I ran background checks before every hookup - Jo

Jo is a 58-year-old, cis-gender woman who describes herself as white, heteroflexible, and in a friends-with-benefits situation. She deals with ongoing physical issues that make sex challenging. Her preferred relationship style is "none" – as in, she doesn't want a defined romantic relationship. Before we started recording she said, "I don't want to be picking up your socks or do your laundry. I may cook you dinner occasionally, but that's because I want to cook not because you're hungry."

While I did my best to maintain my regular sense of equilibrium during this interview, it was a particularly personal one for me. Jo and I don't really know each other, but our families have been intertwined for a long time. In order to preserve the privacy of others not on this call, we kept the specifics vague, but we were both curious to find out if we would learn new things about our shared history in this conversation.

Major themes in this episode include preferring to not have committed relationships, navigating sex with physical difficulties/birth defects, internet dating, and sex after menopause.

• Jo's first memory of sexual pleasure
• Jo's early medical history, including birth defects (Jo's language for her physical challenges) and surgeries to correct them
• Jo's sexual experience with a family friend, then listening to his brother getting beaten for masturbating
• Being pushed into sexual interaction and having to say no
• Learning to self pleasure; also having no one to talk about it with, and the fear of AIDS
• Her fears about sex easing after the death of her mother, and starting to explore internet dating
• Having sex with another person for the first time at 46, and her difficulties with intercourse due to childhood surgeries
• Jo's techniques to learn how to have intercourse pleasurably, if at all; necessity of mentally relaxing for it to be possible
• Using blow jobs to take pressure off of her during sex
• Insisting on a friends-with-benefits structure for relationships
• Jo's trauma response, including needing to know when touch will be coming

Audio extras for this episode are:

• Jo talks about the violence she experienced as a girl because she didn't dress or act according to gender expectations.
• Jo describes the sexual harassment she experienced in the workplace in the early 1980s.
• The extended Q&A.

Update: Since this episode was released, the podcast has concluded. Here's how you can find me now:

• Book a FREE no-pressure intro consultation
• Keep up to date and get your FREE Three-Minute Game
• All my classes and downloads are at my store
• Any audio extras for this episode on the Good Girls Talk About Sex website
• Here's everything I'm up to today
• I no longer use Patreon — you can now support my work on Substack

EPISODE CREDITS:

Host / Producer – Leah Carey (email) Audio Editor – Gretchen Kilby Administrative Support - Lara O'Connor, Maria Franco

Transcript creation – Jan Acielo Music – Nazar Rybak