women are “socialized as men.”We also talk about the contradiction between strict definitions of “lesbian” and including trans men in lesbianism, the historical invention of deviant sexual identity, our own experiences with political lesbianism and queerness, our perspectives on the apology Emily and Karbon have made (and on apologies in general), our rejection of identity policing and punitive approaches to conflict in the queer community, the importance of being able to openly explore ideas even if they don’t positively represent a marginalized group, and so much more. What starts as analysis of someone else's controversy also turns into something more personal. We go on tangents in which we discuss conflicts from several years ago, learn new information about each other’s experience of bisexuality, and talk about the fear that saying the "wrong" thing online could cost us our friendship.

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In this episode, we tackle the massive topic of our relationship to other species, animal justice, and the heavy realities of using and eating animals as food. We also dive into how our differing ethical systems on this issue impact our relationship with one another. What starts as a plan to debate the classic vegan logical argument "Name the Trait" quickly transforms into an unexpected, intimate psychological exploration of both of our worldviews. We open up about the chilling effects of past value disagreements, our personal histories with PETA and fruitarianism, the paralyzed perfectionism of moral OCD, and the heartbreaking gap between sound logic and messy reality. Along the way, we widen the lens to discuss environmental impacts, the corporate incentives of factory farming vs. capitalism, the sentience of plants, and how to hold deep connection across a profound difference in anxiety and frameworks.

Note: Juno has decided to slowly transition to veganism, while Benzi remains committed to eating animals and trying to build a life in which she can do so without factory farming.

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In this episode, we break down the TikTok discourse about “voice memo guy,” and the way it reveals dangerous cultural attitudes about men, sexual communication, dating, consent, coercion, and rape culture. If you aren’t familiar, a voice memo sent to a woman by a man right after their first date was uploaded onto TikTok by the woman’s friend, and it’s become one of the most polarizing pieces of media currently on the internet. We play the full voice memo during the episode, share how we would emotionally react if we received that message, and then provide a critical analysis of the responses we’ve seen to it so far.

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In this episode, we talk about relationship anarchy (RA) theory and practice, our history with becoming part of an RA community in Southeast Michigan, non-hierarchical relating, organizing an international RA unconference, how our views on monogamy and coupling have shifted over the years, the concept of “ethical monogamy,” how everyone can center friendship and community in their lives, the breakdown of intentional community during COVID, and how our new community practices are influenced by what we’ve learned from the past. Near the end, we touch on the subject of agreements and cheating, which will be explored more deeply in a future episode.

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In the first episode of Junzi, we briefly introduce the concept of relational ontology, and begin talking about how this podcast came to be and the fraught history of our relationship (love, conflict, rupture, and repair). We move into discussing what we’ve learned about relationships from our history with one another, our relational values, and the qualities that we love about each other (moving through painful conflict, building strategies for communication, practicing boundaries and reassurance, non-escalator relationship structures, radical honesty, playfulness, and openness to taboo or heterodox ideas).

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