Sex Talks With Emma-Louise Boynton - Sex, Power, Money with comedian, Sara Pascoe

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

In this episode, Emma sits down with award-winning comedian and best-selling author, Sara Pascoe, to discuss the topic of her recent book, 'Sex, Power, Money'. Together they explore how capitalism shows up in the bedroom, how money shapes modern day relationship dynamics... and why some women still want men to buy them dinner; why there remains so much stigma around those who work in the sex industry and why Sara is still is still afraid of men. Did writing the book help her overcome her own sexism towards men? Listen to find out. Book tickets to the next live recording of the Sex Talks podcast here. And subscribe to the Sex Talks Substack here.

Hello and welcome to a live recording of the Sex Talks podcast with me, your host, Emma Louise Boynton. Sex Talks is dedicated to engendering more open and honest conversations around typically taboo topics, specifically sex, relationships and the future of intimacy. Today's episode has been recorded at the London Edition Hotel. If you'd like to attend a live event in the future, please do head on over to the Eventbrite link in the show notes, as we have lots of exciting events coming up. Okay, I hope you enjoy the show. Everyone at the back. That's my sister, actually.

So you've got to be well-behaved. First of all, happy International Women's Day. Thank you all so much for coming this evening. This is going to be a fascinating conversation. How could not? We're talking about sex, money and power. I am, of course, joined today by Sunday Times best-selling author, podcast, host, actor, broadcaster, and of course,

award-winning comedian Sarah Pascow as we turn our attention to the issues that truly mattered to us as humans, sex, power and money. Welcome, Sarah. Hello, welcome to me. Thank you so much for having me. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to you. Welcome to me. So Sarah, let's get started. Let's get these people excited to buy your book or steal it, whichever one they choose to do. I want to start out by asking, so speaking specifically about sex, power, money. This isn't actually the book you set out to write, is it? Because you wanted to write one on porn from quite

a kind of classical, is that right? No, that looks wrong. No, it is. So, I had written Anna Moore, and that had been a lot of sort of autobiography and sort of, I guess, personal experience, personal responses to things, but I had started researching

the evolution of the female body, and I tried to exclude men from that as much as possible because it was a book about women. And then I'd said to my publishers when they had asked or do you want to write another book and I had this joke that I would then write Manimal which was going to be about how the male body

evolved and how the male body was treated in culture and the idea I sort of pitched was that I was going to understand male sexuality I and they thought I was going to write a book which was essentially men are disgusting you know their arousal or the way they get aroused

by things that have resulted in things like pornography which treat women terribly and teach men to treat women terribly the end, you know. And when I started researching the studies on pornography or studies on male arousal, I realized that I and a lot of the feminism I had read didn't understand at all and was also being quite damaging to women in terms of the women who chose to make sexually explicit materials or sell their bodies. and then I became much more interested in like the history of pornography

or a lot of the grey areas of transactional sex and I guess like the patriarchal history of marriage and then it became that I didn't know what my book was about at all and my poor editor at one point she got on the floor and she'd printed out everything I'd ever emailed her and she was like, can you put it in an order? Can you put it in an order for me? Where is the book? Because I just kept saying to it, it's too complicated.

There's like there's this but there's also this on the other side and also this. And she was like, oh, for a book, you sort of need an argument. You need to sort of say, you need to say, this is what I mean, and here's how I prove it. And I was like, no. The point is, I think it's really, really, really complicated and lots of things can be true at the same time. And that's my conclusion. And so that's what the book became.

And also, I could have researched that topic forever. And it's very difficult because you do have to sort of at some point stop. Or your publishers can sue you. They can sue you for their money back. Oh, yeah. Does that happen? It must do. Maybe they just put the fear of God into you.

You'll be the first. You don't want to be the first. Exactly. Shamed, publicly shamed. God, also probably spent the money by that point. I would have done personally. So why then did you choose to focus in specifically on the interrelation between sex, power and money? Because the three seemed to be so interrelated.

So, for instance, if we stick with pornography, a lot of the pornography, pornography stories the tropes involve disparities of power it seemed like so a very and I'm sure this could be disproved but there would never was never equals what do I mean by equals it was never two people who are both university lecturers having sex on a desk it it was so it's always like teacher student you know stepmom stepson and then I went to this I went to a school in peasant and to watch workshops they were doing with quite young children, sort of 11-12. And these workshops were amazing because what they did is they, because it's very difficult as an adult to talk to children about explicit sex materials,

even though you know that they will have watched them or other students might have shown them things. Do you mean it's like legally hard? Or do you mean it's like embarrassing? I think it's hard because, I think it's hard for parents to find out like, they said what? So what they did in these groups? They did lots of talking. you know, and they asked them any questions they had,

but they essentially got them to storyboard their own pornographies. So the kids were writing their own porn and then we were talking as a group about what we thought about the ethics. So the example I'll give you is that so these boys are 11 and they had a story about Milakounis

and she was in super drug shoplifting and the police caught her and then they had sex in the police car. So there's lots to discuss there. And it all comes along to a power dynamic, sort of with 11-year-olds. The story's in porn that they had already absorbed so many of us. They absolutely understood authority and powerlessness. Maybe romantically grow up thinking certain things about sex and where it gets really complicated, but also very interesting is where money and power intersect. Money for such a long

time was why women had to get married. I mean, historically, if you didn't have your own money, if you couldn't make your own money, if you didn't have choices, you had to marry someone who did to survive. And, you know, I know everyone knows this, but the whole thing of like your father walking you down the aisle because you were his and now he's giving you away. You just mentioned there about the power dynamics and how money is always, kind of money and power

are always kind of intersecting in some way, shape or form when it comes to sex. And you gave that example of the young boys creating this fictional porn scene in which they had Milakunis get married. Oh dear, a fraudian slip. I mean they could just get arrested and have sex not that different perhaps

than marriage as you describe it. Can you just tell us a little bit more about what those boys how they saw that situation and whether they did see that as consent? The reason this group was amazing and they don't exist anymore unfortunately because it's very, very difficult to get funding for grown men to go into schools to talk to children

about sex even though it's absolutely vital. What's that? Fundamental. Yeah. I mean... Always the geography teacher. Or it's the responsibility is on the parents. And actually lots of young people want to know about things but don't necessarily want to hear it from their parents.

And also parents don't feel qualified. Or are naive that don't actually know what's on the internet or all of it or what their children might have access to. So it's really tricky. It really does need to be handled so that young people are really informed. So what they did with these kids, so they've written their thing and they would ask them questions. They didn't say to them,

Oh, like, here's a power dynamic. This is unfair. This is naturally, what we term, enthusiastic consent. This is coercion. They said, oh, do you think she wants to do this? And even that question itself was massive for them and a discussion. And then they started talking about certain sex acts and whether they hurt and whether they were supposed to hurt.

And the reason this school in particular had been visited was because some of the girls in the sixth form had written an open letter to the head teacher saying, you have to talk to the boys about porn because they're asking us to do stuff and they don't understand but they think it's the norm because boys were talking to each other

and you know I guess like when I was at school way back in the 90s boys might have still legged each other on you know like who's had a blow job I mean I'm imagining what boys talked about but you know that kind of thing but they were

egging each other other one to do things that you know you'd go to you can go to hospital if you have like an anal injury there are serious ramifications of it because of people haven't even had a drink um it's very aware that some people are like unwillingly um unwillingly sober going anal injuries come on yeah everyone who knows an anal fisher is it's a sex talk i know i know but it still feels a little early um but essentially that's why it's the education the talking is really important It's not because it's all about morals and telling people they shouldn't do things

or to wait until they're married is actually to make sure that if you know something exists that it's something you might want to try, you know about lubrication, you know about trying things slowly, you know about seeing what your body is enjoying or not enjoying, probably not a geography teacher or a parent you're going to want to have that conversation with.

So go back to your point, they didn't tell these kids what was wrong with the pornography. I was sitting there thinking, oh my God, they just asked them questions, do you think she wants to do this? So why do she has to do it Do you think the police are allowed to do things like this in real life? What would be the problem? How would you feel?

How would we feel if police asked us if we'd rather go to prison or to have sex in a car? And their discussion was the point. It was getting them to think about something while also understanding that porn is fiction. In the course of then writing this book, I know you said before the kind of your attitude going into writing it initially, although now I'm kind of seeing this flaw of emails. and maybe there were many different few points before going to it. But was one that, I know you spoke about this before, was kind of rooted in your feminism and thus saw porn as inherently wrong

and as something that was exploitative and objectifying for women. In the course of writing this book, did your stance change? Yeah, but immediately it did, because that stance was because I had never watched any porn. I'd never spoken to anyone who made porn, and it had been a very easy assumption of its negative and it's negative and that it's also that it's only used by men. So it was a very, very black and white, and that's not true. So the very first thing, like, you could say to someone who has that opinion is,

well, what about the women who choose to make porn? And they will either diminish those women with some kind of, like, I mean, there are things that people say, I don't agree with, but they'll say, brainwashed or damaged or the people say all kinds of certain things that are very very unfeminist and art respecting so if your bottom line is women should have autonomy and choice and the next thing is well what if they choose to do something that you don't agree with the autonomy comes first doesn't it and then in terms of the effects of pornography I thought that I was going to find all of these studies that prove that teenage boys who watch it have a higher

incidence of becoming rapists I had read a lot in feminism was that men consuming pornography makes them think of women just as sexual objects. And so you think you're going to find studies so that men who watch 100 hours of porn a week don't think women should be bosses or politicians. And none of the studies, and they've tried, none of the studies show that. If there one day is a really, really good study that does,

and this is the thing about a complex issue, then I'm wrong, and I'm out of date, and I'm prepared to be wrong on these things. But the studies where they've interviewed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of men about what they consumed in terms of pornography, when they started consuming it, and then they would ask them things in terms of how they felt about women

and the indicators that a man would be misogynist He's drunk were much more likely they would be misogynist if they were older, white, living rurally and right wing. They were the people going, I don't think women are good bosses and there were people who were sort of almost like you know, addicted to pornography who didn't have those views, or didn't

say that they had those views. As you say, it's such a complex terrain because as you say, the kind of the feminist argument for so long has been, or kind of as we know, back in the, like, kind of 60s, you had a real kind of stronghold of feminist movement that was saying that porn was, as I said before,

inherently a bad thing, that porn and sex work were both just objectifying women and kind of feeding into quite a misogynistic culture and thus were so inherently bound up the patriarchy. And as you say, I think as our views have progressed and we've been able to recognise the importance of autonomy. Well, also those views really stigmatised the women involved. So it becomes that kind of reverse sexism in a way of women then targeting other women.

Yes, attacking other women, publicly making them responsible for male behaviour. And I think it's Linda Lovelace, who was, she was very briefly anti-porn and she spoke with feminists. And then afterwards, she said that the feminism industry had treated her a lot worse than pornography. There was this hard line, an attempt to police female behaviour and any woman, and this still happens now, you know, there'll be a pop star who wants to dance in a certain outfit and there'll be other women in the public eye who say, you're objectifying yourself, you're making men think that this, that and the other, that kind of judgment does still happen, I think, quite toxicly. I think it's that internalised misogyny that is so rife that I think

we all kind of have to have to recognise. Now, I was listening to something you did earlier in which She said, as someone who, I think you're 42 now on your early 40s. About to be 43. I had to say it so I get used to the idea. It sounds like a great age to me. Almost 50. Almost. As a woman who's out almost 50.

Yeah, thank you. No, no, no. It's good to get used to it. Who remains close to 40 but can see 50 on the horizon and quite a far off when they're wearing glasses and had kind of long vision. You kind of the last, kind of swayed people, last generation to grow up, not having access to, porn in the way that we have it now. Yeah, well definitely and then the people around we didn't have it.

So there was, so that impact, that kind of ripple effect of pornography. How then is someone who I guess has seen what has been a really rapid evolution in the porn industry as been facilitated by technology. I mean technology has just changed the way we do to state the obvious everything

in such a historically short amount of time. What impact do you think it's had on our broader sex culture? I don't think sex changes. I think it's elastic. I think it is, it can be moulded. I don't think it's static in a human being, but I think human beings in general,

I think they have always been perverts. I think they've always been serial masturbators. They have always definitely been criminals, transgressors. The spectrum of human behaviour, they've always been necrophiliacs, there have always been... Sexuality is... For human beings,

is an evolved thing that, leads to, you know, lots of people having children. And it's a really, really, really strong drive because having children is so, like, difficult for our species and looking after them is even worse and birth in them. Human beings had to really like and want sex in general. I know that everything's got a caveat in sex. I know that there are asexual people

and they're obviously homosexuality, which doesn't result in children. Unless you choose to have children, which you can now. Everything has a caveat, and I'm so sorry, because in talking in broad strokes means that you do, Get it wrong. And one thing actually of your book is you do loads of footnotes at the end of every page is a footnote. But by the way, of course, everything in its sense is sort of, once you've said it. Yeah, there's a caveat because everything is too reductive.

But sexuality is this huge thing in human nature. So I think they used to say in the 90s that sexuality was leading technology. You know this? Like they used to go, oh, it's people's need to want to watch sex in brilliant detail and have a huge variety that led, you know, The old wives tell about it It led to the internet. They led to the internet eventually But they were like, that's why

The VCR took off and not the JVC And what was that one? Beta Max, yes. Beta Max couldn't do porn And that's why no one wanted one. Wow. No one's dad wanted a beta max Because you couldn't get dad videos

to watch when the family went to... So that's the thing they talk about in the race for technology that the technology is adapted very quickly for pornography were much more popular. Wow. So sex has shaped the technological revolution.

But this is the thing about sex. And obviously, this is why it underlies everything. It underlies everything. Even people that you don't have sex with. I mean, we don't all have sex with each other all the time, like bonobos do. But wanting to have sex, finding people attractive, really sway us as a species.

Has sex always been something you've been really fascinated with? Yeah. Do you like having sex, Sarah? I think it was my complicated feelings about sex. I knew I wanted to be able to enjoy it very freely. I knew that that was a sign of a really, I guess, stable human being living their best life, having made good decisions. I think sex is a really good indicator, actually, of your overall health. When I went to university, I wanted to go, I was really stupid.

When I was 18, I applied for Cambridge because I'd seen on the news that they wanted more working class people. And I thought that was enough. Like, I didn't, like, I didn't sort of do any extra reading or ask the teacher at my sixth form college. No one from my sixth one college had ever gone to Cambridge. So I thought, oh, brilliant.

I thought no one else had thought of it. And I went, and I applied to do philosophy because I'd read a book by Justin Garda called Sophie's World and essentially they have to interview everyone and I had an interview with probably the oldest man in the world and he said

what do you want to do with your life and I said I want to write a book about sex for my generation and he said why and I said it's just really interesting and I think he would have been prepared for me to argue and I just didn't have an argument yet but I did at that point I did think

probably because technology was sort of changing the internet had everyone started getting email addresses and things I did think that my generation was suddenly I think maybe because of just 17 and magazine more magazine position of the fortnight I think we

probably like people in the 60s did I thought we were inventing sex or reinventing sex and that it was going to be that there was a revolution going on because we weren't prudish like our parents and I think every generation of teenagers thinks that

about their parents There's some children, that's what pornography is because I was doing a gig when I was researching my book and I asked the audience to come and talk to me in the interval because especially younger people about when they first found what their first, I guess, interaction with pornography was and the women your age and slightly older, all of them had been shown two girls one cup on a phone at school. Who remembers two girls one cup? Yeah.

So that's an excerpt from a pornography. Essentially, boys found it and shared it, and then we're showing it to girls to make them feel sick, to upset them, to shock them. And it is really difficult as a younger person, and sometimes even as an older person, you don't have the shelving to store that. There are so many things you have to know and to understand.

And I often think, I mean, you mentioned to start that how poor sex education is, and I mean, I think especially in this country, really chronically underfunded, under-resourced. And what that does, and I say it's often at sex talks, it means that we're not given from a young age a kind of filtering system with which like which is basically I think kind of a foundational understanding of what sex is of what consent is of what kind of how to establish your boundaries

how to communicate what the language of sex is and it's not just sex that's a confidence thing that's about knowing yourself that that education isn't like you know the tropes always you know put a condom on a banana you know go and get tested if you have unprotected sex there's a thing about whatever you as long as it doesn't hurt other people whatever you want is right and getting to know yourself

and what you want is your life's journey and if ever it makes you feel uncomfortable or sad, talk to somebody about it, a professional or if you're young, an adult but yeah the lesson in sex education should be you can have a really exciting journey

with this through your life, listen to yourself, you are the person who will know and instead it's don't have sex and if you have sex you will get chlamydia and you will die yeah but because because the adults are so scared on behalf

of the children because they had incidences like you when you were 12 and they want to protect that they want to you I am the reason adults are scared they're scared or they're scared of people making decisions or thinking that they adults know what the world is like

so they want to make sure that a young person doesn't end up in a situation thinking they're safe but not being safe or I mean all of those things are terrifying and I think the answer for such a long time was just we'll tell them to avoid it then for as long as possible and then end up you don't prepare them properly I mean I have put myself sometimes off having children because I was so awful and I was so I partied so much and I was exposed to awful things and it makes me sad thinking about it because then I think I can't bear to have a child knowing that they're out doing those things although I'd probably have like a really you know maybe like a wonderfully nerdy child who just never went out

and I would like that. But that I don't have the... But did you have a lovely time going out? No, I hated it. Okay. No, I really had a lot of anxiety, actually. Did you? Yeah, I did.

I don't know why. I'd be like in thumping clubs, being like... Not liking it. Because your friends wanted to go. My friends were doing it, yeah. And I know, I am honestly like the poster child of peer pressure. So this is what parenthood is. Parenthood is explaining that to your offspring.

And hoping they make better decisions than you. Yes. Or at least no. Oh, yeah, Mom hated this as well. I didn't want to take all the drugs, but then I took them all. Did you? Yeah. And I didn't want to, but I did it anyway.

I honestly think this is the kind of, this is, that's the kind of chat you can have with your kids. Yeah, maybe. If I, if I find someone to, do you know what? I say, you would really put them off. If you say, yeah, you can have, you can take some MDMA, but you have to take it with mummy. And then they'll never, ever want to do it. That's how you get him to rebel and be like, mom, I want to go to the library. I was going to be my plan

and my children so you just said that and I really resonate that so sex was something that they'd been the kind of fascination with the role that sex plays in all of our lives but it plays this kind of unspoken role

so it has such a big impact on all of us or it kind of shapes so much of our relationship to ourselves much to other people our relationship to intimacy relationships and yet it's still the thing that is like still laden in taboo still feels like something we can't talk about openly there's still that, obviously, with parental relationship,

this embarrassment around this topic. Take us then to the topics that you explored in the book. You speak throughout the book about what you described as transactional sex and explore that in some depth. Can you describe for us what transactional sex is and how your own views on it were challenged in the process of writing? Well, really, I didn't know a lot about sex work at all. And I think one of the really frustrating things for sex work,

workers is people who are writing books about them to contact them and ask them and then ask stupid fucking questions because you've got you've got absolutely no ideas so I'm very very grateful to the people who speak to me and I realized it was just like women in comedy where people say I've decided to write my dissertation about how women are funny actually which happens on a daily basis it's like to be a woman and to be funny yeah so and I think there's a very similar thing with not platforming people to speak about their own experience and speaking on their behalf, which was the first thing I realised, which is why I did a podcast interviewing people

so that it wasn't me putting their words into my own words or, you know, making money off their life experiences, those kind of things. So, again, incredibly complex. Lots of caveats. But transactional sex in general, I realised, was massive because, yes, the broad strokes are someone paying you to have sex or you paying someone else for a sexual act. But then it sort of distills down all the way down to,

a man paying for dinner, man buying drinks, man paying for a certain amount of drinks or a certain amount of dinner where you feel there is some kind of performative obligation. Men thinking if they've paid for a certain amount of drinks or dinner, that there will be some recompense. And that's the really dark thing now, is that those two things might not be aligned at all. So I became quite obsessed with stories in the paper about online dating going minorly wrong. So here's an example. A few of the tabloids ran a story about a man who had gone on a Tinder date, or an equivalent, like an app date with a woman to cost a coffee. And she had ordered the most expensive coffee, £3.50. And then he'd said, I'm getting a waitrose delivery. Do you want to

come back to my house and meet you dinner? She said, no, thank you. I don't actually think you and I click. And so he asked her for the £3.50 back. And she had written, maybe she'd posted it online. first but they were writing this article like look at this skin flint wants his three pound 50 back but the point wasn't the three pounds 50 the point was he thought that there was a transaction happening which is you don't say yes to a man paying for you unless you think you might want to spend some time with them not necessarily get naked with them even but giving him more of a chance not just going yeah not you and there were there are lots of stories like that in the

tabloids from the time where I guess updating was new but also there would be stories like so there's a program called first dates which lots of you will have watched and they're obsessed with they're obsessed with the bill coming in heterosexual couples and they're obsessed with it and there's one episode where an older man insists on going halves with the woman and she finds him I mean she thinks she's talking in her talking heads saying how rudy is how disrespectful he was to her expecting her to pay half and and and but there are other ones where and and and again that's got into the press. If either the man says, well, I think it's fair that, you know, we both ate. We both ate it. Yes. Yeah. And why would you eat it? If you didn't bring your

purse with you. Like, I find, I find it, but I know, but for other people, they were told that is a mark of respect or that is how someone shows you that they like you. But for me, it feels worryingly infantilising and you, we are telling men something. We're giving men mixed messages. if as a society we're saying we are equal to you we can do everything that you can do we haven't been given enough of a chance please respect us but also i'll have um some carbonara and large glass of wine and a tiramisu but um but also so so should you always put the bill well i'm not telling anyone what to do what do you think as kind of the i i think you can talk to the person you're with about how they feel about money how they feel about money how they feel about

money what it makes them feel about themselves paying for someone's dinner makes you feel fucking amazing when you like someone and you get to go this is on me or i've had a lovely time and i i have liked paying for some people's dinners so much so it's not because it's a bit of a power trip i think it's a treat oh yeah i find it a power but not in like a really cynical way but i can kind of see like i feel like i've been robbed of that power previously when men have definitely like assert themselves in pain because it is really like I feel like powerful and in I'm like no and it's and it's difficult because if you did meet someone who you really liked who thought you even offering was like how dare you this is a man's job that's quite I feel for both

of you in that situation because he has been told that there's a there's a correct way to be a man and that you are emasculating him somehow by wanting to pay for yourself wanting to pay for both of you and so the situation that several of my friends in including myself is that if you have a long-term relationship with a man where you earn a lot more than them here's hoping well but but that also then comes with ramifications because they they have been told by society that there's something wrong with that and and and so there isn't so there's a flip side to it where um big old caveat that it's really shit for men and it's and i think it's shit for men in certain jobs i think it's shit for men who like love their work but will never have a massive

pay increase and you said on the phone the other day you were talking about like hashtags about like marrying rich and certain kind of things that have happened again in every generation there have been women who want to exchange being good looking for a man's money and if I was a man I would be so furious I would I understand the men who are furious and see feminists want everything they want this and then also I'm being told that this is the correct way to be a man I'm actually just looking at now because I was, I think I was reading that part of your book, in which you discuss the, um, the economics of dating and then happened to look at TikTok and I fell upon the hashtag dating up, um, which has got 4.9 million views on TikTok. So define, so what is dating

up? So dating up and hashtag dating rich, she's got 6.8. So that is this trend on TikTok that has women talking about actively seeking men with money and I agree in seeing that and it feels like there's this kind of I guess it's like pushback to the feminism and the independence that we have perhaps grown up with in thinking that no as women our financial independence is such a important important part of our overall freedom and thus to be to see this conversation garner so much attention and warrant kind of, I guess, quite a lot of praise online of what's often seems kind of a younger generation.

I think what they probably, a lot of people don't understand who are probably having lots of fun with that kind of hashtag is that I think they think you could be independent and have someone else give you their money. Can you not be independent, have someone give you their money? I think you have reduced choices. And the biggest example I use is that if you do cohabit with someone or you're married and cohabit,

it's a lot more difficult to leave if they're paying your rent it is a lot more difficult to leave if like they've bought yourself I mean it's difficult to leave we our lives you know interact in so many ways that any kind of breakup can be very difficult to extricate yourself from but imagine not being able to afford to leave and and that's what you wouldn't want for people go no no I'm unhappy but it's I don't have an option or I'll have to save up first or or change my life or change my working circumstances I think that That's the very unromantic side.

But to link to that, I had no idea about things like sugar babies and there is a male equivalent where, again, it's a much more, I guess, open transaction. There are rich people who wants to have fun dates and or sex with good-looking, interesting people and find it a lot cleaner to just give financial gifts. then to have to meet people and then explain, I do have a wife, but also I would love to see you in a hotel once every six weeks

or all those kind of things that those transactions can take place and be above board and honest and both people get what they want. I actually worked for a sugar daddy once. Did you? Not as a sugar baby. I did not earn enough money. But I worked as his research.

He was a political, he ran a polster company in New York. It was the weirdest job I've ever had. I was researching foreign affairs in Russia for writing this report, but I used to sit in his home office, and I would just hear from his beleaguered secretary who he would just constantly shout at, so he was constantly crying in the kitchen, Kendall, and then there was also Ken who was next to me, who's the other researcher, so it was Emma, Ken, and Kendall. But he was basically, he had these sugar babies, one in L.A. and one in New York, and he basically, like, from a money perspective had them signed on as

employees of the company but they didn't have to do anything and he would just go and visit them whenever he was in LA whenever he was in it and they would like get cars and apartments and everything and one of them like wrote off a car with him the first week. Not to be a bitch because it's not all about how you look he's the most hideous man I've ever seen in my whole entire life and

also hideous inside and out like a bad bad seed but these women apparently were like young attractive 26 years I mean it's hard to live in America it's like healthcare and money, and I could kind of understand, but not with him. Well, this is where the slippery slope comes, because if everyone who's doing transactional sex absolutely goes, that's worth my money, I would rather, there are people who would say,

I would much rather spend two hours having sex with someone I don't fancy, then have to work all day long in a job that I don't enjoy, or that makes me feel unhealthy, or that makes me feel suicidal. I want to live in a world where people have those choices, but where money becomes involved, especially when other people have lots of money and the people selling their sexual behaviours or sexual actions don't have a lot of money,

they then becomes this thing of having to and obligation and financial coercion because of that. Again, if you have overheads that you need to meet, suddenly it's not so, I don't feel so... I don't want to cheerlead that empowerment because I feel that that's horrible for people. Because people aren't making the decision to sell sex of their own volition. It's from economic circumstances.

But then there's a very good counter argument which people do use, which is like most people don't like their jobs. And most people then... And I think that's horrible too. I hate the idea that people... I guess a big problem that differentiates that and you articulate this in the book is that with underpaid, you may hate the job, but it doesn't come with a social stigma that is attached to a lot of sex work

is still so prevalent. There was a piece of research that it was published last month that found that one in five people think sex work should be stigmatized. Women were substantially more like than men to think sex work should be shunned, with 27% saying this, compared to 17% men. 52% of those polls would not be willing to be friends with someone who currently works a porn star, while 46% would not be friends with someone who works as a sex worker or an escort. And it's worth noting that 95% of sex workers in the UK are women. So again, it's that real mum. There's a really, really big overlap with mothers actually as well. And that stigma isn't just like, oh, people are mean. It has huge ramifications. People have their children taken off

them. They have to keep their life secret. And it includes people who strip and other certain jobs that are thought of as sexual. And it is awful when it feels like there's a lot of women. And I do think it's naivety and lack of education on this subject. And not hearing from the people who do those jobs and why they do them. When I was growing up, the received wisdom was that these were like women out to get your husband or like, and all of that kind of, so it was really like women against women. Like if you don't give it to him at home, he's going to come and go out and buy him. He's going to come and give me 60 pounds.

And that pit women against each other. It's that scarcity minds, I think, that is so inherent to patriarchy, that's like divide and rule. It's saying there's never enough for you women, so you need to fight one another to get the scraps. And also that it's a male right to have it no matter what. And this is where, again, the thing about rich men can buy it, but what about men who don't have those kind of earnings? So it's giving them very dangerous messages as well.

And you interviewed, obviously, you interviewed loads of people for the book, and then you interviewed a whole range of really fascinating people for the podcast. What did you find were the most kind of common misconceptions and prejudices that people who worked in the sex business that they faced and what they did? so the drugs involved the fact that you can take prep now which means that if you have a lifestyle or a job or a partner who is HIV positive you can take medication that means that you won't get HIV

that feels like the most important information in the world and lots of people don't know that and I didn't know that so that was a massive piece of education for me I guess it's that people are just exactly like you and the people you know, they just made different life choices. There's also a massive overlap with people who choose to do sex work and people who maybe would find an everyday job,

even just an office job difficult for ability reasons. You know, might have ME or chronic pain. There are certain things that you don't even consider that that might narrow someone's choices down. And they might then think, well, actually, if I'm a dominatrix, that's going to be a lot easier for me. and there are a lot of people I'm so glad I didn't forget this

the most massive thing is that our laws in this country don't allow sex workers to protect themselves so the most sensible thing for lots of sex workers would be if they could choose someone or a couple of other people and work together and our laws call any situation where more than one sex worker is working at a place we call it a brothel and that's illegal

which means that sex workers are made to work in isolation which makes them much more dangerous and, again, not able to make their own decisions. So that was a really massive thing for me to understand and then want to want other people to understand because quite childishly, you always assume your government just wants the best for everyone.

And... Don't have you seen, Rishi Sunak's banned vaping! We're all going to be so much better off. Has he banned vaping? Is that today? No. So I'm really out of touch. Oh, he's got two big...

I thought they were taxing vaping more. So I think he was banning it now. No, they're getting rid of vapes. So we are in an economic crisis. We're at war. There's some pretty shit stuff going on. And there's two things that were really kind of top of policy. Getting rid of vaping and then cracking down on trans women in NHS wards when there have been zero complaints thus far of trans women in NHS wards.

So there's two kind of hard-hitting policies for the people. Really pleased about that. So just moving on, sorry, you mentioned, I think you touched on this very briefly at the beginning when I want to return to this, that you're, I don't want to put sexism in your mouth, but you said it actually in the book. It was kind of your inbuilt, kind of reverse sexism against men that actually was kind of the starting point for the initial concept for the book. Well, it is sexism, but I'm scared of men. Yes. I think men are scary. And I've been scared since I was a teenage girl. They are. I'm probably a child. And then when I was a teenager, and that's why

I wanted to study male sexualities, that when I realized, when I felt, and I'm not saying this in an arrogant way, anyone who's been a teenage girl would feel this. When I felt adult men changing their behaviour around me as a really young girl, and especially I started to feel unsafe in certain situations and unsafe in public, there's a thing where, you know, if you're, I mean, I definitely, definitely didn't look of age when I was 11 or 12, but I would like, and I think this is true of any teenage girl, If I was reading a book at a bus stop or a loan, I had to get a train to school in my school uniform.

And I had men rubbing erections on me. But even like the constant stuff that's much lower down, like just men coming up going, what you're reading, like demanding your time of you, that there were just things about them that they, and I also knew the monstrous possibilities, which I'm not saying that all men perpetrate, but the potential of that perpetration

meant that all of them to me felt like, I can't believe we have to share spaces with them I do actually remember an ice cream valve when I was 12 me and my friend would always ask a free ice cream he said if you flash me one boob you can get a free ice cream

and I literally just had those like pointy nipples at that point and I was like this is just like The problem of this story isn't your boobs no no sorry that's so true it wasn't that your boobs weren't good enough for an ice cream

I was so right my boobs were good enough for an ice cream but it was a deeply problematic dynamic it highlights. I understand we were saying that. And I don't think there's anyone who's, I don't think there's anyone, there's any, like, you know, someone who identified as female and went through their teenage years as a, as a girl who doesn't have stories like that. And so you, and you say at the start of the book that kind of you have had this latent fear of male sexuality, which, as you say, we can, I think a lot of women can relate to, you can understand. But you wanted through the

course of writing this book to challenge that view. Yeah. Did you successfully challenge your sexism towards men? Yes and no. Yes and no. I think, oh God, if I say like, I love men, I sound like the kind of man who says, oh, I love women and they're a misogynist. So I don't want to say insincerely.

It's not me accusing any individual man of all man's atrocities, just like I wouldn't accuse any individual woman of all of the horrible things that women have done and are capable of. I think I still find something quite terrifying about the force and veracity of male sexuality. And to go really that, war is the example of that. I think we are animals and have evolved behaviours.

And some things, the beautiful thing is that we have civilisation on top of it and learn behaviours. And I love the theory. this is more positive that we're a self-domesticating species, that we pick lovers, we pick mates who are good, you know, in general to humanity. We don't choose monstrous partners on purpose. And I really love that that's what's happening to humanity in general.

We are becoming, and it's a horrible time to be saying this, but we are becoming gentler as a species, at a species level. And I really, really want to believe that and hope that it's true. I think that they're, and this is not me saying of every single man, but the potential in them is different for violence and sexual violence than women have in general. That's why I say. And that does feel sexist to say,

because I am saying they're worse than us. And I mean, you did write at one point in the book that, you know, even though your views on sex work had shifted quite dramatically and had, through the research you'd done the book, you still hated the men who bought sex. Yeah, because part of my plan was to interview sex buyers about their backgrounds and what they wanted and then after speaking to sex workers,

even people who chose to do it, they would still talk about boundary pushers, which is what they talk about people doing things they've told them that they don't want to do or are not part of the service, people, and that's assault. They call it, I mean, I was told the term boundary pushing, but it is assault.

And then also how, yeah, and then I just became very uninterested in the, sex buyer, actually. I thought that's not, I'm not fascinated in, and yeah, I am too judgmental towards them. You couldn't go in as an interviewer and fairly interview someone

who is buying sex because you're... No, because I just felt so strongly. She doesn't want to have sex with you, mate. How is that sexy? She thinks you're disgusting. Just give her the money. Go home. It's like that's seen in poor things. Does anyone see in poor things? I just found it quite a deeply problematic film and was actually shocked that it

was reviewed so highly. But there is that scene where this guy comes in and he's just picking it. He picks her and she's like, he doesn't give a shit that she has no interest because his money does, in that context, speak louder than... Here's one of the things that I hadn't quite made sense of until I was researching the book, which is that female sexuality, as far as I know, and I can't speak for every woman, but we are aroused by someone finding us arousing. that's a really big part of it.

I'm definitely turned on when people think I'm hot. Yeah, they like you, you like them, that itself is part of the turn-on. And if someone wasn't aroused by us, that wouldn't turn us on more. We wouldn't be turned on by someone who we actively didn't want to have sex with us,

whereas men can be. And sometimes for men, that's the thing they want. There are very attractive men who could have sex and relationships, and that's not what they want someone who's not willing. They want to pay someone

to pretend that it's the thing where I became very I can't get fascinated in where that comes from because that makes me not want to be alive and that's on a kind of a biological level there is a difference between men and women in that I know and I feel horrible saying that because I don't think there is I think there's a

we're all on spectrums and I'm sure that there are when I was researching like I couldn't find female fetishist fetishists sorry and so I wanted to write you know it's men why it's only men who are like wants to see and pay for pictures of feet and they... I'm desperate for a man to pay for pictures of my feet.

I think I have quite nice feet. Go on, Only fans. You will get people who will give you money now, but... They'll like it. They like... They like... They like... They don't want beautiful feet, is the thing. There's like, whole account they're obsessed with... That's because you're the closest view of my...

No, semi-pedicured feet. So there were certain things where I'd think, oh, it's just a male thing, but then that was... it felt wrong to the women who I'm sure... are out there really into feet that I would say those kind of sweeping statements and I was trying really hard not to do that. There's another thing I learned which I didn't know is like you don't yuck someone else's

yum like everything is sexy to someone and it's not for you to go like oh you get turned on by that because as long as it's not hurting anyone that's fantastic with the race of research you did you weren't able to successfully challenge that I guess that fundamental fear of male sexuality

and I guess that I kind of had to sit with that for a bit because I think particularly now we are in such a tumultuous time when it comes to gender relations or at least it feels like that and perhaps I think social media is this massive amplification technology which means I guess we're so hyper aware of like the worst aspects of our culture and of our society but there was a piece of new research done recently I'm sure some people saw by kings that found that boys and men from gen z are more likely than older baby boomers to believe that feminism has done more harm than good and one in four UK males age 16 to 29

believe it's harder to be a man than a woman. A fifth of those who'd heard of Andrew Take looked on him really favourably. Do you think now, kind of I guess, given the research you've done, given where you still have that sense of fear, do you feel like we are living through, is this a kind of,

are we seeing a bit of a kind of pushback on the feminism that has progressed our gender relations? And that's the kind of a natural thing because if you think of how much change has happened in quite a short space of time, there was always going to be that pushback on the kind of pendulum shift. Or do you think we're actually seeing something

much more kind of sinister and dangerous ahead of us? I think that feminism has always had a pushback and I think some of it is because people don't really understand what feminism is. You know, there's some really bad examples of feminists and feminism. You could just be absorbing those and then on that questionnaire they're not really explaining like, why feminism, I mean, you know,

women can leave abusive relationships and have the power to earn as much as you. I don't think a quarter of those young men would say no to those kind of things. It's been kind of a bad branding. I just think maybe the social media is the thing. We see a lot of comments on things, you know, as in like underneath. And I think the negative is really amplified everywhere. So we all think the world is getting worse.

We all think everyone is, there's an impossibility of being more positive. And I don't even know how useful I think studies like that are, because that's it's just fodder for the press to do a headline in a very basic article and they never tell you oh we asked 18 people they will tell you the statistic of 25% of men under 25 think 25% of 10 people think this yeah and and so sometimes they're not very big studies and they the way that they're phrased a question is misleading or people aren't answering them very seriously like if it's like students in a campus bar like quite often it's students that they'll study study. So there were lots of qualifiers I would have within it. But then of course, yes, you do have

people like Andrew Tate, energizing men, especially young men in different kinds of opinions and ways of thinking. But I do think that's always happened as well. I think there's always been that, you know, it's a wave, it goes in, it goes out. We're just more hyper, wherever. And I guess also now the algorithm also does play a really big role in that we're actually just serving, and the algorithm does serve up content very specifically. So you're targeting young people, so you're having this very targeted kind of constant diet. of Andrew tape type characters to a specific demographic and also being told

that it's a zero-sum game being told that if someone else who was frequently sort of disenfranchised has more rights you lose them and I think that's and that's the dangerous thing about the way that those stories are reported online for clicks but newspapers also now

work in the same way and have become increasingly tabloid and want to appall people and shock them and have them commenting and sharing to say it's terrible. We live in a kind of crisis a culture of crisis now, it's everything, as a headline and a kind of breaking news store, and it's all that kind of trying to grab our attention,

which has become the most valuable commodity. I'm conscious of not wanting to become an amplification machine for the more deleterious aspects or more kind of damaging aspects of our society, because I know there was a lot of kind of positive stuff that you discovered in writing the book as well, and I'd love to draw on those briefly now before we wrap up. In writing the book and the research you did,

was there anything that, was a kind of positively surprising for you. Does anything that kind of changed your mind or kind of shifted, made you feel, I guess, a little bit more, I want to say, positive, excited about the future of where kind of sex, gender dynamics are taking us? Anything that you felt? Well, the fact that women do have financial autonomy

in our country and in many, many countries is a hugely positive thing. And if you're born into it, you can't really appreciate it because it seems like the basic, the basic thing that yeah if you get marriage you're allowed to leave them that you are allowed to have a mortgage and a bank card and apply for jobs

we would consider those things human rights and absolutely basic but they aren't in other places in the world and they weren't here several generations ago in some living people's lifetimes so I do think that's hugely positive not that we should go oh we're allowed to vote let's be quiet but the conversations that we're having are because we are allowed

to voice our opinions, voice our dissent, voice our unhappiness, say that there's more to do. And then that conversation, you know, sometimes we don't, often, we aren't all in agreement, but what we are in agreement about is that the world can be better, our society can be better, we are so privileged, we are the luckiest people, we have to be as happy as we can be, and we also have to be intersectional, and we have to understand, we've got these huge lessons to learn, to be better, but the fact that so many of us want to is really positive, I think. Every time I come to a event, the fact that anyone leaves the house, actually, I find astounding, and there's just so much good stuff on TV.

And a lot of the gigs I do, because I do stand-up comedy for my job. And most of them are, like, for charities or foundations. And you just realize so many people just want to do whatever they can, and they're busy, and they've got their own lives to concentrate on, but they do want the world to be better. They don't want people to be suffering. That is really hugely positive. And actually something that really stood out to me in the book,

because you mentioned at one point that there's a stat that says couples in which the woman out earns the man, there's a higher rate of divorce. And people were quite horrified by that and thought, oh, you know, this isn't a positive thing. But actually, it's like they have the choice to leave.

Yeah. And that is... It was reported in a way of like, see, that's what happens if you earn more women, you lose your man. Yeah, bitch. And I was just read it and thought, oh, that's because you can go. Because you can say, oh, I don't love you anymore.

And just finally, did learning more about, I guess, the relationship dynamics and how they're shifting as we as women become more economically independent as our kind of power dynamic shift did that change your perspective on monogamy and whether you think that is an enduring relationship structure i never thought monogamy was an enduring relationship structure and history has proved me right but you're a but you're you're anti-marriage yeah but you're married right how did how how do you know how can You walk us through this one.

I can, I can, but I don't want my husband to get deported. He has ADHD. He didn't apply for his visa in time. I was basically forced into marrying him. Now, I do like him very much. I do like him very much. He didn't want to get married either, just so you know. We didn't have a wedding.

And I wanted to write stand up about it, but I was worried that he would get deported. If I said it, so, and we do, we do, you know, he's my boyfriend and we've had children, but we wouldn't. have got married and he had also he'd been married previously and didn't want to get married again so definite proof on the monogamy thing the trouble is you can love someone so so much and you can really mean this is forever life is so long and people change so much and making that promise doesn't mean you should then be miserable because you promised it when you were 24 you were 32 or 55 it's so much better for everyone and I know that your parents are still together not to out you but and there's

There's something quite, with all of the, and I know for some people it can be very upsetting your parents breaking up and not liking each other and all those kind of things, but it also teaches you, you don't have to be miserable with someone. You are allowed to leave and try to be happier. And that should be the story around divorce. Divorce is really, really, really old-fashioned. It should be celebrated as a... It's really, really old. And it's really fun. I think people have a lot of fun getting married and a lot of fun with weddings, and I'm not trying to take that away. divorced? I think some people do as well. I think where they then realize it doesn't make, it's not a, life doesn't end. It wasn't a failure. It's not a failure. Relationships do end. And for some people, they, they die first. But for other people, hooray, you're still alive. As someone then who's been a serial monogamous and is now married, but didn't want to get married, what then is your top piece of advice for anyone in this room who is looking for? love. I do believe the cliche that if you are looking

for love I worry it's because it's a low self-esteem. Just a little bit of like I need to be validated by love I need to be loved more to be happy or to think I'm good enough and there are things you can do yourself, you can't do, you can't choose the moment where

you're going to fall mad in love and fancy someone but you can choose and I know this is really hard to like yourself for a little bit more. And if that feels really, really hard, then it's even more important that you do it, I think. Well, a very positive note

to end that on. Huge round of applause, Sarah. Thank you so much for listening to this live recording of the Sex Talks podcast with me, your host, Emma Louise Boynton. This was recorded at the London Edition Hotel. If you'd like to attend Sex Talks Live, head on over to the Eventbrate link in the show notes.

we have lots of exciting live events coming up. And finally, if you've enjoyed the show, I hope you have, please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to this on. So apparently it helps others to find us. Have a wonderful day.