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Before we jump into my conversation with Tristan, I want to take a few moments to share an important piece called:

Dildon’t Disrespect Black Femmes: Our Personal Experiences With Wild Flower Sex Shop

This piece, written collectively by Ev’Yan Whitney, Ashleigh, Karmenife, La’Shaunae, VenusCuffs, and Cameron Glover, is an important account of ongoing exploitation and abuse that these Black Femmes experienced at the hands of Wildflower Sex shop.

It’s also an important invitation to us all to think about who we critique and who we harm when we take “ethical” stances against certain companies or practices, especially that ultimately then benefit our own interests.

You can read Tristan Taormino’s additional thoughts about the sexuality field and the ways work in this field continues to be devalued and exploited, particularly for people of color and other people who are marginalized.

We must all do better. This impacts our abilities to be present with each other. This impacts our abilities to be in our bodies, experiencing pleasure, building a most just world. It matters.

Read these accounts by Ev’Yan, Ashleigh, Karmenife, La’Shaunae, Venus Cuffs, and Cameron and take a few moments to reflect.

Tristan is here this week! And it’s EPIC.

Oh how I love chatting with Tristan. And you’re about to hear why – we GO places in this 90 minute conversation of lusciousness.

It all started when I asked Tristan to come on the show to tell us about her ultra personal new memoir which dives deep into her childhood, growing up with a gay dad, losing him to AIDS, and even part of a memoir her dad wrote about his life. In fact, if you want to read snippets and get exclusive updates, support Tristan’s Patreon: patreon.com/tristantaormino

But, in this episode we also talk about fat phobia, changing and aging bodies, capitalism, white supremacy, the sexuality field, and much much more.

I can’t WAIT for you to hear it all.

Patreon supporters – head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to hear my bonus chat with Tristan. We talk about the ethics of triangulation in poly relationships courtesy of a listener question!

If you aren’t a supporter, I’d love your financial support to help keep the show going. If you pledge $3 per month, you get access to exclusive weekly bonus content and if you support at $5 per month and above, you can help me field listener questions.

A few of the things we discuss include:

• Tristan’s origin story and how writing a memoir has helped her take an in-depth look at her experiences and the relationship she had with her parents.
• Themes that are emerging in Tristan’s memoir, like classism, grief rituals, trauma, and legacy. 
• How we all need to create our own stories and be in each other’s stories to deepen our understanding of ourselves.
• Tristan’s experience with her mother around sexual shame, masturbation, and pleasure.
• What Tristan has been geeking out about lately and a rad conference she’ll be attending soon.
• How systems of oppression impact all of us and our ability to have the kind of sex we want and know deeper levels of pleasure.
• Accessibility, what does true accessibility look like, and who is it for?
• Not getting any fundamental care can deeply impact our ability to fully express ourselves sexually and how there are so many people who are marginalized that accessing pleasure is hard.
• Tristan shares about the desirability politics surrounding the changes that bodies go through during menopause and how you can’t just solve a “sex problem” because there could be so many underlying issues around our bodies & experiences.

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

About Tristan Taormino

Tristan Taormino is an award-winning author, columnist, sex educator, speaker, filmmaker, and radio host. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with her Bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Wesleyan University in 1993. When she was 24 years old, with little publishing experience and even less capital, she founded Pucker Up, a magazine of writing and photography dedicated to sex and gender and was responsible for every aspect of the 64-page publication, from editing and marketing to sales and distribution.

She is the author of eight books: 50 Shades of Kink: An Introduction to BDSM, Secrets of Great G-Spot Orgasms and Female Ejaculation, The Big Book of Sex Toys, The Anal Sex Position Guide, Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships, True Lust: Adventures in Sex, Porn and Perversion, Down and Dirty Sex Secrets, and two editions of The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women. She is a co-editor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, with Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance Penley and Mireille Miller-Young. She conceived and edited the groundbreaking collection The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge which features the work of leading kink experts from around the country. She is the editor of 25 anthologies including Stripped Down: Lesbian Sex Stories and Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica (winner of the Lambda Literary Award). She was the founding editor of the Lambda Literary Award-winning series Best Lesbian Erotica. Her books have sold over 500,000 copies and been translated into many languages. She’s written for a multitude of publications from Yale Journal of Law and Feminism to Penthouse, and served as editor of the feminist magazine On Our Backs. For nine and a half years, she wrote a bi-weekly column in The Village Voice, which was awarded two Sex-Positive Journalism Awards. She runs her own adult film production company, Smart Ass Productions. Tristan was an exclusive director for Vivid Entertainment (2006-2013), during which time she created and helmed the company’s sex education line Vivid-Ed. Tristan’s work, writing and films are routinely used in college courses to explore the complex issues of relationship and sexual diversity, politics and media.

Tristan has taught hundreds of classes (on everything from negotiating relationships to female orgasms) at conferences, community events, and retail stores throughout the world. As a keynote and guest speaker at events, she’s spoken about community building, sexual liberation, and GLBT issues. She has given over 100 lectures and presentations at top colleges and universities all over the world (including Yale, Cornell, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, University of California-Santa Barbara, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and NYU) on subjects ranging from erotic empowerment to challenging the social construction of monogamy.

Tristan is the host of of Sex Out Loud, the #1 show on the Variety Channel of  VoiceAmerica Talk Radio Network, where she has interviewed a variety of guests from Dr. Joycelyn Elders and Janet Mock to Bridget Everett and Margaret Cho. She has been featured in over 200 publications including O: The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Entertainment Weekly, Details, New York Magazine, Men’s Health, and Playboy. She has been named to several media lists, including Out Magazine’s 100 Gay Success Stories of the Year and The Advocate’s Best and Brightest Gay & Lesbian People Under 30. She has appeared on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, HBO’s Real Sex, NBC’s The Other Half, The Howard Stern Show, Loveline, Ricki Lake, E!, CNN, MTV, Oxygen, Fox News, The Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and on over fifty radio shows.

She is the creator of Sex Educator Boot Camp, a training and coaching program for sexuality professionals. She has served as a consultant to writers, filmmakers, television production studios, and other media makers including director Spike Lee, Sony Pictures Classics, World of Wonder, and Lions Gate Films; she has also consulted for sex toy manufacturers, retailers, and distributors including LELO, Sportsheets International, and Good Vibrations.

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Episode transcript

Dawn Serra: Hey, you welcome to this week’s episode of Sex Gets Real. I am Dawn, your host and I am so excited to share my chat with Tristan Taormino for this week on the show. Now, I have to warn you, when Tristan and I get going, we get going. So, our original plan was to get together to talk about the amazing memoir that she’s working on all about her early life and there’s so much richness that you’re going to hear because we do talk about that for the first 25 minutes or so. But then, we started talking about ableism and changing bodies, and pain and what Tristan’s geeking out about right now, which has to do with whiteness, which led us to talking about the sexuality field as a whole. And 90 minutes later, we realized we should probably wrap this up. But then, we hopped over and we did a 20 or a 25 minute recording for Patreon all about triangulation in poly relationships. So you are getting a whopper of an episode with me and Tristan Taormino today. 

Before we get to that, there’s something really important that I want to take a couple of minutes to take up a little bit of space to talk about because it’s something that we need to really be paying attention to. A piece came out a couple of days ago on Medium called “Dill Don’t Disrespect Black Femmes: Our Personal Experiences With Wild Flower Sex Shop.” Now, Ev’Yan Whitney has been on the show before and Cameron Glover who are both contributors to this piece. There are also four other people who have contributed to this piece and I’m just going to use the names that they shared in the piece to respect what they’ve chosen. So Ashleigh, who, a lot of you probably follow on Instagram @ashleighchubbybunny, Karmenife who is @lisaspliffson on Instagram, and La’Shaunae who is @luhshawnay on Instagram, that’s easy, and then VenusCuffs who’s @venuscuffs on Instagram, plus a shop called Unbound Babes.

Dawn Serra: Now this piece is really, really important and I am going to link to it so that everyone has a chance to read it. I shared it on social media last night, but you can head to dawnserra.com/ep272/ for episode 272, and I have a link to the piece right at the top of the page so that everyone can check it out. It’s really, really important. So, let me share with you a couple of little snippets of what they wrote. So this is their language, their voices. But I want to create a little bit of space for all of us to hear this. 

One of the things that they collectively wrote in the piece is, “We ask that white sexuality professionals stand alongside us and uplift our stories as valid. Sharing with their networks and condemning harm to black femmes with the same energy they demand from us in support of their own endeavors.” So I’m going to read a couple of little snippets that I’ve pulled out. Most of them are the ones that they’ve already highlighted in the piece to really bold the importance of. But, there is so much more to this piece than what I’m sharing here. And it’s important. It’s important for all of us to really think about, not only the harm that’s being caused and the ways that we position ourselves within sex positivity and sexuality movements and other movements as well, like health at every size and so many others. But it’s become so damn easy these days for us to take up stances that we then become almost religious about. Often when we think we’re taking this moral high ground, we’re actually reinforcing really violent systems. You’re going to hear some of that unfold in a couple of these snippets. 

Dawn Serra: So let me just share their words and then I’m actually going to share some really wise words from Tristan to continue the theme of the day, which is Tristan. And then we’ll jump into my juicy, delicious talk with her. So Ev’Yan Whitney writes many things in this piece, but I’ve got three little snippets I want to share. The first is, about Wild Flowers Sex Shop. “I literally felt like they had used me and discarded me when I could be of no more use to them.” Ev’Yan goes on, “I do not understand why I am the target of Wild Flower’s anger about my choice to work on this particular campaign.”

You’ll read more about Ev’Yan working with a company around people who have low desire. So Ev’Yan goes on, “Why aren’t they directing that anger at this pharmaceutical company? Don’t they understand how incredibly hard it is to make a decent living in the sexuality education industry? Perhaps they don’t as two able bodied, femme and masculine presenting white folks with lots of resources and privilege. Wild Flowers no right pass judgments on me for trying to make an honest doing the work that I do, especially when in the two times I’ve worked for them, my compensation for them was way lower than what I am worth.” 

Dawn Serra: So this is one of the things that I really want to highlight for us to all go check this piece out and think about where we’re directing our anger when we’re making stances, right? So it’s so easy to get angry at individuals, to vilify individuals, to kick individuals out, to not give them second chances when often where our anger really needs to be directed is that the systems and the institutions that are causing the harm. And inside of a system like white supremacy and capitalism where none of us are really ethically existing anyway, for someone like a black femme like Ev’Yan and the others that are a part of this piece, to be trying to make a living, which is exceedingly difficult to do sometimes in sexuality, especially if you exist at certain intersections of marginalization like if you have visible disabilities, if you are poor or if you’re a black femme or a queer trans femme. Ev’Yan also writes, “I also ask that folks question the ethics of accompany that blacklists black femmes for their decision to make living wages in an industry that is still working hard to be taken seriously and be respected.” 

Ashleigh of Ashleigh Chubby Bunny writes, “Fat black women are not supposed to be having sex, let alone enjoying it. And if you’re queer on top of that, you might as well just hope someone loves you “enough” to deal with your greedy ass needs or is “desperate enough” to look past them. I’m not supposed to center my needs, have them met, or even make them known. So me doing what I do is important.” And then Ashleigh goes on, “But I do not appreciate being caught in the violent crossfire of a privileged white person using black femmes to do their dirty work and punishing us if we don’t. This is beyond textbook white feminism and something that I do not feel like being a part of as the problem Wild Flower Sex has with Unbound. And Wild Flower should not be trying to stop black women and families from being able to pay their bills because they did not appease the owner of Wild Flower Sex by doing what they tried to get us to do. What Wild Flower Sex has done and is continuing to do is violent. In the grand scheme of things continues to reinforce the system of whiteness that protects those that benefit most from it even when they are actively oppressing others for their own benefit or leisure. 

Dawn Serra: So what you’ll hear about in this piece is Wild Flower Sex Shop who is an online sex shop, who partners with a number of different people including the black femmes that are a part of this article. And then tries to strong arm them into doing certain things on their behalf while underpaying them and under appreciating them. And then, when the black femmes that are in this particular piece make decisions that Wild Flower Sex doesn’t agree with, Wild Flower Sex then tries to get them removed from panels, get them fired, out’s them, and/or blocks them on social media – all deeply harmful behaviors. 

Tristan took this piece and then wrote on it, and I think that it’s so important what she wrote. So I’ll link to that as well in the show notes and at dawnserra.com/ep272/. Tristan says, “Hi white people. Please read this, circulate it and reflect on it. This is a painful but also illuminating example of how white supremacist capitalism is working exactly as it was designed. Please read these accounts. If all you read is my white lady analysis of them, you’re valuing my voice over the voices of POC. So please, please go read this piece and really reflect on the behaviors.” But what Tristan goes on to say is, “What I do find useful to share my thoughts about is some of what’s at play here because it illustrates how white supremacy plays out on an interpersonal level. One, Wild Flower folks frame other people in a sex toy space as competitors and adversaries, which is classic capitalism. But they made no public attempt to call in these “bad actors.” Instead, they used women and femmes of color to conduct an orchestrated whisper campaign which would ultimately benefit their company. Think about how easy it is for us to do those things on social media. 

“Two,” Tristan goes on, “People in the sex industries rampantly continue to “ask” for unpaid labor, exploit sex educators and to value our work. And this happens most often to people of color and other marginalized folks. Three, it’s unacceptable for white sex educators and retailers to use images of black women and femmes to bolster their optics of being inclusive without doing anything to fairly compensate the people whose images they use or address structural inequalities under white supremacy.” That’s also something I really want people who are entrepreneurs who are sex educators to think about. It’s tokenism. If you’re using images of black bodies and disabled bodies and fat bodies, but you aren’t putting your money where your mouth is. If you’re not donating to organizations who are fighting for justice, if you’re not paying the artists, if you’re not paying people that you’re working with, if you’re not actually contributing to change to undermine the system causing the violence than it’s tokenism that ultimately benefits your brand or your business. And that’s just not acceptable. 

Dawn Serra: “Four,” Tristan closes, “This is a clear example of when white people police how black women and fems do business, their values, who they partner with and how they make a living. This policing has the built in assumption that everyone comes to capitalism on the same level playing field and the assumption that white people know best who is “good” and who is “evil” and that our values trump those are people of color. Both assumptions are steeped in white supremacy.”

You’re going to hear Tristan and I go some really interesting places in this conversation and we do talk about whiteness in the sexuality field and how it impacts each and every one of us. And the ways that we experience pleasure, the ways we inhabit our bodies, and so much more. So I think it’s really important for all of us to sit with this. But please, please, please go and read the piece, “Dill Don’t Disrespect Black Femmes: Our Personal Experiences With Wild Flower Sex Shop.” So again, that link is going to be on the show notes and also on the website for the show so that you can check that out. And let’s really have some hard conversations with ourselves around the ways that we’re treating people who have experienced and continue to experience ongoing violence and oppression. 

Dawn Serra: So let’s shift over to my interview with Tristan, which is super fun. You are about to get an earful. For those of you who aren’t familiar with just in Tristan Taormino, which would frankly be shocking. Let me read you a little bit from her bio because she has done some stuff, and then we will go right into this juicy, meandering, beautiful conversation we have.

Tristan Taormino is an award winning author, columnist, sex educator, speaker, a filmmaker and radio host. When she was 24 years old with a little publishing experience and even less capital, She founded Pucker Up, a magazine of writing and photography dedicated to sex and gender, and was responsible for every aspect of the 64 page publication from editing and marketing to sales and distribution. She’s the author of eight books, everything from “50 Shades of Kink: An Introduction to BDSM” to “The Big Book of Sex Toys,” “The Anal Position Guide,” “Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships,” – something that I recommend all the time on the show – “Down and Dirty Sex Secrets,” and two additions of “The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex For Women.” She’s also the co-editor along with three other people, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young of “The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure” which is fantastic and on my shelf. 

Dawn Serra: She also conceived and edited the groundbreaking collection, “The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Roleplay and the Erotic Edge,” which I share all the time with clients. She’s the editor of 25 anthologies. Her books have sold over 500,000 copies and been translated into many languages. She has written from multitude of publications. For nine and a half years, she wrote a biweekly column in the village voice. She runs her own adult film production company, Smart Ass Productions and was an exclusive director for Vivid Entertainment for a number of years. 

Tristan’s taught hundreds of classes on everything from negotiating relationships to female orgasms. She’s also the host of Sex Out Loud, which is the number one show on the variety of channel VoiceAmerica Talk Radio Network, where she has a weekly sex show – that also is a podcast. So wherever you listen to this podcast you can also find Tristan’s show, Sex Out Loud. And she’s the creator of the Sex Educator Bootcamp, which is something that I helped behind the scenes to produce. So for all of you out there who are thinking about becoming sex educators, Tristan’s Sex Educator Bootcamp which is an entirely online training program that you can participate in is something that I highly recommend checking out as a jumping off point and so much more.

Dawn Serra: So you can learn all about Tristan at puckerup.com and at tristantaormino.com. I, of course, will have the links in the show notes and at dawnserra.com/ep272/. And also just a reminder, I now have transcription for every single podcast episode. So if you are someone who is hard of hearing or it’s just easier for you to read, you can head to each of the episode pages for the show and get the transcript. 

Sometimes it takes a week or two for those to come out because it does take many, many hours to transcribe the show. So, a huge thanks to my team for helping me to do that. But if you need a transcript for any reason, then the last 20 or 30 episodes or so have a transcriptions now so you can go get that transcript so check that out. And, here is my conversation with the amazing Tristan Taormino.

Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Tristan. I am very excited to get to talk to you this morning. 

Tristan Taormino: Me too. It’s been a while. 

Dawn Serra: It really has. I have been missing talking to you and geeking out with you, and I’m really looking forward to this. 

Tristan Taormino: Same, same. 

Dawn Serra: So here’s where I’d love to start. You are working on a really cool new project that’s kind of new to everyone, but I know you’ve been thinking about it for many, many, many years. And that is a memoir – a very personal memoir. I’d love to hear a little bit about that. What’s coming up for you? What are you writing about? What’s next?

Tristan Taormino: Yeah. I have been thinking about it for a bazillion years. So, this memoir is basically about me growing up and coming of age, also coming out as queer and growing up with a gay dad. My parents were divorced when I was young. My dad came out as gay and then there was a lapse in time where I didn’t have any contact with him. And then, I started to have contact with him again and we had this really intense, really close relationship. Right after I graduated from college, he was diagnosed with AIDS not HIV, just to be clear. He was diagnosed with full blown AIDS and they thought he’d probably been positive for about a decade. He died about a year and a half later. 

So, the book covers my upbringing, my college years and what it was like when I found out that my dad was gay, and then what it was like to be one of his primary caretakers as he was dying. And it’s really, really hard. I mean, first of all, I’ve never written a memoir. I’ve written about personal experiences, obviously, and I’ve written first person stuff a lot, but I’ve never delved into this particular genre. So, it’s way outside of my comfort zone. It’s like if someone called me and was like, “Hey, why don’t you write a book about orgasms?” I’d be like, “Yeah, yeah. Let’s do that.” It feels so much easier and so much– I’m just more familiar with it, right? It just feels like I could write a sex how to book pretty – it’d be pretty straightforward and this is like nothing like that. 

Tristan Taormino: There are days when I would rather do anything than write about this stuff. It’s really emotional for me and it’s really intense. I started my Patreon, it’s really interesting because I started my Patreon for two reasons. One was to get support and feel like someone was there like hanging in with me as I knew the process was going to be really emotional. But also my Patreon has allowed me to have to do the work because my patrons expect an excerpt, basically. 

So, it’s been this amazing accountability process for me that I set up for myself, which is that now I can’t disappoint people. And so, even when I’m like, “I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this.” I’m like, “But you have to because your patrons signed up for this and you said you would.” 

Dawn Serra: Damn it!

Tristan Taormino: It’s been an amazing motivator to keep me really on track. Because it’s such a kind of amorphous thing. There’s no “deadline.” There’s no one checking my work. It’s such an internal process and I feel like the Patreon has made me be more regular and consistent about my writing practice.

Dawn Serra: Did I read right that part of this process includes you reading things that your father wrote? 

Tristan Taormino: Yes. So my father wrote a lot. He wrote a play. He did a lot of poetry and he wrote a memoir, which I have a hard copy – a physical hard copy printout of. It was never published. My idea right now is to incorporate his story and my story together – how that shows up in sort of form is still up in the air. But as I read his memoir, one of the things that strikes me is, first of all, how radically different our experiences were around gayness and queerness. It took him 20 plus years to come to terms with his identity and it was really fraught with a ton of homophobia, internalized self hatred, all the messages he got. I mean, it was very, very intense and hard for him to come out. And in contrast, it’s like a generation later, I’m in this super supportive place at Wesleyan where I went to Undergrad and everyone around me seems gay, and I’ve grown up my whole life with gay people in my life. And the stigma, the shame – that just wasn’t there. 

So, it’s fascinating to see how that can shift just in one generation and within the same family. And then also, there are these patterns that get repeated. I feel like my dad had a really rough childhood growing up and really wanted to be like, “Okay, I will never do that to my own kid and I will never create this kind of atmosphere of a lot of emotional abuse and verbal abuse…” And unresolved mental health issues with his mom. But as I read some of those experiences and then look back on my experiences I had with him, my relationship with him can be very volatile and intense and a lot of stuff gets repeated. And you only have the perspective on that once you see his story and then see my story alongside it. So, there’s a lot of stuff there. And I think, also, we were ultimately kind of searching for the same things in our lives and these things like a sense of home and a sense of security kind of alluded us both. It’s really intense shit. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. It sounds really special and intimate, and hard and confronting, and kind of all of these really intense things at the same time. 

Tristan Taormino: Yeah. Because I have the hard copy, what I do is I type up– I’m retyping so that I have an electronic copy of the memoir and I got to the part in his memoir where he meets my mom. It was way more emotional than I anticipated. I mean, I have a sense of how they met and the circumstances and of their relationship. Reading it from his point of view was just really hard and then I felt like I’m at a point now where I’ve actually put it down. Because part of me is feeling really anxious because I know how that particular part of the story ends, which is with him leaving me and my mom when I was a baby, basically. And so, I haven’t been able to pick it back up because I know where it’s going and it’s, right now, it’s just too hard to go there for me.

Dawn Serra: Yeah.

Tristan Taormino: I will eventually. 

Dawn Serra: So, when you think about your timeline and your kind of coming into a sense of your own queerness, your relationship with coming out and learning that your dad was gay, and becoming a sex educator – how does that timeline fit together? Where does it begin?

Tristan Taormino: That’s a really good, interesting thing. I was just talking to someone yesterday and I said, “I’m writing this memoir.” And they were like, “Oh my God! Do I ever want to read Tristan Taormino’s memoir?” And with this look of glee on their face. I said, “Actually, I’ve got to tell you, this book only goes up until the point when I’m about 25.” So the next memoir, which I’ve already sort of been planning in my head – There will be a lot of sexiness, a lot of kink, a lot of public sex, a lot of just wild, wild, wild times. But they’re not really going to be in this book. Not that you don’t see the seeds of maybe who I am now and who people know me as. But truthfully, this book starts when I’m born and goes up until my father dies when I was 25. And looking back, I feel like I feel more sort of sexually new and naive than anything else. I really do. Wow, this is not the “Swinging from the chandelier” territory. That actually comes later. It does. It comes later. 

So there, I haven’t made a porn movie yet. I haven’t written my book on anal sex yet. This book really is encapsulated by my father’s life and death. So stay tuned for memoir 2. It’s going to be amazing and it’s going to tell you – spill the tea on all the things that I’ve done. If you think you know all the things I’ve done, just imagine what I haven’t written about and what I’ve saved for a memoir. It’s bananas. But this one is about coming of age, about exploring sex as a young person, exploring desire as a young person. It’s just the beginning is what it feels like. It’s the very beginning.

Dawn Serra: What are you hoping when people read this really tender, personal memoir – their main experience or takeaway is going to be?

Tristan Taormino: I mean, I think it’s interesting to see the kind of origin of people. When people ask me, “How did you get to be who you are?” I essentially begin my story in college. College was life changing in a profound and amazing way for me. And I feel like I began to plant the seeds and become the person I am today in college. So when people say, “Hey, how did you get to be a blah, blah, blah?” I’m like, “Okay, so it’s the 90s. I’m at Wesleyan,” and I tell the story from there. And so, I feel like people have heard parts of that story, but no one knows what came before that, right? They don’t. 

I mean, people really don’t know that much about my upbringing, my childhood. So, to return to your own origin story and kind of see where you’ve come from and how that has shaped and influenced where you are today. It’s a really fascinating process and it’s fascinating what you remember. I mean, that’s the other thing is that, I feel like I am not at the height of my sharpest memory. I’m 48 years old. I’m in menopause. My brain feels mushy sometimes when I wake up in the morning. But I do have a lot of– I have notes. 

Tristan Taormino: One of the great things that I have is I have a lot of stuff– I wrote letters to him and he kept them. So I have those. He wrote letters to me and I kept them. So I have those. I also found a series of letters that I wrote to my mom while I was spending the summers at his house. And so, I have some documentation from during the time, which really helps to spark memory and put you back in that place, which is really interesting. But the origin of just where I’ve been and where I’ve come from, it’s just in some ways it feels like so far away, but then as you write it, you begin to see these pieces of yourself that started early. They started really early. 

So, I feel like I’m interested to see what people think of my origin story and also I want people to really see this trajectory of how life has changed. It’s for a very particular kind of white person, white cis, queer person who’s essentially middle class. My dad didn’t have any money at all, but he had an advanced degree and both my parents struggled with money as I was growing up. But they had very middle class sensibilities. So, I feel like I was raised middle class and it’s amazing just how much all of the work that folks did in coming out in the 70s and the 80s when it wasn’t safe, when it wasn’t cool, when it wasn’t on TV. All that led to a totally different environment for me to come out into. 

Tristan Taormino: I just don’t know that there’s that many father-daughter, queer memoir stories out there. I mean, we have stories of people who are queer and one of their parents is queer, too, but I don’t know that we have that many of them. Because there isn’t this idea of even being a second generation queer person is like – those second generation queer people are now grownups essentially. So I think it’s interesting, like Alison Bechdel has this great memoir called Fun Home. She also had a gay dad and we are about the same age. So there’s a lot of similarities I see in there. But also a lot of differences because her father was closeted and my father was out. 

Dawn Serra: This project sounds so emotionally exhausting, but also just… I don’t know. There’s something in my heart that’s like, “Oh my God!” What an amazing project to get to read all these letters and to re-remember and to connect dots from his perspective. And just the filling out of this 3D model. Sometimes our stories are kind of two dimensional because we’ve made them into something for ourselves to make meaning and then to be able to read his memoir and then have this new depths. It sounds really… I don’t know – important, but scary and hard and the kind of thing you’re going to look back on in 20 years and be like, “Fuck, that was so important.”

Tristan Taormino: Yeah. And just hard. I mean, I feel like there’s still so much emotion wrapped up in it. I feel like if you haven’t lost a parent when you’re young, it’s hard to explain how the feelings can be entirely right on the surface for me; when it’s more than 20 years later and the grief still can spike in these ways that are totally unexpected. I can burst into tears at any time. It doesn’t follow any kind of pattern. And also, I think that there’s a second layer of grief that I’ve experienced because– Okay, so example, I went to a conference on GLBT health stuff and I heard a bunch of speakers. I mean, this is kind of my job, right? One of the speakers was talking about, specifically, about palliative care and end of life care. And she gave this talk. Her name is Kimberly Acquaviva – You should have them on the show. 

So I saw her speak, I really loved what she was talking about. She was really smart. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to follow her on Twitter.” And then I followed her on Twitter, and I found out that this person who’s an expert in GLBT health and specifically doing really good work around palliative care has a partner, a life partner, who’s dying and she is documenting her dying process daily on Twitter. 

Dawn Serra: Wow. 

Tristan Taormino: So, which you could imagine is like really intense. I mean, just really intense. And they have a son together and he is – I think I’m going to say he’s around 18 or 19. I think maybe he’s younger. It’s both beautiful and also tragic, right? It’s tragic. But at the same time, they’re honoring this process in such a deep and meaningful way. They have a GoFundMe and recently the son wrote a letter and posted it at GoFundMe about his experience of one of his mother’s dying. And it was so beautiful that you just wanted to weep for hours afterwards. And especially because he’s not even – he’s definitely under 20. So he’s not even that old for him to grasp all these ideas. 

So, there’s a part of me that feels like I had no role models for how to experience dying and death. I didn’t have any adults around me who were competent or empathetic for various reasons. I had no one to guide me through the process. I had no one to help me make meaning of it. I had no one, really – It’s like if I could do it all over again, I feel like I would’ve done it differently. But I was in my twenties and I’d never lost anyone before, and there was no one around to kind of say, “Hey, Tristan. You might want to think about this,” or “You might want to do this.” Those folks were not in my life. So I grieve that when he died, I don’t know that it was – I was even fully present. I was even in my body when he died. 

Tristan Taormino: When I see people going through the process of death and doing it in such compelling and thoughtful ways, that’s hard for me because I don’t feel like I have this beautiful death story to share. It was really overwhelmingly painful and the aftermath of his death was painful and leading up to his death was painful. There wasn’t a lot else to it. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. Is there some element of writing this memoir that’s allowing you to have some type of ritual around that grief story? 

Tristan Taormino: I mean, certainly spending dedicated amount of time every day with him in a very intentional way is a new experience for me. I feel like in the movies people are like, “Oh, so on Sundays, I go talk to my dead parent at their grave and it’s so meaningful.” Representations in the media. My dad does not have a grave site. He was cremated. I have his ashes, they’re in my house. They’ve moved with me probably, I don’t know, six times. They moved across the country with me. But I don’t know that I’ve had a daily relationship with my dad in the way that I have now that I’ve started this book, where I’m looking through photographs, I’m looking through letters, I’m taking myself back to places and trying to remember what was going on for me at the time. 

I’m, in some cases, checking in with my mother. My mom is going to be 79. She’s real sharp. There are some fact checking things that I can actually do with her in terms of timelines and locations. That’s also an interesting process with my mom who I don’t have – who I have a pretty fraught relationship with. That’s just kind of getting to a place where I wanted to be. So spending this daily time with him in some way, it feels like its own healing. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. I have to say, I’m really looking forward to reading this.

Tristan Taormino: Thanks. I mean, I hope people find it interesting. I mean, I think that everyone has imposter syndrome and I remember talking to my therapist about it actually. She was like, “What are the blocks around even writing it?” One of the blocks around writing it is, “Who the fuck cares?” You’re just this white middle class girl who had some trauma and some sadness but didn’t get over. There are people who have made strides in their lives and have overcome trauma that is unimaginable to many of us – unimaginable. You’re like, “I can’t believe that you’re still here.” And here and thriving, right? I don’t feel like that’s my story. 

I feel like there were things growing up that didn’t work for me and there are ways in which I felt alienated and definitely emotionally isolated. So part of me is like, “Does anyone even care? Does anyone even care about this story?” It’s hard to center yourself and think this is going to matter to someone else. Also, I don’t think when I started it, I thought for a minute there would be as much class stuff as there’s ended up being.

Tristan Taormino: I feel like we have these writers who write about class and they sit on panels and talk about writing about class. And I don’t know that I thought my story was steeped in class issues, but I do feel like it’s been merged as a major theme and one that I’m constantly reminded of. So that’s been kind of a surprise. I think, I thought at the center of it where these issues of sexuality and sexual orientation, but when I go back and see the pieces sort of come together, there’s a thread through it around these class struggles in terms of the community I grew up in, being more wealthy than where I was. The idea that my parents had these middle class values but they didn’t have these middle-class bank accounts. So there was always a kind of financial struggle and tension. And then also a kind of a striving and…

There’s a lot of aspiration in my young years of seeing people around me with a certain kind of wealth and really wanting that. And again, not being able to put that in words even remotely. I had a crash course in class and it began when I was 8years old when I began riding horses, and sort of getting a view of this world that is very wealthy world of people who competed and who were at horse shows. I didn’t know it at the time and I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but it was so clear in this particular world what class was and who had what and what it meant for their value as human beings. I was internalizing all of that at the time without any kind of processing or anyone saying, “Hey, this is what class is in America.” So that has been really interesting to go back over.”

Dawn Serra: That echoes a lot of my upbringing as well. That’s interesting. Well, I’m ready to read it. That’s all I’m going to say. I mean, I think one of the things that I’m hungry for and then I’m seeing a lot of the people that I work with are hungry for is stories. Not, “Here’s The 3 Steps to Make $50,000 a month” or “I Quit My Day Job and now I’m in Bali. You can too” kind of stuff. But I want to be with people in hard, complicated things and I want us to feel less alone in those things. And part of how we feel less alone is in being with each other’s stories and witnessing them and feeling that togetherness where there’s similarities, and also feeling that difference and allowing it all to be true. That sounds like such a beautiful project. 

Tristan Taormino: I think that feeling of not fitting in, whether it’s around class or race or sexuality or gender or age or ability or body size, religion. I mean, all of those things. I do feel like every kid feels alienated on some level. That was my experience growing up that I didn’t quite fit in. I sort of fit in to a lot of different groups, but I didn’t a hundred percent belong there. And that’s also a kind of an interesting thing to think about. How we negotiate feeling alone when surrounded by people basically. 

Also, just examining the sex positive roots of my life. People are always like, “How did you get to become you?” I think people imagine I grew up in a super liberal household or I grew up on a lesbian feminist commune or somehow I got some early programming around sexuality that was different from what they’ve had. The truth is I went to public school and I grew up in a small suburb, and I didn’t get any sex education when I was a kid. But I’m going back and sort of seeing places where I feel like…

Tristan Taormino: I feel like, in really subtle ways, my mom eradicated sexual shame from my life and that has had a major imprint on who I am today. I mean, people want to know, “Why are you shameless? How are you shameless around sexuality?” And I’m beginning to see the pieces of it just in contrast to other people’s experiences. When I ask people, especially I ask people about like, “When was the first time your parent caught you masturbating out – not in public – like in the house, not in your bedroom and what happened?” To me that’s a really pivotal thing, right? Because it sends you all these messages about touching your body, being sexual, experiencing pleasure. People have these freak outs, right? Where they’re like, “Oh my God, stop that.” And the parents freak out and it’s like everyone freaks out and then people are like, “Okay, I shouldn’t touch myself ever.” That’s the message that they get because it’s it’s their child brain. 

So I have a pivotal experience where I was at my mother’s friend’s house, they were having a dinner party. I was in the living room watching TV. I started to masturbate and my mom came over and she was like, “Hey, so this looks fun. I know you really like doing that. We’re at someone else’s house and they haven’t agreed to be a part of that. So why don’t I take you somewhere where you can shut the door and do it in private?” 

Dawn Serra: That’s amazing. 

Tristan Taormino: And to me, it’s barely a memory. It’s literally barely a memory. But then when I go back to and I think, “Oh, this imprinted on me pretty early that I wasn’t doing anything wrong.” That then built this foundation of no shame around bodies and around sex.

Dawn Serra: That’s extraordinary. 

Tristan Taormino: And by the way, the house where I masturbated was this two gay guys. They were French. They were very good friends with my mom. They were amazing cooks. So then there’s this other piece, too, which is that there had been gay people in my life since I was born and that’s way before I knew my dad was gay. So, that was also a thing that was a regular– The fact that people were gay was just totally normalized in my family. It just was not a big deal. When someone said, “We’re going over to this couple’s house to do something or other.” Either my mother or my father, I just assumed it was two people in a relationship. I had no idea what their genders were and it was seen irrelevant actually.

Dawn Serra: So in other words, you are every conservatives worst nightmare and proof that being around gay people…

Tristan Taormino: Makes you gay. And also if for the people who are like, “It’s hereditary or it’s DNA.” I also reify that my dad’s gay and so I’m gay. I think it’s more complicated than that. But, also, I went to the gayest college on Earth. Note to people who are young listening to this or are thinking about going to college, Wesleyan is super, super queer. It just has that reputation. But I didn’t know that when I was in high school. So, I ended up there almost by accident and then I can’t imagine ever being anywhere else. 

Dawn Serra: Because it set the groundwork for here to then Tristan. 

Tristan Taormino: It set the groundwork for sure.

Dawn Serra: Well, as you’ve been working on your memoir and doing all of these other amazing things in your life and having conversations with amazing people and teaching workshops, what are some of the things that you have really been sinking your teeth into and geeking out about lately? 

Tristan Taormino: Well, tomorrow I’m about to start this four day intensive conference called “Unmasking Whiteness.” It’s put on by this group called Aware LA, which is essentially an affiliate of Surge, which is showing up for racial justice; and is built around the idea that anti racist white people need to educate and empower other white people around their anti-racist practices. That there are times in which an all white space is created so that people of color don’t have to do the labor of educating white people about race or listening to their shame or their awkwardness or their stupid questions or as they work through their own internalized racism.

I feel like in Sex Ed, this sort of thing happened, which was way back, I don’t remember what year it was. But when the Sex Masters book came out and it was all white people and people of color very promptly stood up and called out white people in the field of Sex Ed. I took that call very seriously and I began to reflect on, “Okay, why are there only white people organizing this conference? Why are there only white speakers? Why are the keynotes always white?” And so on an institutional level – on a macro level, I began to think about, “Every time I think about presenting somewhere, I have to figure out if they’ve thought about racial justice.” But then I feel like there has to be a secondary piece of work, which is super personal and internal.

Tristan Taormino: I feel like some people are like, “I can get in line here. Let’s see, I need photos of people of color on my website. I need a person of color on the organizing committee. I need some person of color presenters. I need some person of color contributors to this book. Diversity. I got it. I got it.” And that is, first of all, all important. It’s practical ways to enact your politics, right? It’s ways to sort of walk the walk and not just say “We’re inclusive,” but actually take steps to be inclusive. But then underneath that, we have to come to terms with, as white people, our own racism, our own legacies of white supremacy, how we uplift and uphold, white supremacy on a daily basis. How we benefit from it, how we turn the other way and pretend it’s not happening. 

I feel like I’ve moved into a place in the past year with the help of this great organization, Aware LA, where I’ve done more of the internal work of dismantling racism in me. And then it feels easier to try to go out in the world with a different lens and seeing things in a different way when the internal stuff is fueling it. Rather than the kind of piecemeal, “Oh right. I should be thinking about race.” Do you know what I mean? 

Dawn Serra: Absolutely. Yeah. 

Tristan Taormino: So I feel like that’s something that I feel like I made a commitment to myself to do and sort of actively working really hard at. Sort of baking it into the pie rather than putting the ice cream scoop on top. Why did I have a pie metaphor? Because you know, I’m hungry. That’s why. So it’s all about food right now. Really having a foundation and I think you can’t do the external work effectively or with true intention and empathy if you haven’t done the internal work of your own racism. I’m racist. I grew up in a racist society. I’m a white person. It feels really important to me. And like I said, it was kind of spurred on by these awesome people of color in our world, in our sex ed world who said, “Yo, wake the fuck up.” Some of us did and some of us still haven’t, but I hold out hope. 

I just think I’ve made a commitment to it. I made a commitment to having a large percentage of my guests on my podcast be people of color, marginalized folks, underrepresented folks. And I have to think every day, what am I doing to dismantle the system? But you can’t actually explore that question if you haven’t explored your own internalized values. 

Dawn Serra: Right. And if you’re not working on it every single day. Because the default is as soon as I stopped working, I’m complicit again because the system is built to make it easy for me to forget. 

Tristan Taormino: So I think that’s one of the things I’m finding that’s really important to me. And then I’m just thinking a lot about and also how to just put these things into practice, how to develop practices so that I have a go to list of, “These are the ways I’m going to enact these politics on a daily basis.” I’m not just going to say it. Here are the ways that I’m going to do it and here are the ways that I’m going to use my platform, not drop the mic – hand the mic off to someone else. All of those things you have to take into consideration, especially once you have achieved a certain level of visibility and a certain level of power in the world. I’m not powerful on the level of like I’m a congressperson or whatever. But I have this sort of micro power within this community to make change and I feel like it’s my duty to use that. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. Yeah. And I think one of the things that I found to be true, and I’m curious to hear what you’ve found around this too, is the deeper I go into one system of oppression, the more deeply I get ingrained in all of the systems of oppression. So the racial work leads me to anti-fat bias, which leads me to disability justice, which leads me to classism and capitalism. And the dismantling of white supremacy fundamentally means the dismantling of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy.

Tristan Taormino: Absolutely. Absolutely. I just was on Disability After Dark with Andrew Gurza and I think in my own struggles with my body with chronic pain and a number of other things, I felt more and more that when we talk about accessibility, we have to think about it from literally every angle. Who is this accessible to and who is it being excluded from it? And to me, accessibility– When you say accessibility, people are like, “Oh, you mean like wheelchair accessible? 

Dawn Serra: Right. 

Tristan Taormino: And I’m like, “That’s literally one of a hundred things that you have to think about.” True accessibility is about who can access this and who can afford it? Who’s going to be comfortable once they get there? Who can get to the place? All of these things begin to intersect and you begin to see the intersection points, and you also begin to see that I do feel like every day I notice more and more how capitalism really sets us up to fail and really fucks us up. It is set up for us to work ourselves into the ground and yet never actually get the payoff. There are people working themselves into the ground right now who don’t even have a living wage. And I feel relatively financially secure and yet I feel like capitalism continues to fuck with me because I’m not in the 1%.

The 1% people are running around right now having a pretty great time. And the rest of us are… I feel strongly – very strongly because of all my interactions with the healthcare system that I am one healthcare crisis away from being in financial disarray. Just one. And I have health insurance, and I’m educated, and I can pretty quickly advocate the bureaucracy, the paperwork – all of the bullshit that goes around with accessing health care. I think I can be an above average advocate for myself, which not everyone can do. English is my first language. I can work the system to the extent that I can. And yet I still feel like at any point everything could collapse over one hospital stay, one big operation, one health crisis which is terrifying. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. It’s terrifying. And I think one of the things that I’ve been grappling with personally is how as I become more and more aware of how fragile this state that I am in now– Like one health crisis, like you said away from… There was an article that came out in the paper yesterday here at NBC that surgeons in British Columbia are so fat-phobic and they think that people are so subhuman that they’ve stopped operating on them if they have a certain BMI, regardless of their metabolic health and all the other things. To the point where the government is now offering more money to the surgeons who are willing to lower themselves to do surgery on fat bodies. And so, one of the things that I’ve been grappling with is, literally, if I end up in the hospital…

Tristan Taormino: Will you get competent care?

Dawn Serra: Will I get competent care? And if they are paying someone extra money to do surgery on me that no one else will do, what’s the quality of that care? Because they’re going to be able to then turn around and say, “Well, that person was in a fat body and we’ve all proved that fat people are horrible and hard to take care of, so it’s not my fault.” And so, just like those kinds of things, but how many people have been lost before this? How many people can’t even access that kind of care? You know what I mean? 

I think the scope of these issues can feel so terrifying. And I think that’s one of the reasons why people then shut down and “Not my problem.”

Tristan Taormino: Well, and also why people who are marginalized in various ways don’t access healthcare. Don’t go to the doctor, let things go for a while because they’re afraid of walking in and being – it’s literally the opposite of being harmed in the place where the first rule is do no harm. They’re afraid of walking in the office and the first thing that they’re going to hear is, “Forget all this other stuff. It’s your weight.”

Dawn Serra: Right. Or, “Why didn’t you come to see us six months ago? So this is your fault. Even though when you come in, we’re incredibly hostile to you.” It’s like the ways that it’s been proven over and over and over again that doctors will discredit black women’s pain… 

Tristan Taormino: Women’s pain across the board. 

Dawn Serra: Right. And especially like black and indigenous women, right? Just the systemic level of harm that’s occurring. It ties deeply, and I think this is one of the things that I’ve struggled with, I’ve lost a lot of listeners over the years to this too. This stuff impacts our sexuality directly. So we have to have these conversations if we’re talking about and teaching about sex because if I have untreated pain, if I can’t get care, if I have to work three jobs, that impacts my ability to be fully sexually expressed and to be treated as a human being.

Tristan Taormino: Well, access to pleasure – it’s like the idea that we have unmitigated access to pleasure is a myth. 

Dawn Serra: Yes.

Tristan Taormino: The idea that like sex is “free.” I’m just going to put- Of course, it’s in capitalist terms, by the way, that there’s a cost or a value. But the idea that anyone can have sex and have good sex or satisfying sex or sex that makes them feel whole is bullshit when so many folks are marginalized in so many different ways that all of that counts towards how they can even access pleasure. 

I want to tell you that I went to the doctor recently and then I got a bunch of paperwork back and for the first time in my life my BMI has now reached the point where I am considered obese. I’m basically between a size 10 and size 12. It was like there in black and white. It was like they just handed it to me to be like, “You’re obese.” And I was like, “Wait, what? I’m sorry.” These seem entirely random and at the same time, because I’m a certain size, I think people also make assumptions about my health, which are usually wrong. I’m in good to fair health most days because of my pain and because of other issues. You know what I mean? But if people see me and see that I have a certain body type and they’re like, “Oh, well. She’s relatively healthy.” It’s like actually not true. But they make these assumptions based on how I look which I think is also really fucked up.

Dawn Serra: Yeah. And that’s baked into all of our desirability politics, which also ties back to relationships and sex, right? Whose bodies are we valuing? Whose bodies are we discarding and/or putting way lower down on the privilege scale? Usually, for completely totally uninformed reasons, “I’m going to look at you and make a decision about whether or not you’re worthy because you have a certain size and your hair looks a certain way.” There’s not a further analysis beyond that. It’s just I like what I like. I want to challenge those things. I want us to do better and dig deeper.

Tristan Taormino: And also the idea that you’re interacting with the society. So on a daily basis, you walk out in the world, you go see your doctor who’s fat phobic, among other things, racist doesn’t take your pain seriously. And then you go to work where people are talking about dieting and their diets, and people are telling people they look really good because they’ve been on a diet. Then you turn on the TV and we’ve got airbrushed, beautiful– I just saw a project runway where one of the models was so gaunt, was so thin that it made me uncomfortable. You know? And this is like a successful model who’s in fashion week and who’s walking the runway. 

So it’s like you’re absorbing all of this stuff and then you get in bed with someone and you’re supposed to be like, “Okay, let’s go.” I’m 100% in my body. I’m fully present. I’m feeling great about this. 

Dawn Serra: I’m chill.

Tristan Taormino: I feel empowered. I feel 100% body autonomy. I feel 100% confident in my yes and my no. It’s not possible. It’s not possible.

Dawn Serra: Nope. And that’s part of what makes the work so exciting to me. But I think also challenges a lot of people. I think there’s a lot of people out there who are like, “But I just want it to be about sex.” But all of this is about sex. And that, to me, feels really rich and enraging and motivating and interesting. We’re talking about deep human needs and impact. But it has to be more complex and nuanced than just insert A into slot B and, “Yay. We’ve talked about sex.”

Tristan Taormino: There’s this really thoughtful article I had, the writer on and – I’m totally blanking. She is a burlesque performer. I totally follow her on Instagram, so I’m going to look it up right now. She’s a burlesque performer but she also for years and years worked at a sex shop. She wrote this, one of the best pieces, I think about working in a sex shop that sort of went beyond the, “Oh my God, you’ll never believe what people say.” You know that kind of just… God, I feel like Kitty is in her name but… Okay, you’ll have to follow up on that. 

So she wrote this article about her day to day experience and she was like, “Ultimately, can I sell you a vibrator? Yes. Can I tell you the benefits of using lube? Yes. Can I say that you have to warm up for anal sex? Yes.” But there are some fundamental things here that I can’t change in our interaction, like the relationship dynamic between cis, heterosexual people. “The fact that one of you didn’t want to come to the sex shop in the first place, but you’re obviously there and not 100% into it. The fact that your partner just dismissed this out of hand as something that was way too kinky, but maybe I saw a spark in your eye that maybe you actually thought, ‘No, I think that actually might be fun.’” She would observe all of these things that were so much deeper and then it was like, “Yes,you can leave out the door with a vibrator, but this is not going to solve these fundamental things that I can see are going on.” And until these gender dynamics are examined, and until shame is lifted, and until these certain practices are destigmatize, and until you work through your own issues around sexuality and your body. This vibrator is only going to do so much. 

Tristan Taormino: It was just a really thoughtful article and I loved it. And it speaks to that, right? It speaks to that that if someone comes in and you feel like one of the partners doesn’t even want to be there – How do you say, “I’m going to improve these people’s sex life?” Because you know, deep down you’re not and you know, deep down you can’t solve the problem on the spot in a retail environment in 15 minutes

Dawn Serra: Or even by writing into the podcast, which I adore. But so often, so many of the questions have these deep underlying issues. And so we have to have some different kinds of conversations before we can even get to the stuff that you really want because we can’t just jump there without also acknowledging the emotional labor that maybe isn’t happening and hasn’t been talked about for 20 years or a thousand other things.

Tristan Taormino: Well, also the more and more I read people’s questions, the more I’m struck how there is a series of assumptions built into the very question. I remember I was talking to someone recently about… They said, “I want to know, I want to ask women does size matter?” So, I’m just going to answer the question, does size matter? And it’s going to be like a yes or no question. I was like, “Okay, actually can we time out on that for a second?” Because when you’re saying does size matter, yes or no? I think you are assuming that what you’re asking is, “Do you want a big cock? Do you need a big cock?” But if you asked me the question, does size matter? I may answer yes. And what I mean by yes is there are some penises that I can’t fit in my vagina. It’s just a fact. It’s my geography. I’ve also never had children and there are penises that don’t fit my vagina. It’s not even about comfort. It’s not even a pleasure. Forget pleasure. It’s not comfortable. No matter the lube, no matter the warm up. It’s painful and I don’t want painful sex. 

So if you ask me the question, “Does size matter?” I would say yes. But then are you assuming that, I mean I want a big cock? Because I’m answering yes. And then if you followed up that question, I would actually have a lot of things to say. But built in – baked into the question is does size matter equals big big. You’re not saying what you mean? You know what I mean?

Dawn Serra: Right. And I think what also is baked into that question, which I think folks who have been assigned female at birth and who have moved through the world maybe being assumed to be a woman and/or who identify as women. I mean when someone asks a question like that, in my head I’m thinking, “No matter what I answer, their story is going to override the answer.” So if I say, “No, size doesn’t matter.” “Are you sure? Because I’ve had people reject me for this before.” Or “Yeah, size matters.” “Okay, what kind of size?” 

I mean, there’s this gymnastics that’s going to start happening because the direct conversation – we don’t have the foundation for an honest conversation to happen where grief can be present and we don’t have to fix it or where… All these other things are at play. It’s like they’re anticipating the response already to the different answers I might give so we’re not even having an honest exchange.

Tristan Taormino: Right. And that was the other thing, I felt like the premise of the question was, was so much more complicated for me. Because that’s the other thing, so I’m having sex with someone and they have a certain sized penis. Does it matter? Well, it matters in so far as if that penis is going to be in me. So would I reject someone wholeheartedly because of their penis size? No, because I have a more expansive view of what sex and sexuality is. To me, does size matter? Yes. Physically, for me, it does. But it doesn’t matter in the way that you’re thinking it does. And it doesn’t exclude the possibility that I’m going to be sexual and I’m going to have a satisfying sex experience or sexual ongoing relationship with someone irregardless.

It’s like there’s all these layers that don’t get talked about. It’s like the sort of trope of the Women’s Magazine, right? It’s like “If you master these four positions, you’re going to have the best orgasm of your life.” For me, if I have really good chemistry with someone, if I can let my guard down, if my body is cooperating with me, if I haven’t taken pain meds, if I’m as present as I possibly can be in my body, if I have the right kinds of stimulation, I can probably have an orgasm. That’s what contributes to my ability to have an orgasm. But a position? That’s not actually what it is. 

Tristan Taormino: There’s so many factors for me that go into the chances of me having an orgasm and none of them have to do with the way that you flick your tongue, you know? It’s like the way you treated me before we got here. And it’s like, how drawn to you I feel and it’s how in my head I am. You know what I mean? There’s so many pieces here that have no easy fix. 

Dawn Serra: Did I eat something delicious today and I feel resourced?

Tristan Taormino: Or do I feel bloated? Do I feel bloated and actually uncomfortable in my – below my waist. 

Dawn Serra: Yep. Cover that cosmo. 

Tristan Taormino: Can I let go of work. Can I stay connected to the other person? Can I stay connected to my own body? Yep. All of those things – that’s the meat of it. You know what I mean? Those are the things that I feel like I’m contending with and grappling with when I’m thinking about how can this sexual experience feel good and satisfying or how can it be orgasmic? I also am someone who, the older I get, the more I have really incredible sex without an orgasm. And, people still look at me sideways when I say that. They’re like, “You’re saying that because you’re a sex educator and you have to say that.” But that’s not really true. And I’m like, “Actually it is.” There are times when I feel entirely holistically satisfied and the orgasm just wasn’t in the cards. 

Dawn Serra: Yep. I wish for more people to discover that place. 

Tristan Taormino: I know. I know. But if you told me like I would be 48 and in menopause and having the best sex of my life, I would tell you, “You are absolutely bananas.” If you hit me at 28 and said that, I would be like, “No, no, no. Did you see what I just did?” I’m having the time of my life. So I didn’t see that coming. I’ll admit I did not see that coming. 

Dawn Serra: What a delicious surprise. 

Tristan Taormino: Yeah. I mean, I went into menopause early. So I went into menopause when I was 41 and your body does change really dramatically. And your desire wanes 100%. Hormones are real. We can talk about the social construction of gender, we can talk about all that, but hormones are real. And I’m telling you, once my body stopped producing estrogen, a lot of shit happened. A lot of shit went down. Including waning desire. In some ways you have to like reframe it. 

For me, I have to reframe it in order to stop believing that I’m always going to have spontaneous desire. This is where the research that Emily Nagoski goes over in her book, “Come As You Are.” That really resonated with me. It’s like I don’t have spontaneous desire in the way that I did when I was 20. But there are ways in which I can say, “Let’s do this,” and get into it and my arousal builds and things kick in and then the desire’s there. 

Dawn Serra: Yup. And being able to just be with what’s true instead of losing yourself in the desire to be how things were.

Tristan Taormino: Dawn… Being with what’s true and what is is the fucking hardest thing ever. Certainly, I think, in this climate in America, being with what is is a painful fucking process. Because what is is terrifying. It’s anxiety producing. It’s horrifying. It’s inhumane. I mean, being with what is doesn’t mean accepting it. I know that, but wow. The stuff that’s going on in this country – Forget about in the world. 

In this country, there are people who are being detained in concentration camps. That’s just a fact. You can’t look away from that. So I think being present and being with what is right now is a challenge on so many levels. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. And, of course, it’s going to have an impact on what types of touch we want, how much energy we have for things. I mean, I want so much more forgiveness for ourselves and our partners. Especially when things just feel so difficult to be in. Because you watch the news cycle for 15 minutes and it’s like, I think, most people are going to be like, “I kind of need to escape right now and/or cope. Not be really open and vulnerable and all the other things.”

Tristan Taormino: Oh, I’m wondering what you think about this. I’m hoping you’ve seen this on social media because it has been around in my feed. So there’s a tee shirt but it’s all words. So it’s kind of a meme and it says, “Vote like your sister had an abortion. Vote like your partner is queer. Vote like your parent is trans. Vote like you are an immigrant. Vote like English isn’t your first language. Vote like your best friend is undocumented.” So I’m summarizing here, I’m summarizing. But what struck me– did you see it?

Dawn Serra: I haven’t. 

Tristan Taormino: Okay. So I understand the construction of it. It was all about thinking about having a personal stake in the lives of black and brown bodies, the lives of disabled folks, the lives of queer and trans folks, the lives of people who are undocumented, who are, at this point, documented immigrants who are also under attack in the United States, by the way – Just documented immigrants, people who speak a different language. All these different marginalized identities. And so it was “Vote as if blank. Vote as if blank. Vote as if blank” I’ll find it. I’ll send it to you. You can put it on social media. But what struck me about it was – I had this really ambivalent feelings about it when I saw it. I saw it and I was like, “Ookay, I get where you’re going for.” But then, a part of me felt like, “But if you put this in front of a white cis, rich person, they’re going to be like, ‘I don’t know any of those people. And that’s actually not my reality.’” Of course, it is their reality because they know someone who’s had an abortion, but they don’t know that they’ve had an abortion and all that shit. They know someone queer, but that person’s closeted with them. So they don’t know. 

It struck me like in this weird way, which is why can’t we just be humane? Why can’t we just have the value of people’s lives have value regardless of their lives, their lived experience, and their identities, which could be farthest from me as they are? Do you know what I mean?

Dawn Serra: Yeah. And I shouldn’t have to understand someone to believe that they are a human being deserving of respect and basic human rights. 

Tristan Taormino: Yeah. You don’t have to be pro choice.You don’t have to know someone or that’s had an abortion, know someone who’s made any kind of reproductive choice or yourself be that person to just say, “I’m pro choice.”

Dawn Serra: Yup. 

Tristan Taormino: I just wondered if you saw it and when you thought of it. 

Dawn Serra: I haven’t, but I 100% agree with what you’re saying. I don’t need to know… I mean, there’s lots of kinds of people in the world that I probably don’t know. But I still don’t want them…

Tristan Taormino: Stripped of their rights.

Dawn Serra: And taken away from their families and potentially dying. I mean, like none of those things are true. I think part of the ideology underneath that is even though it will be hard and it will hurt and it does hurt in so many ways, I want to give up some of the things that I have because I believe there is enough in this world for all of us to enough. And I think just from a foundational perspective, there’s a lot of people who don’t believe that to be true. So they want to hoard the things because they’re afraid that we’re going to run out and we will because people are hoarding the things. I think that the shirt, that meme, is kind of trying to get people to care when what people are really grasping for is power and resources. 

Tristan Taormino: Yeah. 

Dawn Serra: And a belief that all of these people are taking away their power and resources. And so, it feels like a personal attack.

Tristan Taormino: Okay. But also I love this word “hoarding” because I don’t even think that we should talk about billionaires. I don’t even think billionaire should be the word. 

Dawn Serra: Oh, I don’t either. 

Tristan Taormino: I think people who are billionaires are hoarding money and resources. And that is how they should be referred to because no one needs that much money. No one needs that many resources. No one needs that many houses. They are hoarding money. And that is how we should refer to them. Not as this sort of neutral term of “Oh, they’re just a billionaire or they’re a multimillionaire.” No, they’re hoarding money. They’re hoarding money. 

Dawn Serra: Yes. And causing harm. 

Tristan Taormino: I’m here for the hoarding. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah, me too. 

Tristan Taormino: I’m glad that you use that word. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah, no. More sharing. Less hoarding. More sharing. 

Tristan Taormino: More interdependence and just – Come on, you don’t need that much. God.

Dawn Serra: Fact.

Tristan Taormino: Jeff Bezos. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. Jeff Bezos! Warren Buffett. 

Tristan Taormino: Well, at least Warren Buffett’s trying to get other rich people to behave and giving away a lot of his money. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah but still, it’s not enough. 

Tristan Taormino: But Jeff Bezos is just… 

Dawn Serra: Disgusting. 

Tristan Taormino: He’s the epitome of capitalism. I mean, he’s exploiting the most vulnerable workers but he’s also created a monopoly in that there are times when I’m like, “Where will I get this if not on Amazon?” And then I’m grappling with, “I don’t want to support Amazon. I boycotted on Prime days and all that shit.” But then he’s made it so that everything is on Amazon. So how do we get some of the things that we need? 

Dawn Serra: And when you have certain kinds of disabilities where you’re not able to leave the house or go shopping for yourself, it’s literally the only option from a survival perspective. 

Tristan Taormino: Groceries. I mean, they’re doing groceries. For some people, that’s the only way to get groceries is to have someone bring them to the house.

Dawn Serra: Desiree Adaway shared some statistics the other day who is an amazing racial justice advocate and I don’t remember all of the numbers, but essentially it was, “Here are CEOs and how much more per hour they make than their employees.” The top one was the GAP CEO. The GAP CEO makes 3,566 times more money than their line employees. And I did the math, if gap employers are making $15 an hour, the CEO is making $51,000 an hour. That’s 3,566 times 15. No one needs to make $51,000 an hour. No one.

Tristan Taormino: Nope. Okay. I found the shirt. 

Dawn Serra: Oh, great. 

Tristan Taormino: Can I just read it to you so that maybe you can give me your take on it? 

Dawn Serra: Yes. 

Tristan Taormino: Okay. “Vote as if your skin is not white. Your parents need medical care. Your friend is a missing indigenous woman. Your spouse is an immigrant. Your land is on fire. Your son is transgender. Your house is flooded. Your sister is a victim of gun violence. Your brother is gay. Your water is unsafe. Your daughter is a sexual assault survivor.”

Dawn Serra: It’s like you said, I get the sentiment and these things are true for so many people, but I also think there are so many people who are so far from this being their truth that their stories and prejudice are going to override the sentiment. If I have stories about what indigenous people are and they’re not kind stories because they fit the stereotypes, then my reaction to that is going to be, “But I would never be friends with someone like that.”

Tristan Taormino: Why are they missing? Where do they go to? What kind of nonsense did they get wrapped up in? These excuses we make, right? 

Dawn Serra: Right. Or like if my sister was a victim of gun violence, if I’m a middle class white person, then I probably have a lot of faith in the criminal justice system. And so, my reaction to that is going to be like, “Well then, we’ll get the bad guy.”

Tristan Taormino: “We’ll put the bad guy away.” 

Dawn Serra: Right, right. I mean, I think the sentiment is like, “Treat your neighbor like yourself” kind of the golden rule. But I think we’ve seen that that fails because we don’t have– There’s too many of us that don’t have relationships with people that are significantly different from us. And so, if I fundamentally don’t understand what it’s like to be poor, which the Betsy Devos of the world have no fucking idea, then I’m not going to be able to imagine that. So my empathy doesn’t get triggered.

Tristan Taormino: But do you need to imagine it to have empathy? That’s the thing. Do you need to imagine it or can you just know that you want people to have safe water? 

Dawn Serra: Right. And that’s what I’m more interested in is instead of trying to trigger this false sense of empathy, I just really want… Do human beings deserve to live lives that are safe, that have access to basic food and water and a roof over their head? And if your answer to that is “It depends on the person,” then no amount of empathy, begging is going to get you to understand what I’m hoping for.

Tristan Taormino: Yeah. You honed in on it. It’s about empathy. This is sort of trying to solicit a kind of empathy that humans don’t all have. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. And maybe they have, but for whatever reason it’s become buried or blocked by trauma. 

Tristan Taormino: Or the fear or the fear of resources and the fear of losing is overriding it. Like you said. Their own fears about losing their job, losing their healthcare, losing their homes overrides it. 

Dawn Serra: Right. And all of it is fed by all of our stories of “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and the hyperindividualism because we’ve been taught that we should be able to fix all the things ourselves and provide for ourselves. So there’s no space in the imagination of so many Americans specifically of, “Well, what if I did lose my job and what if I did lose my house? And the community coming together and me not having to be afraid because I don’t have to do it alone.” That’s just not even within the imagination of so many people.

Tristan Taormino: Because we’ve gotten away from this idea of living in groups of people, multigenerational households. The white European colonial model is, I’ve always thought this was amazing. It’s like, everyone has to have their own washing machine and dryer. That’s a thing in middle class America, right? But what if four people shared a washer and a dryer? They have their own houses, they have a laundry room, they have space for it, but everyone doesn’t need it if they all live within a block of each other.

Dawn Serra: Yup. Mind blown off for so many people.

Tristan Taormino: Well, it’s just a sense of interdependence but capitalism sort of thrives on us all having our “own stuff.” When there are things, I think, that we don’t all individually need to have to survive and even thrive. I mean, I don’t do laundry every day. You know what I mean? Right. I don’t know why I thought of that. Maybe because I have to do laundry? I don’t know. 

Dawn Serra: But you’ve got your own washing machine and dryer. 

Tristan Taormino: But when my washer was broken, we did our laundry at our next door neighbors which isn’t that bad. You don’t have to carry it that far. You can take it out of the dryer. You don’t have to fold it. You just come home and fold it. It’s really right next door. Anyway…

Dawn Serra: Well, I would love for you to share with everyone how they can support your Patreon for your memoir and stay in touch with you and find out all the cool things that you’re doing in the world. 

Tristan Taormino: My Patreon is simple. It’s patreon.com/tristantaormino and there’s all sorts of levels. So it starts at $2. It’s super affordable. And then as the levels go up, you get lots of cool perks, like a shout out on my podcast or presents from me or even phone calls with me. So they can check it out and I appreciate every single one of my patrons. I’m also on social media. I do my own social media and I’m on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook (@TristanTaormino). I’m very active on Instagram. So if people want to engage me, that is the best place to do it because Instagram – I just like Instagram. I don’t know why. I’m grooving with Instagram right now. That may change. My not safe for work website is puckerup.com. My safe for work website tristantaormino.com. They can listen to my podcast, Sex Out Loud wherever they get their podcasts. If you want a direct link to iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, you can go to sexoutloudradio.com – sexoutloudradio.com. 

My sex educator boot camp, sexeducatorbootcamp.com.Dawn had a huge hand in that, that website wouldn’t exist. They can sign up for my newsletter and I’m out and about in the world so they can also maybe see me in their hometown. 

Dawn Serra: Yes. Definitely get to a Tristan workshop if you haven’t already because they are super fun. I will have all of those links on the website dawnserra.com and in the show notes for this episode so that you can follow Tristan all the places and check out her super cute dogs. And also the super sexy things that she gets up to. Tristan, thank you so much for coming on the show and absolutely giving me the best brain sex of the day. 

Tristan Taormino: I mean I don’t even know how you’re going to say what the show is about. 

Dawn Serra: It’s just going to be Dawn and Tristan talk about everything.

Tristan Taormino: Okay, because we did hit on a lot of things. There’s not maybe an overarching theme. I don’t know how are you going to pull that out. We just talk about everything. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. Thank you for being here and to everybody who tuned in, thank you so much. Of course, feel free to write into the show with your own questions, thoughts, comments. I would love that. And Tristan and I are going to go do a quick little conversation hopefully for Patreon. So if you support the show, patreon.com/SGRpodcast. And we will see you there. Bye.

Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured and this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and get awesome weekly bonuses. 

As you look towards the next week, I wonder what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?