Sexvangelicals – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Over the last four years, we've written podcast episodes about the sex education the church didn't want you to have. 

One of the most threatening things for a high-control religious system is a goodbye, which results in actual transitions away from these groups that are secretive, forced, and avoidant.

In this episode, we describe an intentional, proper goodbye, from the perspective of how we structure intentional final sessions with our clients. 

Also, this is the last official episode of Sexvangelicals. We ask these six common questions to help us reflect on our Sexvangelicals journey:

1. Where did we start and why?

2. What did we learn?

3. How have we grown?

4. What did we do well?

5. What do we wish we had done differently?

6. What is the unfinished work?

Specifically, we talk about: 

• Transitions (2:30): Jeremiah kicks us off, " Relationships are full of transitions, big and small, and these transitions almost always include some sort of goodbye."

• Opportunity to Say Goodbye (2:50): Julia adds, " Even the more mundane transitions like a schedule change or rearranging division of household labor include some sort of goodbye. You are doing something or something was a part of your life and now it's not, or it's different … give yourself and your relationship the opportunity to say goodbye."

• Who You Were Before the Goodbye (13:00): Julia notes, " As you are considering your own goodbye right now, take a mindfulness practice and go right back to the beginning of it. Think about what was happening in your personal, professional, and relational lives. Think about the broader community and social context. Consider who you were at the time, which is, or was probably different than you are right now."

• Be Kinder to Yourself (14:00): Jeremiah follows up:  "Being able to give hugs to that younger version of ourselves, Being easier on the younger versions of ourselves I think is a really helpful part of the process."

• The Beginning of the Podcast (19:00): Jeremiah shares: " the podcast also happened in the first two years of our relationship. The first two years of a relationship is about bonding. Discovering interests and ethics that you have in common … I think Sexvangelicals became a way for us to come together and discuss a first draft of what happened to us. We trauma bonded with people other than us."

• Reflection (24:00): Julia shares: " Probably in this transition process, in this goodbye process, you are probably reflecting on what you learned in the context of your partnership or some other relationship, right? … I learned a lot about working together with you."

• Growing & The "Fuck You" Phase (28:00): Julia discusses, " The fuck you transition of deconstruction isn't as relationally helpful.  We primarily decided to take off the first 50 episodes because we wanted this to have a more cohesive, professional structure, and we recognized that those episodes didn't actually reflect the maturity that we gained in the years following. And I think that talking about this is actually the most vulnerable area of growth for me to name. We weren't ready emotionally and we weren't ready practically. And that's a hard pill to swallow when that occurs in a public context."

• Hustle Culture (35:00): Jeremiah says, " As an entrepreneur, there's no way of fully escaping hustle culture. But I think I fell into the trap of believing that in order to be taken seriously as an entrepreneur than 21st century, you have to develop a lot of content and produce it in a particular consistent manner, as opposed to saying it takes a few years for a business owner or owners to figure out what specifically it is that they're offering, and then to develop procedural practices and then create and market specific products for the public."

• Ms. Frizzle (40:00): Julia shares some beloved words: " Quote, one of my favorite fictional characters. Take chances, make mistakes, get messy."

• Taking Chances (43:00): Julia adds: " What I can say about what we did well is that we took a chance and yeah, we did something scary and we did something new. And while there is so much that I wish we had done differently, I think it's important to note for so many of your goodbye transitions."

• Highlight of the Work (45:00): Jeremiah notes, " This might sound a little narcissistic as well, but I don't think that there are many people in the religious trauma or post evangelical space who are asking some of the questions that we are."

• Check In with Each Other (54:00): Julia says, " When building something new, create structures in which you can check in with your partner or partners throughout the process and be open to the feedback from your partner?"

This summer, we've answered the most common questions that we receive as relationship and sex therapists. And this week, we answer one of the most common questions: Does body count actually count?

We live in a culture that views your sexuality based on how often you access it. Men who are deemed to have accessed sexuality a lot are viewed as "studs". Women are simultaneously valued and devalued based on how often they have sex. In Evangelical systems, folks who have sex before they get married are sinners.

There are tons of psychological and relational problems that develop from this question, even as many of us are unlearning the myth that our value is tied to how sexual we are or are not. We talk with Natasha Helfer, certified sex therapist and one of the premier relationship therapists for post-Mormon folks, about how we can ask better questions. Check out our conversations about:

• Does Body Count, Count? (6:00) Julia kicks us off, " From the conservative Christian perspective, body count does count, but in a very rigid, specific sort of way. And then when folks deconstruct, they often reevaluate this expectation and consider sex with other partners."

• Purity Culture Embedded (10:00) Natasha highlights, "The reality is that if you grow up in the United States of America, we do have a lot of purity culture baked into the system, including in our laws and our government and our society and our school education systems around sexuality. You name it, we're affected by it."

• Defining Sex (15:00) Natasha discusses " When we think about sex only being defined by a penis entering a vagina, I guess lesbian people are not having any sex. I guess gay men are not having any sex, right? Oftentimes making sure that we define sex very rigidly helps with what I call the loophole argument like "I am still a virgin". I can tell my pastor or my priest or my bishop that I am virginal even though I've given a hand job or received or given oral sex … So all these things that I would consider having sex gets reduced to not having sex."

• Colonizing Lens & Body Count (20:00) Natasha says, " We have all kinds of capitalistic and patriarchal and colonizing ways where sexuality was absolutely affected. And so this idea that I'm going to count and gather a count is in of itself not based in an equity model."

• Grief (24:00) Julia notes, " A theme that I'm noticing in my practice is that I have several couples in which one or both partners are interested in exploring other sexual relationships. And these are couples from high demand, high control religious backgrounds, and they've been in this monogamous partnership. And one or both of them had all the rigid scripts that we've described. And then one or both of them are saying, "I have so much grief around this developmental loss."

• Cultural Messages About Waiting (29:00) Natasha says, " Most of us are getting a lot of these cultural messages and we're getting applauded for doing these choices of waiting to have sex … The whole community is like, hooray, you did a great job. And it's not until usually late twenties to early sixties that people are coming into my office going, what in the hell did we just get involved?"

• Wasting Energy on Purity Culture (38:00) Natasha shares, " I mean, even personally, when I think about all the unnecessary shame and guilt and sleepless nights and racking myself, trying to hustle for my own worth to be a pure worthy woman, I just get livid. I just get livid that I spent so much energy on these things that were, at the time I thought were helpful to me."

• Deconstruction, Relationships, and Therapy (42:00) Jeremiah notes, " In the burgeoning field of religious trauma studies, religious trauma therapy, there aren't a lot of folks that work with relationships and sexuality together that can understand how deconstruction can impact a relationship."

• Integrating Sexuality and Deconstruction (49:00) Jeremiah asks, "If you are seeking relationship therapy and are going through the deconstruction process, what can you expect from a good relationship therapist, who's able to integrate sexuality with the process of deconstruction, with an understanding of the impact of purity culture, religious trauma."

• Paying Attention to Bias (50:00) Natasha notes " A good relational therapist is going to be able to handle their own biases around sexuality, around religious beliefs. Because a lot of relational therapists, quite frankly, are themselves either religious."

• Identity and Sexuality (54:00) Natasha continues " When we talk about sexuality, we are talking about identity. And identity is very important to our mental health, to our relational health, to our spiritual health, to our sexual health, obviously. And when we bypass or ignore huge aspects of our identity, then we tend to be in unhealthy systems."

This spring, we're answering the most common questions that we receive about sexuality. A lot of questions revolve around our genitals. How are they supposed to look? How are they supposed to function? What happens if they don't function the way that they're "supposed to function"? the

In this episode, we challenge three assumptions about our genitals.

1. Your worth as a human being is defined by how your genitals look or function.

2. The thing that lets us know we've had a successful sexual experience is orgasm.

3. The best way to orgasm is through vaginally penetrative sex, which typically only leads to male orgasm.

These assumptions generate the orgasm gap, the fact that men orgasm way more than women do. We close the episode by talking about 15 ways that a couple might connect that leads to both partners orgasming.

Check out our conversations about these topics:

• Internalizing Harmful Messaging (2:00): Julia starts us off, " We all internalize messages about our bodies, especially our genitalia. We can't escape it."

• Vulva Assumptions (6:30): Julia discusses, " First, unlike men who learn that their penis should be as big as possible, women learn that the vagina should be tight and that vulvas that have lean labia are most attractive. Per usual, the message is to take up as little space for women or folks who have vulvas and vaginas."

• BDE (12:00): Jeremiah notes, " The assumption with BDE is that having a big penis equates to higher assertiveness, higher confidence, higher competence, and ultimately a better man. So, what happens if you don't have a big penis?"

• Social Constructs (15:00): Julia says, " Ultimately if you're listening to this episode, it doesn't matter if your flaccid penis is one inch long or six inches long. or shorter or smaller. What I learned in my sex therapy training program is, like you said Jeremiah, that the idea of a micropenis is just a social construct."

• Human Behind the Penis (18:00): Jeremiah shares an excerpt from the book, "Noren is a Swedish photographer who took pictures of men's penises and asked them to describe their relationships with their penises. He writes in his introduction, "Many men have insecurities about how their penises look, and compare themselves with actors from pornography.  It creates feelings of shame and insecurity."

• Messaging Around Genitalia (21:00): Julia discusses, " Vaginal penetration is an important part of the sexual experience for a lot of people, but many people, regardless of orientation, are not having vaginally penetrative sex. When we place the expectation that the best way to orgasm happens through vaginal penetration, we put a lot of pressure on the human anatomy."

• Erections & ED (24:00): Jeremiah discusses, " So erections are almost exclusively about blood flow moving into and filling what's called the corpus cavernosa. The corpus cavernosa is a spongy material inside the penis. So whenever a man gets anxious, that internalized pressure--men almost always carry pressure and anxiety in our hips, in our core. Whenever a man gets anxious, that internalized pressure manifests through a tightening of the pelvic floor muscles."

• Erections & ED II (24:30): Julia continues, " If erections biologically are about blood flow into that region of the body, that means a person with a penis could be aroused without an erection. Psychological erection could trigger an erection, or sometimes when a person has an erectile concern, they might have an erection and then very quickly lose it when the anxiety occurs."

• Pornography is Not Sexual Education (28:00): Julia says, " Without accurate sex education available to children, adolescents, and adults, people only have pornography to turn to. And linking back to what you were saying, Jeremiah, that means men learn a lot of terrible, inaccurate messages about their penises."

• Viagra (32:00): Jeremiah says, " We see this with Cialis and Viagra as well that one of the side effects of those two drugs is delayed ejaculation or retrograde ejaculation. When it is misappropriately diagnosed, it can provide counter indicative sexual results."

• Mystified Vulva (35:00): Julia highlights, " The idea that the female orgasm is more elusive combined with the idea that women are inherently less sexual makes it easier to deprioritize orgasms for folks with vulvas. Which contributes to the orgasm gap."

• Orgasm Gap (36:00): Jeremiah notes, " This misunderstanding and lack of prioritization of female orgasm and how we research sexuality and psychology informs the public's misunderstanding and de-prioritization of female orgasm. For instance, too many men are taught that female orgasm happens through vaginal penetration.  It's true for some women, but more often than not, orgasm happens through a combination of ways to stimulate the clitoris."

• Orgasm Gap Statistics (38:00): Julia shares these (depressing) statistics, " There was a fantastic study a few years ago that asked over 52, 000 people, excellent sample size, about their sexual habits, including orgasm. Straight men reported orgasming 95 percent of the time. Gay and bisexual men reported orgasming 88 percent of the time. The big kicker is for women. Lesbian women orgasmed 86 percent of the time and bisexual and straight women orgasmed 65 percent of the time."

• Duration (43:00): In sharing 15 tips that women who orgasm more share, Jeremiah notes, " Number two, women who orgasm more have a longer duration of a sexual experience. This gets back to what I was referring to a bit earlier regarding the length of time that it takes for a vulva to lubricate. And more importantly, for psychological arousal to occur."

• Aftercare (44:00):  Julia notes, " Number five, women who orgasm more praise their partner for something they did sexually. We've said this on the podcast before. Aftercare is often the most important part of the sexual experience. Make sure that after a sexual experience, be that 5 minutes, 5 hours, or even 5 days later, you're letting your partner know what you liked."

• Prolonged Sexual Space (46:00): Jeremiah argues, " However, if you write out what you'd like to have happen sexually, that takes five to ten minutes of visualizing and imagining the context of an ideal sexual experience. Writing out a sexual experience or fantasy or texting it puts you in a prolonged sexual space that allows your body more time, more space, more senses engaged that allow you to get physiologically aroused in a way that sending a dick pic or a boob pic may not."

• Genitals are not the Star of the Show (55:00): Julia says, " While having our genitals stimulated can feel amazing, most of the contributors to orgasm for women are connected with effective, thorough descriptions of what you'd like to happen to your body, or what you'd like to happen  with the relationship outside of your body."

"In purity culture, both men and women are hypersexualized and then also supposed to be asexual at the same time," explains Dr. Laura Anderson, cofounder of the Religious Trauma Institute.

In short, the expectation is that men are expected to say yes to all things sexual, and women are expected to say and embody the word, no. The sixth deadly sexual sin captures the practice of rigid gender roles.

Men are expected to be dominant. Women are expected to be submissive.

Don't say no to those gender roles.

Laura, Jeremiah, and Julia talk about:

• The pressures on men to say yes to positions of leadership (4:40). Jeremiah explains how his seven-year old self was pressured into a position of leadership strictly because of his sex.

• The pressures of women to present and embody submissiveness (16:00): Laura explains "You're told like there's this very specific certain way that you're supposed to live and act and think. And if you do these things, then you're gonna get this reward. In my case, it was gonna be a husband that I could then have children with, and that's how I'd serve God. But there's no room for any self authenticity, curiosity, freedom of expression."

• The paralysis that accompanies decision making for women (21:40): Laura shares, "In the context of relationships, it's going, which shirt should I wear today? So that if I do come in contact with my future husband, he will look at me and, oh, I chose this shirt. And he'll be like, wow, what a godly woman. Versus if I took and wore this shirt over here, he would be like, oh wow. Her shirt reflects this? So it was absolutely paralyzing. What do I wear? What do I eat for breakfast? What socks do I wear? What shoe?"

• The pressures on dating (32:50): This episode talks largely about Laura's adolescence and young adult experiences. Laura summarizes: "I can't just date anybody. I have to only date who I'm going to marry, which then means I've gotta wear the right shirt to school. I can't date for fun. I can't even try things out. It really felt like this huge weight descending on me. Everything had a holy consequence to it."

• The "threat" of single women in Purity Culture (43:30): Laura reflects, "And I know from my experience as a single woman, I was even more dangerous. It was this idea of, "Because I didn't have a husband to rein me in, I would then seek opportunities to make other men stumble, especially married men, to get them to sin sexually," right? So then there's this hypersexuality of all you are good for is sex or your sexual being, but then also don't act on it because that's a sin and that's gross and that'sdisgusting and you are only supposed to act on it in a very specific context. So keep it shut down even though this isn't who you are.

Laura closes the episode by describing an experience of saying yes to herself and her sexuality, and the freedom that experience opened up for her (49:30).

Julia closes the episode:

"I'm thinking about how the theme around the episode is, Don't Say No. And this is a story in which you said Yes. Yes. And you experienced freedom. What you learned, what I learned, Jeremiah, what you've described that you've learned is that freedom comes from following the rules, which means saying no to all these different things.

Obviously that was not freeing for you, for me, for many people. And then you said yes, and the journey was much longer after that. But what a beautiful moment in which you could connect with yourself and connect with a yes.

Healing together involves finding spaces to say yes to things that are meaningful to us.

Last week, we talked with Cayte Castrillon about her research on the pornography consumption of teenage girls impacts the ways they view their bodies, relationships, and perceptions of men.

We continue our conversation with Cayte this week about how we can talk about pornography in our sexual and non-sexual relationships, and ways we can remove shame, comparison, and judgment from these interactions.

Jeremiah summarizes Cayte's position in the introduction (4:10):

"We're not at fault for our social conditioning, but we are responsible for it. We have to reflect on how we have developed as sexual beings, how that impacts us and our relationships, and then ask ourselves, am I content with who I am as a sexual person? Or do I want to be more intentional about who I am, who I want to be, and for the sake of our conversation, what I want to consume?"

Cayte asks her research participants what would be different if they were to design pornography (8:50). "Almost unanimously," she describes, "there was more communication about the types of touch that are pleasurable. More clitoral stimulation, more gentle touch on the rest of my body."

We also talk about the ways that pornography invites unhealthy comparison (18:20): Cayte reports her research participants asking questions like, "Am I performing? Am I having an orgasm? How am I having an orgasm? Are my breasts responding like that? Is my vulva responding like that?" The "what-if's" are unlimited, Cayte summarizes.

How moral reactions prevent us from having conversations about pornography (25:00): Julia reflects, "And then the moral panic is a red herring from the conversations that we need to have. And it actually stops us from talking about it, because being good or bad actually isn't a conversation about pornography or sexuality at all. That's about someone's value system. It's important to talk about value systems, but I would say value systems within sexual health versus the binary of good or bad value systems." Cayte responds by describing how sex education processes reenforce the larger cultural morality and judgment.

How to talk about porn with your partner (34:50): Cayte describes the usefulness of a third-party source, such as a sex therapist or a podcast. (She recommends the podcast Girls on Porn.) She also reminds us, "If you are going to have a conversation, if you're gonna tiptoe, which I would recommend tiptoeing in. I think a good first step would be how do you even conceptualize watching porn?"

How to talk about porn with your children (48:45): Cayte encourages parents that conversations about pornography "don't have to be all at once. It doesn't have to be long, drawn out conversations with, , diagrams and PowerPoints. It can be, 100 one minute conversations. It can be, in the car, not looking eye to eye with your kid."

We conclude by sharing ethical pornography resources, including, but not limited to (58:00):

1. Lust Cinema

2. X-Confessions

3. Crash Pad Series

4. Indie Porn Revolution

5. www.thepornconversation.org

A huge thanks to Cayte for all of her help, research, and resources! We look forward to sharing more of Cayte's publications as they come along.

Let's heal together!

Welcome back to the Seven Deadly Sexual Sins (According to the Church). We continue with Deadly Sexual Sin #5, especially geared toward men: Don't Watch Porn. After all, we know that women don't watch porn.

Or do they?

We invite Cayte Castrillon, sex therapist and PhD student, to share her research about how women consume porn, what porn teaches women about their own bodies and sexuality, and the observations that women make about the ways that male partners are influenced by porn.

Cayte discovers that approximately two thirds of college age students are using porn to masturbate (10:00). She reflects, "Women are challenged so often to be more assertive, but in order to assert your needs, you have to know and at least be on the path to understanding what those needs are." (18:40)

Cayte conducts in interviews with dozens of college women, centers around three questions:

1. How did pornography impact your body image, both generally and sexually? (15:00): Cayte summarizes that women commonly explore pornography, "just out of curiosity of what's happening out there. What am I, what's capable? What are the possibilities of what I can engage in? So as far as masturbation, that's the selection process I think then that women are engaging in: Does this make me feel sexual? Does this arouse me? Does this make me feel uncomfortable?

2. How did pornography impact the development of your sexual self? How did it impact your interest in sex and specific sexual acts? (21:00): Cayte talks about the ways that porn exacerbates the process of women comparing themselves to the bodies of other women, specifically regarding their breasts and vulvas. However, Cayte describes the common response of porn "giving a place to go to explore not only my masturbatory responses to pornography, but it also giving me permission to be a sexual person, to harness that, to say, oh, there are women that are really in seeming to enjoy sex, whether or not it's performative or not."

3. How do you think pornography potentially impact your male partners, if you have engaged in sexual activity with male partners? (28:00): This question required some hypothesizing, as most participants did not have conversations with their male partners about this. However, the participants observed, "their partners saying, I know my penis isn't as big as such and such, and feeling uncomfortable if there was a performer that had an especially large phallus or extremely masculine muscular physique."

Next week, we will talk about the implications of Cayte's research, such as exploring when the current status of porn caters to the socially conditioned fantasies of men, what does that say about whose bodies are deserving of pleasure and whose sexuality is most important in our country? And we'll share our own vulnerabilities regarding talking about porn in our own partnerships.

Let's heal together!

Happy New Year! The beginning of the year encourages a myriad of ways to set goals for yourself.

What are your New Years resolutions?

What are your goals for the New Year?

What word encapsulates what you want to accomplish in 2023?

Answering those questions, be they at the start of the year, midway through a project, or at the conclusion of an event, requires an effective self-reflection process. Ideally, said process happens both individually and in relationship, be that with a partner, a friend or family member, or larger community.

In this episode, Julia and Jeremiah describe three practices, rooted in our Evangelical upbringing, that can provide a structure for having these conversations.

1) Month and Review (6:30): Julia explains:

"Month and Review was a time for my family to reflect on three different things: answered prayer, prayer requests, and Thanksgiving and praise. So totally loaded with religious language that I don't use right now. Prayer requests, I would say, are desires. What do I want? Or if you're in the context of a partner or a family, what do we want?"

2) Grief Practices (11:00): Julia describes:

"The grief practice is a practice in which an individual, or in the case of my college, a group intentionally gathered to give name to losses, pain, injustice, trauma, disappointment, unfulfilled dreams, et cetera. The practice allowed us to mourn, to be angry at God, ask hard questions, cry, or whatever else we needed. What happened is that the religious structure was a new structure that was unlike the structure that I had for the first almost decade of my life. And that was a structure in a system which gave permission not just to me, but other people to grieve. And not only was the grief okay, but that the act of grieving, especially within community, was a sacred process."

3) Process-Centered Evaluation (19:00): Jeremiah summarizes:

"As therapists, we talk about this it being much more important to attune to the way, the "how" an interaction happens between you and a client, than the specifics of what a person is talking about. That's the distinction between process and content, at least from a therapeutic perspective. We encourage self-reflection practices that move away from, okay, what is the specific content of how I'm sinning, I'm lying, I'm watching porn, whatever, to this process of, okay, how do I actually evaluate myself? What are the questions that I ask myself? What's the kind of dialogue that I have with myself that's meaningful, that's helpful? What kind of dialogue can I have with my classmates, with, my family members that can be helpful and meaningful?"

We use these processes to talk about our worst and best moments of 2023, knowing, as John Gottman reminds us, that for every negative interaction, it's important to name five positive interactions. We also reveal our own individual and relational goals for 2023!

We hope you are having a great start to 2023! Let's heal together!

Christmas is a strange season for folks who are in the process of exploring and healing from the ways that the church has negatively impacted them. Especially when Christmas falls on a Sunday, as it did this year.

The soundtrack of Christmas is a mixture of Whitney Houston's All I Want for Christmas is You, Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmastime, and dozens of religious carols that integrate messages of hope into Matthew's narrative of the birth of Jesus.

Nativity scenes join Christmas trees, ornaments, and lights as the visual backdrop.

Many of our listeners are deconstructing Christianity in some way. Jeremiah describes the conundrum (22:00):

"There's this idea in the deconstruction world that moving out of the church means moving out of the church. It means saying f——— you to the institution and the practices within the institution. In the therapy world, we call this an emotional cutoff: a way of completely separating yourself from family members and systems of older parts of your life. And don't get me wrong, in cases of abuse, cutoffs are necessary. However, generally speaking, cutoffs don't give you the permission to engage with the complexities of the family members and stories and institutions, and that tends to lead to a lot of problems in other areas of life."

Christmastime, in some ways, represents the best of the modern Christian tradition, as Jeremiah explains (20:35):

"Christmas carols and other types of acapella music and the process of singing harmonies are my continual connection to the church. And I'm okay doing some of the mental gymnastics of singing philosophical and theological ideas that I don't believe in to to draw me closer to home, closer to that sense of familiarity."

Christmastime intersects hope with grief, especially for those of us who have moved out of overtly religious spaces. Julia encourages (36:00)

"Being intentional to set aside space for grief. That might be a walk on your own, early in the morning or late at night. That might be time to journal or to write a letter to someone who isn't present for you."

"You don't need to perfect your rituals or traditions this Christmas. It might take several Christmases to find what works for you, and maybe you'll get lucky and you and your partner or partners or friendships will find something new that you can hold onto that will continue throughout the rest of your life."

We hope that you find spaces of peace, hope, and safe spaces for grieving this Christmas week!

Happy holidays from Jeremiah and Julia! We are taking a break from our Seven Deadly Sexual Sins (According to the Church) series and talking about how to navigate the challenges of the holiday season.

In this episode, Jeremiah and Julia discuss two ways that sexuality can be hard during the holidays:

1) Privacy (5:30). Jeremiah reflects, "You may be surrounded by more people than usual. Or perhaps you're sharing walls with family members or ceilings with family members. For some folks, the risk of being caught can be really sexy, but for others, this can really kill the sex vibe, especially when you're surrounded by family or friends who may hold sexual values that don't align with yours."

2) The general pressure of the holidays (22:15): Julia describes the pressure "to have the best sex ever because you've got time off from work and you finally have more than a short chunk of time for a sexual experience…With the implicit or explicit messaging that the holidays are a romantic a season, and for many people, not all people, romance and sex occur together, and by default, then, sex has to be filled with some sort of holiday magic."

We provide several Relationship 101 tips during the episode, including:

1. If possible, get a separate space for you and your partner from family and friends. (18:00)

2. Give yourself permission to not have sexual experiences. (21:00)

3. Talk with your partner about the pressures connected with the holidays, and how that might impact accessing sexuality. (29:30)

4. Create transition spaces in and out of sexual experiences, especially for those that happen outside of your place of residence. (31:55)

Have a fantastic holiday season! Let's heal together!

Happy Holidays, from Jeremiah and Julia! Thank you for all of the support that you've given us in 2022! We're excited to share two holiday episodes with you to wrap up December, and launch 2023 with new pictures, new episodes, and a lot of fun!