 Let's do it, shall we? And I'm opening the doors, we are live. Welcome friends. We'll get started in just a moment. If somebody in the audience could let me know, they see my screen and hear my voice. That's helpful to us. I see your screen and I hear your voice. Thank you so much. And here I come with a link to tonight's event. This has library information and our presenters information. And anything that the presenter talks about tonight, I'll try and keep up and list in our notes. And if I'm anywhere able to link it back to San Francisco Public Library, I will make that happen. This event will be on YouTube. So hello, YouTube friends. And you can watch it again on YouTube. And there's those links. And we're going to jump in now. And I'm going to keep letting folks in. All right. All right. Welcome. This is part of our One City One Book event. And if you have not heard One City One Book, it is Chanel Miller's No My Name and her story of her sexual assault on the Stanford campus and the subsequent dealings with the judicial system, the media, and her survival story and what she does now. And she has an amazing exhibit up at the Asian Art Museum right now. If you can go check that out. Visible from High Street is a huge tryptic mural that she created. And then along the library, the main library, you can see a mini exhibit of Chanel's work. So Chanel is an amazing artist. I can't even read her words without seeing her characters marching by. She's amazing. And she also did really wonderful things for us that folks don't get to know about, such as she spoke to Mission High and Balboa High. And it was a student-led event. She also got to speak to City College and USF students. So it's a pretty big campaign for SFPL. It's our largest literary campaign. And we thank you for being part of it. And we thank Carol, Dr. Carol Queen, the amazing, one and only San Francisco zone, Dr. Carol Queen for being here tonight. We're working closely with San Francisco SF4, which is a volunteer women of color led support rape crisis line. And I'll put their chat in the boxes we get going. It's heavy subjects. We do definitely know, are aware of the triggers that could happen. The link to my doc has lots of resources that I put in the chat box, including my email. If you need me to help you find resources, I am here for you. We want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Eloni Tribal people and acknowledge the many Romantic Eloni Tribal groups as the rightful stewards of the lands of which we reside. The library is committed to upholding the names of these families and nations with whom we live together. And we do all this at the library providing reading lists, hosting events, and providing all the useful and factual information you can handle, because that's what we do with the library. So that link that I put in the chat box has lots of info. We also want to acknowledge that the library is not a neutral institution. And just a quick statement from our Racial Equity Committee regarding the recent violence against targeting Asians and Asian-Americans. We definitely condemn the horrendous violence acts against Asian and Asian-Americans in our communities, our state, and nationwide, both the reported and the invisible. And we stand in solidarity with our Asian communities, neighbors, and colleagues distressed and hurt by these attacks. We also want to acknowledge that these events are complicated by the entanglement of anti-Black and anti-Asian stereotypes and reporting these acts of violence. We acknowledge the reduction in humanity and harm done to the Black community by the coverage and hateful commentary that has been deployed. Both anti-Black and anti-Asian racism withholds white supremacy, and that is not cool. So lots of information. I know, don't forget we're in a pandemic, wear your mask. And now I'm gonna breeze through a bunch of events that we're having and I will go quick. So Earth Day celebration with the amazing Jane Kim, if you've driven down Hyde Street, you've seen that amazing butterfly mural, and it's huge and I love seeing those monarchs flying down Hyde Street. Hanif, I'm gonna breeze through. You can find out all these events and those links. I'm just gonna stop at a few that I think are great and amazing, they're all great and amazing, but super amazing. Our Know Your Name series, which is part of one city, one book, every Monday through March and April, we held these events and we have two left with artist Allie Bloom and artist Tyler Cohen, both gonna be talking about healing through art and we're gonna be doing making art. So it's very fun gathering and also just being in community. On Tuesday, April 20th, 7 p.m. Mirror Memoirs, we'll be hosting a virtual healing circle for survivors of childhood sexual assault. And then we'll be kicking off AAPI, Heritage Month, sorry, last time we called it something different, APAI. So this month, we're going back to AAPI. So I fumbled a little, my bad. But lots of amazing things and lots of amazing authors, amazing humans. And I wanna, oh, you should come check this out. If you don't know this graphic novel, very good, and it's just become a Netflix, Netflix option, Tresay. Art, art, mystery writers, not AAPI, but something very great, a partnership with the Before Columbus Foundation, celebrating Aaliyah Voles for our total SF book club and next month's on the same page author, which is where we encourage all of SF to read the same book. And that's A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua, who will be in combo with Elitza Ferraris on May 24th. Can't miss Chinatown Pretty. If you don't know this Instagram, I encourage you to check it out because it is amazing, a celebration of Chinatown's most stylish and amazingly wise seniors. And let me go back. We cannot not thank the friends of the San Francisco Public Library for being able to sponsor this entire One City One Book campaign and all of our partners that were involved in this. We do have a patron code of conduct and that does apply to online community space. And particularly with this kind of event, we do know it's triggering. We encourage you to take space and make space, whatever you learn here, take it out, but keep it private. Again, another shout out for SF4 and they're here for us tonight. They have extra staff on the line, should you need any assistance. And now without further ado, the amazing Carol Queen. Carol Queen is good vibration staff sexologist and tonight she's gonna talk about sex positivity, consent and healthy sexual relationships. Queen is a staff sexologist, historian and curator of the Antique Vibrator Museum at SF's Good Vibrations. The woman owned, worker owned sex toy book Emporium and she is a historian and archivist and barefoot librarian, all of that and an amazing human being. Carol Queen, it is all your floor now. Anisa, thank you so much. I should enter the time space continuum long enough to say that we were a worker owned cooperative and now we're post worker owned but many of the same people who were worker owners are still in the mix of good vibrations and I'm not specifically repping good vibrations tonight although so much of what I have access to as far as the discourses about sexuality are so entwined with that place. I've been a good vibrations since 1990. You do the math, it's many years. And I'm gonna talk about healthy relationships tonight but I wanna start out by saying that I'm gonna talk about more than that. I'm not a sex therapist, I've got some of that training but I don't do that kind of work and so what I'm gonna in fact do is bring you some theory. Let's talk about some theory, some ideas that hopefully will be helpful to you and the people you know, maybe your kids, maybe other people in your life and maybe you. When it comes time to make decisions about sexuality and think about these things, both in the more granular ways that sex can happen, that sounds uncomfortable, granular sex, nevermind. I'm gonna use a different metaphor when I get around to that again. I'd also like to show that my pronouns are she, her or they, them. I'm comfortable with all of that and I'm gonna reference rape culture in the context of this philosophical way of thinking about this topic that I'm tackling tonight. Rape culture and non-consent, I'm not gonna discuss it in depth nor talk super explicitly about sex at least not until we get to the discussion at the end when maybe some of you will wanna get more into those particular topics. So just, that's a trigger warning but it's not, we're not diving right in and I wanted you to know that up front. I wanted to say about relationships that there are so many kinds of them and when we think about relationships often we think of a connection with another person that lasts for a period of time. I just wanna remind people that that can last a pretty finite amount of time as well as lifelong as well as there being more than one person involved in fact, there are many ways to do all of the things that I'm gonna talk about tonight. So I don't want anybody to feel as though the word relationship is somehow keeping them out of this topic because that's not my intent at all. So I wanna start by sexual health but with sexual health. We talked about sexual health as part of what we wanted to bring tonight but what is that exactly? I like the World Health Organization's discussion of sexual health and I wanna share that with you. Sexual health is a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing in relation to sexuality. It requires a positive and respectful approach to sexuality and sexual relationships as well as the possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences free of coercion, discrimination and violence. And I would encourage any of you to go to the World Health Organization, look up sexual health and get more in the weeds with that discussion that they have there because it's pretty great. It makes me happy that any overarching entity in the whole world is trying to tackle something as big as sexuality and sexual wellbeing with as much senses there showing. And I wanna share with you my working beliefs. When I think about sexuality, when I get ready or at an essay, when I give a talk, when I share ideas with somebody who has questions about sex, I come from these and I wanna make them transparent. You may not share all of them but I wanna share what they are with you now. My working beliefs are that each of us has a right to our desires and these may differ between us and over time. Each of us has a right to our boundaries. Each of us has a right and a responsibility to determine who we are as sexual individuals. Each of us has a responsibility to think about how and with whom we're likely to get our needs met. None of us has a right to act non-consensually and each of us has a responsibility to get consent. Each of us has a responsibility to be clear about what we do and do not want to do. If we don't know, it's our right and responsibility to learn more about our sexual options whether through considered experience, get it or other kinds of knowledge gathering. We have a right to any sexual information that helps us do this. Now all of those ideas that I shared and honestly most of what the World Health Organization shared comes from sex positive philosophy. I first heard the phrase sex positive in the 1980s when I came to San Francisco, not only to try to do something helpful as far as the HIV AIDS epidemic was concerned which was what drew me here as well as the opportunity to start doing my program at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality AKA sex school, the late lamented sexology graduate program that had been around here since the 1970s and I heard the term sex positive. I have been working in the world of sexual diversity, LGBTQ rights, although we didn't have that many, we hadn't bought any vowels yet at all back in the day. We have many more vowels now, thank goodness. I'll talk a little bit more about that identity and the vowels and everything in a bit. I learned this term that would have helped me for over a decade in doing queer rights activism, gay youth activism and the other things that I had been involved in already. But it never heard because they had been cooking up this notion there as far as I can tell. It has some precedence in history but that's the main place that I think developed it and that then it escaped from is the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. So I wanna acknowledge the people who did the work around that back then. It changed my life to hear this phrase. I hope I'm a little bit associated with it in the public mind because I spend a lot of time thinking about what it might mean and what it doesn't mean. And I wanna share some of my thoughts about that with you now. When they made the library info card about this event tonight, they included, at least in some context, a picture of my book that I wrote with Shar Rednar for Good Vibrations, the Sex and Pleasure book, Good Vibrations, Guide to Great Sex for Everyone. This is not an ad for that book, except in so far as I think that you might wanna know that what I'm about to share with you has its own little chapter in this book just in case you wanna get back to it and think about it. You can also just contact me and ask me to share more of this with you. But so I wanna share with you what sex positivity is. It's a term that is more used now than it used to be, but I often don't think it's used correctly. And since I was there, not at the very beginning, but early on, I just feel like I can say that. Sex positivity is a way to acknowledge that human sexuality is diverse and broad. There is no one definition of normal. It's non-judgmental. Or in any case, it asks us to be aware of and be in control of our own judgments. It's against shaming others about sexual and gendered matters, including children. And if you didn't see that nine, 10 year old in Texas today, schooling the Texas legislators, I hope that you will look her up. A trans child took them all to school and was great. Sex positivity is a way to acknowledge that we should have certain sexual rights, including the right to comprehensive, appropriate, pleasure inclusive, positive sex education. It's a philosophy that invites us to acknowledge that pretty much anyone, any fully consensual behavior might be right for someone. And pretty much nothing is right for everyone. It's an idea that can't be fully expressed outside of an atmosphere or context of consent, informed, non-coercive consent at minimum consent. It's a term that can include anyone, including virgins, asexuals, people who have been abused, people who have never had pleasurable or even good sex, because it doesn't describe the sex that they do or don't have. It describes their attitude about sexual diversity and people's sexual rights. And of course it may be a tool to open the door to much more positive sex, but only if that's what they want. More than anything, sex positivity is a way to critique our current culture, which clearly is not sex positive. I express the critique like this, what would it take for our culture to be fully sex positive? What are the elements that would get us there? I invite you to think about that question. It's a valuable lens in a personal context and in activist work. Finally, sex positivity is a notion that gives us access to true respect for other people's sexualities, oh, in our own. So sex positivity is not a phrase that means I love sex. Though if you do, that's great, yay you. It's not a phrase that means I'm kinky or experimental. I'm not vanilla. Vanilla people, which means there's lots of different flavors of sex. Vanilla is that old school one. Though you can put sprinkles on it and it changes it up. Vanilla people can be just as sex positive as kinksters and in fact, not all kinksters are sex positive. Sex positivity is not a phrase that can ever be used this way. If you were really sex positive, you'd have sex with me. You'd do that kinky thing I wanna try. You'd open our relationship, et cetera, et cetera. It is not to be used as a source of judgment or shaming of other people who have engaged in consensual behavior, including heterosexuals, asexuals, non kinky folks, celibate people or anybody else. It is not a way to judge others for not enjoying sex enough. It is not a new norm about what people should do in their sex lives. It is not a license to assume that your sexual response, experience, desires and feelings are or should be shared by everyone else. I can't stress this enough. If anyone, no matter how frisky and happy they are, sexually happy, I mean, tries to use the notion of sex positivity to judge someone else's sexual orientation, gender expression, sexual choices or sexual response. They are not behaving in a sex positive fashion, period. And they're misusing the term. When you are sex positive, you get that you are not like everybody else and that's all good, as in, I'm attracted to people who are like this and others may be attracted to people who are like that. I have orgasms this way and other people have orgasms that way or maybe don't have them at this time. I like this sex toy and other people might not and vice versa. I like this kind of sex so other people get to like their kind of sex. I want a certain kind of relationship and others get to want the kind of relationship that works best for them. I respond this way to the sexual thing but other people might respond a different way. I grew up with beliefs, experiences and a particular cultural context that affects my sexual feelings now. Other people grew up with other cultural contexts and so on and so on and so on. So sex positivity has implications for both desire, what you want and boundaries, what you don't want at least not right now or in this particular instance because without consent and without acknowledgement that there are a lot of ways to be a sexual person, experience sexuality, experience sexual desire, et cetera. We don't get as robust and understanding and an acceptance of the fact that not everybody's gonna want all the same things. Not every person is gonna want the same things each and every time, whatever each and every time might mean in the context of how they do sexual stuff. So I wanna reinforce that diversity is the norm. I do a whole other talk called seven billion sexual orientations. Although since I started working on that talk I think there are more than seven billion people now so I have to change the name of it again soon. There are so many ways to be a sexual human including not desiring to have sex with anyone else at all. That still might be someone who thinks of themselves as a sexual person on some level or not. I said that I was gonna say something about the acronym LGBTQIA and you can add more letters depending on what you're trying to get at. I have heard as many as LGBTTQQ. And let me see if I can break all that down. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual. Sorry, that's where the extra T's come from. The second T was from Mexico, your third T was from Mexico. Queer, questioning, intersex, asexual spectrum and ally. And I still don't think that that makes a word that is easy to pronounce. This makes me think back to Sesame Street and I saw a big bird saying, but the more we add notions to this, this collection of sexuality, the easier it is for people to recognize themselves in the discourse, to hopefully recognize themselves because remember up there I said, think about who it's appropriate to have the kind of sex you wanna have with. And so that's a relational issue when people determine whether they're compatible with another person that they might find attractive. Remember that orientation is the gender that you're attracted to, gender or genders and not the things that you do with them. I.e. there's no such thing as gay sex and heterosexual sex. Gays, heterosexuals, everybody else has the same pallet of sexual possibilities that they might order from. Wait a minute, I just make the metaphor. Say many of them might order from the same pallet they might paint from. And that means that the idea that certain sexual acts are connected indelibly with a way of being sexually might be simplifying it a little too much. There's also the notion that heterosexual behavior isn't part of that acronym. But I like to ask whether all heterosexual behavior is in fact heteronormative. A lot of times the queer discourse says that we're not heteronormative, one man, one woman together, only two together probably married or moving in that direction, probably ready to have children or moving in that direction till death to them part, maybe that's not statistically the norm anymore, but there was a time when it was. There are gendered assumptions built into that that not every person who identifies heterosexual feels, buys into, lives their life according to. So you need to know more than just what somebody's sexual orientation and even somebody's gender identity is before you know whether you're moving in the direction of compatibility. So I wanna encourage people to sort of think about the big world and how we all fit together or don't. Also, then there's the lifespan. There's me, you, any given one of us and our lifespan which may build in sexual fluidity, not only from I was heterosexually identified, I came out knowing queer, that happens, happens the other way too from time to time. Also, I was in my 20s once, now I'm in my 60s, doesn't all work the same anymore and I don't want the same things. So fluidity is maybe not something that everybody experiences, but anyone has the potential to experience it. So things block us from understanding or accepting sexual diversity and it's probably we're thinking about the things in our own lives that might have made that happen if you have felt those ways of thinking about sexual diversity in your own life. Plenty of people haven't, but many people have. And this plays a role in sexual shame and sexual shame, I hope that sexual shame has not touched any of you, but if I know anything about sexology and the world in which we live, sexual shame may have touched most of you. I know it's touched me and one of the reasons that I'm a sexologist is because I and my mother before me had to grapple with and probably everybody going all the way back to have had to grapple with various elements of shame and shaming by others. So shame is often, it's linked up to these ideas of sex positivity I've been sharing with you by often normative and binary thinking of thinking that there are certain kinds of sex that are normal and other kinds that are not. The term normal is responsible for more shame and the pain and relational and sex problems that is associated with shame and practically anything else I can think of besides non-consensual behavior. So shame can be wielded at us, it can also be taken on. One of the things that I responded to really strongly in Chanel's book and please if you haven't read, know my name, well, please read it. It's wise and deep and real and full of things that we all had to grapple with a little harder. One of the things that struck me hard about her story was the way that she had to grapple the shame and the way that shame maybe even more than her grappling with it was put on her from outside through the system. So the notion of shame is linked, at least in my mind with the idea that consent isn't always part of our experience or hasn't always been part of our experience in a sexual context. So what blocks us from understanding and accepting that consent is required when people are sexual, some of the normativity, some of the gender and sexual stereotypes, some of the lack of acceptance of diversity that I mentioned already is one answer to that question. And it leads to the notion of rape culture, which I think of as sort of the opposite of consent culture, although that's not quite right either. Here's my definition of rape culture. It's a culture that minimizes, ignores or normalizes acts of sexual non-consent and does not adequately teach about consent and does not seek to help people learn to pursue their desires in a consensual way. That could include normative ideas. It could include not seeing anyone role model consent. It could include assumptions that if we feel desire, it must be shared by anybody who's sticking around. There's a lot of ways that it can show up, including in predatory ways. I would argue that it is often, though not always, pretty gendered. And when it is, it signifies males as having greater sexual agency than females or people who are non-binary or on the trans spectrum, particularly cis hetero males because plenty of queer males have had problems with this too. And it gives these males more leeway when they exercise this agency. So a little word about sexism. In this context, this means not believing or not behaving as though we believe that all genders have equal rights and are equally due respect all the way from providing differential opportunities and benefits in the world to assuming that someone's value lies in how sexually attractive you feel they are or not. There's a corollary rant to be given about ageism but I don't have enough time, but let me just say that's on the table too. So in a sex-negative culture, you can't be a sexually curious and adventurous woman or queer and be guaranteed respect and safety. This is where slut shaming comes in. You can't be any kind of queer, including gender queer and be afforded respect and safety across the board. So sex positivity is key to addressing rape and non-consent. It's key to healthy relationships no matter how long the relationships last. It's the overarching philosophy that states that our sexual desires are our own and can be engaged in in an atmosphere of consent any way we choose. Each of us deserves respect and consensual sexual behavior should not be a source of shame. So we learn about sex in a lot of ways in this culture. Rarely do we learn enough about sex from sex education to go have a good healthy sex life because sex education is not actually about informing people about how to have a good healthy sex life sadly because the people who are in sex ed classes in high school are too young for that information. Please imagine me putting quotes around that statement. So where do we get our information? We, what did I do? I got it from the gutter. Then I went and got a degree so that I could add to my knowledge base. And many people checked out some porn and many people ask their friends. People learn about sex from having sex. Sometimes people, oh, the library is sponsoring this. Let's mention books. People learn about sex from books. People learn about sex from YouTube tutorials, some of which are even made by people who know all the sex, although some are made by people who do not know all the sex. So it's all kind of buyer of your where, isn't it? Learning as much as we can for ourselves helps us get as far as we can towards being able to live this sex positive life that I've theorized with you about. Let me give you one tool that I think is, some of you will be familiar with this already, but I think that this is an amazing tool. This is called the three list method of thinking about your desires and boundaries. And the three list method was born as a tool for sexual self-expression and understanding right here in San Francisco about 30, 40 years ago by Cynthia Slater, the late Cynthia Slater who helped found the Society of Janice, our friendly kink positive gateway organization if you're curious about such things. Here's some homework everyone. Kick a piece of paper. Draw two lines in between those two lines. Yes, maybe and no. Underneath the yes column, just write the things you know you like sexually about sex. The things you know you'd wanna do. The things that you're comfortable with, have enough desire for, et cetera. The no column. Oh no, no, I'm not gonna do that. No, I don't do that. No, I'm sorry, I don't like that. No, hell no. However you think about the various things that might be on your no list. Oh hell no, make your no list. And then make your maybe list. Those are the things that you might want to do depending on what, depending on, depending on what. That's the important part of this homework in some ways. Not just knowing what you want, that's great. Knowing what you don't want. Super important. Knowing what the contingent situations are that you might wanna do the things that are on your maybe list. Helps you really get into changing your sex life for the better. Making it feel safer, making it feel like it's got a basis of trust, like you can communicate well. What are the things that make a difference? For some people, it'll be where they are in their monthly cycle. For other people, it'll be whether or not it's too cold in here. And other people, for other people, it will be like, I'm not actually sure if I trust this person enough to do this. Here are some more practical, I hope, suggestions for embracing sex positivity, consent, and a healthy sexual life. Talk about sex more often. Not just with sex partners, but as an important element of culture and society. Here, we're doing it right now. Go big picture. Among other things, this will expose you, if you talk about it at, I don't know, Zoom happy hour with some consenting people, whatever, wherever. It'll expose you to diverse ideas and other people's assumptions and beliefs about sex, which helps you sort when it's time to decide whether or not you're gonna have sex with somebody or not. If you're aren't sure about something having to do with sex, a technique, info about sexually transmitted infections or contraceptions, anything at all, research it, library, the library is there for you. And there's much, much information that abounds all around, some of which has its own perspective. But if anybody has bothered to sit down and write a book or an article about sex, it might have something in it for you. Stay alert to expertise versus sex-pertise, which I like to define basically as, I figured out how to have anal sex, you can too. Which maybe, but also, maybe, it just depends. It just depends. If you have an informed enthusiast teaching you, just stay tuned to whether they're teaching only from their own body and experience or thinking about the diversity that I talked about earlier. That's really the thing to watch. And make sure to book scarleteen.org if your sex ed has been substandard up till now, particularly if you've got young people who wanna know more information about sexuality, particularly if you've got young people that you wanna get the right information to tell them now. And Good Vibrations is doing more online Zoom classes lately, plus I'm doing conversations with interesting people about interesting topics. Next up, Earth Day, Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stevens on Eco-Sexuality. If you're not sure what Eco-Sexuality is, you should come and hear what it is. Maybe you're Eco-Sexual right now. Watch porn and all media through a media literacy lens. Who made this? Why was it made? What messages does it send about gender, sexual behavior, enjoyment, safer sex, and other things that are relevant to you? Are you using sex as your sex education? That's not why they made the movie. They made it to excite you, to thank you. It's like a car chase movie. If you watch car chase movies as driver ed, just what could possibly go wrong? You could screw up your car. You could hurt yourself. Just think about the context. And then, remember when I said talk about sex? Talk to your person or people about the porn that you saw. Figure out what you all think about all that stuff. Very enriching because not only can you find new things to try through conversations like that, you also find out things, oh no, not to try, not even to, nope, that's on a no list of somebody that you might love. Carry your own safer sex gear. Don't expect other people to have it. Right now, people are, I understand from reading the interwebs, just about to bust out and have a summer that is gonna be very much like the roaring 20s, all condensed into three months. Just be careful. Aunt Carol says, just wear a couple of masks. Eroticize it. You can eroticize anything. Watch a little bit of mask porn and before you know it, you're gonna be curious about whether kissing through silk masks is sexy. Of course it is. Even more sexy if it's rubber, but make sure that you can breathe well enough when you're doing that, all right. Pay attention to your consumption of party substances. They can affect your ability to determine in the moment what you want and to what extent you can negotiate. I am not saying perpetrators are not responsible. I am saying that partying can be a fraught space around these issues and it's worth remembering that and taking it into account. And finally, get support from others. If you are living in a world where you can't talk about sex with pretty much anybody, I wonder if there are places where you could find online, or online discussion groups are where you could. There are people who come to the Center for Sex and Cultures Zoom erotic reading circle every month having spent the whole month writing out a fantasy and then sharing it and discussing it with other people. There are a variety of ways, especially in the Bay Area to find other people who will talk about sex and diversity with you. Okay, I'm gonna bring in for landing. Most people, especially young people in our culture are ill served by the way sex information is skewed toward the negative and the scary. I've done a little bit about that like that tonight, but I try to keep a relatively soft hand on it and I also understand that we have awful experiences in our sex lives. One of the reasons that I think sex positivity is a profound way of thinking about possibility is that I think that it would be a stop to some of that. Pretty much no one wants negative and problematic experiences with sex, but we live in a sex-negative society which is afraid to provide information about pleasure and positive experiences and plenty of people who don't all agree what's okay to do sexual. We have to take control of this narrative at least in our own lives. And you can all begin doing that now. You can do it in the chat, you can do it, after this is over, you can keep doing it. Take sexuality seriously. Take steps to make our community, your families, your friend networks, sexually aware, consent-based and sex-positive and you'll feel the benefits in your own life. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor to be here. Anisa, are you gonna run the chat, my friend? Is that what's gonna happen now? I am, hello, doctor, yes. So we are opening it up to Q&A, so please get your question. This is an invaluable time you have to spend with Dr. Crow Queen. And we'll open it right up. So anyone have questions, you can put those in the chat and we also YouTube questions, we will take as well. Don't be shy. Which somebody did bring up exhibitionists for the shy. Did somebody bring up exhibitionists for the shy? Thank you. That was my very first book. And just as it sounds, it's a sexual self-help book for people who are shy. I used to be shy. If you can believe that, then you probably feel that perhaps even if you're shy right now, you might get less shy over time. I certainly did. And exhibitionism for the shy is a way to really embrace your inner frisky person, whether it's around erotic talk, dressing up, taking out your clothes off, around consenting people and so forth. It's got some information about role play and about communicating with partners too. So hopefully a useful book. It's around in the library, I hope in many other places, including I hope, Good Vibes. All right, let's see, we have a question. All right, this is so awesome. Thank you, thank you. I hear you encouraging talking about sex and I agree, but my question is how? Do you have tips for those of us who are shy about talking about sex with our intimate partners? Thank you, and Carol. I think I may have birthed a new persona here tonight with the Carol business. It's about time. Yes, I have some thoughts. The first thing that I implied that talking about big picture sex is something that we would do with our, I don't know, our Chardonnay circle or whatever it is that we're doing, but this is also a way to step into conversations about sex with intimate partners, particularly when we find something in the news. Hey, I don't know if you get the same feed that I do, but sex is always in the news every single day, all the time. Sometimes the news is bad, sometimes it's inspirational and interesting. We have a delightful batch of famous exhibitionists out there who are always doing sexy stuff and we can talk about them. I hope that they consent to us doing that because I think they're kind of stuck with it. So lap dancing, the role of repressive ideas, Lil Nas X, just this week. It's changing the world right out there. We can talk about sexual orientation. We can talk about exhibitionistic fashion. You could, I bet that we could start a new game where you throw any celebrity that I know who they are, who are all these people at me. And I could think of seven things to talk about about their sexual life. So go ahead and do that. Talk about the important stuff. Start making sexual terms and ideas free flowing between you and your person or your people because then when the time comes to say, by the way, this whole thing that I read about Beyonce makes me wanna talk to you about something a little more personal. Can I talk to you something a little more personal that I was thinking about? You can share fantasies. You can tell people about a story you read or a porn you saw. You can tell them that there were things that you really dug that made you uncomfortable. What did they think about it? Do they wanna read the story? Do they want you to read the story to them? There are loads of books, stories, websites. We've got audio erotica these days that takes you into fantasy sex worlds that you can then riff off of. Fantasy and what you read and what you watch doesn't mean you have to do the things. It means that it's in your brain and it's affecting you and helping you think about what sexual possibility might look like for you. And it helps you drill down. Is that the right metaphor? Maybe not. Communication with another person to figure out where are the, in your Yes No Maybe list where's the overlap? Where's the Yes, which maybes are overlapping? Can you work that out? Because those things will really help. If your partner's willing to do a Yes No Maybe list, you two share it, then you can go hide it again. You don't put this stuff, you don't magnet on your fridge, especially if you live in a, I don't know, a group house unless that's what you all do. Some thoughts. How would you, how should we go into new pandemic land and be sex positive about this? Well, we're gonna wanna, we're gonna wanna figure out either, do we determine who's safe to play with and how do we determine that? Do we know for sure? You know, we've got vaccinations that are pretty efficacious, not a hundred percent though. How do we, we've had a whole year of figuring out how do you think about your risk and how do you think about the people that you're in contact with? So this means you're gonna have to continue to do that. Maybe there's gonna be, you know, sexy slippery masks with a N95 on underneath. Maybe that's a thing. Maybe as New York City suggests, we might want to go to glory holes. I'm not a hundred percent sure where all the glory holes are in San Francisco that we can all go to. Some of you may know about glory holes and if you wanna put it in the chat, go right ahead. But is it safe for it to face away? Probably. Is it safe enough? I'm not a doctor, at least not that kind. And so doing some research, talking to people, thinking about bubbles as now more sexual bubbles than perhaps you had sexualized them before. And of course, there's still the opportunity of showing off, talking erotically, using your online media, your online technologies and getting one of those Bluetooth situations or a couple of those Bluetooth situations, I mean sex toys, that you can plug in and share together will the phone company get mad at me if I say it's the next best thing to being there? I don't know, maybe they will. Sorry phone company. Those are possibilities too. But if you really wanna kick your heels up, remember that there might be people who lie. Think about how you protect yourself before you go out into the wide world of fun parties and people who are like, sure I got a passport. And I wish everybody the best of luck on this because this is gonna be another social experiment that we engage in. We've already been together in one, we're gonna be in another one soon, if we're not already. I like this question. How would you recommend we have consensual, considered sex positive conversations with people who are not interested in sexuality? Well, the first thing is, definitely acknowledge that they may be coming from a different place than you and you from them. Find out if there are boundaries and limitations that they would like to enforce about how sex is talked about or what kind of sex is talked about. For some of us, we're gonna be in romantic relationship with folks who are on the asexual spectrum or we will be on the spectrum and be navigating with people who maybe wanna be sex buddies with us or long-time lovers with us. So there are lots and lots of opportunities besides just at the book club in the Chardonnay Circle to have these kinds of discussions. The less intimate we are, the easier it might feel to practice. So again, I recommend talking about sex whenever you're in a space with people who wanna talk about it too. And give everybody their TMI safe word around, wait, we just crossed, we're just getting close to a line that I don't really wanna go across when it comes to discussing sex like this. Remember that asexual people or people who are choosing not to have sex for whatever reason, including that they may be engaging with health challenges that take sex off the table for a while can be just as sex positive and interested in the big picture sexual stuff as anybody else. Some might be very curious about what this sex business is like that all you people like to do and some may have boundaries. When we have boundaries we've got them for a reason and I really wanna encourage everybody to respect those. There's a through line, you heard it in the way that I talked about what sex positivity isn't. There's a through line of some people who think that we're all sexually free now so we should all be cool with all of it. That's not the way everybody responds to these issues. Whether it's when they start to take their pants off, when you're on a date or in the Chardonnay circle. So I keep saying Chardonnay, maybe you're not drinking good for you, whatever. It's all to be negotiated each time really which is the reason that getting communicative is the very best skill that you can take into friend networks and relationships because that will help when you come upon the person who only wants to go so far in a discussion. And it might be Greta Agnes who was pretty frisky when she was young but is like, you kids today, that might be a situation too. So you're gonna use this skill at Thanksgiving. I'm telling you and sometimes that's the awesomest place to use it. Wait. Anisa, I can't hear you. Yes, yes, unmute. Some clarification has come in that was all really amazing information though. So they are more interested in, and let's see now I lost it. Talking with people they're not interested in sexually but about sex positivity. Right. So the sex in the news is a really good on trade of this stuff, particularly because there are so many sex in the news topics lately that illustrate the effects of sex negativity on our culture and gender freak out and all the things. It's also this, you don't even have to name drop me even though I'm an exhibitionist. You could say, I did this really interesting Zoom conversation at the library. Do you know what they're doing this year? Do you know what the one city one book is this year? Do you remember the Stanford case? Oh my goodness, they're unpacking all of that and start with I have a piece of local or national news to throw into our discussion and this is making me think about sex positive issues and just converse until you get where you want to go and make sure it's okay for you to talk about sexual topics with this person. Early on in the discussion say, hey is it cool with you that we have this discussion about this stuff? This is so on my mind right now. I'm really wanting to process it with my friends or people around me but I just wanna make sure that this is cool. Thank you, Carol. And then we have time for one more question. That is, can you address long time relationships like 25 years or more keeping it fresh and it keeps changing, I notice. Fluidity. So one on trade of this is fluidity because it's 20 plus years is gonna start to bring people into some midlife years when some hormones might start shifting, some desire and response might start to shift and how one of us or both of us might be changing behind that is one super relevant, super useful to be able to communicate about clearly because it's not the thing to keep quiet about if all of a sudden your vagina, if you have one isn't responding to penetration by toys, penises, fingers or whatever fun you've been having over the last context of the years if vaginas were involved at all. All of a sudden it doesn't feel the same. There's a lot of directions you can go with that. So there's that. And there's also, I've been thinking more about sex, I've been learning more about sex, I read something really interesting, Carol mentioned a kind of sex I didn't know about so I went and researched it. Any of those kinds of inns are inns that I promise you ordinary people all over the Bay Area are starting conversations on the basis of every single day and we can all learn to do it. And as soon as you get past the, I don't know if I can say this out loud, there can be a sense of relief, a sense of I don't have to, I'm not holding this alone anymore, I don't have to keep this to myself anymore. I've got my person here and I'm engaging with them to try to figure out what we might do next together. Those are some skills that if you ever do have a health crisis that happened in my relationship, changed things radically and it's a damn good thing we could talk about sex before it happened. So I don't wish any of you to have any health crises but I do hope that if anybody ever does have anything like that happen to them or the, I don't know, it's been 20 years, maybe we should open our relationship, that discussion, any discussions. They're all a little easier if you've already been talking about sex with some degree of comfort. And if you're not ready to talk, you can read and then you can discuss and then you can get personal and then you're off. Did I mention the library? He's going to bring us. I'm super, let me just say, that's my last word. I just want to tell you a tiny, tiny little story. So I was a young person who was very curious about sexuality but had no access to information as many people still in this particular century still are but this was the 20th century and I lived in the sticks. And the nearest library was in Roseburg. It was 20 miles away. I couldn't walk that far. And I had to get my dad to drop me off at the library about six times before I found the book that I could access as a young person that told me the definition of masturbation. I needed that definition because I had been doing it wrong up till then and I got better at it and look at me now. So libraries are crucial. They'll always be crucial. Right back at you, Anissa. I'm so thankful that the SF Public Library has wanted to do this set of conversations. This is gonna change lives. And I'm honored to have been with you tonight. Thank you for having me. Oh, thank you so much, Carol Queen. And we all have a new family member. And Carol, thank you for being here tonight. Y'all have your homework. Yes, no, maybe. Friends, Carol Queen, love you and miss you. Everyone have a wonderful night, friends.