Join Jordan McCann (Interim Associate Director of the Well) and Jackie Hieber (Staff Clinician at the JMU Counseling Center and former Assistant Director of Sexual Violence Prevention and Advocacy in the Well) as they discuss the concept of sexual citizenship. What is it? How does it relate to you? How do you start exploring your own sexual projects and thinking critically about your sexual geographies? How is sex like a car? Learn the answers to all these questions and more in this week's episode!
The link to the transcript for this episode can be found here.
Resources:
Book Citation:
Hirsch, J.S. & Khan, S. (2020). Sexual citizens: A landmark study of sex, power, and assault on campus (1st ed.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.
You can buy this book on Amazon or check it out from the JMU Library!
Want to talk to someone about your sexual project? Schedule an appointment for sexual health coaching on MyJMUChart.
Be Well Dukes!
All episodes of Season 1 (2020 - 2021) were recorded when The Office of Health Promotion or, The Well, was a part of the University Health Center and located in the Student Success Center. As of summer 2021, The Well no longer exists and we are now UREC Health Promotion. Check out Season 2 Episode 1 to learn more about these changes or visit JMU University Recreation's website.
Join Jordan McCann (Interim Associate Director of the Well) and Jackie Hieber (Staff Clinician at the JMU Counseling Center and former Assistant Director of Sexual Violence Prevention and Advocacy in the Well) as they discuss the concept of sexual citizenship. What is it? How does it relate to you? How do you start exploring your own sexual projects and thinking critically about your sexual geographies? How is sex like a car? Learn the answers to all these questions and more in this week's episode!
The link to the transcript for this episode can be found here.
Resources:
Book Citation:
Hirsch, J.S. & Khan, S. (2020). Sexual citizens: A landmark study of sex, power, and assault on campus (1st ed.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.
You can buy this book on Amazon or check it out from the JMU Library!
Want to talk to someone about your sexual project? Schedule an appointment for sexual health coaching on MyJMUChart.
Be Well Dukes!
All episodes of Season 1 (2020 - 2021) were recorded when The Office of Health Promotion or, The Well, was a part of the University Health Center and located in the Student Success Center. As of summer 2021, The Well no longer exists and we are now UREC Health Promotion. Check out Season 2 Episode 1 to learn more about these changes or visit JMU University Recreation's website.
Episode 4 Transcript & Links
Links
The Well Survivor Advocacy: https://www.jmu.edu/healthcenter/survivor-advocacy/index.shtml
Book @ JMU Libraries:
Transcript
Intro: Hi there! Welcome to Well Dukes, brought to you by The Well. Each week, you’ll hear conversations from a variety of JMU staff and students that we hope will challenge what you know, think, or do in regard to your own health and helps you be Well Dukes.
Jordan: Hello, and thank you for tuning into another episode of Well Dukes! I’m Jordan McCann, Interim Associate director of The Well and resident Sexpert. Today, this episode is going to get a little deep. We’re going to be discussing what it is to be sexual citizens and the role sex plays on college campuses. Just your average, simple conversation over buffalo mash, right? We’ll be discussing how sex and sexual citizenship interacts with sexual assault. I want to give the disclaimer that we will be briefly sharing two different experiences of sexual assault, but know that we won’t be sharing graphic details. We’ll be focusing on how we can get this right and have positive sexual experiences during college. With me today, I have my colleague and friend, Jackie Hieber. Jackie, would you like to introduce yourself a little more?
Jackie: Sure. Um, so I have been working here at JMU for 3 years. I, at the moment, am the Assistant Director for Sexual Violence Prevention and Survivor Advocacy here in The Well. But actually, by the time this is available for people to listen to, I will be upstairs in a new role with the Counseling Center where I’m going to be working as one of their staff clinicians. So this is actually my last week in my current position but I’ve been an advocate and sexual violence prevention specialist for eight years, and the work is really near and dear to my heart so I’m excited to do this episode as one of my final things in this role.
Jordan: I know. I’m so glad you’re still at least going to be at JMU and be around and not totally leaving us.
Jackie: Me too, me too.
Jordan: And I’m so glad that you’re doing this conversation with us today. I think we’re both mutually excited, but I’m really happy that I get to have this conversation with and then for our listeners. And so, as we said, today this episode is talking about sexual citizens, and specifically the stuff that we’re going to be talking about is coming from a book. This book is called Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. It was written by Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan, who are both professors at Columbia University in New York. And this book really is all about a study that they conducted on Columbia students, as well as Barnard (which is the female sister school to Columbia University). And it took place at the end of Summer in 2015 all the way through January 2017, so about three full academic semesters, they conducted this study, full of in-depth interviews, informant interviews, focus groups, and 600 hours of just participant and community observation. So they had a team that was really out there talking to students, reading their journal entries to get a better grasp of what college life is like, especially in the role of sex, and like how sex shows up in so many different places and relationships and conversations in our environments.
Jordan: And so this is why I really liked reading this book. It gave real examples. There were stories that felt really relatable to me, personally, in my experiences, as well as a lot of stories that I’ve heard students, and even friends of mine, share with me, you know, as being people that have gone through the college experience. I think this book also highlights the importance of needing to de-stigmatize having conversations about sex, and then promoting comprehensive sex education early on. So that’s also why I’m here. I’m, like I said, I’m kind of the sex-ed person here at The Well and the Health Center. So that’s the approach that I’m bringing to this. Jackie, I know you’ll talk probably more about the sexual violence prevention, which is also so so crucial. Um, but like, it’s not talked about how these two relate together and I think that’s why we loved this book so much. You know, it’s like… alright, there’s a book now. Hopefully people will get it, right? What we’ve always been talking about. Um and yet, we spend so much time and energy thinking about what to do after sexual assault rather than spending the time thinking about what to do before. And that is in fact being able to have conversations and getting people to understand their own bodies and their sexual citizenship. So Jackie, I want to hear from you. Why did you ask us to read this book and why do you feel that it can be useful for so many other people that don’t do this work every day like you and I do?
Jackie: Well, so to start with, I got introduced to it because this was the book that was just being talked about everywhere in sexual violence prevention and in our field. It was-- as soon as it hit the market… {laughs} I mean, I think I went to maybe five different webinars on it this summer, I mean it was just… Everybody was talking about this book. And I think it's because of exactly what you were talking about Jordan, that so much of sexual violence prevention, if we're thinking about really stopping sexual violence before it happens, before we ever have somebody who's been harmed that we need to respond to, we really need to be looking at how are we talking to people about sex? How are we educating ourselves about sex? How are we teaching this to our young people so that they can grow up and have healthy sexual lives? That’s a key piece of sexual violence prevention, but oftentimes if you're outside of this work, that’s not really visible. It’s not obvious to people. And so that, that’s what I was super excited about. Immediately when I saw it, I thought “Oh I need to talk to Jordan about this, knowing that you are doing our health ed programming and sexual health coaching. I was like “Jordan! Jordan needs to know this.” But then the other thing that I really liked about this book, as I learned more about it, was realizing all the different areas that it overlaps with, even outside of sexual violence prevention or at the same time with sexual violence prevention. So it talks a lot about the role that alcohol plays in sexual experiences, especially on college campuses, because it's coming from real life stories of the people that they interviewed. It also talks a lot about gender identity and sexual orientation and how those aspects influence our sexual experiences. How we come to come to recognize our own sexual orientation, our own gender identity. Those are things that we don't commonly talk about and certainly in a lot of the sex education that we get when we're younger-- especially in high school depending on the information you got, you might not have gotten any of that information. So it really touches on those aspects but I mean it even goes beyond that. It talks about - there are things in here that are relevant to our residence life staff in terms of how they can prevent sexual violence. It's just... it's so... does such a good job of recognizing all the places that this intersects with other elements of what's going on on campuses and helps us to understand how it's all part of it. It's all a part of our daily lives and why this conversation should be important to everyone.
Jackie: And then the last thing that I think that this book does really well that is often missing in a lot of fields as well as in sexual violence prevention is that it names and talks about the racial injustices and the experience of-- the experiences of marginalized identities and how those are so just completely left out of the conversation. When we're talking about sexual violence prevention and even just healthy sexual experiences, how often we've failed to recognize that different identities really have drastically different experiences and how that influences sexual harms that are happening and also positive sexual experiences and, and what it all says about how we need to be looking at our work and trying to create positive experiences for everyone.
Jordan: Yeah, no, agreed with all of that-- right, that's why we love this book so much. And also we will, {laughs] I forgot to mention this, we will have information on this in the-- checkout the show description because we'll have the book information there. So if you are interested in reading this, you'll be able to find that. We highly encourage it. And it's good for students in college to also hear these other stories but as well as parents, community members... um, this has been one of the most and initial comprehensive studies on sexual assault on college campuses and again because it's one of the first ones to really take into account all of these specific experiences and to get this full picture, like you said, they... of all different identities and those stories that they share are coming from a diverse pool of identities and experiences.
Also I think we should note that yes, this study was done at Columbia University, which is a little different from James Madison University here, right? {Laughs} Um so it may not all be the exact same. There are definitely some stories that we know probably aren't as applicable here. But it's still -- whether or not it's the specific locations that people are going to or specific sexual experiences and encounters people are having, it's still good to know and understand what other young people and your peers may be experiencing.
Jackie: And it’s so, I think you said this earlier, but it’s so relatable because of that. Because it comes from stories and they really, as you read the book, you’re essentially just reading the stories of the people that they interviewed and what they took from it. And so many of these stories felt like they were a reflection of the conversations I’ve had with survivors when I’m working with them and supporting them. They’ve been… they’re so reflective of the questions I’ve heard from students just talking about sexual health in general. It’s really.. Just felt really true to my experiences of the work that I’ve been doing for eight years.
Jordan: Alright so I want to now get kind of into the book itself and the main components of it. The authors start off by introducing the three main concepts: sexual projects, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies. The goal is that by understanding these concepts, we can reduce sexual assault on college campuses. So I want to take the rest of our time to kind of define and explain these concepts and then also possibly show and I’m sorry - share some examples of how they’ve shown up in the work that we do with college campuses. But the first thing to talk about which I think is this is such a great example and I think it makes so much make sense in such an easy way for people to understand is the connection and the metaphor of sex and cars and this is probably not going where you think it might be going. {Laughs} So Jackie, can you tell me more about the car metaphor?
Jackie: Yeah, so I loved this metaphor. This came straight out of the book from Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan. They did a fantastic job with this metaphor. They talked about how basically when we learn... They say think about when you learn to drive or how we teach young people to drive. We don't just go out to the car, lift up the hood, and say “Here's the engine. Here's where you change the oil. Okay, you're good to drive!” Like we don't just go out and say “Here are the parts. Alright, you're good to drive.” We actually teach them how to drive and hopefully we also teach them the parts along the way, that's, you know, that's really good, but we teach them how to drive. But if you think about the way most of us are experiencing sex education as we're growing up, it's kind of like that. It's kind of like somebody went out and said, “Okay, here are the parts. Here are some of the parts, not all in parts, but here are some basic parts. Okay, good luck! You're good to drive”. You're good to.. you're good to go have sex and that's not quite it. That doesn't really teach you anything about how to do it, how to have these experiences in a positive and in a healthy way. In a way that is going to be good for you, that is going to be good for your partner, that is not harming anyone else. We don't talk about any of that. We just say here are the parts. Sometimes we say, “Now make sure you don't do this before marriage.” Sometimes we say, you know, “Make sure you don't get an STI”. We put a lot of stigma and shame around it but we don't actually talk about how to do this in a positive way. And that's where a lot of the intersection with sexual assault also shows up. Certainly this is not the only driver of sexual assault. I want to give that caveat. But this is an important part behind it, is if we're never talking about how to have positive experiences, if we're only saying “make sure you have consent” but we never talk about how do you know that you have consent, how do you get it? Then we're failing people. We're failing young people. We're not helping them figure out how to have these experiences in a positive way. So, I think that car metaphor is just fantastic and it just shows you so much of the stuff that's missing and I mean, our sex education is not even, like I said earlier -- we talk about some of the parts. We'll talk about some of the anatomy. Some of the basics, if we're lucky... depending. I mean, there's so much variation in what sex education people get, but we might get some of the parts, but a lot of them-- the ones that tend to be important to us as we get older, things like pleasure and the anatomy that's connected to that-- we might not get any of that. It's almost like you've been driving a car for three years and didn't even know it had heated seats. Like, you want those heated seats! You know? They’re fantastic! Um, and that’s kind of what we’re doing with sex education -- is we're just we're just saying “Okay, make sure you don't crash. You're good to go”. And we’ve got to do a better job of it. We’ve got to really teach people how they can have positive experiences with it.
Jordan: Yeah, and we say it all the time. Sex is not intuitive. And I know as much as we want to believe that other people can read our minds and think that like “well, I don't need to talk about this. They should just know that, you know, this is what I want or like, this is how it is” and we don't want to have those seemingly awkward conversations. But again, it's not intuitive. We don't know. We don't know how to have these interactions with others until we actually experience it live in person and without any sort of that preparation beforehand it can... Yeah, that's where we see some of the like... The unintentional moments happening, I think.
Jackie: Mmhmm. Yeah.
Jordan: And so we kind of started talking about this communication and understanding but really starting from.. starting from the the beginning and I think that's a good segue into the first concept of sexual citizenship or what it is to be sexual citizens and I do wanna note that this term sexual citizen is not one that the authors themselves created this is a word that has been used in, in like sociology and sociology research and especially like comprehensive sex education, but you might be seeing this word start to pop up more often, so can you tell me about what a sexual citizen is and what or what it means to be a sexual citizen?
Jackie: Mhm. I thought this was another fantastic concept. So the way that they… they just do a really good job of defining this so I'm gonna read this as a direct quote from the book. The way that they define sexual citizenship... They say it denotes the acknowledgement of one's own right to sexual self-determination and importantly recognizes the equivalent right in others. They later go on and they talk about how sexual citizenship focuses attention on how some people feel entitled to other bodies and others do not feel entitled to their own bodies. And I just thought this was a, There's there's so much in there to unpack. But I think the really important piece of this concept is that it's not just about recognizing your own agency, your own autonomy, it's not just about being able to embody your own experiences; it's also recognizing that in other people and I think that's where we often fall short is the part where we recognize it in other people and honor it in other people. I think… We often fall short in recognizing that in other people and if we start teaching this concept of sexual citizenship-- sexual citizenship to everyone from a young age, that really changes the dynamic of the experiences we have as we get older and it changes how we talk about a lot of different things. So I just... That feels like such a core concept that we... I had never heard the term sexual citizenship before I read this book, but now that I... I sit here and I think how did I... how did this never come through my experiences before? How is this not a part of what I knew before because it feels so core to what we need to know when we're having these experiences.
Jordan: Yeah and so basically it is it's that it's empowering young people to understand that they do in fact have the autonomy over themselves and their bodies and their sex lives, and I remember some of the stories that they shared that really resonated because, again, these were the ones that felt so real and I feel confident saying that they probably are still happening and… the ones, one story specifically was how it was a young a young man in a relationship. In a same sex relationship but this was kind of his first real boyfriend and first partner and at that age, especially in college if this is the first real relationship or someone you really like or first sexual relationship there are seemingly so many positive things happening in that relationship that can sometimes overshadow when there are some not so great things. And in this example, he was saying how his boyfriend that he did like... He enjoyed being with him, they had sex, but he often found himself... he didn't name it as assault, he didn't realize it was but his boyfriend was usually the one kind of dominating but again he didn't see it that way. Because he saw it as like, well this I'm in this relationship and I feel like it’s almost this, like, obligation to just kind of go with it rather than speaking up and... I think processing and understanding that that wasn't something he was comfortable with.
Jordan: And then in another story too talking about the young woman that she gave a blowjob to a guy because she didn't want to have sex and she knew she didn't want to have sex but rather than facing that awkward moment of having.. of saying no she figured she could kind of compensate by at least doing something else even though she really didn't want to do that either, but wanted to avoid the the whole awkward experience of doing nothing at all because again, it was a sense of obligation of owing something to someone. And I think that's really what happens, and I know that, you with assault, you know, you know all the statistics and often assaults occur by people that we already know or have even had experiences with before, and so it's understanding that and if we can empower young people and start these conversations for them to realize like no I do in fact have control over this or... and I want to have control right it's that empowerment of wanting to have control over our body autonomy and and sex lives. I think that's still part of the goal and reducing the assault on campus.
Jackie: And the idea of, I think you said something important earlier in that example of she felt like she owed something to them and the idea of sexual citizenship is that you don’t owe any part of yourself to anyone else. And nobody owes any part of themselves to you, and that you honor that in both yourself and the people that you're with.
Jordan: Yeah, and so by empowering people to take control of their sexual citizenship or understand it, even thinking about it, another component of that too is recognizing the term that I... I enjoyed this one the most and I think shows up in the work that I do is understanding sexual projects and what that means. So can you tell me what a sexual project is?
Jackie: Yeah, I loved this term too. So again I’m gonna read you the direct definition from the book. They write “a sexual project encompasses the reasons why anyone might seek a particular sexual interaction or experience so pleasure is an obvious product, but a sexual project can also lead to develop or maintain a relationship or it can be a project to try to not have sex, or to try to have children. There's a lot of different great reasons why we might be wanting to have sex in any particular situation and I think at the same time... Most of us have not been asked that have not been asked to consider what is this sexual project that you're working on probably certainly not in those words but even the reasons of why you're wanting to have sex right now. I don't know that that is something that we are frequently asked to think about and reflect upon and what I really like about the way they define this is the acknowledgement about there is also a sexual project to not have sex. That's maybe whether that is you don't want to have sex until a certain moment in your life or that you don't want to have sex right now because you want to experience intimacy in a different way in a relationship that acknowledging that sexual projects can also be the absence of sex. I think that's really powerful too. And that… but we never are asked to reflect on that we're never asked to sit down and think “Okay, what is it that I am looking to do right now? “Why is it that I am wanting to have sex or engage in a certain activity at a certain time?”
Jordan: Yeah, and I think if someone is asking that like, why are you having sex or why do people have sex? There's… not that many options, right? Oftentimes we hear it's like well the the actual reproductive part of it right people have sex to conceive to make a child. Or people have sex to experience pleasure because we know our bodies right? I get like the nerves of the genitalia, they're there to experience pleasure. That's the sole purpose for some of them. And when we look at our target population of college students, we know that, as far as conceiving a child, is really not the goal for the vast majority I think. But then when we look at the other one to experience pleasure to have intimacy and have this experience with someone that might be what resonates more with college students, but again I venture to say that not the vast majority are having good, pleasurable experiences. So it is asking that question of “If you're not having sex or if you're not having good sex, why are you doing it?” And again, I'm saying that I'm not trying to shame people that are having sex like... Sorry to the people of my past you know but I, I completely admit like I've been there. It's relatable. Again, it happens and sometimes it's awkward sometimes it happens because you're like, well, we are not connecting and like this is just not a... we’re... no, right? And that might be the unwanted one… we're like that was just a weird awkward one, but we most certainly want to be avoiding the ones that lead to experiencing trauma. And so, I think by asking that question and again, like we're literally asking this to our listeners to take a second and reflect. What is your sexual project? And again, if that, maybe if that is in fact to not be having sex and to be focusing on college and just experiencing more intimacy in your relationships outside of the physical sex part, that's perfectly fine and and there should not be shame around that because I think the media and peer pressure and social constructs also played a role here too.
Jordan: That there is this notion everyone is having sex in college and we know that's not the case. And so, the last one just to talk about which I also found this one... the most new to me, I think but again also just really tangible is the concept of sexual geographies. So Jackie, what is a sexual geography?
Jackie: This one was also probably the newest concept to me as well, but I think it’s equally as strong and important. So they define sexual geographies as the concept that integrates the built environment into our perspective and they write “Yes, we literally mean things like space and furniture, but also a lot more.” So it encompasses the spatial context through which people move and the peer networks that can regulate access to those spaces so some of the examples they gave... well, I’ll pick one because it's the one that stands out the most. And I think it helps you to see it right away because if you think about most residence halls on college campuses, you think about the furniture that comes in those rooms. It's typically a bed, a desk, and a chair to go with the desk, right, and a dresser, maybe. Well if you think about all that furniture… If you're visiting somebody, if you're hanging out in the room, pretty much the only place to sit is on the bed. And we have lots of ideas about what that means to be sitting on the bed together. [Laughs] Or you could choose to sit on the chair by the desk and you know some people do or you can choose to sit on the floor but the most obvious place to sit is on the bed and right there that starts to create messages that might not want to be created... Just the furniture that was allowed in that space created a dynamic. That's what they're talking about when they talk about sexual geographies. They talk about this too in bigger ways than that so some other examples they described were... Most of the parties happening on some campuses happen to have... be and fraternity houses. So that space that's physical space is gonna be most familiar to the people who live in those fraternity houses and anyone who's visiting is gonna be less familiar with that space and right there, automatically sets up a power dynamic. It creates an imbalance there and that's what can contribute sometimes to some of the harms that we're seeing happen and if we can start to think about those physical spaces, start to think about the fact that if you're living on campus on college, it's really hard to find any private space to have sex or to have even an intimate moment with someone else. So like if you want to come back to your own room, if you're living on campus you got to find something to do with your roommate, you gotta have some sort of agreement with your roommate, right?
Jackie: I think they even talk about the example of: If you want to come back to your room, maybe the solution you came up with as you send your roommate to another room... Well now they're in an unknown space. If we as people on campus can start to think about these physical spaces and things we can do to really balance out that power dynamic that happens in those spaces to create more options for people in their physical spaces, that can go a long way to influencing their experiences so they're they're much more likely to be positive than harmful.
Jordan: Yeah those were some great examples and I also, like, Columbia gave the example of where they just did something that they have done to try to create a solution to this is allowing more late-night spaces and.. So specifically they're they have a cafeteria that they opened up 24/7, so if it is the case on like a Thursday/ Friday/ Saturday night and it's late and knowing that people may not necessarily feel like they want to go to bed but they want to keep hanging out with someone, like you said sometimes the only option used to be is that you had to go to someone's room and that does send a.. May send a message. So by having more spaces to go to, maybe they do just want to kind of continue the night together but sex is not the end goal at that time. It creates a little bit more of a safety plan or a safe space for them, so I think that's something that for us at work with higher education professionals, you know as we said this is important for everyone it's not just the people doing the work around sex education and sexual assault prevention but it's important for everyone because this plays a role in some decision-making for college students.
Jordan: Well we are reaching the end of our time, so just to kind of wrap up we always like to ask our guests and I'll ask you Jackie, what is something you want our listeners to take away from this episode? How can they apply what we've talked about today?
Jackie: That's a great question. I think... What I really hope is that our listeners will just reflect on these three concepts and maybe even that car metaphor too and think about what was it, what are the messages that you've got for your life and how did those shape your sexual citizenship? The sexual projects you're thinking about what is.. What are the sexual geographies in your life right now? And how does that influence the power dynamics that are happening in your experiences? Just to bring that more to awareness I think is really important.
Jackie: One more really great example of this… They named one of the possible sexual projects from the people they interviewed as they just wanted to get more experience, they wanted to get better at sex which is a perfectly acceptable sexual project. And if you are doing that sexual project in a way where you are really aware of your own sexual citizenship and that same right in your partner, you're going to be doing that in a healthy way because that means that you're probably engaging with people in a way that they are also equally excited about the experience you're about to have. Where we run into trouble is and we forget about that sexual citizenship especially in the right that other people have to it. That sexual project of wanting to get better at sex you can see where that can that can cause a lot of harm if you're not paying attention to the sexual citizenship of the partners that you're with. And honoring them and just, you know being.. They say they say in the book that some of it boils down to teaching people from a very young age to be kind and caring and mindful of other people in our lives and how that manifests in much more complex ways as we grow and I think that's really important. Do you have any takeaways Jordan?
Jordan: Yeah definitely echoing what you said for the most part. I think it's that… This can still be-- work for everyone and it really can also start with our target audience our listeners right now college students, you know by having this understanding that they can begin to advocate for themselves and for others and we hope that by starting with the younger generations and understanding this that they're gonna be the ones that help us see the reduction and decrease of sexual assault on campus. Um, and it is. It's in fact as we've been saying just reiterating that having a sexual project of having more sex and getting better at sex is totally fine and that's great because again like if you're have sex we want you to have good sex and how do we know? Well that is also meaning like asking for feedback, you know, how often does that happen and some people are like “heck no that is so awkward,” um but I think that's I mean, that's the real thing right instead of just assuming that “oh, yeah, I'm really good at sex and you know because I haven't heard any complaints.” But at the other time you have to understand your partner may not feel so comfortable telling you, maybe, so you know but like let's have a conversant let's talk about sex baby, right? And so just remembering that that the people that we are then having sex with viewing them as humans and having empathy and kindness towards them that they are.. Hopefully the goal is that they are mutually agreeing to have sex with you as well like they have also consciously made the decision to want to have sex with you and share that experience with you and no one else at that time, perhaps, or if even if it's more than one person.. the group of them at least in that moment have decided to have sex with one another and that is special and it can be great and so I think just keeping that in mind that that is the goal too that it's, it truly is meant to be an experience shared upon and we want this mutual agreement and consent there rather than looking at others as ways to use them to reach certain goals and whether that's unfortunately, for some people, it's just kind of racking the numbers up or having sex with certain specific people rather than experiencing that pleasure and that moment with them because of who they are.
Jordan: Yeah, man. I know we could keep talking about this and I would love to and you maybe will do a part two because this book is so great and again, I just love having these conversations with you. Real quick, again as our guest, I like to ask these questions. First off, what advice would you give your undergrad self?
Jackie: Okay, so I knew this question was coming and I thought long and hard about it and everything I could think of as advice to give me, I always came back to a “Well, then I would have experienced that differently and that I don't know if I would be where I am right now.” So this is a classic counselor response. But I think it was just recognizing that all of my experiences shaped me into the person that I am today and so I don't know that I would necessarily do anything differently. I think it often lends to some advice for undergrads. We all have experiences that shape us. Hopefully most of those experiences are very positive, but almost none of us get through life unscathed right. We all have to go through some really really hard times and no matter how those times come in and no matter when they come, we’re still gonna find ourselves in those moments. We’re still gonna find who we are by living in those moments and through those moments. And I think that's part of what my younger self has learned as I've gotten older is that all of those things shaped me into who I am today and I really love who I am today. And I don’t know if I would want to change it so it’s hard for me to think of I wish I had done that differently because I know how shaped me into where I am today. So I do remember that in college there's a lot of anxiety about finding yourself and wondering if you know life is gonna happen in the way that you want it to and for me, I just had to learn to trust that I would find myself through the experiences that I was having but I... That I would get to where I wanted to be at some point and I just need to trust that I'm still there no matter what the experiences are. I'm still there in that moment and I can find myself at any moment and that's going to shape me into the person that I want to be.
Jordan: Perfect.
Jackie: That’s a very counselor response. I know.
Jordan: No that's so good. I think I think our listeners will appreciate hearing that, That was really good advice. And my second question for you is, if you could be a professional athlete, what sport would you play?
Jackie: Oh this is hard! Hmm… what sport would I play? Well, actually maybe i’ts not that hard. I played softball for 10 years. Softball was my favorite sport, is my favorite sport. So I think that I would want to play softball but you know I'd want to play softball with all my old teammates. I want our old team like the girls that I grew up playing with for ten years. I want that team to be my professional team because it was the sport that I loved but I loved it even more playing it with those people and so I think I would want to play softball. I would also love to be able to do gymnastics and to flip around that like to be like, do like five flips in the air at some point. I mean, I think that is incredible and I would love to do that. But I am also terrified of falling on my head so that that would not be it but I think softball would be the one.
Jordan: I thought you might appreciate that because I know you're a very competitive person also so I was like this will probably be hard for her.
Jackie: [Laughs} It’s true, it’s true.
Jordan: Well, thank you again. Jackie. Again, I just love having these conversations with you and love that I've been able to share my first few years here at JMU with you as co-workers and colleagues. You will be missed here in our office, but you will be great in the counseling center and so helpful to students so I'm so glad that you are a resource for so many here. And thank you to our listeners for exploring this conversation with us today. Tune in next week on Wednesday for a conversation with our SOGIE team on LGBTQ+ identities, and I hope that you have a great week and remember to be well dukes.
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