A 2-Month live online growth and education experience
Guided by: Sexual Integrity Coach Mischa Byruck, with assistance from Sex and Relationship Coach River Black and featuring guest instructors Dr. Hazel-Grace Yates and William Winters.
In partnership with 🐵 Bonobo Network, the Bay Area’s premiere sex-positive community organization
🍆 A leader looking to inspire your community with your integrity?
🤠 A kink veteran and still experiencing disconnects and accidents?
💝 A human being excited about more, easier, and better sex?
We live in a consent-broken society. Even in the most advanced spaces, consent can often consist of increasingly complicated behavioral norms that still feel like obstacles instead of waypoints, and which don't keep us safe or fulfilled.
Beyond Consent is designed specifically for people ALREADY familiar with the concept and practice of consent. It provides an actionable, values-aligned, and community-based approach to intimacy that explicitly reassigns our priorities from conquest to connection.
You will learn a new language for navigating sexual encounters that transcends the subconscious agenda of getting to yes, and goes beyond even affirmative consent as the barometer of success. To do this you will learn to center your community in your pursuit of pleasure, separate desire from agenda, attune organically, and demonstrate curiosity, not ambition.
You will walk away knowing how to escalate and de-escalate relationships and sexual encounters in line with your values, how to welcome your own internal “no” and proactively listen for the no’s of others, how to quickly diffuse harm and rebuild trust following an accident or misstep, and other concrete ways to foster safety and joy in the people around you.
You will emerge a better communicator AND a better person: more trauma-informed, more pleasure-focused, and more self-aware, and someone who can relish sex while ensuring you are respecting yourself and those you are with.
Beyond Consent is an in-depth experience that includes in-class learning, homework, and ongoing coaching support.
Each session will include live lectures with slides, light guided-embodiment exercises, dyad shares, role-play scenarios, small group discussions, as well as time for questions.
There will be ongoing invitations to engage between sessions to support you to integrate the learnings in the real world!
This experience will also Be HIGHLY interactive. Expect to bond and connect with your fellow students in a lighthearted and affirming container as you co-create your vision for a sex-positive future.
Tuesday evenings 6:30 - 8:30PM Pacific
October 3 - November 21, 2023
Mischa Byruck (He/him) is a sexual integrity coach and teaches and guides people of all genders. He is the founder of Evolve.Men, where he supports men to prevent and repair sexual harm through accountability and integrity practice. Previously, he founded forLove, a virtual erotic events company, ran partnerships for DataKind and Code for America, worked in international development, and started a large-scale disaster relief organization. He is an ICF- certified coach, with training from Mankind Project, Men Can Stop Rape, and the Remember Institute. His mentors and advisors include world-renowned Men’s Coach and Author Destin Gerek and Angel Adeyoha, Executive Director of Folsom Street Fair. He has a BA from Columbia and an MPA from NYU.
River Black (she/they) is a sex and relationship coach trained in the Somatica method. In addition to her client work she teaches workshops on boundaries, consent, and polyamory. A sex worker since 2014, she founded the nation's first Sex Worker Student Union while in grad school and continues to draw inspiration from sex work in her performance art practice.
Bonobo Network is the largest sex-positive community organization in San Francisco. We are the opposite of a swinger’s club: politically progressive, queer-focused, body-positive, and woman and minority-run. Bonobos constantly strive to become more informed, liberated, consensual, communicative, compassionate, and inclusive so that we can all get the pleasure, connection, and understanding we deserve. We unite pleasure seekers to live more informed, liberated, & consensual lives to find new ways of relating in kind, inclusive, & fun ways.
1: Beyond Consent: Intimacy with Integrity
First, you’ll throw out the old rulebook of norms, rules, and expectations, and embrace sex through the lens of your own individual values and standards. You’ll learn a general approach to intimacy that challenges both mainstream and even standard “sex-positive” teaching by centering harm reduction and liberation from societal scripts.
2: Your Vision of Intimate Abundance
Next you’ll set yourself a vision for what true abundance looks like for you, around touch, sex, love, friendship and intimacy. You’ll explore what’s getting in the way, and connect your ability to show up in integrity with the realization of your vision.
3: The Gold Standard Apology
Before the sexy stuff, you’ll learn to minimize your own harm. Using a framework for repair that centers your integrity, you’ll learn to recognize “landmine” scenarios and practice double-down inquiries, one-sided vulnerability, and proactive social obligation release. You’ll also learn how to recognize and avoid the most common pitfalls of harmful apologies, like: entitlement, petulant vulnerability, insincerity, and incoherence.
4: Rolling out the Red Carpet for No
“Rolling out the red carpet for No” means making it as pleasurable to say no to you as it is to say yes! In a culture where we’re instructed, incentivized, and conditioned to say yes regardless of desire, this is possibly the most impactful and appreciated skill that you can add to your erotic toolkit. You’ll learn the concept, why it’s GREAT for your sex life, and concrete skills for demonstrating safety, far in advance of an intimate encounter.
5: Advanced Repair and Rejection practice
Let's get deeper and how to say and hear no, even when we're not sure. We'll also explore how to handle community feedback and engage in values-aligned reputation management. How do you separate your desire for someone from an agenda to make something happen? How do you demonstrate attunement far after an encounter is finished? Here you’ll learn how to demonstrate Green Flags, apply the Platinum Rule, and recognize and respond to trauma.
6: Embodied Attunement with Dr. Hazel-Grace Yates
Now that you're covered for repair, you can take bigger sexual risks! Learn new ways to approach the dance of escalation: listening to your own body to sense what’s present, and then naming your sensations and desires with curiosity, not ambition.
7: Partyhost Vampire Energy: Power, privilege, and sex
From social “rank” to beauty to informal authority, knowing how to notice, name, and navigate power well is the key to ensuring that every sexual encounter is joyous and generative. Plus, intentional power exchange can be super hot! You’ll learn how to recognize and name the power dynamics at play in your own life, and how to catch yourself before they inadvertently come into your sex life. You’ll also learn how power and social rank impacts others’ perceptions, and therefore, your reputation.
8: Integration: Love in Community with William Winters