Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #110 Wednesday Martin Ph. D.

Episode Date: September 20, 2019

Wednesday Martin is an American author and cultural critic who writes and serves as a commentator on topics like parenting, step-parenting, female sexuality, motherhood, and popular culture. She is the author of five books and co host of the True Sex & Wild Love podcast alongside relationship coach Whitney Miller. We discuss an array of topics including bonobo sexuality, open relationships, her book Untrue and polyamory dating apps.    Connect with Wednesday: Website: http://wednesdaymartin.com/ Twitter: https://bit.ly/2kXb9pL Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wednesdaymartinphd/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzi_xRw8m-fPOddo5OXD3iA Facebook: https://bit.ly/2mt8KDX   Check out her newest book Untrue , Now in paperback :https://bit.ly/2m01mQ0   Show Notes| Sex At Dawn by Christopher Ryan: https://amzn.to/2kUf9aD She Comes First by Ian Kerner: https://amzn.to/2mnJKh6   Show Sponsors:   Felix Gray Blue Blocker Sunglasses felixgrayglasses.com/kyle (free shipping & 30 day risk free returns or exchanges)    Waayb CBD www.waayb.com (Get 10% off using code word Kyle at checkout)   Alpha Brain Golden Ticket Sweepstakes https://bit.ly/2m01mQ0 Get 10% off all foods and supplements at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/kyle/   Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on: Twitter | https://bit.ly/2DrhtKn Instagram | https://bit.ly/2DxeDrk Get 10% off at Onnit by going to https://www.onnit.com/podcast/ Subscribe to Kyle Kingsbury Podcast iTunes | https://apple.co/2P0GEJu Stitcher | https://bit.ly/2DzUSyp Spotify | https://spoti.fi/2ybfVTY        

Hey, pals. Today we have a very special episode, and it is with Dr. Wednesday Martin, who's a PhD, a phenomenal human being. She's become a very close friend of mine. She wrote the book Untrue, which, if you haven't heard, is basically a guide to female sexuality. It's kind of the female version of Sex at Non, which is a book that really changed the game for me and my wife. And this is a fantastic read. The reason I like this book so much is because of the fact that it doesn't necessarily need to change the way you live in terms of monogamy versus non-monogamy or any of that stuff. And we get into these conversations on the show, but it certainly gives you a broader perspective of what female sexuality is all about

and how that that's been mucked with and fucked with like many things thanks to the church and other institutions over the last few thousand years and uh it's just an incredible incredible podcast we get into a lot of cool stuff we talk about our similarities and differences between other great apes talk about bonobos and all sorts of cool shit on this show her book untrue just got released this week on paperback so if you want the cheaper version, get that paperback. It is fucking excellent. Of course, it's on Audible and I have the hardcover already. Definitely highly recommend that book to read. And after listening to this podcast, I'm sure you'll want to. We'll link to that in the show notes. There's a few ways you can support this podcast. One, click subscribe so you never miss an episode. Number

two, leave us a five-star rating and some cool, insightful ways that this show has helped you in life. And perhaps I will read one of those reviews on here and give you a shout out. Lastly, but definitely not leastly, please support our sponsors. They support the show and make it possible for me to travel to my guests and make this whole thing work. I couldn't be happier with the people that we have sponsoring the show right now. One of those sponsors is Wave. They are a fantastic CBD company. They use an all organic farm that's USDA certified out of Colorado,

and they use 100% solvent free CO2 extraction, meaning you get the cleanest CBD product available. If you go to wave.com slash Kyle, you'll get 10% off. Also, another great brand is felix gray they make some of the best looking blue light glasses i've ever seen blue light blocking rather you may not realize it but the average american blasts their eyes with bright screens for 11 hours a fucking day when you consider how much our day revolves around our devices it doesn't seem so crazy i mean i've got every apple device known to man. I can throw on these fucking glasses and I'm right as rain. Also,

we've got some amber bulbs and different things in the house, but the one quick fix across the board is to just throw on some glasses at night and not worry about it. Majority of Americans live with tired, dry eyes, blurry vision, and headaches caused by screens. This sounds familiar. Felix Grey glasses are for you. They filter out 90% of high energy blue light and eliminate 99% glare coming from your daily barrage of screens. Unlike other blue light filtering glasses, Felix Grey uses proprietary blue light technology embedded into the lens as opposed to a cheap coating that can easily chip or scratch over time. Don't go another day looking at screens without the help of some Felix Greys.

Go to felixgreiglasses.com slash Kyle for free shipping and 30 days of risk-free returns or exchanges. That's felixgreiglasses.com slash Kyle. And of course, we've got a whopper of a movement happening right now at Onnit. We've just sold over 1 million bottles of our flagship product, AlphaBrain.

And to celebrate that milestone, we wanted to do something special for you, the customer. So in the spirit of Willy Wonka, we're running the AlphaBrain Golden Ticket Sweepstakes. Inside each new purchase of AlphaBrain, you'll receive a golden ticket. Ooh, a special pass that gives you access to one of thousands of prizes,

including the grand prize experience and all expense paid trip for two to Onnit HQ in Austin, Texas. How to claim your prize, you ask? Each golden ticket will have a unique code on it. Just go to Onnit.com slash golden dash ticket and enter the code and fill in the entry form. You'll then receive a confirmation email with the instructions on how to claim your prize because everyone in this giveaway is an instant winner. Everyone. It doesn't matter. You buy a fucking bottle.

You're an instant winner. To learn more, go to on it dot com slash Kyle and buy a 30 count or 90 count. No, just buy the fucking 90 count. You know you're going to use this stuff. Get more bang for your buck. 90 count bottle of alpha brain to enter and add code word Kyle to save yourself 10%. Thank you guys for tuning in the show. I know you're going to love this one with Wednesday Martin.

Again, let us know your thoughts and your feelings. This one stirs up some emotions for people. There's a lot of stuff that happens when we start to rethink our history and rethink women's sexuality. Let us know what you think online, on the gram, on Twitter, at Kingsboo, and go to kingsboo.com, K-I-N-G-E-S-B-U. And you can enter your email for my all-time favorite supplement list. Thanks for tuning in, y'all. And get back to me after the show. I first heard you on Sex, or not Sex of Dawn, on Tangentially Speaking with Chris Ryan. Oh, Chris. Hi, Chris.

Yes. I love you. Chris, amazing dude. I got to go hunting with him in Hawaii. I love him and I love Casilda, his co-author. She's amazing. Yeah, they're great people. And it's a great book. It is a phenomenal book. And much like Aubrey, obviously you and Whitney went on his show, much like Aubrey, it's a book that changed my life. And not just because of the decisions that I've made since reading that book and reading yours, but also because it's a paradigm shifting thing to understand that the story we've been told of where we come and how we got here

is vastly different from what actually happened and where we are. So different. Right? Yeah. And I think of things like that, that they just, they're kind of like earth shattering where you grow up a certain way. I mean, even like Santa Claus. I was just talking to a friend about that. You know, you get to a certain point and you're like, Santa Claus isn't real. What is real?

What is real in the earth? What can I believe if I can't believe in monogamy and Santa Claus? What is left? You know what? I'm always so flattered whenever anybody mentions Untrue in the same breath as Sex at Dawn. Because I really set out to write Sex at Dawn for women. And then Chris and Casilda, being Chris and Casilda, not only did they let me interview them, but they were so supportive of Untrue. And so I love them for that reason, but mostly I love them for the contribution they made to crossing all this rich science and social science over so that people had access to it, which is exactly what I wanted to do with Untrue, mostly for women.

But I also wanted men to understand women and our sexual strategies and our evolutionary backstory of our sexuality, too. So thank you for that compliment. I'm honored. Well, there's so much here. Obviously, the book is littered with science in the best way possible. I mean, it's everywhere. It's at every turn. And you've interviewed so many experts. Yeah. So I was kind of having trouble deciding where to start, but I think we can, we have a safe bet to start with bonobos. Oh, I mean, who doesn't love bonobos? What are the differences between chips and bonobos and how are we like other primates?

That's a great starting place because we're starting with evolution and we're starting with the evolutionary backstory of human sexuality. So here's the deal. To learn about bonobos, I spoke to this primatologist named Dr. Amy Parrish, who for a long time we didn't know a lot about bonobos. Bonobos, relatives of chimps, they look like chimps, only they're a little bit skinnier, are only native to Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, where there's been all kinds of war and strife and danger for humans and bonobos alike. So for many years, it was too dangerous to go where bonobos lived. And so for many, many years, we didn't even know bonobos existed. And then we thought they were a kind

of chimp. And it was hard for primatologists to get in there and study them. Many primatologists believe that bonobos behave pretty much the same way under human care in a proper setting as they do in their indigenous place. So Dr. Amy Parrish, when she was in her 20s, presented some of her findings about bonobos. So you have to imagine she's 25 or 26 years old. She's really tiny. She's blonde. She has blue eyes. She's probably a person who, you know, thankfully she had the foundation of being raised by a feminist and she had a lot of self-confidence. But you can imagine that probably a lot of times in her life being diminutive and cute, a lot of people underestimated her. So she goes to this conference of primatologists. It might have

been 1994. And she shows these films of bonobos. And it's like watching the weirdest, most creative porn you've ever seen. Bonobo's doing it this way and bonobo's doing it that way. And a primatologist named Meredith Small basically compared it. She was there and she basically compared it to like watching Caligula. She was like, I just can't believe, you know, and she said, we were all stupefied. We didn't really know a lot about bonobos, let alone their sexual behavior. So bonobos, unlike chimps, resolve conflict by having sex. So if you provision chimps or they come across themselves

a cache of food, chimps will likely get into it violently. But if you present bonobos with the same cache of food or they come across it, in order to dispel tension, the first thing they'll do is they'll start having sex with each other, and then they'll get down to the business of eating. So that was a really big difference. But as Amy Parrish had observed bonobos, she had noticed some other differences other than the fact that bonobos used sex to dispel tension and create social bonds. She also noticed that when there was food, the female bonobos ate first. And she noticed that female bonobos are like almost hairless. They're getting groomed all

the time. So when you're grooming another animal, when an animal is grooming another animal, especially under human care in a zoo or something, they have more time to groom, little tiny pieces of hair get pulled out. So she noticed that the females were getting groomed all the time and that some of the females had this almost like Shrek-like appearance, except they weren't green.

But you know, just like almost no hair. She's like, that's funny, getting groomed a lot and the males and females lining up to groom the females, some of the females, and the males getting really no grooming love at all. So Amy Parrish, a trained primatologist, is thinking to herself, that's funny because usually the dominant sex is eating first and getting groomed the most. And in chimps, clearly that's the males. Also among chimps, males typically sexually coerce females. They commit acts of violence

against females. They commit infanticide against females with infants. And chimps are very clearly a male-dominant species. So Amy Parrish starts seeing what's going on with bonobos. And she says, this is not looking at all like chimps. Let me look at the veterinary records. Because I'm seeing female bonobos, like, kicking the asses of male bonobos. What's the picture? Let me get a fuller look at the picture. So like a good scientist, she looks at the veterinary records and she says, wait a second, something like over 95% of near lethal injuries are being committed against males by females. You guys, we're looking at a female-dominant species. And they're among our closest relatives. A lot of people say that bonobos and chimps are equally closely related to us. We share almost 99% of our DNA with them.

There's other science about muscle mass that leads some people to say that we're more closely related to bonobos than we are to chimps. So basically, we have this matriarchal hookup culture is as much a part of our evolutionary backstory and the story of human sexuality, as is the violent male-dominant practices of chimps in certain settings. We're now seeing that most of our chimp data come from Jane Goodall's work with that group of chimps in Tanzania. What other primatologists are seeing? And Michelle Bazanson and Allison McNamara. Allison is at UT Austin. Michelle is at Santa Clara University. They're primatologists, I know. They're actually now looking at the fact that even among chimps, if we look in different ecologies beyond what was happening

with the chimps in Tanzania, we're seeing a broader repertoire of behaviors. But what we know for sure is that bonobos are a female-dominant species. And why? How is it possible? What's going on that these females are able to coerce males, commit acts of violence against them? The females never, almost never have we observed males aggressing against females. If they do, they learn a lesson really quickly. There's very little documented infanticide as opposed to chimps where it's happening a lot. And again, females get groomed and females eat first. So when we look at all this, it tells us a very different story than we are used to telling ourselves about who we are. Okay, how do the females get this way?

Why are females on top? One of the hypotheses, and I subscribe to this one, is that one of the things that you'll see among bonobos is that often, because there's so much sex, a female might be solicited by a male and a female bonobo at the same time. And the way bonobos solicit is like a bonobo will put- Here we go. We're going to have to use this mic when you're over here. So a bonobo will put an arm around the other bonobo, and it means let's get it on. So imagine, you know, female over here. You're a female. Male over here.

The female will overwhelmingly choose the female. And many primatologists think it's been documented a lot. Simultaneous solicitation by a male and a female, more likely to go to the females, more likely go to the female. Bonobos have a very richly innervated, forward-facing clitoris, even more exposed than the human female clitoris, and larger. I have seen female bonobos just sitting there playing with their clits for minutes and minutes and minutes at a time. Very accessible, very pleasurable. So the notion that we're working with is that it's extremely pleasurable for them when they do what's called G to G rubbing, like humans might call it scissoring, although it's not always involving scissoring, but if you want a human analogy. So they're doing that rubbing together and it feels so good. When they

do it, they often shriek with pleasure and it feels great and it feels better probably than intercourse. So this good feeling and pursuing that pleasure allows females to intensify their social bonds with one another. And Amy Parrish, who identifies as a Darwinian feminist, calls this the bonobo sisterhood. And that the power base for these females is built by having sex because they're far from their kin. The natural power base for a female primate is, is she with her kin? Female bonobos aren't. They disperse from their natal groups at maturity, and they're in with this whole group of strangers. But they get busy with the other females. They get busy sexually.

And that is why female bonobos are on top. That's their power base. I love it. So this is a story about human evolution that we have not been talking about. And it's just as important as the chimp line of thinking, because a lot of people like to say we evolved for violence and warfare, and those are the chimp people. But we need to fold in this other part of our evolutionary origins. Yeah.

And even with that, some of the deb debunking of jane goodall's stuff was that even though they were in a natural environment by providing food and crates they were creating an unnatural circumstance for them to get that food so like that could in a sense be the reason that we were seeing warring over there's it could be that humans sort of messed with the context. Yep. Although I'll never cast dispersions on Jane Goodall, but yet that's possible. That happens at field sites. And the other thing that happens is that we tend to view animal behavior through the distorting lens of our preconceptions about masculinity and femininity. We tend to project that onto animals. So we live in a very specific culture where men still have more access to power and resources than women do.

And it is no surprise to me that especially before the great second wave of feminism or during it or in the years preceding it, that scientists, field scientists, would not be completely neutral in their observations and would focus on certain behaviors that kind of propped up a story about who men and women are that we had become comfortable with. So those two things seem to be going on. And that's why I think that, um, Alison McNamara and Michelle Bizanson's, um, paper is so important. People should read it. Late people should read it. I'll tweet it. Yeah. Well, we'll link to it in the show notes. Yeah. Um, one of the interesting pieces, and I know Chris talked about it in his book as well as you and yours is the differences

and similarities between our genitals and the other great apes. Right. And this blew my fucking mind. Like it cannot be understated. It cannot be overstated. Like it just, it really was one of the key cruxes upon which I was like, oh, this makes all the sense in the world. So two things about that. One is sperm competition, which you have to love primatology and evolutionary biology because these are fields where there's like a subfield all about sperm competition. And if you Google sperm competition, you can find the papers and the books and the focus on it. And the reason it's an important focus is that it tells us about reproduction and breeding strategies, which also tell us things about social behavior and social relationships, right? So Chris and Casilda

focused on testicle size, which is one thing that people like to focus on a lot. In Untrue, I'm more focused on, and that many people believe that testicle size can tell us whether a species spent most of their evolutionary prehistory being monogamous or non-monogamous, right? In science, we use the term, well, some scientists use the term promiscuous. I'm with Sarah. I'm with Sarah Hurdy, who's one of my favorite scientists. And she says promiscuous is a term without scientific merit. It's a word that we use to describe an individual who's having more sex than we think that individual should be having. It's a judgment.

It's an opinion. Yes, and it's usually a female, right? And it's a negative look. Right. But anyway, to get back to testicle size um yes so people like scientists study that because it tells us um they believe whether a species spent most of their time being monogamous or mating multiply Let's use that term rather than promiscuity. So, right. That's a whole fascinating sub-story to human sexuality. And, you know, there's so much contradictory data

about it. And, you know, there's so many arguments about it, about whether it's a good metric of anything. What does it really tell us? And people like to argue about it. In Untrue, I did get into that a little, but mostly I liked to talk about the anatomy of the clitoris when I'm talking about genitalia, because that is a really undertold story. And we only recently, honestly, it hasn't crossed over into the mainstream into the last five years. Our whole entire thinking about female sexual anatomy was untrue for decades and decades and decades. we say this too, but I like to say that we put a man on the moon, sent a rover to Mars, and mapped the entire human genome before we had any idea what got women off and why, because we didn't even know what the clitoris looked like until Helen O'Connell told us, right, this Australian urologist who was doing surgery,

and she kept being told when she was doing urological surgery on men, be careful, don't damage the nerve supply to the penis, right? That would be a catastrophe. And she said, oh my God, I won't. That would be a catastrophe. We don't want men to lose sexual sensation because we don't. And she was like, you guys, how do I protect the nerve supply to the clitoris? And they were like, what are you talking about? What? Did you say something, Helen? Helen, did you sneeze? That's a myth. What was that? So she set about to discover the anatomy of the clitoris, right? She went back and

she looked at archival drawings from previous centuries before we had forgotten what the clitoris was. She did autopsies. She had a look during surgeries. And she also finally got funding to do three-dimensional imaging. And, you know, not until the late 90s or the early 2000s really did the American medical community even hear about it. The actual truth about what the clitoris looks like is still not in some medical textbooks. I recently gave a talk in North Carolina, a bunch of highly educated female doctors, some of them were OBGYNs, and I held up my three-dimensional model of the human female clitoris. And I said, does anybody know what this is? Out of a group of over 120 women, three or four women raised their hand. One of them was the is the IT person. So there's no shame in us not knowing about the anatomy and physiology of the

clitoris, but it really tells us who we are as a culture that we're only first learning about this. And the clitoris really contains the narrative seeds of helping us understand who we are sexually, how we got here, why we want, why we want, why monogamy is hard for people, particularly for women, why women become bored more quickly in long-term relationships sexually than men do. So much of that, the clitoris can tell us so much about all of it. And we've only started to understand it. So if I'm feeling negative, I'm pissed that it's taken this long. And if I'm feeling positive, I'm like, oh my God, we're on the brink of a revolution of knowledge

and understanding about human sexuality because we're paying attention to female genital anatomy. And because of feminism. And because of sex positive activism online. And their ability to share information like this. You have podcasts, books, Audible. Yeah. You know, in the internet, of course. There's a whole new way to talk about sexuality because mainstream television

certainly has a hard time with it. They know, they don't want to hear about female infidelity. They don't want to hear about female sexuality. It's uncomfortable. Um, it's the Cheerios crowd in the morning. The kids are in the car. The kids are watching TV when mom and dad are watching the Today Show or whatever, not to rank on today. But, um, you know, you could say it about any big news show, national news show in the United States, they shy away from this kind of thing. So it's so wonderful that social media, podcasting, and all these other options and platforms are giving us a place to talk about female sexuality. Yay. Yay. So I think the point Chris was making was that larger testicles

and larger penis size and length would mean that you're more than likely not only having sex for pleasure, but you're having sex with multiple partners. Right. Well, particularly larger testicle size, because if we're talking about sperm competition and you're competing with another guy, maybe he was just right up in there, you want your sperm, you need more sperm. But not only that, some scientists believe that male sperm at the end of an ejaculation, there's a substance that can kill the sperm of other males. So based on our testicle size, some scientists argue, oh, we evolved to be something between monogamous and to mate multiply. And some people say, we definitely evolved to mate multiply. And some people say we evolved based on testicle size to be monogamous. Okay, let's look at the clitoris now.

Like, let's start paying attention to the story that female genital anatomy and the anatomy of female pleasure, what that can tell us, because we've kind of gone as far as we can with testicles, you guys. Still though, I don't wanna- Not that I don't love them.

I'm not gonna beat the dead horse, but I think if you look at like, a gorilla has 800% more testosterone than a human male. And they're polygamous. And they have very small balls and very small penises because they fight for it. Yeah, we used to say that they lived in harems. In harems. But we don't say that anymore.

But yes, right. So the males live with multiple females. Yeah, absolutely. So they're going to have all that muscle. They're going to kick some ass and then determine who's the top dog that gets all. They also just don't need, if you look through this lens, if you believe about, you know, the stuff about sperm competition and test size of testes. Right.

So the thinking is, well, they don't need a lot of sperm because here they are with the ladies. They've got their ladies and it's all good. And they're the silverback and so on. Okay. Meanwhile, you're a chimp and your female chimps will risk their lives to mate multiply. They will mate multiple males within their troop.

They will seek males outside their troop. Non-human female primates love novelty. One of the single most observable characteristics of the behavior of female non-human primates is a lust for sexual novelty. So if you're a male chimp, how big do your testicles need to be? Pretty big, right? So this is the thinking. We really need to add to the mix thinking about female genital anatomy and especially the clitoris and pleasure.

And what does that tell us? What can that tell us about males and females alike? Because females, female primates are the ones who evolved the clitoris, which is solely for pleasure, right? Testicles are functional. A penis is functional and for pleasure. A clitoris is just there at the end of the day to make you feel good. Why? So that you will seek out pleasure. How do you get it? Not from one male at a time. Sarah Hurdy likes to say that there's a disconcerting mismatch between a male primate capable of a single copulatory bout of maybe eight to 10 minutes on average and a female who requires 20 minutes of intercourse and thrusting to have an orgasm that way if she's capable of it. And that disconcerting mismatch is the place where the whole story is taking place. It reminded me of this book I read in college called She Comes First. Ian. Yeah, Ian Turner's book.

It was great because it shifted. They talked about that in there. Everybody read it. Five to eight minutes for men. And obviously, you can stretch that out if you've learned or you have experience. And then 20 minutes or plus for women. Right. So how do you create?

How do you fill the gap? Right. So his whole thing is you help her come first, and then it doesn't matter how long you last now thanks to ian we know that right yeah but the thinking is if you follow sarah hurdy's line of logic which many people have and which i do is that before ian's book long long before ian's book a female to get herself there she she knew intermittent reinforcement, which is the thing that makes you stay at the slot machine. You don't get it all the time. Intermittent reinforcement meant that females knew that once in a while they would hit the jackpot. They would have an insane orgasm or a multiple orgasm, the ultimate behavioral reward, right? How do you get to there?

Not by like copulating with one male and hoping for the best. By copulating with one male, he's done. You need 10 more minutes. You need to keep stimulating your clit. You go to the next male and then the next male and then, ah, great. They're not doing it because they're like, I'm going to improve the sperm quality I get. I'm going to confound paternity and have multiple males maybe thinking, oh, it's a good enough chance that it's my offspring. I'm not going to kill it. They don't do it because they're

depleting the sperm of their female rivals. They're doing it because it feels really good. If you want to understand human sexuality, you have to understand the tremendous force of the clitoris and the tremendous force of female sexual pleasure being one of the driving forces, I think, of the evolution of sexual and social behavior among humans. And it's such a different narrative. It's such a different narrative. When I was in college studying evolutionary biology, nobody told me, except Barbara Smuts was talking about it. She was one of the teachers at the University of Michigan when I was there as an undergraduate studying evolutionary biology and primatology. But other than Barbara Smuts and Sarah Hurdy,

who was not at the University of Michigan then, talking about females mating multiply, no. What people thought was the male just comes up and copulates the female. That was the language that I was taught. The male copulates the female. Fast forward, female field scientists, right? Women start to become field scientists. And there were enlightened male field scientists like Kim Whelan at Emory who say, wait, let's like look at the larger picture before the copulation. And Kim Whelan was like, let's take these rhesus macaques out of their cages. Because in the cage, it just looks like the females there,. She's like this. The male's like this.

And this is what's happening, right? For sure. That's what's happening. Because that's how males are. They just want to get up and get it and fuck. And females are just passively tolerating it. And then some female field scientists and enlightened male field scientists are like, well, let's see what happens.

So Kim Whelan lets the macaques out of their cages. And what does he see? He sees that there's a whole, to our eyes, crazy choreography in which the females are soliciting the copulations by tapping on the ground, by getting up in the male's face, by like pulling a certain face that macaques have this repertoire of facial expressions. The females, all female primates do for when they want to do it. Do they bite their upper lip and look down? They're like, do you come here often? Yeah. The CACs actually, I love how Daniel Bergner in What Do Women Want describes, and I quote him in Untrue, that the female and the CACs are desperately often trying to get the kind of

indifferent males to mate with them, to copulate them. They don't care that it's mating. They just want some pleasure. And they're sometimes on the ground, down on the ground, banging on the ground down on the ground banging on the ground what daniel uh describes as a morse code serve me sexually right now do it um there are other um non-human primate species in which the female will like uh try chase the male uh to get him to have sex with her slap him um just throw herself down in front of him and have a temper tantrum. And we have said that females of most species are coy and sexually retiring and not interested in sex. We are totally wrong.

And so we have misunderstood not just who men are, but who women are. I always like to say that when there is bad science about female sexuality, it affects men. Sarah Hunter Murray just wrote a great book about how we've used bad science to basically misrepresent men as dogs and they want to have sex all the time and they don't care about emotional connection. And what she found in her work was that, you know, a lot of men don't want to have sex all the time. Primatologists are finding that males of many non-human primate species are sexually very careful and kind of coy. Sperm depletion is a real thing. You know, Sarah talks about how a lot of men can't, you know, have sex. They don't want to have intercourse if they're feeling sick,

if they're feeling depressed, if they're not feeling connected. So it's really comprehensive, the effects that it can have if we stop with this untrue science about how women are. It can help men. It can help people who identify as neither women and men. It can just help with our cultural master narrative. I mean, which right now is just so fucking polluted with toxic masculinity and violence. You brought up such an interesting point that I hadn't really thought of until now in college. And I'm surprised they'll admit this, but in college, there was a lot of times where I

couldn't get hard for women. And it's because it was a one night stand and I didn't feel any connection to them. And there was nerves built around that because I didn't feel comfortable with them. And I'd had experiences where I was able to get hard and we'd have sex. And then I'd be like, just like, I didn't, I don't feel it. You know, like, I don't want to stick around. I don't want to talk to you now. You know, as opposed to like, if I actually had taken the time to build some level of connection and trust, then there'd be no issues and we could make it work. You can make it work, right? So this has to do with the fact that in our culture, we have really

reduced men's value to two things, your wallet and your dick. That's all you're good for. That's what this, that's what patriarchy does to men. It says you're only, you only count for anything if you're in the top of the top of the top with your income, your, your wallet. And you only count for anything if you have a big dick and you swing it around and it's hard all the time and you make women come because it's patriarchy is really lousy for gay men. Um, and, and, and everyone who's not a man at the very, very top, right? So you were feeling that. And you were also, you had been profiled. You had been profiled that you didn't want connection. You just wanted, if you're a real man, you just want novelty.

A new woman is like all you need to get you going. No, men are more complicated than that. And that science is untrue. Plenty of men need connection in order to feel safe and excited even. And plenty of women, if we look at the script of what non-human female primate behavior tells us across many species, plenty of women really, really need novelty and feel really deadened by too much intimacy, enmeshment, domestication. and women alike, whatever your sexual orientation or preference, we need to get this accurate science into people's hands and peel back the false science. And it will really set people free. But you experienced it firsthand, what it felt like to be profiled like that. Because you probably felt, did you feel like, wow, what's wrong with me? Like, God, I'm 22 years old.

What's wrong? I'm supposed to be like this. And I'm finding that I'm actually more like this. And I never had a problem jerking off. I had to do it multiple times a day. It was so horny. So like, why now, right? Yeah, I mean, we added in, I didn't really get into this with the performance piece, right?

Because bad science that says that men are these ever ready energizer bunnies without feelings. They're just more sexual than females. Monogamy is really hard for them. They just need novelty and variety all the time. That leads to a certain self-concept, but it also creates performance anxiety. So we've put men in this position in our culture by telling them,

you're all about your wallet and your dick. Those are the only things about you that matter. We've created a whole culture of performance anxiety among men. And part of it for many men is that they feel like they're living a lie. They're like, I know guys are supposed to be like this, but that's not how I feel. And that's not how I am. There's something wrong with me. And I mean, I dealt with that a lot with women that I interviewed. And when I looked at the social science about women struggling with monogamy, a lot of them were like, I'm not all cozy and good with monogamy. It's really hard for me. So again, back to that point, bad science is doing a disservice. Bad science about who men and women are sexually, it's harming all of us.

Well, let's get in. I mean, we've got a lot of ground to cover here. Okay. Let's get into... Let me just stop talking about social science so much. What are some of the similarities and differences in male and female desires? Because this was another piece that I was like,

I mean, specifically around sexual desire. And then I'll take it further with some of the talk for the issues on monogamy, like what people experience on different sides of the equation, because I found that to be very interesting as well. Okay. So the question was... Desire. What are the differences and similarities in desire? I mean, my friend Tammy Nelson, I mean, she wasn't my friend before I wrote this book, but she is now, wrote a book called The New Monogamy. And she looks at monogamy as a continuum, right? Everything from on one side, some people feel like some people's monogamy agreement or concept of monogamy is like, don't even look at porn. Like that feels like a betrayal of me.

Yeah, you're cheating on me if you watch porn. Don't look at another man on the street. That hurts my feelings and feels non-monogamous to me. And then in the middle, maybe you have people who are like, you know what, I get it. It's been a while. I get that you're interested in looking at other people. It hurts my feelings.

But, and then on this end of the monogamy continuum, right? We have people who say, oh, you can have sex with whomever you'd like as long as I'm your primary. We're the principal relationship. I'm going to, I'm good with that freedom. We're still monogamous because I'm your primary. So that's the monogamy continuum, right? So that's one of Tammy's big contributions. But I felt like another huge contribution she made to my thinking is that she summed up what so many researchers and experts said to me, which was, she said it so succinctly. She said, when we look at male and female behavior around, quote, cheating, unquote, and non-monogamy, what we see is the motivations are very similar.

We've been spoon-fed the steady diet of lies that men cheat because they want sex and women cheat because they want emotional connection. What Tammy and so many other people in the trenches with couples said to me was the same thing, was male and female motivations for stepping out or for saying, can we please revisit this monogamy agreement of ours are very similar. People want variety. They want novelty. They want adventure. And they want to balance it with security and safety.

Make no mistake, that balancing act is harder for women. We've been taught that it's harder for men. But emerging data, well-designed studies, longitudinal study after longitudinal study is showing us that that balancing act is hard for everybody but harder for women than it is for men. Yeah, it's interesting to say the least. I think, um, there was a piece that, that really started to ring true with me when I was thinking about this. I think you were

talking, let me see if I can pull it up. No, that's not it. Damn it. Why am I drawing a blank on it? Around desire. Oh, goodness. This is great. It'll come back. Or let's just sit here and wait.

I have all day. I'm just sitting at my dining room table. I don't know why I didn't type it in as a sub question. It was right there. Sorry. That's okay. Was it about men and women and monogamy? Yeah. So it is on Tammy's stuff.

So what it was is it was a question around because, look, I mean, I don't think either one of us have a, uh, we don't, I don't have a preference on monogamy versus non-monogamy. I don't have a preference on what people should do or shouldn't do. My whole point is that there is no right and wrong when it comes to this. Right. And the more we can open our minds, we can at least understand some options would be great, right? Just some options, giving people some options. And then having that softness to say, it's all okay. Just like if you believe in Christ and you believe in Allah, that's all okay. That's all okay. You're not a fundamentalist about monogamy and non-monogamy, right?

So with that, I wanted to get into some advice around this because clearly we have, from that research, we understand that. And this is a point that I make all the time is that it doesn't matter what you do. If you're polyamorous, if you're a swinger, if you're monogamous, every relationship is fucking difficult. So I want to get some advice around and specifically coming from Tammy Nelson and what you've read with her. How do you keep novelty and sexual adventure in a monogamous relationship? Oh, I love this question so much. Okay. First of all, you have to acknowledge that it's a necessary thing for men and women or people who identify

as neither, unless you're asexual, which some people are, and that's okay. And that's also normal. I always like to say we evolved as very flexible social and sexual strategists. So we just, it's normal for us to like a wide range of things, whether we're like obsessed with feet or we're obsessed with intercourse, or we just totally are asexual for a long period of time. All those things are normal. Okay, but what we really have to normalize is our really deep craving for novelty and variety and adventure when it comes to sex.

And new research by Marta Miana in Las Vegas, by Annika Gunst in Finland, by Kristen Mark in the United States, by Sarah Hunter Murray in Canada, by Dietrich Klussman in Germany. I could go on and on with a few more really well-designed studies. What we see from all of them is that when we put a ring on it, domesticate, when we get really close to a partner, when we institutionalize the roles, that dampens the female libido faster and more comprehensively than it does the male libido. So I've written about this a lot. There's a lot of resistance to this idea in spite of the great well-designed studies out there about it.

And that's because we've been taught, no, men are dogs. Men need novelty and variety. And women just want one guy to be with them while they're pregnant. And it's true. Women gestate and lactate and we're the ones who do those things. But it doesn't mean that the way we get there and keep it going for ourselves is just by being monogamous. So there's this wealth of data in this exercise showing us that women struggle with monogamy in a long-term committed partnership, especially if you're living together. Women who aren't living with their partners are generally spared this effect, which is interesting, right? That is super interesting.

Really interesting. about this, about Dietrich Klussman's study is just one of many that shows that female desire tends to drop between years one and four of a long-term committed cohabiting partnership. Whereas male desire tends to go down slowly, slowly. I believe Sarah Hunter Murray's study was either of nine years or 12 years that it was still pretty steady. If these men were having regular sex with their long-term committed partner, their desire was higher. And we used to be like, yeah, that's because men like sex more than women. But now recently, what Marta Miana, Esther Perel, Annika Gunst, Kristen Mark, Sarah Hunter-Murray, and all the other people whose studies I don't have time to mention right now are telling us and showing us is it's not that women like sex

less than men do. It's that women struggle more having sex with the same person over and over and over in spite of the fact that we've been taught the opposite about women, right? So we have, if you're a field scientist, you're like, how human women are actually behaving and what they're actually wanting versus what human women have been told for several generations now they naturally are and naturally want. That's the first piece. Everybody needs sexual variety and novelty and adventure unless they're asexual, which is also normal. Now, the second piece, let's normalize that women, in the aggregate, there are exceptions, tend to feel it sooner and harder than men do.

And the most important thing when you're saying, how do we get variety and novelty and adventure? Acknowledge that it's necessary and acknowledge that women are asphyxiating without it sooner than men are. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the relationship. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with your male partner. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. That's what I hear all the time. I see all these women blow up their relationships because they're sexually bored with their long-term partner. Even if they love him, they find things that make them mad about him.

They create pretexts to have an affair or to leave the relationship because the only thing available to women who are just being normal women when they want variety and novelty and adventure sexually, the only thing available to them in our culture is to blow up their marriage and be with somebody new or to cheat. Yes.

Okay. So now let's just talk about it. So we just talked about the most important thing to do is to normalize it and for guys to not feel like it's some kind of report card about how they're performing sexually or who they are, what kind of husband they are, what kind of wage earner they are, what their penis is like. It's not a referendum on that. It's a normal human woman being a normal human woman if she's a little bored after one to three years sexually. Now what? Okay, let's talk about it. Tammy's monogamy continuum comes back to us. And what we see is there are all kinds of solutions. Some people are not going to be comfortable saying, oh my God, it's not working out for me anymore.

We put a ring on it. Oh, by the way, Annika Gunn's study, they went back and looked at whether having kids had to do with women turning off in years one to three or reporting lower desire in long-term relationships rather is what Annika Gunn's study was about. And the preliminary analysis, kids had no effect on it. This is the way women in the aggregate are, whether they have kids or not, whatever's going on. Okay. Just bored faster, sooner. All right. But not

everybody's going to be like, you know what? I mean, clearly that means that I have to end my relationship and start a relationship with somebody new. Or clearly I just, I need to add some more partners to the mix to get what I want. Everybody's not going to be comfortable with that. So there are all kinds of places along the continuum to go. People get so annoyed with me when I say this, but some of the recommendations that you've heard a million times can work if you actually try them and execute them through the lens of variety novelty adventure. Lingerie is boring if it's an obligation. I have to do this to spice up my marriage. I have to do this because my partner, whether it's a woman or a man, likes this.

I have to. I have to. Viewed through the lens of novelty, ooh, I'm going to be an escort for my partner tonight. This is going to be hot. I want to do it. Only if you want that, right? Or I'm going to be like the, I don't know, the woman who's lost in the hotel and out in the hallway and her lingerie. And I have to knock on my girlfriend's, my partner's, my female partner's door and be like, whatever. I don't know what you're going

to do. If you can make it fun for you, if you can make it hot and you can hook into that novelty thing, see, I'm wearing this. You don't know me. I don't know you. We're strange. We're new to each other, right? There's that. Okay. Maybe lingerie isn't your thing. Porn can be a great thing. But when you're watching it, a lot of women tell me that when it's effective for them, it's because they're pretending that they're that woman getting fucked or going down, having somebody go down on them or fisted or whatever it is that they're into. They're pretending that they're another person or they're pretending that their partner is that other person. They're putting the novelty and variety into it. Yeah. Esther Burrell mentions that that's

one way you can introduce the other without ever having interaction. Without ever being so scared about another person being a wild card. We don't know what other people are going to want. What if you get with the third and like you're- Dig their hooks in and try to wedge themselves in between. Or just they get their feelings hurt really badly.

Or what if they're of reproductive age and they want to have offspring? Sorry, they want to have a kid. And, you know, that's all science on everything. And that blows up. Like there are a lot of wild card aspects to another person. How can you get like the total turbo charge of the third without it being literal? Just experiment with the third. Just the idea of the third. Many women have told me that just going on like a website and looking at escorts turns them on. I've heard that from women. Just imagining their male partner with an escort or their female partner with an escort or imagining that they're that escort. Imagining bringing the person into their marriage or their

long-term relationship. That can be really great for people. Going to a sex party doesn't mean you have to do anything. You can have a really firm agreement before you go. You could go to a strip club if that's your thing. A lot of, you know, female sexual fluidity is a real thing, especially in a certain age range. And so like, it doesn't mean that you're going to pick somebody up and bring them home with you. If you go to a sex party and enjoy that, or, you know, go watch an erotic dancer, a sex worker, whose thing is dance. These are all strategies and they're all like, can't we normalize them? Yeah. You talked about role-playing on your podcast, Wild Love, which is an amazing podcast with Whitney. It was one of the first episodes where you guys were talking about how, you know, like go to the bar and act like you've never met before and even take it a step further. Don't get ready next to each other.

Right. Don't. Like show up different. Grab a maneuver. Show up separate. I don't know. And then maybe take a little time if you go late and like scope out your partner and like see what your partner looks like through the eyes of other people. Ooh, maybe somebody's even flirting with your partner. How hot would that be? Or just seeing your partner anew, like you haven't seen her or him all day or maybe since the day before, I don't know. And like, wow, you just see them in a public place. You can't just walk over and have them. They're in this world with everybody else. And that can be really fun and exciting. Yeah. That can really work. And then yes, you can, then you can go further with the role play. I

mean, of course I love the DMs that I get from people now that I wrote Untrue. My husband's like, wow, Untrue just made our lives so much more interesting. Like the messages you get, I get great messages about all these creative strategies that people use. But a lot of women have been in touch with me saying that that one's really great. The role play of the stranger is very effective for a lot of the women who get in touch with me. Yeah that one's really great. The role play of the stranger is very effective for a lot of the women who get in touch with me. Yeah, I like that. You break up some of the familiarity. Let's talk about that for a second,

that over-familiarity is a big issue for women. And what are some of the ways we can avoid it? But just give some examples of what that is. It's everyday shit that people don't even think about. It's everyday shit, literally, like sharing a bathroom. So Marta Miana is one of my favorite sex researchers. She's at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and she wrote a wonderful paper called Why Did Passion Wane? And she did a qualitative study, but there's plenty of quantitative data about this phenomenon as well. But she decided, let me dive really deeply into this data about women reporting low desire in

long-term monogamous relationships. I make the leap and I call that boredom. A lot of researchers won't, but my job is to push it. So she spoke to, I believe it might've been 20 of these women for a number of years. They were women who were recruited to her study because they reported that they felt low desire for the long-term partner or husband. I believe they were all, all but maybe two were heterosexual, but they reported that it was distressing to them also, right? So these are women for whom their low desire in a long-term committed relationship was a problem. And she wanted to quantify it.

What exactly, sorry, qualify it. What exactly is it? What are the aspects of this boredom? So she said there were three and one was domesticity, right? Moving in together, being there, sharing a bathroom, being able to finish each other's sentences, enmeshment, right? Just really knowing your partner really, really well. Again, being able to finish each other's sentences, knowing every move sexually,

but knowing every move socially, just knowing the person really, really well. Ooh, we're taught, oh yeah, that sets women on fire. Like they're super turned on. They need to feel super safe. So they must love that. No, we hate over-familiarity and it's worse for us. I like to say that like, if you're a woman and you like leave your dental floss or use dental floss on the counter in the bathroom, like whatever, like are you wearing a a thong game on for your husband or your boyfriend? But if you're a guy and you leave your dental floss on the counter, beware. I also like to joke that, um, for men who say to me, like, what can I do? It's like,

if you want your wife or long-term girlfriend to be happy, consider moving out. It's kind of a harsh thing to say. Like Esther Perel once joked, I love that she joked to this woman who was just in this horrible conundrum of not wanting to leave her husband but not desiring him. And Esther Perel joked, like, maybe you should divorce him, you know, in her great accent. And she was kidding. But the point remains, and we know this from Marta Miana's work

and all the other work I've been talking about, the point remains that domesticity, which we have been taught kindles the flame of female desire, actually just throws water on it. And it's so counterintuitive to what we know about men and what we think we know about men and women that it's hard. Did I answer your question? Yeah, 100%. So there's a book that I read when I got into the fires of open. The fires of open. The fiery jaws of consensual non-monogamy i had the fire

lit under my ass to understand relationships better and so i got non-violent communication i also got more than two an ethical guide to polyamory great book and then the one that i'm going to talk about now conscious loving by kathlyn and gay hendrix and one of the things they talked about in the book as a critical piece for any relationship monogamousamous or not, is that great relationships have a period of connection and a period of separation. And that's something I never could put my finger on. But I was always like, by the end of this trip, I've been in New York now for five days. Like by the end of this trip, I'm going to be chomping at the bit to get home to Natasha.

Yeah. Right. Because I've had space. And when I have space like that, when I return, it's like fucking fireworks. We're having sex again for the first time in a long time. Right. There's some separation. Yeah.

And some novelty. You put some novelty and variety and adventure in there. Maybe she's thinking about like, what is Kyle doing? Maybe you're thinking about like, what is Natasha up to? Who's Kyle flirting with? Or like, did he do anything? Or I mean, this is the beauty of an open relationship. Some people have rules where they know everything. Some people have rules where you maybe don't know everything and you can project. And if you have a strong bond, that projection isn't going to crater you. It's going to excite you. You'll feel compulsive. Maybe your

person will even come home and tell you about an adventure that they had, and that will start things on fire again. But certainly just the separation can work wonders for the female libido especially. But guys too. Even if you don't get to travel for work, another point you brought up that I really appreciated was you don't have to sleep in the same room. Like I, I am a big dude and we have a king size in the guest room and a king size in the master room, but I still want more than half that king size bed. I'm big Natasha, but, um, you know, and, and when we sleep together, like sleep is sleep and reminds me of the Seinfeld episode. Like how did this get confused with this? You know, it's like, that's, that's just it. Right. Right. And you can make it hot. You can invite each other to

each other's bedrooms. Ooh. Yeah. Like you want to do a sleepover. Yep. And so that's what we, I mean, I do that. That's very fun. You know, we're not out of each other's beds every night of the week, but that's certainly something we employ at least a few nights a week and it really works. It really works. And then she's got her own bathroom and I have my own bathroom and we're getting ready in the morning. And you're keeping it separate. Yeah. It's so important for women, especially not to feel too enmeshed with their male partners.

We can't be too. Of course, we want to be sure of you that you're going to be there, help with the kids, love us, not fuck us over. Of course. But beyond that, then we need some excitement and adventure. And it can be an adventure to be in separate rooms with separate bathrooms. It's not an adventure like going to a sex party, but it's setting the groundwork for women to have this separateness that creates excitement and that is a festering ground for variety and novelty. You seem new to us again. And we're not like your dental floss. Forget it. It's over. It's over. I want a divorce.

All right. What are the parallels between good relationships, monogamous or poly? What do you find is like a common denominator, no matter what people are doing? A lot of people listen to this, if they're still listening, they're like, I'll never fucking try and open. That sounds like a headache. Whatever. I get it. Yeah. I love this question. Just to understand, everything takes work. Everything takes work. Everything takes so much work. This is going to sound so boring, but one thing that I have noticed about people in polyamorous or open relationships. Okay, so when we say open, the clinical definition of open for many years was like a don't ask, don't tell thing.

But that's not what you mean, right? Correct. was like a don't ask, don't tell thing. But that's not what you mean, right? So the definition of open being like, we can have other partners and we talk about it, right? And we have agreements about it or we have total trust about it. And once in a while we check in and say, is this a good thing or a bad thing? What do you think about this person?

Okay, that's what you mean by open. Because open used to mean you could do what you wanted, but the lines of communication were not open. You mean open in terms of your behavior and open in terms of communication. For people in that kind of open relationship and a polyamorous relationship, those people talk a lot. I have learned. I have watched them. I have spent time with them.

There is this wonderful psychologist I love named Mark Kaupp. I write about him in Untrue, and he works with polyamorous people a lot. And he said two really funny things. The first thing he said is, I had to get a bigger couch in my office because the thruffles and the quads would come in, and there wasn't enough room on the couch. But the other funny thing he said was, wow, these people process the shit out of everything. So if you're a person who's attracted to an open communication, open behavior relationship or a polyamorous relationship, it's probably self-selecting for a group of people who are interested in communication, working through interpersonal issues and problems, coming up with agreements. It's not just people who are really into sex. It's people who are like,

it's worth it. Having relationships with other people is worth it. And I have this, and I'm also interested in the whole cool thing that happens where we talk like crazy. So I have interviewed people and I've spoken to people like you who tell me like, we talk about things a lot. Monogamous people could learn a lot from poly and open people about having difficult conversations and not just getting up and walking away. I have like an avoidant attachment style. I am the queen of like, something's hard, like, but see ya. Whereas my husband has an anxious attachment style. And so he's the king of like, we're coming up against a hard issue in a discussion. Like, I'm feeling anxious. Like I need to be super connected to you. Whatever your attachment style,

if you're monogamous or if you're poly, communication is going to be more pleasant or less pleasant or easier for you, or there's going to be more window dressing on it that makes it a specific way. But what all those people have in common who are successfully negotiating open relationships is they're great at communication. It's so unsexy. You want to think like what they all have in common is they're just like so highly sexed, like their libidos are out of control. Or what they have in common is they're just like ballers. Or like what they have in common is they're badasses. They don't care what people think about them. No, untrue. What they have in common is they stick it out for communication. So fucking boring sounding.

So true though. And I think it gives them their novelty adventure variety thing when they're communicating well because believe it or not you're not becoming enmeshed when you're communicating with your partner really well you're just seeing like this person is a separate continent who is this person so anyway i think that's something monogamous people could really learn from poly people and open people. Talk it through, just sitting there, not getting up and walking away, not being too scared.

Having the conversations that you don't think you can have. Oh my God, in my 20s, only gay men were telling me, this was before there was even a word, consensual non-monogamy, and gay men were telling me like, you don't have to be monogamous with these men. Like just to have a conversation about it. It was not possible really at that time in the way that it is now. So I hope people will have the conversation about it and we'll have the like difficult, uncomfortable, sexy conversation about what your partner really wants when it comes to monogamy.

That's something that Tasha and I always had because we we were friends when we first met I was in a different relationship and we just remained friends and then when she found out I was single then we started flirting a bit more but we would always talk about our our partners and previous partners so that was something that was always shared which ruffles a lot of feathers and then uh for a lot of people and a lot of men want to know that you're the only one that they've ever had that. And it's like, bro, if she sucks dick good, she didn't learn it from you. Like, like, let's, let's, let's give praise to the previous people that have helped us

along the path and turned us into the sexual beings that we are now. You're right. Men are not allowed. Yeah. Men are like put in a narrow lane about that. Right. Like a lot of men feel like they're supposed to feel very competitive about that and be the only one. And the person's supposed to be like a virginal, a term that I'd like to see canceled. Yeah. They're like, yeah, that. Right. So you guys kind of did the opposite. You told each other, you're saying you told each other

sexy stories. Yeah. We were always there. And even from like, like fantasy stuff, I want to do a better job of being more like Chris Ryan and less like Aubrey when it comes to discussing my personal on the podcast. I guess I'm a habitual line crosser in some of the details that I've given, you know, to the masses. But I can say this without flinching, you know, one of the details that I've given to the masses, but I can say this without flinching. One of the things that we would always do is when we're talking dirty to each other, we would role play instantly in the moment. Oh, that's a connection. Yeah. I'm in the old West and I walk into a saloon and I go upstairs. I've never heard a saloon fantasy. I'm loving this.

You've been taking man after man all day long. And I just ordered three shots of whiskey. I've been on my horse all day. Yep. And now it's my turn. And I kick the guy out of the room who's in there before me and take you. Right? Like shit like that. I mean, this is just like one example.

This is one example of thousands. Yeah. But I mean, how... That's really cool that you guys... It's instantly fresh because our imaginations as humans are fucking awesome if we fan the flame. So many people say that the sexiest organ in a person's body is their brain.

Come on, back to the fact that we evolved as highly flexible sexual and social strategists. And it's the reason that we're here and like homo or gaster is not and homo sapiens is because we have this flexibility. God, use it. What you're describing is such a great adaptive strategy when it comes to being in a relationship with somebody that you've had sex with repeatedly. It's a great strategy for the first time with somebody. I know. I think that talking dirty, as we call it, I don't know, I think we should call it something else, like being brilliant. But I think it's one of the

greatest skills. If only we actually taught sex ed in this country to children, first of all. And then, like, I would like to see universal sex ed in this country for adults. And, like, brilliant talk would be, like, on the syllabus. It's got to be in there. Oh, my God. The number of relationships that that has saved. And people tell me, it's so funny. I hear everything from people. I love it so much. It's such a privilege. But one of the things that I've heard is that

people say when they're into that and they find another person who can keep up or a person who's not into it and then picks it up, it's so gratifying and it connects so well. So right, I was talking about communication and I said, it sounds boring, but it's not.ifying and it it connects so well so right i was talking about communication and i said it sounds boring but it's not and you're showing exactly how it's not boring talking dirty is one of the greatest most evolved forms of communication in a relationship it's about trust and like feeling free to go there like for somebody to free you up to have those fantasies in your imagination and then talk about them. Ooh. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And in the moment. That's communication, people. Dirty talk is communication. Communication isn't just like, this is how I feel. All the hard conversations.

This is how I feel. All those still exist too. All those are important too. I think one last point on communication. When I read more than two in Ethical Guide to Polyamory, they went through just like you did. They talked about open relationship. They talked about swinging.

They talked about polyamorous. And the book is largely on polyamory. They said the one thing across the board that's true. We got some construction going in the background. It's a lawnmower because here we are in Hamptons. Mow those lawns. Mow those big lawns. Mow those big lawns. Mow those big green lawns.

The one thing they said across the board that they know for certain doesn't work is don't ask, don't tell. Yes. And that was very telling to me. Very telling to me because you sever the cord of communication. So in Untrue, there's something else you're doing too. In Untrue, one of the things that I wrote about was going to the STAR, the Sex Therapist and Researchers Annual Conference. I went to one in Philadelphia and one, I went to two. One was in Philadelphia

and one was in Toronto. Actually, I went to three. Anyway, who cares? The point is that at STAR, Terry Conley did a whole talk on consensual non-monogamy. She's an awesome psychologist. She used to be at the University of Michigan. Not sure where she is now, but if you're into CNM or thinking about it and you want to read the research, read Terry Conley's research. So she did a presentation in which she summarized

her own research and the research of others, including Amy Morris. And she talked about exactly this. She talked about, she was looking at monogamists, people in don't ask, don't tell relationships, and people in polyamorous relationships. And what she found was that who reported the highest level of jealousy? Monogamists and people in don't Ask, Don't Tell. Who reported the lowest levels of jealousy? People in poly relationships. Who reported higher levels of sexual and relationship satisfaction? People in poly relationships. Why?

Communication was part of it, but the other part of it is feeling that you're part of a community. If you're monogamous, you don't have a community. You have the whole world. That's not a community. If you're in a don't ask, don't tell relationship, you're guarding a secret, and it makes you feel shut off from other people.

But it also means you don't have a lot of people to talk to about it. If you're Polly, fuck. At Open Love New York alone, you have like, we're doing Polly board game night. We're doing Polly movie night. We're doing Polly cocktails. We're doing Polly chai for those of you who don't drink. Thank you. I love Polly chai.

We're doing this. We're doing that. We're going on a field trip. We're going to an art museum together. These people. We're doing this. We're doing that. We're going on a field trip. We're going to an art museum together. These people- We're doing acid in Central Park. Whatever. Just me? Just me?

Okay. And then they're connecting with people in other Polly groups across the country, right? They have a community. And that's really important for relationship satisfaction. And so it's not just the communication, it's the community. Okay, this is what I learned when I came to see you guys in Austin.

It wasn't just you and Natasha. It wasn't just Aubrey and Whitney. It wasn't just the people in that room. You guys had built a community of people. You called them open relationships. They weren't always poly relationships. You were a group of consensually non-monogamous people who had built a community for yourselves. Oh my God, we had like, you know, we had like aphrodisiac dinner and aphrodisiac cocktails and you all

knew each other and you all introduced me to all of yourselves. But it was clear that you have built a community. If you are going to be in an open relationship, you need a community, because the world will shit on you. They will tell you you're pathological. You will go to shrinks who tell you that there's something wrong with you, with your upbringing, whatever. Whenever you feel that, just go read the work of Amy Moore's. Go read the work of Terry Conley. Go read the books that you recommended. Come read Untrue and find your community because that's going to be really important if you're in a stigmatized subculture. And let's not forget, consensual non-monogamy was brought to us. Well,

it was brought to us by a lot of people, including like romantic poets and then transcendentalists and then hippies. But especially for me, I'm always so grateful to gay men. Dan Savage talks about this a lot, about how gay men, a stigmatized minority, brought us consensual non-monogamy. And they like gentrified it for us. Like they gentrified Chelsea and the West Village and the Upper West Side and San Francisco. Thank you, gay men. Love you every day. But they gave us consensual non-monogamy. And yet, even though it is now entering into the mainstream, we are so married to the dyad that if anybody is in a triad or a quad, or even if a person is in a dyad, but having adventures with another person or other people, that person is going to have it heaped upon

them. A lot of judgment. Community, so important. I love it. I got one last question for you. Just touched on it. Open Love New York. Where can people find things like this?

Do you have any recommendations? You mentioned a couple of apps for me in particular. Oh, yeah. Okay. It depends on what you're into. So in Untrue, like all my books, I do a mashup of things. I interview experts. I interview actual just regular people. And I review a lot of studies. And then I do fieldwork, right? So my fieldwork for Untrue. So when I wrote my book, Primates of Park Avenue, my field work was I hung out with rich moms. For Untrue, my field work was I went to these parties called Skirt Club, which are sex parties for women only. And a lot of those women are in long-term committed relationships with men. For field work, I went to an all-day workshop on consensual non-monogamy that Mark Kapp did for other shrinks to help these shrinks understand what it is to work with couples in open and polyamorous relationships.

And I went to discussion groups and cocktail parties that Open Love New York does. And they were so nice to me. Misha Lynn and Chrissy, I always blank on Chrissy's last name, but they had really taken a beating in the press and been misrepresented. And in spite of that, they welcomed me. And I really wanted to honor my commitment to them to write fairly about Open Love New York.

So Open Love New York has a monthly cocktail party. They have, like I said, they have like board night in the winter. They have poly chai if you don't drink. And they have these great discussion groups. They discuss books. Chris Ryan and I did a talk for the people at Open Love New York. More than anything else, what Chrissy and Misha did is they made Open Love into a community. So Open Love New York is a community. And people can find support. They can find a book recommendation.

They can find a person to talk to when they feel jealous. What do I do with this? They can find a person to help them understand compersion. They can find a person who's been through what they've been through. Or if you're new to it, you can talk to people, connect with people who are doing it and normalizing it for you and showing you, yeah, this can be done. So I love, I just love Misha and Chrissy for their passion. They've been at this for many years. Misha's so funny. She transitioned from a male to a female identity. And she told me when I interviewed her, I just felt like I was already wet. I might as well just

totally throw myself into the river. I've transitioned. Now let me just see what I really think about dyadic relationships. Oh, I'm not that crazy about them. I'd like to be polyamorous. So she and Chrissy have both walked the walk and they're there to support people. And I have often when people say to me, oh my God, please help me. Like I'm beside myself. I live in a small town. My partner and I are polyamorous. We're just getting so much shit. We feel bad about ourselves. People are, we need a community. Open Love New York has been able to help them. So I don't want to put an undue burden on Open Love New York, but I do want to say that I think it's a really wonderful resource and people need community so badly. It's like, it's like being a, like walking on the moon or being the person who's breaking trail, literally on a trail. Trailblazing.

Yeah, trailblazing or being a pioneer. You can feel so lonely. And so these resources are just incredibly important. The only one I can endorse is Open Love Near, because I've personally spoken so much with Misha and Chris. Okay. How about if you're not polyamorous, but you're either single or you are open to where you're allowed to have sex with other people? What is the good hookup side? Oh, yeah. Oh, you want to talk about this? Yeah. Let's talk about the apps. Yeah. Let's talk about this. Okay. So yeah, I get to know so much cool stuff,

much of which I can never act on. But so Pure is an app that a lot of women told me about. The first person who told me about Pure is my friend, Bryony Cole, who's like a sex tech goddess. And Pure is an app that your photo and what you're looking for disappear after an hour. Pure connects you to people maybe a mile away, maybe a block away, maybe in the same cafe where you're sitting. And they want what you want. Do you want to just hook up? Do you want to maybe have a relationship? Do you definitely want to have a relationship? What are you looking for? You can say it and it disappears in an hour guess who's really into pure women people who develop pure my understanding is that they were not expecting so many women to be using pure know why they like it are the cicadas we have really loud cicadas oh yeah you

said that we didn't have good cicadas yan. I thought you had some Yankee cicadas. Nothing compared to the Austin cicadas. We got some loud-ass New York cicadas outside. Do you want me to say what I said over again? We can keep going? Yeah. Okay. You know why? It disappears.

No slut shaming. No footprint. No stigma that you could get on, say, I don't know, Tinder or whatever else. Okay, so pure. If that's your thing, if you purely want to hook up and you want it to disappear after, you'll be on there for an hour and then it's gone. A lot of people in their 20s and 30s wrote to me and told me about something called field. I think it might be F-E-E-L-D or maybe

it's F-E-L-D. Sorry that I don't know. We'll figure that out. I'm not sure exactly. I just know that a lot of people use it. A lot of people who just want to hook up use field. Do we even say hook up anymore? I don't even know. Wow, I really need to be, just people need to come to my DMs and tell me if we still say hookup. Do it right now, please help. I'm 53. What else? Well, there's Tinder, right? People really, I don't know, love it or hate it. It's really popular. A lot of people use it. And I think people as an ecological niche, what fascinates me about Tinder, I'm writing a piece about this for Refinery29. I have a column in Refinery29 called Sex Actually. And I'm writing something

about these apps. But it is such a rich ecological niche. You have such a huge range of ages, preferences, orientations, what people are looking for in terms of a relationship or just hooking up. So there's another resource for people who want to use an app. And then there's Bumble, which sort of markets itself as a feminist app. I have had women get in touch with me and say that they feel like Bumble is not serving women who just want to hook up. We know that some women do. Women love variety and novelty and venture. They need it even more than men do in the aggregate. So I have heard from some women telling me, I wish Bumble would be more friendly to women who want NSA or just a pure hookup.

And then there's, oh, this is interesting. There's a new app for if people are into MILFs and GILFs. There's a new app called Lumen, which is for women 50 and older. I'm going to try that out for my Refinery 29 piece that I'm writing. I mean, I'll just, I'm not going to try it out. And well, anyway, you know what? I don't care what anybody thinks. But so there's that. So because some people, again, we evolved as really flexible, sexual and social strategists. So like one of the one thing that happens is that there are people who are into all kinds of things, including some people are really into older women.

So Lumen is there for women who want to get it with somebody who's a peer or younger or older, but it's also there for people who are into women in that age range. So those are the ones that I'm aware of. I'm sure I'm woefully ignorant in a lot of ways, but those are the ones that people that I interview tell me about and that they're excited about. Hell yeah. That knocks that question out of the park. Buy the book, Untrue.

We'll link to it in the show notes. It's on Amazon, but we'll have a link up for you guys. Listen to Wild Love. True Sex and Wild Love, my podcast with Whitney. And Untrue is available in paperback as of September 17th. Awesome. And then where can people find you on social media? On Instagram, I'm WednesdayMartinPhD. And on Twitter, I'm WednesdayMartin. Awesome. Thank you so much. Not on Facebook anymore. Thank you, Kyle. Fuck Facebook.

I love you. Thanks for having me on. Thank you. Thank you guys for tuning in to today's podcast with Wednesday Martin. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Please hit us up on Twitter and Instagram at Kingswood with any questions related or not related to the show. Happy to answer any and all of your questions.

Hope you guys enjoyed this one. And as always, remember 10% off all supplements and food products at on it.com. Don't forget, we got this awesome golden ticket sweepstakes. So make sure you buy a 30 or 90 count bottle of alpha brain and you'll get a golden ticket for yourself and possibly I'll be seeing you in Austin.