Some writers have said love became a new religion, you know, as religions declined and as communities declined.

That's when the shift happened where the partner or the lover was meant to be everything for us

and so much pressure was put on romantic love.

Welcome to Doing It with me, Hannah Witten, where we talk all things, sex, relationships, dating and our bodies.

Hello, welcome back to doing it. I am so excited about this episode.

This is a real fan girl moment for me.

I am absolutely obsessed with Dr. Meg John Barker, who is the guest on today's podcast. I feel like so much of my adult sex and relationships education has come from MJ. They are an academic and a writer

and co-writer of books such as rewriting the rules, enjoy sex, how when and if you want to,

and queer a graphic history amongst other books as well, obsessed with their podcast with

Justin Hancock and Justin is also going to be

on a later episode. So big fan-girling moment all round for me. I basically just got to sit and chat

with people whose brains I really love. I went down to Brighton to visit MJ, and we recorded

this in a coffee shop, So there will be a bit

of background noise, but hopefully it is not too distracting from the conversation. We talked

about consent culture and what it means to live in a non-consensual society. We talked about

scripts such as the scripts that we're

taught for sexual encounters, scripts for relationships or just life in general, and how we can

become aware of these scripts and maybe where we learned them from, and how we can write our

own scripts for our relationships and

sexual experiences so that we're doing things the way that we want and what suits us.

So we talk a lot about different kinds of relationship styles and about having an

intentional relationship. I really hope that you take away from this, what I often take away from the Meg John

...