Sex Talks With Emma-Louise Boynton - Tackling sex misinformation with Sophia Smith Galer, author and journalist

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

In this episode, Emma sits down with multi-award-winning journalist, TikTok creator and author of Losing It: Sex Education for the 21st Century, Sophia Smith Galer. Together, they delve into the many sex myths Sophia tackles in her book; what Sophia refers to as the ‘sex misinformation crisis’ we’re currently facing; what initially drew her to explore this topic-area within her reporting; the challenges she and other journalists face in getting editors to take this subject matter seriously, and how we can all have a better relationship to sex overall. It’s an episode jam-packed with fascinating sex insights and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. This was recorded in front of a live audience at the Zults pop up store in Soho.  Launching in collaboration with Sexual Health London (SHL), aka the NHS’s free STI testing service, Zults is the brand-new and first-of-its-kind app that aims to provide a super easy way for individuals to test, manage, and communicate sexual health results if and when they want. Go an check out what they’re doing on Myrezults.com.

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. So each week, I'm joined by a new guest, whose expertise on the topic I'd really like to mine,

and do well just that. From writers, authors and therapists to actors, musicians and founders, we'll hear from a glorious array of humans about the stuff that gets the heart of what it means to be human. If you want to join the conversation outside of the podcast, sign up to my newsletter via a link in the show notes, or come along to a live recording of the podcast, at the London Edition Hotel.

Okay, I hope you enjoy the show. If you have a negative first sexual experience, you are more likely to have negative sexual health outcomes in your sexual future. This episode of the Sex Talks podcast was created in partnership with the Zoltz app, which is helping to make managing your sexual health a whole lot easier.

Launching collaboration with Sexual Health London, aka the NHS's free SDI testing service, Zoltz is the brand new and first of its kind. app. They aims to provide a super easy way for individuals to test, manage and communicate sexual health results if and when they want. Go and check out what they're doing on myresult.com. A link is in the show notes. So very appropriately, given the work that Zaltz does, in this episode I sat down with multi-award winning journalist, TikTok creator and author of losing it, sex education for the 21st century, Sophia Smith Gala. We also had this conversation

in the Zoltz pop-up shop in Soho. I've interviewed Sophia a couple of times now, and I always love our conversations because she is such a font of knowledge on the topic of sex and what she describes as the misinformation crisis that surrounds it. But while we've talked a lot in the past about the sex myths she tackles in her book, which, by the way, I highly recommend,

if you're interested in this topic, what I didn't know so much about was why Sophia was drawn to this topic in the first place, and the challenges she and other journalists, face in getting editors to take the subject matter seriously. So we started the episode addressing exactly that, before making our way onto some of the aforementioned sex myths that Sophia explores in such detail in her brilliant book. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did.

When you train to become journalist, they always train you to be a generalist. So the idea is that you don't know what the news of the following day is going to be. Is it an earthquake happening somewhere? is it that a politician has said this or that. So that's what you're trained. Ed Miliband and his bacon sandwich. Right. Like, you know, you're trained to cover any of that.

And I was really lucky with my first job in journalism. It was covering, it was social media journalism for BBC culture and BBC future. Culture was the arts. Future was tech and science. And straight away, I was thrown into some very sort of nice and interesting specialisms. I then became a religion reporter for the BBC. And that's when I wrote losing it. Makes sense.

And then when. When losing it came out, I had become a senior news reporter at Vice, which was, you know, RIP, RIP advice. But incredibly supportive of understanding sexual and reproductive health as an important news specialism and like demanding of news coverage in the UK and abroad. So it was like I wrote losing it, not knowing I would enter a job like that. Because I was going to say, early on, so I went back at the BBC, how receptive were editors to you pitching stories about sex? I wrote, I made a film about Vagenismus,

so I was able to successfully pitch that, and it went viral when I made it. And it's still on the BBC today, if anyone's interested in seeing a film and seeing a doctor and to women with Vagenismus talk about that experience. I was really proud of making that and that, you know, I had no problem getting that commissioned and it got platformed and amplified internally. I do remember early in lockdown, so I would have been 25,

lockdown just locked down. And I can remember at the time I had access to kind of these news meetings where senior people at the BBC would listen to young people for their pitches. It's where we could have an influence where elsewhere in the organisation, we may not traditionally.

and I can remember saying I have an idea like loads of young people can't have sex now they can't have sex that's going to be a problem that has got to be a problem and I'm sure we can find doctors

and sort of sexual health sort of professionals who could speak to us about it and I got laughed at and I'll never remember the men who laughed at me like the senior men who laughed at me and then a few years later

in public health research these studies would come out showing how it was non-cohabiting couples and single young people who were the worst hurt in terms of socialisation during COVID-19. I was on the front lines of no sex. Right. Many years. It's not nice beyond a sex standpoint either.

This is about health and well-being and acknowledging that for a lot of people, if sex in whatever way brings sort of psychological health and wellbeing benefits connection what happens when a massive group of people suddenly can't have that anymore so it wasn't always easy no and because I was going to say what I think when we think of so I only think even now I think the conversation around sex has definitely evolved a lot and I think that's much more front and centre particularly kind of mainstream news organisations but I still think there's a kind of it's categorised and kind of sex and dating as kind of women's issues so it's kind of over here is like you know, salacious dating stories, how many people this person had sex a year.

It still doesn't feel like it's necessarily taking that seriously as a journalistic topic. Do you think that's correct or do you think they have? 100%. When you work in a newsroom, you see quite quickly how, what topics take center stage. And I would also argue that it really depends what kind of newsroom that you work for. But if you work somewhere that has a remit and aim to, engage young people and to engage women, you will see them do more sex and relationships coverage. It's the minute that they kind of don't really care who consumes their content, that you might

see a sort of disinterest in covering those themes, or when they do cover those themes, it's not done in the correct way. It may be salacious, it may be, it may not actually be about health, it's about, oh, here's an excuse to talk about sex, he-he, let's do it. That happens in newsrooms all the time. And it matters. And it matters hugely, obviously, I wouldn't run a platform called sex tools if I didn't think it mattered. But on the cover of my very beaten up, well-read version of your book, you say how, because sex tells us so much about who we are as a society. I remember that. That's why I like my copy quite a lot, actually, because it reminds me of that quote every time. Hang on. Can we get the book, please? Thank you so much. Do you want to read out?

Yeah. I wrote this once. our sex lives tell us a lot about the society we live in it's likely that the people you meet and work with buy your milk from receive DMs from and fall in love with may all have had their lives profoundly affected by sex myths and an awful lot of them are all trying to have sex with themselves with each other and maybe even with you that's a really good call to arms in the front of the book

but tell us a little bit about that why do you why have you written there that sex tells us so much about our society? What does it tell us? Yeah, like the way people have sex tells us an awful lot of information about their upbringing, about the societal backgrounds that they come from, about, yeah, I am a big believer in how gender equality is there in the bedroom or is, you know, very transparently not there in the bedroom. I think you can learn a lot about how somebody has been socialised from how they behave when they're in the bedroom. and equally what they're, a lot of people's attitudes to sex, I think especially when we sort of talk to attraction

or what we perceive the people, sort of relational sex. So when we have sex with other people, what we perceive them to be interested in and what they perceive us to be interested in is normally really heavily informed by like gender norms or sort of societal standards about what it means to be, you know, a hot person or an attractive person. We know, I remember when I wrote the book looking at, there was a huge body of data used in research.

I think it was in Australia and it was about, it was, as most of these studies are, they focus on heterosexual populations. So sex research as well as loads of academic research is described as weird, but they don't mean weird. They mean the acronym weird. W means Western. E means educated. D means democratic, R means rich. It's the idea that most of our samples that we choose when we research people actually come from Europe or North America.

You know, research is not representative of the wider world. This was done in Australia. And it was like, oh yeah, the thing that men care the most about, I think, will not surprise you. It was sort of facial appearance and physical attraction. And then when you sort of ask what the women care about, there was like this enormous list really huge list

which also included things like you know financial status and other things and then you look at that cost of living crisis is no joke right you look at that

and you look at these sort of expectations that we have of each other you think about how okay so if I map the cost of living crisis onto this what happens is everything going to get better or is it going to get worse

it's probably going to get worse so data data tells us yeah that our sex lives tell us a lot more about our lives beyond sex I think I've read something I think Lena Dunham did an interview a while ago in which she was saying the exactly same thing really echoing what you've just said there

but she was like sex there's something about the way we see people she was kind of talking about why she loves doing sex scenes and having them on the various things that she's created she's like you get to explore a side a facet of people that you don't

ordinarily see. So you get behind their intimate side, their vulnerable side and we all have our kind of public persona but actually what's quite literally underneath often reveals so much about that person. And it may not be intimate and vulnerable. It may be extremely performative. Totally. It may be

But even that I find fascinating because what is the why do someone perform exactly? That kind of what is the pressure and the onus on people to go into the bedroom and feel they need to perform? And again it comes back to gender norms as we discuss there's so many things happening there. Let's dive into the book then, losing it. As I said, it's a brilliant book.

It's so rich in research and data and your own personal experiences. You mentioned before, you were working at the BBC's. You were covering religion. That was your focus at the time. Very apt then to write a book about sex. But what was, you focus, the book debunks a series of different sex myths,

which will go through a couple of them in this interview, from the virginity myth, the penetration myth, the virility myth, the whole bunch of them. Why did you want to focus specifically on these myths, Why was that your avenue to exploring sex? Because I think a lot of the work that I do is debunking. Increasingly amongst journalists, there's a huge focus now on when we report is often having to challenge something that either someone powerful has said it

and it's actually false or misleading or it sort of pivots around a piece of online content that's gone viral that is in fact untrue. And I could see how easily that premise could be mapped onto sexual health and well-being in the UK and abroad. I could see very quickly how if you begin to apply some of the journalism standards to writing about sex and sexual health, it instantly demands that you do a bunch of things, which includes debunking sex misinformation, which is a phrase that I really worked hard to try and popularize when I wrote the book and when it first came out. because we hear a lot about political misinformation, COVID-19 misinformation. We don't really hear about that so much anymore,

but that was huge a couple of years ago when they were trying to get everyone vaccinated. And I was like, there's sex misinformation as well. Where are all the resources being devoted to talking about this? And the other premise that I wanted to introduce was holding power to account. We can moan that all these things exist. We can be frustrated at how certain groups of people maybe being treated

in an inequitable way someone's responsible for that somewhere down the line and what would end up happening is the more reporting I did in that space the more holding power to account I was able to do so

and at this time losing it has sort of matured a little I'm about to publish I'm at Vice now I'm doing loads of these loads of these news reports about sort of sexual health and sex education in the UK and I did a story that was about, like, the government lied about the amount of money it was going to put into training teachers to deliver sex ed.

Now, if any of you have been following the news, you know, I actually work really hard not to because I hate news most of the time, even though working it's so boring and depressing, but you may have a sales pitch. Yeah, I get a sales pitch for my industry. But it was quite hard to avoid sort of Rishi Sunak and the government treating, sex education, like a political football and not something that has to be kept to really high standards,

which are set internationally, by the way, by like the World Health Organisation and really important people. And all the treatment around that, there was nothing about how, hey, you could actually give more money to train teachers. You know, the thing that you lied about doing a couple of years ago,

you don't hear about stuff like that. And I was only able to uncover that because I did a Freedom of Information request. So if you don't have reporters who have the time to do things like freedom of information requests, you don't have power being held to account and you don't have things changing. I love that. I love hearing you describe that because I think it's really highlighting, kind of to your point, how journalistic rigor is so integral to a topic.

I think particularly like sex, which I think often isn't taken seriously enough and therefore isn't subject to that sort of rigorous reporting and holding power to account that you've just described there. I was really passionate in losing it. There was one chapter where I talk about a personal experience. Everything else is reporting and reportage. I was unable to travel because it was the pandemic. But I did so many interviews with people around the world

about what had happened to them in their lives. So people who I would identify as like victims of sex misinformation, something happened to them because people endorsed ideas that are false in their lives. I interviewed loads of doctors, loads of sexual health. experts. I think because sex is a topic, as I said before, that doesn't get kind of put in this kind of category of sex and dating relationships, and thus it's a women's issue, because women only have sex, apparently. I think it becomes, as a result, slightly kind of not taking this seriously. I think sometimes that means the writing then around sex, particularly when it

comes to sex as a topic, kind of a book topic, is very memoir. And it's very much asking, I think we ask this of women, I think generally in the public sphere, and writers specifically to mine their personal experiences. Yeah, the personal essay industrial complex. Exactly that. So it was very refreshing, I think, to have a book that does take that journalistic approach to a topic that I think has previously been

kind of quite couched in the, what did you just call that? The personal essay industry complex. The personal essay industrial complex. That, exactly that. The subjects, but the deep-brouched in that. So I want us to go through a couple of the sex myths that you bust in the book.

But before we do, I just wondered off the top, what did you, was there one myth or kind of piece of sex misinformation that through your research and in your writing you found to become most insidious and perhaps most damaging? The book originally, so it ended up being,

I don't know how many sex myths at this point, quite a few, maybe like eight to ten that I write about in the book. It's not a comprehensive list, but about eight to ten in the book. When I came up with the, idea for losing it. It was all about first-time sex, popularly known as virginity loss, which I critique that phrase and I don't like using it. It was originally going to be entirely about

virginity, but like a journalistic exploration, like interviews and investigations around virginity, to the point that there are loads of bits that didn't make the final book. And I went on very weird rabbit holes on the internet and I have all this information and I just don't know what to do with it. Like I know an awful lot about virginity auctions that just, which do happen. Book part two. Yeah, I shouldn't be, yeah. Losing it, like, directs, cut, like, all this weird stuff. But originally I did so much investigation around that

because it was like, how is this archaic concept still extremely influential? And I don't only mean, in the case of conservative cultures, that if you grew up in the UK, even in a totally atheist secular house, it was very likely that you did have a viewpoint over your first sexual experience. probably if you had a sexual experience you then realized oh hang on that wasn't entirely accurate the idea that was painted for me of that um de-flowering and the emerging into adult womanhood it's just quite uncomfortable um there's this amazing piece of research that was done by a psychologist in the US who tried to map out what people's for um there are loads of different words for it

none of them are great but like sexual initiation sexual debut um i quite excited sexual debut coming off this stage my kind of sexual awakening and being like I have arrived

yeah so she like did all of this research and she clocked that ah so people have first times

in three different ways based on all of my interviews and research and analysis so you either see your first

sexual experience as a gift to be given I love I love the I love the little smirks. Wrapped with a bow.

Yeah. And another way was a stigma to lose. And the third way was a natural right of passage. And the most positive health outcomes are associated with which group do you think? Let's go. Raise your hand if you think it's the gift. First time sex is a gift to be given. This is a biased audience because you're at a sex talks event.

Raise your hand if you think it's a stigma to lose. Raise your hand if it's a natural right of passage, right? Well done. So those who perceived of their first experience as a right of passage were more likely to not expect sort of candles and rose petals and that there'd be a few bumps along the road. You know, actually quite a realistic impression of what it would be despite having no experience of it.

And that it was sort of something that people, if they choose to get around to some point in their lives and yeah, it leads to whatever, quite a relaxed approach. Lots of people are in societies where they're kind of basically not allowed to have a relaxed approach about it. So if you perceive of virginity as this like, oh my God, I can't go to university and be a virgin, which is, I think, like, really prevalent here, that population is way less likely to use contraception the first time they have sex.

They are way less likely to divulge their sexual status to a partner. So they're less likely to tell the person they're having sex with that they're a virgin if they choose to use that vocabulary. In terms of communication with a partner and having good sex, if you don't tell your partner that this is all new to me, like be patient with me or I'm eager to learn new things, you know. Something that happened with the gift givers was that they expect something in return. And traditionally what they expect in return is a trusting long-term relationship.

Right? How many stories do you hear in popular culture of women? and I know who are not given that. And then how do you feel after that experience? You know, that can be soul-destroying. I didn't even get money for the bus home because I didn't have my wallet with me. I had to walk home two hours and shoes that didn't fit

on the next morning. It was so awful. It was a guy in a band who I really found out of it. Oh, we've all been there. The boy in the band, he played guitar and that was enough said. And I was like, just fuck it, just get rid of this. Whatever, whatever this idea. But it was this idea of it was something to get rid of.

There was a kind of social stigma. I remember I was 16 when I first had apprenticeship sex and it was, I felt a huge amount of shame around that because I went to all girls' school and people were very sexually acted from a very, very young age and it was seen as being like, it was kind of embarrassing. I was like, I'd left it really late by comparison to the rest of my peers.

And so it really felt like this burdensome thing I needed to get rid of. It had nothing to do with how I felt. I felt totally uncomfortable and it was really down to peer pressure. And I look back on that and I just wish I could just say, God, like, just don't what, don't be stressed by what other people think in relationship to your own kind of sexual.

Yeah, we almost talk about it too much. We talk about it like it's a big deal and it's not the best way to talk about it. Also, because if you have a negative first sexual experience, you are more likely to have negative sexual health outcomes in your, in your sexual future. You know, you are more likely to have what in the business, you know, they call like sexual dysfunction or sexual problems. it's more likely. Not really that surprising, to be honest,

but if you think of it as something that's really likely to lead to negative health outcomes, from a public health perspective, you want everyone having as good a first time as they possibly can. Your first question, I've like gone on to a tangent about random virginity experiences,

but your question about what's the most insidious? I forgot about that. I was, dear. I think the virginity myth is the most insidious because it begins introducing, the inequality of sex to you. So who here thought first time sex meant a penis and a vagina

or a penetrative experience. That's what I thought. I had never really had anyone speak to me about what other forms of sex even look like to know that it could look different to that. And I also think it's the most routineized one in the sense that so casually, even friends who are coming to sex talks

and kind of pretty woke and, you know, we're kind of quite familiar with these topics speak quite comfortably around sex. They will still refer to when I lost. my virginity and oh that person's still a virgin. So I think it's a kind of colloquialism that also keeps that myth very much alive. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's part of it as well. Just something I was thinking about as I was preparing this interview, I was listening to the BBC show that you recently did because I think sometimes when we have these conversations, we talk very much about women's experiences and for good reason, I think. One, because we mainly talk about women's relationship to sex at sex talks,

but I think also their stigma around virginity and it being wrapped up and ideas of kind of purity culture. We are most perniciously affected by the world's most prevalent sex myths. I don't doubt that for a second. Perfectly put. That's what I found.

That's not to say other groups of people don't suffer from sex myths, but women and heterosexual women gay women don't have, in many regards, for example, the orgasm gap do not have the problem. Yeah. Come on ladies.

You know, self-selecting audience. there are instances in which heterosexual women literally come last. Always. But I think with that, as I was listening to the interview you did for the BBC, so you did something recently on in-cell culture, so that's involuntary celopacy amongst young men. And I thought it was fascinating to that, because I hear entirely what you were saying,

women are most perniciously, as you say, affected by a lot of the sex myths that you cover. But it's interesting listening to that and hearing these young boys also talk about the burden and this stigma associated with virginity for them as well. And for a lot of them, it's kind of a motivator to then getting embroiled in these, these in-cell chat forums online.

Because of this shame and kind of social pressure, they felt around the fact that they were still so-called virgins, and that was seen as socially unacceptable. What did you discover talking to those young boys? Yeah, so it was writing, losing it, that I, I've been in the kind of reporting that I do, which has often involved, like, gender, and tech and, like, sort of confluence of the two, I've always known about, like, in-cell

spaces online. You can't get away with, like, not knowing about them. And I spend an awful lot of time on Reddit, and I was aware, I can't even remember how I first came across it, but when I was writing losing it, I came across a subreddit called In-Cel Exit, and it's really unique space on the internet, because the In-Sel subcult, the In-Cult, the In-Subcult. being this sort of slice of the pie chart of the larger mannosphere, which is a sort of group of various toxic masculine communities online. Incells who, as you said, define themselves as involuntarily celibate and the community that they're part of blames an unfair social hierarchy in the world for that.

And they perceive the world to only involve people who are in these sort of inescapable strata's of life. So if you're a man, you're either a virgin or a chad. You know, there's like no in between. You're either one of these alpha men who get all the girls, or there's no hope for you. Or you can like game the system to try and become more Chad-like. All of these themes, they're quite bad. Because they spread so much hate in these groups,

the communities, the online spaces have been increasingly banned. So the subreddits you used to everyone read it for them have gone because they're not allowed to be there anymore because they spread too much misogyny and sort of violence. if you go on social media platforms you can't find so much anymore I'm pretty sure if you went on the TikTok search bar and tried to search in cell

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to search because they have violated too many community guidelines so why has in cell exit survived because it's a space really heavily moderated where men who self-identify as in cells go there because they don't want to be there anymore they're really worried that they believe in an ideology

that they don't want to and they're looking for a way to not feel that way anymore. And I think popular media focuses on the misogynistic aspect of it and what I learnt doing this Radio 4 doc where I've spoken to Incells for years, but never face-to-face. And for the doc, I got to interview Incells face-to-face. And overwhelmingly, yes, they believed in this social hierarchy in which they were not only were they never going to get a date

in their perceptions, were subhuman, and they used vocabulary like morbid curiosity about this interest in seeing what in cells were posting online because it resonated with them. Listening to these young men tell you their experiences of being in this very kind of outlier group, or maybe not like the insult groups are growing actually year on year, aren't they? It's, they've grown massively. Yeah, what's kind of happened is, well, how do you count? how do you count

loads of these online like subredits for example could once be a reliable is sign of how big a certain community was well they've been banned now so they've been banned which will protect loads of people but equally that will frustrate any research trying to quantify how many there are

so it's interesting I mean there will be if you I mean who here has heard the word simp right Intel's did that Their language is permeated to modern culture.

So just to explain what simp means when it doesn't know. A simp. A simp, urban dictionary might define it better than I'm about to. But it's, I think it comes from like sympathy, I don't know. But if you were a simp, it means you kind of fawn after a woman in a way that's deeply unmasculine. And like, you shouldn't do it. It's seen as a bad thing that a man shouldn't do. I want a simp. Yeah.

That's all I want. But what did speaking to these young men reveal? to you about male sexuality and the impact that sex myths have on these young men today? If you are on insult exit, I wouldn't necessarily say you're like representative of the general male experience. A lot of individuals there have really gone through a lot in their personal lives. A lot of them have extreme body dysmorphia. The problem is more that individuals who have those problems should find support and instead they're finding like dodgy online communities. That's sort of a separate, large issue here. But if you look at the broader

manisphere and like in-cell adjacent, if not always super in-cell spaces, one of the big things, and certainly why it became part of my book, was about how on Reddit and in loads of the subredits that are dedicated to sexual problems for men, there is enormous overlap with in-cell and manosphere communities. So, if you're a subreddits that are dedicated to sexual problems for men, there is enormous overlap with in cell and manosphere communities. So if you were a young man, heterosexual and having what appeared to be symptoms of erectile dysfunction,

the chances of you ending up on a completely, on like a subreddit completely devoid of any sort of doctor or physician advice. And just seeing like there are all these guys who recommend things like just don't masturbate ever. Stop it. It's called no fap. the no-fap movement

like just don't masturbate ever like that's a solution it's really not a solution um semen retention both of these are very um prolific myths online where men feel like

I want to take control of my own sexual health that seems to be sort of falling apart in front of me how do I do it well this guy on the internet said that if I if I try to orgasm but don't come I will like you know gain like testosterone from this sort of power life is hard enough things are tough these days. Like, don't do it. And as the doctor I interviewed,

I asked loads of dogs about it, but I remember one who specialises in supporting men with sexual health problems, he was just like, is not masturbating bad for you? No, it's more that masturbating brings loads of health benefits, and that's also

that's not the cause of the problem here or your relationship with it may not actually be the reason for example you're having erectile dysfunction. So this isn't, isn't the solution, speak to a doctor, we have the solutions, all of these conditions across sort of sexual dysfunction, they're always, the words that are gynecologists described to me, eminently treatable. In many cases, like, you tell a doctor about it, they're really

not that fuss because they're like, oh, oh yeah, it's okay, yeah, you just do this. And you're like, oh, why was I so sort of worried or like feeling so scared about this actually is really common and there's a treatment. We'll go into another myth. I just wonder, so much of this comes back to poor sex education. Yeah. Because when we don't have a foundational understanding of the language around sex, around our bodies, how to explore our bodies, what consent means beyond yes and no, and we will go into that momentarily, we're then going into, we're going on the internet, perhaps in these

forums, going to school, hearing things from our classmates, having our first sexual experience with no kind of firm, kind of almost like filtering system to filter out bad information and bad experience from good information and good healthy experience. But I'm conscious when I speak about how crap sex education is, mine was terrible, don't get an SDI and don't get pregnant. I focus quite heavily on sex education in school, so in our educational system. And I conscious, as a blind spot, me, that I don't necessarily think about sex education that happens outside of the context of our school system

because I do think our kind of broader sex culture is pretty broken and extends beyond school. How do you see, the problems that you've identified this book, the myths, the kind of proliferation of misinformation, well, it does come back to bad sex education, but where do you think the root of that bad sex education is? You're right, that is obviously not only in schools. Like, I remember there's a chapter that I do on the tightness myth.

And I know in that there are, there are doctors who are using devices called virgin speculums. And they're sort of, it took a doctor, in the US, for example, and in the UK there have been junior doctors who've like entered and been like, what? And they've changed the system because they've come in and they've challenged it where seemingly no one else thought it was like a problem before. So, of course, it's not only in the education system, a lot of the focus that I do is often on the education system, but certainly in terms of, I mean, we opened this with newsroom

culture. Imagine if newsrooms cared more about reporting on all of this. Imagine if newsrooms and governments listened to public health literature. Public health literature tells us that the best way to counter misinformation isn't to wait to debunk it, is to pre-bunk it before people even start spreading these ideas. So there shouldn't be young people growing up, thinking all these ideas around virginity or like the first chapter of the book are like the virginity myth,

the Heimann myth, the tightness myth, penetration myth, they shouldn't be sort of hearing and like hearing about them and disseminating them in the first place because it's a lot of work, it's far harder to debunk than to pre-bunk. And it's, there's been loads of research

and experimentation, for example, even with Google, they've noticed that they can really successfully pre-bunk. I think it was COVID-19 misinformation. off the top of my head, through YouTube video trailers. They were able to use that like pre-roll space on YouTube to successfully pre-bunk audiences. It's inoculation. It's like digital inoculation against misinformation they might encounter. So that could happen.

And where's the investment? And when it comes to sex education, when you said at the very beginning, that it always or kind of frequently becomes like a political football. And I mean, kind of ad nauseum, we get kind of conversation will crop up in parliament of how do we reform sex education, and there's a cue kind of moral handwringing and MPs saying, you know, we shouldn't have sex education, you know, I don't my children learning about sex,

we've seen happen quite recently. As it so happens, quite recently we have had the government bring forward a review of relationships and sex education. That was following reports that pupils were being taught inappropriate content in RSAG in some schools. The new draft guidance was published, I think it was two months ago, it was in May, and it's been received

has been quite kind of controversial. I think we're in a sexual wellness group of WhatsApping people and everyone was kind of horrified. Yeah, it was popping off that day. Their WhatsApp group is actually overwhelming and I can't keep up, but it was popping off that day in reaction to this draft guidance, it says that amongst other things that suggests that we should have, age limits on so-called

sensitive topics, aka no education around puberty prior to year four, no sex education for four years five and six, and a ban on teaching about gender identity beyond what the law says about gender reassignment amongst other things. What did you make of this draft legislation? Yeah, like really bad. Also, it's, I don't know, I don't actually know if it is draft legislation. I think it's

ultimately guidance or... The concern would be if it became sort of hardened into something more dramatic like legislation. But the point is that there are going to be people who are going to take that guidance and it's going to vindicate them. That's the bigger problem here. Even domestic violence, not teaching it, I believe until possibly year four. So there are going to be all these children without the vocabulary to talk about what might be happening in their homes

or understanding how it affects them, getting to year four when the damage is done about the impact that we'll have on them. Periods. There are people who are starting their periods in year four. And what if you haven't got around to the class yet? Because there are a million other pressures on the education system to teach you about in the meantime.

I dread to think about what would happen. So primary education, it's relationships education, it's not sex education. That begins in secondary school. When you look at the curriculum for primary school age, especially really early years, so there's a lot of misinformation that gets spread around like, your five-year-old's been taught sex ed.

And it's like, and then what do you infer from that? You assume, are they being taught something inappropriate for their age? There is a really good huge table from UNESCO. that tells you what each age group should be taught. There's so much research into what's developmentally appropriate for young people. But when you look at the primary age group, it's like all basically self-esteem stuff. Like it's not about sex. It might get towards like puberty.

You do talk about things like this person in your class might have a mummy and daddy. Another person in your class might have a daddy and a daddy. another person, you know, and it's about respectful relationships, that's the sort of buzzword. It's about, the focus is all on self-esteem and respect, which I would argue, like, is the best grounding you can give a young person. Because when they grow up... It's autonomy of your body. Autonomy of their body and, like, love of themselves. And then they're going to get to an age at some point when it's developmentally appropriate, where they understand what that means in relation to other people.

one of the most powerful tools of quite far-right governments in the US historically who've campaigned on the same issues they know that the argument of sex education is sexualising your children is really powerful none of us want to think we could be endangering our kids one of the most powerful protections you can give your children is high-quality sex education they are more likely with it to delay the first time they have sex. And people are often surprised at that. It's like, yeah, because they know the sort of the science, the health, the well-being and they're, they're comfortable about it and they're not feeling

the pressure. They're not feeling this or that. They're going to be empowered to go into it in a sort of healthier way. Well, I think if you've only ever, if your sex education has been learning from friends around you, the kind of tibits of information, most of that is just social pressure then to have sex as opposed to actual useful information about sex. and boundaries and consent. And I think we're talking a lot about consent now. And obviously it should be, you know, front and center in sex education from a young age.

But when we think about consent, the conversation tends to really focus on, has someone been raped? So has consent been given, infuse acid consent been given or not? And I often think about that. If you don't know what your boundaries are personally, because you haven't explored your body.

You don't know what feels good for you. You don't know what feels bad. You don't have the language of sex because you haven't been taught it. What does consent really mean when you're in the context of having sex with someone? Because you don't necessarily, you're not really empowered to say this is what I want

or actually this is not what I want. And moreover, you'll probably not empower to then withdraw your consent during a sex or that. Yeah, what does it mean when we consent to bad sex? What does it mean when we consent to sex that dramatically goes another way in which if we've not understood what withdrawing consent might look like

or how to negotiate yourself out of that kind of scenario, what do you do then? So in the book, I argue that it's presented often as like really binary. It's either, and really enthusiastic yes or really enthusiastic, no. And I think that research shows us that the realistic ways that a lot of people demonstrate consent, which changes, by the way, if you're two people, having sex the first time to people who've been in a relationship for a long time, interviews with, again, it's always heterosexual people, but interviews with those respondents would say to you actually a lot of the time

it's non-verbal when we agree to have sex with each other, especially if like patterns form and you establish a dynamic as a partnership that you wouldn't have that dynamic with someone the first time you were having sex with them. So to just be like, yes is yes, no is no, which a lot of legislation is now being formed around. I don't know as much about the legal side because I'm not a lawyer. If that helps push convictions, that's a very appealing idea because we know that there aren't enough convictions.

But then on the other hand, if it's not representing actually what consent or non-consent looks like, that's also quite dangerous. because what if you have given an enthusiastic yes and something dramatically changes? How is that going to pan out? You'd want comfort that. You'd have protection there as well. So it's really hard.

I talk about it as it's more a continuum. Consent is more a continuum than a binary yes or no. And really starts outside of the bedroom. The other thing is that I went to a consent workshop as part of writing that chapter. And it dragged me like straight back to my own sex edge where I can't really remember being talked about consent. But it was, you know, when you described, don't get pregnant,

don't get an STI, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't rape. That was like basically the sort of consent talk, all of the language that was used around, because often consent workshops when they're given to, this was for 16 to 18-year-olds, they're often not only about sex, they're often about image-based abuse, so it may be like sending someone a nude,

and like the law around if you're under 18, you can't do that, stuff like that. So it's all sort of bundled into the same session and loads of the language in that workshop that was being used around facts around porn consumption. All of the facts were associated with boys. So you would have left that session thinking women, girls, don't watch porn, don't consume porn.

It was very much like, I left the workshop thinking you've presented women as victims in this, you've presented men as like aggressors. How are you setting up the women to go forward and feel like empowered and positive about their sexual futures? Because when we, I remember thinking about the don't get an SDI or don't get pregnant. I was left being just terrified I'd get pregnant when I didn't want to get pregnant. I was just left terrified from those lessons. Also just puts a bar so low regarding what you expect from sex.

It's not do or not rather do. That wouldn't be good. But it's more like some people like blah. Some other people might like something else. In an age-appropriate, developmentally appropriate way. Like, it can be done because there are countries that do do it. We are embarrassingly behind as the UK. It's also pleasure.

Like, sex can be for pleasure. And if you don't talk about pleasure. Doesn't appear once, because I've controlled F'd it to try and find it in the... It doesn't appear once. Pleasure also, by the way, fun fact, relevant to where we are today, is that if you were to try and advertise as sexual health, a health, a health product, and even mention the word pleasure once. Face meta wouldn't let you, wouldn't let you put it there.

Viagra, fine. Fine. And vagina, the most blocked word, I think, of anything on social media. Really? Really? Yeah. So don't talk about vaginas. You have amassed so much information.

You've interviewed so many people. You've done so much research into sex and the myths surrounding it. what do you think is one thing everyone can do to improve their relationship to sex? The quote that's resonated the most about my book that I see people like screenshot or share and I enjoyed saying it at the time. So it was like, oh, this works. This worked with my readers. I don't think anything else in life offers us an opportunity to be kinder and smarter every time we do it

while also having loads of fun than sex and to look at sex and plenty of people would not want to look at sex as an intellectual exercise and that's not what I'm recommending but to think of it it's an opportunity to be kinder and smarter to yourself and the person you're with

is messaging I never had growing up and it's messaging I have tried to channel in my personal life and in the advice that I give when mates ask me for sex advice so that's a wonderful piece of advice isn't that nice way? What a wonderful way to end. Thank you so much.

Huge round of applause to Rio. 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.