Welcome back to a Slut’s Guide to Happiness, where your body is perfectly imperfect and it’s safe to be as sexual, kinky, queer or slutty as you want. 

I’m your host, Vanessa Cliff. You know I love dressing up for you. So today I have a shirt to support your confident, brave slut path, which is relevant to what we’re talking about today. 

It says, “I never dreamed I’d grow up to be a super sexy unicorn, but here I am killing it.” So ladies, gents and folks, whenever anyone tries to shame your sexuality, just toss your unicorn mane and hold that horn up high. 

Outside of my unicorn rainbow life, I’m also a CEO of Cliff Media, which is a female and queer-led production company that invites all enthusiastically consenting adults to participate in scenes. We film content that explores the same themes as in this podcast: healthy non-monogamy, loving kink, joyful community and empowered female and queer sexuality. 

We just wrapped up one of our largest shoots at Cliff Media thus far. It was particularly significant because of who was there. It was the first time we were able to deeply integrate queer and straight folks in one space. Tens of people, about half queer folks and half cisgender straight folks, came together to produce two really silly, fun, creative, sexy scenes, scripted and led by a team of trans and queer performers who directed from within the scene. 

The energy was fucking incredible. I knew before and during the shoot, both because people told me and because we can read body language, that this was scary for lots of folks, coming into a big group on camera with people you don’t normally interact with and with people whose identities or bodies you may not normally interact with.  

That’s a lot to tackle emotionally at once. And it’s beautiful to release those fears, to release the the the idea that you can’t do this, you can’t interact with these people, you can’t perform, you can’t be seen naked, you can’t be on the internet, you can’t have group sex, you can’t interact with queer people or interact with straight people, depending on who you are, that you can’t have sex with people outside of the normal gender and sexual orientation range that you’ve been told you can have, that you can’t step into this whole other box, this whole other world for you. That’s a lot to release. 

So people bravely showing up is incredible. I spoke with folks there about transforming that nervousness into excitement. 

One thing that I do before shoots, public speaking, going into parties or situations where it’s going to be intimidating, rather than ignoring the butterflies, beating heart, and sweaty palms, rather than trying to tell myself I’m not nervous, I actually lean into it. I let myself feel, oof, I’m nervous. 

And then I think about it and feel, wow, fuck yes, I’m nervous because I’m pushing myself to do something new and exciting in my life. I’m living a life big enough that I get to experience nervousness. 

Then those nerves become exciting, but not because I’m trying to convince myself I’m nervous. The authentic truth is that it is exciting that I’ve chosen to do something that makes me nervous. 

There’s a Nobel Prize-winning Liberian politician, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. And she has said something that I often reference: “If your dreams don’t scare you, they aren’t big enough.” Fear can actually be an indicator that you are on the right path, building toward a bigger, bolder version of yourself, toward a freer version of yourself and your life. 

I love seeing people being brave. So today we’re going to talk about a similar-ish topic, around the concept of addressing your fears, confronting your fears, leaning into them, although in a context that, for most people, may be more familiar than community-based porn.

Sex and relationships can be really beautiful, life-affirming experiences, and they can also bring up a lot of tough feelings. Examples include jealousy about your partner’s interactions with other people, regardless of whether you’re polyamorous or monogamous, fear of abandonment, of being rejected, of not being good enough for your partner, physically or emotionally, of being wrong or perverted. 

There’s also the fear – or the real life experience – of being hurt or assaulted. 

How do you move through these fears? How do you heal after you experience hurt? How do you prevent these fears around sex and relationships and intimacy from taking over your life, from preventing you from having the very best sex and the very best intimate relationships that you could be having, and the best version of your life? 

In this episode, I’m going to talk about an unconventional approach to responding to these tough feelings.

I want to acknowledge upfront that while this approach has been radically transformative for me and my life, it’s definitely not for everyone. Many of my partners and friends have expressed an interest in a different method for addressing their fears, something that I honor. I think it’s important that everyone goes through their own process.

Mostly I’ve heard from other partners and friends wanting to assuage these fears with reassurance, avoiding triggers, and pursuing healthier alternatives. I want to describe this approach first, what we might consider a more normative approach to addressing fears associated with sex and relationships. Then I’ll hop over to what I am proposing that I have found that really works for me.

The desire to assuage fears makes a lot of sense. You want to care for somebody that you love by helping them to ease through these difficult feelings. Trying to assuage fears is a really common way to approach these challenges. 

For example, if you’re feeling afraid of rejection, you might want your partner to affirm that they want you. If you’re feeling jealous, you may want to limit your partner’s engagement with other people. You may avoid talking about your partners, other partners, or other sexual encounters, or you may ask for affirmation from your partner about their interest in you. 

You may try to do things to make it less scary, like meeting your partner’s partners or asking your partner to spend more time with you. Or if you’re feeling afraid that your sexual desires might be perceived as inappropriate, you may avoid talking about those desires, or you may ask for affirmation from your partner that those desires are okay.

If you’re feeling fear of being assaulted – whether for the first time or fear of being assaulted again after it’s already happened to you – you may ask a partner to avoid words or sex acts that trigger memories of assault. You may try to avoid circumstances where you think you might be assaulted. 

These are all completely normal, common responses to fear and self-protection, keeping yourself safe and whole in a world that can sometimes be dangerous and difficult. 

As a poly relationship anarchist, I don’t give in to requests to limit my interactions with other people, but I do love offering reassurance and support to partners and all these other ways, if that’s what they want. 

But what I have found that has worked for me most recently has been radically different. Instead of avoiding the outcome I fear or seeking reassurance that the fear itself is unnecessary, I lean into the fear. 

I say world, fucking bring it on. What if every part of my fear is true? What if the worst happens? Put it in my face, rub it in, give me all of it. Make me terrified. Then I find that I survive, we survive. 

Remember how I mentioned nervousness and excitement feel similar in the body? That’s the same thing with terror and arousal.

Think about it. When you’re absolutely terrified, you get what we call a sinking feeling in the stomach. Energy flows downward when you’re turned on, you get a tingling feeling in your genitals. Energy flows downward. In both cases, your heart is racing and your breath changes. So terror and sexual arousal are very similar experiences in the body.

You can lean into each of these experiences mirroring one other and lean into fear and ask for the things that scare me the most. 

I’m also asking it of the people who make me feel the most loved and safe and often while fucking in an environment and a container that feels loving and safe. We’re rehearsing what might have felt like the apocalypse before but in a safe container of a loving relationship and connected sex where I can collapse into fear and lose myself for a minute or an hour. It changes the meaning of those fears.

What was once fear becomes associated with arousal, desire, connection, love, flow, state, survival, and personal power. I become stronger and the fear loses potency.

I’m going to share a few examples of how this has worked for me. I’ll start with some examples around jealousy, because this comes up all the time in relationships. Although I’ve been polyamorous for more than a decade, I still struggled with jealousy a lot, at least until about two years ago. 

I’ve heard many monogamous people say, “I couldn’t do poly. I’d be so jealous.” But people who are polyamorous aren’t necessarily any better at jealousy or any less jealous. It’s just that they have chosen a relationship where they’re going to talk openly about jealousy with their partner and commit to working on it. That communication and grounding in reality is the path to a healthy polyamorous relationship.

As much as it feels like it sometimes in the moment, it turns out that jealousy actually doesn’t kill you. Acting aggressively or disrespectfully in response to jealousy can be a death toll for relationships. But the feeling in itself is normal. It’s all about what you do with it.

In previous relationships, I took a more traditional approach to managing jealousy.

I’d ask partners for more time together, especially if they just spent a lot of time with their other partners. I’d ask for reassurance that we’re still okay and they still wanted me. I’d ask to avoid hearing stories about sex or dates with other partners. 

About two years ago, I found a new approach to eroticizing fear. 

One example of this, and there are a lot of different ways this can look, is cucking. 

In the popular stereotype, cucking includes humiliation. People might imagine that a guy with a big dick is fucking someone’s wife while insulting the dick size of the husband. If dick size insecurity is your fear, for one, I love your dick anyway, but maybe that specific manifestation of jealousy does work for you. 

But it doesn’t have to look that way. Cucking can be done by a person of any gender. Typically a man being cucked is called a cuckold and a woman being cucked is called a cuckquean. I like both roles. It also doesn’t have to require humiliation, depending on what is your thing. But in essence, cucking is about eroticizing your partner having sex with other people. 

I have a lot of cuckquean fantasies. One of my partners and I play with this a lot, so he’ll come over after fucking some other guy or girl and make me taste them off his dick. He’ll tell me intimate details about how he and the other person fucked. The more kink or emotional or hot it was, the better. 

Depending on how I’m feeling on a certain day and what the nature of my partner’s connection was, sometimes I just easily get off on it, more out of compersion, like the happiness that comes from experiencing someone else’s joy. 

But if it’s someone that my partner is really connected to, or if it’s a new kinky experience, I’m scared at first – and that fear itself is what gets me off. When he’s telling me about these experiences, I don’t ever want reassurance. I don’t want to hear that it wasn’t that good, that I’m better, or even that my partner isn’t going away.

I want their excitement about the encounter and sexual connection with someone else to be up in my face. Tell me how deeply you came in her. Tell me how good his mouth felt on you. 

As that fear melts into arousal, I realize two things. One, that actually this thing I was afraid of is fucking hot, and two, I’m stronger than my fears. I get to choose what those fears mean, and I choose to make them a source of my own pleasure. 

The more I play with this, the fewer experiences I have that create fear. My partner can now give anonymous blowjobs or creampie his friends with benefits without it triggering anything in me. It’s still super hot to hear about, but it doesn’t bring up that rushing feeling of fear in my gut anymore.

There are always growing edges. My partner and I have agreed we have no relationship boundaries. Any sex acts or words can be used with anyone else. This is in huge part because I deeply value freedom. I also think there’s some authenticity to it. We say this because we know that we’re going to connect with other people in the world, so we might as well support each other in the process. 

Some sex acts or words used with other people can be particularly hard. For example, I love calling my partner daddy. It’s something super intimate for us. It took a long time for me to get comfortable with it in our relationship, so when my partner sent me an audio recording of him calling another guy daddy, I really struggled with it. I just stopped the recording. I even felt a little angry.

I didn’t express my anger because I know it’s irrational. It’s not like he violated a boundary. We didn’t have a boundary related to the use of the word. It’s just the body’s self-protection, trying to make sense of the fear in a way that keeps me safe by externalizing it. 

But later that night, my partner and I talked about it while fucking. He made me listen to the whole 20 minute audio recording because then I’m confronting fear. I came hard over and over as we talked about it, as we moved through it. Then I put on a strap on and fucked him. I made him call me daddy. I asked him to keep calling other guys daddy, and said I want this in life now. I asked him to fuck a guy and call him daddy while I lie in bed and masturbate next to him. 

I want to take away that fear. The things that made me angry, the things I definitely thought were way too intimate for us to have with other people, I want to dive into them. I want to go hard, find the edges, go all the way in. And as a result, I’m now totally okay with my partner calling other guys daddy.

Even when we’re not having sex, because we went through that process, my partner calling a guy “daddy” is now connected in my brain to something positive, to desire and arousal. Sometimes it can bring up a little bit of a tingle, but mostly the fear is gone and definitely the anger isn’t there anymore. I’m just turned on by it. I want it. 

The last example of this approach to fear is something that involves discussion of assaults and consensual non consent.

So I want to note that if your approach is avoiding triggering subjects around assault, I deeply support however, you best take care of yourself. Feel free to skip on to a different episode. If you’d like to stay with us, I’ll dive in. 

So from a very young age, I have been afraid of assault by an anonymous intruder. I remember that as young as eight years old, I would make sure to dress in full pajamas and hold the blanket up to my neck so that if someone did come into the house, I would be more protected. This is obviously irrational, like the blanket or my clothes would not have stopped someone anyway. But it gave me a sense of comfort.

I don’t really know where this came from because I was never assaulted earlier in my life, but I was later, at age 16, and then repeatedly raped in a domestic violence situation around the age of 25. 

Of course, I would not wish these situations on anyone, but I do think the process of surviving through them made me stronger. 

This is especially true in the experience of repeated rape by an ex-partner-turned-housemate. Because of the way that I responded to the situation, I changed my narrative about myself. It was an impossible situation. I creatively struggled my way through, and I eventually escaped independently and found their way to a happy life. 

The experience of rape in itself, or really how I responded to it, was helpful in undoing my fear of rape because what I feared happened, and I still survived anyway. I know that it won’t kill me. 

And yet somehow, because fear lives in the body, an interesting way is up until about two years ago, I could not fall asleep without underwear on because of that lingering sense in my body that at least something covering me would make me at least a little safer in case someone came in at night to attack me.

A couple years ago, my partner and I started playing with CNC, or consensual non consent. And I want to clarify that this is a play with someone that I have given consent for these activities, that it is entirely different than rape because I am saying I may not want it right now, but in general, I want to be pushed and used by him. 

Our consensual non-consent or CNC play has taken lots of different forms.  Sometimes we roleplay assaults just us one-on-one where he pretends to be the intruder. Sometimes he forces me to have sex with him or with other people, even after I am physically and emotionally exhausted, like a broken, fucked doll. 

Sometimes I’m even crying or nearly immobile. Sometimes it’s around other people that come fuck me unannounced, even if it startles me, even if I wasn’t expecting it, even if I was tired and don’t want it. I haven’t quite got quite gotten to the part where they come and fuck me while I’m asleep, but that’s still a fantasy for me. 

It’s super important to note that all of these things are consensual non-consent, meaning that I’ve given blanket consent to use me in any way he wants with anyone he wants. He is not doing things that I don’t want in a broad sense. I just didn’t specifically desire those experiences at the moment.

But I have cum hard later thinking about these experiences. It was very much an erotic experience for me. It’s maybe a little bit difficult to explain to a general audience the desirability of getting used in a way you don’t want at the moment. It’s counterintuitive to a traditional vanilla understanding of consent. But if it is an experience you actively want with the right person, with someone you love and trust deeply, with whom you have given that blanket consent, and who can help you to make it an empowering experience, then I’ve found it to be incredibly healing.

So now if someone intrudes in the house, so what? And I don’t mean “so what” in a flippant sense. But now I’ve experienced that in a loving container of practicing role play when intruders came in when I wasn’t expecting. I was not ready for sex. And so it had a similar feeling, it’s now a thing that I’ve experienced before. 

It still definitely shouldn’t happen. I still definitely don’t want it to happen. But if it does, I know what to do. Maybe I’ll cry with someone that I love and care about afterward. I’ll go get STI tested and I know that I’m going to be okay. Been there, done that. Still fucked up, but still me. Still loved, still happy, still okay.

So now, for the first time in my life, because I know that I will survive through anything, I sleep naked and I don’t need the covers pulled up to my neck. It’s really important to me that folks know I’m exclusively talking about my personal healing process. Everyone’s healing is super individual, and in no way am I advocating for condoning rape or assault.

In fact, the roleplay that I’ve described works only because I’m actually the one in charge. I’m in charge because I gave that blanket consent and I can revoke it at any time. I don’t revoke it with my partner because I enjoy being pushed to my emotional limits, finding my boundaries and moving them. 

When people talk about the line between abuse and kink, it’s not narrow, it’s not confusing. It is about enthusiastic consent. They are at opposite ends of the spectrum of sexuality. 

Do I want to be raped by a random person or someone I don’t want to fuck? Hell no. Do I want my partner or whoever he decides to arrange for me to roleplay raping me? Hell yes. The same actions perhaps, but a world apart.

Experiencing consensual non-consent, the “hell yes” assault in the context of a choice that I made where I’m ultimately in charge, where I’m acting within the intimate container of a loving relationship, that “hell yes” experiences takes away the power of the “hell no”. It takes away the power of assault in contexts that I don’t actually want. Ultimately, that power remains mine.

Whether the struggle is around jealousy, fear of replacement, rejection or abandonment, or even fear of assault, this approach that I found helpful is similar to a psychological intervention called “exposure therapy”. In exposure therapy, people confront their fears by gradually exposing them to it in a safe environment, in this case, the safe container of a relationship.

The difference here is simply adding sexuality to the approach. Whatever you fear, after you’ve experienced it, it’s less scary. Maybe you can even find ways to make it hot, arousing, or a source of joy or connection. 

Perhaps it means you can let go of trying to limit your partner, release some of those relationship rules that you made up. You can laugh and cum hard together instead of crying through long conversations and trying to assuage jealousy fears over and over.

You can both have full sexual lives with each other and with other people. You can go out and live your life, your full life, without fear of assault. You can interact with whoever you want without worrying about what they might do to you. Because you’ve already been there. You’ve already felt the fear and done it anyway. That sexual and energy transmuted those fears into pleasure and personal power.

This has been another edition of A Slut’s Guide to Happiness with your host, Vanessa Cliff. 

You can find us wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple and Spotify, as well as on cliffmediaproductions.com. 

Thanks for diving deep and going heavy with me today. I think it’s beautiful that we find all the different ways to get free. 

If you’re over the age of 18, you can check out our video content on our website at cliffmediaproductions.com. 

And most of all, I invite you to join us in the pleasure of being awkward, the human naked and without pretense. 

Let’s get free.