Bisexuality, Biphobia & Why the Feminine/Masculine Energy Advice Online Is Repackaged Misogyny — S3E4 with Dr. Joli Hamilton

About This Episode

In Season 3 episode four of And Just Like That… We Found Therapy, host Isabel MV is joined by Jungian psychologist, jealousy researcher and polyamory advocate Dr. Joli Hamilton to unpack Sex and the City's "Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl." It's the episode where Carrie dates a bisexual man and handles it terribly, Charlotte discovers her inner drag king and then never calls him again, Miranda goes to a goddess class to find her femininity and leaves more confused than before, and Samantha describes herself as tri-sexual while making biphobic jokes.

What We Cover

• Is gender really an illusion — and what does Jungian psychology actually say about masculine and feminine energy?

• Why the "be in your feminine to attract a masculine man" advice circulating online is just misogyny in a wellness container

• Biphobia vs. bi erasure: the difference, and why both are still very much happening in 2025

• Is bisexuality just a stop on the way to gay town? What the research actually says

• Carrie's jealousy around Sean's bisexuality: why she fixates on men as the threat — and what that reveals about her own homophobia

• Why Carrie is actually a terrible sex columnist, and always has been

• Charlotte in drag: what that scene actually reveals about her psychological capacity — and what she lost by running away from it

• Miranda going to goddess class: why the question of masculine vs. feminine is not nearly big enough for what Miranda is actually suppressing

• Samantha's tri-sexual zingers: funny on the surface, but who is she performing for?

• Can you be friends with your ex? Joli's take on how healthy communities handle transitions

• What ethical non-monogamy actually requires — and why opening a relationship that already has problems will not fix those problems

• Jealousy as a research subject: what it really is and why it's so hard to navigate

About Our Guest

Dr. Joli Hamilton is a Jungian psychologist, certified sex educator, TEDx speaker, bestselling author and founder of the Year of Opening. She researches jealousy professionally and works with individuals and couples navigating ethical non-monogamy and conscious relating. Take her 10-question quiz to find where you sit on the spectrum, and find her jealousy resources at jealousyroadmap.com. She also hosts the Playing With Fire podcast. All links in the show notes.

Transcript

Hey, Boundary Babes, welcome back to And Just Like That We Found Therapy. Today, we are diving into one of the most quietly controversial episodes of Sex and the City, Season 3, Episode 4, Boy Girl, Boy Girl.

Carrie is dating someone who's bisexual, and honestly, she does not handle it well. The girls have opinions, none of them particularly enlightened or current.

And Charlotte has a moment in drag that I think says more about her than the whole rest of the season.

We get into gender, bisexuality, jealousy, and why that whole being you're feminine to attract that masculine man advice you keep seeing online might just be repackaged misogyny. This one got deep. I hope you enjoy it.

Bye. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of And Just Like That We Found Therapy. I am your host, Isabel Amvi, and I am super excited to be joined today by Dr.

Joli Hamilton. Joli is the founder of the Year of Opening. She's an advocate for creative monogamy, polyamory, consensual non-monogamy, the best-selling author, a TEDx speaker, and the host of the Playing With Fire podcast.

Welcome, Joli. How are you?

I'm great. I'm thrilled to be here with you chatting.

Anything out of your very impressive resume?

You know, you hit on all the big things, except I do like to sometimes throw in, and I'm also just a boring old mom. I think it's so easy for people to imagine that everybody who's doing the non-monogamy thing is like in their 20s. I have seven kids.

They're grown.

You have seven kids.

Like, I do. They're actually all grown now. The youngest just turned 18.

So like, but I just, I've tossed that in because I feel like it sort of rounds out the picture. Yes, I have my PhD. Yes, I studied jealousy professionally.

Yes, I am an advocate for creating the relational life you like. It's beyond the monogamous norms, but also I just live a very boring soccer mom life most of the time.

That is so funny because this ties in with some of the themes in the episode that I think lead to believe that maybe bisexual people are very selfish, and that maybe doesn't fully go with children. So let's get into it.

2:17

Gender Roles Explored

Today, Joli joins me to discuss season three episode, Poor of Sex and the City, Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl. And the episode opens with Charlotte's show at her gallery, where she is hosting a show with photographs of Drakking, the women dressed as men.

And we meet Baird, who is the photographer and the artist. And as he's explaining his work of art, he discusses that he thinks there's a lot of duality of feminine and masculine energy within each one of us, and gender is just an illusion.

So my first question to you is, do you agree, do you think that gender is an illusion?

Well, I think that gender is a wildly misunderstood term, right? We ask the word gender to hold too much for us, because the idea that we could divide everything in the world up into a list of this and that, that actually works fine for me.

I think we can break the world up into binaries all we want, except why do we assign them to men and women? As a cisgender woman myself, that doesn't make sense to me.

Also as a Jungian psychologist, Jungian theory relies heavily on the idea that humans make sense of the world out of creating these this and that categories, but that doesn't mean that that's how we actually experience ourselves, right?

So the idea that we then have to fit into one side of the other, that feels silly to me. So I mean, gender is an illusion is a neat little packed phrase to try to capture something that is way more complicated.

Like we all contain the possibilities for everything within us. And then a lot of us perform our gender in certain ways that feel better and worse to us.

And all of that means we have to be we have to get beyond the glib to really, really dig into how does gender feel for you and how does it feel for me. But I certainly feel like I can resonate with it.

I mean, I think that's such a fantastic point. Do you think if there was less pressure of what everything a gender should hold by the eyes of society, if there was less pressure on that, there would be perhaps less gender transformation?

I don't know if I'm saying that correctly.

Like divisiveness, you mean?

No, I feel like there's been a topic lately, especially with young people. I know in the US it's been a big topic about maybe teenagers going on hormone blockers or maybe transitioning, that's what I meant, into the opposite sex.

Do you think that there would be maybe less pressure, not pressure, but like less urgency to make those changes if we didn't put so much pressure into one gender?

I think it's hard to say what would actually play out in any given society. But as the mother of some non-binary and trans kids myself, no, I don't think that it would stop what you're describing as pressure for them to transition.

I think what we're experiencing is watching teenagers, watching young people live out their lives the way that they feel most authentic, right?

And I don't think that I don't I don't think that there's something that we that we need to do to stop that from happening.

What I what I can imagine is if we if we stopped focusing on the idea that this group of people needs to behave in one way, in order to appropriately be living their gender and this group of people needs to live another way, what we might find is we

fought less about all of this. We might be less politically divided about all of it. And on top of that, we would find that there's more safety for our young people, right? They they would feel safer to explore.

Would they would some of them still want to take hormone blockers? Absolutely, because for many young people, what they find is they need a period of time to explore more fully. And we have the capacity now.

You know, transness didn't come out of nowhere. We've had trans people with us the whole time. So it's interesting to watch that particular episode and think, okay, it's about 25 years old now.

And it seems so shocking, right? Like it was so shocking to see Charlotte put on drag. But except it's not.

It's not at all shocking. Like I remember 25 years ago myself, you know, having days where I dressed more masculine or dressed more feminine according to my society's rules.

It's really, it feels like the political divide has made it into something that it doesn't need to be. What if we, I guess, so I guess to your point, could we all just relax? And would that help everyone?

Yes, absolutely. But with any individual person, like would that encourage them not to take medical steps? No, I don't think it would at all.

Because I don't think people take medical steps like hormone lockers or like transitioning, unless they feel it deeply. Like we know that the data tells us that transitioning regret is incredibly low.

It is one of the lowest regret categories anywhere. Like surgical regret is a real thing, right? But like there is a higher surgical regret for cisgender women who have boob jobs.

The numbers of regret are higher there than they are for young people who choose to medically transition.

So I think we get the emphasis.

I think we get that emphasis a little off.

Yeah, I feel like it's been so weaponized right now. In both parties, especially in the States, to doing elections. But I think that's a brilliant step to bring up.

But funnily enough, I think this episode does really dig its heels very much into what is it that society feels is feminine and masculine.

Because while Charlotte is introducing Bird, she plays the scene and the girls are like, whoa, why did you run away? And she's like, oh, I just have a crush on him. And they tell her, like, OK, why don't you ask him out?

And she's like, oh, no, I could never, because she's very feminine.

And I ask you in preparation to this recording, I personally do feel that sometimes as a cisgender woman that is heterosexual, if I bring too much of my masculine side, I feel like I might be setting myself up for a feminine man, which is kind of

what we see play out in Ms. Amanda and Steve's relationship dynamic in this episode. Do you think that there's something to this, or it's completely theory?

Well, I think it is playing into exactly that divisiveness, right? So what we've done over the last couple of decades, we have seen everyone lean really heavily into this idea of exactly what you're saying, right?

And I see it in my clients who are dating. They're like, oh, I want to be in my feminine so I can attract a masculine man. First off, have you dated a man who's in touch with his actual femininity?

It's fucking awesome. They're emotionally intelligent. They know how to hold space.

Like, don't write that off. So if a man is deeply in touch with their femininity, I don't know. Just don't knock it before you've tried it.

It's a huge set of green flags. It is. Okay.

But even if we were to set that aside, what does it mean to be in your masculine? Exactly. What does that mean to you?

To bring your masculine energy?

I feel, because I am an entrepreneur, I work for myself in the finance world. I also have this podcast. I live alone.

I've been single for a while. I feel like I've had to step into both my daddy and mommy of my own household. And I have to carry stuff.

And I have to be, sometimes a bit more abrupt, because otherwise people will theme all over me. So I sometimes feel that I need to soften when I go back into the dating scenarios. Because I do feel like I'm like, Okay.

What do you want? What are we doing? Like I can be very cut through.

Yeah.

I don't think you're talking about your masculine side. I think you're talking about having a standard.

I think you're talking about understanding how to run a damn household by yourself and saying, if you can't step in here and meet me in that, then you're not worth my time to date.

I think it's a huge mistake to think that a woman needs to lower her bar so that a man can jump over it. Fucking learn how to jump over the bar or don't play with me. Just don't bother.

This is why we're seeing more and more women not bother to partner long term with men who aren't willing to jump the bar, who aren't willing to incorporate their feminine and masculine qualities. And we're going to use those terms to divide up.

I, to me, to be in my masculine is to know, to know myself, right? To bring self-awareness. Well, in order to bring self-awareness, right?

In order to hold a container, hold space. I have to have self, I have to have the ability to do deep self-inquiry. I have to know how to sit with my emotions.

I have to know how to sit with my partner's emotions. Do you know very many men who can do that? Because, unfortunately, that's not how I'm hearing people describe masculinity.

I'm instead, I'm hearing people who are like, I pay the check, I pay the bills, I want to be a provider. Okay? Provide me your own emotional regulation and stability.

Provide me that. That will show me masculinity.

I've heard in this podcast before that masculine is the one that does and feminine is the one that, I don't know if it was feels or thing, but it was very much like that.

I feel like the feminine is supposed to be more in its head and the man it's more in the action.

Yeah, so that's bullshit. It's total bullshit. Psychologically speaking, it's total bullshit.

What that is is repackaged.

It's repackaging the same misogyny that we have seen for decades, but putting it into this nice new age container and saying, girls, you're just not getting the men you want because no, just no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, let's just not do this.

We are buying the same hook line and sinker our grandmothers fought to get out of. So could we just not do that? So instead, what if we instead divide it up this way and say, there are people in the world who like to take action and be in leadership.

How many women do you know who are fantastic organizers, leaders? They know how to run an organization. They know how to run a household.

They know how to run things. That's leadership, right? Okay, fine.

Let's say we want to call that masculinity. Cool, great, whatever. I don't actually care what label you want to put it on.

I happen to be married to a man who is both able to lead and able to follow. He is a C-suite level executive, and he is absolutely able to do those things we might label, you might have heard labeled, as quote-unquote feminine.

He is able to identify the sensations he is feeling in his body. He is able to identify what those feelings are.

He is able to slow things down when the emotional tension of a room has gotten big and say, wait, wait, wait, let's feel through this together because there is a lot going on in this space.

He is also six foot tall, has broad shoulders and a black belt in martial arts. Like, I don't... It's so funny to me that we imagine that women who are...

There are so many natural born leaders amongst us and so many men who could be emotionally competent.

Why in the world would we want to then say, no, no, no, no, let's divide us up according to vaginas and penises and say, you guys all need to lead and you girls all need to feel.

It's so silly in this day and age when we're trying to hold so much more nuance and say, what if we get to know the individuals? Like, for instance, you asked about... You were talking about Miranda and Steve.

Miranda clearly has a lot of leadership capacity and Steve does bring her in touch. And she's a doer. She's making shit happen.

So is Samantha. But here's the thing. So are all four of them.

They are all outdoing. They're making their lives. Like, I don't...

Charlotte would be like our embodiment of the quote unquote feminine, right? Charlotte makes so much shit happen. And Charlotte is...

And she does play it up.

And even when she marries Harry, like, she still is like, she is making so much happen.

So what are we talking about when we say men are the doers?

So I understand what you mean. I completely understand.

But like, sometime, I do wonder, because in my pack of questions, I did ask you, do you think that there needs to be balance between feminine and masculine energy in a relationship, which maybe doesn't need to be like, you are feminine, he is

masculine, that is a balance. But like, do you think that maybe that is true in every situation that there is in a relationship? Like, do you think that maybe when you're...

I think every person, I think every human needs to get in broader touch with more of their capacity, right? So I think, so I am a Jungian psychologist, and in Jungian psychology, we do talk quite a lot about the masculine and feminine.

But what we're talking about is your internal sense. So you said that you feel it sometimes you're leaned too far into this masculine energy. I don't want you to soften for a man.

I want you to learn to soften for yourself, right? And to be able to hold both of those.

I think in every relationship, no matter what the genders are of the people in the relationship, I want everyone to be able to hold both of those energies within themselves and recognize that that duality is always existing within.

Just like when we're raised, right? We, you said, you know, you're holding both the mommy role and the daddy role. Yeah.

I want you to also have a sense of your own internal, I can mother myself and I can father myself. Right? So when I partner with someone, it's tempting for me to say, I want you to hold all the masculine stuff.

But that's actually offloading my psychological work onto them. I want both of us to be able to hold both halves of that particular full. And we may in turn, right?

Like we may go through phases, like I was pregnant a lot of time, right? Like to have a lot of children, right? You're pregnant a lot of time.

When I was pregnant and nursing for 11 and a half years, that's a long time. Clearly in touch with feminine energy, right? Right?

Yes.

Like that's a long time to be in my, like literally doing the work of that female body, right?

So there I am, I'm doing it. It also required me to be parenting a growing group of small people becoming humans.

I had to be in touch with the part of me that's holding a nursing baby to my breast, while also teaching children how to engage healthily, which means discipline and teaching them how to like, how to become people.

I had to be in touch with my masculine and feminine aspects.

So at the time, if I had offloaded that on to my husband, like, you wait till your father gets home for discipline, that's not the kind of parenting I would ever have wanted to give my kids.

So this is where, like, it's just one example of how, yeah, I might want to ask my partner to show up with like that, that sort of other halfness. But really what I'm doing is missing the opportunity to become more fully myself and to know them.

So to have, to have the ability to be in both sides of that picture also means that I invite my partner into both sides of that picture. Might we have a marriage then that looks different than what society tells me? It should.

Yeah, we, yeah, definitely. It's definitely not going to look like Big and Carrie, right? Like, it's, it's not.

Thank God.

But I think, I think actually Charlotte and Harry do a decent job of balancing, especially if we then go to the more recent And Just Like That series, right?

We see them start to like, oh, they're starting to come into some balance there. And that to me shows psychological maturity over time.

How interesting.

20:15

Bisexuality Misunderstood

Then we switch over to Carrie out ice skating with Sean. And he mentions he's in a whole other generation than she is. And when they're taking off their ice skates, they're covering the exes.

And he kind of like casually brings up the fact that one of his exes was a man. And Carrie's like, whoa. Blown away.

Cut to the girls at brunch the next morning. Carrie is like, he just blurted out that he was bisexual, but like nothing.

And like, here I'm very curious to know what you thought about the girls' views on bisexuality, because they throw everything and they're like, no, it's just so open about it. Like it was not a problem. That's what I'm reading between the lines.

Or bisexuality is just like a layover on your way to gay town. It doesn't exist. For women, it's just experimenting because like both all men and women that experiment with bisexuality end up with men.

And Miranda says, it's just greedy. What do you think about this, given that it was 25 years ago, but like do you think that we still suffer from this?

Yeah, I mean, we do still suffer from biphobia and bi erasure, for sure. There are these two words, right? Biphobia tends to show up more right now.

We see more biphobia around men who come out as bisexual, right? Yeah. Men will often not admit to their bisexuality because they are punished in modern, at least modern American society.

They are punished for it.

Women tend to actually flaunt it and some of them will even like fake it, but like promote it a little bit more about themselves because especially in certain circumstances, it's seen as being like the cool thing, like all the cool girls are, right?

So it's much more acceptable. In both cases though, we have bi erasure. Bi erasure is when we actually slip into, I forget which one of them says like, oh, bisexuality is just a stop off on the way to gay town.

That is so not borne out. Yeah. It's just not borne out by the research.

It's just not. So, we have actually had, there's also a little conflation in here because when we say greedy, okay, here I am a bisexual polyamorous woman. My husband is also a bisexual polyamorous guy, right?

I don't actually mind if somebody tells me I'm greedy because of my polyamory, I'm like, sure, okay. Fine.

Yeah.

If that's how that makes sense for you, cool. But I don't think we should conflate bisexuality and polyamory because the vast majority of people are still practicing monogamy, right?

The data tells us about 20% of people in the US have tried non-monogamy, about 5%, maybe 4 to 6 is the numbers I'm seeing, 4 to 6% of people are non-monogamous right now. So the vast majority are practicing monogamy.

Which means when he says that he's had a bunch of partners and one of them was a guy, he's very clearly sharing his bisexuality there. But what does that have to do with greed? He had one partner at a time.

How is that greedy? It's outdated as in it's also just not making sense. He's not taking more than his share of the pie.

I do. I frequently do. I enjoy it.

But again, for a guy to come out and say that and then to lean into it, the idea that somehow it's greedy for him to have dated people, it's such a funny way to put that and shows our own insecurity. Right? Like it's not like...

Yeah.

I don't know if you got this at all, but I remember when I was growing up and Gossip Girl was coming out, whoever was playing, Nate Archibald and Chuck Bass, were sharing a flat in New York.

And the press in Spain was running wild, saying that one of them or both of them were also entertaining male sexual partners.

And the commentary around that was like, they're so good looking and they have it so much that they've already gone through all the women they wanted to sleep with. So now they've gone on to men.

And that is the narrative that we got at least in Spain. And that's what I clocked when I heard Greedy. It is like, I am so bored of meat.

I am willing to try fish. And that is exactly the kind of headline that would come in the trashy magazines in Spain.

Yeah. You know, OK, so as a bisexual woman, I find it funny because I honestly cannot imagine. So you said you're a cisgender heterosexual woman.

I genuinely, Isabel, could not imagine waking up in the morning and just from an innate sense of self knowing that half of the population is not for me. I have never felt that way. It feels so foreign to me.

I am attracted to individuals. I'm attracted to the person in front of me, which means I'm attracted to not most people, actually. I'm attracted to who I'm attracted to, right?

Just like you are. But when you wake up at any given morning, you're like, I'm not interested in this half. Like, yeah.

And that sounds so strange to me. I just never, like not even as a young person, I just never felt that way.

So this is, I think, one of the fundamental misunderstandings in the way we talk about and write about bisexuality is missing, like we're missing each other's lived experience.

I don't know what it would be like to wake up and just be like, yeah, I'm just only interested in men. That sounds absolutely bizarre and foreign to me.

And you don't know what it would be like to wake up and be like, yeah, the whole world's my oyster. I am attracted to all genders and that feels normal for me.

So when we talk about that greed or that, oh, you've run through or you've had all the meat and you just want fish, like, it's just funny to me because I'm like, no, I want the people I'm attracted to.

And some of those people have certain biological characteristics and some of them have other and it just, it just has nothing to do with their gender at all.

Maybe this is a place where just heterosexual cisgender folks just like, we may struggle to feel into it because you really do. You wake up and like, your options are just limited. So it's hard to stretch the imagination in this way.

I think, I've thought a lot about this because I think when Charlotte also says like, I'm very into labels, gay, straight, stick to your name.

I do think there is probably a big part of me that because I was raised Catholic in a very conservative country like Spain is, that label kind of like brings a lot of, oh, I fit in. I never, you know, went away from what I saw was normal.

So I'm okay. And I think there's a lot of that that happens.

And you and I had this conversation where at one point, being a preteen, I asked my philosophy teacher, if love is really what love is sold to be, which is falling in love with somebody's brain, emotions, et cetera, shouldn't we all be bisexual?

And my philosophy teacher was like, no, because pheromones and whatever, whatever, whatever. And I was like, oh, okay.

Which is, so we could, if a given teacher has a particular ideological perspective, right, they're going to be able to make some kind of argument that says, like, oh, oh, love works this way, or biology works that way.

But I think a place that we can all agree is everything is complicated. There is no, there is nothing in this world that is like, everybody does it this way. Nothing, nothing in nature.

There's nothing that is black or white.

Right.

We just, that's not how nature works. Not just humans. Like if we look at animals, like, we see homosexuality across all the different species.

We can find tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of evidence of this. So the idea that I like labels and you need to stick to your lane is also a little funny.

Like when I, when I heard that label, that word come out of Charlotte's mouth, I thought, honey, I love labels too. Love labels. Like I, I am a categorizer by nature, but my label is either bisexual or pansexual.

I am attracted to all genders. Therefore, for me to stay in my lane is to stay, yep, I'm attracted to all genders. That's, that's my lane.

And that means also, for instance, though, I'm also polyamorous and I choose not to date monogamous people. Some polyamorous people will date monogamous people. I think that's a much more interesting question.

Like, if, oh goodness, yeah, so if this boy she's dating had said, well, you know, I kind of, I, we're kind of in a, like, a polycule situation and he'd taken her place, spin the bottle and, and like, and they were all dating each other.

I think that's a way more interesting question. Can I date someone who loves multiple people? Rather than can I date someone who has kissed another guy?

Yeah.

But when this guy she's dating says that he's bisexual and she starts jumping to conclusions like that means he's going to want to date a boy and a girl at the same time.

That's not actually, like, that's not a foregone conclusion at all. Lots and lots and lots of bisexual people date just one person at a time.

30:22

Carrieʼs Jealousy

This is a very interesting segue because at this point, Carrie and Sean are at a club and they're kissing and then he looks away and Carrie's like, Oh, are you looking at that girl or that boy?

And then they sleep together and she keeps pushing, like, do I kiss better than a man? Which in this case, just him being bisexual, but allegedly monogamous with her, finds her mind out of control into being extremely jealous.

I don't think that Carrie would be a good monogamous person to try out being with a bisexual, polyamorous person.

I don't think she would be a good person to be with a polyamorous person at all, but she's also a cheater. Like, she has the capacity to cheat. So, like, she's also not a great person at monogamy.

Most people suck at both. It's okay.

So how?

Great at doing relationships, humans.

But how do you read the jealousy that keeps pushing through the episode as she starts getting more intimate with Sean?

Well, it's really, I actually think that's maybe the most interesting part about it is she gets obsessional about this idea of, do I kiss as well as a man? Well, honestly, okay, I've kissed a lot of people of a lot of genders.

In general, women kiss better. Like in my own sample set, women kiss better. Why is she worried about how he's kissing men?

Like, I'm just not worried about it. Now, she might be worried about how well a guy gives a blowjob. That is real.

I have seen men give each other blowjobs and, they are good at it. That is like, that is next level. So that's a different question.

I think it's interesting that her jealousy, right? And jealousy is, from a research standpoint, jealousy is the fear that a valued relationship will be interrupted by a third party. So she is experiencing jealousy, but she focuses it on men.

And this, I think, actually, could we like jump shows then to Elaine Bennis in Seinfeld? Because Elaine is dating somebody and she gets all caught up in this too. And then eventually he leaves her for a guy and she says, yup, I just couldn't compete.

You know, he just had, I just couldn't compete because the guys he's dating have access to the equipment. They know how to work the equipment better.

I think that's a really funny take on what the jealousy is manifesting as, because jealousy is about the fear of interruption.

Well, a woman is just as likely to interrupt your relationship as a man, but she gets overly focused on how a man might interrupt the relationship.

And that's because of her innate discomfort with the idea that she's now competing on a totally different playing field than she has before. She is a small, she is a petite, beautiful, articulate woman, right?

Like she knows how to compete with other women. She doesn't know how to compete with men. She's never contemplated it.

So all of a sudden she can't trade on the things she's always traded on. This isn't necessarily, Sean may be completely capable of being in a monogamous connection with her. We don't even know.

We never get to find that out really. I mean, they're not dating long enough to find out. But she's terrified.

And to my mind, it's because of her own insecurity that like, why isn't she jealous that he's turning his attention and might be looking at a woman? For god's sakes, Alanis Morissette is there. She's going to be worried about something.

That's what I would choose to be worried about, friends. So, you know, her insecurity is showing. And then, let's get right down to it.

She is showing her own homophobia. That's what's on display throughout this whole episode is homophobia.

She doesn't believe that he is not gay. Because she keeps asking him, like, Are you sure you're not gay? And she's completely fixated.

Yeah.

Yeah. This is a woman who is willing to put up. Right.

Yeah. First off. Yeah.

Like, okay. But this is also a woman who's willing to put up with Big treating her like shit for a decade. But she's terrified that this guy she's been dating for three weeks is gay.

And that's going to be the downfall of her life. Which and then super ironically, she also has gay men in her life. Why didn't she ask them more?

Because like we didn't really get the full perspective. Like if we were to like zoom that episode forward in 25 years. If he's gay, he'd be gay.

But what if he is actually bisexual? Then you have to actually trust that your relationship is built on the same foundations that all relationships are, which is to say, some people will betray you and some people won't.

Do you trust this person or not?

Exactly. Exactly. So just to wrap the episode up, Carrie and Sean are at this party and Sean is introducing Carrie around.

And there's a lot of like, oh, he was my ex, but then he married this other man. And like I was also with her, but she's now with another woman. And then blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I remember when we talked first about this episode, you told me like, it is so interesting to see this 20 year old talk about bisexuality and their relationships. Can you comment more on that?

Cause I just found it a bit messy up like, okay, I'm stepping into one of those friend groups where everybody has loved with each other.

We do have to put this in context. First off, these are 20 somethings into their early, maybe into their early 30 somethings, but they're definitely 20 somethings who have chosen to live in New York City in a very like artistic-y kind of community.

Yeah, it's messy. Yeah, like that's what they're supposed to be doing right now, right? Is it messy?

Yeah, because that's the part of life that they were exploring. That's not what I did in my 20s. In my 20s, I was married.

I got married at 20 years old. I was raising children. I did my messy stuff later.

But the fact that a friend group has so much cross-dating, that's not at all uncommon when we're talking about a community that actually has any kind of emotional regulation skills.

Because if I have emotional regulation skills, then I might break up with someone, and it might be okay to then see them happily with someone else.

The thing that I think is messy is when we see the girls like, oh, I could never be friends with my ex, or I could never have... Why? You can do that, but what's going on there?

What exactly is happening that means that you need to have that level of separation? Was the relationship so damaging that actually at the end of it, you're like, oh, fuck, get me out of here. I don't want to be anywhere around this person.

Do you just need a break from them? But if we're talking about dating in our friend groups, yeah, eventually I want to be able to share space with each other and I want it to be okay.

I have to agree. I did one episode solo where my whole thing was like, I don't think that you can be friends with an ex, but maybe I'm the problem.

It totally depends on how you're doing your relating, right?

Like I date a fair number of women and in the lesbian, like the larger lesbian community near me in my local geographic area, oh my gosh, like all of my girlfriends were still friends with co-parenting, like they're all hanging out with each other.

They're all still in each other's broader circles. That's just the like cultural norm in this area is that yeah, we share a community. We've got each other's backs and this is fine.

We don't, so we don't love each other in this way anymore, but that doesn't mean we can't still care about each other. But this mononormative culture is very much like, no, once you're my ex, done. I don't want you in my life.

I'm not sure that from a community standpoint, that makes sense. And if we go back to like intact cultures, that can't be how it worked, right?

Like we didn't, we couldn't ostracize each other just because we were no longer living a particular way with each other. So there is something I think very modern and isolationist about the idea that I can just cut people off.

And this thing, I don't have contact with all of my own exes either. But the idea that I can never, that worries me. Like, what if we can learn how to transition?

I actually consider our relationship a huge success if it can transition from one form to another form, which doesn't mean we don't need time. Might need time. We might even need some co-counseling.

We might like stuff can, we may need closure. But can I go from being romantic partners with someone to being friends? Can I go from being romantic partners to being co-parents with someone?

Because that happens all the time, right? I have kids with somebody and I divorce. I better figure out how to be in community with them or we've got a problem.

Yeah.

No, I think that's a much healthier way. I always think like where does the love go? Like everything that you build with someone, is it supposed to go nowhere?

But I've found it hard. But the last scene is hard of the episode is the famously in the bottle game where Alanis Morris said is supposed to kiss Carrie and Carrie, the sex columnist says like, whoops, I'm a girl, spin again.

And she's like, no, that's okay. And then they kiss and she was like, I did it because I didn't want to be an old fart. It was kind of different, tasted like chicken, but I did it.

And then she please say she's going for cigarette, which I find it very funny because you always get the figure of the father that went to get milk or cigarettes and never came back. Yeah, which in this case was Carrie.

What do you think about Carrie's reaction? And like that line was so wrong.

Yeah, it's I mean, it's so it's it's funny. It's it's funny. Mostly, I think anytime you kiss someone, right?

How many times have you kissed someone at the end of a first date and been like, Oh, there's not going to be a second date because it just there was no chemistry. It just didn't for whatever.

In fact, I rarely leave a first date even now without at least a brief kiss because there is something in that like in that physical that you're like, you just you just want the thing.

So not clicking with one person in a spin the bottle game does not tell me enough about whether I like kissing women. But beyond that, can we just speak to the larger frame of Carrie is this sex columnist.

She is the most uneducated and narrow minded and deeply, deeply and experimental sex columnist I have ever read in my life. She doesn't have kinky sex. She doesn't have queer sex.

She doesn't have, she doesn't know anything about sex. She doesn't know anything about STIs. She's a bad sex columnist.

We shouldn't take her advice. She doesn't know what she's talking about. She's not good at relationships and she's not good at sex.

And there's no evidence that she ever gets better even later, even in her 50s. There's no evidence she gets better. I'm so glad when she starts writing novels.

That is a much better job for Carrie Bradshaw. So much of a better job.

I'm glad we got something good out of the spin-off. That was her final finding.

Yeah, because the spin-off was, it was not awesome in all the ways. But I think that was really good.

But I agree that she is not good. She's not a good sex columnist. And I was going to say, maybe a love columnist, but no, she's not good at relationships either.

No, and she's not getting them, but she's not good at being good in them. Yes.

She's good at scoring a date, but here's the thing. So I am a certified sex educator. So I have a lot of training in sexuality, and I have a lot of friends in that world.

To be an amazing sex educator requires so much more than just dating. We don't just speak from our lived experience. We also educate ourselves broadly on all the diversity that exists in our sexuality.

And Carrie never does that. Not even to write a freaking column, and it's so sad. So no wonder this episode focuses, right?

So her episodes are always, every episode is about her sort of writing her column, right? So she's writing to us, and we're seeing her life play out in the background.

And the thing that stands out the most to me is like, maybe relax a little bit, ask some damn questions instead of saying all the time, and maybe try some stuff and find out whether it's for you without deciding whether it's good or bad for everyone.

Because I could never survive on the vanilla sex that Carrie has. I could never do it. I could barely survive on the vanilla sex Samantha has.

Even Samantha barely bridges into King, barely gets into King, right? So that wouldn't work for me. So it's funny that we think of Carrie as kind of a sex pot, but she's actually really old-fashioned, right to her core.

We see that show up again and again and again when she's just like, no, I don't think it should be like that. Why? Why?

Humans?

We like some fucked up shit.

We like to do what we like to do.

Yeah. And there's no denying it.

And she's willing to fit herself in a box. And I'm not, personally.

I love that. No, I agree. And I think Carrie is just like, her life could be summarized as like, she wants to be chosen.

Once she's chosen, she'll fit whatever that comes with into the box that she's created for that. But that's why she just wanted to marry Mr. Big.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, we could know this show would be so different if we ever got to see Carrie's parents. Because what I want to know is, how'd she wind up like that?

That's what I want. So I'm a Jungian psychologist. I want to know.

I want to know about her relationship with her parents. I want to know about how she wound up being. She is more Charlotte than Charlotte.

Like, she's actually more narrow. Like, we talk about Charlotte being this, like, narrowly divine. No.

Charlotte, like, once we actually watch Charlotte, like, bloom inside a safe relationship, she's much more expansive. She keeps her own sex life alive. She claims her space.

Like, she leans in. Whereas Carrie shrinks, makes herself smaller and smaller and smaller. I think that the show still, it is interesting.

I actually, I just rewatched the whole show, Soup to Nuts, like, two years ago, when my 21 year old daughter was watching it. And we were laughing over mostly how repressed Carrie was.

And yet, I remember 25 years ago thinking like, oh, I wish I had gotten to live that life. And now, at going on 50, I'm like, oh, sweetie, she's just not even trying to exercise her free will.

No, she's very much coloring inside the lines.

Yeah. And other people made those lines.

Yeah.

Charlotte, we see that like that sort of restriction. But then it seems like Charlotte starts to actually make her own lines. Like when she divorces Trey, we start to see her like make her own lines.

She still wants to color in them, but it's like she designed the box that she's getting into. And then Miranda, too, like we have like she is like cutting off parts of herself.

So then in the spinoff, we see her reclaiming her whole self because she had cut off so much of herself.

Very interesting.

It does make for a good show.

Yes. It makes for even better therapy.

46:55

Character Relationship Advice

But maybe this is a great segue to the last bit of my episodes where I asked you to give some advice to the girls. So, for Carrie, how would you try to guide maybe a client of yours that was dating for the first time somebody who is bisexual?

The first thing I would ask them to do is a little inquiry about what they think bisexuality is. I would ask them to tell me. We would just talk about it.

Tell me what bisexuality is. Tell me how bisexual people are. I would also ask them, depending on whether that person they were dating, you know, what the gender of that.

So if they're dating a guy and he comes out to her as bisexual, I would ask her, like, what do you think is going to happen? The exploration here would be about her imagination of what's possible.

And from there, I would dig in a whole bunch about really exploring, do you know this is true? Like, where are you getting this? Where is this story coming from, right?

Like the story lives in you. Like you said earlier, you have a philosophy professor whose words are like, they're stamped into you. And so you have to, you have to grapple with that old imprint over and over.

So I would be working with her to find out what she currently imagines bisexuality to mean. And to see whether she's actually an appropriate person to be dating a bisexual man, because she might not be, she might be harmful to him.

It's not Sean who hurts Carrie here. She's about to damage him. It's great that she walks away because she's going to damage him.

Yeah.

It does look like she would probably end up making him feel wrong about being the way that he is.

Yeah. It does not bode well for a long-term relationship together. And the other thing that we could potentially do is then explore a little bit about what she is attracted to.

What are these qualities that she's attracted to in him, so that maybe we could expand her imagination of what she's looking for, because something in him drew her.

Let's find out more about that, because we don't get to know him well enough, but I think it's possible that he has some of the very qualities that she desperately does want in her life.

But she's so afraid to be perceived as different and to have to have contact with anything that rubs her the wrong way. Yeah, there's a lot of growth possibility there.

Totally. For her, yes. Okay, Miranda and Steve keep fighting throughout the episode.

And I think it comes to a head when Steve is like, Miranda, I swear to God, you're the guy sometimes. Because she is very much like, I'm not sure that I want him to move in with me.

And she goes to this goddess class to try and be more in touch with the feminine side of her. And she's like, I can't, I wish that I could be a girly girl.

How would you maybe encourage a woman that feels like she's way too much into her masculine to make room for the masculine side of her partner in the relationship?

There's so much unpacking for her here because she goes to that class. And I think, what version of femininity is that? What the hell is that?

I don't, that is, it's so, again, so narrow.

When Steve says, it's like you're the guy, I think that is centered on the idea that all women would be looking for someone to be on the relationship escalator with them, to say that they love each other, to move in together, to get married, to have

children. Not all women want that. And not wanting that does not make you not feminine, right? What if you really enjoy your femininity and you like living alone?

These two things are not mutually exclusive. So we get, I think we get confusion here because Steve and Miranda have some real, they have some real tension points.

And I would want to explore those things like how he behaves in her house and does he ask her how they want to share space? That's him showing up in his feminine. That's him showing up also in a thoughtless pattern of this is just how guys get to be.

I just get to take up space where I want to, right? Like so both of them are behaving in thoughtless, unreflective ways. The two of them need to sit down.

How do we communicate with each other fast? That's what they need to do.

Now, it would also be really, really wise for Miranda to expand her definition of both masculine and feminine so that she's not trapping herself into the idea of I'm a high-powered lawyer and therefore I'm in my masculine.

Because that is just mad men level silly. But she may be not in touch with the aspects of her femininity that she wants to, which we see happen again later when she comes out as gay, as queer in the spinoff series.

Has she been repressing aspects of herself? Yes, but it's not her femininity, it's her queerness that she's been repressing. Miranda's got so much digging to do that goes so much deeper than, shouldn't girly girl to make space for this boy?

It's just so not a big enough question.

All right. I love that. Okay, what about Samantha, who in this episode famously describes herself as tri-sexual, will try everything once, but then has such zingers to say about bisexual men?

So Samantha is our classic, will punish men for their bisexuality or for their tri-sexuality, right?

Like, let's just stop that. Let's just stop it. It's ridiculous.

So one of the things I would say to her is, Samantha, you're doing that for the laughs. Who are you trying to get to laugh at you, babe? Like, where did your daddy hurt you?

Who are you trying to get to laugh at you? Because those zingers aren't actually in line with the rest of how Samantha's behaving. I would also ask her this.

I am also a tri-sexual. I would never say I would try something just once, though. The first time you do something is going to be the worst.

You're not good at it yet. I generally need to try things three or four times to find out whether I like them. But what I...

And when I interacted with her... I love that.

Okay, whenever I'm sleeping with somebody for the first time, my request from them is always, I absolutely will do a one-night stand, but you've got to tell me if we're doing a one-night stand, because this is going to be the worst sex we ever have.

Yeah.

That it should get better. If your sex is not an upward trajectory, you haven't learned how to do it yet. Find a sex educator immediately.

Do not pass go. Go find an educator.

Because if you are relying on just the chemistry and spontaneity of the first time to create your quote unquote peak moments of sex, oh my God, you have not even brushed the surface of what is possible for your orgasm. So you got a lot of learning.

Samantha has so much capacity, but she's frozen in this, like, I need to be in my independence, and therefore push things out so fast. And we see remediation for her when Smith comes into our life. And he requires her to slow down and expect care.

That is one of my favorite relationships.

It is the best one in the whole show.

It is hands down the best relationship. Even the way that they end. Absolutely, like, across the board, best.

Yeah, I agree.

Okay, and then finally, Charlotte, I had a question about the labels, but maybe, what do you think about Charlotte finally given in to Bird and dressing as a drag king, and when she takes the picture, like they kiss and then she never calls him back

Okay.

Charlotte comes so close, so close in this episode. We actually, I think this is the episode we see for the first time.

Exactly what I was saying earlier, that Charlotte is actually going to be the one who can stretch her psyche into a more mature version of herself, and we see shreds of it right there.

Now, she still has to go through a lot of learning, but in that moment, when we see Charlotte in drag, it's not that she's got the mustache. It's not that her hair is done a certain way. It's the way she sinks into her body.

She puts her energy down into her pelvis in a different way. She puts her shoulders back. She leans back into Baird.

She relaxes into her inner masculine. I want her to be able to keep that.

Yeah.

She should have dated Baird, at least for a period of time, and relax from the idea that she needed to then become something. No, she's exploring, and it clearly lit something up in her. There was so much more for her to find.

So if I were working with her, I would encourage her to enjoy it. And obviously, Charlotte is, she is goal-oriented, right? She is metric-driven.

She wants a husband, she wants children, she wants the brownstone, she wants the things. Okay, cool. But do you have to get them right this second?

Or could you enjoy exploring who you are? Could you enjoy exploring even your gender? And I think if she had leaned in and done that, we would have seen Charlotte actually blossom into who she wanted to be sooner.

Exploring that more fully would have also made her the grown-up in the room. So frequently, they position Charlotte in amongst the four of them as the childish one.

When she's not being, when she may have a childish first reaction, but then her, the way she moves is often with a little bit more responsibility. And I did not see this on my first watching of the show when I was a kid, too. I didn't see this.

It's now that I look back and I'm like, oh, she had the capacity to explore more fully, but she was so fixated on getting to the altar that she missed some of her own opportunities.

I think she talks about that. When they get architectural digest or whatever it is to come to their home, and she was like, nobody cares because she grew up wanting to be that woman with the pearls and the husband, but nobody cares what goes on.

And for that, she sacrificed all the exploration when she married Trey.

Right. And she winds up with this thinness to her life. That, I mean, thank God her relationship with Trey ends, right?

Like thank God it ends because it would have been thin. It would have been just this facade, this facade over her.

Yeah.

And instead, she winds up cracking open and finding out that life is going to be much more about naked ass on the white couch than it ever is about the pearls.

Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Joli.

That was the episode. I'd love for you to share maybe where people can find you. And I've been listening to Playing With Fire, your podcast.

And I also wanted to prompt you to maybe if there's somebody out there that is thinking about opening the relationship, what do you think are the most important things to keep in mind?

58:44

Conscious Relationships

So first off, if you've heard the term non-monogamy or polyamory and you're like, that freaks me out, that's okay.

Nobody's asking you to, I'm not trying to convert anyone. It's really important to me that I say that first, because sometimes people think when I say I'm an advocate for this, like that I am advocating everyone should. Absolutely not.

My goal is for every person to have a more conscious relationship. And to do that, we have to explore what is possible, even if that just means knowing what's out there.

Now, some of you, though, we're listening and we're like, wait, somebody who takes polyamory seriously and who also is kind of like me, like we're in our middle years and we're doing life in a certain way?

Yeah, you might like non-monogamy more than you think you would. If that's you, I would start off just taking my 10 question quiz.

This quiz was designed out of my doctoral research to help you figure out where you are on the scale from like, oh, hell no, I am not ready to explore opening all the way to like, yeah, I could and let's do this thoughtfully. So it's a quick quiz.

The reason I recommend that is most of us could use an education on what alternatives we have even if monogamy winds up being the right one for us, right? Like monogamy is great, but I want you to do it consciously.

And also, people usually ask me, I mean, you asked me about jealousy. I research jealousy for a reason. Jealousy is a, it is a bear.

Jealousy is hard to deal with. So if you're looking for resources around jealousy, you can grab all of my resources around that if you go to jealousyroadmap.com.

I'll link that all in the show notes. I just have one question because like I have two of my very good friends who one was in an open marriage and another one has been trying to advocate for her own open relationship.

I think sometimes people do confuse an open relationship or open partnership with the allowance for your partner to lack responsibility, like lack of responsibility for somebody else's feelings. And there's less accountability in polyamory.

That's a big thing that I've seen in my friends that have experienced with this.

Yeah. So here's what I would recommend. Okay.

Let's imagine you're in a current partnership and right now you're taking stock and saying one or both of us wants something more. We don't even know exactly what polyamory or non-monogamy or open relating might be, but we know we want more.

If you immediately jump from there to dating, you are not going to know what you're doing because dating polyamorously is not like dating from a single position, right? We have to learn some skills.

But also in order to do ethical non-monogamy, right? That's the other big term we hear people toss around. I need to be able to understand what's required in a really great relationship.

So great open relating is just great relating. It is understanding and attuning to my partner's feeling. It is understanding how to make agreements.

It's understanding how to regulate my nervous system when I'm feeling big things like jealousy. It is also exploring and experimenting at a pace that's right for the people in this relationship.

And that pace is probably going to feel good to one person and bad to the other, right? So there's so much to do. I work with people on this transition.

Like that's my day to day work. Every day, what I do is help people make this transition. And the big work is always on deepening your relationship skills.

Because if you are currently unhappy in your relationship, or you have a sticky fight in your relationship, or you have an area of your relationship that doesn't quite work right, and that's why you want to open up, great.

Awesome, I love that for you. And we have to figure out how you're going to address that area.

Yeah.

And do the opening, because that area isn't going away. If you're unhappy here, you will be unhappy there.

Yeah.

So it's not that we have to come to... For instance, if you're sexually unsatisfied in your relationship, it may be that what we need to deal with is, oh, the two of you are not sexually compatible. Either you weren't ever or you aren't anymore.

That might be true. So we may need to actually de-escalate your sexual relationship. And yes, you may get sexual needs met in other places.

However, we still have to deal with the fact that you made this relationship originally based around some sexual expectations and understandings. We gotta unpack that baggage. I never ever work with people for less than a year, ever.

It takes three to five years to make the transition from a mono-paradigm to a paradigm beyond that. It takes time and patience.

So if you're doing this and it's going poorly right now, for God's sakes, let yourself reach out for help, whether that's from me or from one of my colleagues, not just therapy, but education on how you do this better, because you have only had

monogamous examples. And unfortunately, monogamous therapy doesn't help non-monogamous relationships. I, perversely though, non-monogamous education and therapy does help monogamous relationships. It's just the way of it.

This has been so informative, Joli.

Thank you so much. I thought I was pretty woke and knew many things, but this has been so informative. Thank you so much.

There's always more, right?

Isabel, thanks for entertaining. And thanks for diving right in on the gender and masculinity, femininity questions. Because these are things I think we all, we need to be in continual, ongoing conversation about this.

Between all of the different viewpoints.

It's all about how if I'm in my masculine, then I'm not feminine. So yes. Thank you for your two cents on that.

There's so much more out there.

Joli, thank you so much.

I'll link everything in the show notes for people that want to reach out. And we hope to see you again soon.

Thank you.

Thank you for tuning in to another episode of And Just Like That We Found Therapy. If you loved it, follow the podcast, leave a five star review and send this episode to someone who needs it.

And don't forget our new segment this season, He's Not Your Mr. Big. Send me your love dilemmas over on Instagram at wefoundtherapypod and I'll answer them with one of our in-house experts.

See you at our next therapy session. I love y'all.

Bye.