In Pursuit Of Good Badness

What do New Year's Resolutions and sex have in common?

Hi Friend,

It’s been a while since I’ve written here. Thirteen months, to be precise. I would love to explain my absence by telling you that I’ve been having some sort of fallow year that has involved realigning my relationship with productivity and giving myself permission to stop. If anything, it’s been the opposite as I’ve doubled down on my post-graduate specialist training as a sex and relationship therapist, in addition to fully launching my general therapy practice. But at any rate, it’s good to be back!

I’m writing this as we enter the final throes of January, which means that, statistically speaking, 80% of those shiny New Year’s Resolutions that were sworn in 29 days ago have likely been all but abandoned. When it comes to making resolutions, I’m ambivalent. As a sucker for ✨ newness ✨ (thanks, Late-Stage Capitalism!) there’s something irresistible about the allure of a fresh beginning, full of hope and promise and renewal. That said, in the age of continuous goal-setting / growth mindset / looksmaxxing / biohacking / [insert form of self-improvement here], there is something almost passé about them. As if an annual goal made only in January is a quaint Millennial tradition, like wearing trainer liner socks or using the crying-laughing emoji. Not to mention the fact that spring, the season of actual new beginnings, light and growth, seems like a far more logical time to be planting seeds both figurative and literal.

One of the many issues with New Year’s Resolutions is their framing. Typically, we pluck out a desired end result and proceed to measure our subsequent progress through a narrow, binary lens of success and failure. We tend to focus on the content - that is, a clearly-defined goal - and neglect to consider the process in reaching them, as in, the far more ambiguous experiential shifts in ways of thinking and being that we need to factor in to reach our desired outcome. In having an idealised end result, we judge ourselves harshly if we fall short.

I often see a version of this in my work as a Trainee Psychosexual Therapist in the NHS. In sex, Western medical and psychological practices have long promoted the four-stage Desire > Arousal > Orgasm > Resolution Model as the gold-standard for "healthy" sexuality, imposing a rigid, linear, normative framework on what is a complex and multidimensional process. This model is rooted deeply within culture; in film, literature, pornography - that all-too-familiar trope of a spontaneous swell of desire that leads to some form of penetrative sex, that concludes with all involved parties climaxing. Indeed, for some, this is how they experience sex. However, the many people that don’t have unknowingly internalised this narrative (that is based on research that is no less than 60 years old), leading them to feel broken or dysfunctional when their own experiences don't align with it.

One way of expanding our narratives around sex is to recognise willingness as a starting point for the sexual experience. This perspective normalises responsive desire, in which desire is sparked as a result of sexual activity, rather than being an essential precursor to it. Contrary to the model above, in which desire spontaneously erupts, leading to sex, this way of thinking says that desire doesn’t actually have to occur for sex start - we can decide to have sex in the knowledge that the resultant physiological and psychological cues will generate desire. In other words, desire follows willingness.

Broadening our narratives around sex also means being able to have what sex therapist Suzanne Iasenza calls ‘Good Bad Sex’. This is sex where “no matter what happens physically or emotionally… one can still feel good about connection, about sex, and about ourselves. It means that if someone suddenly feels anxiety, anger, or sadness during sex, they can still value the parts of the experience that were pleasurable, or even feel good about their willingness to try - bringing curiosity instead of judgment to the experience.” In moving from a performance-based to a connection-based erotic life, we are far more likely to feel good about sex. And when we feel good about sex, sex becomes better - it’s a virtuous cycle.

Similarly with New Year’s Resolutions - or more broadly with any kind of behaviour change - by shifting from a reductive goal-driven Desire > Achieve Model (one that implicitly expects to wake up on 1st January magically able to do The Thing), to a process-driven model that embraces the willingness to be ‘good bad’ at our goals, we can gradually move towards meaningful transformation. By broadening our narratives around success and failure, we allow space for imperfection, exploration, and growth, fostering a more compassionate and realistic approach to both self-improvement and intimacy.

I, for one, have lost count of the number of these newsletters that haven’t made it off the cutting room floor, mainly because I missed a preconceived and utterly arbitrary optimum window for addressing certain topics in relation to real-time events. So here I am, being a ‘good bad’ writer by writing about New Year’s Resolutions not at the start, but at the end of January - a whole three weeks after the dust has settled on all the other hot-takes out there. Then again, maybe this is the perfect time to be writing about them. In the words of the eternally wise Oliver Burkeman:

Mid-to-late January strikes me as an excellent time to consider the goals you’d like to achieve this year. It’s much better than, say, the start of January, when you might have allowed the calendrical moment to fool you into launching an aggressive plan to transform your life completely (the subtext of the plan generally being that you’re a disastrous person who needs to fix their disastrousness immediately). Hopefully, by now, all such initiatives have run safely into the sand, leaving you free to consider what actually works when it comes to achieving your goals.

Until next time,

Kitty

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🔖 Bookmarks

What I’m reading, watching, listening to right now

The Imperfectionist - Oliver Burkeman - If the quote above piqued your interest, read the full article, ‘The Right Dose Of Self-Discipline’ - the latest in Burkeman’s excellent newsletter.

The Politics of Pleasure - Upstream - This was such a thought-provoking podcast, exploring Critical Hedonism, the practice of looking at what we desire through a critical lens. Eric Wycoff Rogers and Zarinah Agnew unpack the hedonic treadmill that leaves us forever wanting more, and challenge the simplistic notion of hedonism as mere indulgence. An essential listen for anyone interested in how pleasure can be pursued thoughtfully in a way that enriches life.

Doppelgänger: A Trip Into The Mirror World - Naomi Klein - The book I’m reading atm. For anyone else that’s been watching the Nazi salute-filled news, wondering ‘how in the hell has it got to this?’, Doppelgänger offers a theory: diagonalism. Think of it as an alternative to horseshoe theory to describe the alliance between disaffected liberals, wellness enthusiasts, and far-right ideologies. Klein argues it’s not as simple as far-left vs far-right, rather we’re witnessing the rise of a new class dubbed the "far-out Left".