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

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

Do you remember the first time you thought about sex? Or the first time you talked to someone else about sex?In this episode, Kate is discussing mid-20th century teenage sexuality with Hannah Charnock from the University of Bristol. Hannah has been using first hand accounts to find out how teenagers would find out what's ‘wrong’ or ‘right’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and what role the American base system has played in British sexualities.*WARNING there are adult words and themes in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Thomas Ntinas.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here. 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. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am here once again with your fair do's warning. What is a fair do's warning, Kate? Well, it is the warning that we have to issue at the start of the show to let you know that it will be containing raunchy, adult,

and just downright naughty material. And if you don't want to listen to that, then this is your chance to back out now. And if you do listen to it and you're still shocked, well, tough tips, because fair do's, we did tell you it was going to be rude. The teenage years, crushes, sleepovers, giggly science lessons and some spots, yeah, lots and lots of spots, awkward conversations, endless homework and French kissing in the back of your hand. We all have our own memories of these precious years. But do you remember the first time you ever thought about sex?

Or the first time you spoke about it with somebody? Today we are going to find out how teenagers have historically talked. talked about and experienced their sexualities, specifically since the mid-20th century. 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 enough and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Goodness, for a beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwigs the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. By now, we've all heard of the American base system. Bases 1 to 5. Was it 4? Did just I go to 5? Right, sorry, bases 1 to 4, apparently.

For teenagers, each step is an increased level of intimacy. And another thing to brag about, or maybe to hide from your friends. But before we inherited this points-based system in the UK, teenagers were already formulating ways of understanding and discussing their sexuality. ways of measuring themselves against one another to check what their progress was. And for as long as there have been teenagers, there have been people worrying about teenagers. Today I'm speaking to Hannah Charnock from the University of Bristol, who used mass observation records and spoke to people who were teenagers during the 20th century

to find out what it was like to be developing during this time and how things might have changed. Let's go. Hello, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheet. It's only Hannah Charnock. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. Yes. I'm so pleased to have you here. Is it horribly cold where you are? It is absolutely freezing where I am.

Baltic. Yeah. Yeah, right. Well, we will try and warm ourselves up by discussing this particular subject. This is a really fascinating subject. And it's one of those ones that, like, we have to talk about it. It's important we talk about it, but it makes people very uncomfortable. Definitely.

We are talking about teenage. So my producer's written here. teenage intimacy. I think probably what we mean is teenage sexuality in the 20th century. Yes, I would say intimacy is important, but quite a delicate way of phrasing some of the stuff that might come up. Yes. Yes. So how did you come to research this?

How did you come to sort of think that this is a subject worth researching and getting, I'm careful of our phrase it, but getting to grips with? Well, so initially I was supposed to be researching cultures of contraception after the 1960s. So I was interested in what happens with contraception after the invention of the pill and how does the pill come to play such a large part in our sexual culture, I suppose.

And I started doing this research and it turns out that studying contraception in the late 20th century is really hard, not least because it's very technical, looking at the different types of contraception that were available, lots of those. We suppose it would be, yeah? Lots of those, their technologies and they're owned by companies, and that as a historian is quite a difficult, it's quite a difficult thing to get access to. So I was thinking about different ways that I could think about contraception. And I'm a social historian. So more than the technology and more than the medicine, I'm interested in people and what contraception meant to people. And so I thought I would do an oral history project. So I thought my methodology would be that I would ask people about their use of contraception.

contraception. Why wouldn't you? Obviously. That's amazing. Why? It's like, it's one of those moments where it's kind of like, why haven't other people done this? This is so obvious. Yeah, and well, and other historians have done this for earlier time periods. There are some really wonderful studies on kind of contraceptive practice in the early 20th century. But it was almost like the invention of the pill was such a big watershed that nobody really wanted to deal with the afterwards. And so I started doing these oral history interviews. And I just became more and more interested in almost the build-up to those conversations. So when you do oral histories, you don't just dive straight in and say, you know,

tell me about the first time you ever used a condom. Do some preamble. You let people ease in to the interviews. And so I would just ask people about like their living situations when they were growing up and the relationships that they were having as teenagers. That led into conversations about the sex that they were having as teenagers and the various sexual activities that they were engaging in. And I just came to feel that actually this was the more like interesting part of the project.

God, yeah. Like I was interested in how do you get to the stage where you're having the kind of sex where you would need to use contraception as a kind of long-winded way of putting that? And it's so important because I've said it so many times and all, anyone who studies the history of sex and yourself included knows that like the biggest barrier that you've got is first-hand accounts of sex throughout history. And it always skews the data because it's like, oh, you can go at the 18th century and you can find out what a doctor thought or a lawmaker

or a priest. But that doesn't show us what was actually happening on the ground, what people were experiencing. That bit is always missing. Absolutely. And I was really lucky when I was doing my research in that because I was doing kind of late 20th century history or my research focuses on the period from the 1950s, to the 1980s. So I'm interested in the lives of, primarily of baby boomers. And what that means

is that there were two really great kind of source bases available to me when I wanted to do this research. So the first, as I said, was oral history. So lots of people of this generation are still alive and they are interested in talking about their lives. And so, yeah, I could conduct a research project where I interviewed them and I asked them questions about their sexual lives and their sexual histories. But the other really important resource for me were testimonies that were collected as part of the Mass Observation Project.

So Mass Observation is a social research organisation. It was founded in the late 1930s. And in its original iteration, it was quite anthropological. So they would send professional observers out into the world and they would stand on street corners or sit in the pub

and they would watch what people were doing and listened into people's conversations as a way of trying to understand what was society like in the 1930s. It became really important during World War II. And in that time period, the diaries that we have of people on the home front during World War II were submitted as part of mass observation.

And they would send these questionnaires out asking people, you know, how do you feel about the fall of France or the blitz in your city and things? And in the mid-20th century, it fades from view, it disappears. But in 1981, it was reborn. As again, like a social research organisation that was interested in trying to capture the lives of ordinary people and everyday life. So there are like several hundred, a couple of thousand mass observers, their volunteers come from all over the country. And they just observe us.

Yeah, and a couple of times a year, mass observation sends them a kind of questionnaire type thing about a whole range of. it can be on absolutely anything. So sometimes it's the questionnaires on really contemporary things. So, for example, in the last couple of years, the questionnaires have asked people to record their thoughts and feelings about COVID and about Brexit and about elections and other things going on in the world. But often alongside those very contemporary questions, they'll ask people slightly broader questions.

And in 2005, one of the directives that the questionnaires was specifically on sex. and it asked mass observers to record their sexual life history, moving from their very early years all the way through into adulthood. And for me, as a historian of kind of sexual life, that was an amazing resource. Wow. We've got people just writing down their experiences of sex and sexuality and how they felt.

And I, you know, have never seen another source base like it. It's absolutely wonderful. One of the things I think it's really interesting about this is you often hear that teenagers were invented in the 1950s which is quite a broad sweeping statement and of course people were teenagers but this is more like the social idea of what a teenager is. Is that true, do you think?

Well, historians kind of go round and round debating whether or not this was true. So the term teenager enters public knowledge, public use in that post-war period. so in the kind of 1950s. And I think it is fair to say that the conditions in post-war Britain and also, you know, post-war everywhere in the world, created new experiences for being a young person.

So in Britain, for example, by the time you reach the mid-1950s, we're in this period of what we term post-war affluence, so there's an economic boom. It's very easy for young people to get jobs. They have much more disposable income than they ever had in previous generations. And then when you combine in that, the creation of the welfare state, and the kind of the expansion of schooling, so the raising of the school leaving age, plus the fact, I mean, that you have this baby boom generation.

So the literal number of teenagers or young people in the population is just, like, much bigger. and it becomes known as the bulge. And as this generation grows up, you can see them moving through the population. So the baby boom generation is the generation of young people born between the end of World War II and over the next decade or so. And you can almost trace the political debates that emerge responding to this big bulge in the population.

So as this group of young people are about to enter education, suddenly this is a big topic for public. debate. As you were saying, it's not as if teenagers don't exist and lots of parts of the culture that we associate with the 1950s teenager. So going out to dances, going to the cinema, all of that kind of thing. That existed in previous time periods. But the figure of the teenager as an important demographic in society definitely becomes more prominent from the 1950s. I always thought that the baby boomers generation were called that because they were the ones that had lots of babies

but is that not right? They are the produce of a generation that had lots of babies. Yes, they are the babies, like they are the babies. They are the babies of the other people boomed and they're the babies. Precisely, yes. Right. Every day's a school day, isn't it, Hannah? Right.

This makes more sense. Okay. So now we have to get to the nitty gritty, the good stuff about what your research found out. So let's start with something like, what sort of age were people becoming sexually active? Yeah, late 20th century. So we're really lucky that for the mid-20th century, through surveys, such as the national surveys of sexual attitudes and lifestyles, we actually have a fairly good run of data to track the age that people had sex for the first time. So as you might expect, the data suggests that the age that people had sex for the first

time decreased over the course of the 20th century. So for people born in the 1920s, on average, they had sex for the first time when they were around 18, 19. For people who were born in the 1950s and 60s, that average was about 17. And for people in the 1990s, the age was 16. Average age was 16. Now, obviously that that average accounts for a fair amount of variation. But another interesting way that we can think about this is, so across the 20th century, the age of consent for heterosexual sex was 16. And one of the things that these surveys indicate is that whereas only 4% of women who were born in the 1930s had sex before they were 16, women born in the 1990s, almost 30% of them had sex before they were 16. So that's,

quite a big jump. So although the difference in average age seems quite incremental, you know, the difference is only two years, 16 and 18, accounting for the variation, the extremes, I suppose, surrounding that average, there is quite a big jump in that people are having a significant proportion of people are having sex much younger by the late 20th century than was the case earlier. Wow. Another thing that all sex historians have to deal with is the year. use of language that was appropriate at the time. This is like, this is a big, big issue. Like, if you are researching sex work in the 19th century and you try and keyword search sex work in a newspaper, you will not get very far. You have to find the language that they are

using. So if you say it's someone, how old are you when you first had sex? Then we have to try and define, well, what do you mean by sex? Like, is that penetrative heterosexual sex or are we counting fingering? Like, what is... Yeah, so this is a big thing in my research. I mean, in some ways, I suppose along the same lines as in contemporary society, actually, most people, if you ask them, when did you have sex for the first time? They will assume that you mean penis and vagina, penetrative sex. That is the assumption. And there's a, like, you know, there are really interesting stories to tell about the other forms of sexual activity that young people were engaging in. But in terms of, like, language, if you say sex, they assume you mean

penis in vagina. And to get at the other forms of sexual activity, you end up having to use phrases such as my favourite heavy petting. I think I remember that from a swimming pool sign. Exactly, yes. Yeah. And once you use that language, that describes a slightly different set of practices. Is that something that you figured out straight away? Or was it sort of a trial and an error situation here. So the way that it tended to work in my interviews was that I, so we would do the preamble, we would talk about people's living situations growing up and the types of relationships that they had as teenagers. And then usually the way that it would work is that I would ask them about the first time that they had sex and they would give me a virginity story usually. And once we'd

told that, they'd told that story, I would then usually ask whether or not, you know, that was the first type of sexual activity that they had engaged in, or whether or not they had, you know, they had done anything else before that. And at that point, we would then get stories of other forms of sexual activity, such as hand jobs, fingering, dry-humping, other forms of stimulation. Oh, memories. But one of the things that people found really difficult in the interviews is, is precisely this problem of language,

because those types of activities, the language that you... It's difficult, isn't it? In a clinical setting? Yeah, I mean, I like to think that my interviews aren't clinical, and they're not... No, you are a delight to talk to, but... But it is a slightly odd dynamic. It's not medical.

So, for example, if you look at medical texts about these types of activities, they use phrases such as genital apposition, which... Jesus Christ. No, nobody would never... I wouldn't even know what that is. Nobody would use that in a sentence. Well, you appositioned my genital, please. Exactly, yeah.

But at the same time, you know, so when I was conducting these interviews, I was in my kind of mid to late 20s. Lots of the people that I was interviewing were in their 60s. They don't want to use the language of fingering and hand jobs, particularly when I was interviewing men, they would find this conversation really difficult because all of the language that they have, I suppose we would consider to be quite crass.

You know, it's kind of bantery language. Yeah. And so in lots of ways, the language of petting and heavy petting became, it's the safe word. But then it meant that as an interviewer, I was then having to ask much more specific questions by, okay, so by heavy petting, what body parts are doing what to what other body parts? You get like hand puppets involved.

Yeah, exactly. Show me where on the doll this happened. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, so that issue of language was really tricky. And I don't want to be providing them with language. You know, I don't want to... No, because then you skew the data set, don't you? So that became, it became a bit of a dance in the interviews of trying to, you know,

figure out exactly what people meant by these different terms. I'll be back with Hannah after this show. short break. I'm Tristan Hughes, host of the ancients from history hit, where twice a week, every week, we delve into our ancient past. I'm joined by leading experts, academics and authors who share incredible stories from our distant history and shine a light on some of antiquities great questions. Was the Oracle of Delphi really able to see into the future? What can be discovered from lost civilizations? And was King Arthur actually real? You can expect all of this and more from the ancients on history hit wherever you get to your podcasts.

System of bases help. I don't think that was a thing in Britain for a while. Like we saw it in moving and stuff and it took a while as I was growing up to go, one, two, three, right, okay. Like, did that help? Bases, so for this generation, so this baby boomer, post-war generation, bases weren't really a thing. But they did, and it comes through in the testimonies that at the time as teenagers, young people, of this generation did have kind of classification systems. So lots of them described having had a ranking system. And the ranking systems varied. So some of them were like one to five. Others were one to ten. It would always like the final one, your five or your ten was always

penetrative sex. Like that was the thing that everything else was building towards. And then other forms of sexual activity would fit somewhere else in the ranking. And one of the things that's really interesting is that the rankings weren't all the same. The rankings weren't consistent. So in the ranking systems, you would usually get the general direction of travel would be from things like hand holding and a peck on the cheek through to kissing, French kissing, snogging, kissing with tongues. And then there would be some kind of touching usually of the breasts and then kind of genital touching of some kind would be on the hierarchy. But the exact nature of where things were on the hierarchy differed from person to person.

It seems that like different schools, different communities had slightly different ranking systems. So it was fairly consistent that people would differentiate between above the waist and below the waste. So above the waste was seen to be lower down the hierarchy than below the waste, which got you closer to your penitative sex. But that in some communities, the key, the key. The key distinction was whether or not this touching was taking place above the clothes or below the clothes.

So you would have kind of breast touching over the clothes, then breast touching under the clothes, and then, you know, genital touching over the clothes. Yeah, and like dry-humping, I guess, through to genital touching under the clothes. Whereas for other people, the hierarchy also, or alternatively sometimes, the key difference was whether or not you were giving or receiving. So whether or not you were the active party or not. And that that was often quite gendered. So men in particular often stressed the difference between touching and being touched. Quite a lot of men of this generation expressed a degree of, let's say, sadness.

That actually when they were teenagers, their girlfriends, their female partners often were less inclined to do touching. and that they might make it all the way up the hierarchy to penetrative sex without ever having, for example, received a hand job. That's much as a number three or four. Yeah, exactly. So the hierarchies are, historians talk about sex as being socially constructed. And this is a really interesting example. You've got this range of sex acts that people,

they understand them to be different levels of sex in different places, in different communities. And one of the most interesting things that I found, while I was doing this research is so people would describe these hierarchies to me and one of the things that I started to notice was that oral sex didn't really feature in these hierarchies. No, really? Like, are we blowjubs cunnelingus or the whole thing?

The whole thing. Like nobody really mentioned oral sex at all. Is that not a thing? Well, after I'd had a couple of these interviews and was they like, hmm, is it, I wondered whether it was just that people were particularly uncomfortable about saying that and talking about. So I thought maybe I should try asking directly to just see whether this is something that people were fudging in their narratives, like in their interviews. Okay. Or whether this is actual history. Did not. Yeah. So I started asking people in interviews and one of the things that came out

in their testimonies, people would say, well, no, like oral sex would not have been something that we ever considered doing before we had penetrative sex. And lots of women in particular identified that as But when they were younger, when they were teenagers in particular, they understood oral sex to be a much more intimate, like in some ways much more profound and kind of serious sexual act than penititive sex. And therefore, there was never any expectation that they would engage. I mean, many people had never even heard of it as teenagers. That it was more intimate. Yeah, that they, that that would be something that maybe you would do with a partner when you were

married and had been with them for a really, really long time. but that it wasn't, yeah, just wasn't part of this kind of pre-penetrative sexual hierarchy. That's fascinating. Which is obviously a huge, like hugely different to contemporary sexual cultures where oral sex has been to a great extent normalized, and now if you look at the ways in which young people in contemporary society construct the sexual hierarchies, oral sex, almost always features before penetrative sex. That's fascinating.

I've just remembered now that there was a whole big thing, on sex work Twitter within the last few years and I learned something new about it that we're talking about how the one thing that they absolutely hate not everybody hashtag not everyone if everyone's listening and panicking

but there was a real strong vocal consensus that receiving cunolingus from a client was dreadful the thing that was coming back from that was like exactly like you said there it's almost like it's too intimate we need to research this further people need to research and look into this

but I always remember that looking at thinking that's really interesting of all the sex that's the one that sort of has got this huge reaction from it. Yeah, and so like you say, actually, the history of oral sex is very poorly understood. This is not necessarily something that, yeah, we have a wealth of historical knowledge about, mainly because it's really hard to research it. But I think the sense that I got from my testimonies is that part of the question of intimacy here is to do with how people feel about their bodies.

and the one thing I think we need to remember when we're talking about teenage sex in particular is that the very nature of teenage sex means that people are not, you know, spending an afternoon in their bedroom, taking lots of time undressing one another, spending lots of time around one another, naked, like really taking their time

to, you know, really celebrate one another. That is very true, actually. That teenage sex was often very furtive. It wasn't necessarily being done at home in a bedroom, people were engaging in sexual activities, so both penetrative sex and, you know, all of these other kind of sexual activities. Quite much, frantic. Yeah, and, you know, on the sofa, when your parents have gone to bed, in corridors or

in dark corners of like dances or nightclubs, it's, you know, we all joke about behind the bike sheds, but actually there's an element of truth to that. No one's growling at the badger behind the bike sheds, are they? Or like, and the other big place, outdoors people talk about like being in parks or like that they would euphemistically go for walks with their partners. And then cars were really important space for teenagers having sex because they were relatively private.

You could drive them to a place that you knew was secluded. There are ways in which you can organise them so that you can't be seen. But all of this means that lots of young people, and even those who are engaging in penitative sex would do so without necessarily ever having seen a fully naked body, without necessarily ever having seen, you know, their partner naked. That makes sense.

And particularly if you think about the kind of 1950s and 60s, like women's clothing was that women wore dresses and stockings and suspenders all the time. Which are fiddly as fuck, despite their super sexy reputation. Yeah, but it means that it's not as if you're having to, you know, fully take off your trousers, and underwear in order to have sex.

So I think some of this is about Canalingas in particular, and got to have your face up in the neck. And if you are having sex in cars, you'd have to have one leg out the sunroof and another one out of the driver's side. Yes, that makes perfect sense. And, you know, cars from the 1960s not necessarily designed. They're not designed for that.

They are not, I don't know if any cars are designed for that, but in my book, they should be. What about same-sex sex sex in your research? Like, how was this, did you speak to sort of men that had sex with men, women had sex with women, and how did they understand these first early debuts into the world of sex? So most of my research focused primarily upon heterosexual sex. But one of the things that's really interesting is the really complicated place that queer sex, where queer sex fits within those life histories.

So for example, I wouldn't say it was common, but it certainly wasn't uncommon or unheard of, that the men that I would interview would describe having engaged in some kind of same-sex activity. So particularly those who had been at boarding schools or in other kind of institutions would describe instances where they'd wonk each other off, for example. For young women, one of the things that was really interesting is that often, within their narratives, they wouldn't necessarily describe huge amounts of sexual activity with one another, although women would describe how as teenagers they would sometimes practice kissing with other girls, but that wasn't seen to be sexual. That was about they are practicing to do these activities with boys. But there was this really interesting phenomenon that several women described of crushes. And a crush for women of this generation was often, like young women would often have,

have these about older girls. So for example, you know, if you're at school and you're in one of the lower years, it might be a girl who's several years older than you, like maybe in the sixth form. And that really interesting, they used to have crushes together. So it wasn't just about you as an individual having a crush on somebody older, but that this is something that you would kind of talk to your friends about and you would have crushes together. You'd have like a collective crush on somebody who was slightly older. And again, like with women's, they were often quite at pains to stress that this wasn't sexual. It wasn't about saying that, you know, you fantasised about having sex with that person. But it was this kind of strong,

emotional feelings, sometimes romantic, sometimes not quite. It would like this, it would sit in a slightly funny space where they couldn't quite work out what it meant. So yeah, like that was, like, that was quite sweet. One of the things that my research shows is that particularly in that mid-20th century period, there was still very much this sense that queer feelings and queer experiences in adolescence were, it's all just a face. It was understood to be, you know, part of this, you're growing up, you've got hormones running through, you're developing psychologically, you've got a lot of feelings and you've got to process them. And particularly for young women, the idea often was simply that eventually your womb would kick in.

You know, eventually your innate desire to have babies would mean that you would get over this. Right. And want to have sex with men so that you could fulfil your biological destiny of having children. Yes, yes. If you listen very quietly, you can hear lesbians laughing about that. Yeah. Did you get a sense of where people were learning about sex at this period in history? Because now obviously there's compulsory sex education, which isn't great,

but it's there, and there's, you know, a wealth of books and things that you can use. But like, what about before that, before the internet? How are people learning about sex? So a variety of, a variety of different ways. So in this time period, school-based sex education was not compulsory. But plenty of women and men described that they did receive some form of sex education insofar as they would, many people had, would still take, like, I guess, the equivalent of religious studies. and so they might get some form of sexual instruction in that context.

By far the most common one was biology lessons. So people would talk about learning, dissecting frogs, learning about the reproductive system of rabbits, and that there would often be some kind of vague reference made to like, oh, well, now you've learned this about rabbits. This is how it works in people too. So there's a few gaps in there. Sure. Yeah.

So some people did, like there was some, offering at school. Something that I've been working on really recently is that in the mid-20th century, you get the rise of facts of life literature. So this is literature that is sometimes produced by invested organisations. So like churches and religious organisations

publish facts of life books, medical professionals, psychologists. The Family Planning Association produces some... The girl guides produce some amazing facts. of life literature. Really? The guides did it? Yeah. That was a bad job ever got.

Which is all, you know, it's all designed to, like, how can we ensure that young people go on to lead healthy lives? And so a fair number of people, and particularly young women, would describe having been given this type of literature, particularly in the run-up, like, as they entered their teenage years, and it was predicted that they would start their periods. So lots of people described, you know, like, that these would just be books left. at the end of the bed. They'd be told to kind of read them.

But then there was never any expectation really that you would have a conversation about this. No. So I think it's not that adults were completely opposed to telling young people about sex. Actually, you know, lots of people thought that young people did need to be educated about sex. And, you know, there were some lessons in some schools

about reproduction, about sexual health in fairly vague terms. And like I say, there's this new genre, of literature that emerges and that is written by adults and is given to young people by adults. But the nature of this sex education, in terms of its coverage, quite biological, and the innate assumption in all of this is that sex revolves around marriage and that even for those people who are thinking about having sex, before they get married, they need to understand sex and they need to manage their sexual lives carefully so that they don't create problems for themselves in marriage. So lots of the discussion, like I say, it's very biological

and yet it's very focused on the relationship, like what might sex mean for your relationship and yourself moving forward. And what this means is that there is a kind of gap between the types of questions that adults are answering for young people and the questions that young people have themselves. And that what you kind of see in this period is that For young teenagers, so when you're in your kind of 12 or 13, what you want to know is you just want to know where this, how this works. You know, like, you want to know where babies come from. Like, and you want to understand why it is that your mommy's got a big, big tummy, and people keep telling you that a baby's going to come out. You want to know why your body is changing, why you've got hair growing in places that you didn't have hair growing.

But that as teenagers, we're moving into their late teenagers, 15, 16, 17, 17, 7. that kind of abstract knowledge, that knowledge in theory about where babies come from, becomes kind of less important than knowing how does sex work, how do you do it, like what does it feel like? And so for that information,

teenagers turn to each other. And adults, you know, particularly by the late 1960s, 1960s, are extremely concerned about this. They think this is just a breeding ground, for misinformation, that teenagers getting all kinds of bad information, that they, this is where lots of the myths come around. They're concerned that high rates of illegitimacy and venereal disease are coming from

the fact that young people, they don't fully understand how you get pregnant from sexual activity. So adults are very concerned about this. But for young people themselves, often this knowledge that they get from their mates is the most important type of sexual knowledge that they receive at all. It's the most important type of sex education that they receive. And that one of the things you find in the mid-20th century is that it becomes much more common practice for young people to talk to one another about their sex lives. So this is where you get the stories of, you know, how far did you go? Yeah. And, you know, there's always one person in your school who had sex with a load of supermodels

and at the time you believed it and it was just complete gibberish. Yeah, I remember all of that. you've been amazing to talk to, and I could honestly, I could keep going. I've got so many questions, but I'm going to have to wrap this up. But one of the things I do want to know is when you're conducting this research, like I can't imagine the ethics process, the committee that you must have gone through to be allowed to do this. But what was, from a research's point of view, and it sounds like you found out so much information, but what was the experience like for you as a historian to go and talk to all these people and be told these stories? Because they're quite intimate, well, are very intimate stories. And sex by its nature is inherently personal. And

even when I talk about the history of sex, people often disclose very personal things to me, either in person or via email. And it can sometimes feel like quite a heavy thing to take on. Like, I know this about this person. What was this process like for you on this huge scale of gathering this information? It was quite mixed, I think. So there's a part of me that think sometimes we're a bit precious about sex and that actually we assume that other people are more precious about sex than they actually are. And, you know, I think one thing in particular that was helpful to my research is studying the period that I do, so in particular the 1960s, there's this big narrative, there's this big story that people tell about sexual culture in the

1960s. So this idea of the sexual revolution or the permissive society in the 1960s. And And one of the things that that meant was that lots of my interviewees, they were aware of that concept. You know, it's in the press all of the time. Any time anybody talks about sex in the 20th century, they'll talk about the 1960s and the sexual revolution. And that gave them something to work off. So one of the things that would happen is that, so some people wanted to talk to me because they see themselves as the embodiment of the sexual revolution. So they were having sex at 15, they were taking part in orgies all over swinging London. you know, they want to put their story on the record as part of that, like, big historical moment.

They see themselves as part of that change. But there are other people. So in particular, so I conducted this research as part of my PhD, which I did at the University of Exeter. So most of the people that I was interviewing had come to live in Devon. And many of them had lived in Devon their entire lives. And part of their motivation for speaking to me was that for them, it was about setting the record straight, it was about saying, you know, here is this big story that everybody tells about sex

in the 1960s. And I'm here to tell you that in rural Devon, it wasn't like that at all. And so they had, like, their motivation for speaking was quite different. And I think, you know, sometimes we worry about researching sex that what you get is a kind of bias towards only sex positive people want to talk about sex. You know, only people who are super comfortable and open about sexuality want to talk to you about sex. sex. But my experience is that that's not true. People came to talk to me who had, you know, fairly ambivalent attitudes to sexuality. And for lots of people, this was just a kind of slightly amusing way to spend two hours on a Tuesday afternoon talking to this PhD researcher

about some stuff that they probably not thought about for a while. So in some cases, it wasn't particularly heavy. And I think we should be careful of somehow giving researching sex a more heightened status than researching, you know, other parts of history. The flip side of that, though, was I was conducting my research in the mid-2010s, and I submitted my thesis about a week, two weeks before the Harvey Weinstein story broke, and me too, kind of went viral. And one of the things that was heavy in the research was the sheer level of sex. assault and harassment and coercion that came through in women's testimonies. And that was something

that I think I had known, like if you had sat me down and asked me to think about it, I would have said, yes, I think this may be a theme that might come up in my research. And for the ethics approval, I'd had to indicate, you know, what I would do if people, you know, were to give disclosures about sexual violence. But it. It was all quite hypothetical. Again, this is going to pre-Me-to movement. And the second interview I did, someone disclosed, having been raped. And that didn't get any easier across the years that I was doing the research.

And it was quite tricky because people have very different feelings about those experiences and beyond the individual experiences about the culture itself. So in terms of thinking about cultures of coercion, for example, you know, one of the themes that comes out of this research into teenage sexuality in the 50s, 60s and 70s is that there was still very much this idea that boys, young men, would be the ones who, if we understand sexual activity to be on this hierarchy

that builds towards penetrative sex, that it was young men who, like the man in the relationship who would be the person pushing from one stage to the next. and that the only way that you would move up the hierarchy is because your boyfriend or your kind of male sexual partner would be the one to kind of indicate that this is what we're kind of doing now. So this culture of boys try, girls deny, was like underpinned these sexual cultures. And for some women, they found this problematic,

like looking back on their lives from middle age, you know, in the early 21st century, as they would be telling me stories about their sexual. they would articulate that actually this feels quite uncomfortable, this seems quite, you know, lots of them would say, you know, this isn't what I would want for my children or for my grandchildren. And yet others were very much of the mindset

that that was just the culture. And that's just how sex, that's just how teenage sex works. So as a historian, that was quite difficult to navigate. You know, there were things that to me felt quite heavy, but potentially they didn't to them. and making sure that you're not projecting your own set of values and your own feelings about the past onto your interviewees. Like, that could be really hard. Hannah, you have just been fascinating to talk to.

Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your research, where can they find you? So I am a lecturer at the University of Bristol, so you can Google me and find me there. And there you can find some links to blogs and articles that I've written. Thank you so much for taking the time to tell me. about this day. You have been an absolute revelation. It's been an absolute pleasure, thank you for listening. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets,

The History of Sex, Standle and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.