Hey everyone,
Thanks for your continued subscription to The Science of Sex. It really means the world to me. It’s been a busy month. My interviews with Renata Gomes and Jonathan Kent had some audio issues that are inexplicable on my end and must’ve been an issue with the Zoom software. I’ve had it happen once before when I was on Vanessa Torre’s podcast, everything sounded perfect but the final recording came out weird.
Fortunately, I’ve done audio production for 22 years now. Unfortunately, that means these two interviews will take additional time for preparation as I clean up the audio, balance the levels, and make it listenable.
Tomorrow, I’ll be recording a podcast episode with Ro Moëd of Unapolygetic. If you’re not familiar with Ro, she describes herself as a relationship-anarchist and is a polyamory activists, though she discusses a wide variety of relationship topics, delving into philosophy as she analyzes our modern relationship values and experiences. Beyond this, honestly, she’s arguably the most intelligent person I’ve ever met in my entire life.
Ro isn’t critical of monogamy—she’s critical of the mechanism that says that monogamy is the only way to have a healthy, happy, mature relationship, and she’s critical of the behaviors that some people employ—which can be quite manipulative—to keep their partners in one-on-one relationships. Virtually everything she says and writes is profound.
Here are some snippets of what Ro has to say:
And some more of what Ro has to say:
Ro and I were guests on
’s live relationship seminar where we discussed the different types of relationships available and what they mean to us. Ro and I live very different styles of polyamory.I published a few essays on Medium recently. One of them is a personal story about a very rich man who once befriended me and his relationship struggles. This was my first cue that people aren’t viscerally attracted to money or status symbols. Some people might respond to them as incentives or novelty items, but nobody feels deep sexual attraction over them. They’re objects. I’ve since consistently found this hunch to be true in scientific research of all sorts.
We Need to Learn That People Aren’t Attracted to Money
The other is more scientific, it’s about the “replication crisis” in psychology and a 2015 paper that warns that warns that we’re inventing pathologies (illnesses) by conducting research into benign everyday life activities. One paper was accepted into a science journal that wondered if we’re “addicted” to having in-real-life friends. How ridiculous is that?
If you’re not a Medium subscriber, you can subscribe to my email lists here (for my essays on politics and current events) and here (for my science and relationships writing).
Study Says We Might Be Inventing Fake Mental Illnesses
The last essay can also be found here on The Science of Sex on Substack. It covers Florida’s ongoing attempt to erase LGBTQ people from public spaces over the last 50 years:
Thank you again for your continued subscription to The Science of Sex. The growth has been tremendous as thousands of people have flocked to The Science of Sex and subscribed.
A special thank you to my paid subscribers for helping us keep it going here so we can fight back against the assault on sexual liberty, sexuality, LGBTQ+ folks, and more that are all going on right now as a backlash to the last century of progress.
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