Ashley Mariani:

My name is Ashley Mariani, and I am a clinical social worker that specializes in perinatal couples and birthrights, so all of this stuff, intimacy related, including birth trauma. And I am super excited to talk with you. Where can I start?

Kyleigh Banks:

So the conversation I would love to have today is around sexuality and boundaries and specifically what does it have to do with birthwork? Because something that comes up in my community or came up in my last round of the Birthworker Academy where I train doulas, is that there were people messaging a lot of these doulas and at the same time and playing this whole role of my wife is in labor, it's last minute, can I hire you? Can I have a conversation with you? Or even pretending to be the pregnant woman of I'm in labor, I'm at the hospital, I need help. And multiple doulas in my program had this happen to them. And I feel like you would be the perfect person to have a conversation with about what we can do as doulas to take care of our own mental health and set boundaries for ourselves.

Ashley Mariani:

I love that. At one point, I did have a course on boundaries but it was rooted in boundaries with your mother-in-law. So I love that we're getting another perspective. Boundaries are everywhere in our life and it's so important. Yeah. So our family nanny took your doula certification program, and I loved hearing all of these amazing topics that were being brought up in the discussions. One of the topics that she had brought to me was what you were talking about, this idea of pregnancy fetishism.

Why is this in my wheelhouse is probably the first question that most people have. So I have an undergraduate degree in sexuality, marriage and the family. I did a pretty cool project in my undergrad on BDSM and kink, which is so wild to think that I did that, but I did, and I had members of the BDSM and kink community come in and do a presentation for my class. And in my research in all of this and diving into the community to obtain proper information about the community itself, I came across a lot of topics around fetishism, and pregnancy fetishism was huge. It was really, really big. There's a particular website where a lot of kink and BDSM, kink mostly, people go to exchange services without pay, just engage in the world itself.

And so on this website, there was a lot of demand for pregnant women in general. I did see a lot of threads that involved more of a voyeurism, a voyeuristic take on the pregnancy piece where it was like, "Describe to me what it's like going into labor. Get into detail. Talk about the bloody show. Talk about your water is breaking. Talk about the pain." I find it so interesting because the space of having orgasm and the space of giving birth are so very similar. You enter this trance-like state when you're orgasming and you enter a trance-like state when you're also giving birth.

And so I don't think that this is a conscious piece to the puzzle for the voyeurs or the people involved in the kink community at all, but the topic that was coming up from what I understand within the course that you're running, the academy, was how do doulas deal with this? What do we do? Do we take this seriously? Do we ask the person? Do we call them out? Do we ask for some proof that they're in labor? And as a new birth worker and especially one that hasn't experienced this before, I'm sure it takes you back. You don't know how to interact with this information.

Kyleigh Banks:

Yeah, there's the rollercoaster of emotions because at first, it's like, did I just get my first client?

Ashley Mariani:

Yes.

Kyleigh Banks:

And it can feel really icky really fast.

Ashley Mariani:

Because you realize that there's a violation piece to it. You get excited and you start to feed into the narrative that they're creating for you, and then you get really excited that this could be a client, so you're on this high or on this cloud.

Kyleigh Banks:

Exactly.

Ashley Mariani:

And then suddenly, you're taken advantage of, and suddenly it's like, bam, this was just somebody that was trying to get their rocks off and preying on you and it feels like psychological violation.

Kyleigh Banks:

Yeah, absolutely. And to be honest, this has actually never happened to me that I can remember. I find that interesting because I do have a very large platform, and so I am coming from this from a teacher perspective. My students have been going through this, but I haven't myself. So I'm so excited to talk to you about what do we do about it? How do we respond?

Ashley Mariani:

Yeah. There's a word for this. I call it pregnancy fetishism, which it's also called, but there's a clinical term, and I'm not going to attempt to pronounce it because it's a philia or a phoria, but it's spelled M-A-I-E-S-I-O-philia or M-A-I-E-U-S-O-phoria. It's really difficult because already as a new entrepreneur or already as a new birthworker, you're diving into this work because you're passionate about it. But I'm sure you've schooled these students on you deserve to be paid for your work, and you should not be doing anything for free if you don't want to be doing it for free. Don't feel ashamed to say to somebody, "This is how much I'm worth."

I think that's the first piece in all this, is that if somebody is reaching out to you via email or social media, asking for assistance, are you going to just jump right into this or do you have boundaries around how much information you're offering clients before they agree to a fee schedule or sign off on a waiver or a policy?

So the buffer piece here is that if you take the proper steps that you should be taking anyways, and even if you're not asking clients to pay a fee, there's still liability paperwork involved in all of this. Clients need to know their rights. Clients need to know their expectations. So once you engage in that process of like, "Hey, here are my forms. Here are my waivers. I need you to read this over. Let's have a quick call so we can have a face-to-face." And if you are charging someone then saying, "This is my fee schedule. Did you want me to break it down? I require a deposit of this amount, blah, blah, blah." That's going to scare off anybody who's trying to take advantage of you. It's going to be like, "Oh, no, I can go on only fans and get this for way cheaper without the commitment."

Kyleigh Banks:

Yeah, I absolutely love that you brought that in. I did an entire episode about onboarding a client. And if you have those systems in place, that is like you setting a boundary. You have to go through those systems. There's no other way to onboard a client. You have to fill out this form and we have to get on a call and then there's the intake form, and those are the steps. And so I love that. Putting those systems in place to save you from ever even having to think twice about what to do in this situation.

Ashley Mariani:

And it doesn't have to be somebody that is trying to take advantage of you and use the information and wisdom and knowledge that you have to get the rocks off. It doesn't have to be that situation. It can be any situation. Even as a therapist, there are many times, whether it's myself or my colleagues where people have messaged on social media and said things like, "I'm in a really bad place. I'm going to end my life. I need you. I need you to walk me through this. If you don't help me, I'm going to end my life." And especially as a new therapist, you're like, "I need to help this person. I can't let this person end their life. I need to do something. They've reached out to me. What about legal wise? Am I not helping them? Do I have an obligation to help them?"

So not being able to think with your prefrontal cortex because you're in this state of fight or flight or in this state of excitement causes you to jump forward a bunch and miss a bunch of steps. But you really need to go back and say, "Okay, yes, I need clients, and yes, I need to make money, but this is not my ideal client. This is not professional in how I want to interact with clients anyways. And what am I actually responsible for when it comes to something like social media? This person isn't even my client. So if they choose to do something, nothing can really come back on me because there was no waiver signed. There was no interaction between the two of us outside of this messaging."

Kyleigh Banks:

Are you following Kate's story at all, Rose Motherhood?

Ashley Mariani:

No. What happened? No, I'm not.

Kyleigh Banks:

There was someone who infiltrated a bunch of women's online spaces and I think tried to ... It was a man. He claimed he was a doula and he tried to get pregnant moms, low-income pregnant moms. He tried to befriend them and get pictures from them to upload to these sites.

Ashley Mariani:

Oh, my.

Kyleigh Banks:

So it presented in a little bit of a different way than just the perv reaching out to the doula. He infiltrated a whole bunch of communities and there's actually lawsuits now. There's not really a lot of details on online, but crazy.

Ashley Mariani:

Wow. It doesn't surprise me. Even when I was joining Facebook groups for local twin parents, there was a Facebook group that was a private Facebook group and I attempted to join, and the mediator of the group said, "We need to see a picture of your ultrasound." And I said, "Well, I'm not doing ultrasounds so that will be impossible, but I can take a picture of my belly if you want." And she was like, "No. Unfortunately, because of the fetish community" ... and this is not to give anybody with a fetish a bad name by any means. If it's consensual, 100%, there is totally space for fetishism of any kind. If it's between two consenting adults, let me underline consenting and adults, go for it, whatever. But when the other person isn't consenting, it's extremely violating. And so she was just talking about how people were infiltrating this particular Facebook group with a fetish for twin pregnancies in general and so she needed proof for ultrasounds, which I 100% respect, but also felt a little ousted since I wasn't doing ultrasounds.

Kyleigh Banks:

Yeah. You would think just a normal conversation would have ended that.

Ashley Mariani:

Yeah, would've sufficed. Yeah. I was like, "I'll show you my face. I'll do video." And she was like, "No." And I'm like, "Oh, okay." Well, I thought that would've been more legitimate than anything else.

Kyleigh Banks:

Interesting. Yeah.

Ashley Mariani:

And I think that this instance too of being a birth worker, being caught off guard like this, the majority of people, especially in the majority of people that are taking a course that you've designed, they've come to you because they truly understand what it means, what obstetric violence means, what your birth rights should be and are and advocacy. All of this is super important to them. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's usually because they are mothers who have had their own birth rights violated, who have been manipulated by the system, and so there's this layer of trauma that already exists.

And to be in the situation where you have a history of trauma and now you are feeling violated by this stranger, you'll have people in your life saying, "Oh, it's not a big deal. They didn't know. It's not like they targeted you personally." But as a trauma survivor, those situations, anything that sets off your alarm system or makes you feel unsafe in your body or even receiving pictures that are inappropriate, that's all violating, and that's all extremely scary and sends your body into the sympathetic state and you're just trying to look for ways to feel safe.

So I also want to just reinforce that if this happens, plan for your support system to be there for you. And I'm sure that's a huge part of doula, of being a birth worker, is just having your support network around you. Whether that's supporting a difficult birth or an outcome or something like being a victim to a predator online who has a pregnancy fetish that they're not interacting with appropriately.

Kyleigh Banks:

I'm really fascinated in the work that you do because the work that you do is such a perfect intersection of birth and sexuality and also advocacy, and so it pulls from all these different yet very intertwined places and really milestones in our lives. It's really fascinating. I can't wait to hear about postpartum sexuality because I know that's another almost expertise of yours. Yeah?

Ashley Mariani:

Yeah. It was interesting because when I started my undergrad, I was like, "I am going to be a sex therapist." That is my goal. I will be a sex therapist. And then as I started becoming wiser and wiser to academia and how academia works and all of that fun systemic stuff, I realized, why do I have to pay a ton more money and register with the college, I'm already registered with the college, and jump through more hoops essentially when I have wisdom from other facets I can utilize? So then I put that on the back burner.

And when I did my master's in social work, I had really no idea outside of working with couples what niche I wanted. And then I became a mother and went through my own birth trauma and had to search far and wide for a therapist online essentially that could help me. And at that time, there was not very many at all. And so I said to myself, "Self, you are going to become an online therapist for pregnant and postpartum women, perinatal women." And so I went into the perinatal mental health world, the maternal mental health world, and then after a while, I felt this ache to reintegrate my roots, my training in sexuality, and I felt extremely motivated to find a way to do that. So I was already working with couples. I was already working with perinatal mental health and maternal mental health, and so I was like, "How do I do this?"

And more and more conversations on social media started to be more appropriate or acceptable, I should say, to talk about sexuality and to talk about femininity and to talk about the divine feminine and the divine masculine and the mature masculine and the mature feminine and all of this beautiful energetic space and how we show up in pregnancy and in postpartum. And then just very logically, my clients started to roll in as couples and sex started to be one of the main issues that couples were coming in for. And it was a matter of my partner is upset that I have a low libido and I'm still postpartum and I don't know how to want sex again because I do want to be sexual with him and I do miss pleasure, but he feels betrayed and he feels wronged and all of this extra feelings around sexual entitlement and all that jazz.

And so I said this is a thing. I can't ignore this anymore. I can't ignore the fact that all of these new parents, all of these couples, all of these postpartum couples are coming to me saying like, "Our sex life sucks and we need to do something about it."

Kyleigh Banks:

What a beautiful lesson in listening to what your people want and serving them in the best way possible, meeting them where they're at. I love that.

Ashley Mariani:

Thank you.

Kyleigh Banks:

And so what do you do today? Who do you serve?

Ashley Mariani:

Yeah. Well, good timing. I don't know when you're going to release this episode, but today was the release of my new website and my rebrand and all that stuff.

Kyleigh Banks:

Yay. That's so much work. So congratulations. Yeah.

Ashley Mariani:

Thank you.

Kyleigh Banks:

I know it's probably a long time coming, so yeah.

Ashley Mariani:

Holy cow. And I just give props to the woman that I worked with because I was like, "No, yes, no, yes, yes, no, yes, no, yes, yes, no." She was like, "Okay, I'll wait for you to figure it out." But I really wanted to capture in the rebirth of mind online, the sensuality and the sexuality and the intimacy and the sexual energy that comes along with motherhood and recognize the shame that society places on mothers for wanting to be sexual. And then also, recognizing that part of the disconnect between couples is that in the postpartum journey, women aren't supported emotionally by their partner in ways that allow them to feel vulnerable and allow them to feel emotionally connected.

And so one of the things I am starting on, and I've released a sneak peek of it, is the new dad's guide to the postpartum woman. And for the most part, our partners aren't stupid. They're not dumb-dumbs. Some of it is weaponized incompetence for sure, and that exists, and we need to acknowledge that. But I really want to emphasize this idea of emotional safety and just like in birth and labor, when you feel safe and your body can relax and there's no predatorial threat or perception of one, we open, our womb opens to let baby out. And similarly, we need that same head space to open our womb to allow pleasure to happen in that space as well.

So how do we do that if we perceive our partner to be someone that's emotionally unsafe? And emotional threat can be something as simple as feeling unseen, unheard, underappreciated, having too high expectations, not giving enough space during the postpartum period to just bond and having the expectation of a clean house and meals made and etc. If we tie this back into boundaries, taking up that mature masculine space and creating a protective boundary around mom and baby so that outsiders, friends, in-laws, extended family members aren't penetrating this sacred postpartum space. If there's issues with that, there's going to be issues with sex.

Kyleigh Banks:

So much, yes. So much, yes. So many people need to hear this. So it's really cool. I'm just so grateful that you made the people that you're focusing on because it impacts every other aspect of our lives. It really does. It's all connected.

Ashley Mariani:

Everything. It's so connected. And one of the projects that I'm working at right now is developing the pillars to sexual enrichment. It's often that men will come to therapy and say, "I'm just angry. I want connection to my partner." Okay, amazing. That's a good thing. I'm so excited for you that you want connection to your partner. Yes. So therefore, we should be having more sex. No, no, no, no, no, no. Because if that is all connection is to you then we're missing huge pieces here. Let's go back. Let's start again because connection is way more than just penis and vagina here. Connection is way more than just ejaculation or orgasm. Connection is so much more. It has so much more depth than that.

For a lot of men in particular, that frustrates them because they have to go back to square one and they have to relearn this person in front of them, which seems appropriate considering that becoming a mother means that you are relearning yourself. So we can't just assume that our partner gets off scot-free without also having to relearn who you are too.

Kyleigh Banks:

Do you run workshops or do you have online programs or are you only doing this in person?

Ashley Mariani:

Oh, I'm so glad you asked. My hope is to expand. So expansion of everything, abundance and putting abundance out into the universe, expansion is happening, so I'm going to start with this new dad's guide to the postpartum woman, and then I'm going to move towards offering workshops on the pillars of sexual enrichment. And then I'm 100% opening up and wanting to know what other people want. Again, I have the knowledge ... You know how sometimes we can't see the forest through the trees, how we take for granted all the information that we have just stored up into our brain and we just assume that everybody also has this information?

Kyleigh Banks:

Oh, for sure. For sure. Absolutely.

Ashley Mariani:

So I'm like, what do you want to know? What does the world want to know? And I'm not going to pretend I know what everybody wants to know, but that's why I love opportunities to have these global conversations, to have these public conversations where so many listeners are going to be able to hear this and say, "Wow. Could you just do a workshop on this?" And if it's in my wheelhouse, I'm totally open to that. Yeah, for sure.

So part of the work that I do is client led. There's this pressure on a lot of "experts" to be the fixers and the healers and self-authoring and autonomy is so important. Obviously, you know this. So I'm just here to be the tour guide. I'm here to shake out my tickle trunk of stuff and you get to dress up how you would like based on what falls out of that tickle trunk.

Kyleigh Banks:

I love it. And workshops are the best way to do it, in my opinion, nowadays.

Ashley Mariani:

Yeah.

Kyleigh Banks:

Workshops are an easy yes. It's quick, and then you could just test so many ideas and decide what to move forward with. So I can't wait. I can't wait to see what workshops you have coming out next year.

Ashley Mariani:

Thank you. You inspire me every day. The information that you put out into the world is so important. I share so much of the content that you create with my clients because birth trauma and sex are also so interconnected. If a woman isn't even aware that she's had birth trauma, and we have this conversation around why you feel the way you feel, and she's talking about the sadness and the grief and the fear that she experienced, and we walk through all of the violations that she went through and all of the moments where her rights were violated.

Even just having her partner sit there and witness that conversation is so powerful because when we bear witness to somebody's pain, they feel so seen. When we sit there, even as a therapist, the partner doesn't have to say anything. The partner can just see a different perspective, hear somebody else ask the questions, understand, maybe they even ask, what is trauma? How do I interact with her when she's triggered? How can I help her nervous system heal? What kind of things can I be doing to show up for her differently to create a safe space for her brain?

So this is why the work that you're doing and the information that you're providing to your students is so important because the more the public understands what birth trauma is, the more the public understands what obstetric violence is and what their rights are, the more we can hope to change the system. And if the system is not going to change, then we create our own dynamics around birth and labor.

Kyleigh Banks:

Yes, it's been just an amazing blessing watching all of the new birthworkers flood the community because they're just exponentially more. Every single year, just more birthworkers, and it's a great thing. It's one of the best thing that's ever happened to birth in a really long time.

Ashley Mariani:

Yeah, I totally agree.

Kyleigh Banks:

I'm proud to be a part of it.

Ashley Mariani:

Yes. Well, and you're spearheading a lot of this. It's so important. And I'm sure that even when it comes to information that you're presenting, there's conversations around how to bring in sensuality into labor and delivery like clitoral stimulation, nipple stimulation, rocking and kissing your partner. This is why we can't shy away from conversations around sex and sexuality. We need to integrate them into the birth space.

Kyleigh Banks:

All right, Ashley. Where can people reach out to you if they just totally resonated and they want to spill their brain to you?

Ashley Mariani:

Well, my beautiful new website would be the first place to go, which is www.mindonline.ca, and my Instagram is probably the second place to head to, which is mindonlinetherapy, all one word, dot-ca.