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I am constantly on the lookout for people who are doing amazing, inspiring, fun things in the world of sex and relationships. So, you just know I had to reach out to Feminist Press when I saw they were publishing a children’s book with the title, “Tell Me About Sex, Grandma.”

And what better time to celebrate kids and parenting and sex and divorce and healing than Mother’s Day?

Anastasia Higginbotham is the author of a series of books called Ordinary Terrible Things aimed at helping kids to understand and find words for things like sex, divorce, death, racism, and queerness. Anastasia’s books are about centering kids’ wisdom and giving them space to have a full range of feelings and permission to be who they are.

But the magic of these books is also in their healing power for grown-ups. If you were raped or molested, “Tell Me About Sex, Grandma” will offer a balm to your young self about what happened. If your parents split when you were young, “Divorce is the Worst” gives you permission to sit in those big feelings you may have tried to hide years ago.

This is the kind of stuff that overturns patriarchy and helps young people realize that they actually hold a tremendous amount of wisdom and power.

Also, at the end of this week’s episode is a sneak peek of next week’s incredible episode on abortion. Please do stay tuned.

Follow Sex Gets Real on Twitter and Facebook. It’s true. Oh! And Dawn is on Instagram.

In this episode, Anastasia and I talk about:

• How sex ended up in Anastasia’s Ordinary Terrible Things series which is about tough topics like death, divorce, racism, gayness & bullying. The truth is, sex SHOULDN’T be there, but because of our sex negative culture, it is. Anastasia has beautiful thoughts on why she included it.
• Kids learn that sex is a secret and yet it’s everywhere. There’s power in the things that are hidden and not talked about, so kids are naturally curious about this confusion contradiction. Also, the stories kids have about sex now are largely about how babies get made between a man and a woman – it’s not about pleasure and it’s heterocentric. Anastasia wanted to take that on.
• Trusting kids as the authority on their own lives and centering their wisdom and experiences.
• The danger in denying that young people have sexual identities, sexual feelings, and sexual curiosity, and how lack of validation creates a great deal of shame.
• Parents having too much invested in their children, which is why grandparents can be such a beautiful relationship between elders and youngsters and allowing youngsters to be who they are.
• Sexual abuse, consent, incest, and why it’s so critical to tell young people, especially girls, to tell them every single day that their body is theirs and no one else’s. That they have edges that they don’t have to share with others.
• Dawn’s favorite line from “Tell Me About Sex, Grandma” which is: “It belongs to no one else but you. No one else is allowed to boss you into sex, or to take it from you without your permission. You get to choose whether to do it. And the same goes for everyone. You choose for you, they choose for them.”
• Why Anastasia wanted to include rape and incest in a book about sex for 4-7 year olds, and how to do that without scaring them.
• As a young person, Anastasia said her heroes were the prostitutes of old Western movies. She wanted many lovers and women who didn’t take any shit. We talk about what it means to want to be scarred by love.
• Why trusting people when we’re first exploring sex and pleasure, especially as teenagers, is so fraught and challenging. Everyone is immature. So, the best you can do is know your body, know your desires, know what you want.
• The indoctrination of kids to ignore their body and boundaries by forcing them to override their own edges to kiss family or receive hugs that they don’t want.
• Allowing kids their pain and anger about racism and homophobia. We can have big feelings without defending or separating from our own humanity. We can be for justice, and Anastasia’s books are all about teaching us how to do that.
• What we can do when we realize we’re a collection of broken pieces, and why relying on children to be resilient is actually about asking them to exist in pieces, too.

Resources discussed in this episode

You can pre-order “Tell Me About Sex, Grandma” and purchase “Death is Stupid” and “Divorce is the Worst” from Feminist Press, and you know I love supporting feminist, independent sources, so please do buy from them over Amazon or a big box retailer.

About Anastasia Higginbotham

Anastasia Higginbotham is a writer and artist who created the children’s book series Ordinary Terrible Things, published by the Feminist Press. The series includes Divorce Is the Worst (2015), Death Is Stupid (2016), and Tell Me About Sex, Grandma (2017). It’s been embraced by children and adults for empowering and trusting kids as the authority on their own lives. Higginbotham makes the books in collage on brown grocery bag paper with clippings from magazines and catalogs, and bits of fabric and jewelry that have special meaning.

Higginbotham’s series is informed by more than 20 years as a speechwriter for New York City nonprofits that combat all kinds of injustice. For 10 years, Higginbotham taught full impact self-defense to kids and adults with Prepare Inc., coaching students ages 6 and up to breathe, talk, and fight their way through confrontation and attack scenarios. Her essays have appeared in Huffington Post, Ms., Bitch, The Sun, Women’s Media Center, and The Women’s Review of Books. She’s featured in the anthologies, Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation, 30 Things Every Girl Should Know About Women’s History, and Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape. She is a 2015 Hedgebrook Fellow.

You can stay in touch with Anastasia on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @ahigginbooks.

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Episode Transcript

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to (You’re listening) (You’re listening) You’re listening to Sex Gets Real (Sex Get Real) (Sex Gets Real) Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra (with Dawn Serra). Thanks, bye!

Hey, you. It is Mother’s Day in the U.S. and Canada today. So it seemed perfectly appropriate that this would be the episode that would be going up. It’s going to surprise you, I think. It’s a chat with this incredible, incredible human being named Anastasia Higginbotham. She has more than 20-years of experience doing justice work and being fiercely feminist in the most amazing ways. She recently, with the help of Feminist Press, started publishing a series of children’s books called Ordinary Terrible Things. These books are for kids who were really young – 4, 5, 6, 7 years old. But in reading them for myself, I was hearing the words that I wish I would have heard every single day, from the youngest of ages, to understand my body, my edges, what I was allowed to say yes and no to. Also, there’s something powerful about the way that Anastasia takes enormous topics like death, divorce, kids telling you, you’re gay before you even have an identity or a word for it yourself, racism, and allowing kids to be the center of that experience with their feelings and their confusion. It’s truly the kind of stuff that if all of us had an opportunity to have conversations like these and books like these from early early ages, would completely change our sex negative culture and this patriarchal culture. So I’m so excited about this. 

Dawn Serra: I also want to remind you that Dylan and I have officially recorded our chat and it is so juicy, it will be coming out at the end of May. If you want to get a super exclusive version of our chat, that will be going up for Patreon supporters at all levels. So from $1 up, folks over on Patreon are going to get an extended version of that chat, which oh my gosh, you know Dylan is amazing. So you can go to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show over there. Of course, every single dollar helps me to pay for website, and technology, and hosting of this show and I appreciate it so much. 

There’s also something really special at the end of this episode, so if you wait until the end of my chat with Anastasia, there’s actually a little sneak peek of what’s coming next week. Because next week’s episode, I think, is going to be very big and very important. It’s all about abortion. I collected stories from a handful of people who were brave and decided it was okay for me to share their stories. One of those stories – it’s a very intense story, it’s at the very end of this episode, and I will offer a few words about what’s coming next week. I really hope that you tune in. So here is a little bit about Anastasia.

Dawn Serra: Anastasia Higginbotham is a writer and artist who created the children’s book series, Ordinary Terrible Things published by The Feminist Press. The series including Divorce is the Worst, Death is Stupid, and Tell Me About Sex, Grandma, which is what brought me to Anastasia. It’s been embraced by children and adults for empowering and trusting kids as the authority on their own lives. Higginbotham makes the books in collage on brown grocery paper bag with clippings from magazines and catalogs, bits of fabric and jewelry that have special meaning. Higginbotham series is informed by more than 20-years as a speechwriter for New York City nonprofits that combat all kinds of injustice. 

For 10 years, Higginbotham taught full impact self defense to kids and adults with Prepare Inc., which we do talk about today, in this chat about why fighting actually helped her heal from things like rape. Coaching students ages six and up to breathe, talk and fight their way through confrontation and attack scenarios. Her essays have appeared pretty much everywhere like Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine, Bitch, The Sun, and many other places that you can see on dawnserra.com/ep161. She’s featured in a series of anthologies. So here is my chat with Anastasia, specifically about Tell Me About Sex, Grandma. Then at the end, we’ll talk about abortion.

Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Anastasia. I am ridiculously excited to have you here.

Anastasia Higginbotham: Thank you. I am ridiculously excited to be talking with you. This is really, really wonderful.

Dawn Serra: There’s a lot of things that I love to roll around in with you today. You have such a rich history of feminist work and writing about sexuality, and being so involved. Right now, you’re in the middle of creating this incredible series of kids books for fairly young children called Ordinary Terrible Things. A couple of the titles of the books are Death is Stupid, Divorce is the Worst, and Tell Me About Sex, Grandma, which is how I found you. You’ve got some other books that are coming up over the next couple of years around racism, gayness, and something called Ruined – You Ruined It, which I’m super curious about. 

So I love that you’re talking to kids about these really interesting, juicy, and often awkward and charged topics. So I’d love to start with, when we’re talking about divorce, death, racism – how does sex end up in there?

Anastasia Higginbotham: Sex ends up in there, I mean, it’s not supposed to be there, right? It’s supposed to be this beautiful thin, this organic thing. Yet, it is there because of the way that our culture is. I mean, it’s this thing that’s everywhere. It’s in all the songs – in the supermarket, it’s in the song that’s playing overhead. It’s on the advertisements of a movie, on the bus that’s going by, it’s on a huge Victoria’s Secret posters that we pass, in the mall – and yet, it’s hidden, too. It’s this thing that adults are trying to hide it from kids, even though it’s so blatantly something that we’re obsessed with. It’s this thing that kids learn that is secret, and saturated into everything at the same time. So it must be powerful, and even, it might be dangerous. So a child is naturally going to be interested in what that’s about. They’re drawn to power, we all are. So I think the power of it is really compelling. But the repressed way that we deal with it or rather don’t deal with it, especially in American culture, that’s the only culture I know I haven’t lived anywhere else, is very confusing. I think that those conflicting messages, contradictory ways we talk about it, and don’t talk about it – giving kids a very mixed message. 

I also think that kids are growing up with all these stories about the Prince and the Princess falling in love, the man and the woman, the mother and the father – all of these heterosexual couplings. And this idea that sex has something to do – has everything to do somehow with the baby that’s getting made between those two people. If you’re a child who has already connected a little bit with your own desire and your own leanings, and your own attraction, and the comfort and pull that you feel toward someone of your same gender or your same sex, then those stories are oppressive. They become oppressive, and they give you a message that you don’t fit already. So those little baby desires that are just starting to come out are not going to come out as healthily or they’re not going to just burst out like they should be allowed to. I think kids tend to close that down and pull that back, because they see that there’s not really a place for it out there. So I think makes sex an ordinary terrible thing. 

Anastasia Higginbotham: Finally, if someone’s messing with you, if you’re being interfered with, if somebody brought sexual energy or sexual attention, or sexual activity into your life, and you didn’t ask for it, sex becomes a very confusing thing. You don’t even know what to call it yet. So I wanted it there in the Ordinary Terrible Thing so we could dial the conversation back and start having it from this place of, “Wait, wait. It’s not out there. It’s in you already. Let’s start there.”

Dawn Serra: One of the things that I read as I was preparing for this was the line around trusting kids as the authority on their own lives, and that that’s really what your books do. I think there’s so much beauty and power in allowing kids to have their feelings validated, to have their questions, and for adults to even maybe be able to say, “I don’t know, but that’s a really good question.” I’m obsessed with emotional intelligence and I’ve been doing lots of reading around it, and what I keep finding is the ways that for most of my life, I have felt like my feelings weren’t valid, that I wasn’t allowed to have certain types of feelings. Or that I was bad for having certain types of feelings. So I think there’s something so beautiful in these books, where you’re allowing kids to actually ask awkward, hard questions and to have big feelings around these things. Sex certainly is a place where, I think, we have so many feelings, but we try to pretend like we don’t.

Anastasia Higginbotham: It’s hard to own it. It’s interesting to me that you have that experience and that you would be– I mean, so many of us, I think are drawn to these titles, even though the titles are stupid – you’re not supposed to say stupid. I mean, a lot of kids are not allowed to say stupid. And I put it on the cover because I was like, “No, no, no, we have to give them permission, especially during a crisis to say exactly what’s going on for them and exactly what occurs to them to say without censoring it, and trying to behave.” Because as you know, feelings don’t behave. When you’re all stirred up like that, the last thing you want to do is tell a kid, “That’s not the right feeling” or “Don’t lead with that” or “Don’t tell me about it.” But a lot of people, if they had that experience when they were children, they don’t know what to do when they’re then the adult, and the child is saying something that’s too big, it’s too much.

Dawn Serra: Something that I find so interesting – as a sex educator, I run into this and feel very frustrated, but I know that I’m outside of the norm in a way because of all the things that I’ve worked on and been exposed to, and learned. But it’s this chronic denial by parents and administrators and legislators, in accepting that children do have sexual feelings, they have sexual identities, they have sexual desires. The type of sexual desire or identity you have when you’re 5, 6, 7 years old, is not the same type of sexual identity you have when you’re 25 years old. But there’s this application of adult sexual experiences on to young people, and denying that they have curiosity, denying that their teenager will be the one that has sex, denying that college students are going to get into very complicated situations with consent and alcohol. So it becomes this very dangerous conversation, where we move through our adolescent and childhood years and all of a sudden we’re expected to just know how to behave in adult situations when we haven’t ever had those conversations. 

Anastasia Higginbotham: No and no validation from the adults that they went through it too.

Dawn Serra: Yes.

Anastasia Higginbotham: It’s very bizarre. What what age group do you teach sex ed to? Do you teach young children too or are you mostly with adolescents and older?

Dawn Serra: I’m mostly adults.

Anastasia Higginbotham: Oh, that’s awesome. It boggles my mind that people don’t… Are they more scared because they do remember what they felt when they were kids or because they don’t remember anymore? I mean, to not want your child to develop sexually, at their own pace, on their own terms isn’t a way to not want your child to develop – you don’t want them to grow up. That can do some real harm. It’s customary to not want your daughter to start dating. I get it, in terms of what you’re afraid of, but good god, to start having those conversations early, so you don’t have to be so scared. Let her know what she needs to know and let her tell you what she already knows. So that you can see what you’re working with, as you go along. I don’t have daughters, but the culture is so fraught with misogyny and various things. But also just, the ways that boys are brought up. It’s not good for them either. 

Dawn Serra: One of the things that I love about Tell Me About Sex, Grandma, is that you’ve said Grandma isn’t an expert. She’s not a social worker. She’s not a sex educator, but she’s not afraid of the questions. I kind of saw it when I was reading it as – Grandma isn’t afraid of taking the time to be in these weird, awkward places. I remember, I recently read Stuart Brown’s book all about play. He talks about how parents have too much invested in their kids – too many fears, too many insecurities, too much of themselves, invested in being a parent to slow down and be patient, and have that playful space where you can really allow the child to be who they are, which is the role that grandparents end up taking in a lot of cases. Grandparents have that space, that they can just let their grandkids be who they are. I saw that so reflected in your book around Grandma is being there and holding the space, and letting these questions be while making a grilled cheese sandwich. 

I’d love to know, for you, why was it important for it to be Grandma?

Anastasia Higginbotham: For exactly the reasons you say, I feel like as a parent, I’m often telling myself, “Okay, what would a grandparent do here? What would a grandparent do?” in terms of making me back off? Because I think grandparents often, when they’re really in it, they know how there is some distance just like you described. But I also wanted it to be Grandma because I trusted her. She’s not exactly based on my grandmother or my mother as a grandmother, although there’s a little bit of my mother in her. She knows this path. She knows this child. She knows there’s a lot about this child that she doesn’t know. wanted her to stand as the matriarch. I wanted the sexual power to be rooted in the oldest woman in the family and that is an expression of my own longing for that to be part of our culture more and more, because it’s just not enough. I mean, even young women we’re not – I’m not young. I mean, I’m only young compared to grandma. But we don’t trust young women with knowledge of their own bodies and power. 

Grandma is meant to disrupt patriarchy. Patriarchy has done some very harmful things and continues to do very harmful things to sexuality and sexual liberation. It just can’t happen when patriarchy is lording over it all the time and taking away our power to define ourselves, and experience pleasure and taking away boys’, and every genders’, right to experience exactly who they are and how they feel pleasure, and how they express desire and an agency in their sexual lives. I want to disrupt patriarchy, I want to undermine it, I want to be done with it.

Dawn Serra: There was a part of the book that moved me so deeply, because it was something that I don’t think anybody actually said to me until I was well into my late 20s. By then, so many things had happened to me that I was not choosing for myself, and it says, “It belongs to no one else but you. No one else is allowed to boss you into sex or to take it from you without your permission. You get to choose whether to do it. The same goes for everyone you choose for you. They choose for them.” There was something about that, that made me feel so much grief and sadness for the younger me that wished that had been the words that people uttered to me over and over and over again, throughout my childhood and teen years. It’s not a message you can give one time. Because everything out there, with the way we’re structured with misogyny and patriarchy and rape culture, is trying to undo that message in the teach us, “That’s not actually the truth.” 

So to me that message repeatedly, and even as an adult, to hear that is so permission granting. But it was this powerful moment for me of deep sadness and grief that I didn’t get those words and that message, and that I had to stumble my way into it through years of harm and feeling like something was wrong, and really not even understanding my own body. To this day, still sometimes I’m really not sure what my body’s trying to tell me or what I want, because I spent so long cut off from it. I just adore that that is such a powerful clear message. I mean, there is no excuse, there is no buffering. It is just plain as day – this is the truth.

Anastasia Higginbotham: Yeah. Amen. I feel the way you feel. I wrote those words when I was 44 years old. It took me 44 years to come up with that line for myself, to start telling myself that and I had heard different versions of it in my own process of recovering from the same kind of stuff that you’re talking about, I expect. I agree it has to be repeated. That message has to be started early and repeated. I wanted the book to talk about rape and incest. I wanted to find a way to use language that wouldn’t frighten children or frighten the adults who are reading with them, but would validate that those are real experiences. You already know what it is to have something taken from you without your permission. If you’re a child, at two years old, you already know what that feels like. You know that you dislike being bossed into things. So if we could use that kind of language, we can help it be different for them. It takes too long, otherwise it takes really too long. There’s a lot of interference and stuff to get through. Then finally you start to feel good and you’re mid 30s or something – that’s just too long. It’s just too long to wait. It’s silly.

Dawn Serra: So many of the people that I work with are trauma survivors, and are in their 30s, 40s, 50s. And they still aren’t quite sure what sex could be, what sex means to them, how to untangle the stories that they’ve been told their entire lives about whether or not they deserve pleasure. For me, to be able to be four, five, or six years old and have a book like this, that an adult reads with me over and over and over again, to really understand my body is mine and I get to rejoice in that, and settle into the sensations and feel confused by it and it’s all okay, and that other people have their bodies and they get to have those experiences, and it’s not for me to try and change just like they’re not allowed to change mine – I mean, even if at some point you experienced trauma, to have had that message the whole time, I think would completely and fundamentally change so many of the issues and the insecurities and the lifelong pain that so many of us carry. I’m excited that this book exists. I’m excited that all of these books exist because…

I mean, the thing that so many people I work with struggle with is they really don’t even know how to name their wants, their needs, or to validate their feelings. So you’re doing that with these stories, but specifically around Tell Me About Sex, Grandma. This, to me, feels like healing.

Anastasia Higginbotham: That’s what it’s meant to feel like and that’s what I needed it to be – to the degree that I’m trying to heal myself by making these books. That’s exactly the goal. So yes, it is written for a four year old who might be curious about this, but it is also for the people that you’re describing their 40s and their 50s and their 60s, who are still disentangling. I don’t know if that’s a word, but trying to get untangled from whatever warped way sexuality was presented to them, or imposed on them, or defined for them. I wonder what adults will do with this book. 

I mean, it is meant to love and heal adults as well for – not to feel grief about what could have been and and feel cheated, but to feel validated, as you say, about it could be so much simpler. But getting back to that once it has become complicated and once there is trauma and harm, takes a lot of care and patience. We are very patient with ourselves in those processes, at our best, we’re patient with ourselves. But I would like for adults to look at this book. I know adults are drawn to the Divorce book and the Death book. So, it It should be so for the Sex book I am talking to them.

Dawn Serra: I read that a question that you would love to get about this book is why there’s a framed picture of Mary and the baby Jesus on the wall over Grandma’s head, at the very beginning of the book, when that child kind of burst in and is like, “Hey, Grandma!” and you see Grandma sitting there with that picture over her head. Why is that an important part of the story for you?

Anastasia Higginbotham: Because I wanted the story to be a little bit scary. I wanted God in the room. We don’t know how this is going to go if God is in the room, because for many people, religion and God, any god, is used to tell the child that their sexuality is bad or that the impulse to have is evil or the desire for someone who is not your wife or not your husband is not – someone who’s your same sex, your same gender. There’s so much hanging over our heads that is about that, and for some of us it really penetrated and made us afraid. I wanted that child to burst into that room and put a demand on Grandma – not ask a question, “Hey Grandma, would you tell me about sex.” It’s a demand. “Tell me about sex, Grandma. I deserve to know.” 

I wanted Mary and the baby there to represent the fear of God in the room, but I also then because they’re in Grandma’s room and Grandma gives permission, and Grandma embraces this child – their question, their curiosity, and the truth about the child’s developing sexuality which is alive already. In a way I am also asserting that Mary, as goddess, as one of the goddesses, is saying too, “I approve of you as well. You’re perfect as you are. When you walked into the room with your demand, I already loved you.” That’s another way that I want to subvert what’s out there about what’s a sin and what isn’t, “Grandma prays to her. Grandma says it’s okay, so it’s okay.”

Dawn Serra: It’s permission slip after permission slip after permission slip. I love it. Considering my upbringing, I certainly was exposed to sex. My mom was not shy about exposing me to sex as a young person and I had Where Do Babies Come From? type of books from very early ages. It was always about the mommy and the daddy hug very close. Then a baby starts growing in mommy’s tummy. 

I think one of the things that I love about this book so much is this book is about sex. It is not about procreation. It is not about special hugs between mommy and daddy that make babies. It’s a very different perspective of – sex is this whole separate thing. Let’s actually talk about what sex is – that you get feelings, and it feels good, and it’s about your body. I love that it’s not another Where Do Babies Come From? book.

Anastasia Higginbotham: Yeah. There’s a couple of really good Where Do Babies Come From? books out there now and that, you’re right, this is not it. I mean, this is about sexuality that can happen – there doesn’t even need to be a partner involved. You can just nourish your own sexuality. It doesn’t say someday you will meet someone and you will decide. It’s like, No, no, it’s so much more than that. It’s so much richer than that. It’s so much more your own already. So I’m glad you liked that.

Dawn Serra: I do! I love it because that’s – I want so much more of that. We need to create a culture where it’s safe to talk about sexuality and all of its aspects. I don’t want to just talk about penises and vaginas, and virginity that’s not interesting to me anymore, and in fact, it’s harmful. So let’s talk about bodies and pleasure, and all the ways that that manifests. This is such a wonderful starting point for those much more nuanced and diverse conversations around – “This child might be a sexual.” “This child might be intersex.” “This child might have be trans.” There’s nothing in the book that says any of those things aren’t normal or acceptable. It’s just this beautiful starting point for these conversations. God, we need that for adults too.

Anastasia Higginbotham: We do! Every step of that was intentional. I mean, it would not be a good book, if it didn’t speak to and include, and invite all of the people that you just mentioned. It wouldn’t be worth $1. I knew I couldn’t put something out there that excluded anyone in that way. In a way, I wanted it to be kind of a Choose Your Own Adventure book too, because I left a lot of space on the pages. There’s not a lot of illustration, there’s not a lot of words and I want people to be able to personalize it when they’re reading it with whoever they’re reading it to. The page, for example, the page where the child says, “Does sex always make a baby?” Grandma says “No, thank goodness.” The kid says, “Why thank goodness?” Grandma says, “Oh, did I say that out loud?” So that page, there’s so many different places you could go with just that. That’s the place where you could talk about birth control, if you want. 

You could talk about the fact that no – you can only make a baby if the sperm meets the egg and fertilizes it. And that’s only going to happen inside the woman’s body. So if you’re having sex with your friend, and you’re not engaged in that particular act, you’re not going to get – nobody’s going to get pregnant. I feel like so much sex ed actually has told kids as if, “Anything you do sexually can make a baby.” No, there’s so much you can do and so many people you could do it with if you choose to – there’s no baby anywhere in that scenario. There’s no chance of pregnancy if it’s the same sex relationship, there is no chance of pregnancy. You can relax into that. Wouldn’t that be something? 

Dawn Serra: Oh my god, that makes me so happy. I’m like, “More please!”

Anastasia Higginbotham: I’m glad it makes you happy.

Dawn Serra: I read this wonderful quote from you that I think fits in here so beautifully since we are talking about sex and all the different ways we can have sex, and all the different ways we might enjoy our bodies and relate to other people. You’ve said this wonderful thing that said, coming from a long line of passionate women, “I felt drawn to the pleasures of the flesh, but more than sexual contact, I wanted the hard edges that come from having a lot of sex with many lovers. My role models were the prostitutes in old westerns who played poker with mean cowboys and won. They swore in low husky voices, were cynical but funny, carried guns in their garter belts and never needed men. I wanted to be scarred by love the way these women were. For what it’s worth, I was successful in achieving my goal.”

Anastasia Higginbotham: I wrote that a long time ago but it sounds great coming from you.

Dawn Serra: I think that’s such a wonderful thing to know about you, of idolizing these sexually powerful women who take no shit and, “I don’t need you but I’ll use you if I want to.” And who embraced their pleasure, and knowing that for you, that was a place of like, “Oh god, I want to be like them.” I mean that, to me, is so wonderful and juicy.

Anastasia Higginbotham: What’s funny is, I mean, it didn’t really totally come together until I learned to fight. I mean, I was really hampered by the scars. Did I say I wanted to be scarred by love the way they were? But then, those injuries and those scars actually do diminish your pleasure for a while, or at least make it really fraught and inconsistent. But I had to learn to physically fight and face all my fears, and all my history about rape and abuse. Then when I did, when I took those classes that you can take with adrenalized fighting where you simulate real life attacks, then oh my gosh, then it really opened up. Because I could trust myself. I really did feel like the character that I described, that you just read to me. But it wasn’t until then, just because of the way things – being as they are. I couldn’t totally relax. I couldn’t totally relax until I knew that I would snap into action, if the situation required it.

Dawn Serra: I think that goes back to – I think for all kids, but specifically in patriarchy for folks who are socialized as female, we are taught that our job is to resist advances and to be wanted. There’s not a lot about our edges, about taking up space, about getting to say, “No, this is my body and I do things on my terms, and you can do what you want with your body.” Then maybe we can decide for ourselves to do something mutually, but that is not a part of the conversation for girls. To hear that for you to find your way, to learn to fight, I think is really powerful. Also, I think the way to change the dialogue so that we don’t actually have to get to a place where we’re physically fighting is for all of us to start with this foundation of autonomy and sovereignty from the youngest ages and saying, “Your body is yours and no one else’s.” Instead of wondering like, “Is it okay to say no? Am I allowed to say yes?” That’s a huge thing, too. “Am I even allowed to say I like these things?” Because that’s also really taboo.

Anastasia Higginbotham: Right, right. “Can I trust this person who I’m saying it to?” “How do I know this person is trustworthy?” “Can I say to them that I want to do this with you?” “Are they going to tell everybody and what’s everybody I think of me?” I mean, that’s another reason why sex is in Ordinary Terrible Things, when those feelings start kicking in and you’re just exploring a little, little bit with your friends or someone who you are having a crush on, or maybe even in love with in eighth grade, ninth grade tenth grade. Man, the terrain is really treacherous in terms of trust, and it’s always going to be because you just don’t know. Everybody’s immature, everybody’s immature. So, to know your own self is really the best you can bring to that situation, at least to know your own desire and wants and how to speak about it. Or how to communicate with your body, if you can’t say the words, how can you communicate with your body? That’s also possible. It doesn’t have to be…

We know, we know when the person that we’re talking to, or holding or involved with feels uncomfortable. We can tell. So what if we raised children to trust their instincts about that and be like, “Oh, I noticed you got uncomfortable just now.” Or “I noticed that I’m sitting a little bit further away from you right now.” All of those things could be part of it – reading our own body language, reading other people’s.

Dawn Serra: Yes. That circles back to trusting kids as the authority on themselves, and instead of overriding children’s wisdom and experiences of their bodies, and forcing them to accept touch and forcing them to do things that they maybe feel weird about – that’s when we begin the indoctrination of like, “My body says, I don’t really want this,” or “This feels creepy or achy or just unpleasant. But people are telling me I need to do it anyway. So I guess I ignore those sensations when they come up.”

Anastasia Higginbotham: Right, right. Then you take so long to unlearn – ignoring them. Like what you said at the beginning of the conversation, you were like, “I’m still not sure sometimes what I want.” Me too, me too. Even with people who I really, really trust. I’m not quite sure, am I doing this to please them? Am I even here in this moment?”

Dawn Serra: Yeah. I know you’ve got some more books that are coming out. Tell Me About Sex, Grandma comes out this year. Then next year, you’ve got a book called Not My Idea, which is about racism. I know that you want to talk a little bit about that. Then you’ve got another one coming out called I’m Not Gay. I’d love to learn a little bit more about the two of those books because they sound amazing.

Anastasia Higginbotham: Sure, sure. Not My Idea is about a white child coping with racism and trying to understand what is the system? What are these images, first of all, the child is seeing – has seen the news and has seen an incident of police brutality, of a white officer shooting a person who had their hands up, and that person has brown skin. The white child is looking at this and wants to know what this is about. The white adults in the child’s life are not forthcoming – they don’t know how to talk about it. They’re not prepared to talk about it and they want to reassure the child and redirect the child, “In our family, we don’t see color.” “In our family don’t worry, you’re safe.” It’s not acceptable to the child. The child is picking up on enough to know there’s something going on here. 

The child does see color. When the white adults in the child’s life don’t speak honestly and answer the child’s questions, the child goes to the library, and the child is going to get the information that they need about the injury and the history, and what has yet to be acknowledged in this country about whiteness. I mean, really, it’s a crisis of whiteness. All these kids are born into it. It wasn’t their idea and yet they are entitled to be upset about it without defending it. They can be for justice, racial justice, and find a place in it. They don’t have to distance themselves from it and from the pain of it, and from their own humanity. So that’s Not My Idea. 

Anastasia Higginbotham: I’m Not Gay is one that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. It’s about a child who is getting a lot of information from other people about who they are, being targeted for their perceived sexual orientation. This is a child who doesn’t connect to those labels yet, and may never. I believe that the child is trans and doesn’t know it yet. But even that, I feel like I’m violating the child’s character just by saying that. The child is trying to learn about themselves by all this weird attention they’re getting, that other people see that they can’t quite see yet because they don’t know what the rules are. Even the child’s parents say, “It’s okay to be gay.” And this kid’s like, “I don’t even know if that’s what I am. Also, it’s not. I am picking up on the vibes from around. There is something out there that is hating this aspect of me. And that makes me a target.” So those are very complicated ways of describing those books. I’m sorry, I’m in the weeds about it.

Dawn Serra: No, I think that those – I mean, the thing that you’ve said that, crisis of whiteness, yes. Also, getting messages from others about our identity and whether or not it’s okay, yes. I mean, that is chronic as well. What I love the most about what you said is that we can be upset without defending and that is something that I think is so missing from some of these really big conversations around systemic oppression – from the oppressors. We can be upset and hurt, and hate that this is happening, and lost and not know what to do, and feel overwhelmed and we don’t know where to start. We didn’t choose this and we didn’t start this without resorting to that knee jerk reaction of, “Now I’m so flooded. I’m going to either deny other people’s experiences,” or even defend which we see a lot. I think around things with rape culture, and certainly conversations around race, where men give all these reasons for why a woman was raped or violated, and trying to distance themselves from those terrible feelings. The same with whiteness of – I think the pain is something that so many of us don’t know how to navigate. So I love that you’re creating these books that allow kids to feel hurt and mad, and angry about death and divorce, and racism and gayness and all these other things that you’re going to be writing about. But with it still focusing on justice. I think that that is some powerful paradigm shifting stuff.

Anastasia Higginbotham: Let’s do it.

Dawn Serra: Yes.

Anastasia Higginbotham: If we can get some other people into it, we can keep going and keep talking about it. Each book should be the start of a conversation, and really, the start of seeing a child at the center of their own life and a child with a very rich inner life. There’s a lot going on there and we know because we remember, and to deny that is very foolish and it also denies us the experience of that child person who knows a lot, and also is still a child. Again and again, the demand is put on the adults, the adults need to grow up and be there for the child who is still a child. And not just say, “Well, kids are resilient.” 

Lynda Barry, one of my heroes, the cartoonist and writer, Lynda Barry and teacher, she calls the resilience of kids, that whole thing, as the ability to exist in pieces. I love her for saying that. It’s in the book, One Hundred Demons, a belief that adults have about a child’s ability to exist in pieces. There is a spiritual belief behind all these books in the whole series, behind the whole Ordinary Terrible Things series, that is about taking those pieces. We all have a version of it. We all have the illusions that get shattered into pieces and taking them and making a new thing that is your thing. Making a new beautiful thing that is your story, your experience of this event. Your parents’ divorce is your divorce, that is yours. So the use of collage, the use of these little slips of paper, and a little images from magazines and catalogs, and fabrics that are important to me – all of that is about taking the broken parts and putting them together into something that has wholeness and has a steadiness and knows itself. Even though it can’t control anything that’s going to happen next, but knows itself and is conscious. I am aware. Sometimes that’s all we can bring to a moment. We can’t solve everything.

Dawn Serra: I love that so much. I love that creating wholeness from the broken parts, doesn’t mean perfection or flawlessness, or that maybe even the parts look like they fit together. We can be this mismatch of hurtful experiences and abuses, and lovely, joyous ecstatic, experiences and stuff that’s in the middle we’re confused about; and still find wholeness in all of those things if we’re willing to embrace our story and our voice, and like you said, know ourselves for the good, the bad, and the ugly. If we can just know ourselves without trying to force ourselves to be something other, which is the chronic state of adulthood these days.

Anastasia Higginbotham: Right, or to always try to be better. “I should feel better.” “I should be doing better.” “I should make other people feel better.” It’s like, “Wait, slow down. See where you are.” Each one is going to be different, too, with the pieces. Everyone’s going to put the pieces back together in a different way. That’s really exciting to… I mean, that’s why it’s exciting to meet another person who’s had many of the same experiences with you, but they’re totally different, and that’s thrilling.

Dawn Serra: Something that really stands out to me, as I’m thinking about everything you’re talking about, is I’ve observed in the work that I do around sexuality, relationships, pleasure, and body autonomy, that so many of the questions I get from people who are in some type of personal or relationship crisis – what they really want is permission to not have to feel awkward, permission to not have to say the scary things. They just want someone to be able to say, “Here’s the magic answer, so that you don’t have to feel unsure or like you don’t have control.” Or maybe you don’t know what you’re doing, and you might make a mistake. Something that’s so clear to me in these books that you’re creating around the crisis of whiteness, around wondering why people are angry at folks who identify as gay, of talking about sex, of being angry at divorce, is plunging into these awkward conversations; and allowing that to just simply be what it is. The answers might change. You might not even have answers the first couple of times you read these books, and to trust that if you show up and hold that space, and try and it’s the start of a conversation. 

I think that’s something else that’s really important. I find so many people, especially around their bodies and sexuality, want to have a one and done, because “I can’t tolerate needing to do this more than once because it’s so scary or uncomfortable.” So I love how you said the phrase, This is the start of a conversation,” which says, “We’re probably going to have to talk about this lots of times, in lots of different ways, to even start finding our way to our answers and our truth.” I think that’s such a wonderful thing to offer young people from the very beginning of their life in building some of these skills.

Anastasia Higginbotham: Thank you, thank you for saying that. I like the awkward – I’m drawn to… Your whole podcast, there’s permission for all of these things to be discussed in this atmosphere of your acceptance and courage as a person to listen to the stories. It’s similar work that we do. I find the most meaning and the most education for myself in those awkward conversations. So it’s natural that I would want to share that and help people do that more. It’s nice when people are open to that, it’s really nice when people are open to that. 

I want to thank The Feminist Press, specifically, for taking this on and seeing this Ordinary Terrible Things books as feminist, deeply feminist, just by validating kids lives. So it would not have happened if my publisher at The Feminist Press hadn’t said, “Oh, no, this is us. This is the next thing, this is what we need to invest our energy and money.” So they did that for me and they did that for anyone who appreciates these books. That’s what we get to thank.

Dawn Serra: I have to say when I think about deeply feminist topics and change, I can’t think of anything more feminist than giving young people the words to claim autonomy and sovereignty, to not expect access to others bodies, to know that it’s okay to have feelings and to articulate them regardless of your gender. That it’s okay to feel happy and sad, and to grieve, to ask questions about racism, and sexual orientation. I mean, this is toppling, patriarchy and misogyny – every system of oppression that’s out there that requires us to disconnect from our bodies, to deny our feelings, to deny the humanity and others. This, to me, I agree with Feminist Press, is these books are culture changing and culture making, because in these beautiful, subtle ways, they’re giving permission for people to recognize their own humanity.

Anastasia Higginbotham: Yes. Wow, you’re terrific. I need to write down a bunch of stuff that you said or maybe I’ll get a transcript from you. I love the way you tell it back to me. I’m like, “Does it do that? Great!”

Dawn Serra: Yay! Yes, exactly. Hopefully, everybody who listened is eager to run out and grab your books or to ask their libraries to carry their books. I would love it if you would tell everyone who joined us for this chat, how they can stay in touch with you, where they can find out more about you’re writing and these books, so that they can grab them for themselves.

Anastasia Higginbotham: Sure. I keep up on my Instagram, and I’m at @ahigginbooks. I have a website, anastasiahigginbotham.com and I’m on Facebook. That’s pretty much where I am in that world, that cyber world. I keep in touch and I’ll share pages as they come out of the new books. That’s been a fun thing to be able to do and have conversations with people, too, in those forums. I learned a lot.

Dawn Serra: I will share those links as well as links to Feminist Press and your books on dawnserra.com/ep161 for this episode, so that everyone can click through and follow you and grab the books. I want to start by saying thank you so much, Anastasia, for being here and for sharing your wisdom, and your excitement, and the beautiful work that you’re creating.

Anastasia Higginbotham: Thank you, thank you for appreciating it the way that you do and for helping me to find more people to share it with.

Dawn Serra: I want to also thank the listeners. Please check out these books. I don’t care if you have young people in your lives or not. I felt healing happening when I read these books. So please do check them out, head to dawnserra.com/ep161 to grab all of Anastasia’s information. Of course, if you have thoughts or questions about this episode, or you have questions you’d like me to field on a future podcast, please go to the contact form on dawnserra.com because I love hearing from you. Until next time, I’m Dawn Serra on Sex Gets Real. Bye.

Dawn Serra: Here we are at the end of the episode. As promised, I have a special sneak peek into next week’s episode about a book called About Abortion by Carol Sanger. Some of you probably know that I have a history of being in abortion spaces. I was a clinic escort for years in Northern Virginia, protecting women and the people who came with them to the clinic from very violent and aggressive protesters. I ran the Washington DC pro-choice book club for many years. But abortion hasn’t really played a big role in this show, yet, in the three years that we’ve had it. Yet that’s been a gap. We talked about reproductive rights, we talked about birth control, we talked about consent and condoms, and kink. Yet abortion hasn’t really played a role. 

When I saw this new book, About Abortion, from Harvard University Press, I immediately contacted them and asked to be put in touch with the author, Carol Sanger. She spent six years writing this book and it is not your typical abortion book. It is a book about – it’s really approachable, and it’s actually magical. We talked a lot about it next week. But a big part of the book is that the stories of people who are actually experiencing abortion, are largely silent, and missing from the dialogue that we see around reproductive health. So I put out a call for stories from people who have had abortions, and I received a number of responses. 

Dawn Serra: My guess is a lot have you will have big feelings about an episode that is about abortion. So I wanted to share one of the stories with you to give you an idea of how personal and approachable this conversation is going to be. It’s a very, very special conversation. Carol and I actually had a phenomenal time and you will hear more next week. But here is one of the stories and please know big trigger warning, there is discussion of rape, abuse, suicide, drugs. This is a heavy story, but it’s an important one that moved me deeply. 

So Holly had her abortion when she was 17. Some of the factors that she weighed when she learned she was pregnant were her age, her health, and her future. So here’s her story: “I was gang raped when I was 13. I got pregnant. I was beaten almost to death five months later by the abusive boyfriend that had facilitated my rape. I lost the twin girls I was carrying and ended up with severe uterine trauma as a result. I turned to heroin and sex to try and forget or die, whichever was fine. At 17, I got clean. I had my first real teenage relationship. I was on the pill, but still managed to get pregnant. As soon as I knew there was a baby inside me, I was ecstatic. As soon as the person I was dating knew, he dumped me. For him, it was a shackle. For me, it was a second chance to protect and nurture something I had failed to do for my girls.” 

Dawn Serra: “I lived in southern Georgia at the time, my father was a marine. I drove two hours to be seen at a military clinic where no one knew me. Blood was drawn and an ultrasound was ordered. “Your womb is a hostile environment.” said the doctor. It was covered in scar tissue and didn’t have much lining. My painful and light periods were now explained. After a month in the hospital when I was 13, I had been told I would most likely never be able to have children. But being a child myself, I had thought that impossible. At 17, I realized that that one night had altered the course of my physical as well as mental future in real, lasting immensely painful ways. The doctor said the baby had implanted too low, almost directly on top of my cervix. As it grew, it would put pressure on my cervix, which would cause it to dilate and I would miscarry – likelihood 95%. He could sell my service shot and put me on bed rest for the next six and a half months. But there was still no guarantee I could carry to term.”

“I was a freshman in college at the time, I was a minor and completely dependent on two lovable but absent parents. I had just started my new drug-free life. The doctor recommended termination. He said he’d given me a few minutes to think about it. But something would need to be done today, regardless. I had 10 minutes to make my life or death decision. I chose to abort. I cried the entire time I was conscious. I cried every day for weeks after. I had to attend NA almost daily for months not to relapse. Since then, I have been pregnant three more times. All accidents, all miscarriages and no living children. I don’t know if you’re looking for self-congratulations or self-admonishment here. I don’t have room for either. I have anger at my abuser, at myself, at the world. But I made a choice that day, an extremely difficult one, that I was fortunate to be able to have. I grieve for all my children. I still wonder at and exam and all of my choices, but my life has moved forward.”

Dawn Serra: “My current partner and I are trying to get pregnant. I am blissfully happy with him, and I’m in the best position of my life mentally and financially to have a baby. I know it could end badly again, but I’m giving it one more shot. If it works, this time, I like to think that there will be a little piece of all the others in this new life. If it doesn’t, then it’s just a little more grief. I’m used to grief. I can handle it.” 

So next week’s episode is going to feature several different stories from people who shared their experience of abortion, their reasons, what it’s meant to them since then. Some of them are happy and beautiful. Some of them are sad and filled with grief, and others are simply matter of fact. But this episode that’s coming up next week, I think, is a beautiful follow up to this week’s episode with Anastasia, where we’re talking about knowing our bodies, knowing our limits, and trusting ourselves. So I hope you’ll stay tuned and weigh in because it’s going to be epic. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.