What Excites Us!

Episode 14 - Tell All with Shahn: From Stone to Shahn

Transcript:

Gwyn  0:00  
This show is for adults. And this episode in particular, is not for delicate ears.

Shahn  0:06  
There's very little spectacular about a different tongue. I mean, occasionally there is but mostly that's like dedication and respect. And if you aren't listening to my no, you probably don't have enough respect. 

Gwyn  0:21
Hi there, and welcome to What Excites Us, the show that discusses sex and sexuality throughout time and place, including the here and now. This episode is a chat with my dear friend Shahn, about his journey, going from a stone butch lesbian, to where he is now some 30 years later. We discuss what the term stone butch means, growing up a queer kid in Vermont, where his identity has landed these days, some basic Grindr etiquette, and so much more. Shahn truly is one of my very best friends. And so the original conversation is much longer, with lots of fun tangents and giggles. If you would like to listen to the whole hour and a half in its unedited glory, and it's really fun, I invite you to subscribe to my Patreon, which you can find only by typing the full page in your browser bar. And that URL is patreon.com/whatexcitesus. And I would like to remind you to please subscribe to the show if you haven't already, so you don't miss a single episode. They are released every other Friday.

Gwyn Isaacs [AD]
This episode of What Excites Us is brought to you by me I'm Gwyn Isaacs. And besides being your podcast host, I'm a certified sex coach and educator. And right now, I have some openings for text based clients. I love coaching over email and text. It allows you to be open and vulnerable in ways that may feel too difficult in person, which lets us tackle the concerns you have at your own pace. Very few of us were taught how to have sex. Most of us are feeling our way through the dark, hoping we get it right. I can help you build skills in the bedroom and navigate your intimate relationships. I have two ways you can sign up to start texting with me right away. When you go to earthlydesire.com/coaching You will find a weekly subscription for daily correspondence. And a way to schedule a live one hour text chat. Visit earthlydesire.com to start on your path of more pleasure today. You deserve it!

Gwyn
Hi, Shahn, welcome to What Excites Us! Thank you so much for being here and for being my first civilian interview.

Shahn  3:06  
Wow I'm a civilian. That's cool.

Gwyn  3:09  
I wouldn't put you in the normies category. That's for true.

Shahn  3:12  
Oh, right. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I'm not.

Gwyn  3:16  
You're not like a sex educator out there working the beat.

Shahn  3:19  
I am not though I did just change my Grindr profile to No means No.  

Gwyn  3:26  
I love that!

Shahn  3:27  
So I might become a Grindr consent educator. Or I'll uninstall it for a while. Thanks for having me. 

Gwyn  3:39  
Yeah, so who are you? 

Shahn  3:41  
So anyway, oh, hey, I'm Shahn

Gwyn  3:44  
Tell us about yourself.

Shahn  3:45  
Uh I'm uh I'm Shahn, and I like to do those Shahn things. Nope, I got this. Uh, I can do my Kik intro. I'm 50. I'm an FTM. I live in New York City, Brooklyn to be specific. I'm disabled. I have different disabilities not, you know, clearly I don't have three of the same disability. [both giggling] I mean, [sigh] I hadn't thought about this part. 

Gwyn  4:24  
How do you identify? 

Shahn  4:25  
How do I identify? I identify as a non binary trans, masc? person? I don't I hate that masculine thing. I don't feel like I'm terribly masculine. But I also don't feel like I'm terribly feminine. And if I had to pick one, I would pick masculine because I'd rather try for that. Because I spent my childhood trying to be feminine. And wow did that not work out. Clearly.

Gwyn  4:53  
What pronouns do you use? 

Shahn  4:55  
Oh uh, he him.

Gwyn  4:58  
And what the hell is a stone butch?

Shahn  5:01  
Oh, a stone butch is, uh, well, So way back in, you know, like around the 50s. So it could include the 40s of 30s, a little earlier and 60s 70s. And even now people still use the term butch and femme. But in what was then called lesbian community, or perhaps gay or homosexual women's community, if they ever put those words together, a lot of people use this sort of, I'd say like flirting and coupling, a dynamic or a ritual called butch femme. Which on the surface, looks a bit like copying heterosexuality. But it's truly not, I don't think it is, at least.

A butch, especially a butch woman is someone more masculine than a woman of the time is, like, quote, unquote, allowed to be. And I guess, like, in that sense, as a masculine woman identifying person, I felt pretty comfortable calling myself masculine. But like now that I get seen as a man, I don't feel as comfortable calling myself masculine. That's a whole that's another podcast though. So a stone butch is a butch queer woman, I think in today's parlance would be a little better. Who does not choose to receive sexual or physical attention, more sexual than just physical, like they tend to, you know, could be cuddly.

But first and foremost, did not receive penetrative sex ever, like, never got fucked, and probably it shook out, I didn't take my clothes off. For most of my time as a stone butch, I didn't take my jeans off. I didn't take my boots off for a lot of the sex that I had, actually. And occasionally, I would even leave my baseball cap on, which now there's a whole like fraternity porn industry that centered around dudes with a lot of privilege and backwards baseball caps, having gay sex, which I think is hilarious. So a stone butch isn't on the receiving end. So back when I was kind of really into my, my butch identity was the late 80s, early 90s. The way that I saw it, it seemed very common that butches dated femmes and pretty much only we're just seeing the beginnings of like butch on butch, and of course, femme on femme, lest I forget, and I think now it's just kind of called you know, sex. [both laughing]

I think it's a real, I think it's real good progress, actually, like, you know, rather than like, butch on butch, it's, it's just sex, which is cool. So, femmes were often the people who received the sexual attention. God, it's so hard to talk about, like that far back in the days because there was so little talk about consent, and limits. And, like, we all often we would start out our, like, sexual negotiation on a dance floor somewhere, while like, completely trashed, and oh boy.

Gwyn  8:27
Wait, you had sexual negotiations back then? Because I sure didn't.

Shahn  8:31  
Sorta, I mean, I mean, I at least had the you know, you want to come home with me? And that was about it. 

Gwyn  8:38
Yeah. Okay. 

Shahn  8:39
Oh, I can't imagine saying to someone, you know, like, oh, man, I had this great hookup. We were totally trashed. And then somehow we got from the club to my place.[laughing] And then, you know, like, four hours later, like, we're both bruised and smoking a cigarette. Dang. Yeah.

Gwyn  9:02  
Yeah. It still happens. There are, there are plenty of folks who still engage that way. 

Shahn  9:09  
I'm sure 

Gwyn  9:10  
I think it's shifting.

Shahn  9:11  
Ya, I am too. Yeah. I mean, even if we could just have like, like some drunken words of like, you know, What won't you do? Or, you know, is there anything that you won't do? Or is there anything that you really want? Or? Yeah,

Gwyn  9:27  
Yeah, some words. Words are definitely helpful. And that is also a topic for another podcast.

Shahn  9:33  
Another podcast. I digress all the time. 

Gwyn  9:37  
Oh, me too. [both laughing]

Shahn  9:41
Yeah, so I know 

Gwyn  9:43 
back in the day, 

Shahn  9:44 
so back in the day

Gwyn  9:46  
80s and 90s three you identifying as lesbian yet?

Shahn  9:51  
Yeah. In like 1989 ish. 

Gwyn  9:55  
Okay, 

Shahn  9:55  
I came out somewhere and I went to outright Vermont.Yay Outright Vermont  

Gwyn  10:00  
Woohoo Outright! 

Shahn  10:02  
Yeah, they started right around then like, right around 1989. I remember I was that initial like group of young queers.

Gwyn  10:13 
So when when he came out, were you already identifying as stone? Certainly you were butch.

Shahn  10:19  
I don't think so. I was. Yeah, once. I don't remember exactly when I learned about butch as a term. 

Gwyn  10:20  
Gotcha. 

Shahn  10:20  
But as soon as I did, yeah, that was me. 

Gwyn
Do you remember how you I like identified yourself. Like, for instance, I was a part of the dyke squad. And people use that to be really rude. And I was like, Yeah, fuck that. That's awesome. Totally the dyke squad. [laughing]

Shahn
Yeah, I remember, nobody really had a lot of reclamation vibe going on. I think Vermont gets like social and political trends a little bit later. We certainly did before the internet, right? Probably still do, even with the internet, like just a little bit later. But yeah, but this was yeah, like so I think it was, like an interesting kind of coincidence that I like a very butch kid came out at a time when, like the rest of the country. The rest of the United States, at least was kind of done with butch/femme. Like, there were still some people who lived the life but there weren't a lot of like young kids identifying that way except a whole bunch of us from Vermont did. And so, yeah, so I got, I got a weirdly like, 1950s oriented kind of view of, of what being gay and female was. I think I like, I also feel like a lot of my early social life, as well as like sexual and dating and romantic was really about learning, like what normal people did, and just doing my best to do what everybody else did, in some way. And so since a lot of other people were doing butch/femme, so it was a little bit easier for me to do butch/femme. And, and, like, you know, normal people had sex, so I had to want to eventually have sex. And I put it off for a while, saying that I wanted to wait until like, I knew it was a really significant thing. And I just there wasn't anybody in high school that I thought about that way.[laughs] kind of a thing. But really, I was terrified of sex. Gosh, probably into my 30s. Honestly. I mean, that's assuming that I'm not terrified of sex now. I don't know. It's all kind of terrifying.

Gwyn  12:58  
When you first heard the term stone where you like, oh, that's me.

Shahn  13:03  
So, you know, it might have been that the first time I heard of stone, especially stone butch was with the book "Stone Butch Blues." But I can't have been, I have to admit, but then again, "Stone Butch Blues" came out kind of early in my life. March 1993. 

Gwyn  13:24  
Who wrote "Stone Butch Blues?"

Shahn  13:27  
Oh, Leslie Feinberg, an amazing, a stone butch socialist activist, wonderful human who's passed away. "Stone Butch Blues" is a little bit sad because it's very much about feeling like an outsider. And kind of being an outsider. One of the things I think that was probably one of the bigger tragedies about stone butches in like the, I'd say, probably pre 80s is that, um, they didn't really open up to a lot of people. Like they were like, kind of like yours stereotypical, like, macho, stoic dude. That makes me a little sad to think about, like, how many people just held so much like grief inside because you don't walk around pre 1980s You know, looking like a dude with breasts and not incur some hostility, or a whole lot of hostility. I mean, I lived through some of the hostility being in Vermont in the 80s even though it was starting to go away, but I feel like it happens less.

Gwyn  14:42  
So when you found the term and you decided that you identified as that what did that give you?

Shahn  14:48  
Gosh, I feel like it gave me armor. No, I mean, I I had armor already. But it was like refinement. Like I had a I had something that I could hold on to, you know, and just be like, This is me. And somebody else knows who I am on a level that they don't even know need to know that I exist, to know that this is who I am. And I don't think I'd ever really felt like that before. 

Gwyn  15:18  
It makes a lot of sense

Shahn  15:19  I probably spent a great deal of my life just, you know, like walking up to people. I mean, this is much more of a metaphor, but walking up to people and saying, like, Do you get me?

Gwyn  15:32  
Did you feel like you had? Did it give you a voice? Like?

Shahn  15:37  
I did. So yeah. Yeah. I mean, it gave me a community of people who did not perform gender the way we were told to. In 1993. I was in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I hung out at a bar called the 19 bar, I think it might still be there. But the only place to go in the early 90s. If you were queer really was a bar. I met other stone butches there at the 19 bar. Through them I learned about this thing called Vulva Riot, which was amazing. It was an open mic night, basically. Not open mic, it was a curated community, like kind of talent show. Though there were no winners or losers. We were all winners. I'd already met my on again, off again romantic person. I don't know what to call them anymore. Because we both have transitioned in our own directions. Though we started out as lesbians. I don't, I think we're both not anymore. [laughs]

Gwyn  16:45  
Excellent.

Shahn  16:48
But even like, early in my transition, so I started my like, personal gender journey. I mean, really, my personal gender journey started way before I even knew what a gender journey might be. Because I didn't have any of those words. I'd watched Maude, which I think is kind of hilarious that I'm going to bring up Maude is like a shining example of trans awareness. Because I'm pretty sure it was a gay man who played a transvestite. Like, that's the word they used for him 

Gwyn  17:25  
Yeah. Yeah. 

Shahn  17:27  
And I think I don't even I don't think his role could be created today. Or even really recreated. I think he'd have to either be like, a really clear drag queen, who was like, I'm a man, and this is performance, and it's my job. Or a trans woman who's like, I'm a woman. 

Gwyn  17:49  
Right.

Shahn  17:50  
Yeah, I don't I don't know if there'd be a whole lot of room to to blur lines with that kind of a character ever again. Because also they just they didn't have the right lines blurred. I think back back then. Like they just, we didn't have enough definition to even blur lines. 

Gwyn  18:09  
No, not at all 

Shahn  18:11 
back then we were. 

Gwyn  18:13  
There were barely lines and there was a smudge. 

Shahn  18:16  
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And we're all just kind of stumbling around in the dark trying to figure all this out. Yeah, 

Gwyn  18:23  
So can I ask a nosy question?

Shahn  18:25  
Sure. 

Gwyn  18:26  
When you were having sex did you enjoy it?

Shahn  18:30  
In a way it depends on how you define enjoy it. I had a good time. I got good at what I did. Which is fuck, I got good at that. I got good at fisting.

Gwyn  18:45  
It sounds like you gained pleasure from gaining skills. 

Shahn  18:50  
Mmm hmm

Gwyn  18:51
Did you also have enjoyment in the act?

Shahn  18:54  
I think so. I didn't feel like sexual pleasure. Like I didn't. I didn't. I wasn't very connected to my body at the time. This was right about the time that I'd started realizing that I was disabled and started looking up like what could it be? And it was also right around the beginnings of naming and acknowledging fibromyalgia. And though today I wonder if what I have is not fibromyalgia but some other stuff that can easily get misdiagnosed. That's a whole other podcast too

Gwyn  19:33  
Right? 

Shahn  19:34  
At least one or two more.

Gwyn  19:37  
At least. When did you stop identifying a stone butch? What led to the shift? And when did that happen? Do you think?

Shahn  19:46  
I fell in love with a person who self identified as a girl. So I will say I fell in love with a girl who ended up being toxic and abusive. But one of her rules for being in a relationship with her was that I had to stop being stone butch, and be open to receiving sexual attention. And also, she talked about being stone butchs is like, just in general closing myself off to people and being emotionally unavailable. And so it was the rule to be emotionally available. It was a big part of the relationship that if we had sex, I was supposed to be fully naked the whole time, which was quite a shift for me. And I've gone back to not being fully naked anymore. Now, it's like, I'll disrobe if I you know, someone needs to access something. Otherwise, I don't know. It depends on the person. Just to be really clear, in case anybody else just thinking like, hey, my romantic friend person asked me for that, but I don't feel comfortable with it. But this dude seems to be like, just fine. I don't think it was a great way for me to stop being stone. 

Gwyn  21:08  
No, it seems really, really awful.

Shahn  21:11  
Yeah

Gwyn  21:12  
You were forcibly I mean, you were you. We can't do this unless you do that. 

Shahn  21:16  
Yeah. It felt it. Yeah. 

Gwyn  21:19  
Definition of fucked up itness. Yes.

Shahn  21:22  
Manipulative, I think is one of the words that works. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And the whole, the whole relationship wasn't great. But I'd say that's another podcast, but I don't think I'll ever really talk about that like in public, so to speak, because, um, no, that's the trouble that, that disclosing abuse tends to bring, unfortunately. In my life, when I have said so and so hurt me. It's almost always blown back on me twice as hard. So

Gwyn  22:03  
I'm so sorry you've had to suffer through that. That is some bullshit.

Shahn  22:08  
Luckily, I have a therapist. 

Gwyn  22:10  
Yay, therapy! [both laughing] So when when you guys broke up, you didn't go back to using that terminology? What, what was different for you?

Shahn  22:24  
Well, when I entered the I don't, we're just gonna call the like, shitty relationship, that I realized that there is like a type of privilege and a level of privilege where it's easy to get fooled. And to think like, well, I'm getting this like nicer treatment, because I deserve it clearly. But it's really just that you look like a white man. That's all it is. And please, nobody tried to tell me that white men in general have earned a higher level of privilege, because nah

Gwyn  23:01  
that will not be tolerated onn my podcast, I'm sorry.

Shahn  23:05  
Yeah, I mean, individuals can earn, like, you know, acclaim and whatnot, but whole groups of people tend not to, like, you know, earn oppressor level privilege. Yeah, so I felt really uncomfortable with that one of the agreements that we made, one of the demands that she made that I agreed to, was also that I detransition, and I go back to being a woman, which was much harder than I thought it was going to be. Like, I really thought I was just going to walk around and say to people, no, no, I'm female. It's all good. And people would respond like, oh, okay, miss, you know, no problem. And no, like, people fought me on it now, like, you're obviously a dude, shut up, and all this stuff. And so it kind of felt like I was transitioning all over again. 

Gwyn  23:05  
Oh, how awful.

Shahn  23:19 
Yeah, it was, it was bad. But then I left. So I went back to calling myself butch, but not stone butch because part of the agreement was that I not be stone. When I left that relationship, it took me at least a few years to come back to FTM identity and talking about it, I think, easily since I had top surgery, but probably earlier than that, that was 1998 I just thought of my gender as trans. And FTM being an acronym for female to male, there was an organization the 90s that defined FTM as people who are assigned female at birth, but may not feel like that's a complete or accurate description of who they are. And usually the pronouns were more like we because we were defining ourselves so we're like, you know, we were labeled this at birth, but don't feel like that's accurate or a complete description of who we are. And by that definition, FTM could include every one from a butch lesbian, a soft butch lesbian even, all the way to your FTM who doesn't who just identifies as man, because, you know, he was a man, he was just born with some, some wrong parts, just gotta get those parts exchanged. I like that. I really liked that definition of FTM and never stuck. I think a lot of people who identify as FTM are assumed to identify as man or male. And I don't super identify as that, but I don't not either. But I often say that I look like a man because I do. But I don't usually say like, you know, as a man, I feel kind of stuff because I just don't think I'm not that good at being a man, which is fine. I'm not trying to be good at being a man. I think if I tried, I'd probably be fine at it. [laughs]

Gwyn  26:04  
Yeah, absolutley

Shahn  26:05  
I mean, I got the baldness down. [Gwyn giggles] That was a that was a skill I honed over the past decade or so.

Gwyn  26:16
So did you decide that you liked having sex where you were the receiver?

Shahn  26:24 
I decided that I wanted to work on my own emotional and physical availability for myself. 

Gwyn  26:33  
That's brilliant. 

Shahn  26:35  
So yeah,

Gwyn  26:37  
I wish more people felt that way. What whatever, wherever, whoever you are in your world if you decide to work on your own. physical and emotional reality for yourself. I think that's the right thing. 

Shahn  26:53  
Yeah. And I mean, 

Gwyn  26:54  
Where are you now?

Shahn  26:57  
Oh, I don't know. It's I mean, so I left that relationship, like 13, 13 years ago now. 2008 And umm I'm like a year or so, no, I'm two years into a like a post regular anonymous Grindr hookup life. I did that for probably three years.

Gwyn  27:22  
And in those hookups would you give and receive?

Shahn  27:26  
Uh sorta 

Gwyn  27:29
Sometimes?

Shahn  27:30
The well the the best way to like advertise yourself for sex on Grindr is to either identify as like top bottom or versatile and back then I said that I I, I think I I said that I wanted to bottom. I'd never actually said that I identify as a bottom but that's a, that's a, that's a nitpick for another podcast. That's the like, OCD episode [both laughing]

Gwyn  28:07  
I should totally have one of those. I should 

Shahn  28:10 
Oh, heck yeah.

Gwyn  28:11 
I should absolutely do an OCD episode. Yeah.

Shahn  28:14  
I'm just now thinking like, do I know anyone with a tidying kink? And what could I just scatter all over the floor if they get in trouble? Like, oh, that's bad. [Gwyn giggles] Like, just empty my silverware tray, like, onto the floor? Because then they probably have to clean them too. Cuz Yeah, just touch the floor. 

Gwyn  28:42
Yeah. And a Brooklyn apartment for sure.

Shahn  28:46  
Yeah, that's awful. That's terrible. I'm a bad bad person. 

Gwyn  28:50  
No, you're not. You're a sadist though. [Shahn laughs]

Shahn  28:53  
Yes. Yeah, well, I like to come up with punishments that, you know, actually punish. You know, not like I'm gonna punish you by doing this thing that you really enjoy. 

Gwyn  29:04  
Right? Right. Again, this is another podcast

Shahn  29:10  
Again, another podcast. [Gwyn laughing] I mean, another episode a whole nother show.

Gwyn  29:16  
I wonder if people want to hear all those episodes that you and Shahn were taunting. [laughing] I hope you feel that you were any of these episodes and have Shahn and I babble again, please let me know. Because my if you haven't noticed by now, one of my very good friends, and I'm happy to get on the mic and babble with them. All day long

Shahn  29:40  
Yeah. We babble a bit. And 

Gwyn  29:43  
we do 

Shahn  29:43  
hardly ever done it in front of microphones though. 

Gwyn  29:46  
No, it's, well, 

Shahn  29:48
it's mostly just been in a room.

Gwyn  29:50  
Ya no, because at GDR were both music DJs  Yeah. Yeah.

Shahn  29:55  
Yeah. I mean, we were hardly ever in the booth together even really RIGHT. RIGHT or if we were going to start blushing because now I remember

Gwyn  30:05  
being a music director. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. 

Gwyn Isaacs  30:14  [AD]
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Gwyn  31:55  
So today, you don't identify as stone?

Shahn  32:01  
No, no, I, I don't know. I'm sort of not stressing about you know what my position is. I have a boyfriend who is super nice and respectful and does like sex things to me that I really enjoy. And having experienced sexual attention that I actually enjoy. And that I crave, I find that I just don't want the other stuff anymore. I'm really kind of over it. So I spent those three years bottoming to mostly cisgender men, and most of it was bare backing. And it's actually a little astonishing that I'm still HIV negative. It's not that astonishing because I was on PrEP for like two years of it two and a half years. But if you get to a certain point of like being on these hookup apps, and everybody's like, let me see your hole, or can I stick it in your hole? Like uhhhh it's really easy to feel objectified, when the only word they're using is hole.

Yeah, so I let a lot of dicks into my vagina. And I'm also allergic to latex. So for me bear backing was a an economics and just the logistics kind of decision being on PrEP, protecting me from HIV, which I felt like was the one thing that was most important to protect my body against. Although I also got gonorrhea like three times, and gonorrhea sucks. Even asymptomatic it really sucks, mostly because I'm also allergic to penicillin, which is the best by far treatment for gonorrhea. And even for gonorrhea, you still need two injections of penicillin. You need two doses of penicillin and the first day dose of a Z Pack, azithromycin, which is like two pills from The Z pack then if you're allergic to penicillin, then you get antibiotic that you get three injections of. One right and right after the other but they all have to go in different sites. So I got both shoulders and like one hip and then you take like four azithromycin tablets, maybe three, more than what you do if you got penicillin. And then I felt I had a fever and felt ridiculously gross for five days.

Gwyn  34:34  
Are you happy where you are now?

Shahn  34:37  
I think that I could be, so sexually like sex speaking, I think I could be more happy. But I think where I'm not as like happy or satisfied as I could be has, like it's like 100% me right now. Maybe 95% me 5% some childhood stuff, but in terms of like, healthy adult expression, I think that even childhood stuff, I just lump it into, like, that's me. In three years of accepting almost any random dick that didn't call me a woman, because that was an immediate uhn uh, into my body, I've learned that I do have some standards, I have more standards than I've previously implemented. And I have for at least for cisgender men, I have some really high standards when it comes to respect. I think a lot of dudes assume that because they have a cock in general, like, even if it's not very nice, but especially if it's a nice looking one. They don't seem to think that they need or, you know, I could just stop at think. But they also don't seem to think that they need to be respectful of people, you know, like, they're the top, they can just stick it in your hole. Whatever! I mean, there's a lot of people who enjoy that. And there was a while where I kind of I enjoyed it. I never had an orgasm that way, like in the three years that I did that, not one person who came over gave me an orgasm. Yeah, I can do that for myself. And I did that for myself. And then it was like, a little bit more athletic. So I got a bit euphoric, just from that, like from getting my my blood pumping more. Yeah. And I find something really grounding about having something in my vagina. I much prefer, like the grounding sensation, I think is better when the thing inside me is a dildo. Mostly because people attached to something that can go inside tend to not just want to sit there. Right. Yeah.

Gwyn  36:59  
So you you've had quite a journey. Your your sexual journey has been interesting And, I mean, hearing about it anyway, it's certainly interesting. I, I would imagine that you feel the same way. Do you feel like you're still on a journey? Or do you feel like you've like, You're good now?

Shahn  37:18  
No, I think I'm still on a journey, because I'm still, my boyfriend asked me why I'm only talking about hooking up with men. And like, aren't you open to women as lovers too? Well, theoretically, but I still have some trauma around women in my life. And yeah, that's oof, yeah. So clearly, I think I have some more journey to go on that. And I don't think it'll end with me being like, you know, I'm never gonna get with a woman again, or anything like that. I'm not very good at like, I don't get attracted to this kind of person. Because as soon as I say I don't, I'm already like, finding reasons why that doesn't apply. So it's better for me to just not say that I'm closed off, especially like this group of people. I'm just I'm working on closing myself off to people who are disrespectful. Hence, the Grindr name of No means no. I think some(where) in my description, I write that if somebody says not interested, it's not an invitation to negotiate. Like, it really means we're not interested. And the most argumentative are the ones who have in their profile, if you're not interested, just say, so stop wasting my time, their time. And I'm like, well, then, you know, don't waste it back. Right? Yeah. With this whole, you know, like, Oh, baby, you'll love my whatever. I'm like, No, I probably won't. [Gwyn laughs] If only because I just said no. Therefore, everything you say, to try to get me to change that to a yes. is just going to reinforce that. No, I made that that initial decision of No, was the correct one. Because anybody who says, you know, like, No, I don't want to hook up tonight. And then the person's responses. Oh, come on. It'll be quick. Or, you know, like, you've never had a tongue like mine. I've probably had 12 tongues like yours. There's very little spectacular about a different tongue. I mean, occasionally there is but mostly, that's like dedication and respect. And if you aren't listening to my no, you probably don't have enough respect. So

Gwyn  39:40  
yeah. Yeah, all of that 12 times over. I want to zip that out and make it its own little light cone. Yeah.

Shahn  39:49  
I want to start consent cast or something like that, because you asked about consent, except I don't really want consent education to be my crusade. I'm too I'm too old and burnt out for a crusade. 

Gwyn  40:05  
Not your thing? 

Shahn
yeah, it was once upon a time. 

Gwyn
Fair enough. But as you've demonstrated so nicely throughout this entire podcast, people change,

Shahn  40:17  
Mmm hmm 

Gwyn  40:18
Shift and grow and take on different things and put down other things. And that is Yeah, yeah, absolutely normal.

Shahn  40:26  
And, and it's entirely possible in the next, I don't know, I'll say optimistically, like 30 plus years of my life, I could not be burnt out. 

Gwyn  40:37  
One can only hope.

Shahn  40:39  
Seriously. 

Gwyn  40:40
So the last question that I asked everyone. 

Shahn  40:43  
Oh

Gwyn  40:44
You ready? What excites you?

Shahn  40:47  
Ooh, obedience. Yeah,

Gwyn  40:52  
Well, that's why we didn't work out. [both laugh]

Shahn  40:53  
Yeah. I was just thinking that actually, just in case, you ever wondered, like, could Shawn and I ever, like, maybe, maybe not? Yeah, but I really like obedience. You know, I don't like to fight to have a nice time. [laughs] I do not like to fight.

Gwyn  41:18  
Thank you so much. 

Shahn  41:20  
Thank you. 

Gwyn  41:21
This has been really nice. 

Shahn  41:23  
[laughing] This was fun

Gwyn  41:26  
Alright, when you were listening, did it prompt any thoughts about your sexual journey? Are you into the same things you were when you were younger? Most people shift and change over time? Has your identity transformed at all? If any of these questions or others came to mind, please let me know. I would really love to have more conversations about what's happening on the podcast. Speaking of which, if you're interested in having a recorded chat to share with folks about your sex life, now or then, please reach out. I'm happy to do so anonymously or not, it's entirely up to you. What's important to me is that we all feel accepted. By sharing your story, even if you think it's boring, which I can guarantee it's not, we can do that. We can help other people feel good about who they are by being who we are.

You can find me at whatexcitesus.com earthlydesire.com or on Facebook and Instagram as Sex Fairy Gwyn. That's Gwyn spelled G W Y N. If you like the show, please tell a friend. And let's spread the good word about how a satisfying sex life can lead to a satisfying life overall, What Excites Us! is produced, edited and hosted by me, Gwyn Isaacs. All the music is used under a Creative Commons Attribution license. This week it includes The Vendetta by Steven Kartenberg, Let Me Talk, Carol by Josh Woodward. Harmony by Polyplus. And this track is Electric Type Writer by Shahn also known as 1nterrupt on SoundCloud. Tickle.life hosts this show and has lots of other great content about sex and sexuality in articles and other podcasts. Thanks for listening. Don't forget that you are loved. And I really really appreciate you. Bye