Love Lives - Sophia Smith Galer on sex myths, virginity and virility

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

This week, we’re joined by Sophia Smith Galer, a multi-award winning reporter, TikTok creator and now author. Her TikTok videos have garnered more than 75 million views. She discussed her debut book, Losing It: Sex Education for the 21st Century, which is all about busting the myths about sex we were taught at school. From virginity and virility to consent and porn, the subjects covered in this chat are wide-ranging. This episode was recorded during a live event held at Waterstones Gower Street in London.https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/lifestyle/ex-virginity-education-sophia-galer-b2083460.htmlCheck out Millennial Love on all major podcast platforms and Independent TV, and keep up to date @Millennial_Love on Instagram and TikTok.If you, or someone you know, have been affected by child sexual abuse, call Childline on their helpline for children and young people who need to talk. Phone: [phone]The Victim Support helpline provides emotional and practical help to victims or witnesses of any crime, whether or not it has been reported to the police. Phone: [phone] (24/7)Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/millenniallove. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. This episode of Millennial Love contains themes that some viewers may find distressing. Hello and welcome to a special edition of Millennial Love, a podcast brought to you by The Independent on everything to do with love, sexuality, identity and more. This week I was very excited to be joined by Sophia Smith-Gaylor, the amazing journalist and TikTok extraordinaire and author of a new book, Losing It, sex education for the 21st century. We spoke about all things to do with sex and the myths that we were taught about it at school and how they affected us personally and professionally. We spoke about all things to do with sex and the myths that we were taught about it at school and how they affected us personally and professionally. We spoke about Me Too, boundaries, consent, all sorts of things and so much more. I can't wait for you to hear it.

We recorded this episode live at Waterstones in Gower Street in London. I hope you enjoy the show. Hello everyone, thank you so much for coming. I'm very excited to talk to Sophia about her brilliant book, Losing It, Sex Education for the 21st Century. So I'm not sure how many of you have had a chance to read the book, so I'm going to start off by passing off to Sophia to tell us a bit about what it's about and how it came to be. So that's a long story but I'll try and keep it short. Losing It is all about the dispelling the sex myths that continue to rule our lives and the idea is that every chapter addresses a sex myth. It who endorses it perhaps how influential it is

or the harm that it causes and then i talk to everyone from medical experts to sex therapists to normal people who do or don't have sex and i ask them you know why how why not um and lay lay the case for what the fact-based true story is that we should be telling about sex so that's what it's about and did you always want to write about sex education and when did you kind of realize that this was something that had been percolating in your head for a while but you actually thought this could be a book and this is something I want to percolating in your head for a while, but you actually thought this could be a book and this is something I want to turn into an actual product and really explore a bit deeper.

I came up with the idea for the book and then I Googled it. Because also when you do a book proposal, you have to kind of say in it why the book should exist and who the sort of competitors are on the market. And I was like, no one has written something that sort of debunks or addresses sex myths in this sort of journalistic manner um even about virginity like the first chapter I address you either find psychologists right about it or the odd historian I I've there's nothing written for the lay person in a journalistic manner that kind of interrogates things and and holds people to

account holds the people who need to be held to account um so yeah that's yeah I agree with you I think all of that stuff sex education traditionally it's all kind of buried in like an academic book somewhere in the back of a library it's never really been something that is as accessible as it should be and as it is in the book and I think there are so many ramifications of that which you know people our age have really felt the consequences of having grown up with such shoddy sex ed at school which we'll get on to. I guess initially I want to talk to you about how you mapped out the book because it's all about dispelling the different myths as you talked about. How did you choose which myths you wanted to focus on and did they all come to you quite quickly?

The book began thinking about the virginity myth. So, and the reason it begins with that is because that is how our sex lives often begin. We begin with the earliest ideas that we are told about what happens when you enter sexual maturity, what is expected of you when you enter sexual maturity, all these ideas. It's kind of the, now we talk about like origin myths for like villains and films, it's the origin nasty myth of lots of other sex myths that unfold from it. So once you explain the virginity myth and the harm that it causes, that's how the rest of the book charts itself. So I begin with that original idea that the idea that our sexual activity somehow connotes a value and makes us vulnerable to

judgment from others when we allegedly live in a world in which we enjoy sexual liberation and sexual freedom, and we should not be judged for that. We're supposed to live in a world in which we enjoy sexual liberation and sexual freedom and we should not be judged for that. You know, we're supposed to live in a sex positive world. That obviously is not the case. And we do not all have access to that sexual freedom. When I think as well about if you start believing in those things, you may possibly look for other myths that endorse that.

For example, the next myth is the hymen myth, which is so closely wound to the virginity myth because people who not only endorse the idea that if you've never had sex, it means something, or if you have had sex, it means something else. You may also find yourself endorsing the idea that someone who, a woman who has a sexual history, it is writ into her anatomy and it simply isn't the case. It's complete pseudoscience. Then the next myth comes on, the tightnessness myth again linked to it the idea that women who have had um women who are sexually active um that it is reflected in your vaginal laxity somehow again this is a myth however it is endorsed by a lot of people who want to make a lot of money from you

um and then it easily fell through to the penetration myth. So looking at relationally, how do we actually define sex? And this is also caused and present in the virginity myth. Because lots of us are encouraged to think of a first time experience as that one time, not a set of experiences. And we are likely to consider it as the first penetrative moment. And obviously, if you start endorsing or scripting sex to everyone as it has to be penetration, you start really excluding a lot of people, you start excluding people with disabilities, you start excluding the whole LGBT plus community basically, you also start excluding female pleasure and female capacity for clitoral stimulation. So they all very neatly kind of happened. And then the virility myth for me leads on from the

penetration myth because the idea that the pressures that are put on men, especially heterosexual men, to initiate sex and to be sexually prolific. And I kind of chart what happens when men feel like they don't fulfill this role. What are some of the harms that are caused by it? The last two chapters, I guess, are a bit slightly more broader, pulling away slightly from direct conversations about the body. And they look at asexuality and they look at sexlessness. So people who may choose to identify as celibate, for example, and the great misunderstanding that people like, how could you not want to have sex? Like sex is natural. Everyone wants to do it. And it's it's like no that's not that's not actually the case um and there are a lot of people who are confounded by that um confounded

to the point as i chart in the book how um poorly treated in in many regards the asexual community are from everything from being pathologized to being abused not only even by straight people but by people in the lgbt plus community that they see themselves as part of this is very very isolating experience sometimes um and last chapter consent is like the thorny one it's it's probably the most kind of um well i feel like when we talk about sex in the media it's the zeitgeist to talk about consent um and for many people's current experiences of sex education in schools, it's exactly the same thing.

You know, they're presented with special consent workshops in a way that they aren't presented with special workshops about other areas of sex. And of course, it can come across, what I really found is how often it comes across as pretty sex negative, putting forward consent as this binary of you either say yes or

say no and we'll teach you when to say yes and when to say no good luck go forth um and that simply is not the reality of sex that's not necessarily the reality of beyond sex think about the coercive or non-consensual experience we go through every day and looking at street harassment as a consent issue that should be addressed more in schools looking at normalized coercion in relationships that may have nothing to do with sex itself but is part of the power dynamics and gender dynamics that we should be taught a lot more about so that's how it kind of and then I after I've done all the myths um I have a chapter that's on the future of sex and it looks a little bit at modern sex educators who are doing really incredible things the obstacles that they're facing um some interesting

things in tech as well um yeah so Yeah, so that's how the book. I think that's important to look at that at the end as well, because it's so easy to come away from these things and think, God, it's all so bleak, isn't it? But there is a lot of change happening. And, you know, thanks to people such as yourself, there is progress being made and in technology and in all of these areas. And I think one of the main things we can do to push forward that change is to just have these discussions that we're having this evening

and hopefully that people will have after they've read your book. Let's go back to the virginity side of things first, because I want to talk a bit about language and the importance of that, which you write about in the book. And I think it's so interesting, like the idea that the terminology losing your virginity in and of itself presents sex as a really problematic thing from the get go. And that's the kind of terminology that we were conditioned with growing up. And like you said, it's also incredibly exclusive. Tell me a bit more about that and I guess how that influenced the title of your book, which I'm guessing it did. that influenced the title of your book which I'm guessing it did yeah uh it's supposed to be like a deeply entendre like because um losing it will probably instinctively make some people think

about having sex the first time losing your virginity um I write losing it there to be like we need to lose concepts and myths such as that in and of itself um yeah I have a bit in the in the virginity chapter where I explore how the language that we use around virginity in English and in other languages reflects the myths we believe in. So even in, so in, if we take English, for example, losing your virginity, popping or busting a cherry, if we think of some of the idioms that are used around virginity that's another reason why i have a cherry here but um i deliberately asked for a maraschino cherry not a cherry cherry you know not a like raw cherry as well um because i wanted it to be like fake saccharine sugared um just like these myths are It's like a consumable good, perishable good

for one-time use. If we look at other languages, I remember in, I had like a follower who speaks Urdu tell me how the verb that was used, there are kind of different ways you can say loss in Urdu and the word was about used when you describe things that are lost forever. Swedish, someone said it's similar to drop, like you drop it as if you could pick it back up again, which I thought was quite funny. But even in Arabic, kasra, you break your virginity. And in Arabic, we find a lot of, there's a lot of problematic language in Arabic used around sex. So, for example, in the hymen myth, I explore how in Arabic, the word hymen is ghisha al-baqara, and that literally means virginity membrane so if you are trying to educate

people that actually um there is no way you can tell somebody's sexual history authoritatively and definitively from a hymen examination it's very hard to persuade if it's called virginity membrane um because that's how the word has been associated arabic is not the only language that does this um and what's really really cool and i raised this in the last chapter um in swedish they had the same problem madam sinna was their word for hymen also meant virginity membrane and uh the sort of sex education authority in sweden did a whole program to try and replace that word with slidcrans uh which means vaginal corona this was before the coronavirus pandemic so unfortunately but corona means crown um and

that's far more that's far more representative of what the hymen actually is, which is normally a tiny pointless piece of tissue with no known biological purpose. But it's normally kind of ring-shaped or crescent-shaped. And the idea of it being crown-shaped is quite empowering. It's a sort of far more positive image. But the issue with the verbs and the nouns used in Arabic is that there is the idea that membrane, it's like a seal. And again, that's wrong. It's not a seal. If it were a seal, women would not be able to menstruate. a seal. If it were a seal, women would not be able to menstruate. It is literally a ring of tissue kind of around the opening. And so kásara, to break it, the idea is that when you have sex the

first time, it is broken. And we know that that's not necessarily reflective of what actually sort of biologically occurs. It's wild how much misinformation there is around this stuff. And obviously, I think it does mostly affect women, I think. You know, even something as simple as I have friends who last year didn't realise the difference between the vulva and the vagina. And it's things like that that it's wild that we're not taught about that at school. 46% of Brits can't, do not recognise or understand that women have three holes. 37% of Brits would mislabel the clitoris on a diagram regardless of gender. We often, it's often a joke and I talk about this in the virility myth that we make a lot of jokes about men. I notice

it's a very, you know, female heavy audience. So that's why I'm bringing it up, especially because it's not spoken enough about, especially I would say in heterosexual female spaces, there is a need to be kinder to men. But all the jokes that we make fun of men about, including that they can't find the clitoris, actually a lot of women would not know where the clitoris is as well. And we all have to be a bit kinder to each other because uh who here would have been shown a diagram of clitoris in any lesson not only sex ed but biology I wasn't no definitely not absolutely not let's talk about the tightness myth that you mentioned earlier because this is also something that again I only

really thought about fairly recently when I was writing my book which and aside from the biology side of it there's also the the logistical side of it because if you think about the slut shaming that we attach to that myth yeah which is based on the idea of a woman who sleeps around isn't tight enough why did we do that when a woman who is having lots of sex in a relationship is possibly having more sex than than that person do you know what I mean so it's like it's it's all of these ideas where do you think this comes from and how much how much can we blame porn because that's such an obvious uh you know angle to go down uh in the book I reference Amanda Montel, who in one of her books talks about how she actually talks about sex being...

Let me make sure I remember this accurately. The idea that we even call penetrative sex penetrative, how much of the language that we use around sex is male centric like male body centric phallocentric you could possibly say um and it was from listening to that and i thought oh my god that's that's so interesting and she talks about how obviously the history of uh documenting and printing pretty much anything for a very very long time rested in those who were literate and had access to printing presses and whatnot and historically this has obviously been skewed as over mail and then we've been able to balance the scales a bit but the it's very clear as you say that tightness is used as a way to advertise uh to try and get clicks

in pornography um it's how a lot of women will describe themselves on only fans in order to get like more people looking um but it is a word entirely used um for the male gaze, like the male online gaze and male offline gaze as well. It is a word that describes what heterosexual men would enjoy in bed. And it's not necessarily the word that you would use from a perspective, which is women's health informed, essentially. people with a women's health background or especially who have pelvic floor therapy specialisms like some of the people that i interviewed um if you talk about tightness with the pelvic floor they use vocabulary like hypertonic now i used to have a hypertonic pelvic floor this is something you see a doctor about um it's not it's not a positive thing to have a tight pelvic floor but because tightness means something else for the other the other partner involved

it's it's construed as a positive um in that chapter there are just we know that the vaginal rejuvenation market is exploding and we know that um vaginal tightening methods are a part of that as well as other methods um and lots as well lots of invasive surgeries which all um not invasive surgeries but stuff like lasering you know stuff that's like slightly intrusive there's just like no scientific basis for so much of it and. And there was one recent study about lasering as well that found that these procedures and these providers claim that they're going to improve your sexual confidence or even your sexual function. And it preys on the fact that we aren't aware of our, we aren't taught about our pelvic floors. It preys on the fact that we aren't aware about the, we aren't taught about our pelvic floors. It preys on the fact that we aren't aware on about the true size of the clitoris. And we aren't aware of how everything

down there interacts with each other. Because if you were aware, you'd think, oh my goodness, I can't have surgery there. That could affect my capacity for pleasure, or I can't have surgery there. That it might affect, you know, the structure of my pelvic floor, which is what literally keeps everything in place beyond my sexual organs, my bladder. You know, everything that's really important down there that you don't want anything going wrong with. Yeah, you see that all the time, though, don't you? With like advertisements for vaginal cleansing. Oh, yeah. There are these sprays, aren't there? Like scent sprays and things like that are there are these sprays aren't there like scent sprays

and things like that which which are really really toxic and wasn't there was the whole um I mean it's a whole industry there was a whole Gwyneth Paltrow vaginal steaming it also um collides with a lot of people's faith identities and spiritual identities and that's where it can get pretty challenging because in telling some I that this happened to me the other day in a cafe when i was having a chat with someone um someone really really powerfully based on their on these kind of um spirituality system that they chose to believe in really believed in womb healing and as part of that believed in vaginal steaming believed in um vaginal wands um and i basically said to her you're entitled to believe in what you want but they have been shown to be negative for women's sexual health

trying to think of a really early incarnation of all of this just thinking of the bajazzle i should have the bajazzle and dowie that's that they used to what did they do they put like gemstones and stuff on themselves this is still something that comes up a lot in um sex education delivered in schools when i remember there was a really good clip on channel four a few years ago when they did a program about sex ed in schools um so many young people also i don't even touch this myth in the book but the idea that um being hairless is being more clean, it's hygienic, and how we've let that belief happen when it's the opposite.

The less hair you have, the more vulnerable that you are to infections. And once you have someone sort of basically explain how that is, you sort of think, oh, yeah, I understand that now. Yeah. And it's not that hard. Like, we could talk about it a lot more. A lot of sex misinformation could be very easily debunked just with a bit more effort. Yeah. And a bit more ethically made mainstream porn, perhaps, as well.

Yeah. But I mean, there is a part of the porn industry that's got, will never have an interest in being ethical. That's the problem. And there will always be people who never want to pay for porn. Yeah. The She Soars podcast is an absolute must for conversations about sexual and reproductive health and rights. We are a group of passionate young women from across Canada who are exploring global issues that affect girls' lives and choices and how they relate to Canadian youth. Tune in to season three of the She Soars podcast for more hot topics and inspiring speakers from

around the world and discover ways we can all take action. Her rights, her voice. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. It can help you summarize your unread emails, suggest what to make with the food in your fridge, and it helped me achieve a family photo where everyone is smiling at the camera. I didn't think it was possible, but it is with Google Pixel 9. Learn more at store.google.com. I guess kind of related is the virility myth, isn't it? And I'm pleased you write about this in the book because I think, like you said, it's important to look at the pressures that men are under and the way that that affects women as well and all of us.

So talk to me a bit about what the virility myth is and what some of the men you spoke to, what were some of their main concerns and how does it impact them? And what are the consequences on their female partners if they're straight? Yeah, so two of the really interesting things for me that came out of that chapter um so again the premise is if men are expected to sort of

behave according to this gender norm of virility being sexually prolific sexually powerful what happens when they feel like they aren't fulfilling that? And in the book, I look at two areas. I look at men who experience sexual dysfunction and cannot perform. It's really interesting. Performance anxiety has become a phrase only to describe male sexual dysfunction, where I think if you actually look at the extent of what female sexual dysfunction can be as well, you would also find conditions in which performance anxiety and anxiety is a thing. But with erectile dysfunction in particular, we know that men find it more challenging than women historically to go to a healthcare provider and say that they have a problem.

That being said, erectile dysfunction has enjoyed a lot more airtime and awareness raising than sort of the equivalent dysfunctions on women's side. And a lot of money going into research into it as opposed to sexual health conditions yeah big time um but yeah it was really heartbreaking speaking to people who felt like they were going to lose their partners um there is data from one survey that tells us that there are some men who would rather break up with their partners than speak to them honestly about it um when communication could help solve it um a big thing is that a lot of people associate erectile dysfunction with older age, and we actually know that there's a decent number of men in their late teens and 20s and 30s who have it as well. But traditionally, that's probably more likely going to be tied to anxiety about sex

as opposed to a physiological blood flow issue, which Viagra sorts. So what's happened is we know that erectile dysfunction is medicalised, we know that there are pills that you can get that can help out, but they help out with blood flow. So you could wind up getting a pill over the counter thinking, oh my goodness, I have this problem but this is going to, you know, everyone says says this works you take it and it still doesn't work problem gets worse and um if if you if you keep avoiding sort of meeting with a healthcare professional or sex therapist and getting to the root of the problem you keep evading it online there's an awful lot of sort of anonymous groups in which men speak a lot about erectile dysfunction, but there's so much pseudoscience in it. If you think about women's health having goop,

go to men's health, NoFap, anyone here heard of NoFap? You know, very bizarre online communities that um tell you you know to solve your erectile dysfunction just never ever ever masturbate and that's not what uh that's that's not what that's not what sex therapists say no the point is you you might need to reassess your relationship with sort of self-pleasure but would never recommend never ever doing it again kind of thing um and it's just like you need to communicate and have a chat with with an expert but because people feel so like oh it's not it's not manly to go and do and admit that um i can't remember if it's from 2021 or 2022 but there's a piece of research i wish it came out in time for this but didn't um this piece of research that suggests that men are

more likely to be open about the fact that they take medication for rectal dysfunction if they identify as a feminist i just think that's fascinating the other issue that comes up in the virility myth is incels um incels and um is the complete extreme of men who become very, very self-loathing simply for what they believe is the unique fact that they cannot have sex or access sex with anyone. But then what's less extreme, but far wider, and therefore super distressing as well, is the kind of casualised misogyny online. This is often referred to more broadly as the Manosphere, which has a number of different sort of misogynistic groups in it that behave online. But again,

there's a lot of overlap between incel and incel-adjacent spaces online and communities about erectile dysfunction. So it's reasonable to believe that some people, their inability to access sex may be informed by perceived sexlessness or kind of a self-fulfilling cycle. You don't know quite where it starts. We also know, when I say we i know because i did i kind of did some i don't know what to call it i did a data thing where i um looked up lots of people and what i would describe as an incel adjacent forum and i looked at what other reddit communities they

belonged to to see if anything interesting came up um i mean mainly gaming which like i'm i love gaming so you know i hope that they find some joy in those groups um but a lot about virginity anxiety really suggesting that but we know if you're already for if you're joining an online community predicated around none of you can have sex kind of makes sense but a lot of so a lot of them have not been able to have sex even the first time and there there's been very barely any research on incels in their psychological profile but there has been more research on people who identify as older virgins um men who identify as older virgins, men who identify as older virgins. And we know that people who do not feel like they are in sync with their peers feel excluded, contributes to lower mental health,

low self-esteem. Our society, again, everything always goes back to the virginity myth, but our society helps make them feel as bad as they do and we don't live in the sort of most helpful society for people um you also have to think about everything from global economic crises uh unemployment in so many places um even online dating in which a number of men do describe frustrations with how online dating works. And anecdotally, we do know that women swipe more than men. We know in heterosexual online dating, we know that that happens and it skews the app as a result.

And it can make it quite challenging for men to meet someone online compared to women. All of these things are stopping some men from being able to perform in the way that they wish to and the problem comes when that is distressing, when men don't think't think oh there are so many problems in society that's why i'm going through these things that's why my female friends are going through their things we should all help each other out that's not that's not the conclusion a lot of people come to especially if they're in these confirmation bias echo chambers online the conclusion that they draw to is oh my god i can't win i can't win i can't get

a job i can't get a girl um but those girls are having sex with other people why are they having sex with guys like that why can't they have sex with guys like me um and there's one man that i interview in the book who says he explains how throughout his teenage years and at university, he just never got the hang of talking to girls. And in talking to him, he started off very friendly and polite. But as I got deeper and deeper into the discussion with him, the language he was using was quite, I don't know what the word is, quite incendiary. But he, you know, he would swear a little bit more and he would say, how can some girl fuck some random guy and not me? No real sense of like bitterness and resentment about this. And there is a really fascinating forum

that I talk about in the book, which is Incel Exit. When I wrote the book, it hadel exit when i wrote the book had 7 000 members i checked the other day it has 10 000 members now these are people on reddit who think they've become an incel and want to escape there is a forum for them um and i spoke to someone who i think he used to volunteer for child line this is someone who's always just been quite altruistic um phd psychology student and he hangs out on intel exit and you can see by his posts he spends a lot of time on there helping people out and he said oh i've never been in intel myself but i know how it feels to be like a late bloomer uh and for him it was part of his especially over the pandemic it was something he was doing voluntarily to help people.

And he said two really, really interesting things. He said, yes, I think a lot of them need sex education because you can see in their sex negativity. They have a complete misunderstanding of what sex actually is. So the even sort of duration of a sexual session, a lot of them come up with ideas that are like completely not what the reality is. You know, they have completely unrealistic expectations of sex.

And the other thing was that, yeah, and incels define themselves as incels by their sexual identity, sexual access. However, there's more to that that makes someone an incel. It's other things. It's like desperately low self-esteem. Of course, in many cases, sadly, it's misogyny as well. But it's so many things that compound and lead to people feeling this way.

That brings me kind of neatly onto what I wanted to talk to you about next, which is when this kind of mentality leads to violence and not always sexual violence, but I guess let's talk specifically about sexual violence and about your chapter on consent, which I think is something that I'm always very keen to talk about because like you said, even now, what are we, 2022, five years, if my maths is right, which it might not be, after me too uh and still such such a wide cultural misunderstanding of sexual violence in general and what consent even means um so why did you want to address it in this book and what would you say to someone who says consent me too we've done that put that away done that don't you talk about it anymore why do we need to still

yeah so this links really well like i said because in the virility myth one of the studies that i referenced is one from 2015 it was a survey of 600 men i think it was in the us and they found that men who felt like they didn't um fit in with traditional male gender norms could be more prone to violence and the could is important because it wasn't all men it was only men who actively got stressed about that fact and it was called masculine discrepancy stress in this study and they were the ones who were more likely to basically act out because of this, substance abuse, binge drinking, possibly violence. In the consent myth chapter, so many studies that look into acts, which I challenged the reader into thinking, this is a consent issue you might not be taught

about it in your one hour consent workshop at school because you're told all you're basically told in that is the avoidance of assault and rape so physical which is more than what we were told at school I mean we didn't even have that but even so it goes to show that how much more nuance is required in these conversations yes so you may only be kind of alert or set up to comprehend an element of physical criminal threat, whether it would be you perpetrating it or, you know, it happening to you. And I try and challenge the reader into thinking, every time you're on the street and your cat calls, that is someone not respecting your boundaries and agency. This is a consent issue. And it's problematic. it's not raised to young

people as such unsolicited sending of images which is now being called cyber flashing um research into cyber flashing suggests uh it is not men um it gives the idea it's exhibitionism researchers have found that it's a minority of people doing it who are doing it to be an exhibitionist. They're doing it because they want to solicit sexual contact. So it's a lot darker than the phrase cyber flashing actually gives. But when they look at profiles and who is more likely to cackle, who is more likely to send an unsolicited

dick pic. It's the same thing time and time again. It's people who rank highly with high hostile sexism scores, which is a kind of rating system that researchers in the sort of psychology space will use. So how do you get to the root of that and stop people ranking highly with hostile sexism scores? Legislation. I think legislation kind of always helps, like raises awareness and obviously it gets people into trouble for doing it. But you also have to get to the root of the problem, which is trying to figure out why is it we have so many people who are hostile sexists? is that we have so many people who are hostile sexists and how do we stop them being hostile sexists because it's likely to begin to limit a number of behaviors i want to know in the process of writing this book and reflecting on your own experiences how has that been for you and have you sort of gone back and viewed things through a very different lens as your research has gone on

yeah yeah and what i say at the beginning of the book i kind of do i do like one big trigger warning otherwise i'd be trigger warning like every third page but um i say be prepared that some of the things you're going to read might make you rewrite your sexual biography in some cases this will be for the better you know hopefully it'll make you understand that what happened, if something happened that you weren't 100% happy with and you thought you were the only one in the world, you will learn through this book, you're like normal. But the other thing is that you may learn that things are actually examples of normalised coercion that a lot of people experience.

And you at the time didn't label it as coercion. You labelled it as like romantic persuasion or doing something for someone that you loved um you yeah there are definitely times where i read something and i thought oh my goodness uh and i honestly i honestly think if i was ever confronted with some people of my past i wonder what i would say to them you know i would i think get quite angry because the the thing is maybe it's not good to like bring up bring up stuff from like the past but also what if they do it someone else yeah exactly i've i've had moments like that as well. And I've actually been at a festival where I've seen someone who did something to my friend.

But at school, it was something that we all kind of passed off and laughed about. He raped her. But at the time, we didn't recognize it as that. It was very complicated. And then I've seen this guy at festivals as an adult and had to stop myself from going over and screaming at him. It's really hard. and had to stop myself from going over and screaming at him. It's really hard, but I think it's really difficult because obviously a part of you wants to try and, I guess,

educate them about what they did. But it's like when you're so angry and emotional, it's like it's never going to, I don't know, I feel like that kind of person is never going to respond well to something like that or some kind of confrontation. Yeah, it's really interesting. Obviously, as a journalist, your job is holding people to account. But I guess, yeah, I think that in reading this book, a lot of people will be holding themselves to account,

but they perhaps didn't before. So that's my way of telling people and what are you most looking forward to in terms of next steps like is there any research that you're looking forward to or any steps in the sex education world that you think are going to make a real difference for the pandemic to finally sort of sod off and for curriculums to be unaffected again, for timetables to be unaffected again, and schools will no longer have an excuse to not incentivise teachers and incentivise the general climate of the school.

You know, it often isn't the teachers at fault. It's normally like the kind of whole environment of the school. But incentivize everyone from the people who have like funding power to make sure that everyone gets robust, high quality training in order to deliver it to young people. And that schools hopefully think about more than just a random workshop here and there, but think about how they can bring a young person's early sexual identity, sexual maturity questions, how they can bring a culture of a safe space in a school and a culture where their sexual health and wellbeing is being supported, whatever that looks like.

So it's culture changes that need to happen. Thank you so much. Thank you, Sophia. Thank you. That's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. If you are a new listener to Millennial Love, you can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Acast or anywhere else if you are more of a visual person you can also now watch us on independent TV so please do head over there and subscribe, like and share, do all of those things so that more people can find us and you can keep up to date with everything to

do with the show on Instagram just search Millennial Love see you soon if you or someone you know has been affected by child sexual abuse call Childline on their helpline for children and young people who need to talk victim support also provides emotional and practical help to victims or witnesses of any crime, whether or not it has been reported to the police. Can Indigenous ways of knowing help kids cope with online bullying?

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