Sex Talks With Emma-Louise Boynton - Solo pod! How to re-wild your sexual landscape (and close the orgasm gap!) according to Emily Nagoski

Episode Date: August 31, 2024

In the second solo Sex Talks pod Emma-Louise delves into the topic of last week's newsletter: new research on the orgasm gap, what it reveals about our broken sex culture, and, importantly, how we fix it. Touching on the work of sex educator and author, Emily Nagoski, Emma discusses how we can re-write our sexual script in order to foster a better, individual relationship to sex, and why this is so important in improving our overall sexual landscape. You can subscribe to the Sex Talks newsletter here and keep up-to-date on forthcoming events here.

Hello and welcome to the Sex Talks podcast with me, your host Emma Louise Boynton. Sex Talks exists to engender more honest, open and vulnerable discussions around typically taboo topics, like sex and relationships, gender inequality, and the role technology is playing and changing the way we date, love and fuck. Our relationship to sex tells us so much about who we are and how we show up in the world, which is why I think it's a topic we ought to talk about with a little more nuance and a lot more curiosity. If you want to join the conversation outside of the podcast, sign up to my newsletter via the link in the show notes.

Hello everybody and welcome to another solo episode of the Sex Talks podcast. It is wonderful to have you here. I'm actually sitting on my bed recording this, which weird because I'm usually in a studio or camped out in some kind of cavernous terrain. So hopefully the acoustics in my bedroom will work for this. I hope you have had a wonderful week so far and have some fun plans for the weekend. It's so weird that the end of summer is upon us. I kind of don't know where it's gone. I feel like I've been in limbo for so much of summer with just lots of kind of work things hanging in the air that are like unfinished. and like ever evolving and have been totally all-consuming.

So that's why my head's been at. But I posted something yesterday actually, which is something I've been reflecting on a lot as a summer drill to the end. And that is about whenever September is on the horizon. I always have that back-to-school feeling, which I'm sure resonates with many of you. And no matter how many years on from any academic institution I may be,

I still get that feeling of a new school term university semester about to begin. I rush out to buy some new stationery to get that brand new pencil case, even though I do not need a pencil case anymore, fun highlighters, all the school day accoutrements that made going back to school really exciting and fun. I used to love backpacks with tons of compartments. so I would buy the backpack which had the most number of zips that was my kind of metric for backpack suitability was how many zips it had so I don't know what my equivalent backpack will be

for this coming school semester granted I do still carry around a very big backpack anyone who has who knows me knows I'm a bag lady but as I think about going into this new school year as it were I always reflect the end of summer on what habits I want to bring into the so-called new year with me and then what habits I want to leave behind. I always feel this time of year is actually kind of more of reflected time, reflective time than the actual new year in December. And something I've been thinking about a lot of late is distraction and distractibility. I think I've been on my phone a lot recently, a lot for work,

but I think I then make that an excuse like, oh, I need to be on Instagram for work, and then ended up kind of falling down the rabbit hole of the algorithm them and not feeling great about it, how we use these things when they are designed to keep us on there, like slot machines and the kind of gambling, gambling setup. Anyway, the thing I think about is with distractibility is how to get a little bit more focus and a little bit less distracted. And something I read the other day in James Clear's newsletter. James Clear is the author of Atomic Habits, which is all about habit cultivation. And he sends out a newsletter, which I really

really like once a week. I think comes out on a Friday. It's called 321. And it just has little nuggets of information, bits of advice, quotes, that sort of thing. And I find it would be really great thought prompts. And he sent out one recently, which was about the power of boredom, which read, boredom is a filter. Common ideas come before it. Uncommon ideas come after it. Sit with a project long enough to get bored with it. Then sit a little more. The most useful insights bubble up after you get bored. And I really love that. It made me think of an interview I did with author Cocoa Mellas not so long ago about her book, Blue Sisters. And she said that one of the best piece of advice her, a previous writing teacher had given her, was to sit, much as James Clear

says, sit through the frustration and the boredom long enough to get to the 27th second. And by that he meant that so often was how she described it our moment of genius comes at that second beyond the point at which we get bored so he said so often we'll make it through to the 26 second i don't know why i said 26 and 27 but nonetheless so we'll make it through the 26 second and then we'll reach for our phone we'll make a phone call we'll go and grab dinner we'll break our concentration because we're bored, we're frustrated, we're coming up against a, you know, a wall and whatever work we're focusing on. But if we can push through to that 27th second, that's when we get the great ideas. That is when we get that moment of genius. And she reflected on how in an age of

distractibility where, you know, when the attention economy is continually grabbing out of minds and we're constantly, you know, we never had any reason to be bored now. Coco, one like how many moments of genius are getting lost because of technology and the way it distracts us so constantly. And that really stuck with me, particularly as I'm doing a lot more writing at the moment, and it's really hard and it's often really boring. It's being left with your own, or not boring, but it's being left with your own thoughts is tough. And it's so instinctive to seek to break free of the container of your own mind and reach for a phone. And I find, myself doing it constantly even though I've just joined the London Library and it's a very kind of

studio space so it feels quite embarrassing being on your phone there like it's quite doesn't feel like it's kind of very kosher to be sitting you know tapping away on one's mobile phone but even then I find myself reaching to refresh refresh refresh refresh I call this rat brain mode and it is mode I do not like being in anyway so that is something I've been thinking about a lot as the summer comes to an end how to sit in stillness and cultivate a greater appreciation of boredom and all that it offers us. So perhaps that can be a point of reflection for you too as the summer comes to an end.

Before we get into the main topic that I want to discuss today in the podcast which is about last weekend's newsletter, I want to just quickly make a recommendation. I went to see a screening of an incredible documentary last week or maybe the week before now. I'm losing track of time. It was called Daughters, or it is called Daughters, and it's just been released on Netflix,

and it is one of the most powerful, beautiful, evocative, emotive documentaries I've seen in such a long time. The documentary, which is directed by Natalie Ray and Angela Patton, centres on the Date with Dad program that Patton has led for more than 12 years as part of her community work with black girls in America. As part of this program, the children have brought into the prisons where their fathers are incarcerated for a party, a dance, there's food, a photo booth. And while that might sound pretty kind of unextraudinary, prisons in America have increasingly stopped allowing in-person visits, otherwise known as touch visits, between family members, instead permitting only video and phone calls. I have so much to say on the criminal justice system in America, also here in the UK. I think how a society treats those who are incarcerated is such a reflection of the

morality of that society. And I think we all have, I think, you know, both the UK and America, we really ought to be hanging our heads in shame. But I think this documentary, what it does, like, it highlights just how dehumanize it. that restriction on inmates is when they're not even allowed to see their family. They're not even allowed to touch their own children, their own wife, even in the like kind of visitation area.

And as the documentary shows, for some fathers, including a few of those who were actually to pitch in the documentary, this date with dad program offered what actually ended up being the only time during their sentence or would end up being any time during their sentence, that they could interact with their daughter and person. So it was incredibly powerful, as I said.

And it got me thinking a lot about masculinity and male vulnerability, particularly as prior to the party, all the men were who were going to participate in the party, had to join this mentoring group for, I think, 10 weeks. And it was facilitated by a guy who was basically helping them talk through their relationship with their families, their age of their daughters, reflect on their time in prison,

what they were anticipating about the dance, how they felt about it. One of the dads sitting in that mentor group ahead of the party just said at one point, God, this is like the most we've shared with one another. Like, you know, in the entire time, many of us have been here in prison. And it was just so beautiful being able to see this group of men

really bond during these mentoring sessions and really support one another through what was an incredibly emotionally taxing time. And in the aftermath of the dance, you see them will gather around and reflect on how the experience was for them individually. And they were so supportive of one another. And one guy, his daughter, hadn't ended up being able to come. And, you know, he cried and another guy wrapped his arm around him.

And there was just such vulnerability in that moment. And I found it just, yeah, so touching. So it's on Netflix. and I would highly, highly recommend that you watch it. It is such a worthwhile documentary to see. Right, so let's go on to the main topic of today's podcast, which is the subject that I addressed in the most recent newsletter. If you haven't subscribed to my substack, please do.

The link is in the show notes, and I send it out, or I will be sending out very religiously every Sunday. I'm here on out, as I'm about to get super consistent with all sex talks output. please hold me to it. But it's the, what I wrote in this week's piece was reflecting on a recent study about the orgasm gap, which I'll go into in a sec, and also something I read in Emily Nagoski's book come together. I would really recommend this book to anyone who is beginning to reflect more deeply on

their relationship to sex, sexuality, you know, their relationships if you're just going through a period in which you just want to be a little bit more intentional about your approach to sex and to relationships. I think Emily Nogoski writes in such an accessible way and she really breaks down, I think, very important sexual, scientific concepts and ideas in a way that is just so applicable to your day-to-day life and connection to sex. And I've just started reading Come Together, which is the follow-up from her number one New York Times bestseller, Come As You Are, which was all about female pleasure. And I'm really liking this book, actually. I find it I don't know. I think I find actually more accessible than come as you are. I'm really, really

enjoying it. I think she's a fantastic writer. Right. So for those of you who haven't been to sex talks yet, and thus haven't had me wax lyrical about the orgasm gap, in brief, this is the disparity between the rape at which men versus women orgasm during heteronormative part of sex. Now, we have known for some time that while men typically orgasm 95% of the time during straight coupled sex, yes, 95% of the time. Women orgasm around. around 65% at the time by comparison. Now, according to data analysis by sex therapist, Dr. Karen Gurney, this figure drops for women to just 18% during casual sex with men.

I know, 18%. And to be honest, I actually reckon that's probably inflated, and people are still lying about that, because I'd say 18% for casual first-time sex seems pretty high. I should know it's first time, but casual. We've also been aware of the fact that there is no orgasm gap in same sex. couples, which highlights that this isn't an anatomical issue. No, it is not just harder to make women come. It's a cultural issue. It's around whose pleasure we've learned to prioritize and

whose pleasure we've learned how to prioritize. But, and this is a big but, what hasn't been studied until now, is whether the orgasm gap exists in all adult age groups. Now, I've been told so many times that a woman's sex life just gets better and better as we get older. So, something to look forward to, I goddam hope. But, sadly, new research by the Kinsey Institute, analysing data from around 25,000 single people in America, found that the orgasm gap persists across all age groups. Yep.

So from 18 to 80, women are consistently orgasming with significantly less frequency than their male counterpart. Now, I was interested to look into what was contributing to this gap and also to really think about why it matters. So I found myself down a bit of a research hole and came across a study from 2022 which examined the orgasm gap in relation to gender labour, which the report described as the work individuals do

to reinforce ideals around masculinity or femininity. And they found a pattern of gender labour across both men and women as they sought to explain gender differences in their rate of orgasm. According to the report, participants frequently drew on traditional gender norms as they portrayed the orgasm gap disparity as somehow natural. The result of women just being innately more inclined to prioritize emotional romantic intimacy while their male counterparts tend to prioritize physical, sexual desire and pleasure.

Now, this was from both male and female participants. The women participants would tend to say, oh, you know, orgasm isn't so important to me. I really have sex for, you know, the emotional connection, the feeling held, that sort of thing. and for men, it is just more important, like they really crave, you know, physical satisfaction, you know, more than I do. And vice versa, the male participants would also reflect this same idea that for them, orgasm was very important, it was kind of very necessary in sex, and in their experience, it just wasn't as important for women. In such way, participants frequently suggested that women just don't really need to orgasm during sex in the way that men do. because ladies of course while we're simply looking for connection intimacy a warm body to be held at night

men have a vital god-given need for climax which cannot be ignored right hmm so suspect but both men and women who featured in study they tended to enforce these gender stereotypes even when that meant women reproducing norms that limited their own perceived right to pleasure and sexual enjoyment this the researchers highlight is in no small part down to a culture of shame, a topic that we cover a lot at sex thoughts that exists around female pleasure specifically. And there are so many factors that contribute to this shame. But chief amongst them, as the writers articulated, is our very phallocentric model of sex, which defines regular sex exclusively in terms of a penis in a vagina. Thereby relegating everything else to alternative

of sexual practices. Even the very vocabulary that we use around sex, aka foreplay, is the stuff that comes before the main act. So it's the starter. And we put in that bracket of foreplay, all the good stuff, fingering, oral sex, everything. And typically then categorize, like, the main meal, aka real sex, as penetration. Even that is just so, one, it's so ingrained in our sexual culture. And two, it is so male-centric and so heteronormative. Because also, what about the same-sex couples? That completely devalidates the legitimacy of same-sex kind of sexual practices as somehow not being the real thing, the main thing. It also completely prioritises the type of sex that best pleasures men. As we know, the majority of women require clitorial stimulation in order to orgasm.

And if main regular sex is seen as penetration, and that's the kind of the focal point for people, then of course women aren't going to be orgasming as much as men, because we're not having the type of sex. We're not prioritising having the type of sex that we need to be able to climax. The research has also pointed out that more kind of clitorious focus, sexual behaviours, for example, tended to be characterised by participants in the study as unnecessary and challenging. sometimes even as dirty or not natural, which really reflects prevailing myths that women's bodies and sexuality generally actually are somehow gross and sinful, which could not be further from the truth, but also feels very resonant. I mean, I definitely grew up thinking that, yeah, sex was penetration and that everything else was, yeah, kind of embarrassing. I definitely had so much shame around someone going down on me early on my sexual career because, yeah, I felt dirty. I felt like there was something about my body that would be gross to a man. And sex in my young, naive mind was very much for a man's pleasure and not my own. So the

reporters go on to write, the gender labour of upholding a definition of regular sex centres and normalises men's sexual pleasure, while marginalising and problematising women's pleasure. So much so in fact that women end up feeling discomfort around their sexual pleasure and hence self-regulate their own sexual expression. If women are taught to feel more shame and embarrassment about their bodies and sexuality, then they're also going to be less likely to explore and get to know what they like and get to know what they don't like in the bedroom, which only further alienates us from our own bodies and pleasure. As the researchers suggest, by ascribing men to the physical and women to the emotional in the context of sex, participants

ends up just reproducing the sort of gender essentialising ideas that are often used to justify other gender gaps in heterosexual relationships, like child rearing and household labour. I mean, how often have you heard people say, women are just naturally more predisposed to be caregivers, we're just more empathetic and kind, as if those traits somehow spout from our vaginas. And thus, we're naturally better caregivers and we should be the ones who do the majority of child care, which I just think is ridiculous. Separate research has also suggested a correlation between the unequal division of household labour and low sexual desire amongst women in heterosexual relationships. As some of you might remember, I interviewed the founder

of the Everyday Sexman Project Laura Bates a little while ago. And she reflected on this research in the podcast saying, maybe women are exhausted, angry, furious and feeling put upon. And so not particularly in the mood because they're doing the three hours of unpaid extra childcare and housework. That would make sense. If you're exhausted and burnt out by the end of the day, getting into your kind of sexual headspace is going to be the last thing on your to-do list. And yeah, if women are bearing the brunt of those household chores and it's unequally distributed, there is going to be that feeling of resentment that of course is going to be reflected in your intimate relationship with a partner. As Laura was reminding us, the orgasm gap doesn't exist

and isolation from wider gender inequalities. It is inextricably linked to them, which is why this is such an interesting topic because it tells us so much about our broader sociocultural norms and ideas and functionings. So how do we begin to close this gap then? Because surely that's what we want to be doing. That's what we want to be kind of taking this research,

is, okay, we know that this is a problem. We know that it's an enduring problem. We take issue of the fact the orgasm gap apparently exists across women's entire lifetime. Now we need to try and fix it. All of us, collectively. So I have my dating app profile that gives you little prompts and one of my promises. Together we could close the orgasm gap because it's a together activity. So even though the orgasm gap does reflect, I think, feed into broader systemic inequalities the women face throughout society. So obviously it's going to take more than just kind of better sex education

to fix it. This would, I think, feel like a very essential place to begin, because so much of what their report reflected on, and what we reflect on at sex talks, is how poor sex education sets all of us up so badly to be able to go into a sexual context and advocate for our own pleasure. At least all just because we don't really have the language of sex to draw upon. And not having the language of sex, like even how to name our anatomy, like how to, you know, you can just practice talking about sex. It makes it really hard to be able to then feel confident and empowered in a sexual context to articulate what you want. And again, articulate what you don't want. I think good at sex education is such a kind of critical place start. But I think it's

also important to think on an individual basis for you listening today to this and being like, oh my God, this is so bad. We need to address the orgasm gap. What can we individually do? And this is when Emily Nagoski comes in with her brilliant idea about the sexual garden. So any of you who've been to sex walks before will know that something we talk about a lot is this idea of the sexual script. And that is the ideas, traditions, mythologies, norms that have essentially shaped our, as we're reflected on today, very male-centric penetration-focused, shame-laden, sexual culture, and which end up showing up in the bedroom. So our sexual script is the thing, the script we get handed from a young age, that we end up following because we don't know any better and we don't necessarily have any good counter information to challenge these ideas about sex handed to us by society. And hence we end up thinking, but we end up often thinking the sexual script is somehow natural that it's like the order of things when it is quite literally manmade and thus we can rewrite our sexual script, which is what Emily is. Nogoski advises we do. She describes it in terms of a garden metaphor.

Bear with me here. On the first day you were born, she writes, you were essentially given a new field of rich and fertile soil, the garden of your sexuality. Instantly, your family and those around you begin planting seeds in this garden about bodies, gender, sex, pleasure, safety, love. Then your culture steps in and plants a variety of weeds and invasive species, wind-blown seeds of myths about the ideal sexual partner, she writes, and ropes of vines about beauty standards, spreading like poison ivy under the fence and over the garden wall. She explains that for some, the lucky ones, their family will help weed out the deleterious invaders, aka damaging cultural sex myths, aka damaging cultural sex myths, and will cultivate

pleasure-positive ideas instead. But unfortunately, for the majority of us, we get stuck with kind of the toxic crap that we must eventually spend our whole adulthood trying to weed out ourselves. And while it's frustrating we have to do this work, she acknowledges, especially in later life, when we've had to bear the brunt of pretty crappy sexual script up until this point, it's also an opportunity, a chance to create a new sexual mind and landscape entirely on our own terms. For me, it's happened at 28, as many of you will know, when I started sex therapy, and really began my own season of gardening in haste. From the outset of doing sex therapy, my fantastic therapist Alex prompted me to question all the sexual shoulds I had become

unconsciously beholden to. Ideas like sex for a man's pleasure. My pleasure doesn't matter. My body doesn't deserve pleasure. I should always want sex. I'm broken because I don't like sex. Oh no, Alex told me. It just sounds like you don't like the sex you've been having. And of course, she was right. But in prompting me to interrogate these myths I'd inculcated as facts. Alex gave me a whole new lens through which to see my relationship to sex and with it, my relationship to myself and importantly to my body. I was finally able to see that the rot that had eaten away at my garden of sexuality for so many years, to borrow Emily Nagoski's fantastic metaphor, wasn't the result of some personal failing. It wasn't my fault that my relationship

to sex felt so bad, but it was a result in large part of ideas I'd inherited from our broader broken sex culture. So while I think there's so much vital work that we still need to do to address broader gender inequalities, which prop up and feed into sexual inequalities, I found it really empowering considering this idea of our sexual garden and how we can individually redesign our own sexual landscape. I also really liked the way Anne Nogoski articulated this as something we should do for ourselves, yes, but also a form of public service. In improving our own ideas around sex and sexuality, Nogoski argues, we can help to improve the overall sexual landscape that we all inhabit, thereby making things a little bit better for the next generation. I came away from that

thinking, God, pleasure is a public service, is it not? I think it is. So, if you take away one thing from today's podcast, please take away this idea that we ought to be leaving the world in a better place for our grandchildren, and we can do that one orgasm at a time. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and enjoy the weekend. Autumn sex talks programming goes live tomorrow on Friday and I'm so excited for what's to come and I really can't wait to see you all there. Have a fabulous weekend. Thank you so much for listening to today's Sex Talks podcast with me, your host, Emma Louise Boynton. If you'd like to attend a live recording of the podcast, check out the event bright link in the show notes as we have lots of exciting live

events coming up. You can also keep up to date with everything coming up at Sex Talks, Plus get my sporadic musings via the Sex Talk substack. I've also popped that link into the show notes. And over on Instagram, where I'm at Emma Louise Boynton. And finally, if you enjoyed the show, please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to this on,

as apparently it helps others to find us. Have a glorious day.