Sarah Mirk decided to write her book “Sex From Scratch” because, in her words, the majority of what she found in the dating section of her local bookstore “sucked.”
Mirk set out to write a book that, rather than offering a series of rules to follow, offers insight and real experiences from people navigating different types of relationships.
“Sex From Scratch: Making Your Own Relationship Rules” focuses on modern relationship advice that explores non-traditional choices from deciding against marriage and kids to non-monogamy. At 28, Mirk has used her journalism career at both the Portland Mercury and The Stranger in Seattle to explore gender, politics and pop culture. She is currently the online editor for Bitch Media. She has faked pregnancy to get the inside scoop on Oregon pregnancy resource centers, shared Oregon’s lesser known history through a comic series and worked with female Guantanamo veterans, writing a comic book that shares their experiences.
Sarah Hansell: Explain the title of your book, “Sex From Scratch.” What does it speak to?
Sarah Mirk: It’s basically a DIY approach to dating. People build chicken coops from scratch, and you make food from scratch, and it speaks to people deciding what they want their relationships to look like without leaning heavily on tradition or on what their parents did. So they’re sort of figuring out for themselves what they want their lives to look like, and figuring out for themselves what feels healthy and happy for them, meaning they’re making up their relationships from scratch.
S.H.: Do you think the way you title the book works well with Portland especially, with the whole DIY culture here?
S.M.: I think that people in Portland really get it immediately. I think that it especially resonates with Portlanders, because we’re on the whole a more liberal and less religious bunch. And a lot of people here are really invested in making their own relationships.
It’s not just a Portland thing. I interviewed about 100 people for the book, all over the country, and it’s not like Portland is the only place where people are being progressive. You see it in nationwide trends in declining marriage rate, and people getting married later and people having fewer kids. I see all of those as examples of people deciding for themselves what they want their lives to look like.
S.H.: So, non-monogamy is one of the big non-traditional relationship choices you talk about in the book. What made you realized monogamy wasn’t for you?
S.M.: Well, I’m still debating that question, I guess. It’s kind of like, I wrote this book from a really sincere place in that here’s what I’m thinking right now. But who knows what I’ll be thinking 10 years in the future? And the idea is not to conform to one cookie-cutter type of relationship — that this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, but to develop the skills and personal resources to figure out what you want as you change and grow.
I think non-monogamy and open relationships are a useful framework for thinking about what you want. So, the whole thing about open relationships is, the first thing you think about is, orgies, sex all the time! But I see it more as the approach I want to take to relationships, now and in the future, thinking honestly about desire and attraction and jealousy, and saying why we feel these things, like what’s going on there, basically. Rather than in a traditional monogamous relationship, it’s like you can never speak of it again. The whole topic of potentially being attracted to someone else is verboten. If you do talk about, that’s grounds for anger. And I want to push that instead like, I know that I’m somebody who’s naturally attracted to lots of people, and I love other humans.
S.H.: On a more practical level, how do you navigate new relationships? What are the guidelines that you set up with new partners to avoid problems?
S.M.: That’s the thing about my book —there’s not like a secret magic. It’s pretty obvious stuff, that I just have to keep reminding myself, because although it’s obvious stuff, I don’t do it very well. I think a lot of people don’t do it very well. So the one thing I try to do when I’m navigating a new relationship is be really straightforward about how I feel. I just try to be as honest as possible, and not try to be manipulative in any way.
S.H.: You talk about one of the biggest fears of monogamy for you was only having sex with one person for the rest of your life, at least when you first came to the idea. Do you think non-monogamy is humans’ natural inclination?
S.M.: Yeah, I think so probably. You know, I think people are wired differently from one another. I’ve been surprised to find that some people just naturally really want to be in a monogamous relationship and that’s what they’re interested in. But I think one thing that confounds it is that we sort of lump together dating and attraction and sex and it’s like those things are really linked to each other.
And so, even the people I’ve dated who are super monogamous in terms of only wanting to date one person will still find multiple people attractive and can still entertain the idea of, oh, I could sleep with multiple people in my lifetime. So, I think humans are probably naturally inclined toward non-monogamy in terms of sex. Whether we’re geared towards non-monogamy in terms of relationships is, I think, really difficult to prove or suss out because we have such a history of our specific culture here gearing us toward monogamy as being the only option.
S.H.: In writing this book, you interviewed a lot of people across the country, some more high-profile, some not. What was the best story you heard in your interviews?
S.M.: Well, I was sort of most taken aback by interviewing Betty Dodson, the older woman who lives in New York, who was the raunchiest interview probably. I guess I sort of thought of her as this old-school icon, whereas in real life she was both very straightforward and not — she didn’t have a practiced story to tell, she was just very off the cuff and very honest, and really focused on me and put me on the spot. She started asking me all these questions about my life. I liked her stories about, when she was young and moved to New York and sort of looked at her relationships, and she was part of the sexual revolution in the late '60s early '70s. She told this really vivid story about being at some 1960s swingin’ sex party and women fixing their hair during sex, and that was just such a clear visual that got at so much stuff that she was talking about. Which is like, even in that context, people not being focused on what women are getting out of it.
S.H.: Do you think that things have come a long way since the sexual revolution that she’s talking about, in terms of a focus on women’s pleasure?
S.M.: In every aspect of every day, there’s still stereotypes around female sexuality that aren’t true and male sexuality that aren’t true and don’t reflect people’s actual experiences, and that’s what I’m trying to do with this book — to say here are some actual people talking honestly about their lives and their sexuality. And hopefully that can counter some of the very pervasive ideas that are out there, that are top-selling dating books.
I think we’ve come a long way, but if you look at the top 50 dating books on Amazon, four of them are written by pickup artists, like, here’s how you get a lady to like you by playing this very traditional masculine role.
And numerous others are titles like, ignore the guy, get the guy, that are also based on really traditional gender roles and the idea that men want sex and women don’t. Those are still best-selling books, and that blows my mind. Looking at my friends and the people I know and people in my generation, it’s like, who’s still selling this and who’s still buying it? So many people I know are not doing that at all with their lives. And there’s not a lot of media that reflects those very different and real experiences.
S.H.: What do you think is the most important piece of journalism that you’ve ever written?
S.M.: Hopefully this book, I guess. I would say this book for sure. Runner up would be this comic I did about female veterans who served in Guantanamo. What was important about it to me is the person who’s in the comic, who it’s about. It’s a nonfiction comic. This woman came to me and said, “I served in Guantanamo and I have no idea how to deal with this experience. A lot of shit happened to me and I don’t know what to do.” And I said, “Ok, let’s try and make an art project out of it.” And over the course of a year, we wound up making it into a comic where I interviewed her about her experience and made it into a story and she and I together interviewed somebody about their story and we made that into a piece.
And I was nervous all along that she would not be down for going through with it…but instead at the end, it definitely changed her life. At the end she was able to have a story she told. Rather than just a bunch of shit that happened to her, she had a story. And then she wound up organizing a panel about Guantanamo here in Portland. She is so nervous to speak in front of people and could not have said anything about it before and she ended up organizing a panel on her own about this stuff. And she went to New York to present at an art conference about it. That’s the time when my skills were most clearly able to help somebody else get through a really hard spot and make something they wouldn’t have been able to make otherwise…where I’ve been like, wow, because I was up for doing this and I have the skills that I do, this person was able to really come to a place of more peace in her life and deal with some horrible stuff that she went through. And that is basically the goal, I think. So that one actually worked, and that’s rare.