Sex From Scratch: Making Your Own Relationship Rules

By Sarah Mirk

Modern life calls for modern relationship advice. Sex From Scratch is a love and dating guidebook that gleans real-life knowledge from smart people in a variety of nontraditional relationships. Instead of telling people how to snag a man, seduce a woman, or find “true love,” the book sums up what dozens of diverse folks have learned the hard way over time. Sarah Mirk offers tips and stories from the steadfastly single to people making open relationships work, from people who’ve decided they’re never going to have kids to parents who are consciously producing the next generation. No matter what type of relationship you're in or what type you want, Mirk's reporterly wisdom and sense of humor provides perspective, humor, and down to earth guidance. This is an essential, fun, insightful resource whose time has come. The 2nd edition contains a ton of new interviews and updates.  Featured interviews include Betty Dodson, Michelle Tea, Aya de Leon, Tomas Moniz, Margaret Jacobsen, Ev'Yan Whitney, and more. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
• Release date: Nov 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781648410444

Sarah Mirk

Sarah Mirk is a social justice-focused writer and artist who loves to read, draw comics, make zines, pet dogs, and learn about the world. She began her career as a journalist for the alternative weekly newspapers the Stranger and the Portland Mercury. She then worked as the online editor of national feminism and pop culture nonprofit Bitch Media. She moved on to become a contributing editor at the graphic journalism website The Nib, where she writes and edits nonfiction comics about history, politics, and identity. She is the author of the book Sex from Scratch: Making Your Own Relationship Rules and the sci-fi graphic novel Open Earth. Sarah holds a degree in history, with honors, from Grinnell College. She identifies as queer and cisgender and lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner. You can follow her work on Twitter or Instagram @sarahmirk. She always welcomes questions and good ideas.

Book preview

Sex From Scratch

Making Your Own Relationship Rules

Second Edition, 3000 copies, November 14, 2021

All text is © Sarah Mirk, 2014, 2017, 2021

This edition is © by Microcosm Publishing, 2014, 2017, 2021

In the Real World series

eBook ISBN 9781648410444

This is Microcosm #155

Edited by Elly Blue

Designed by Joe Biel

Cover illustrations by Sarah Mirk

Portraits and street scenes illustrated by Natalie Nourigat. Quotes illustrated by Molly Schaeffer.

For a catalog, write or visit:

Microcosm Publishing

2752 N Williams Ave.

Portland, OR 97227

https://microcosm.pub/SexFromScratch

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Global labor conditions are bad, and our roots in industrial Cleveland in the 70s and 80s made us appreciate the need to treat workers right. Therefore, our books are MADE IN THE USA.

Microcosm Publishing is Portland’s most diversified publishing house and distributor with a focus on the colorful, authentic, and empowering. Our books and zines have put your power in your hands since 1996, equipping readers to make positive changes in their lives and in the world around them. Microcosm emphasizes skill-building, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and bookettes about DIY skills, food, bicycling, gender, self-care, and social justice. What was once a distro and record label was started by Joe Biel in his bedroom and has become among the oldest independent publishing houses in Portland, OR. We are a politically moderate, centrist publisher in a world that has inched to the right for the past 80 years.

I choose to love this time for once

with all my intelligence

—Adrienne Rich

For my parents, Marquita and John.

Thank you for not screwing me up.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction •

Introduction to the second edition •

1. Loving Being Single •

Michelle Tea: Don’t Date People Who Bring You Down •

Tracy Clark-Flory: Don’t Fake Orgasms •

2. Building Feminist

Relationships •

Ev’Yan Whitney: Ditch the Beliefs that Don’t Fit •

Aya de Leon:

Take Up as Much Space as You Want •

Andi Zeisler: Choose to Make Each Other Family •

3. Navigating Open

Relationships •

Tristan Taormino: Practice Saying No •

Erika Moen: Love is Not Enough •

Bauer •

4. Gender is Messy •

Stu Rasmussen:

This is My Life and I’m Going to Run It •

Margaret Jacobsen:

Show Up As You Are, and That’s Enough •

5. Staying Childless

by Choice •

Wendy-O Matik: Love Who You Want, How You Want, As Many as You Want •

6. On Never Getting Married •

Betty Dodson: Sex is More Than Bumping Genitals •

7. Knowing When to Split •

Tomas Moniz: Relax, Listen, Ask Questions •

Reading List •

Acknowledgements •

Introduction

Look, I don’t know what I’m doing.

Most advice books are written by people who say they’re experts and sell you on the notion that there are secrets inside that will transform your life. I have to tell you some bad news: I’m no expert. There are no secrets here. Only you can change your life. Sorry.

What is in this book are a bunch of good insights, practical advice, and admissions of honest mistakes from people who are not selling anything except the idea that everyone should feel empowered to have a healthy and happy relationships. It’s a do-it-yourself approach to dating and it’s a hard road, that’s for sure.

When I hit my mid-twenties and was in a long-term relationship that didn’t feel quite right, I didn’t know where to turn. My boyfriend, Carl, was great. He’s funny, he’s generous, he’s the smartest person I know. But I wasn’t certain whether I wanted to keep dating him, whether I wanted to get married and have kids with him and have sex with only him forever. It felt like the world was closing down a bit when I thought about that, but I wasn’t sure why. I was raised by open-minded parents in the feel-good early nineties and was taught to have a clear vision of who I am, encouraged to just be myself by every TV special since 1986. We’re told over and over to be proud of our differences and embrace all of our own quirks. But when it comes to relationships with other people, our role models don’t encourage quite so much originality. Instead, our vision of dating is very straightforward: No matter what kind of weirdo you are, you aspire to someday get married, you aspire to have kids, you actively work to have sex with one person for most of your life, and whoever’s relationship lasts the longest wins.

As I started to evaluate whether my relationship was healthy for me, I started to realize that though I knew a lot about myself, I didn’t know a lot about how I wanted to be in relationships with other people. I started recognizing that a lot of what I grew up learning about relationships is based on religions that I don’t believe in and on old-school ways of thinking that come from generations long before mine. Part of why I felt so lost was because I had no value set for relationships that felt honest and relevant to me.

It’s not just me. In the United States, fewer people than ever identify with any specific religions. People are getting married later than ever, or not at all. More and more people feel comfortable identifying as queer and genderqueer. The rigid traditional benchmarks of success—marriage, monogamy, and kids—aren’t useful for everyone. When people try to squeeze their relationships and identities into that vision, they often find that it’s an awkward, unhealthy, and destructive fit. We need a better understanding of what a successful relationship looks like.

I worked as a newspaper reporter for years, and I know that in reporting, you rarely rely on just one person’s perspective. Instead, the most honest stories come from analyzing a diversity of experiences. When trying to make decisions about my own relationships, I was anxious that basing my romantic choices on only my limited experience and narrow perspective would inevitably mean making terrible mistakes and breaking the hearts of people I love, over and over. Or, maybe worse, I’d wind up trapped in a relationship that slowly drove me crazy over time. One winter, on a Friday, after I got off work writing at the newspaper, I visited the relationship section of a bookstore, looking for some kind of guidance. The dating section of the bookstore during Friday happy hour is a weird scene. But I avoided eye contact and focused on the books. I didn’t find much. Almost all the best-selling books about relationships are divided along gender binary lines (the skinny bitch’s guide to dating or pick-up-artist rules for men, for example). The ones geared toward women are specifically focused on trying to snag a man and get married to him. I don’t think that an emotionally manipulative, goal-oriented approach to relationships sounds like a good idea. I’m just not that into competitive sports. A couple other books—like The Ethical Slut, Opening Up, and others mentioned in the endnotes of this book—offered refreshing alternative visions of relationships. But they were all pretty focused on one specific type of relationship, and I wasn’t sure what kind of relationship was good for me. I wasn’t certain what I wanted at all. I wanted to find a book on the relationship shelf that would gather the collective wisdom of what people older and braver than me had learned. I wanted to read about people who have learned the hard way. That book didn’t exist, so I decided to write it.

I spent the next two years interviewing nearly 100 people around the United States about their relationships as well as charting my own experiences. Since so many people trusted their darkest thoughts and mistakes to me, I feel that I have an obligation to put myself on the line and get vulnerable as well. During the time that I researched this book, Carl and I went through ups and downs. We talked about our relationship a lot. We had many hilarious adventures. I stole his sweaters. He fixed my bike. All the things I discussed with strangers about relationships were put into personal practice as we tried to build the most healthy, fun, loving, and equitable relationship we could. We could be brutally honest with each other—I told him things about myself and my fears that I had never planned to. In the end, we decided to break up. It was slow and it was good. I moved out, we saw a counselor. Finally, we talked and cried in a park right next to where someone had graffitied that line of ‘80s movie wisdom: Be Excellent to Each Other. We were. And now we’re great friends.

In the meantime, I slept on sofas in Seattle, Vancouver, BC, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Madison, New York City, and Boston, and interviewed people in Iowa, Illinois, Idaho, Virginia, Missouri, and all over New England on the phone. I met up with friends-of-friends in coffee shops, recorded heart-to-hearts with old friends over sandwiches, and, one time, a group of strangers in Jamaica Plain hosted a polyamory potluck in my honor. This was research I funded myself because I was curious, and let me clearly stress that it was not scientific. It’s anecdotal. The focus of this book is very narrow in some ways, being almost entirely about Americans, and is undoubtedly biased by my perspective as a straight, white woman who was raised middle class. Almost every one of the people I talked to were over the age of 25 and only a few were in their 50s and older. Most of them were white—about a quarter were people of color. Many were spiritual or religious but only a few were practicing. Most identified as either male or female and most identified as straight, though about 30 percent were queer and ten percent were transgender or genderqueer. In my research, I didn’t collect quantitative statistics on how often specific demographics get divorced or the average age at which someone typically realizes that everything they know is wrong. Instead, I focused on the stories about people’s lived experiences that I hope can act as examples for how to be intentional about the life you build.

Each chapter focuses on a specific type of relationship or identity. Because I like to keep things easy to read, each chapter includes a list of lessons. The end of each chapter includes extended interviews with people who were brave enough to put their names in a book about sex and dating. You can read the whole book through, or you can pick and choose the chapters you think sound most interesting. Every chapter is relevant to all sorts of people, whether or not you want the kind of relationship described. That’s the whole idea—we have a lot to learn from other people. What’s exciting about the relationships featured in this book is that they show the many opportunities we have, being alive today. Though our rights and abilities are limited by politics, economics, and discrimination of various stripes, we live in a time in America where many women no longer need to get married to be financially stable, where we have the technology to control whether we want to have kids, and where we’re able to protect ourselves rather reliably against sexually transmitted diseases.

There are plenty of perspectives and types of relationships this book leaves out. The big caveat to the ideas discussed here is that they all apply to relationships that have a baseline level of safety and mutual respect. This book doesn’t delve deeply into trauma or dealing with histories of abuse. Most of the advice for having healthy and happy relationships doesn’t apply to relationships that are physically or emotionally abusive. The skills and ideas here are meant to help people have better and more honest consensual relationships. Building a culture that makes it easier to avoid and recognize abusive relationships and end rape is an essential field of study—but it’s not the focus of this project. This book also does not deeply cover bondage, dominance, sadism, and masochism (BDSM) or include much discussion of celibacy. I interviewed a number of people who are into BDSM and thought it would be better to incorporate their experiences throughout the book rather than having a special chapter just about BDSM. I originally planned on having a chapter about celibate relationships, including people who identify as asexual. But when I sat down to write it, the chapter just didn’t feel right. Everyone I spoke with had very different reasons for not having sex in their relationships, from people who had experienced major trauma and didn’t feel comfortable having sex for a long time, to people who feel comfortable with their sexuality and bodies but have an extremely low sex drive. Among asexual folks, people experience their asexuality so differently that there were few patterns or big ideas that I could write a cohesive and distinct chapter around. People who weren’t having sex in their relationships were applying the same critical thinking to their dating lives in all sorts of relationships: Being intentional, figuring out what they want and need, and talking honestly with partners. From the folks who identify as asexual, the only lesson that I kept hearing again and again is that asexuality is real, sex drive varies on a spectrum, and relationships without intercourse are still very worthwhile and loving. Instead of writing an entire chapter, it seemed like I should just type one line: Asexuality is real and valid.

So there we go. Every day, many people around the country are making decisions about how they will be happiest, healthiest, and most honest with themselves and their romantic partners. Whether it’s making the decision to get married, the decision to get divorced, the decision to sleep around, or the decision to be monogamous. Let’s create an ethical framework for romantic relationships not built on religion or tradition. There is no destiny in relationships; we make our lives for ourselves. The advice in here is for all kinds of people in different types of relationships, including people who think they’ll probably someday decide to get married, be monogamous, and have kids, and people who are already doing those things and also people who think all of that sounds like a horrible idea.

There are no universally right decisions to make in building good relationships. Instead, what’s important is to understand that there are decisions to make and to be intentional about making them. Regardless of the narrow image of sex and dating we see on TV and in films, there are many viable ways to be in healthy relationships. Given a certain level of economic, political, and social privilege, we have the ability to make our relationships look however we want. So even though there is no check-off list of sure-fire secrets to happy marriage or must-know tricks to obtain a perfect love life, there are personal skills and ways of thinking critically that can help any person have healthier relationships. It’s a hard and honest way, but, oh man, it’s a lot more fun.`

UPDATE FOR THE SECOND EDITION:

When my publisher told me that the first print run of Sex from Scratch had sold out and it was time to put together a second edition, my first reaction was dread. Oh God, I thought. What have I even learned in the last three years?

These days I’m far more likely to be asking questions, recognizing how my own behaviors can hurt others, and listening rather than offering definitive answers of my own. I appreciate making more space for uncertainty, change, and curiosity, and am even less bound to trying to figure it all out. Instead, I figure things out all the time, then keep exploring. What I’ve learned over the years since writing this book is that I still have so much more learning to do. But that’s a good thing. Learning is the best thing a person can do, I think. Being in situations that are challenging and new make me be a better communicator, a more articulate advocate for my own needs, and a more open-minded and compassionate human.

Our culture prioritizes stability in relationships over all else, but I’ve come to prize chaos as a prime learning opportunity. Creating the kinds of relationships that make me happy often requires taking a big ol’ step into the unknown, walking off the map into uncharted lands, whether I’m on my own or with partners. At the book release party of Sex from Scratch, I got to know someone who would become my partner and then my boyfriend for the next year. After we broke up, I was open to pretty much anything. Over the next two years, I explored a bunch of different relationships—including months of single celibacy, semi-anonymous hook-ups, intense-but-brief loves, really sweet dom-sub situations, and being the extracurricular person in other couples’ open relationships. I also traveled a lot, Tindering around the world. I feel like I’m now equipped to teach a crash course of the intimate impacts of toxic masculinity, as I wound up often playing bedroom-therapist to straight, cisgender guys who had (very alarmingly!) rarely had in-depthy conversations around consent, insecurity, sexuality, and body image before.

Right now, I’m in a new but rather serious relationship with a partner who’s transgender and queer (hi Ben! You’re cute). As we talk through issues around monogamy, insecurity, and epic life plans, I’m also navigating what it means to be in a long-term queer relationship. I thought I would have my sexuality all figured out by the time I was 30, but it turns out my identity is still evolving. When I wrote the first edition of Sex from Scratch, I identified as straight. I don’t know if you can be straight if you’re in a queer relationship with me, said Ben. What about identifying as mildly queer? That sounds like a good self-definition for now. This relationship feels strong and healthy, in a large part because my partner and I have a lot to learn from each other and are both skilled at using words to express our feelings. It makes me feel powerful in a wonderful way. I feel well-equipped to deal with whatever shape our relationship takes.

A lot has changed in our country in the last seven years. The first edition of this book was written before the advent of Tinder, before same-sex marriage became legal nationwide, before transphobic bathroom bills became a national issue, before Laverne Cox graced the cover of Newsweek, before Aziz Ansari wrote a hilarious stand-up act and best-selling book about modern dating norms, and before Donald Trump was elected president, threatening the lives and liberties of millions of LGBTQ people. For the second edition, I’ve added lengthy interviews with two wise and brilliant Black, queer role models for the world: Marge Jacobsen and Ev’Yan Whitney. I’ve also added a mini-interview with asexuality activist Bauer, since the first edition didn’t highlight asexuality in a very intentional way. There’s significantly more discussion in this edition about online