Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

Social distancing has quickly changed all of our lives – but in very different ways. Some of us are alone, some of us are together with family and no respite in sight. How is social distancing impacting our erotic connections? What parts of social connection – or aloneness – are you missing and yearning for? What are your strategies for keeping your eroticism awake during this season of change? What adaptations might help you and your family get through this with more wellness and balance?

Please visit PleasureMechanics.com/care for all of our #LoveInTheTimeOfCorona episodes, sliding scale community access codes to our online courses and more resources.

Speaking of Sex Podcast Episodes Mentioned:

• Burnout : The Stress & Sex Connection Interview with Emily Nagoski
• Surviving Sexless Seasons

Other Resources:

• The Fantasy Method

Transcript for this episode is in process.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

Mutual Aid is an ethos of care that has risen out of multiple communities – including the disability rights movement & immigrant communities- that invites us to consider our interconnected webs of strengths and vulnerabilities, needs and assets. Rather than relying on “charity” models of giving that maintain power imbalances and systems of harm, we can step into modes of giving and receiving care that center mutualism, consent and solidarity.

In this interview with Aida Manduley, LCSW, we examine Mutual Aid as an embodied ethos of erotic justice.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

• Get A Therapist – Aida’s resource list to help you find a compassionate therapist
• How To Feel Your Feelings And Why You Should Try

GIVE GENEROUSLY:

We will be paying forward a percentage of our monthly sales – please join us in giving as generously as you are able!

• Third Wave Fund
• National Bail Out Fund

MORE ON MUTUAL AID & COMMUNITY CARE

• Mutual Aid Vs. Charity
• Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Resources
• Find a local Mutual Aid group

About Aida Manduley, LCSW

Aida Manduley, LCSW is an award-winning Latinx activist, facilitator, and presenter known for big earrings and tackling taboos. Their politics are radical, their life is ridiculous, and their penchant for irreverence as intimacy is notorious. Trained as a sexuality educator, social worker, and nonprofit executive, they’re working to make the world a more equitable place and get us all more comfortable with hard conversations. With a focus on liberation and communities marginalized due to race/gender/sexuality, their perspective aims to maximize kindness while retaining both a sense of humor and a sense of justice.

With over a decade of experience and degrees from Brown University and Boston University, Mx. Manduley’s areas of specialization include trauma, anti-carceral justice systems, and the integration of technology for change efforts. They are well-known for their leadership with The Women of Color Sexual Health Network as well as various other national and regional coalitions. They’re currently based in Boston where they have a thriving therapeutic practice at The Meeting Point. 

You can find them on Twitter (@neuronbomb), on Instagram (@aidamanduley), and on Facebook (http://bit.ly/FBaida) as well as their personal website, www.aidamanduley.com

More Podcast Interviews With Aida Manduley:

• Exploring Attachment Theory with Aida Manduley
• Sex and Social Justice with Aida Manduley

Transcript for Speaking of Sex Podcast Episode #369

Podcast transcripts are generated with love by humans, and thus may not be 100% accurate. Time stamps are included so you can cross reference or jump to any point in the podcast episode above. THANKS to the members of our Pleasure Pod for helping make transcripts and the rest of our free offerings happen! If you love what we offer, find ways to show your love and dive deeper with us here: SHOW SOME LOVE

Chris Rose (00:00):
Welcome to Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris from pleasuremechanics.com and wherever you are in the world as you are hearing this I am sending you so much love and support. It is mid April 2020. We are here in New York and we are just sending so much love and solidarity to our global community and beyond as we get through this global tragedy together. We are here with you, we are listening to your emails as they come in about how we can support you. And if you come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/care, that’s pleasuremechanics.com/care, you’ll find all of the resources we are gathering for you. And you will also find the sliding scale community access codes to all of our online courses. We know that so many of us are in financial free fall right now. So we have thrown open the doors to all of our online courses. If you feel like they can support you right now in connecting with your own erotic body or with the people you love, come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/care and dive a little deeper with us, learn massage, practice mindful sex, and let us support you through this. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/care.

Chris Rose (01:25):
On today’s episode we have a powerful conversation about mutual aid and it is inviting you into a stance and ethics on giving and receiving care. I hope this episode challenges you and opens your mind and opens your heart to knowing the boundless nature of what we have to give to support one another with. We’re not in this episode just talking about cash, although we are talking about that too. We’re talking about care and love and time and resources and talents and skills and all of the things we have to share together as humans to care for one another, show one another love and support one another’s lives and well being. This is an urgently true conversation right now. We hope you get benefit from it and if you do, please check out the show notes page for further resources. Resources that will support you and ways that you can support others with all of your gifts and talents.

Chris Rose (02:34):
Yes, so definitely check out the show notes page on this episode, it is a treasure trove of resources for you and come on over to pleasuremechanics.com/care where you will find this episode along with all of the other resources we are gathering for you and our sliding scale community access codes. That’s pleasuremechanics.com/care and on with our conversation, here we go. Welcome to Speaking of Sex. Can you get us started by introducing yourself and the work you do in this world?

Aida Manduley (03:09):
Absolutely. My name is Aida Manduley I’m based out of Boston my pronouns are they/them/theirs in English, ella and elle in Spanish. And the work I do is the work of healing and liberation broadly defined. So that means that I have a private practice as a therapist out of Boston, which is now all virtual, because of the coronavirus pandemic. But I also do consulting, education, presenting across the US and abroad. So it’s a lot of sort of micro work with individuals and relationships and then macro work that’s larger in scope. I also am fortunate to be part of a bunch of different collectives and sort of larger groups that do things on policy or larger advocacy because I love to put my fingers in all pies. And so I want my desires that span honestly like, my sexuality and my work desires are very sort of greedy in that way and I say that positively rather than negatively, so. Putting stuff kind of everywhere.

Chris Rose (04:19):
Thank you for naming this. We’re recording this on April 11 2020. And we’re in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic. But what I’m finding now is so much of what is always been true is urgently true. And so I invited you into this conversation to talk about some concepts that are always true for me within the human family but are now urgently true. So whenever you’re listening to this conversation, hello into the future. Whenever you’re listening to this conversation, I hope you find resonance in this and can apply it to both your immediate situation and the global situation, however you’re finding it as you listen to this podcast. So we’re going to talk about mutual aid as an embodied ethos of erotic justice. Mutual aid as an embodied ethos of erotic justice, and we’ll move through this sentence together. Because a lot of these concepts will feel new to you as you’re hearing them. But I also invite you to feel into the truth that perhaps you already feel about them.

Chris Rose (05:32):
So I invite you into that already knowing this that might be rising in you. So can you lead us off? What is mutual aid and how is it risen as an ethos, as a framework of care?

Aida Manduley (05:45):
So mutual aid is not a concept that I invented by any means. I want to make that super clear. But mutual aid is something that comes out of different fields like philosophy, organization theory and anarchism things like that. And at its most basic, the idea is that people are caring for each other and people are exchanging resources and services for mutual benefit, right? And the mutual is actually really important there because that is one of the things that distinguishes it from charity. Where charity is more, top down charity is more Oh, we the people that have things will give to people that don’t. And it’s a little bit of a head pat kind of situation. Mutual aid is more about solidarity, the way that I practice it, it’s about seeing what are the gifts that I have to bring to the world? And what are the things that I need? And how do I connect to people who might be a good match for that, right? So if I have a resource, or a capacity that someone else would benefit from, I would like to give that to them.

Aida Manduley (06:54):
And the idea of exchange within that again, some people will say, “Oh, I don’t want to exchange anything. I just want to freely give, and when I need something, I hope that someone will freely give it back.” That’s a beautiful interpretation of that, that also has a lot of roots in anarchism super support it. For some people, it feels really important for a lot of reasons and sometimes, from a history of freely giving and never getting anything in return or getting care back, it feels really important to clearly see the exchange. But in a nutshell, that’s what it is. And the idea is that it’s voluntary. It’s not something that is forced or there’s an entitlement to. And so if we look at the values within mutual aid or the values adjacent to it, there’s ideas of mutualism, there’s ideas of collectivism, and interdependence. And these are contrasted with individualism and independence, which are values that in the sort of modern United States are pretty prevalent and don’t align with actually a lot of communities that either have been originally here before the modern us was quote, unquote, founded. And they don’t actually match the values of a lot of other countries and other communities that are coming into the US.

Aida Manduley (08:11):
So this conversation by nature requires looking at things like race, class, immigration, etc. Because a lot of us have been steeped in the, bring yourself up by your bootstraps, you have to get everything done yourself and if you don’t, it’s a personal moral failing rather than, oh, maybe there are some other factors that play a part in this not just yourself.

Chris Rose (08:35):
And I want to draw up this piece that you were saying about what moral and ethical positions our traditional charity models tell us about giving and receiving help and care. And how deeply that infects our psyche down to how we can accept love and care from even our most intimate partners. How does this show up for us when we’re trained that giving and receiving is a power dynamic, that giving and receiving requires some sort of subordination of the receiver? How does this infect the humanity and dehumanize kind of all of us in the process?

Aida Manduley (09:18):
I’m going to get meta for a moment. One of the things that people often think is, oh, we have to prove with facts that people need help or that this is the right thing, and this is the wrong thing. And one of the things that I’ve learned as a therapist, as a fundraiser and as a community organizer, so three different fields, all kind of saying the same thing. People actually are moved by feelings rather than facts. Doesn’t mean that facts don’t matter. It means that you have to have an emotional frame and context for whatever ask you’re making for it to actually have a higher likelihood of success. So stories are the ways that humans have been communicating for millennia.

Aida Manduley (09:59):
We have been telling stories about our families, about our peoples for so many years. And that’s actually a better way, again if we’re getting into cognitive science, those are better ways to actually remember information. We’re not great as a species in remembering random facts. We’re great at remembering stories and sort of a more robust thing like that. A lot of us when we give, or we’re taught to give, have been told that the stories of our money or our resources are not the important thing, and that we shouldn’t really be considering them. That the stories that we need to judge are the stories of the people with need. And so there’s this imbalance of vulnerability, where the people who have needs are told, you have to show me like your blood type, your immigration status. You have to give me records for the last 10 years of your life, receipts for every coffee.

Chris Rose (10:55):
Isn’t that all proving your worthiness to receive help?

Aida Manduley (10:57):
Right, exactly. And so that brings up this not just the concept of the vulnerability imbalance but, whose story is invisible and thus seen as the default, right? Or as irrelevant to the choice of giving, when in fact, it is actually central to the choice of giving. So to do a slight departure, but again, I’ll stay on topic, I promise, Jeff Bezos, he has given to charity right? And he has given some of his wealth. And to most people in the world, it seems like a lot of money. Because for a lot of us it is. However, if you look at the context of his money, how he got his money, what his actual net worth is, it is pennies, actually less than pennies. And because we don’t often ask for that context, right? Of what percentage of your income is this? What percentage of your worth and wealth is this? When it is so easy and there are such a disparity of wealth, we have to ask some questions.

Aida Manduley (12:00):
So, vulnerability, disparity, lack of context, the story piece also brings up this idea of deserving poor, also deserving immigrants or undeserving immigrants, undeserving poor. And so as you were saying, Chris, there’s this story of, I’m going to give from this place of scarcity and out of context, and there’s going to be a humiliation and that giving.

Chris Rose (12:27):
And how does this, I’m so aware of how this model that I was trained in as a white person has disciplined me to position giving and receiving in certain ways, even in my erotic life. Like I felt like an erotic superhero for so long because I had so much to give. And I had all the tools to give, but receiving remains really hard for me and it was hard for me to ask what I wanted. And then when I became sick, it’s struck me so deeply how we are trained that if we need help you hire help. You don’t ask for help, because asking for help means you’re weak and have a vulnerability and that’s not okay. And because of need, I flipped into this model of radical vulnerability asking for help, showing how weak I had become, and what started emerging were really beautiful, intimate offers of care.

Chris Rose (13:27):
So I’m trying to make this bridge in between like how we think about giving and receiving philanthropically and charity wise versus mutual aid which calls upon all of our strengths and vulnerabilities. So some of us have hard cash, some of us have physical strengths, some of us have ability to make spreadsheets, some of us have ability to organize people and network. And when we tap into all of that, we realize how boundless all we have to give is. Where am I going with this? So there’s this link between like mutual aid and receiving oral sex that I’m trying to make here.

Aida Manduley (14:03):
I got you. I got you.

Chris Rose (14:05):
And in your life you, also I want to talk about the community element of this because so much of what I love about how you use social media, which is I think the main place we’re connected I guess. You make beautiful, bold, specific asks, and then you see this outpouring of willingness and care. And it’s almost on the daily. So can you talk about how you embody this in your daily life, your community, and perhaps even your erotic life?

Aida Manduley (14:35):
Absolutely. I mean, part of what you’re talking about, right? Is receiving and giving. Or receiving and asking versus offering and all these different things. One of the things that I would encourage everyone to think about as you’re listening, right? To this podcast is, again, what are the stories that you’ve been told about these things? What do you remember from your childhood about how it was okay to ask for help or not ask for help or offer help or not offer help. There are things that we are taught to invisibly receive, such as privileges, for example, right? So some people are trained in, “Oh, you got this trust fund, don’t question it. That’s just inheritance and that’s normal and you get to keep your inheritance forever and then pass it down to someone else.” Folks who get trust funds are rarely told, “Hey, you could just give this away. You could put other people as executors to your state.” While some people don’t even know what an executor to a state is.

Aida Manduley (15:36):
And there are ways that we are taught to give invisibly again, in parallel to IRAs. So if we look at emotional labor, jobs, or if we look at the managerial tasks in a household, often that falls to women. And again, not exclusively, but a lot of the world is heterosexual sort of, so I guess that is relevant. So there’s a lot of things that some of our bodies are told, you are supposed to do this job without complaining and it is your role in life. And so I would encourage all of us to look at what are the invisible things that we’re being asked to give? What are the invisible things are being asked to receive? Because actually starting to name that is one of the steps in actually moving outside of the models of scarcity and actually being more intentional with this work. Right? And so for me, being intentional with that has been shifting some of the stories I’ve been told about how to give.

Aida Manduley (16:36):
Some of the stories that I’ve grown up with about giving is that you give quietly or alternatively, mega loudly, right? And so for me the ways that I’ve started to shift that is, as an adult, I have tried to be louder about my giving, not from a place of let me brag, but from a place of how can I motivate other people to A, give and be in solidarity, and B, see that there are so many things we can give that are not cash, right? Cash is actually deeply important. I very much encourage people to give cash. But for those of us who may not have as much as the next person, what are other resources that we can feasibly give? And so for me, a lot of it is I want to be loud, I want to model some of this so that other people are motivated to do it.

Aida Manduley (17:29):
Which is why I’ve also put out a lot of offers, especially recently during the pandemic, to like, help people out thinking through this, because it can be really overwhelming, right? Because technically, what I’m asking people to do is okay, I want you to look at all the stories you’ve been told, I want you to start challenging those stories, find alternative stories, start taking action, inventory all your resources, start sharing them, etc, etc. That’s a lot. I’m asking a lot. And it doesn’t have to happen in five minutes, right? So the other piece that I sort of bring up in how to bridge this is, looking at this as a long term project, that is a marathon, not a sprint, but has a sense of urgency that will actually not go away and will just increase over time.

Aida Manduley (18:17):
So for me, erotically, right? In my personal life, this means that I have and I’m having more now, because I actually didn’t have this for many years. I’m having more explicit conversations about resources and finances with all my partners. This means that when I am sexually engaging with someone, I want to talk about kind of the same thing. What are our resources? What are our gifts? How do we want those to play with each other? So that sometimes means “Hey, here’s my like, two million sex toys that I have here from years in the field of sexuality education. What of these are you interested in, if any? It might mean ,”Hey, I need this particular form of care or sex because of a trauma response.” Or I need the X, Y, Z. So the skills around asking, around grounding and feeling, are actually super helpful in the sexual arena as well. Right?

Aida Manduley (19:23):
And that might seem more obvious because we usually talk about sex and feelings rather than feelings and money. But what this means is that for people who are more comfortable talking about sex, instead of money, you already have some of the skills in there to talk about money and vice versa. So that, Chris, that resonates with what you were saying earlier about, you already have some of this knowledge, you just have to kind of feel into it. I’m trained as a social worker. And one of the big ways that we talk about skill development is strike space. There’s already a lot of strikes in all of us that we just need to sometimes discover or hone, but that we don’t have to necessarily look externally for everything. There’s a lot of resources within us. And so that’s the other frame that I would bring to this. Strikes based, what do you already have, that can be a gift to yourself and the world? You are part of the world, so that’s inseparable.

Aida Manduley (20:26):
Rather than, “Oh, I have to do all these new things that are really scary and overwhelming.” You already have a lot of that within you, and you’re not alone, right? And if you are, for whatever reason, that is something that doesn’t have to be that way forever, it’s something that can change.

Chris Rose (20:42):
I want to pull this thread of specificity, because it draws out that we all do have specific gifts and talents. And we all have very specific vulnerabilities and means and it is a matchmaking process. And this is one of the things you do so beautifully, because I’ll see you post something like, “I need someone to work on a spreadsheet to organize this part of my life with me. Does anyone have time and effort for that right now?” And you get this gleeful outpouring of like, “I live for spreadsheets, there’s nothing I’d rather do.” And I’ve seen you do this over time to know that whatever your ask is, you have this joyful outcry of, I have something to offer here. And what we see in that is that offering what we have, what we know, what we do well, feels good. And part of the feeling good is that we’re doing it together.

Chris Rose (21:37):
So this is that erotic bridge I want to draw out here because when we’re talking about the erotic in the Audre Lorde sense of feeling big feelings together. There are so many ways to seal feelings together.

Aida Manduley (21:54):
I really really love connecting people. That just brings me a lot of joy. I love looking at this idea of strange bedfellows, right? Who isn’t talking that might have a fun time talking? Who isn’t collaborating that might have a fun time collaborating? So looking at, okay, I care about sex and queerness, but also environmentalism is really important. Have we done anything about that intersection? If not, let’s make it happen. And so that’s sort of the nice part of where that comes from for me. The harder part is overwhelm. So part of me doing some of this more public asking and more public matchmaking is just the deep sense of grief and overwhelm personally in my own life, but also, there’s so much to be done in the world. It is absolutely bananas. It is, if I look at the enormity of it and sit with it, which, I do regularly and it’s actually important, so don’t just ignore that context and intellectualize it. Like I invite all of us to feel that every so often.

Aida Manduley (23:00):
It is awful, it feels so big. But for my own peace of mind and my own mental health, knowing that I am not alone in that is actually super helpful for my mental health and for my existence. Knowing that I’m part of a web of people, knowing that people have done this work before me and will continue to do it after is amazing. It makes me feel more powerful, because I know I’m not trying to tackle capitalism, global hunger, climate change by myself. This is a group thing and so if I can help foster the group, and if I can help nourish the group, that’s beautiful. To build off the bridge that you mentioned, right? So this piece around connecting as well. A lot of people like to give. A lot of people feel good when they help meaningfully. A lot of people feel alone and unnecessary, and that’s a bad feeling for them. So when I think of asks, I don’t just think about it from a place of I am weak and need help.

Aida Manduley (24:10):
It’s, I am offering people an opportunity to use their gifts. I’m offering people a chance to show reciprocity and care because I offer a lot of reciprocity and care too. Right? And even if I didn’t offer any care, or if I had very, very high needs comparatively to my quote, unquote, output, this is an offer, right? I am letting people love me, I am letting people care for me or others. And if we look at, the love languages that get talked about a lot in relationship circles and sexuality circles, one of the love languages is service. And service doesn’t usually feel really good if it is just foisted on you. But if you are giving someone the opportunity to offer it. Right? This is a gift, right? Giving service and receiving service is a set of gifts. And I think that’s a useful reframe for people who think that asking is burdening people, or who thinks that having needs is bad.

Aida Manduley (25:16):
It doesn’t have to be that way. We can think about it differently because it can be different. And if we ask specifically, that’s the other part of it. To me, this bridges with consent. I want to let people know what they’re getting into. I want to be responsible with my request, as much as I can be. Right? Sometimes we don’t know what the hell we need. And it’s messy, and that’s okay. But being clear about the messiness is important. To me, it feels important to again, as much as we can be clear, because that also mirrors my values around consent and transparency, which I use in my sex life as well. Sometimes I’ll tell someone, “Okay, hey, I’d like to have sex with you.” What does that mean? Really have no idea, but let’s figure it out together. Sometimes it means, “Hey, I’d like to hook up and do X, Y, Z, are you interested in that or something else.”

Aida Manduley (26:12):
And so again, the skills that we have in one arena can very easily translate with a little tweaking sometimes, into sort of building a new capacity or skill set that we need for the betterment of the world.

Chris Rose (26:26):
So my next two questions were on enoughness, and on consenting care. So I think we’ve pulled both of those threads a little bit. I want to circle back to enoughness. Because I think this is one of the big mental barriers we throw up is how could it possibly ever be enough? So how do you approach the idea of enoughness? And do you find that the more generous you are, the less you ask that question?

Aida Manduley (26:51):
Yes. Honestly, the enoughness is often just not the point. Right? I think we’re missing the point. The point is, how do we do more healing? And there’s not a magic number of what that looks like. There will always be need in the world. But that doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to work on it. And, to me this idea of enough, I see it in two different ways, right? So there’s the good enough versus perfect. And so, I would want to separate that from, did I give enough to be worth it? Because those are different. So, perfection versus enoughness in the first scenario, often means that people are looking for again some quote unquote objective measure that if they are not meeting, they are bad if they are not perfect they did a poor job, they should fly into the sun. Perfection, right? And here’s a very cliched phrase, but it’s useful.

Aida Manduley (27:59):
Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good, right? Don’t let this unattainable ideal of Oh perfect prevent you from making progress. Right? So I like to think of it more as and here’s where we get into math from high school. I like to think of it as an asymptotical relationship. And basically what that means is, we are always striving, never reaching. So it’s just like, edging. We’re just sexually edging but emotionally. And-

Chris Rose (28:32):
I love this so much.

Aida Manduley (28:36):
So we’re always getting closer but never getting there, which again, for some people who like edging they’re like, “Oh, perfect. I just always want to be doing that.” For some people who like the actual maybe climax or I do actually want to get there. What do you mean I just have to edge myself until I die. The other way of looking at it is, the edging is global. But you can have milestones and you can have reachable goals. And in fact, that’s actually really important. So we need a little bit of both. We need the very zoomed out, “Hey, we’ll never necessarily fix every problem. But if we zoom in here are some milestones on the path that we can actually do. Right? So if we think of fixing, lack of abortion access globally, that is really overwhelming. But if we think okay, in my state, what can I do here to address abortion access? That becomes more manageable.

Aida Manduley (29:34):
And the idea is to find the sweet spot between this is small enough that it is manageable and big enough that it is challenging. And the same thing goes for giving financially. We want to find the sweet spot of this feels bold, but also this is not ruining my entire life. And because those are things that are attached to feelings, we have to usually not do that by ourselves. Because what our feelings say is sometimes not accurate, right? Our feelings are always valid, but they’re not always true. Right? So maybe me giving $5 a month feels extremely dangerous and it might be extremely within my financial capacity and then some. So one of the things I encourage people to do with this concept of enoughness is to have buddies and at least have one other person that they’re checking in with about it. And ideally, someone who is not of the exact same social standing or position that they are. But have one buddy that has more or less. Have a little bit of a challenge here in terms of who you’re talking to.

Aida Manduley (30:51):
So that’s one big cluster of enoughness. The other cluster of enoughness is around, did I do enough to be worth it? It’s always worth it, that’s the secret. Any work that we do to heal the world and heal ourselves and the environment is always going to be worth it even if it seems insubstantial, right? Because suffering is something that all of us at some point will have to deal with. And even if we can’t fix the suffering of 20,000 people, if we can at least address the suffering of one person, and that one person might be ourselves, it is worth doing that work. Obviously, I would also encourage us to think okay, how could I maybe expand the amount of people that I help or provide resources to or share responsibility with? Absolutely. And that’s where in terms of my training, therapeutically, there’s a type of therapy called DBT dialectical behavioral therapy.

Aida Manduley (31:54):
One of the big things in that therapy model is this idea of the dialectic. The idea of holding seemingly opposing and contradictory ideas or feelings at the same time. So with this sort of thing, and DBT in general, the dialectic is often between change and stay the same. So find acceptance, build acceptance for where you currently are, and also challenge yourself to shift and change. And that can seem really hard to do, and it is, but it gets easier with practice. And so that’s the other part around enoughness that I would invite people to think about. How do you build acceptance for what you’re doing right now and consider that enough, while also challenging yourself and considering Okay, maybe it’s not enough, what would it look like to change it? And that’s, again, that tension is honestly the sweet spot for me and I would guess for a lot of people as well, though it’s hard to cultivate.

Chris Rose (33:00):
So I want to ask you a little bit about the current cultural moment and especially how it feels, you have been living and loving in this field for many years. And now we have the governor of New York State saying, “We have to live for the we, not the me.” We have social distancing teaching us this massive lesson about public health and how we really are healthy and well as communities rather than as individuals. There’s this kind of accelerated massive spotlight on some of these concepts. What are your feelings about that? And what are your kind of calls to action so we don’t lose these as a temporary crisis response and instead start embodying them and living into them as a possibility for something to build a culture around.

Aida Manduley (33:56):
Absolutely. If we turn to feelings for a moment again, anger and anxiety can be really good motivational feelings that are just to do something. Which is where, I also like to reframe, again because I’m therapist, I also like to reframe some things that we might find as problematic, right? Like there’s a lot of gifts that those of us who have trauma or mental illness or whatever have to bring to this moment. So just want to sort of put a little pin in that. But in terms of feelings anger, anxiety can be really motivating. It can get us out the door. Those can’t really be the only fuel that we use. It’s not sustainable long term. Similarly, compartmentalizing things, not sustainable long term without ill health effects mental and body wise. So I would encourage us to use yes those feelings when we can to motivate us or get us out of bed or get us sort of rolling however.

Aida Manduley (34:59):
But also grounding it in other feelings and other values, because those are the ones that when everything else goes away are going to be at the foundation and at the core. If we’re only burning on spite and rage, I love rage, I use it all the time in my work. Many career choices have been made out of deep rage, and I will own that. Things like peace, things like desire, things like love even if that sounds super hippie dippie, those are the things that at the end of the day are going to actually maintain us long term. But they need that balance of the rage, the grief, the despair.

Aida Manduley (35:39):
And we also need time to freeze right? So giving ourselves the permission to take a breath. Giving ourselves permission to just have a day, where we focus on ourselves. Giving us permission to deal with our own health, rather than I only have to be giving to other people all the time and ignore myself, ignore my physical body or its needs. That’s a big part of it. Again, just not just shifting the thinking, but shifting the story around what we’re doing, why and how long it’s going to last. Because if we think that this is just going to be over in a week, we’re going to be A wrong and B disappointed. However, right? You can’t see me but I’m doing a lot of on one hand, on the other hand, on one hand, on the other hand. I gesticulate a lot, please use your imaginations everyone.

Chris Rose (36:33):
And I want to say frustrated in the gap between expectation and reality.

Aida Manduley (36:39):
Absolutely, absolutely. And on the other hand, right? Also thinking about, okay, what are the milestones? What are the checkpoints? And also sometimes it is measured in, do I feel better? Do I feel good? What does it look like for me to know that I feel better? How could I tell, right? Are my cheeks rosier? Is my sleep better? Do I eat without stress? What does that mean for me or you specifically? And getting involved in that part of things. So the story shifting expectations and thinking zoomed out, then also thinking zoomed in, thinking in smaller chunks that are achievable. We need, that little rush of I did it, building in celebration is what I’m talking about. So when we do this work long term, if we’re just moving from a place of rush and anxiety and anger, we often don’t give ourselves time to take a moment and celebrate what we just did, because we’re on to the next thing. So cultivating pause and cultivating celebration is super, super, super, super important in doing this in a way that is sustainable, and doesn’t burn us out and doesn’t leave us just hating everyone around us and then never doing anything again.

Chris Rose (37:59):
Right within our life positioned around aid and care and assisting and helping other people deeply and giving, what do you receive from generating joy and play in your life and sharing those connections with others?

Aida Manduley (38:13):
Oh my god, more joy and play. Frankly, there’s a conversation that happens in a lot of non monogamy circles about love is not a finite resource, the more love you have in your life, the more it generates. And I found that to be really true. And it doesn’t have to be love born out of I’m having sex with 25 people. It’s love that’s shared with those who we see as our family or those who we see as with us as comrades in whatever. And so one of the things that, for me, it gives us a sense of community, and that’s one of the things if we’re thinking back about giving and solidarity, charity, all of that stuff, we need to expand a lot of us, not all of us. But a lot of us need to expand who we feel for, who we feel as part of our kin.

Aida Manduley (39:09):
Not because we necessarily have to then give everyone the same amount of resources or care or personal time, but because empathy and knowing that we’re part of a larger web of humanity is really important. Obviously, while holding the differences that also make us really amazing. I don’t want us to just be like, oh, we’re all the human race. Amazing. We have no differences. But we are all the human race, right? Like we have to think about and expand who we think is worthy, who we think is disposable, who we think is worth existing. Because when we start dehumanizing other people, when we start turning them into numbers, that’s when things get real bad and dangerous. And sometimes we do that without even realizing it. So to me the joy and the play and the connection brings me pleasure, or just straight up pleasure. And it also brings me the bomb to dehumanization. Because I see what it is like to be in community. And yes, there is stress, there is rage, there is distrust, there’s all these things that we can classify as negative, but they also increase my capacity and likelihood of experiencing the positives and the things that feel really light.

Aida Manduley (40:33):
It can look like a lot of things. And so what I would again, what I would encourage people who are listening to think about is, what are the things that A, you currently find pleasurable and playful and silly that you could maybe do more of? And also think about the things that you’ve been told that is not appropriate for you to do anymore because it is too juvenile. And maybe it’s time to reclaim some of those.

Chris Rose (41:01):
Thank you so much. You’ve really been a guide and help for us as we continue to expand our capacity for feeling big, for generating and for giving and caring. So thank you so much for your leadership, for your life, for your vitality and for your joy.

Aida Manduley (41:18):
Thanks. The pleasure is definitely shared. Which is part of the point.

Chris Rose (41:24):
Thank you so much and we will see you next time on Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. Thank you so much.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

A quick dispatch amidst all of the disruption and overwhelm of the global coronavirus pandemic.

Our home ground during this global emergency will be https://www.pleasuremechanics.com/care

During this time of global emergency, Pleasure Mechanics online courses are open to all.

We can support you with tools & strategies to nourish one another with touch, connect with those you love & resource yourself with pleasure.

Community Access Codes:

• CARE33 = 33% off
• CARE = 50% off

If you would like access to our courses and the above community access codes are not enough of a discount, please be in touch with us and we’ll work it out!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tune in on: Spotify | RSS

Please visit PleasureMechanics.com/care for updated resources on this global emergency – we love you – stay safe, stay connected.

This podcast was recorded on March 11, 2020, after we were recovering from family illness during the first few weeks of the global coronavirus outbreaks. As we watch this global situation unfold, this episode is a call to arms – a reflection on how we all must learn to act wisely, love bravely and care deeply as we face this, together.

We draw upon the wisdom from the community of early AIDS activists who organized and advocated for their community while immersed in the grief and fear of their own losses. ACTUP, an early community care coalition still active in AIDS advocacy, stands for the Aids Coalition To Unleash Power. With wisdom and love we too can unleash our own power and face this epidemic, together.

Be safe out there, and be in touch with us.

Update and Correction: This episode was recorded in the very early days of the Coronavirus pandemic, and we inaccurately called it “like a flu virus” Coronavirus is not the same as the “flu” virus, and it was inaccurate to name it such. The episode was edited and corrected to prevent misinformation. Big love to @CazKillJoy for the callout and correction! Check out their powerful resource guide for those of us with chronic illness facing this pandemic.

Public Health & Care Work Wisdom Resources

FlattenTheCurve.com – Easy to understand, evidence based best practices for minimizing risk for all

Care Work: by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Prentis Hemphill on Contagion, Consent and Connection

---

Podcast Transcript for episode #368: Love In The Time Of Corona

Chris Rose (00:00):
Welcome to Speaking of Sex with the Pleasure Mechanics. I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose (00:05):
I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose (00:06):
We are the pleasure mechanics, and on this podcast we have explicit, honest conversations about sex, love, bodies and beyond. Come on over to pleasure mechanics.com to find our complete podcast archive, over 360 episodes waiting for you and organized by topic in our index, so you can dive in. And definitely head to pleasuremechanics.com/free to join our free online course and go a little deeper with us.

Chris Rose (00:42):
We are back. We had a really intense February of illness, and our whole family was ill and it was persistent. Our daughter was out of school for over a month, and we are now returning to you strangely in a new world, in the era of the Coronavirus.

Chris Rose (01:11):
We are recording in the early days of March, and at this time of recording, this is now being called a global pandemic, but we are still in early days. But we, as we return to this podcast, we, of course have a document with hundreds of topics about sex and fucking and orgasms and ejaculations and erections and all kinds of thing and love and being a longterm couple and all sorts of things we want to talk to you about. And how could we talk to you about anything but this right now?

Charlotte Rose (01:45):
This is top of mind for so many people around the globe right now, and we have people listening all around the world. So we just wanted to speak to this.

Chris Rose (01:55):
And as I was approaching this podcast, we’ve been sitting with it for a few days, as we’ve recovered ourselves and you still may hear some scratchiness in our voice, and we do want to thank you by the way, for your patience as we didn’t produce a new podcast episode for weeks on end. We love being with you week to week and having this ongoing conversation over the years with so many of you, and we appreciate all the emails that came in out of concern when we were ill.

Chris Rose (02:26):
As we got ready to record a new episode and started thinking about where do we pick up this conversation about pleasure, about orgasms, about love, about mindful sex, all of the things we talk about on this podcast, the Coronavirus global pandemic emerged over the past few weeks. Just as our family was regaining health and our voices and sending our daughter back to school, schools were being shut down. Entire countries are in quarantine and we have a global pandemic, a global pandemic of a virus – but also a pandemic of fear, a pandemic of fear, of social isolation and of mistrust, anxiety, worry.

Chris Rose (03:17):
And, we in this conversation, without bypassing anything that is true right now, we want to pave the way back to love. How do we use this moment to source, generate and share more love with one another and more care, because, we’re going to need it.

Chris Rose (03:39):
So we’re calling this episode love in the time of Corona. Love in the time of Corona, both as a nod, a bow to the great novel, Love in the time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but also love in the time of Corona because we believe love is going to quite literally be the medicine that sees us through this.

Chris Rose (04:04):
And we don’t say that in a trite, flippant way. What we want to explore in this episode is how if we center love and care and compassion, instead of fear and mistrust and anxiety, how that actually prepares us to survive this together.

Chris Rose (04:24):
All right, so deep breaths. Let’s fill those big healthy lungs with oxygen. Let’s first acknowledge all of the people already impacted by this disease, all of the people already deceased, all of the people already infected and suffering with this disease, all of their loved ones, all of the caregivers, all of the emergency and medical professionals who are working their asses off right now. So let’s just hold some love for them as we get started in this conversation.

Chris Rose (04:55):
And let’s get started by acknowledging what is real for so many of us. So many of us are suspended in a state of panic and fear and worry right now. Basically, in every city around the world and spreading now out into the surrounding areas of those cities, this virus, the Coronavirus that’s causing COVID-19 is what most people are thinking about. And what a moment where we have a global moment of shared awareness, but it is an awareness of fear of anxiety.

Chris Rose (05:33):
And we have seen this before, and one of the things I wanted to bring to this conversation was all of the wisdom that has been shared with me in my conversations with my gay elders. I lived in San Francisco and I had a lot of older gay friends, and I worked for Joseph Kramer who was on the front lines of this. And the conversations I had with them about how their community survived the first years of the AIDS epidemic will inform this conversation.

Chris Rose (06:06):
And I want to draw from the wisdom of that community that ran one of the most successful public health campaigns while they were in the midst of their community epidemic. While they were saturated with fear, with anxiety, with grief and mourning, they activated themselves and organize themselves into a force of love and care and compassion, not only on the front lines for those that were ill, but socially with social awareness around the virus, and politically to get laws changed to create more care and health care and rights for their community that was in a crisis.

Chris Rose (06:48):
So all praise to the AIDS activists that show us that this is possible. It is possible to survive this, and not only survive this, but use this moment to come together, care for one another so deeply, that culture itself is transformed by that care. Okay.

Charlotte Rose (07:13):
Yeah. And what we’re seeing now is the early stages of this virus spreading, and the anxiety and fear is so high. We see people panicking and shopping and collecting food and resources, which makes sense. But with that there are also waves of social mistrust, and fear, and racism emerging that we need to be aware of, and try and calm and shift and change, as we move into caring for ourselves and our communities and those that are really important to us.

Chris Rose (07:50):
And so what we’re seeing is an accelerated version of what we have seen in other virus pandemics. And it makes sense that everything is speeding up. Medicine itself, science itself has sped up. And so from the first illness with this virus, to naming the virus that was causing the illness and having its genetic map was only a matter of weeks.

Chris Rose (08:13):
And the panic and the fear has also sped up, partly because of social media, and also partly because of global communication, but also because this is a fast moving thing. This is just this past month, and our immediate reaction has been one of fear and panic. “Let’s hoard resources. Let’s all wear masks improperly.” We’re acting in a panicked way, for the most part.

Chris Rose (08:43):
What we need to do is, as quickly as all of this is moving, shift that into knowledge-based wisdom, and that knowledge-based wisdom will allow us to act with more care and compassion towards ourselves and those around us, who are going to start being affected by this illness.

Chris Rose (09:04):
What I mean by this is when we are in fear and in panic, we do things that don’t make sense. We act inappropriately to the situation. We feel overwhelmed, we feel flooded, we feel our nervous system freaking out into survival mode, and we start doing things. It’s like anything to survive. And this is why people’s news feeds have been flooded with misinformation in everything from the hippy dippy like, “Just eat more garlic and you’ll be fine,” to gargle with bleach and we see images of parents like Lysoling down their kids, the inappropriate use of these amazing tools we have.

Chris Rose (09:43):
So what we can learn here, like from the AIDS epidemic for example, it was in the first few years they treated this like it was a flu illness. Everyone was wearing hazmat suits, but as the knowledge became more accessible that this was a bloodborne illness, we could take off the hazmat suit, and start touching the AIDS patients as they were dying.

Chris Rose (10:08):
Once we knew it was not skin to skin transmitted, once we knew it was not transmitted through sharing drinks, and we all kind of remember this AIDS education that was mobilized, like, “Here are the ways you can catch AIDS, and here are the HIV and here are the ways you cannot.” All of that organization, all of that community education was mobilized from the gay community, itself. As it was being stricken with this, flyers were being xeroxed, handmade [inaudible 00:10:39] were being created. Meetings were being organized in the bath houses, and community activists were starting to tell people what they needed to know to stay calm and not panic.

Chris Rose (10:54):
And that’s what we need now, and we have this information just as rapidly as this is all emerging. And so on the show notes page, I’m going to share some of my favorite links that I’ve been gathering that really just lay out what do we know from the science evidence based approach to this virus spreading, what do we know, what are best practices and we can translate those best practices into wise action.

Charlotte Rose (11:24):
The action that each of us take is going to be different, depending on our risk factors or the people that we are in close contact with. We need to hold the complexity that this is a virus that will affect people differently.

Charlotte Rose (11:36):
So for some people they may need to take sick time off and that will create lost income, which will have a certain impact. And for somebody else it could be really life threatening. So we have to hold all of that.

Chris Rose (11:49):
So I want to introduce here the term community care, the idea of care webs and care networks. And this comes to us, both from AIDS activism but also from the disability justice activism and movement over the past few decades. And what this calls on, is this very real human truth that we each have different strengths, assets, weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

Chris Rose (12:20):
So in a moment like this, and I want to acknowledge here again what makes this different from the AIDS virus, and in many ways more scary and more serious, I have to say, is that this is not a bloodborne illness like AIDS.

Chris Rose (12:39):
And so it’s actually way, easier to catch. And right now just to say like the global estimates is that most people will be exposed to this. So we will all be reckoning with this, and this is why we had to bring this into the conversation, and how it has everything to do with our sex lives and our love lives, and we’ll keep bringing that in.

Chris Rose (13:01):
But one of the things I want to acknowledge here, we all have different strengths. We all have different vulnerabilities. So as you said, someone might have an awesome immune system, be really young and healthy, but their restaurant shuts down for closures, or they miss event income and that has devastating effects. Whereas someone else might have all the money in the world, but exposure to a virus could cause devastating illness or death.

Chris Rose (13:26):
And with that knowledge, with acknowledging that truth that yes, we all have vulnerabilities and yes we all have strengths and assets to bring to this. We activate what we call a care web, a care network where we can share both resources and care work. We share what we have to bring to the table, and we share our needs and vulnerabilities and ask for the help we need.

Chris Rose (13:51):
And communities of chronically ill and disabled folks, and people with HIV and AIDS have had to do this out of a survival in a culture that does not provide basic accessibility and care for a lot of people. But there is wisdom and there’s so much knowledge born out of these communities that have had to fight for their own survival. People are now like, “Oh my God, how do I stay at home for a few weeks?” There are a lot of people who are housebound all the time, and they have something to teach us about how to live at home well.

Chris Rose (14:28):
But for all of us, what this means is looking around us, and becoming really honest about what is your care web, where do you fit into that, what are your strengths and vulnerabilities in this moment, who are around you, what are their strengths and vulnerabilities, and how do you activate that web?

Chris Rose (14:47):
Now’s a great time to send emails to all the elderly people you know and love. Just check in on them. “I’m here. I’m thinking about you. I love you. Let me know what’s going on. Let me know if you need anything.”

Charlotte Rose (14:57):
Do you need anything?

Chris Rose (14:58):
Do you need or want anything? Our good new friend introduced this addition to it. Do you need or want anything? Because maybe what they want is social connection, and this is going to bring us to our next point. But we all need to be looking around us, activating our care webs, finding our strengths, like really digging deep and like, what are you bringing to this? What are your strengths, what are your resources, what have you hoarded, whether that be toilet paper and supplies that you might want to share with your elderly neighbors, or maybe you have hoarded health, and you’re in vibrant health and you’re going to be one of the people delivering meals, because you can handle this virus.

Chris Rose (15:36):
So start really taking inventory of what you have to bring to your care web and what you might need to ask for.

Charlotte Rose (15:44):
So this is about finding the people that you care about, that you love and seeing how you can be in service to them, and what you can ask for from other people. This is about caring and connecting with those we love. And this is so important, because this is a disease that is inviting social distancing. It is asking us to create isolation.

Charlotte Rose (16:07):
And so to counter that we must, it is a human need to be in connection with others.

Chris Rose (16:13):
And we have the technology to do it without exposing ourselves.

Charlotte Rose (16:17):
Exactly.

Chris Rose (16:17):
So just as the erotic massage community learned how to give one another erotic pleasure without exposing themselves to the fluids that carried the virus, and thus created this incredible web of love and pleasure. And Annie Sprinkle in New York city, started hosting healing circles where they shared love and presence and listened to one another as they grieved, but also breathed together and share touch.

Chris Rose (16:45):
We need to figure out how can we deeply connect, while keeping ourselves safe? So social distancing, this is what’s going to be one of the most painful parts of this virus, and I just want to name it now so we are prepared for it and we can start strategizing together. Social distancing, both because workplaces and schools will be closed, cities and countries are and have been and will continue to be quarantined, and we will be asked to stay at home.

Chris Rose (17:15):
Not because you yourself might get sick, but because you might be a carrier for the virus that exposes the vulnerable populations. And when this kind of virus that is so nasty gets exposed to such a wide, when we talk about vulnerable populations, that’s elderly, but that’s also the chronically ill, like me. So I also want to say you’re ableism is showing if in these conversations you’re like, “Well it only affects the old people, so fuck them.”

Chris Rose (17:46):
It affects old people, people with chronic illness, people with organ transplants, all sorts of immunosuppressed people, immunosuppressed children. And no one should have to justify their humanity to be counted here.

Chris Rose (18:01):
Onwards, we are going to be asked to socially isolate, either because we are actively sick and thus need really intense quarantine, or because your whole town is kind of on lockdown and you’ll be asked just to stay home as much as possible. And there is social isolation in the fear and anxiety about how this is being transmitted. And so the masks we’re seeing people wear improperly, the gloves, we are becoming touch phobic at a time when isolation and loneliness are already being named as public health crises.

Chris Rose (18:39):
So what is the medicine for this? How do we leverage this moment? I want us to look around and first name the fact that we’re all interconnected. We see it now, with like no rose colored glasses needed. It’s not like, “Oh, we’re all one, kumbaya.” We are all one species on this globe.

Charlotte Rose (19:02):
We see how interconnected we all are. It’s amazing.

Chris Rose (19:04):
Phew. We’re a fast moving species, like we are one organism.

Chris Rose (19:11):
Okay. Reigning it in, time to unify, time to look around and be like, Wow, I’m really deeply connected. I am never alone.” So even if you’re in social isolation, even if you’re in quarantine, you are as connected to the entire human species as the rest of us. We are all one in this, and you have your place in that. So welcome to humanity. We see it now as this global species, and we all need each other.

Chris Rose (19:36):
We’re all going to need each other in these really intense ways. And so, one of the counters for this, and we’re going to start with communication, and digital technology is amazing. Thank God for video conferencing and email and all of those things right now, right, while we still have them, satellites, please stay up.

Chris Rose (19:58):
We all need to reach out to each other. So we’re socially isolated. Let’s activate these technologies we have, and go through your contact list and text everyone you know. Think about everyone you know, start doing age reverse process. Everyone you know who’s 70 and up, write to first, and then go into the sixties, the fifties.

Chris Rose (20:20):
Think about the people you know and love, maybe a professor from college you haven’t talked to in 20 years, or the guy that works at the grocery store that you really like. Next time you’re in there be like, “Fred, how are you? I’m thinking of you. Stay safe out there buddy.” It is time to make deeper contact with one another.

Chris Rose (20:44):
And in some ways, we can use the technology to go global and really love and like tell one another, “we’re thinking,” but it’s also going to have to go really local and this will be a challenge for us, and in time where many of us don’t know our neighbors. Do you want to introduce yourself to the people that live around you or not? We’re all going to have to make these decisions, but let’s really approach this with a wisdom that if we are being told to socially isolate, we must counter with more connection, with more love, with more deliberate acts of social connection, sharing the emotions we’re all feeling in this moment.

Chris Rose (21:24):
Get on a zoom call with your four besties, and feel this together. Talk about the anxiety you’re having about your aging parents. Talk about what’s going on. This is a time to not isolate and lock down your emotions and feelings and feel alone, because actually this is a time where we’re all feeling the same thing together.

Chris Rose (21:45):
So how do we feel that? Audrey Lord talks about the erotic as feeling deep feelings together, and even this can be deeply felt, and yes can even be felt as erotic, because we are touching the core of life here, right? We are talking about our own survivability, which in many ways strips the sexuality out of the room. How many of us have been horny in the past few weeks? I’d actually love to hear that. How is this impacted your gender? Some of us might be fucking like it’s the end of the world, and we kind of want to talk about that too. How do we leverage eroticism right now? How do we flood our bodies with feel good hormones from orgasms that actually strengthen our immune systems, because fear and isolation depress our immune systems.

Chris Rose (22:38):
So even if we’re just talking on a scientific, epidemiological public health level right now, in our social isolation, we should all be having a lot more orgasms, a lot more touch with those of us who we are in a shared biosphere with. If you are in home lock down with the person you love, now is a great time to be deeply loving and touching one another, safely with protocol.

Chris Rose (23:04):
How do we do this? What are our survival strategies to get through this, loving and caring for one another deeply and sharing the fear and grief that is here and coming?

Charlotte Rose (23:17):
And I’ll add to that when we’re at home, how can we be kind and loving and caring to ourselves? How can we meet the other people that we are living with if we are not feeling like having wild crazy sex because we are feeling stressed? Can you cuddle on the couch and give one another a hand massage? How can we let ourselves touch and be touched, and connect and increase the amount of oxytocin in our system so that we can counter the fear that is everywhere? How can we intentionally make ourselves feel better in ways that feel authentic and right to you, whatever that is?

Charlotte Rose (23:56):
There is so much fear and anxiety that is everywhere right now. So trying to find ways where we can come back to a moment of calm in our own bodies, in our own homes, reset ourselves to a state of feeling loving and caring and connected-

Chris Rose (24:12):
… and safe, right?

Charlotte Rose (24:13):
… and safe.

Chris Rose (24:14):
We’re not feeling safe in the world. That’s part of the masks and the gloves, is that the panic responds to not feeling safe. And when we come home to one another or to ourselves, our sanctuary, how do we restore a sense of safety? And again, this is using the knowledge we have, developing protocol, and using that protocol and trusting yourself so then you feel safe. Right? So this is like using condoms to fuck.

Chris Rose (24:39):
It’s like if we use the tools we have, we can then return a sense of safety, or at least risk management, risk reduction. And that’s the other huge lesson is no one is safe from this. We are in a global communal practice of risk reduction. And there’s, communities that know a lot about this.

Chris Rose (25:00):
And so, I’ll link again to what are the practices that when you come home it’s going to now be, they’re going to be rituals of kind of like stripping down. And Charlotte, you actually, you have a lot of wisdom for this, because you lived with a sick partner in a state of fear and anxiety and had to return yourself to love constantly for years. Thank you. Like, right, you were a caretaker of the person you loved. But also you’re a little germ-phobic and a lot of the practices you have been doing naturally, are now being suggested.

Chris Rose (25:38):
So things, like Charlotte has indoor clothes and outdoor clothes. So she comes home from the outdoor world, and she strips down, a glorious moment, I might add. She strips down and she gets in indoor clothes. And those are the outdoor clothes, and they get washed and they’re going to be washed more often now.

Chris Rose (25:55):
We have a lot of insight to this because we were erotic masseurs, touching thousands of peoples, of genitals. So protocol becomes really important. How can you do that without risking transmission? You use protocol, gloves, hand washing protocol, but you learn to use them properly, right?

Chris Rose (26:13):
So as sluts at sex parties, with all of our trainings, I learned how to use gloves and lube and all of the tools so I could put my hands in 10 people in one night with zero risk of transmission. And I could have fun within that, without spinning out into anxiety.

Chris Rose (26:33):
And so using the tools we have properly, and this is why I’ll rail on the masks one more time. Masks are really important tools that are now in shortage, but because people aren’t using them properly, they’re actually increasing the risk of transmission. Just like wearing two condoms increases the risk of that condom breaking. Two condoms is not better than one. A mask worn improperly, is not better than no mask at all.

Chris Rose (27:00):
And so what we need to do is come into real alignment with what are the protocols and strategies that we can trust, because they’re evidence based, like we trust them. And then with that trust, we can relax.

Chris Rose (27:13):
And this is where it’s kind of deeply erotic, folks. Like, just like to do a big SM scene, you need to have enough trust that you can relax into the intensity. We’re going to all have to generate practices that allow us to find safety and refuge within this viral crisis.

Chris Rose (27:32):
Another big lesson I want to highlight from the AIDS epidemic and the community response to that epidemic, when the president of the United States was unwilling to say the word AIDS for years, while tens of thousands of people were being infected, the community that was burdened most by this virus, who were holding group funerals, who had dozens of friends in the hospital at once, they were the very people that mobilized into the activists, that in many ways got control of this virus. And it’s been named now in retrospect, one of the most effective public health campaigns.

Chris Rose (28:15):
And one of the big groups to form was a group called ACT UP. And what that stands for is the AIDS coalition to unleash power, ACT UP, the AIDS coalition to unleash power. And they hosted amazing protests and demonstrations and brought public art into it, and social awareness campaigns pre-internet, I add. And they put their lives and bodies and souls into advocating for their own community, for saying, “People are sick. We need medical care, we need more access to pharmaceuticals, we need faster drug approval processes. We need policy for the care that this crisis demands.”

Chris Rose (29:09):
And this is a moment, where globally we will see how government responds to this global crisis, creates disparate results for its citizens. I hope that especially, here in the United States, there is a huge movement born out of this for healthcare, for all, for recognizing that health is public. It’s a communal group event, and it is not something to allow private companies to hoard billions on.

Chris Rose (29:41):
This is just wisdom, based on what this public crisis demands, and healthcare in this country has been a crisis for a long time, but I hope the scale of this will accelerate the conversations about recognizing that health care and the love and care that is manifest in healthcare, it’s too easy to think about insurance companies and pharmaceuticals. And as a type 1 diabetic, insulin dependent, I am now relying on pharmaceutical companies and my health insurance, which just got incredibly more expensive.

Chris Rose (30:18):
By the way, please support us at pleasuremechanics.com/love. I am so aware of this in my own life, that to keep loving my family, to keep loving the people in my life, to show up for you all on this podcast, week after week I need medicine. I need care. And that’s not a character flaw. It’s time to stop treating healthcare like something people need to earn.

Chris Rose (30:46):
Healthcare for all allows all of us to show up with all of our strengths, and all of our assets for one another. And this is another huge lesson out of the chronically ill community, is some of the people who are struggling with the most intense disabilities have such incredible offerings. And if we give them access, if we give them the care to live, we then gain access to their offerings, right?

Chris Rose (31:16):
Community care, and this is going to become so visceral in this pandemic. It’s going to become so clear, crystal clear how we care for one another, who has access to care and who does not. And I hope and I pray that we all can generate way more, and I think maybe next week this has gone long enough, next week, let’s talk about generating love, what that means, what are the practices there?

Chris Rose (31:45):
How do we generate quite physically on a very practical level? How do we generate more love to share with one another as medicine? Love, meaning attention and care and presence, just connecting with someone and being like, “I feel you. You feel me? We’re feeling this together.” That is love. That is medicine.

Chris Rose (32:09):
Love is medicine. Cooking for one another and using our time and resources to nourish one another’s bodies into wellness, because illness often, what it needs most is rest, nourishment, care, tenderness, time. How do we give that to one another? How do we generate that for one another?

Chris Rose (32:30):
So I think this has gone on long enough. Love in the time of Corona, part one perhaps. I’m going to throw this back to Charlotte to bring us home with some love here, but I do want to say, we are here for you. We can keep doing our job from our home, and we will keep doing it as best, as we can. Please connect with us at pleasuremechanics.com. Please connect with us at pleasuremechanics.com/love, and show us some love, so we can keep being here for you. And talk to us.

Chris Rose (33:05):
We’re going to keep this conversation going. We’re going to keep talking about sex and pleasure and love and relationships, like all the things that we’ve been talking about. And I don’t think we’re going to rename the show, How to Fuck at the End of the World. But we’re going to be talking about how to be in this together, fully as erotic beings, as sexual beings, as feeling beings, as emotional beings. And we are here with you. All right. Charlotte, how do we move in this from fear and anxiety back home into love and compassion?

Charlotte Rose (33:43):
I think we see that we are in a time of fear and anxiety, and that it is an active practice to shift ourselves into a state of love. And from that state to take action, to care for ourselves, to care for the family, or the people that we are living with and then to care and connect with those that we love and care about, and want to be safe and well, and those that are immediately around us that might need our care.

Charlotte Rose (34:12):
So we activate ourselves as agents of care, kindness, connection and love. We educate ourselves and we take informed action. And that in and of itself, is medicine. That is helpful to our systems and to our communities of care. So let us remember, we really truly are deeply connected as a globe. This shows us this. Let us register and notice that our wellbeing is literally tied up with individuals that are on the other side of the globe that we will never know or meet.

Charlotte Rose (34:45):
We truly, deeply, literally are a connected unit on this globe. And so how do we act accordingly? How do we let this moment change our consciousness that we are a globe, and we need to take care of one another urgently? So let us do this. Let us do this together. We need each other. We need each other. Let us dissolve the illusion that we are individuals that can only take care of ourselves, and that is what will make life work. That is a story that has to just be dissolved and go. We are a community, and we need to take care of each other. Let’s do our best.

Chris Rose (35:28):
Here, here. So let us know. We are a community too, this pleasure mechanics community. You all don’t know each other, but we are connected through this conversation. We weave your emails and questions and testimonials into everything we do. So we are also one pulsing community.

Charlotte Rose (35:48):
So we are aware that people are isolating at home. People are staying at home, and we believe that touch is so important for your emotional state, and for your physical state. So we want to make sure that as many of you as possible have access to our courses, to be able to support you in getting through this time. We want you to feel supported and cared for by us and to generate the ability to be able to love and support yourself and your lovers.

Chris Rose (36:24):
Join us. Join us at pleasuremechanics.com. Check out our online courses. Use the code care, C-A-R-E for 50% off, and we’re just going to keep this sale open until you know this crisis is over, until the Corona crisis is over, maybe until we have a vaccine, maybe forever. I don’t know.

Chris Rose (36:45):
And we have always had, and I will reinstate here a policy that we want everyone who is ready to explore our courses, we want you to have access. We never want finances to be a barrier. So as always this has always been true, but as always, if you want in on our courses, and even with the 50% off discount code, they’re still inaccessible to you, we try to keep our prices as low as possible so we can keep the lights on and serve you. If it’s still inaccessible to you, just email me. Just be in touch and say, “hi.” You don’t have to explain your situation. Just say, “hi.” You want in. We’ll work it out. We always do. All right.

Chris Rose (37:23):
We do not want to be running a Corona sale. We want to acknowledge that our resources are available to you. We want to make them accessible. We want people to come home into their bodies, and touch one another with love and tenderness now more than ever. So let’s do this together. Care for 50% off.

Chris Rose (37:43):
We’re going to trust, it’ll work out for us longterm. And we’re going to explore as a community how we can come home to pleasure, how we can use pleasure to generate love and energy to get through this. We say pleasure is fuel. Now more than ever, we need to explore this together. So let’s do this as a community. Use the code, care for 50% off. Email us if you need more access, and let’s be in this together.

Charlotte Rose (38:11):
And we’ve just made a commitment to ourselves, to each other, and now to you that 1% of everything we generate, not just from that code, but from everything we will be sharing with an organization that is focused on community care, so whatever is most urgent at the time.

Chris Rose (38:29):
And again, we’ve been doing that already. I really believe that the only function of generating resources is to live and love one another, and then to share it with others. So we’ve always tried to be generous as this business-

Charlotte Rose (38:44):
… grows.

Chris Rose (38:44):
… just grows, and has just begun to really full-time support us, is the truth of it too. While we’re all being vulnerable in the time of Corona together, like this business is just starting, after 13 years, to be enough income to support us in a pretty modest lifestyle. So we do need your support. We need your love to keep our lights on. And this is now true for all of us, right?

Chris Rose (39:09):
We’re going to figure out that we are a web of care and there’ll be a give and receiving flow that will be more and more visible between us. It’s already there. It’s always been true. It’s how humans survive. It’s going to become more palpable.

Chris Rose (39:24):
So let’s feel into it and become a community of radiant beings of love, and calm, and care for one another and for the world right now. Yes?

Charlotte Rose (39:38):
Yes.

Chris Rose (39:39):
I’m Chris.

Charlotte Rose (39:40):
I’m Charlotte.

Chris Rose (39:41):
We are the pleasure mechanics.

Charlotte Rose (39:43):
Wishing you a lifetime of pleasure and good health.