Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex Myths

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

Why were the ovaries once seen as inverted testes? What words might you use if you were trying to describe a condition 'down there' to your doctor? And why did people once believe that you couldn't conceive a baby whilst standing up?In this episode of Betwixt the Sheets, we're clearing away the smoke, mirrors and occasional cobwebs from the mysterious realms of sexual science. Kate is joined by Emily Nagoski, author of 'Come As You Are' and expert on sexual wellbeing, healthy relationships, and the prevention of sexual violence and harassment.*WARNING there are adult words and themes in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Anisha Deva.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my lovely bit twixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning. Fair do's. This podcast contains two adults talking about adult themes in an adulty way. We're actually talking about the history of sex myths. So we will inevitably veering into conversations around sex and body parts and graphic surgery and rude language and all kinds of stuff.

And you know what? You just might not want to listen to that. You might be about to have a lovely day. with the family or be enjoying your corn flakes and you just could do without such filth. In which case, run. Get out of here while you still can. For the rest of you mucky pups, let's get into it. Experts say that social media has caused an epidemic of fake news, impacting everything from politics to our sex lives.

But when it comes to sex, myths and misinformation have been floating around a lot longer than the internet. For example, the clitoris was once in. described as a new and useless body part by one 16th century male anatomist. Hmm, not sure what his wife thought about that. And women in ancient Greece were once thought to have been controlled by their wombs. Or here's a more recent one from the schoolyard, maybe you remember it, that you can't get pregnant standing up.

You know, apparently one in ten young people still believe that. So yes, it's safe to say that there have been numerous cultural sex myths floating around for thousands of years. Well, for as long as we've been having sex, anyway, and today we are going to bust some of them. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society. with me, Kate Lister. If you go to the doctor and you need to talk about a genital-related issue,

what words do you use? How do you describe your body to the doctor? Do you give it its scientific name, or Latin name? Do you go to colloquialism or a nickname? Or perhaps you'd just say something like down there, or my bits? But where do these names even come from? And what is the anatomical history behind these words? Today I am joined by sex educator and best-selling author Emily Nogoski, to discuss some of the history of female sexuality and to debunk some of the cultural sex myths, which have, frankly, made everyone's lives of misery for thousands of years.

They made everyone feel like they're crap between the sheets, haven't they? Things like medieval anatomists believing that women's genitals are tucked away because they are so shameful and they need to be hidden. Hmm. Or the apparent cultural sticking point that is the hymen still needs to be debunked today. And what is the history behind normalness in the bedroom?

What even is normal and who was calling the shops there? I hope you enjoy the ride. Welcome to Petricks the Sheets, Emily Nagorski. How the hell are you? I'm COVID extraordinary. How are you? Are you really? Are you poorly sick? Given that it's still the pandemic, fading into endemic. Yes, given that context, I'm really doing amazing.

It's so weird. Like, we're not even out of this thing, and yet everybody, at least in this country has kind of gone, yeah, that was a thing that happened. And we're just running around looking pensioners now. We're not even buffing. Yeah, it's the same here. Nobody cares. As a sex educator or public health person, our actual health needs have not changed.

No. I'm going to definitely ask you about sex in the pandemic as we're going through this, because you are, of course, sex educator extraordinaire, author of, come as you are, the surprising new science that will change your sex life. Yes. And this book has been such a huge success. Did that take you a little bit by surprise? I mean, obviously we all want our books to be successful, but I mean, this was just, this pushed a button.

Yeah, it was a little easier for me because it didn't start that way. It sold just fine when it was first published in March of 2015. And it sort of every year kept growing and more and more people were reading it and finding it and recommending to their friends and therapists were using it with their clients as a tool. And I think it's because people were sharing it with people. It grew and grew and grew. And now, okay, so I'm Gen X. I am middle-aged. But I went on TikTok for the first time recently because people were like, a lot of sex education is happening on TikTok. You should go see what's happening on TikTok. So I looked and the very first video I watched was a about delayed orgasm in the language that I use and come as you are.

Criterion velocity, like this really nerdy concept that I love. And I was like, holy crap. You've influenced the TikTokies. The TikTokies. I'm so excited. And then there was a video in responsive desire. I'm really thrilled. How are you getting on a TikTok?

Because I'm on TikTok and I'm finding it. It's very, very sensorious. Like learning what you can say and what you can't. I feel like such a twat, like writing out Segs, S-E-E-S-E. E, G-G-S instead of sex, and saying spicy worker. I have not yet tried to post anything because there's... Because of that, yeah. It kind of gals you, you know?

You just like, like the whole point of me doing this is I'm trying to, you know, bust a few sex myths and I can't actually use any of the words. And reduce the stigma and normalize using the language and you can't use the language? Can't use it. Yeah, we may as well be going, you know, just like my downstairs area. My, my bits. Right. Exactly, I was thinking bits.

My parts. Nether regions. My private area. One of my favorite questions to ask doctors when I meet them, and I'm never sure quite what they think of me, but I always want to know what do patients refer to their genitals as? Like, what's the most common one? Because especially with women, I always think that, like, we're really stuck with words

because we've got, like, vagina and vulva and pedendum. But it sounds really clinical and weird. And then you've got like overly sexualized. Like who's going to go to the doctor and go, my pussy hurts? Like, maybe somebody. But. Well, what do the doctor say? The doctor said the most common thing that they hear is downstairs. And also kind of like a downstairs.

Like that kind of like they can't even say downstairs. Yeah. It could be anything from the eyes down, quite frankly. Wow. I just finished recording my own podcast and my producer, Moe, is delightful and sex positive in every kind of way. But she really struggled with the word genitals. Right up until like the last week of production, she was like, I just don't feel good about the word genitals. But by the last week, she was like, genitals, genitals, genitals, genitals.

So all it takes is practice and exposure. If people feel awkward and uncomfortable using the words, say them out loud to yourself. I mean, I studied the history of sex and you're a sex educator, but this kind of shame that we have around even our body parts is like woven in the very fabric of how we can talk about it. how far back do you think that goes? And what have you uncovered about that? If you think about the word vulva, that's been a medical word that's been around forever. But when I was growing up, all I had was vagina. Yeah. Think about what it means if we call the total package of the it's a girl style of genitals,

just the vagina. We name it just by the reproductive canal itself. Which just ignores and erases, you know, the labia and the, and the clitoris, all of these really important parts that have such important functions, like the pleasure part for most people who have this package of genitals. But all we're calling it is reproductive canal. We may as well be calling it down there, really. Yeah. Just calling it a vagina.

We know that sort of gives you a rough location, but there's so much going on there that isn't captured by that. If you can even bring yourself to say the word vagina, for me it's the equivalent of calling your throat, your face. I was embarrassingly old when I realized how much more there was going on in your vagina area, in your nether face area. I remember reading that you have a, is it a vestibule? Yep. And I love that because I made it sound so middle class. Vestibule.

Yeah, it's like the lobby of a hotel. And I always get it mixed up with veranda. I get the wrong one. I'm like the veranda of my vagina. Yeah, that's further back. But if we don't know the words, if we don't know what we're talking about, that's so limiting, isn't it? Like, how are we even going to get going with anything else? And there has absolutely been a sort of narrative that giving people language to talk about it is inherently corrupting.

Ooh, okay. Who's being corrupted? So in American sex education, I mean, American sex education is its own deeply awful story. It originates in the eugenics movement. Oh, dear. Yeah. So everything in sex education was about teaching the right kind of people to have the right kind of marriage, to have the right kind of children to populate the nation. Right.

But we know it's not just the United States where this was the case. Marie Stopes, the married love sex educator, she was writing in the time of eugenics for eugenics. and to give not the right kind of people access to the information to be able to support their own sexual well-being was to give them access. I mean, who controls sex in a culture controls nothing less than the genetic destiny of the species, right? It's a big deal. So we can't empower the wrong people with the wrong kind of language. And the wrong people is literally all women because we cannot be trusted to be in control of our own bodies. I know I can't. Any person of color cannot be trusted to be in charge of their own parts because they might do something with them.

So it's a really dark history. Lots of change has happened in the last 50 years. It's accelerated in the last 10 years because of social media, which I'm really glad about. And people still, like even if people haven't read the ridiculous lies from like 19th century sex education texts, Somehow they still believe them. Yeah. Even if you don't believe the lies verbatim, is they still are exerting an influence

if we can't use the language properly. Do you know what else I think is really fucked up? It's like when you actually look at these very medicalised words and you actually, from an etymologist point of view, unpick them, they are awful. Like vagina comes from the Latin sheath or scabbard, right? It's something that you put a sword into. It's just a cockholder.

That's what vagina is. Yep. Pudendum is my favorite example. From the Latin Puderi, meaning to make a shame. Oh, fuck off. Oh, my God. And Aristotle's masterpiece, another one of the, like, classic awful sex manuals. Maybe the earliest English language sex manual.

Cripped from Continental Sex Manuals, obviously. It said that the reason it's called the Pudendum to make ashamed is because the way girl-style genitals are set up, it's like they're tucked away to be hidden. because they are ashamed. Oh. Yeah. That is some mental gymnastics, isn't it? Yeah, I stopped using pudendum entirely when I learned that.

Pudendum means to be ashamed. I'd rather go with pussy, quite frankly. Yeah. At least that's more honest. And tell me about ovaries, because they have been historically thought of as being like female testicles. Well, they are, except the testicles are male ovaries. Oh, nice.

Oh, I like that. Yeah. So this is a phenomenon called biological homology. Homo same. The homology means that they have the same biological origins. So when we're developing in the uterus, up to about six weeks, even though we might be genetically different, you would not be able to tell what kind of genitals that person is going to grow up to be. But around six weeks, there's this wash of hormones, testosterone, and different characteristics of this embryo change how it reacts to this wash of testosterone. And all the prefabricated hardware, it's in place for everybody, and there's a change in developmental trajectory at that

six and a half week mark so that the organs that become the ovaries in the people who will eventually develop, it's a girl on the day they're born type genitals, change into testicles for anybody who's going to get the it's a boy package of genitals on the day they're born. Yeah. It's the same parts. They're just organized in a different way. And this is true for literally every part that you can think of. with some exceptions, but almost all. So in utero, it's called the labioscrotal tissue.

Labial scrotal tissue. Because you know that like stretchy skin where hair grows? Yeah. In the people who on the day they're born, people go, it's a boy, if you get up close and personal with that person's scrotum, you're going to notice a seam running down the center. It's called the scrotal rafy. I know that seam. That's where the tissue knit together to form one ball. sack, as opposed to if things have been a little bit different in the hormones or the chromosomes or other things, that person's body would have developed two separate labia, labioscrotal tissue. All the same parts are just organized in a very slightly different way. That is fascinating. But I think what's interesting like the idea that like we've all kind of got the same bits,

but we sort of separated in utero, is there's a really long history of looking at like lady flavored genitals as being either an absence. of anything or an inverted penis. There's like pictures that you can see from the 17th century. If you saw that, you just go, that's a cock. It's got bowls. It's got the shaft. It's got that little bowl knitted seam sack that you mentioned.

And it's not. That's a vagina. They thought that a vagina was just like an inverted penis. I mean, from the Ottoman Empire, there's a straight line narrative of women being slightly broken men. It's fucked up, isn't it? And like Freud did it as well with his, penis envy. Oh yeah. I mean, it's not just penis envy. Freud, I mean, kind of don't get me

started, but he's the one who said that in all my years, the one question I've not been able to answer is, what does a woman want? And he's saying that at the same literal time that the women's rights and workers' rights movements are chanting what they want. Never thought of that. So the poster behind me is from a 1970s hospital workers union. It says bread and roses at the bottom. Bread and roses is a slogan from the workers' rights movement of the 1910s. Wow. When Freud was working, women and workers were chanting, give us bread and roses too. What does that?

So bread is like basic human rights. We all need a roof over our head. We need to be able to feed ourselves and our families. We need to stay warm and healthy, keep clothes on our backs. We need the bread. And then roses is time to be human to experience art and play and music and reading. What we want from our work is not simply to be automaton's who do our work and survive, but to be people who can maximize our potential. Give us bread and roses too. That is so beautiful. They were saying it at literally the same time that Freud was like, I don't know.

Who even knows what women want? There's only a political movement built around people demanding what they want. And again, I'm American, I live here. Both the workers' rights and the women's rights movements were hugely overwhelmingly racist and exclusive of women of color. But at the same time that women of color and in particular, black women were excluded from these movements, there's a beautiful book that I recommend everyone read. It's called Wayward Lives Beautiful. experiments. And it's by Sidiya Hartman. And it is about the ways that women and girls and femmes at this time in history, we're working to have beautiful lives as if they were free. So historically,

everyone is striving for this company. And when it comes to sexual functioning, like, yeah, we want bread. We want to be healthy, one would be disease-free. We want to be pain-free. But we also want the roses. We want basic bodily autonomy, yes, but we also want access to the delights of life, the pleasures of our bodies. Sexual well-being is not simply, I don't have any pain, I don't have any diseases. It is also, I have access to pleasure inside my body. I live in a world where it is possible for me to access the resources I need in order to gain access to the pleasure in my body. Wow. That's beautiful. Bread and roses. I'd never heard of that. Freud, what a dick he is. Punch Freud in the nuts. I think he had vagina envy. We're talking about,

like, sex myths that we're busting today. Do you think that there is still a sort of hangover from this idea of viewing women's bodies as being incomplete, lacking, or sort of failed men? Oh, God, yes. I was kind of hoping that you'd go. No, we're fine, Kate. We're past that one now. No, we're good. We have fixed that. No. So around 1999, something happened in the world of sexual medicine, Viagra. Mm-hmm. So now people whose penises wouldn't get erect, they can take a pill and an hour later, they can get an erection under most circumstances.

Viagra and all the other PD5 inhibitors have a really high placebo effect, but they're pretty effective at increasing blood flow to the genitals. But of course, the question that comes immediately after this is, but what about women. Of course it comes after. Of course. And the whole model of sexual functioning is developed based on men. And then we sort of see how we can apply it to women in the same way that the science of heart attacks is all based on men. Really?

And then we sort of see how we can apply it to women. All of medicine has been functioning this way for hundreds of years, where women are an afterthought and the ways that women's bodies differ from men's are the ways in which they are broken. Oh, that's fucked up, isn't it? It sure is, and it's one of the reasons why women struggle so much is because there's a standard narrative about how sex is supposed to work, which is a narrative that describes sort of a central tendency among cisgender men. That spontaneous desire comes first. Yeah. And then you go through the arousal process. And then there's an orgasm during penal vaginal intercourse because

white supremacist is heteropatriarchal, rapidly exploitative late capitalism. says that that's how orgasm happens, and then you're done. Certainly what I cry out in the bedroom anyway. Right? I know. It's very sexy. And so, for example, this idea of spontaneous desire is one that is based on sort of the central tendency of cisgender men. But in fact, around the time that Viagra was happening, there's a sex therapist named Rosemary Basson who developed a theory she called responsive desire. And it was developed to describe women. Spontaneous desire emerges in anticipation of pleasure.

Like you're just thinking about it and looking forward to it and you're like, oh, I would like to get to the sexy times, please. That's the feeling we call horny most of the time. I'm familiar with it. Yep. Some people aren't. Some people have what's called responsive desire, where instead of experiencing desire in anticipation of pleasure, they experience desire in response to pleasure. Okay. Yeah. Say it's a long-term relationship and they have a really strong relationship. They really enjoy each other, lots of trust and admiration. They experience pleasure when they engage sexually with each other. But this person never spontaneously out of the blue is like, oh, you know what?

Hey, how about some sexy times? But, you know, it's Saturday at 8 o'clock. You and the red underwear. Let's show up and let's do this thing. They put their body in the bed. They let their skin touch their partner's skin. and their partner goes, oh, right, I really like this person and I really like this. That's responsive desire.

There's a sex therapist in New Jersey named Christine Hyde who taught me this party analogy, like if your best friend invites you to a party, you say yes because it's a party and your best friend. But the date starts to approach and you're thinking it was going to be so much traffic. We're going to have to find child care. Am I really going to feel like putting on my party clothes after a long week? But you said you would go, so you put on your party clothes. host and you show up to the party. What happens then? You have a good time, usually. Yeah. Yeah. Usually you have a good time at the party. If you are having fun at the party, you are doing it right.

Oh, I like that analogy. That's good. And my thing is there's no amount of being like horny to go to the party. Like, man, I really wish I could find a party to go to tonight. That if you find yourself a party, all that like desire doesn't guarantee that the party you find is going to be something that you have any fun. This is true, especially if some people can't find the party that you want to go to. I'll be back with Emily after this short break. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway.

Visit Chief Poetan as he prepares for war with the British. See Walt Disney a cute. accuse his former colleagues of being communists and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park. From pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to the space race. I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. You up to with the clitoris at the moment?

Because like that... Things are going really well, actually. Hurrah! Oh, how bruh! Tell me about the clitoris. So, to my knowledge, the earliest medical illustration of the full extent, by now everybody knows surely about all the internal structures of the clitoris. The memo is out there.

I don't know if everyone's picked it up. Not everybody has gotten it, but the thing is... Okay. So you know how I was saying, like, the labia and the scrotum are like the... same things just slightly... And the veranda. Yeah. It's also the case that the penis and the clitoris are homologues like that.

It's all the same parts, just organized in different ways. Wow. So, you know, the head of a penis, it looks... It's called... The Latin word for it means acorn. I don't know. I don't know why. But it's called the glands, right?

So the head of the clitoris, the external part, the glands clitoris, is the equivalent of just the head. But then there's a cord from the glands under the... tissue and it bends down behind the pubic bone and branches out into the sort of wishbone. Yep. Those structures inside our bodies are the biological equivalent of the shaft of the penis. Wow. So there's all this internal structure, all this internal tissue.

And you know how a penis changes as it gets an erection? It swells and gets hard? Yep. The clitoris's organs do that too. All of that is happening inside, deep inside the body of a vulva. Wow. When arousal happens. So there's all these internal structures.

Like someday somebody's going to write like a master's thesis, watching medical history of the ways that these internal structures have come and disappeared and then come back and disappeared from medical textbooks. Because it was there. One of my favorite clit facts from history is that the clitoris was discovered twice in the 16th century by two Italian. anatomists. Right, yeah. Discovered in the same way that America was discovered. Exactly.

Some people already knew. Yeah, it's like the most champion act of mansplaining in the whole of human history. And it was twice just in the 16th century. Jiminy Cricket. Do you know when it was that we discovered about the actual size of it, the rest of the iceberg? 1847. Wow. Published in a medical textbook, illustrated the whole thing.

So it was there and then it disappeared and people forgot. And then it came back and then it disappeared again. And like, there's all kinds of questions about why does it disappear? Why do we find it so difficult to remember about the internal structures of the clitoris when really we don't have the same struggle with the shaft structure of the penis? No, we don't. No. And there's a whole lot of shaft of penis that's also an internal organ.

Like if you press down on an erect penis, like down against the pubic bone, like there's all this, I'm making a gesture that other people won't be able to see and I'm kind of glad about that. She is indeed, yep. Like you'll be able to feel how deep the shaft extends into the body. If you go down behind the scrotum and press, you'll feel the shaft of the penis through the skin there. So many people go back there looking for the prostate, but just behind the scrotum, you'll find penis shaft press through the internal structures of the penis. Penises deserve so much more credit and they will get more credit when the clitoris gets the credit that it has been due. Right? It's just for too long, it's been like a sort of a cameo role in sex history, hasn't it? And when you consider like how important it actually is, is ridiculous. Because one of the things that you do focus on a lot in your book is just, I suppose like they call it the orgasm gap now, the fact of like the importance of the clitoris in sex. I prefer pleasure gap because there are people who really struggle with orgasms for all kinds of reasons. And like no one should feel pressure or expectation like you're supposed to be having orgasms and you're not having the orgasms.

therefore you're the failure. Nice. Very true. And I also don't want to set it up so that the people whose partners struggle with orgasm, the worst thing we could possibly do is create a context where if your partner struggles with orgasm, you feel like it's your fault and you need to be doing better. Because that's a really great context to facilitate people faking it. Yes. Like if orgasm isn't there for me today, but my partner, man, my partner feels like if I have an

orgasm, do you got, you do, I'm sure you do, have the sort of fairground game where you take the big hammer and you hit the thing and a thing goes up and it goes, ding, yeah, yeah. And when it goes ding, that's how you know you're strong. If your partner feels like your orgasm is a measure of them being strong, yeah. They really need your orgasm, right? And if orgasm's not there for me today and my partner feels that kind of way, I might just go ahead and give them what they need. Oh! Oh! Yes, it was so good.

Can we go to sleep now? Love you so much. Best time ever. Sometimes it's just a no show, isn't it? And it's just not going to happen. Yeah. And it's because of the nature of how sex works in our brains. It has a dual control mechanism where there's a sexual accelerator that, yes,

notices all the sex-related information in the environment. And it sends that turn-on signal. Yeah. Cool. But also in parallel, you have a set of breaks, noticing all the good reasons not to be turned on right now, all the potential threats. And those potential threats are ubiquitous stuff like body image stuff and stress and gender stereotypes about how you're supposed to do sex and who you're supposed to be as a sexual person,

hit the brakes. Trauma, relationship to stress, very common things. Just like the monitoring of the closed door for the rattle of the handle. or if a kid is going to interrupt. That hits the breaks. And like you had a long, difficult, stressful day or have had like months of accumulated stress, your breaks are going to be hit so much that it doesn't matter how much you stimulate the accelerator. With your brakes on like that, you're just never going to get to orgasm. Yeah. And when people are struggling, the typical advice is to like add stimulation to the accelerator, like handcuffs and roleplay and porn and vibrators, and those are great if you like them. Go for it. But also,

So it turns out when people are struggling, it's usually not because there's not enough stimulation to the accelerator. It's because there's too much stimulation to the break. Wow. And if my orgasm isn't there because I was confronted all day by a whole bunch of gender binary, patriarchal COVID life stuff, my breaks are being hit and maybe orgasm is not going to be there for me. It has nothing to do with who I am as a person.

It has nothing to do with how much I love my partner, how much I love my partner, how much I I want to be close to him is just like, should is hitting my brakes right now. Yeah, and it's just not going to happen, is it? Oh, I know a cultural myth that we should bust together. This is an important one. Heimans. Oh, my God.

This is because I've written about the history of virginity, and so much of it is predicated on this mysterious hymen. So take it away. So the whole theory of biological homology applies to the hymen also. Okay. In the cascade of events that result, in the organization of the genital structures. For a lot of people with vaginas,

they also have, there's just this little fold of tissue, right, at the sort of bottom edge of the vagina, though hymins vary a lot. There are microperfurt hymins and imperfurt hymins and septate hymins. They vary wildly from each other. And some people with vaginas don't have them at all. And biologically, again, we go to, like, medieval Europe, and they see a sort of, like, film covering most of the vagina,

And they see it as my husband calls it a freshness seal. And because we live in, you know, this culture where women's bodies are the literal property of the father or the husband who owns their body, when you've got a freshness seal, it's like a guarantee that the babies this person has are you're the father of them. So virginity matters because of the patriarchy, obviously. And the deal is there's just no relationship between the size and structure of the hymen and whether or not that vagina has ever been penetrated with anything. There just isn't. People who've given birth have intact hymins. It's gibberish, isn't it?

It's complete and utter nonsense. And we buy into the lie because we have metaphorized our bodies. We have taken something that's just a description of biological reality and turned it into a cultural, gender binary narrative about who we are as people. That, like, the size of either the penis or the clitoris, they're both fallaces. The size of your fallacy is somehow a measure of your sexual virility. I know multiple people now, actually, who grew up believing that they were hypersexual because they had big clitorises.

That goes back in the literature right back to the ancient world, this weird paranoia that anyone with a really large clitoris that it's morphed into a penis and then oh my god lesbians that's the sort of the trajectory yeah and again these people that i meet it's not like they've read that history and learned it from there no it's just so like deep in the roots of the culture that you absorb it without knowing where it came from it's so fucked up isn't it is there any way to tell if somebody is a virgin no what the fuck's a virgin what do you mean by a virgin what do we mean by virginity even. We all think we know. We all think that we know exactly what that means until you push it a little bit. Until you start testing it in different scenarios. Like it was a concept that made

sense when a woman's body was the literal property of the man who owned her. And he wanted some sort of guarantee that there was no likelihood that she would be pregnant by someone else and he'd be investing his resources in genetic offspring who were not his own. Within that narrative, virginity is something. But But in the world I want to live in, virginity is not, like, for example, if you're a person who's just never going to have sex with somebody with a penis, like, that's just not what does it for you. Are you a virgin forever? Is that the deal? Is that the deal? You're just a virgin forever? No matter how much anal penetration you've had, no matter how many orgasms you've had induced by your partner with their mouth or their hand. Like, are you still a virgin when those things happen? Can you lose your virginity to yourself?

Can you? Can you lose your virginity to a tampon? See, I'm laughing, but they actually had to have proper advertising campaigns around that, didn't they? Yeah, people genuinely truly believe it. And there's very, like, dark contexts that can happen. Catholic teenage girls having anal sex so that they can satisfy their partners without losing their virginity. Do you see that cropping? There's like this weird virginity small print that you sometimes see of like they've done everything but put a penis in a vagina and they go well I'm still a virgin, actually. Yeah. And the other thing is like this has real

world repercussions, doesn't it? Because virginity tests, which are gibberish and don't work. But it's not like they're being administered by mad, wise women in the villages. They're an act of violence and they are being used still in states. Occasionally like the World Health Organization had to come out and just say and actually condemn virginity tests within the last few years, didn't they?

Because they're still happening. Yeah. Whether or not someone has access to education can be gate kept by the size and shape of a totally functionless fold of tissue. No biological function. There are some people who argue that in infancy, the hymen might be protective against the spreading of bacteria into the vagina from feces. Maybe. That's not a tested hypothesis. It's a just-so story. Yeah. Like, it's a story that makes sense and people like it, but there is no established function.

There's only a handful of other species that even have hymins. Wow. By the way, I'm always looking for, like, the scoop about other animals that have hymen. So if anybody listening to this is like, I know of an animal that has hymins, let me know. Please do. Write in. You can find me on Instagram, Inagoski, like, I would love. Yeah, we want to know. Sliding into my DMs with, like, different species hymins.

So one of the things that I loved about your book, I thought this was really important. is that you make the point repeatedly that sex happens in the brain. And this, I feel, is really important from a historical point of view because for as long as there have been people with bits that feel nice, there have been attempts to locate where sex is in the body. And that has really dark repercussions, like women having their clitoris is cut out, or men being circumcised to attempt to stop this, that and the other,

ovaries drafted in the 19th century. So I think that, like, what you're saying there about sex happening in the brain, that's really important. Yeah, it helps that it's also factually true. Yeah, there's got that going for it. So in 50 Shades of Gray, which no shade. Like a lot of people derived a lot of pleasure from those books and movies. It also created a public conversation around women's sexual pleasure at a scale that my work has never done.

So, like, great. And also, it came out right at, like, the worst of, the economic downfall right around 2008, 2009. And I know for a fact that it introduced women to the idea that sex toys are, these women who would otherwise never have known. And so they walked into their small, local, feminist sex positive sex toy shop for the first time and bought themselves a vibrator and it saved small businesses. Right?

Like good things happened as a result of 50 Shades. That said, I read it. I'm a reader of romance. I enjoy it very much. This particular story was not for me. But the main thing is that, I mean, I didn't hate it. I didn't throw it against the wall until the first spanking scene. So, Anastasia has consented to the spanking.

She does not want it. There is not one word about her liking it. She is like screwing up her face in pain. She is wriggling to get away. she does not like anything about it. And at the end of it, Christian Gray, our hero slash douchebag, puts his fingers in her vagina and takes them out and they are wet with vaginal lubrication. And he says, feel this.

Anastasia. See how much your body likes this. You're soaking just for me. Dush. And the deal is, this is that metaphorization we do, that if a person's body responds, we have this narrative that says because a person's body is responding, they must like and want it. And it's called arousal non-concordance when there is a mismatch between what a person's genitals are doing and how they subjectively feel, which one is true? That is true. I mean,

I know loads of guys that get erections just from being sat on a bus. Absolutely. Especially, like, you know, 13-year-old boys. Right. You're sitting in class, your teacher's shirt moves and, like, erection or like if you get an erection you sit in the back of the bus and the vibration gives you an erection doesn't mean that you are turned on and erectile dysfunction in the middle of the night when you're getting it on you would really like that erection to be there the next morning you wake up with an erection when it's just inconvenient yeah right arousal non-concordance like it's understandable to us it is but somehow we can't apply that to a wet vagina or a dry vagina that's so true isn't it the worst part about it for me

is that in the book, Anna goes on to describe herself as feeling something like debased, degraded, and abused. Oh, dear. But because he said, see how much your body likes this, she believes him. Because aren't we taught as women to believe everybody else's opinion about our bodies more than we believe what our own internal experience is telling us? Maybe she just had thrush. Did he think of that? You know, he didn't.

He didn't even ask. Oh, no. Right, tell me about how, because we're talking about, Sex in the brain. What I love about your work is that what you're doing about stress and sex in the brain. Yes. I think this is really important. I think we all kind of know, don't we? If you're stressed, you don't feel very sexy. But for 10 to 20% of people, stress can actually increase their interest in sex. Boom. People vary. They do. And the reason what to ask you about this is because obviously we are, it's still in the pandemic, but we're not in like the midst of lockdown. And

there was this whole big thing. There's going to be loads of lockdown babies. Yeah, I heard that stuff. and I was like, y'all don't know how sex works. No, no, no. Who was feeling sexy at that particular? You know, everyone was a biohazard. About 15% of people were feeling sexy, yeah. People vary, there were some. But apparently that whole, like, in the middle of a catastrophe

that there's going to be babies, comes from a big blackout that happened in New York. There was going to be lots of blackout babies in, like, the 1950s. Apparently, that was a myth. Yeah. The Kinsey Institute was collecting data, and it would seem that most people were not feeling. sexy during the pandemic. Yeah, because they're just intensely stressed and stress is a physiological,

biological response to help us survive threats. Like, for example, being chased by a lion in the evolutionary environment where we're adapted for, when you're being chased by a lion, is that a good time to have or want sex or have a baby? It is not. No. It's not. It's not ideal, right? So for most people, it makes very straightforward sense that like when you're in a very stressful situation, like, for example, a global pandemic, or a blackout that's affecting five million people, they're maybe not going to feel super turned on by that threat. Right. But yeah, people think that just because you're, like, stuck with somebody for a long time,

you're going to start having lots of sex with them. No. What would you say to people that you work with and people that you meet in your research, where, like, we're all living ridiculously stressful lives. We're like in the permanent running away from the lion bit, aren't we? Yes. How do you get past that and get back to the horny, sexy, lovely, juicy stuff? So the reality is that we've been lied to about how the stress response works,

just as much we've been lied to about how the sexual response works. Like, we're not told about the break. Everybody, when they're 15, they should learn that there's a break. And you have to respect the break. Everybody, when they're 15, should learn that stress is a biological cycle. It has a beginning when you're exposed to the stressor. where you get this rush of adrenaline and cortisol and glucocorticoids and all that stuff. And every organ system in your body is affected by this change.

There's a middle where all those changes, which are there to motivate you to do something, work. When you're being chased by a lion, what do you do? You run. Run like fuck. Right, exactly. So you run, and then there's an end. Either you get eaten by the lion, in which case none of the rest of this matters, or you escape from the lion. And if you escape from the lion,

when you like run and run and run and the lion gives up and you run all the way back to your village, and you're like, oh my God, you guys, I had to tell you this story about this thing that happened. You feel not just relieved, but elated and glad to be alive. The sun seems to shine brighter. You love your friends and family. That's the complete stress response cycle.

Alas, these days, we are almost never chased by lions. Our stressors are not acute. like that, they are mostly chronic, which means we are being stalked by the lion all day, every day, in the form of our commute, in the form of our families, in the form of money and capitalism and patriarchy and white supremacy and like all the things that stress our bodies every day. When you are being chased by the white supremacist, et cetera, patriarchal, rapidly exploitative of late capitalism.

When you're being chased by that, what do you do? I mean, you try and run. Yeah, the thing is, it's not a metaphor. You run. You can't actually escape, but you use your body in a way that shifts your chemistry out of that activated state into the... I'm relieved. I'm elated.

I'm glad to be alive, and I love my friends and family. Physical activity of any kind, it does not have to be running. You can literally just like dance in your chair. Yeah, move. Even if all you do is like clench every muscle in your body tight, tight, tight, for a really slow count of 10 and you keep holding it a little longer, even though your muscles are like, oh, that's a lot. And I really want to stop and you go just a little bit longer than that.

And then you flop. Just that is enough to siphon off. I like that. Because stress is a physical phenomenon, even when the things that actually our stress are not physical phenomena. So the process of dealing with the stress in our bodies, both fortunately and unfortunately, is separate from the process of dealing with whatever caused the stress in the first place. So when you're having a big fight with somebody, you think resolving the fight is going to cause you to be calmer? I would. Not necessarily. Mostly not. Especially if it's

like a workplace and you have to be really socially appropriate and you're gritting your teeth. Your body chemistry is like, launch yourself across the table and rip their face off. But what you're saying is, that's really interesting. You know, I'm going to have to get back to you on that. We'll circle back to that. We'll circle back to that. Thank you for that feedback. Right? You're behaving yourself. Yes. So you have dealt with the problem, but you have not dealt with the stress in your body. That's such a good tip. That's a whole separate process. And that's chapter one of burnout. It's honestly, it's an amazing book. final question she is, I thought this was really powerful, but I read that the feedback that you get most from your students is, I am normal. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. And it surprised me the first time

it happened. I actively solicited feedback. Just tell me one important thing you learned. And I had shoehorned in like so much science. I had tried to teach them like as much advanced stuff about methodology. And I thought they were going to talk about the science. And instead, I had 187 students in my class. And more than half of them wrote some version of, I'm normal. I know that I can trust my body because it is normal. Even if I'm different from other women, I'm still normal. And it was reading those responses from my students. I was grading final exams.

It was the last question on the final exam, sitting in my office, grading with tears in my eyes. Which is not what grading final exams is like, right? Right. That was the day I decided to write, come as you are. Wow. God, that's so powerful. Emily, you have been incredible to talk to. Thank you so much.

If people want to find you and want to know more about you, where can they find you? Not physically. Let's not give them an address. Let's not do that. But online. Yeah, I mean, you may see me walking down the street. And if you do, feel free to say hi, Emilynogsky.com, you can sign up from a newsletter, which is not that frequent and mostly is a sex Q&A.

I have a podcast that's out now from Pushkin Industries and My Madison Wells called Come as You Are. And the first episode is about the dual control model, which is super exciting. That's amazing. And it's really good. I worked hard on it for more than a year for these eight episodes. So I really hope people like it. Of course they will.

Absolutely. And what about social media? Are you on social media? Instagram is the place you're most likely to find me. I just did a live yesterday answered spontaneous sex questions. Amazing. And maybe for the tiki-tokies as well at a future date. Yeah, I'm working on it.

We're working on it. Oh, Emily, thank you so much for joining me between the sheets. You've been just amazing. It's been a delight. My favorite topic. Thank you so much. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. And thank you so much to Emily for coming on the podcast, just as she is.

And if you enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcast. If you like this episode, why not check out our other episodes on the history of the clitoris or the history of virginity. And I will see you next time, my lovelies. This episode includes music from Epidemic Sound.