Rebel Love

INTRODUCTION

Everything you’ve been taught about sex and dating is wrong. All those dating rules from your therapist; all your friends’ well-meaning suggestions about when to text, call, or sleep with a new partner; and most of the dating books on shelves today are wrong. While most dating books are well intentioned and try to be helpful, they are actually full of advice that both counsels you away from being your true, authentic self and reinforces sexist gender values.

I want to help fix this. For more than fifteen years, I’ve earned my clients’ trust as a certified sex therapist with a strong personal connection to left-of-center, misunderstood, and marginalized communities. These are among the hundreds of thousands of people who follow me and listen to me on The Amber Rose Show with Dr. Chris (formerly Loveline), the popular podcast I cohost with Amber Rose.

Rebel Love is a different kind of sex and dating book. It focuses on how to be genuine and self-accepting, not how to be respectable, classy, or a “lady.” Healthy relationships ignore gender roles (and gender altogether) and focus instead on desire and compassion; they’re about expression and freedom, not regulation and control.

What needs to be addressed is not how to catch a man or woman or how to be “better” in bed, but rather how to build authenticity from the inside out, gain appreciation for body and sex positivity, eliminate the harmful practice of slut-shaming both in your own life and in wider society, and bring an end to rape culture.

Most dating advice is outdated and oppressive. I want this to be a book for the rest of us: the smart, informed, open-minded masses who sense that traditional sex and dating norms are repressing us, but want to go beyond simply acknowledging this and actually do something to change it. Together, let’s turn all the old-fashioned sex and dating rules that are harming our relationships and our culture on their heads.

I want to show you how to make your sex life hotter and your relationships healthier (and no, those two goals aren’t mutually exclusive), no matter where you fall on the gender or sexual identity scale. To help combat the toxic messaging we’ve been steeped in all our lives, I’m presenting a whole new set of touchstones, some of which may be controversial or unfamiliar to you. Let’s take a look.

People are diverse and it’s time to embrace that.

This book is for everyone: all genders, races, ages, backgrounds, sexualities, and body types. (People who body-shame don’t want a partner; they want a fantasy. If you complain about the size of your partner’s penis, go buy a dildo—you aren’t ready for a real relationship.) I’m in support of redefining gender, embracing all kinds of sex, killing stereotypes, and empowering people to be who they are, both in and out of the bedroom.

There are no more dating rules or sex rules, period.

This means no ego-based lists of dream-partner requirements, no more “should I or shouldn’t I?” texting games, no more setting limits on who you’ll date or have sex with. I advocate for doing what feels right, even if that’s texting her five minutes after you’ve met, having sex with him on the first date, or trying any consensual type of kink, fantasy, or nontraditional relationship that turns you on.

Self-acceptance is everything.

This means learning to radically accept not just your body but your mind and your sexual desires. It’s not about being classy, appropriate, on-trend, IG popular, or “respectable.” I don’t believe in changing who you are; this book is about choosing not to cooperate with ageism, thinspiration, slut-shaming, body-shaming, and so on.

Anonymous sex can be a relationship in and of itself.

One-night stands can be just as valuable, intimate, and transformative as years-long relationships. I differ from most conventional therapists out there in that I encourage people to have lots of sex with lots of people. Why? Because it helps you connect with others and yourself.

Self-help is selfish.

As a culture, we’re overly focused on individualism and self, often forgetting that we grow most within relationships. Plus, we are always in relationships (even when we’re alone, we are still emotionally and psychologically connected to people). I encourage people to focus on relational help, not self-help, and relational esteem, not self-esteem—think we, not me.

Your sexuality is fluid.

How you identify now isn’t necessarily how you will identify for the rest of your life. Though sexual fluidity has been getting more public recognition in the past few years, there are other sexual identities still commonly neglected; for example, asexuals and solosexuals (asexual = someone with no sexual drive; solosexual = someone who gets off alone but has no interest in partnered sex acts). No matter how you identify, your sexuality isn’t an unimportant afterthought, and I’ll address the entire spectrum in this book.

At heart, this book is an “anti-dating book” dating book. It scraps all the worn-out ideas of men being from Mars and women being from Venus, not to mention the backwards concept of “acting like a lady, thinking like a man.” It scoffs in the face of pretty much every well-regarded relationship expert on TV or otherwise. (As we all know, the old guard’s way of relationshipping hasn’t worked out so well: we’ve got a 60 percent plus rate of cheating and divorce, and 45 percent of today’s population is single—the highest rate ever.)

In today’s hyperconnected online world, we need face-to-face interactions with people—which includes dating and sex. Thanks to the pressures of social media and the Internet, people are lonelier than ever before. This isolation is making us sick; in fact, research has found that it’s a bigger health hazard than smoking and can even contribute to early death. For these reasons, we should all be reaching out for more connection, love, and physical touch, not less. In my world, nobody’s faulted for seeking out more love or sex.

The biggest question all my patients struggle with is “Am I normal?” People come to me miserable and searching, but desperate to feel okay as they are. And why wouldn’t they struggle? We live in a world that feeds on social comparison. Entire industries are built on knocking down our self-confidence, especially women’s. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and the radical transformations I’ve helped facilitate in my work are similar to the ones I want for you as a reader. Every single one of those transformations occurred because my clients finally reached an understanding that they’re okay as they are. They don’t need to change. They don’t need to diet. They don’t need to invest in new clothes, hair, personalities, or anything else. They can move through the world, date, and fall in love just as they are right this second.

The only path to intimacy is authenticity and vulnerability: being open and honest about every part of yourself. This is why I’ll never tell you to lie, scheme, fake disinterest, or play games to “get” the person you want. That’s not love—it’s manipulation.

One of the biggest myths I counter in this book is the idea that sex, dating, and relationships are trivial and aren’t things that will change your life. Dating and sex are among our most significant areas for growth and self-reflection. They’re a tool we can use to help liberate ourselves, both from our own negative self-perceptions and from the systems that hold us hostage psychologically and sexually. That’s something I learned firsthand when I shifted gears from standard (and problematic) psychology and became a certified sex therapist.

I was educated in a more traditional, psychological framework, one that was, like most of our culture, incredibly sex-negative. My early clinical work was focused on sex addiction, which I now know is one of the most problematic, pathologizing fields. My teachers and peers believed that any kind of sex outside a relationship was unhealthy and that there was only one right way to have sex or be in a relationship. Anything beyond vanilla, monogamous, husband-and-wife, penetrative sex was considered wrong or unhealthy. They also believed that using porn and masturbating “too much” or at all were signs of sex addiction.

I’d always been an activist, but I still inadvertently transmitted some of that negative messaging to my clients. When I began educating myself in a new model centered on feminism, queer politics, and social justice, my entire personal and professional mission shifted. My clinical work finally felt authentic, meaningful, and like… me. With this, my clients’ lives changed, too.

Since that pivot in my career, I’ve had years of clinical experiences that prove that sex and dating are both meaningful and profound, with the potential to trigger major internal transformations.

We are here to break the rules, especially when the current trends are unhealthy and keep most of us feeling disconnected and alone. There is so much power in our sexuality, and when you move your sex life beyond the system and its rules, you become even more powerful. How you fuck, sext, and manage your sexuality is an indication of how empowered and liberated you are; it’s also an opportunity to change the world.

This book is not another sexist piece of gender-training propaganda. Instead, it calls out the dangerously flawed concept that men and women are “opposites” who require different sexual or relational skills. This erroneous idea of opposites actually becomes its own problem, setting people up for their current dating- and sex-related obstacles. (Stop reading those other dating books!)

We have to unlearn a lot. We have to unlearn the idea that being different or authentic is not cool, beautiful, or healthy. And in order to do that, we need real talk.

If you’re confused about where you fall on the gender or sexuality scale, this book is for you. If you haven’t had a partner in fifteen years, this book is for you. If you’re in an open marriage and looking for new insight on how to deepen your primary connection, this book is for you. You may be grappling with the realities of dating a handful of people at once, or wondering whether you’re “not normal” for only getting off on anal, or struggling to find your place on a small suburban campus that doesn’t quite grasp the definition of identifiers like gender-fluid, pansexual, or nonbinary. This book is for people who insist on pushing themselves when it comes to how they view and experience love and sex.

This book will also challenge what so many of us have unknowingly held to be true when it comes to sex and relationships: that porn is bad, that sex addiction is real, and that heterosexuality and marriage are the automatic gold standard for a happy life. It will force you to unlearn what you’ve been taught all your life. It will show you how redefining your relationships can help you redefine who you are and who you want to be. It might even make you cry—not from shame, but from relief. Like so many of my clients, you will feel freer, happier, and more confident in yourself, just the way you are right now.