Today, I’ve got a question for you:

What does it mean to prioritize sex? 

I’m curious what comes to mind for you when I say that someone makes sex a priority.

Maybe you think about someone that schedules sex with their partner, making sure that sex goes into their busy calendar just like meetings at work. 

Or maybe you remember a friend who, once they got into a new relationship, started ignoring your invitations to go out together in favor of staying in with their new partner.

Perhaps prioritizing sex calls to mind something like choosing to buy toys, furniture, or clothing to enhance sexual experiences.

Do any of these resonate with you?

What’s interesting about these examples is, while they relate to the prioritization of sex, they are prioritizing from a place of lack. Whether that’s lack of time for sex, lack of time for anything other than sex, or the lack of the “spark” which might be rekindled with the right product, there’s a sort of sadness to these examples.

Many people start out prioritizing sex when they sense lack, whether they’re in one or more relationships or single, and that’s totally understandable. The problem is that the actions you take when you begin from lack tend to be reactive, rather than proactive. 

Put another way, lack drives you to address problems and challenges right here, right now, and if you are only ever solving for the immediate present, you’re never setting down the foundation for change. You are dooming yourself to repeat this pattern of lack again and again.

Consider, then, how much more powerful it would be to prioritize sex from a place of enoughness, regardless of your current relationship status. Actions taken from a place of enough tend to be proactive. This is how you create the foundation for creating the relationships you want to experience.

The second important transformation needed to become a Slutty Activist is to become Sex-Forward, to make sex a priority from a place of enough. In the Dignified Hedonist framework, this is done in 3 steps: Increase Your Odds, Ask Audaciously, and Boost Your Boundaries.

Here’s a sad fact: most people are, or start out, as atrocious sexual communicators. We have a real lack of role models for clear communication around sexuality. If anything, the role models presented by society are exactly the opposite. 

In movies and on TV, we’re presented stories of romance where the characters communicate in subtext, where nothing is said directly and yet somehow everything works out. This is presented as romantic and desirable behavior.

We are being set up to fail by the myths in our culture about how love and romance work because, and here’s the thing, if you want to make sex a priority in your relationships, you have to be able to communicate about it.

What’s more, if you missed out on implicit social skill building due to social isolation, bullying, or neurodivergence, the hurdles you have to clear in communicating sexual interest multiply. It’s one thing trying to navigate implicit communication when you at least have internalized some social cues, and it’s quite another when you don’t even have those cues as a reference point.

When you don’t take action to develop your sexual communication skills holistically, this comes at a cost. You feel frustrated by your inability to connect with people, which can lead to getting needy and increasingly desperate. You can wind up in short relationships that go nowhere over and over again. You can wind up accused of creepy behavior, which I know from my clients is one of their biggest fears and something everyone wants to avoid doing. If this goes on for long enough, you might even get so fed up that you pack it in and stop putting yourself out there completely.

The good news is that communication is a skill, and skills can be learned and developed. In order to Increase Your Odds of finding people who share your desires, you need to progressively build your communication skills while also taking action in you sex and relationship life, leading with your existing strengths.

When it comes to building sexual communication skills, let’s not mince words - it’s hard. Making this choice requires courage. Your ability to communicate as a sexual being is one of those areas where you will really feel that sense of “wrongness” we talked about earlier on the show. 

Remember, that’s because the systems of power all around you don’t want you to be able to communicate your desires clearly without an attachment to the outcome. If you start doing that, you’re likely to start experiencing what you want. If that happens, you just might start feeling satisfied with your life.

If you’re just getting started, you may struggle to make eye contact. You might get tongue-tied or don’t know when to join the flow of a conversation. 

Maybe you overthink the text messages you send and then worry about them for a long time after. Body language may be a mystery. You likely have a lot of anxiety about touch, even though you really want to touch and be touched. Flirting is confusing.

At this point, folks who are fed up and frustrated often find their way to pickup artist, female dating strategy, or other seduction spaces online. If you’ve spent some time in these communities, you might have learned a couple of conversation patterns or kino escalation routines and they’ve really helped you, but you’re still nervous about something happening that is off script.

To truly Increase Your Odds of creating the relationships you want to experience, you need to develop holistic communication skills: Written, Verbal, Body Language, and Touch, and learn how to leverage context. 

Put another way, you need to learn how to communicate your desires and understand the responses someone gives in return, and how to pick the right places to look for partners who are more likely to want what you want.

When you know how to send the right messages in the right contexts, everything gets exponentially easier. You become able to communicate confidently and with flow in written, verbal, body language, and touch communication. You understand others when they communicate using these methods. You feel able to express yourself clearly in a variety of contexts and situations.

In our world, clear communication is a gift. If you spend any time at all on dating forums, you’ll have seen the heart wrenching laments of people of all genders all over the world struggling to understand what the people they’re exploring relationships with mean with their words and actions.

Becoming a clear, direct communicator sets you apart from a majority of people currently in the dating space. It saves a fuck ton of time for you and for them. Your direct communication can also act as an excellent filter, allowing you to quickly move on from people who don’t share your preferences about clarity.

But wait, there’s more.

When you combine clarity and directness in communication with a willingness to ask for what you want in a way that honors the dignity of all involved, you become unstoppable.

Most people really struggle to ask for what they want when it comes to sex and relationships. If you were to ask them, most would say something like they just don’t know how.

What sits underneath this sense of not knowing how, this feeling of struggle, the actual root of the difficulty in asking is a fear of rejection. I often get the sense that, what people really mean when they say they don’t know how, is that they don’t know how to ask and also avoid being rejected. Or, rather, they don’t know how to ask in a way that guarantees a yes.

Here’s the thing - there’s no ethical way to ask someone and guarantee a yes. Well, except for maybe negotiating a scene with a play partner where you agree to that up front. That doesn’t stop people from trying to convince you otherwise, though. 

Just buy this or follow that pickup artist’s method and you’ll get your yes, and if you somehow still don’t, well, that must mean there is something fundamentally flawed with YOU, or that YOU didn’t try hard enough or do it right.

You know, instead of the actual truth, which is that not only is all that bullshit, but it is actually misdirecting you away from a powerful fact:

When you become someone it is easy to say no to, it becomes much easier for others to say yes.

The magic is in getting to a place where you’re equally okay with hearing yes or no, which I call Outcome Independence, and then ask with clarity and consent baked into your question.

Where a lot of people start out is in a place of stuckness and inertia. It could be that you’ve had a crush on someone for months or maybe even years, but you somehow just can’t ask them out. It could also be that, when you’re in a relationship, there are things you really want to try with your partner but you just can’t figure out how to bring them up.

Can you see how convincing people that rejection is proof of deep and immutable personal failings benefits power and facilitates fascism? Has it clicked into place for you, as it has for me, just how wide ranging theimplications of this perpetual stuckness are, not just when it comes to dating, sex, and relationships but to our wider ability to create change?

If the only time you ever feel able to ask is when yes is guaranteed, then is there ever a good time to ask for a raise? To protest injustice? To put pressure on your lawmakers? To unionize? To strike?

By extension, then, learning to ask for what you want in a spirit of dignity, in a way that is gentle and affirming of autonomy, is one of the single most important actions you will take as a Slutty Activist.

When you first start Asking Audaciously, you’ll find that sometimes you’re able to muster up the courage to ask for what you want, but rejection still knocks the wind out of you. You might also be deeply discouraged to discover that sometimes people get really upset by your questions.

It’s at this point that a lot of people want to quit. I’ll tell you now that, on the contrary, this is what actual progress looks like. Incidentally, this is where it can really help to have a coach or a supportive community behind you, to encourage you when things get challenging.

The reason being that, if you are able to keep going and building your asking muscle, you will arrive at a place where you feel confident asking for what you want and do so regularly, as the desire arises. You know you won’t always hear a yes and not only is that fine – to you, that’s GREAT. You make ample space for no, and you welcome no when it arises.

It’s funny what happens when you make that huge shift from fearing no to welcoming no. This single shift probably has the biggest impact on others, both your friends and acquaintances as well as your lovers and potential lovers. 

Someone who isn’t phased by a no appears to others as bullet proof and extremely confidence. Someone who welcomes no in conversations related to dating and sex is like a breath of fresh air. Seriously, when you go out there and ask for what you want in a way that invites no, people are often surprised. This may be the first time someone has done this for them. It feels weird, and it also feels really fucking good.

The short version of why it feels so good is because you are honoring their autonomy, and by extension treating them with dignity, which is what most people mean when they say they just want to be treated like a human being.

You can take this further, though. 

Throughout this podcast, whenever I talk about dignity, you’ll hear me say the dignity of yourself and others. Yourself - You, yes you - your dignity matters. Treating yourself in a way that honors your inherent worthiness is absolutely necessary to effective Slutty Activism.

The way that you do that is by setting boundaries. When you Boost Your Boundaries, you basically go supernova when it comes to your skills and your impact in everything Sex-Forward.

This is because a great deal many people have been taken advantage of or been pushed to do things they didn’t want to do throughout their lives. This is where the common worry about becoming a doormat in relationships comes from - the lived experience of being repeatedly trod all over in your relationships with others.

The solution is in learning to identify your limits and become masterful at setting boundaries. Boundaries are necessary to realize the true power that comes with communicating well and asking for what you want.

Whenever I think about the importance of setting boundaries, I remember one of my clients, let’s call her Megan.

Megan came to me for a Desire Audit, a one off session where we work on the Define Your Desires piece of the Dignified Hedonist framework. During our conversation, I was struck by how extremely clear she already was about what she wants to experience.

“Megan, I’m curious - most people who come for a Desire Audit only have a general idea of what they want, but you already have a very clear picture. What do you think has gotten in the way of actually having these experiences?”

She went silent for a long time. I could see the gears were turning.

“That’s a good question,” she said, before another long pause.

Her face started to wobble, and before I knew it, she was crying. A few heaving sobs followed by a steadier flow of tears.

A few minutes later, after working herself over with some tissues, she said, “Sarah, I waste so much time with people where it just doesn’t go anywhere.”

“And the thing is I get this feeling that it’s not going anywhere pretty early, but then it seems rude to just say I don’t want to see them anymore. I keep giving them the benefit of the doubt over and over. I keep telling myself this time has to be different, and the same damn thing happens. 

It feels like I’m broken. What is so wrong with me?”

Nothing was wrong with Megan. She was actually extremely awesome. The problem was with Megan’s lack of boundaries. That’s what was behind repeated relationships where she was fundamentally incompatible with her partner.

You can’t avoid feeling the effects of a lack of boundaries. Maybe you’re worried about getting into or are already in a relationship where your partner takes from you without giving. It could be that you’re worried about or have already experienced infidelity in a relationship and this has negatively affected your view of relationships in general. You might secretly worry if “beta bucks, alpha fucks” or “all men are bastards” might actually be true.

Here’s where things often get muddled for folks. Power wants you to believe that boundaries are for other people and that setting boundaries consists of creating other rules of behavior that other people must follow. This is how boundary setting is often portrayed. It’s also fundamentally flawed.

You cannot control the behavior of others, and attempts to control the behavior of others are highly unethical. You can only control your own behavior.

When you try to set boundaries on the behavior of others, you externalize your power. When it doesn’t work, you feel angry, frustrated, and like you failed. So you try harder… and fail harder. This leads some people to conclude that there’s no point in having boundaries… which, just think of the boon that is to all structures of power and oppression if you come to believe that boundaries are pointless! My goodness does that ever make you ripe for exploitation!

So what are boundaries, if they’re not about setting limits on the behaviors of others?

Boundaries, my friend, are for you. Creating healthy boundaries consists of defining your limits, and what action you will take if someone or something exceeds those limits.

When you first start creating boundaries, it’s common to still seem like a foreign concept. Often what happens before you create healthy boundaries is you develop some ways to cope if you think someone is taking advantage of you, primarily, through avoidance. That can look like silence, side-stepping, or leaving.

Know that this is really common on the journey to establishing boundaries. The world will try to step in and convince you that being avoidant is wrong and means there’s something pathological about you and your behavior. This is meant to push to backwards, to try and keep you in a state of boundarylessness.

Instead, you can recognize this for what it is - a transitional phase on the journey. You don’t want to get stuck here, and you can also recognize that this represents a huge step forward when you’re starting with no boundaries.

With time, you will learn how to set boundaries and how to enforce them in a way that is self-honoring, powerful, and that centers dignity.

Once you have those boundaries established, you won’t worry about being taken advantage of in relationships, because if someone tries, you know exactly what you will do. And it’s more likely you would never get to that point in the first place because you already would have weeded such folks out early on.

Frustratingly, this leads to a conclusion similar to the one we reached when exploring the actions involved in becoming Desire-Led.

When you’re boundaryless, that is, when all of the boundaries you have created are for other people, the sheer amount of energy you expend trying to enforce those boundaries leaves you feeling exhausted. That’s a big part of why people give up. 

Whereas, when you set boundaries for yourself, you often never even get to the point where someone is trying to trample on them, because you weed those folks out long before it starts to really cost you energetically. You eventually come to feel like you’re not “doing” anything and yet experiencing much, much better relationships.

It’s so unfair, isn’t it, when the amount of effort and energy in does not match what comes out the other side.

But, who says this has to be hard? Who says dating, sex, and relationships have to be effortful? Who says relationships have to be work?

Put another way, who benefits when your relationships, of whatever kind, feel like a fucking grind?

What if instead relationships get to be easy? What if dating, sex, and relationships are play, instead of work?

What structures would that threaten? And what would that mean for you?

When you bring Sex-Forward in your relationships, when you don’t leave questions of your sexuality and sexual desiring to assumption and guesses but instead communicate it outward in a loving, dignified way, you’d be forgiven for assuming this will make it basically impossible to get together with anyone.

When, in actual fact, becoming Sex-Forward makes it so much easier to find people who share your desires. It saves so much time and energy. 

Time and energy, remember, that you can spend for masturbation, for maintaining multiple relationships (sexual, romantic, or platonic), for community organizing, for protesting, for going on strike.

And when you interact with your partners or potential partners from a Sex-Forward being, it doesn’t stop with you. It can’t.

Being on the receiving end of this style of communication is so life-affirming, so powerful, it often stops people in their tracks.

I’ve lost count of the number of screenshots clients have sent me of messages they’ve received on dating apps or by texts specifically remarking on how different it feels to be asked in a Sex-Forward way, thanking them and letting them know how nice that is.

Whether you go one to form a relationship of whatever sort with someone or not, just by virtue of interacting in a Sex-Forward way, you provide them with real, irrefutable evidence that another way is possible, one where we’re honest with our desires without placing the weight of our expectations on anyone.

And because not only does that exist, but it also feels wonderful to receive, you know what? You help others to raise the bar of what to accept. You make your dating and relationship landscape less shit just by virtue of your presence in it.

You know what happens when other people start doing this? They become an example. They start to save on the time and energy they used to waste. They become more able to engage in the world. 

One by one, they become part of our movement for change. Together, we become a force to be reckoned with.

So, what do you say? Come join me?