272 - Consent is Sexy (and Professional)
Coordinating intimacy
Mia Schachter, our guest for this week, is an intimacy coordinator for film and television and an educator, podcaster, and writer as well. Additionally, she teaches classes about consent and boundaries, both one-on-one and to groups.
As an intimacy coordinator, Mia helps people with struggling with self advocacy, boundaries, and communication. Through practice, meditative exercise, different scripts, and a multitude of other different methods, she guides a number of sessions to help boost people’s consent and boundary skills.
Throughout this episode, Mia covers consent and boundaries not only within a sexual framework, which many of us may be familiar with, but also in a nonsexual setting. She discusses:
Power dynamics
Giving vs. Taking
Boundaries for couples
Boundaries and consent in long-term relationships
How ongoing focus on consent can add fun to an experience or relationship
Mia is also offering online classes right now during the COVID-19 pandemic, which you can learn more about on her website, and she is active on Instagram as well at @miaschacter.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking to intimacy coordinator, Mia Schachter about consent and how it can be sexy. She is an intimacy coordinator for film and television and educator writer and a podcaster. On set, she provides a variety of services including choreography, negotiation of nudity riders, and emotional support to actors as well as consultation on things like sexuality, prosthetics, LGBTQIA+ issues, ethical non-monogamy and more. She also teaches boundary and consent classes with private clients. We are so excited to have her on the show today to discuss more on consent and boundaries. Mia, thank you for being here.
Mia: Hi, thanks for having me.
Jase: Can you just give us a real quick overview of how you got into this line of work and what exactly it is that you do?
Mia: Yes. Well, there's like two separate things. There's this private stuff that I do one-on-one and these classes that I teach, which you've mentioned and then there's the second thing, which is intimacy coordination. I got into intimacy coordination in a very-- I tripped and fell into it. I moved home to Los Angeles a little over two years ago and a friend of mine asked if I wanted to write a romantic comedy about a sex choreographer for movies and we both thought like, "Well, this must be a job," but we weren't really sure.
Then almost immediately, within a month of starting to write this movie, all these articles and interviews started coming out about this new job in Hollywood called an intimacy coordinator and we realized we had to restructure the script and really investigate what this job was because it was a lot bigger than what we had thought. It's not someone who just comes in and tells you where to put your hands and move your legs, whatever.
We started rewriting the movie and then I got a job as a casting assistant on a TV show and we hired an intimacy coordinator. I reached out to her and said, "I'm writing this movie, can I interview you for my main character?" And she said, "Yes." This was Amanda Blumenthal who was the only intimacy coordinator in Los Angeles at the time and this is like a year and a half ago.
Dedeker: Oh, wow.
Mia: Yes, I met up with her and interviewed her and at the end of the interview, I said like, "Are you training people to do this? I would love to do this job, I'll pick up your dry cleaning and get your coffee. I'll work for you for free." She really needed to train people, she wanted to train people. She wanted to learn how to train people, but also wanting to be able to confidently recommend other people when she couldn't take a job. At the time, there was no one else doing it in Los Angeles.
Emily: You were like the second intimacy coordinator in Los Angeles?
Mia: Well, what happened was she trained me and two other peoples, there were three of us training at the same time. Then in throughout that time, two people who'd been doing it, one in Chicago and one in New York, moved to LA. Then I think I was the first one working from my cohort, so I think I was the fourth in Los Angeles.
Jase: Got it.
Mia: Then how I started doing this other work, this boundary and consent work and teaching it and coaching it privately was out of my training to be an intimacy coordinator. Then various other kind of modalities that I had worked in and trained in a little bit, I started to put together these classes that I was offering to actors, acting classes, and directing classes. The more I was doing that, the more I was finding that it really seemed like there was a need for this information in a really digestible and approachable way that isn't super clinical and doesn't make people feel bad or guilty and that so many people were struggling with self-advocacy.
For me, that really came out of like decades-long gut and autoimmune struggle that I was going through. Through that, I was really learning how to advocate for myself. I had these really non-negotiable boundaries that at the time wasn't really calling boundaries, but so much of my recovery after the physical stuff was taken care of was emotional and trauma in the body, and all this other stuff, and learning to communicate and stand up for myself, and feel like really feel my boundaries and my limits and my needs, and get really in touch with that kind of embodied sense of what I needed.
I developed a practice of teaching people how to do that for themselves, and now I have like four or five private clients and I was doing it. I was offering it for free as I was like putting it together and trying to figure out if it was actually something that had any merit to it and it was clearly so impactful for people. I was really blown away. I started at January 1, 2020, I was like, "All right, I do this professionally. This is what I do," and I charged money for it. I'm now pretty confident about what it is that I offer.
Emily: That's awesome.
Dedeker: Well, I want to start with if people who listened to our show, some people are very, very well-versed to consent culture, have been to consent workshops, things like that, and some people listen to our show are very much not, and so I'm wondering what can someone expect, what's a brief rundown of like, what's the place that you start with a client and what might they expect from working with you?
Mia: Privately, what I do is I go over several different frameworks and structures for consent and consent vocabulary. That's always the first session so that we're operating from the same basic foundation and that we share a common language. That's also what I do in these classes in my intro classes. Then when I work privately with people, I get really into like where are they struggle to advocate for themselves. We often end up really simply purely practicing scripts. We'll just practice saying like, "Hey, this is my boundary." "Okay, great. Thanks for telling me." Then it's like, "Hey, I asked you not to touch me there." Then I'll say back to them like, "You're totally right, thank you for bringing that to my attention. It won't happen again."
Then we feel the difference between when I say, "Thank you for stating your boundary, I'm glad to know that." The difference between that and, "Oh, I'm sorry," because the sorry falls really flat. Then it really starts to go in any number of directions. A lot of the work that I end up doing with private clients is like if someone is struggling to do mundane daily tasks, what we'll do is infuse those tasks with meaning. There's a spiritual component to this work and that takes on whatever form is meaningful to the client. The first thing I do is ask them about their feelings about the word spiritual, because there's other words that I can use if someone doesn't like that word, like mindfulness, or attention, or meaning.
I'll just give a personal example. I often let myself go to sleep without brushing my teeth and-
-something that I have found really helped me get more excited to brush my teeth was when I instituted a gratitude meditation into my toothbrushing practice. When I brush my teeth now, I say to myself, "I'm so grateful for my teeth and I'm so grateful for this toothbrush and I'm so glad I don't have to go to the dentist." Instead of just doing this thing meaninglessly like, "Oh, I have to do it, I guess I have to do it," it now has this meaning and this dialogue a little bit, and there's a little more awareness and attention placed on the
action and actually, the intention of the activity more so than just the activity itself devoid of meaning.
Jase: It was interesting that you're mentioning before about practicing with clients. It's funny because I feel in our most recent two or three episodes, practicing has come up in that about like, "Well, how do you actually do this for yourself?" It's practicing especially if you can find someone else to practice with you. That's such a good example of how helpful that can be. I was curious in your example, as part of that practice, do you also practice with people when the response is not so positive?
Mia: Yes. Well, a lot of this work revolves around feeling your embodied response to something that someone else says or how you feel. What I try to do is practice the positive version with somebody. Sometimes this is about race. Sometimes it's about other identity intersections and it's not sexual at all. In fact, most of the time, I'm not dealing with sex. It's a lot more relational. What I try to do is practice the really positive version and ask the client like, "How does that feeling your body? Where do you feel that?" It's often like, "My shoulder is just relaxed," or like, "Oh my God, I can breathe."
Then we will practice a negative one which is what we saw often run into which is like, "Hey, I ask you not to touch me there," and then the answer is like, "Oh, I thought it was okay because last time I--" That's usually how it goes. Then I'll say like, "Where do you feel that?" Then they're able to identify tension in their chest or tension in their forehead or their shoulders went up or their breathing is constricted.
Then we talk about the ways that recognizing those bodily responses, those really visceral responses can indicate to you a lot sooner than your brain is consciously aware that you're in a situation that you don't want to be in anymore, or that if you start to notice that every time you hang out with this one person, you got a tension in your chest and your shoulders and your breathing is restricted and every time you leave, you can breathe more easily and your shoulder is relaxed. That can be an indicator to you that that's not a healthy person for you to be around and you don't need to logic your way out of it. You don't need to go down that justification path or making excuses path. You can be like, "You know what, it doesn't feel good."
Emily: That's been powerful.
Dedeker: Right. I'm curious to clarify a little bit because I think we are so used to talking about consent within just specifically the sexual framework that it makes sense, like it goes so beyond it. Of course, you don't need to share nitty-gritty details of your clients, but I am curious about more specifics of the kind of things that people come to you that are not based about negotiating consent during sex.
Mia: Well, I'll talk about some-- I teach these classes and one of the internal classes that I teach is I teach two different internal classes. One is an interpersonal class that has nothing to do with sex and then one is a sex class. It's this intro to consent and boundaries around sex. The interpersonal one, I actually find a lot more interesting because we don't realize the ways that consent comes up constantly in our personal lives.
Here is just an incredibly simplistic example. I was with a friend several months ago. We were at his house. We were going to go somewhere else and we're going to get in the car and I didn't want to drive. Then so I was going to say, "Do you want to drive?" Then I realized that if I said it that way, I was making it seem like I was offering him something. "Do you want to drive?" As though he would be like, "Oh my gosh, thank you. Yes, I would love too."
When in fact, my motive was that I didn't want to drive. There's ways that we can modify our language to be clear about what our desires are and who it's for. I was making it seem I was offering him something for him, "Do you want to drive?" but instead, it was really for me. My desire was not to drive and so I said, "Would you drive?" Then by doing it that way, I was giving him the ability to make an informed decision about what it was that he was agreeing to.
Dedeker: Right. That makes a lot more sense. It is funny how those situations come up just all the time.
Emily: Oh, we are.
Dedeker: Depending on your background, your cultural background, your class background, your gender background, your race background where you've been so culturized in so many different ways to deal with that interaction to either soften it or say it indirectly or minimize the impact of want to know might it look like on us that it’s like we do have this whole big grab bag of tools for negotiating consent in this situation. Some of them potentially healthy or more effective than others.
Mia: Yes.
Jase: The three of us all did a consent workshop thing maybe a couple of years ago at a conference that was super fascinating, but one of the things they talked about in that was the difference between, "Am I doing something to you for your benefit or am I doing it to you for my benefit?" What you just brought up is exactly that. I remember during that in the part where you with your partner had to say, "May I do this to you?" This was in a how to be a nonsexual setup-like setting. "I want to do this to you, but for my enjoyment."
It was really hard to; one, to think of it and then two, to then not start doing it and then worrying about how they're thinking about it rather than focusing on enjoying it yourself, but just the way that we get all that so crossed up with itself about like, "Who's this for?"
Mia: Right. I finally found a really clear example of that. Typically, we think of a massage, it's for the recipient, so the person who's giving the massage who's doing the action is also giving the gift of the massage and it's for the recipient. If I were in massage school and I needed to practice, and I said to a friend, "Can I practice this massage technique on you?" We're both still getting something out of it, but it's for me. It's actually for me. I'm the one who needs the practice and you're actually doing me a favor.
Being able to make that distinction I think is so incredibly important because also then as a massage practitioner, as a masseuse, you want to make sure that you are actually doing the massage for the other person because if you walk away satisfied and they don't, then you're not good at your job.
Jase: Right, yes.
Emily: Absolutely. I do want to go back to theater and film and television just a little bit because that is where you and I met. You were the intimacy coordinator for the Wild Party which was a show that suddenly is on hold until further notice because of COVID-19. We did a lot of the things that you're discussing at this level because the show itself is very sexual in nature and there isn't rape on stage, there are people who are kissing all over the place and generally, it's just a lot of frivolity and touching in various things.
Something that you said earlier, the fact that having an intimacy coordinator on a set or in a show setting like a theater setting that's only been around for maybe the last year and a half is really astounding to me, but I think that's definitely sure because I haven't seen anything regarding having full time intimacy coordinators and staff until very, very recently. Do you think the Me Too movement moved that forward or why is this happening now in a way that it wasn't happening before and do you think that it will be the norm or as time goes on?
Mia: Yes. Intimacy directors are the term for this job in theater. In TV, we don't use the word director because we're not directors and we're not in the DGA. We can't call ourselves directors. We're also not there to direct the scene. In the theater, intimacy directors often do actually get handed the scene and basically take the reins for that scene. Intimacy direction for theater has been around since as early as 2007 or so.
Emily: Oh, wow. Okay.
Mia: There was a group called Intimacy Directors International that's based in New York. They're now called IDC which is Intimacy Directors and Coordinators. They've been around for a while. I don't know the exact number of how long they've been around, but they've been around for a while and they've been training intimacy directors for the theater. What happened was that they were starting to-- This idea of intimacy coordination was starting to come up several months before October of 2017 when the Harvey Weinstein article came out I believe. I maybe screwing up and I'm like thinking of the people who are going to listen to this podcast and be like, "Mia, you're wrong."
Jase:
Mia: I very well may be wrong. I'm pretty sure that it was like starting to grow and coalesce before the article came out. Then the Me Too movement really hit a fever pitch and I also want to acknowledge that the Me Too movement have been around for a good long time too with Tarana Burke. It really came into very much natural mainstream consciousness after that article came out. Then there was a lot of press around the intimacy coordinator on The Deuce for HBO which was Alicia Rodis. Again, oh, gosh, I'm pretty sure she's one of the founding members of IDI, of now IDC. She was trained as a intimacy director and also had a stunt background. When The Deuce was looking for someone to act as a buffer between the actors, and the production, and the directors, and the writers, they found her and she became the first intimacy coordinator for television.
Emily: When you say buffer, do you literally mean like that the intimacy coordinator I guess in that case is there to speak to the actor and be able to like figure out what they're comfortable with or not and then be able to relay that back to the director? That it doesn't have to be about super one-on-one in a potentially uncomfortable setting?
Mia: Yes, exactly.
Emily: That's really interesting.
Mia: Essentially, to mediate the power dynamic.
Emily: Yes, and I was curious about the power dynamic. Obviously, there are these power dynamics between an actor, or even a series regular, and maybe a guest star, or a director and a producer versus an actor. Yes, and talking about those power dynamics, those same power dynamics are in other types of workplaces as well. Are there ways in which people can manage that in a workplace situation? Is there a potential for maybe intimacy coordination to happen, not maybe with that specific name, but in a normal workplace setting?
Mia: Yes, definitely. I hope that that's where we're headed. It's been on my website for a long time because I offer these classes to acting studios and directing classes, and I've taught them all over. I've put on my website and I offer them to organizations, and religious institutions, and classrooms all over the place.
Emily: With religious institutions. Fascinating.
Mia: Yes. Well, there's a lot there, but no one has ever approached me for any reason outside of training, offering these classes to acting students, producing students, and directing students. I would love to see that happen on a larger scale elsewhere. I think that anywhere that there is a sexual harassment training, there should also be-- because that is the negative. Right? That's like, "Don't do this, don't do that." It doesn't offer how to do stuff right and it doesn't offer any practice or any nuance. I think in these classes that I do-- The one that you did Emily like, "I can't do this on Zoom anymore," but there was some touch, there was some very low-grade harmless consensual touch where we practice saying no.
Then we practice saying yes but not having the action done to us. Then we practice saying yes or no and then experiencing the action. Then we practice setting up expectations about what the action is going to be. Then we practice asking each other, "Was that what you expected based on what I said?" We practice like getting better and more specific about our communication then also really feeling into ourselves about, "Am I comfortable with you bopping me on the nose? Am I comfortable with you squeezing my elbow? Am I comfortable with you tying my shoe? Am I comfortable with you standing behind me?"
Emily: I think that's so fascinating because often, you don't know until it occurs. I think in those moments too, maybe conceptually, you'd be able to say, "Yes, okay." If somebody stood really close behind me and I knew who it was, I'd be okay with that. When it happens in the moment, you can have a very strong visceral reaction to it that perhaps you didn't even expect. That is really interesting having that one-on-one interaction in that way.
Mia: Yes. One of the ones that comes up a lot is that almost in every class that I teach, someone says, "Can I bend down and untie and retie your shoe?" Thinking like, "Whatever, no big deal." Then the person says, "Okay." Then all of a sudden, there's this person whose head is right in your crotch, and there's this shift in height, and there's this active servitude it feels like a little bit. All of a sudden, the whole dynamic is thrown off. Then what happens is the person who tied the shoe often says, "Was that what you expected?" The other person says, "You did exactly what you said you were going to do, but I felt completely different from what I was expecting to feel," and being able to even parse that out. Sometimes things are not what we expected, but they're okay. Sometimes they're exactly what we expected, and they're not okay.
Jase: Yes. I think something that the whole conversation about consent and stuff always brings up for me is that culturally, I feel like we're brought up here in the US at least, and I think a lot of Western society in this very contract-focused culture of like, "Well, you signed a thing, so there's no backsies even if it wasn't what you expected." We see that all the time on our TV shows. I've been catching up on Silicon Valley recently and that's the recurring theme through most of the seasons of that of like getting themselves in bad situations by not understanding the contract they were signing entirely or the fine print.
What sucks about that is that while that may make for very interesting legal dramas and intrigue, it's not a good setup for how consent conversations, even on mundane things should go, which is that it's like this ongoing conversation and not just a, "Oh, well, X happens, so therefore Y."
Mia: Okay. A lot of times when I talk about the work that I do, someone will crack a joke about how, "Well, now, celebrities make you sign a contact that you agree to have sex with them, so that you can't file rape charges after the fact." I do believe that that is happening. However, if consent is ongoing and reversible, then just because I signed a contract five minutes ago that said, "Yes, I'm having sex with you by my own volition, that doesn't mean that now I still have to do it, or that you can't then push my limits, or even rape or assault somebody." Just because I agree to have sex with you, that's not really giving specific consent. I didn't agree to every single sex act of being touched in every single place, and all those different things, and I'm allowed to change my mind.
Whether they're mythical or real, they're irrelevant. They're not really addressing the nuances of consent. Also, what you're bringing up is this idea of consent as permission, but I see that as just the tip of the iceberg of what consent is. Consent is really an agreement that we make with people. It's not just like, "Can I do this?" "Yes, you can." Okay, consent has happened. Though, that's one form of consent. Consent is an agreement, and something that you update constantly, and consent as a practice. Consent as a practice, and a language, a vocabulary, and a structure, and a way of thinking, I think is a lot more of what we need to be learning, and teaching, and working towards rather than when people say, "Make sure you get consent," and what they really mean is like, "Ask if you can do something."
Dedeker: Right. I think another important part of this conversation is that Jase pointed out us having this very like contract-based transactional culture. I think what's really important in the work that you do, Mia, is practicing not just the positive, but also practicing situations when someone messes up, or when there's a mismatch in expectations. When either it's, "Oh, what I heard you say, that created expectation that was different than what actually happened," versus, "Oh, you did exactly what I expected, but it felt different." I think that that's also where we get into the weeds as well coming from this very black and white transactional culture is that then we can get into the weeds of like, "Well, you said you would do this, but then I felt differently, and so you're a bad person." Instead of there being a script there to follow or words there to follow to rectify that, to repair that to get us back on track, because I think that's also another important part of this work, it's also creating what's the structure for turning to when someone makes a mistake or when there is a lapse in communication like how do we get back on track there.
Mia: Right. I think the script is really helpful because what I find so interesting is that even when I tell people like, "Okay, the exercise that we're going to do is you're going to ask each other if you can do really silly things like poke someone in the forehead or tap someone on the shoulder," but the other person is just going to say, no, they're just going to say, "No, no, no," every time. I'm giving you a script. I'm telling you, "Just say no," and it's still incredibly hard to say no. It's so many people still say, "That was so hard. It still felt like rejection to the other person." Even though they knew it was coming, people will still feel rejected.
What's amazing about these scripts, even though they can sometimes feel really silly and clunky, is when you really check in with how they make you feel, it's so ingrained. It's so in our blood and our bodies. There's just no way around it. We are programmed to feel rejected when we hear no. Then what we have to learn is how to feel and then express genuine gratitude when someone tells us no. We have to train ourselves to do that.
Jase: That for me was the huge mental change during the first one of these consent workshops that I did was not so much to learning how to say no, although that was also its own challenge, but the thing that was the most like I didn't even know I didn't know it was the thanking the person as a response rather than, "Oh, sorry." It's like--
Mia: Like, "Oh, I shouldn't have asked."
Jase: Right. "Oh, I've screwed up now somehow for even asking," but it's like, "Oh, thank you for letting me know. I really appreciate that." As I thought about that more, it's become even more impactful to me this idea of it because it's so hard to say no. If someone ever does clearly communicate a no to you, it's like they've given you a gift. They've done something that's hard, they've done something that takes a lot of courage potentially to tell you that and now you know, like it's actually clear and it's like, "Wow, thank you for that." That for me really actually helped a ton in terms of receiving rejection too and not having to feel rejection.
Mia: Right, because it takes you out of your ego. It takes you out of your spiral of insecurity of like, "Oh, I fucked up. I shouldn't have asked. Oh, shit, shit, shit. This is so embarrassing." That's the feeling that we feel and then we're like, "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." That's really ego-based too, like so often apologizing is like, "Please forgive me, I screwed up. Please, please, please, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." The gratitude does two things. It takes us out of our own head and away from our own ego, but it also lets the other person know, "I actually hear you." Sorry is so dismissive and perfunctory but the thank you is like, "I really, really heard what you said."
The first time that I had an experience in my personal life where I was fooling around with someone and I was getting nervous, I was like, "You know what? I've been--" Well, maybe I should back up, all right. The whole time I was training to be an intimacy coordinator, I did not have sex for like eight months. I was so sick. I was incredibly, incredibly sick. This is when I was dealing with all these autoimmune gut stuff, it was all coming to a head. It wasn't necessarily a conscious decision to be celibate, it was just that I had none of that energy in my body. There was just nothing going on in there.
It was so ironic that I was training to do this job and learning about consent and boundaries and sex and bodies and all this stuff. It was just so not part of my life at the time. It was also bizarre how much it linked up time-wise. I started training two weeks after I broke up with somebody and then stopped training and then immediately started dating. It was really weird, it was bizarre.
I was afraid that this training was going to ruin my sex life, like I was going to be so picky, I have such high standards, and that nobody was going to want to have sex with me. Instead, the complete opposite happened. I somehow unconsciously-- My vibration must have changed because I started drawing people to me who were so well-practiced in consent and had all this experience in BDSM, and kink, and all this stuff. I was like, "This is so crazy. I didn't even have to do this consciously." I started sleeping with somebody and-- Well, this is before we were sleeping together, we were fooling around and it was getting to a point where it was like, "Well, do you want to move? Where do you want this to go?" I was like, "I'm going to share that I'm feeling really nervous." He was like, "Okay, do you want to pause and just talk about it for a second and sit up?"
Dedeker: Wow.
Mia: I was blown away. I truly couldn't believe it. I was like, "Yes, that's exactly what I want to do." I sat up and we start-- and he was like, "Is it emotional? Is there a specific thing?" He was like, "You don't have to share with me but if you want to, let's talk about it." I was like, "Yes, there's a trauma." I started telling him about this trauma. I was now trauma-informed and so I was simultaneously having an experience and observing myself having an experience.
Jase: Right, right.
Dedeker: Wow.
Mia: I'm like, "Oh, wow," I'm really hot and my heart's pounding and I'm not making eye contact with you as I tell you this. I'm like playing with the quilt. I'm nervously fiddling. I was like, "Wow, this is really interesting. This is exactly what you would think would happen if I were nervous." I shared it with him and he said, "Thank you so much for telling me that. I am so glad to know that." It was so clear that he then felt like he could treat me better moving forward. I'm getting a little choked up talking about it, because it was so new, and it was so shocking, and so simple. It was so incredibly simple.
Emily: Jase.
Dedeker: Well, I think that's a really good segue. We want to spend a little more time talking about navigating these things in personal romantic relationships, not just in the workplace, not just with people who are brand new to you. Before we do that, we are going to take a quick break to talk about some of the sponsors for this week's episode. Let's move on to talking about consent and what role that plays in your personal relationships, maybe your long-term relationships. Outside of specifically doing something like going to a consent workshop or things like that, what are some things that couples can do to establish and enforce personal boundaries and navigate personal consent in their own relationships?
Mia: Well, I love this three-minute game, Betty Martin's three-minute game. The basis of it is giving and receiving, like asking someone, "What do you want to do to me and then what do you want me to do to you?" and practicing both making offers and making requests. That's a really good one.
Jase: How does the game work? Then what?
Emily: You ask that for three minutes?
Mia: Yes.
Emily: Then we do it for three minutes.
Jase: Can we do this game for three minutes? Okay, got it.
Mia: Yes. Then you can add components like feedback like maybe if you-- Then you can give people feedback afterwards. One thing that I did recently that was fun that I was guided through at an event was practicing giving and receiving feedback just by a hand massage. You just give someone a hand massage for two minutes and every time you move or change pressure or change stroke, whether it's circles or up and down or side to side, you check in like, "Is this better than this? Do you like this? Is this better?"
Then you watch their face, and you watch their reactions, and you watch for non-verbal cues, and you just keep checking in. Some people start to find out-- Like I'm a lot better at asking questions than I am at giving feedback. I can request feedback, but I have a harder time giving feedback. Just starting to notice those things about yourself and practicing that. Also, I really think practicing these scripts before you're in the heat of the moment.
One of the examples that I love that I heard on queer sex ed is in a BDSM context, if you've decided that if the dom calls the sub a slut and you've agreed on that, calling a safe word can be really, really scary and you don't want to disappoint anybody. Also, doms are often really hesitant to call safe words. It's a misconception that the safe word is for the sub exclusively. Being able to practice ahead of time. Don't just agree on a safe word, practice saying the safe word before you need the safe word.
If your safe word is potato and you want to say, "Okay, let's practice this, potato." Then the other person says, "Thank you for saying potato, slut." Then you've done it. You've gotten it out of the way. So often, the scariest time to do anything is the first time. Once you've gotten it out, it's a lot, it's so much easier to do it. I think especially when you know someone really well, being able to imagine future situations and then practicing ahead of time, how you want to be able to communicate about something. Practicing it so that later, you can be like, "I've already done this. It's in my body. I've done it before, this is familiar." Even though you're now in the heat of the moment, you're not necessarily totally in control of all of your wits, you've done it before. Other than that, I'd have to really dig in.
Jase: I love that. We were talking earlier about power dynamics, and how that can show up with a director to an actor, or the star of the show to someone who's just has a few lines. Or they're just, hot girl number one, or whatever their role is. There's a very serious power dynamic there between those people. I'm curious, though, because I feel like this also comes up potentially in all of our relationships, our day-to-day relationships. Not only with people that we work with, where there's a sort of a clear hierarchy there, but also with the way that we interact with- I don't know, people in the service industry, or people who make less money than us, or people who make more money than us, or whatever race, gender.
So many different things that can create this kind of power structure that we can often be unaware of, particularly if we're the one in the position with more power, we tend to not be as aware of it. I'm just curious if there's ways that people can approach that in their personal lives, that does feel natural, or what I've loved so much about what you've been sharing is kind of the real-life experience of "Here's how this looks in real life, not just theoretical. Oh, yeah. Consent is X, Y, and Z. See? We're done."
Mia: You got it?
Jase: I'm curious about if you found that with your clients or anything. How that shows up in surprising ways.
Mia: I think the biggest one is race and gender. The biggest ones, they overlap constantly. Let's just think theoretically about a-- I'm going to put it into a sexual context unless you want me to specifically avoid that.
Jase: Do a sexual one, then maybe I'll challenge you to a non-sexual one.
Mia: Okay, In a sexual one, if we want to talk about race and gender. Say you're doing like Dom/sub slave play, and you have a black man and a white woman in a relationship. That's one power dynamic. Then who is- and then say he's dominant and she's submissive, what's that seem like? Then if you have her being dominant and him being submissive, then what's that seem like? Also, the aftercare that's gonna be involved in that. The aftercare in that scene is gonna be so historically and contextually loaded in a way that it's not going to be between two white people, or even two black people, or just two people of the same race.
Then, say it's a black woman and a white man, different power dynamic depending on who is the sub and who is the dom, different power dynamic. We have to be thinking intersexually about even our sex lives and the ways that those power dynamics play out because we're each going to have very different triggers that are going to be based in our family structures, our history, our inherited trauma, societal implications, and histories of all the different complexities of who we are. I think it's really easy for a lot of folks to kind of disregard those power dynamics in their private lives, and hope or strive to live privately in a vacuum outside of those contexts.
We simply can't and that's not a really good way to try to take care of each other. I think acknowledging those power dynamics, talking about those power dynamics, and figuring out the ways that they kind of can continue to be hot. Because power dynamics are hot. That's something that we're all going to have to kind of grapple within the wake of this movement of "Are workplace relationships forbidden now?" No, they're going to keep happening, so how do we navigate them ethically? How do we navigate consensual relationships when there is a power dynamic at play? We cannot remove power and we cannot prevent people from falling in love.
Jase: Right. I was thinking about this because I watched a TikTok from the Rock recently. Bear with me, it's going to be a little bit--
Emily: I can't wait to see where this goes. I still don't know what TikTok is. What is TikTok? Keep going.
Jase: Okay. It has nothing to do with what-- the contents of his TikTok. But I was just thinking about the Rock and what an imposing, intimidating, physical figure he is. Just being this huge, super muscular guy with no hair. There's a certain feeling that that gives you, a certain sort of power, like a physical power inherent in that. Then I was thinking, though, about in every interview and video and everything, he just seems like a little teddy bear. He seems so sweet. It kind of got me thinking about that because I noticed for me, a few years ago I went through this weird period of adjustment with that because I grew up as this little skinny, nerdy kid.
The way I interacted with the world was as this little skinny, nerdy kid who gets pushed around, isn't tough, is physically intimidated by other men, is not intimidating to women, or at least I felt that I wasn't, I realize now that's not probably how that was experienced. That was my reality. That's how I thought I was. Then a few years ago, I went through this period of getting into weightlifting, and I got significantly larger than I was. I think Emily and Dedeker can attest that my physical presence got a lot bigger and stronger. I found that it created this weird disconnect with the people I was interacting with where I wasn't getting the same reactions that I used to get from my interactions with men or women or whoever.
It took me quite a while to realize it's like, "Because in my head I'm still this thing which gets this response, but in everyone else's reality, I'm something else and I might not be the same for everyone." Just seeing that that also changes and you might not even be aware that it's changed because you still are usually the scared little kid version of yourself that's inside.
Mia: Well, you're making me think of girls who shoot through puberty in high school or middle school and being suddenly totally sexualized by people around them, and just having kind of no idea what's going on. Maybe, at first, enjoying the attention, and then shifting it and realizing "This is actually a really gross and predatory." I mean, I went through that myself. I remember feeling like "When am I ever gonna go through puberty? Is this ever gonna happen for me?" Then finally, it did, and there was a period of time where I was being objectified and I liked it.
There was some pleasure that I was taking in being noticed in a way that I hadn't been noticed before. Then, it took me a little while to start to realize, like "Actually, I don't like this attention.The way that I'm getting it is--". Now I have the language to say it was unintentional. It was a very objectifying, nonconsensual, not unintentional. It was non consensual and it was very objectifying and it was from strangers. I had to then update my perception of myself. I have to be very-- I think that we all have to be this way. This is something that is making me think about this idea.
Like I've heard this from so many people and it really just kind of grosses me out when people are like, "What? I just flirt with everyone. I flirt with everyone. I'm just a flirtatious person." I just feel like, we have to be willing to acknowledge the effect that we have on people. We cannot pretend to be blind to that. If the effect that you're having on people is that you set their hopes up in a way and make them feel a certain way, that makes you feel good because you like the response that that gets for you. You have to be held accountable, unless you're one of those awful people who says, "Your feelings are your problems".
Then we have to be willing to take some accountability, if the information that we're getting even non-verbally is "I'm starting to see that I have this effect on people. Is that the effect that I want to have on people? Is it miscommunicating my intentions? Is it accurate about where I plan to follow through on certain things and how I plan to continue these dynamics?" If it's not, then you're miscommunicating. You're not communicating well, and so if to walk around saying like, "Well, I just flirt with everyone." To go back to the puberty example, like to be- I think that we can use that in our favor when it comes to insecurity. Because if I walk around thinking that I'm a hideous monster, but people are constantly checking me out and asking me out and flirting with me, then there's a disconnect between how I see myself and the information that I'm receiving about how other people see me. We have to be able to meld those two so that we have an accurate idea of who we are and how other people see us. Otherwise, I don't know, then you get into things like body dysmorphia or whatever. That's just whole other can of worms. I went on a tangent there.
Dedeker: I think it makes sense. It's that fact that we have to learn to marry the fact that we have this subjective reality, that sometimes doesn't fall in line with everybody else's subjective reality. I think that's hard because it's like you're pretty much always the protagonist of your own story. Not always the hero necessarily but always the protagonist and you know what your motivations are and you know what your thoughts are and you know what your feelings are at any given moment. It can be so easy I think to project that into a situation. Like your example of the person is like, "Oh yes, I just flirt with everyone." We can project like, "Well, I know that I don't have a bad intention with that." I know the mindset-
Mia: Why can't other people tell?
Dedeker: -why can't other people know that? Like for you, Jase, "I know that on the inside I'm a skinny nerdy kid, and that's what motivates me, so why wouldn't other people pick up on that?" That I think that is something that I think personally is just a really important part of growing up, which is just learning that we all have these subjective realities and we just need to make space for that. I want to bring us back to talking about having these kinds of specific consent conversations within the context of longer-term romantic relationships, because I think with some people there can be this sense of dread. There can be the sense that like, "Oh this obsession with consent, we just want everyone to focus on the worry and the concern, and it's going to drain all the fun out of it and stuff like that. I'm wondering, can you talk about the ways that an ongoing focus on consent in both new relationships and establish ongoing relationships can actually add fun and improve a relationship? Instead of just focusing, on "Well, maybe it'll decrease some badness."
Mia: As you were saying that, my note that I wrote to myself is "Consent is so sexy."
Mia: You can use consent as dirty talk. Consent also-- Okay. Well, I'll back up for a second. As we were talking about, consent is not just permission, so it's not just going to be, "Can I squeeze your boob, right? Can I grab your butt?" Because you've established that that's something that you do together. Consent might be as simple as doing it and looking at somebody's face to check if they're enjoying it. That might be consent. Consent can also be an agreement and it can also be preparing someone's nervous system. I'll talk about consent as an agreement first.
Say you want to go down on somebody and you want to do it for them, right? It's like in service of them and their pleasure. You could set a timer and you could say, "For 20 minutes I'm going to go down on you and it's for you. I want direction and I want feedback unless you don't want to give it to me." Anytime that person then starts to think like, "Oh God, they've been doing this a really long time. Should we switch, should I reciprocate?", they can remind themselves, "Oh no, we agreed that for 20 minutes. It's for me." Then you can switch instead of switching positions, you can continue doing the same action, but you can have the person who's doing the action do it for them.
Then for the next 20 minutes, they continue to go down on you, but it's for them. Then it's not going to be so much about feedback. It's going to be watching this person devour you and be creative with their expression of desire on your body. That also might be where you start to learn new things that you like because you're not so focused on "This usually works for me." Like, "Do this thing that I know will get me off." It's going to be more about witnessing them taking pleasure in you. That's a way to play with consent as an agreement and then consent as preparing someone's nervous system.
I'll give a non-sexual example first. I was at the dentist a couple of months ago and my dentist was probably unbeknownst to her practicing really good consent. She was saying to me, I couldn't speak and I had the thing in my mouth. She was like, wave your hand if you need to stop and give me a thumbs up if you're good. Okay, great. I have a safe word and I have a go word. Then she said, "Okay, now you're going to feel a little air. Now you're going to feel a little water. It might be cold. We're about halfway done." To me, that was a consent practice because she was preparing my nervous system for what I could expect to happen, and also giving me the tools to communicate with her about what was okay and what wasn't okay.
In a sexual scenario, if you say to someone, okay, are you all familiar with the acronym FRIES for consent?
Dedeker: Yes.
Emily: Oh, yes.
Mia: Whatever.
Emily: Please
Jase: Go over it real quick for our listeners.
Emily: Go over it for the listeners.
Mia: Consent is Freely given, Reversible, Informed, Enthusiastic and Specific. I specifically want to talk about specific because I think that specific is the hot one. I mean, all the other ones are great too, but specific can be really, really hot. Because you can say to someone I am going to lick you here, touch you here, squeeze you here, do this to you and do this to you and then watch their eyes light up, and then you have consent. If they start to look off to the side or break eye contact, or "Ew", do one of those. That's a no. Check in, what about that do you not like, what do you want? Because sometimes it's like, "Let me take a shower first." You know what I mean? Sometimes it's not that they don't want you to do that to them. It's that they're just worried about whatever. We all have our insecurities that prevent us from experiencing the utmost pleasure all the time.
That's another way that consent can be super-duper sexy. Consent can be planning the sex later. Instead of being like, would you like to have sex with me later? You can be like, here's what I want to do to you later. Is that cool? The person can then daydream all day about what you're going to do to them later, and you've accomplished consent.
Jase: I feel like this also, even in a non-sexual situation, in terms of preparing the nervous system, like you said, with your dentist. I could also see this even on a day-to-day situation where like, for example, my job when I'm there in the office in LA, it's with some of the people there I've become pretty close friends with over the several years that we've all worked together, but still having the sense of like someone's going through a hard time. Like one of my coworkers, her dad died last year, and this question of when she's at work of just like, "Would you like a hug right now? Or would you like your space?", also kind of giving the option for a no. It's not just like, you have to say no to me, it's pick one or the other. Then it's she could say, "A hug would be great. Or it's like, no, I'll probably start crying if I got a hug, I'd rather not do that right now." That either way gave her I guess that preparation for whatever it was going to be, rather than just bringing it on them.
Mia: It sounds like you also made it really equally easy to say yes and no. I think something that was taught to me in my training was your yes is only enthusiastic if you are equally empowered to say no. If you don't actually feel that no is a viable option, or if you're scared to say no, or if you're not in the habit of saying no, and it's really hard for you to say no, then your yes is not as enthusiastic as it could be. It sounds like you were taking the steps to help ensure that a no was just as easy as a yes. I think that's a beautiful thing.
Emily: We've talked so much on this show about how in relationships often, as you said, there's that power dynamic. A lot of people feel like, "Well, I'm with you, so I'm entitled to your time or your body or your energy or any of those things", so it does become so hard to feel like you can't say no to someone who you're so established with and who maybe, they're doing something really nice for you or they're taking care of you in a financial way because you've lost your job or something along those lines. To say no to that is really challenging.
Yes, I guess in that kind of way, just with the things that you've talked about, are there ways in which people can maybe just practice being able to say no to each other and make it so that it's not such a charge thing all the time?
Mia: Yes. I would practice it in really trivial ways, like, "Can I bump you on the nose?" kind of thing. Back to that one where you just practice saying no and pay attention to what it feels like when the stakes are really low. If you practice saying no to like, "Can I pour you a glass of water?" "No." "Oh, thank you for telling me." If you practice it with those really, really low stakes, it will get easier to do it when the stakes are higher. I just want to know that I see we're talking about practicing this stuff within like a relatively healthy relationship.
Emily: Yes, exactly.
Mia: Yes. If you are coerced or being forced to stay somewhere, you're not-- Or there's a looming threat of whatever, physical, emotional, abuse, violence, whatever these things may be, then you're not really going to be able to practice this most likely. In a relationship where that's not the case, I think that we would hope that no one wants us to do stuff that we really don't want to do. Sometimes, I think, when we can get over the mental hurdle to the other side, which is that you're giving someone the gift of not violating your boundaries, then it is a lot easier to appreciate when someone tells you no. Again, that's something that's only going to happen in a pretty healthy relationship with a healthy foundation.
Jase: Yes. We're at the end here. For our listeners at home who, for example, might not have a partner specifically to practice this with, or might not have that or are just interested in taking any of your classes or private coaching, or maybe even they have a business and are like, "Actually, we don't have a sexual harassment training seminar or we do and it's shit", because most people are, what are some of the things you offer there and then where can people find that information about you?
Mia: Well, I do these consent and boundary classes and I will be happy to offer them all over the place. I do think that they don't replace a sexual harassment training. Just from an HR perspective I don't really know, but I would imagine that you have to have a certain probably State-mandated thing. As a supplement, yes, I would love to be doing that, also if anyone wants the industries up and running and need an intimacy coordinator, I will be available. You can find me on my website, which is sharetheloadinc.com. My Instagram is @miaschachter, which is S-C-H-A-C-H-T-E-R. I'm not really on any other platforms.
Jase: Great. We'll also put those links in our show notes for this episode. If you go to multiamory.com and find this episode, 272, you can also get those links there.