Janet Hardy

Ecstatic Pain, Community, and Non Monogamy

On this episode of the Subspace Exploration Project Todd, Clay, and Ronen spoke with renowned Author, Educator, Kink Connoisseur, and Ethical Slut, Janet Hardy. Janet literally wrote some of the first books on non-monogamy and spent decades building healthy queer communities. We talk with changes in community and culture over the course of her career, and point to several things that appear to have not changed at all.

Janet’s Website: https://janetwhardyauthor.com/

Janet Hardy 1 Episode Transcript

This is The Subspace Exploration Project, a personal journey into kink, non-monogamy, mental and emotional health, gender expression and community building.

On this episode, we spoke with renowned author, educator, kink connoisseur and ethical slut, Janet Hardy.

Janet literally wrote some of the first books on non-monogamy, kink, and spent decades building healthy queer communities.

My name is Janet Hardy.

I'm the author of somewhere between 12 and 16 books depending on how you count second editions and third editions.

The best known of which is The Ethical Slut, which is in its third edition with half a million copies sold and translated into, I think, 13 languages so far.

And I live in Eugene, Oregon with my spouse and pets.

And I'm semi-retired.

I used to run Greenery Press, which published a lot of these books and other people's books.

But I retired from that a few years ago, and now I just work exclusively as a writer, editor, and sometimes illustrator.

Oh, and educator.

I fly out and educate people a lot.

So The Kink Journey, when did that start for you?

Because for me, it's just beginning.

So how did that start for you?

And the mechanics and like culture of BDSM at the time that you were discovering that, how was it difficult or how did it differ from what you see?

It was very different from now.

My BDSM fantasies go back to my earliest memories.

I can remember having kinky thoughts back when I was four.

But the world was a very different place.

I was a young adult and raising my kids in Sacramento in the late 70s and early 80s, when there was next to no information available about BDSM at all.

And there were groups in big cities, San Francisco, New York, and so on.

But I didn't know that.

And there certainly wasn't anything like that in Sacramento at the time.

So I was flying blind for a lot of it.

I didn't know what I was doing.

The closest thing I had to education was, there used to be an offshoot of Penthouse Forum that was called Penthouse Variations.

That was kink letters, quote unquote letters written by people who had had the experiences.

And so I had that.

I sort of lost faith in that one.

I wrote a story for them about the experiences I hadn't had yet and they accepted it.

So I realized that what they were printing was not necessarily True Life Adventures.

And I had a book from England called S&M The Last Taboo, which I think is still in print.

And that was what I had.

That was it.

I was married at the time with two grade school-aged kids.

I came, I went to my spouse after years of angsting over how I was going to break this to him, literally years, and told him where my interests were and we tried.

And someone's got to hold down one end of the bell curve and he was it.

He just wasn't into it.

And that was also back before there was any good information about Polly.

We had, we talked about maybe opening the relationship so that I could have some BDSM experiences.

And he just couldn't find a way to make that work in his worldview.

So we parted as friends.

When I was about 32, 33, somewhere in there, shared custody of the kids, both physical and legal.

And I began exploring.

That was not quite as discontinuous as it made it, as I've made it sound because I started exploring while I was still married to him.

Because I was not sure whether this was going to be an itch that would go away once I had scratched it or whether it was going to be part of my life from then on.

I didn't want to end a marriage over something that was going to go away.

It was going to go away in two weeks.

So I did some experimenting and ran some personals and read some personals.

And it took me a couple months to decide that, yeah, no, this was going to be an ongoing part of my life.

And at that point, we ended things.

You know, then it was no more fun than any other divorce, but it was better than most.

And we remain friends to this day many, many years later.

And I went on to explore.

I started by playing with people I knew around Sacramento.

I answered one personal ad from a guy who on paper seemed like he would be a good fit, but the chemistry wasn't there.

But he called me a few weeks later to say there's some outfit called the Society of Janice that's having a party on Super Bowl Sunday in San Francisco.

Do you want to go in together?

And so we agreed to do that.

And we also agreed to let everybody know as soon as we walked in the door that we were not there as a couple.

And so, you know, a woman for her first time in a kink environment is very likely to get heavily cruised.

And of course I did.

And I met several people at that event who have gone on to be longtime friends.

I also met Jay Wiseman, with whom I was in a relationship for 13 years, and I wound up moving to the Bay Area to be with him and to be in the kink scene in the Bay Area.

My kids were commuting to their dad on weekends and to me during the week.

Now, that's backwards to him during the week and me on weekends, because they didn't didn't want to leave their schools.

And that worked fine for a number of years.

Jay and I split up, would have been about 2005, 2006, in there somewhere, 2004 maybe.

And I played the I played the single game for a few years.

And then I met Edward, my current spouse, who I had actually known for a very long time, and we had never considered each other as potential partners, because he thought I he thought I was straight and I thought he was gay and turns out we're both bi.

So once we got that figured out, which we did when I answered his personal lab, not knowing it was him, not knowing it was him for several rounds of correspondence, and then all of a sudden the penny dropped and all our mutual friends were getting calls going, what can you tell me about this person?

And, you know, long story short, here we are, we celebrated our 18th anniversary last month.

Here we are in Eugene.

So that's a very long answer to a very short question.

I don't think that's necessarily a very short question.

I think that's as long as you as long as you want to make it, the more information, the better.

So how did you navigate some of the internal things?

Because back like when you were talking about there was no language.

There was some language.

I can remember, for example, thinking that anybody that you did SM on was a slave, which I found out later was not the case, but that was the language I had.

I had not heard of tops or bottoms.

One of the problems with having discovered SM, the last taboo as my first entry level book into kink, was being a British book, it reinforced my belief that when you said SM, what you meant was spanking, or impact play as we now call it, which is not the case.

But it took me a while to find that out, mostly by hooking up with different people and finding out that they wanted different things than I did, and being utterly unprepared for that.

The first guy I ever played with wanted to be walked on, which who knew?

I thought it was odd then.

I think it's odd now, but there's a lot of kinks I don't get.

But during my one date with him, he mentioned at one point that his previous girlfriend had been willing to step on bugs and small animals while he watched, at which point it was like, okay, Hardy out.

That's not okay for me.

So I never saw him again.

But I met people who wanted to be tied up, which I knew nothing about doing.

People who wanted to do role plays like age play and so on, knew nothing about that anal stuff.

I knew only a tiny bit about that.

The one time I ever actually injured someone during play was trying to do anal play without knowing what the fuck I was doing, which that's a really easy way to injure someone.

Not a lot of what we do in King requires a lot of education beyond common sense, but I think anal does require some serious knowledge, which I didn't have.

Language wise, I came into the scene as what I then called a dominant, later learned that a top would be a more accurate description of what I was and then later on later than that a switch.

And I still have trouble with the tendency in Kinkland to equate everybody who is done to as submissive and everybody who does as dominant, because power games are not my thing.

I'm a pain player and a role player, and I have no interest in giving or taking orders or serving or being served.

Both make me acutely uncomfortable, which has been a bit of a challenge in terms of finding like minded partners, although I can do a convincing dom impression if it's called for, but it doesn't do much for me.

And I can't sub at all, I'm just terrible at it.

So you know, it goes on.

Good role playing, though, I hear.

Role playing is kind of my second love after impact.

Dawsey, my co-author and I, for many years, were really good role players together, and I'm sure still would be, except we're 500 miles apart and we're both aging and losing both physical abilities and libidos.

So we haven't done that in a while.

But if you read through some of our books that we wrote together, you can see descriptions of scenes we did together, which were mostly scenes with a role play over tone.

And we were great.

Not everybody is good at role play, but we are, particularly together.

Some would say that FetLife is a bit of a cesspool.

I mean, even back in the days that where you and I were producing that podcast, The Female Voice, as I was trying to understand more about kink, I kind of avoided, like, the only thing that I was, aside from some of the books that were referred to in the podcast, the only other resource was FetLife.

And when I would jump on there, a lot of what I saw was like, this is...

Yeah.

I left FetLife a number of years ago.

I'm not even going to go into that, it's background.

But my opinion about Fet is that the closer you come to the profile of being hetero or hetero-ish, DS-ish.

Thank you.

Not, well, more than hetero, not queer-oriented and a beginner or advanced beginner.

If you fit all those criteria, you're gonna learn a lot on FET.

If you don't, you're gonna get diminishing returns, and the more of those criteria you don't fit, the more diminished the returns are gonna get.

So I don't, you know, I keep a secret ID there just because sometimes I have to go find out what people are posting about something, but I haven't seriously participated there in at least a decade.

So for people who are drawn to BDSM at the beginning of their journey, what are some of the better online community and informational resources that they might want to seek out?

I would say go online long enough to enter BDSM, Munch and the name of your city, and then go talk to actual people who do actual things.

Anything you find online is filtered through many, many filters and the self-image of the person posting and the environment.

And there's no quality check on anybody who posts online.

This person could be less experienced than you, like I found out about Tenthouse Variations.

The only way you're gonna learn the real thing is to go find real people.

And if that's not safe for you to do where you live, then take a vacation, go to a different city, find out where the munch is there and go to that.

Also, if you have adult boutiques in your city or town, there's usually some very good reference books and also the people who work there tend to be knowledgeable about kink and related topics.

Go in there, talk to them, look at the toys with them, learn from them.

I actually did most of my learning back before I found the organized scene from a magazine I found while on vacation in New Orleans with a friend called San Mutopia Guardian that existed back in the late 80s and early 90s when I was first finding the scene.

And it had the best article I've seen to this day about flagellation and impact play.

And that was where I started actually learning how to do what I did.

There isn't a magazine like that now.

And I don't think there can be because the internet sops up too much of the potential readership.

But the magazine was written and published by people who knew what was what, longtime players with real life experience.

And it was hugely helpful.

And I wish it were still here, but it isn't.

So Greenery Press, which I founded in 92, was the best I could do to fill that gap.

I published books from people who were real world players.

I was there to vet them to make sure that they were saying things that were true.

I had a bunch of beta readers who were also expert in their topics to look over the books and tell me if there was something wrong in them.

So it was the closest I could come to doing something like Samutopia.

And I ran Greenery up until, let's see, it would have been 2020, yeah, when I turned 65.

And then I signed it over to our distributor who is still running it.

So it was a good run.

So non-monogamy and exploring that has been a huge part of your journey.

And you wrote some of the first books on that.

What are some of the important challenges that you've experienced learning about having more than one love?

Polly was actually remarkably easy for me.

I have not run across many challenges in that aspect of my life.

The place where my partners and I came apart was to do with the sorts of things that long-term couples come apart with, whether they're monogamous or non, which are things like sharing of chores and how money came into the house and went out.

And those were the hard parts.

The easy parts were poly.

The only times I ran across real issues with our polyness were when one of my partners was playing with someone who I thought was demonstrably bad for them or bad for our relationship.

And then I had to speak up.

But for the most part, there was one time I had to call a timeout because he was playing with a woman who wore patchouli oil and I was not okay with finding patchouli oil smell on my pillow.

You know, this is a very easily solved problem.

And the other one was smell related to, and now I can't remember what it was.

But apparently that's my hard limit, is bringing smells I don't like into my house.

I agree with that.

Do not bring a smell I don't like into my space.

Exactly.

So yeah, poly was not the hard part and never has been.

My first marriage was the only time I have seriously tried monogamy.

And we held it together for a decade or so.

And then when the BDSM thing came to light in my life, that was where we founded.

And since then, I've never promised monogamy.

I've never done monogamy.

These days, I'm not doing sex at all, which makes the whole thing kind of moot, but the relationship is still understood to be open should one of us wake up one morning and go, huh, I'm about ready to go get laid.

It's been 18 years and that hasn't happened yet, but we're young and good.

We're not young.

We're young, younger than some people, but not really very young.

What about, we all have our own relationship with pain, as far as like impact play and things like that.

And for some people, it can create a sort of ecstasy.

And so-

Yes, it would be me.

Can you talk a little bit about like how pain and ecstasy can coexist and be something really fruitful?

I can talk about how that works for me in my play.

I can't project onto other people.

But what I find is I spent quite a few years learning how far it was okay to let myself be pushed.

And I started out pretty conservative on that when something got difficult.

I would say for it and ask for some talk and a breather.

And then later on, I got better at hanging tough as it got harder.

And what I discovered eventually is that if you hang in there to the point just past where it feels tolerable, that's where you take off.

That's where you fly.

And it's not a good idea to try to do that if you're new, because you don't know, you haven't learned to tell the difference between good pain and bad pain.

And it's important to know that your power stays in you, even when you're letting yourself be pushed very hard.

And the way you learn that is by learning how to say for it out or otherwise bow out if things are starting to feel too challenging.

I think there's a scene in the new topping book that, it's in one of the books anyway, where Dawsey and I are describing a scene we did together and we're both way out there on our personal edges and doing very intense sensation play.

And I start to put a plug up her butt and she stops me and gasps out a word or two saying she has had diarrhea that day and her butt is too sore.

And so I throw the plug away and we just keep going back into roll with the space of two breaths.

So there are ways of taking care of yourself, even if you are way out there on your edges, but you have to learn how to get there gradually.

What I think a lot of people have trouble distinguishing between everyday pain, mundane pain and the kind that you experience in scene.

I promise I'm no better than anybody else at dealing with regular old everyday pain.

I ruptured a tendon in this wrist a couple of days ago, and I promise you this is not erotic, not in any way, shape or form.

I think where the difference lies, it has to do with intent and it has to do with a container.

Where if you're letting yourself get pushed out to where you're not quite in your right mind anymore, you need to know that there's somewhere, someone there that's containing you and your energy and your scene so that it's safe to go out there like that.

A book that I've read not too long ago that I recommend to anybody who's interested in pain as an ecstatic experience is called Hurt So Good.

And it's a memoir by a woman who has been a kink player and has been a marathon runner and a ballet dancer and a couple of other things that are really about pushing your body beyond where it thinks it can go.

And she goes and does things like entering hot pepper eating contests and doing polar bear, you know, frozen water swimming and things that do not sound like any fun at all to me, but she gets to that ecstatic place through all of them.

And it's a really fascinating read and also very funny and good to read.

It rang true to me then just about anything else I've read about ecstatic pain play that Dossie and I didn't write.

If I could ask you more about Dossie, you did a tantro workshop with Dossie Easton.

I did.

We did many of them together, but I know the one you're asking about because I've written about it four or five times now.

This is when we were working on our book Radical Ecstasy, which we're just about to start work on a second edition.

It's a book about achieving ecstatic states during BDSM play.

And we had started going to Tantra classes because we figured we might learn something there.

So we'd been to quite a few by then, and we had discovered that having been ecstatic pain players for a number of years, we were really good at getting into whole body orgasms and all that Tantra stuff.

So here we were, it was a weekend long workshop.

We were staying in a motel in Sonoma County, I think it was.

And the last exercise of the day on Saturday night was, we'd been circulating around, it was an all female environment.

We'd been circulating around the room, playing with all the different women under, with different prompts.

And the last exercise of the day was to pair up with the person you'd come with and to just reconnect through the breath and the gaze and all that good Tantra stuff.

So we were doing that.

We did a thing where we were sharing air by breathing into each other's mouths in turn.

And I felt myself starting to go into an orgasmic state and it went on getting stronger and stronger and with no volition whatsoever, I fell over backwards and arched up off the floor in a full bow just on the top of my head and the soles of my feet.

Dossie did not catch on to what was happening in time, so she couldn't get off me in time.

So she was riding me like a bronc, and I was just arched up like that.

If you offered me a million dollars to do that right now, I would not be able to.

Screaming, couldn't stop screaming, pounding the floor with my fists just, and it was terrifying.

I did not know how to stop.

I didn't know if I was gonna have a stroke or if I was gonna die or what.

And eventually it turned out I didn't need to know how to stop.

It stopped on its own because the body can only do that for so long.

And so I eventually collapsed and she collapsed with me.

And I curled up and burst into tears because I was scared shitless.

And she patted me and took care of me.

And I think if we had had the sense to just sort of end it there and go home and go back to our regular lives, I might have been able to get through it.

But as it had worked out, there was a whole nother day of workshopping left, which I went to because I didn't have a ride home.

And I was doing as low impact tantra as I knew how to do, you know, just not putting out much energy or taking in much energy.

And then we had a book to finish.

We were on deadline.

So I couldn't turn away from this experience.

I had to keep on immersing myself in this environment that had done that to me.

And as a result, there were years afterward where anytime I took my attention out of my intellect and put it into my body, I would start to go into an orgasmic state again.

And it was happening without volition, you know, at the grocery store, at the antique store, at the exercise class.

That was a barrel of laughs.

And, you know, I think to many people, having involuntary orgasm sounds like fun.

It is not fun.

The other things that you do that mean your muscles are contracting without your volition are not fun things.

They're things like labor pains, heart attacks, charley horses.

The only thing that makes orgasm more fun than those is context.

And since I didn't have context for what was going on, I was very frightened.

We finished the book.

I was trying to figure out how to get back to anything like ground zero.

I've come to realize in the intervening years that our move to Eugene, which happened at about that time, was probably an instinctive move on my part to ground myself to be in a place where I could live more quietly and more physically.

You know, we got chickens, I baked bread, all of that sort of hands-on grounding stuff.

And I did eventually here in Eugene, the home of every old hippie on the West Coast, find ecstatic dance classes, a couple, or not classes, but gatherings a couple nights a week, where I could go and dance the energy up and down myself for as much as I wanted.

And then when it was time, I could choose to let it out.

So it was energy practice for me doing ecstatic dance, and it was great.

And so eventually I got to where I'm in reasonable comfort with that.

But that story I just told you spans about 15 years or more.

So it was a long, long time.

When I was doing the podcast with Todd, one of the people we interviewed was a woman named Isis Lior, who was also what is, she was the one who told me what happened, was called a Kundalini awakening.

And she too has had one.

And she gave me some language and some context for what had happened to me that was hugely helpful.

And that was a big step in trying to figure out what had happened and what I needed to do to get back to a level that felt comfortable to me.

So yeah, all of that.

As a result, I have not done big BDSM.

I've spanked people for various fundraisers around town.

And occasionally if I'm in the same city as one of my old sweeties, we'll do a little scene.

But I've not done serious BDSM or serious genital sex in 20 years.

I just don't trust my ability to come, to not go back into that state if I'm voluntarily putting myself into that kind of ecstatic mindset again.

So I just don't.

Fortunately, my spouse is also the veteran of many, many years of very adventurous sex.

And we're both feeling like that journey is pretty much over for us, but you know, we could be wrong.

We could wake up tomorrow morning and decide we really, really need to fuck.

And I suppose we would be able to figure out how to do it.

Probably not in a vagina intercourse, but we could figure something out.

I can get creative.

I still have my harness.

So what are some of the biggest misconceptions people have about BDSM, especially going into it brand new?

Oh, a big one is people who read BDSM porn online and think that that's the only way to do it.

And so they try to jump with both feet in something like a 24 seven total power exchange relationship.

And no, there's plenty of people who have been in BDSM for many decades who have not tried a 24 seven TPE relationship because it's not a turn-on or because it feels fraught.

Dossie and I between us, let's see, she's been doing kink since the late 70s.

I've been doing it since the late 80s.

You can add it up.

Neither of us has ever been in a full-time DS relationship.

And we've had lots of fun.

So, I think learning from porn, this is not my quote, I've not been able to run down who said it originally, but it's like trying to learn to drive by watching The Fast and The Furious.

It's just not a good place to learn.

So, you start with one thing, and then you add another thing, and then you add another thing.

And eventually, some of those things will work, and some of them won't, but because you've only added them one at a time, you'll know what the glitch turned out to be.

And eventually, you get to where you want it to be.

And then maybe later, you'll want to take it a little farther, and you'll add something else new.

But trying to do it all at once, I would say, is the mistake I see made most often by newbies.

Misconceptions.

I think a lot of people understand that BDSM to be always male dominant, female submissive, particularly in the hetero world.

And I'm here to tell you it's not, but that is the pop.

And it seems to me that since I first came into the scene in 1988, that I do see that balance shifting more toward male dominant, female submissive, which I don't like.

I like the world to be more balanced than that.

But on the other hand, someone's kink is someone's kink.

And I can't tell them it's wrong if they're liking it.

If they're having a good time and nobody's getting hurt, more power to them.

But I feel like they miss a lot by not trying other configurations.

But I'm not their mommy.

They can do it any old way they want.

I think a mistake I see made within the kink community and to some degree with outside it as well, is that only the people who go to the conferences and the workshops and who hang out on FET, and who do the outwardly BDSM thing, that those are the only people who are doing BDSM.

Lots and lots and lots and lots of people do really good BDSM without ever feeling the need to go be part of a community, either because they're not joiner types or because they have good reasons not to.

And that doesn't make them poorer players by any means.

It makes them people who know what they want and who get what they want and more power to them.

Back in the day, when I first jumped on FET Life, back in 2011, started to start to wrap my head around certain aspects of kink.

Jumped on FET Life, very quickly turned off by a number of things that I saw there.

So I kind of just resigned myself to not jumping into the community.

So I kind of, until like maybe a year ago, I just thought, okay, I just haven't explored those things.

And I've maybe, I'm probably just vanilla with some quirks.

Yeah.

And as I've started to actually talk with people in the community, I realized, no, I'm a kinky motherfucker.

I just, I didn't have the language, I didn't have the community to know how these things fit here and there.

If the first thing I had discovered in Kinkland was Fet, I would probably have run from it too.

It's too distant from what my desires are.

I would probably have found a home in the spanking community rather than the BDSM community if I had happened to walk that way.

But I don't get on all that well in the spanking community either because they are mostly into a sort of domestic discipline model that I like in fantasy, but that I have found doesn't work out all that well for me in reality.

I went to a few Shadow Lane things back in the day, had a great time.

But what I found is that the people there, they totally understand the whole brat, that sort of dynamic.

And they have reluctantly come to terms with dominance and submission because they get a lot of it.

What they don't understand is ecstatic pain play.

So, you know, I was getting the holy living shit wailed out of me by a friend and laughing like an idiot, both of us the whole way through.

And people were looking at us like we had three heads.

They just didn't get it.

So I don't know where I would have wound up if I hadn't been fortunate.

I mostly discovered the more organized scene, both by going to events in San Francisco and by at the time Usenet, which had a group called Social Sexuality Bondage, BDSM, and another group called Alt Sex Banking.

And that was where I found most of the friends that I still have.

In theory, FET should have supplanted it, but I think the vibe is very different.

There's a lot of potential there, but you know who always gloms on to those things.

And it's a very heteronormative douche bag.

I think it's partly, Kink when I came into it was difficult enough to find that you had to really want it, particularly as a woman.

You had to really search to find your way in, in a safe way.

And now it's a couple of keystrokes away, and I don't think people value it in quite the same way now that it's such an easy thing to access.

And I also think there is a much, much lower barrier to entry.

And in some ways, that's great.

I love that nobody ever has to feel alone in their kink desires anymore.

And the Internet brought that about, and that's awesome.

I spent a year as the hotline coordinator for the Society of Janus taking calls from people all over the country who were just so alone and so scared.

So that doesn't have to happen anymore, and that's great.

But on the other hand, the low barrier to entry means that morons can do it too, and that's not as good an idea.

And people can bring all kinds of creepazoid energies into it.

And if creepazoid is your thing, fly be free.

But it's not my thing, and I don't feel comfortable around a lot of these people.

I kind of feel like the people who are the morons, as you say, who are getting into it, the people that want to hit because they're going to find a reason to hit, whether or not they're going to do.

It's that and it's people whose core values are still rather authoritarian, misogynist, or sexist, or gender role.

That's a better way to say it, gender role-based.

People who are not questioning norms and who are coming into bringing all those traditional values with them.

I'm glad they're happy, but they're not my people.

I mean, I want to hit too, but I would also like to do that in a way that is good for me and the other people that I'm hitting.

That is ethical.

That is ethical, yeah.

I utterly get that.

Are there aspects of BDSM, sexual exploration and non-monogamy that you would like to see more public discourse on?

Of course, we're getting a ton of discourse on non-monogamy right now because of two books that have come out in the last month.

So I'm getting more calls from media than I've had in years.

One of the things that is a real annoyance to me right now is that the word polyamory seems to have been co-opted by a particular subbranch of what I think of as the greater world of polyamory, which is the kind of, they're mostly hetero or hetero-ish.

They're mostly interested in live-in relationships.

They're, you know, it's a highline world.

Their politics tend to be more conservative than most people I find in alternative communities.

It's this particular vein of poly that goes back to the early 90s.

And it's fine, you know, it's, again, not my people, but they're good people.

I have a lot of friends in that world.

But I hate the idea that that's what people mean when they say polyamory instead of all the other wonderful arrangements that people make.

One of the first things Dossie and I did when we decided to start working on a polyamory book, which as a joke, we were calling the ethical slutt as it's at the time, was we started going to poly events to see what people were wanting to know.

So I was at one of these, I was at a poly picnic somewhere in South Bay.

And during the introductions, I said that I was there because my co-author and I were working on a book about polyamory.

And so okay, during the break, one of their leaders takes me aside and says, but Debra Annapol already wrote a book about polyamory.

And I said, well, Debra wrote a great book about a particular type of polyamory, which has to do with long term part, more than two long term partners under the same roof.

And that's great.

But we want to write about all the different kinds of ways that people collect, connect.

And he said, well, like what?

And I said, well, you know, like outside partners and group sex and all, you know, and he says, oh, you mean like tertiary relationships?

I nobly controlled the eye roll because I think tertiary relationships is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard.

And I said, no, I mean like the guy on the other side of the glory hole.

And then I got to watch his face all kind of come apart.

And it was awesome.

But there's been that schism for many, many years between this one particular subset of poly that, you know, I can shorthand it as highline poly because that's how a lot of people found poly land in the beginning, was having read Stranger in a Strange Land or another of the books where he talks about non-nonogamous relationships.

And all the rest of us, you know, people who have been doing queer poly or kink poly or fuck buddy poly or any of the other ways people can connect for all these years, and it's like we don't exist in some of these newer writings.

I think I'm a lot of questions right now, but I really appreciate your time and sharing with us.

Sure.

Well, if there's other stuff that comes up, you know, drop me a note and we can always talk again.

Yeah, that's great having you on.

Thank you.

You too.

Bye bye now.

That was Janet Hardy.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Subspace Exploration Project.

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