Sex Talks With Emma-Louise Boynton - The link between housework & orgasms: Tackling everyday sexism with campaigner and author, Laura Bates

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

What does the number of hours women spend doing housework have to do with the orgasm gap?! According to bestselling author and the founder of the Everyday sexism campaign, Laura Bates, a lot. In this episode, Emma sits down with Laura to discuss the systemic ways in which gender inequality remains entrenched in our society - from the social pressure on women to deprioritise their pleasure, to the routinisation of casual sexism, to the rise of extremist, misogynistic ideologies. But it is not all doom and gloom, they end the discussion looking at the reasons for staying hopeful and what we can all do to fix the system, not the women. 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. 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. It sounds like a very personal thing to do to sit down and list every single instance of gender inequality, but it's actually a very political act because it reframes what we have so often been told to bury and to stifle. In this episode of the podcast, which was recorded live at Soho House,

I was joined by best-selling author and the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, Laura Bates. Laura founded Everyday Sexism back in 2012 when she was just 25. inviting women on social media to detail sex encounters they'd had. Two years later, she published a book of the same name, Everyday Sexism, and there followed nine other books, including Misogyny Nation, Men Who Hate Women, and Fix the System, Not the Women, to name just a few. I wanted to talk to Laura about the latter book in particular and get a steer from her as to where we're at in the fight for gender equality

and the systemic issues that make this fight all the more difficult. I found this interview pretty confronting, actually, in that Laura highlighted so articulately just how deeply embedded sex and remains within the very fabric of our society. But it wasn't all doom and gloom. There is a lot to be hopeful for, and we end of the discussion, turning to exactly that. Do let me know what you think. I'd love particularly to know about your relationship to feminism. Has it changed? Has it evolved? Where are you at with your feminism right now? do let me know. Before we start, this episode contains reference to sexual violence and assault. Okay, let's get into it. So Laura began by telling me what initially prompted

her to set up the everyday sexism campaign. The idea came to her, she explained, after experiencing a spate of sexual harassment incidents all in one row. She was shouted at from cars, followed by a guy off a bus, witnessed a man masturbating on a bus, and then the real tipping point, Guy sat next to her on the bus and began groping her legs. No one said anything. It was after the string of pretty horrible events that she began talking to other women about their experiences of sexual harassment. She never anticipated the outpouring that would follow. So I set up the project initially with the aim of kind of raising awareness amongst those who weren't aware of the issue, but also providing a cathartic safe space for women

and girls to share their stories. And then I thought that maybe 100 people would share their stories. What actually happened was that a quarter of a million testimonies came in from people of all backgrounds, people of all genders, people of all different walks of life. You know, just everything you can imagine from a woman in Argentina trying to ignore the four men cat calling her from their car only to find that they screeched to a halt and tried to drag her in. A woman in London working in the city being told by her boss to sit on his lap if she wanted

her Christmas bonus, a reverend in the Church of England being constantly asked if perhaps there was a man to do the wedding or the funeral instead, a man being denied parental leave at work and told that that was his wife's job, a woman being told she wouldn't be considered for a promotion because she was a maternity risk, a Mexican university student being told Céideita de Vizmas Bonita by her professor, in other words, you look prettier when you shut up, a pair of 12-year-old sisters trying to have a picnic in France when a man came and exposed himself to them, a woman in India too afraid to report the man with the erection pressed into her back on a public bus. Just hundreds of thousands of these stories, quite quickly it was

being talked about in the New York Times and the Times of India and Grazie of South Africa and the kind of awareness-raising element happened more effectively and more quickly than I'd anticipated because of the sheer scale of it. It became the largest data set of its kind and it meant that I was able to start taking sections of the entries offline and using them to drive real world change. So we take the entries, for example, from girls who are being sexually harassed and abused at school and use them to go into Parliament, talk to MPs and ministers and education secretaries and say the curriculum needs to change because young people are facing these things and there is nothing on the curriculum about sexual violence, about healthy

relationships, about what consent is. So we changed the national curriculum. We took thousands of the stories that had just come from women on buses and trains on public transport like my own story and we used them to retrain 2,000 British transport police officers and to really work with them to completely change the way that the force dealt with sexual events is on the transport network, which increased reporting and the detection of offenders on the network by about 33%. So lots of trying to use collective voice and stories in quite simple and effective ways to try and change things for the next generation. And I remember actually when the everyday sexism campaign started, as I said it was 2012. And at the time I was at university. And I remember

a group of friends and I discussing it and saying, kind of for the first time, it almost gave you permission to recognize that those small instances that you get kind of used to, those small examples of sexism that happened just casually, but they're not normal. Maybe that they are normal, but they're not okay. And there was this real kind of sense of being able to acknowledge that that's not okay and a kind of a sense that finally could talk about it and verbalise feeling uncomfortable and those kind of weird feelings that would come up when someone does touch you inappropriately on the bus when someone grabs your bum and says no it is my right to touch you anywhere I want to I really remember that moment that kind of that shift and that feeling at that

time law that was back in 2012 and you've since gone on you've written nine books since which we're where you find the time, I'm just, it's amazing. So let's just begin with going into the kind of the latest book, Fix the Women, Not the System. Can you just explain for us what you mean by the system and what you kind of, why you wanted to highlight this difference between blaming the system and systemic issues versus individual women? Yeah. So we are in the midst of a crisis of sexual violence, a public health crisis, which sounds like a kind of hysterical overreaction, but isn't at all if you look at the statistics. We have a situation where half a million women are sexually assaulted every year, 85,000 women are raped, a quarter of women experienced

domestic abuse in their lifetime. At the moment, it's really not hysterical to say that we live in a country where rape has been decriminalised, because if you report a rape to the police at the moment there's a 1.4% chance that a perpetrator will be charged or even summoned to court as a result. And it's also a country in which there's a phone call to the police every minute about domestic abuse, where a woman is murdered by a man every three days. So there is clearly a systemic issue here. And whether you look at it from a kind of ethical perspective or even from more of a kind of political perspective, the combined cost to our economy at the moment of domestic and sexual violence, so-called honour crimes, forced marriage combined, is £40 billion,

which is more than our defence budget. So whichever way you look at it, this is a crisis. And what frustrated me was that even in the rare moments when we acknowledge the crisis, almost always because young, attractive, middle class, white woman has been murdered or has gone missing, in those moments, we focus on the individual women, instead of taking it as an opportunity to look at this crisis and say, well, clearly this is systemic and clearly the drivers of the crisis and also the solutions must be systemic. So what I mean by that is that after the murder of Sarah Everard, for example, we were told that the serving police officer who'd raped and murdered her was a bad apple. We were told that women should be more streetwise, and she just never should

have submitted to the arrest that was used to imprison her from a serving police and crime Commissioner. We were told that maybe women should consider downloading apps to track themselves. And then Sabina Nessa was murdered and they handed out attack alarms to 200 women in her local area. And one of the top Google searches at the time was what was Sabina Nessa wearing. And then Bobby Ann McLeod was murdered and the leader of her city council came out and said, well, women shouldn't be putting themselves in compromising positions. And then Ashling Murphy was murdered. And the thing that trended around the world was she was just going for a run.

And it might seem like that's a weird thing to take issue with because I understand why people shared that and I know that nobody did it baniciously but I think it said so much about our public focus and response that even in our grief about a woman's death the greatest expression of our collective grief and mourning about that was she was just going for a run much like after Sarah Everard's death

when so many people tweeted she was just walking home and she did all the right things because what that says about our society is quite profound that this was shocking and devastating because she wasn't asking for it. That's what we're really saying there. And implicitly, if she hadn't just been going for a run or just walking home, if she had been out drunk at two in the morning in a short skirt or meeting someone for sex or whatever it was, you know, she had it coming. That's kind of where we are sort of collectively. And you can see that from the response to things like the police telling women in Clapham not to go out on their own at night after

Sarah Everard disappeared, because as a society, we are very comfortable with that approach. So many people said, you know, it's not victim blaming. It's just telling women to look after themselves. There's some guy out there. We don't know who he is. It's just about common sense. It's just practical. Trying to keep women safe.

What could possibly be wrong with that? But if the police had knocked on doors in Clapham and said to the men, sorry, but you can't go out on your own at night at the moment because one of you is murdering people and we don't know which one it is. So you're going to have to stay in pairs for the foreseeable. People would have said, well, that's an outrageous. You know, you can't constrain all men's civil liberties because of the acts of a tiny minority of men.

Of course you can't. And of course you can't. That's right. But then why are we so comfortable constraining the freedoms and liberties of all women based on a tiny minority of men? So it was about this real frustration that even when we talk about male violence, we call it violence against women. Even when we talk about women dying at a terrifying rate,

we focus on what other women should do to keep themselves safe. instead of what we as a society should be doing to tackle the problem. And even when a serving police officer rapes and murders a young woman, we talk about how she responded to what happened, instead of looking at the fact that he was nicknamed the rapist by his colleagues because his misogynistic views were so widely known, or that 2,000 serving officers in the four years preceding had been reported for sexual misconduct, or that over half of met police officers who were accused of sexual misconduct and found guilty

keep their jobs. Those aren't isolated incidents. Those aren't bad apples, despite how frequently those phrases are used. That is institutional misogyny. It's a systemic problem. And it's a problem that intersects with the fact that black people are nine times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people. It is also a problem of systemic racism. And if we don't look at these systemic problems, if instead we're constantly blaming individuals within the communities most affected, that is no pathway to any kind of solution. Nothing will change. We've been doing that for decades. We've been telling girls for decades what to do to the extent that probably almost every woman in this room will sometimes walk with her keys between her fingers. We'll cover her drink when she's in and out at night. We'll go to the bathroom in groups and text each other when they get home safely and not wear heels in case they need to run and not wear headphones so they can hear if someone comes up behind them and not go the dark lit route even if it takes longer to go the long way around that's better lit or make sure they get a cab home but not the wrong kind of cab. We are so used to those ideas that we almost do them without thinking, but it doesn't change

anything because the only thing that survivors of sexual violence have in common is not some silly mistake they made. It's coming into contact with a perpetrator who's made a choice to commit a crime. And it's so interesting as you say that about kind of the tendency we have to call out these individuals as bad apples. And I immediately think of kind of figures like Harvey Weinstein, who are so vilified in the press, they become these kind of bogey monster. and we kind of see, you know, if we just get rid of Harvey, and not to say that it's, you know, we shouldn't want to bring down the Harvey wine scenes of the world, but I think they almost get held up as if we can just get rid of these kind of symbols of the more extreme visible examples of sexism and misogyny, then the problem is solved. And I almost think in that kind of extreme kind of media vilification, to your point, we end up overlooking just how, deeply rooted are the issues that they represent. Not least the fact that those kind of figureheads, the Wayne Cousins, the Harvey Weinsteens, they operate within a kind of spider's web. They're not

operating in isolation. I mean, wasn't Wayne Cousins kind of part of a WhatsApp group? And he was sending messages to over 40 people, 40 police officers receiving WhatsApp messages, you know, alluding to rape. He was called the rapist casually. And I think sometimes it's very, it's easy for us to overlook just as you say, just how systemic these things are. And you just mentioned there kind of the ways in which we, women particularly in a society, become normalize, preparing ourselves for potential attack. And you begin the book with your so-called list, the list of things that I guess you kind of, things that have happened to you and that you've heard from people, can you just describe in a little bit more detail your kind of thought process behind kind of putting together this

list. Yeah, it sounds like a very kind of personal thing to do to sit down and list every single instance of gender inequality of sexism or harassment or abuse that you can remember. But it's actually a very political act because it reframes what we have so often been told to bury and to stifle and to self-doubt because really from childhood we are trained to minimize our own distress. Whether it's the moment that you're, you know, forced to kiss an uncle or give grandpa a hug whether you want to or not. This idea that children, that girls in particular shouldn't have autonomy over their own body starts from so young. And then the gaslighting and the doubt starts also from childhood. So I mean phrases like, boys will be boys. He just likes

you. I'm sure it was just a compliment. Why can't you get a sense of humor? Lighten up. It was probably just a joke. He didn't mean it like that. You've got the wrong end of the stick. I'd love it if someone whistled at me in the street. You're overreacting. you've got your wires crossed well what are you wearing had you been drinking maybe you were leading him on there are a million ways that our stories are denied and disbelieved and silenced

and actually reclaiming them can be a really difficult thing one of the most common things that happens after I give talks or at book signings and things is people coming up and wanting to share their story really more than anything for somebody else to validate that it is a valid thing to have been hurt by that it was real that it wasn't their fault that it does count and probably the most common thing I ever hear is women who will tell me

a litany of stories of all different kinds of abuse and harassment and that they will almost always start or finish by saying, I know I'm relatively really lucky. It's not that bad. It could be worse. I know other people have it worse because that's what we're trained to think. So I wanted to start the book by trying to trace those stories because I think in itself there is something really empowering about allowing ourselves to recognize that the things that the world teaches us our individual failings or confusion or our own mistakes are part of this system that we are encouraged at every term not to see. And that includes things in our lives more widely, things like, oh, I'm just not the kind of person that feels comfortable asking for

what I like in bed. Or I'm just not the kind of person who I just, I just messed up the evaluation, the performance evaluation. I just didn't feel confident enough to ask for that promotion, things that we think of as individual failings, but every possible statistic shows us are actually systemic problems, systemic issues around women not orgasming as much as men do, systemic issues around women not being promoted and not feeling able to ask for promotion. And it's not because women are, you know, being stupid or just not being bold enough, because all of the studies show that the second women do put themselves forward, lean in, ask for that seat at the table, they are penalised for it.

and they behave the way that men are rewarded for behaving in the workplace, they're seen as abrasive, they're perceived as being too much, they're seen as ball breakers or being a little bit too much out for themselves, and they're penalised. So it isn't you, it isn't those individuals, you know, being what the world has told them that they are just not quite enough or a bit too much. It's a system that we're all operating in that every turn we are gaslit into not seeing and looking internally instead. And you just mentioned there, my brain flagged at orgasm, obviously, this is sex talks.

I talk a lot about the orgasm gap. But I think it flashed because as you were just speaking there, I was just thinking, when we are not taught to recognize traumatic instances as being traumatic. And like I don't have no a single friend, female friend, who hasn't experienced some degree of sexual harassment, on extreme rape, something sexually that's happened to them. And I'm sure this is also, and male friends I'm sure have experienced things too, but I just know the kind of the prevalence amongst my female friends. That affects how you show up in sex and intimacy.

When someone has gone against your will in some capacity in a sexual context, at your most kind of vulnerable, open state when you are literally naked with someone and they have breached your boundaries in that environment, That stays with you. That has an imprint. And I remember speaking to my sex therapist. I did sex therapy, which is what spawned sex talks. And much like you just said, I remember saying to my sex therapist, well, there was this thing that happened a few years ago. I'm really lucky. It wasn't that bad. I don't remember. But I know, but I, you know, I can't forget it. I can't forget that something happened, even though I don't know the details. And it was just

something that had always sat with me. And I felt guilty for feeling a certain way about it. I felt bad for having feelings and feeling uncomfortable and having this kind of what felt like a kind of mark left on me by a sexual assault incident. And it was only doing sex therapy that for the first time I was able to talk about it and just kind of process it. Even just through that simple act of verbalizing, this thing did actually happen and I know it did happen. And I feel shame. I feel embarrassment. I feel hurt. I feel pain. I feel all these things. But I hadn't felt legitimized my experienced prior to that because I thought it's just one of those things you kind of have to get over it and it wasn't that bad you were fine in the end and we think oftentimes and we think of

rape we think of dark alleyways and extreme violence yes that is one horrific form of rape but there's lots of other ways in which sexual assault instances can be you know do are traumatic and my therapist said to me at the time trauma can affect us like we can be traumatized by any by anything that happens to us really and it can leave that imprint but you just have to kind of learn to recognise that. As we think then about sex specifically, when we spoke before this conversation, you said that one thing you would like us to cover in the conversation, which music to my ears, was the orgasm gap. Who here knows what the orgasm gap is? Okay, a few hands. Yeah. So just by way of a brief explanation, the orgasm gap is the disparity between the rate at which men versus women orgasm in

heteronormative partnered sex. So while men, or all genders are orgasming 95% at the time when we're masturbating, men stays at 95% at the time when they're having sex with casually, with a partner, in a heteronormative dynamic. The women, it drops to 65% in the context of relationship, heteronormative sex, and to 18% in the context of casual sex. So a lot of women are not coming in partnered sex. And I was pleased that you wanted to talk about this, but I was also I guess I wanted to delve it, dig into a little bit, why you feel it is a pertinent topic and how it intersects with the very heavy issues that we're discussing this evening in which you addressed in your book. Where does sex come into it? Yeah, I mean it intersects

in so many ways and a big part of my work is about drawing connections and encouraging people and policymakers in particular to have more of a kind of interconnected way of looking at things that our society likes to separate out into neat boxes. One of the big areas of that is the connections between the supposedly kind of low-level things, stuff that we are told that we're making a fuss about or we're being divas if we talk about and the kind of more serious aspects of various forms of abuse. And I think that the orgasm gap falls into this. So the first thing is that there is a kind of societal, I think, message that this doesn't really matter.

It's not that big a deal or even that it is the way things should be, that actually women who are asking for what they want during sex, women who are having a lot of sex, women who are having pleasurable sex, women who are in charge during sex, or her being very vocal about their needs and their desires are somehow not particularly feminine, they're not particularly desirable, that that isn't something that society wants to encourage. But also that women complaining about that sort of thing is kind of, you know, a really minor problem, you're overreacting, you're making a fuss about nothing, there are serious issues at play. But the reality, is I think that it is so tightly interwoven with so many other issues. It is, as you've said, interwoven with issues around sexual trauma and sexual violence. If we know that we live in a country where half a million women are sexually assaulted every year and a quarter experienced domestic abuse, there are so many hundreds of thousands of us walking around with experiences of trauma that play into our future sex lives. But there are also so many of us walking around with undiagnosed trauma, essentially with forms of trauma that nobody will even acknowledge

exist and that are related to gendered interactions. So of course they come into play and have an impact on whether or not sex is pleasurable in heteronormative partnerships. But there are also other elements here that I think are really fascinating. For example, nobody ever talks about these things in the same conversation. There'll be totally different studies or totally different news stories. But if you look at that orgasm gap and you look at the statistics, there's a pretty tight correlation between the gap there and the gap in the number of hours of housework and unpaid domestic work and unpaid childcare that women are doing compared to men, again, in heterosexual partnerships. And I think that's fascinating. Nobody ever puts those two things

together. Nobody ever goes, maybe women are exhausted. Maybe women are angry. Maybe women are furious and feeling put upon and not particularly in the mood because they're doing the three hours extra child care and housework like those two things for anyone living it they're really connected but we never talk about them as if those two areas of kind of study and research and interest are connected and the other connection i think that comes into play here that's really important is the low level constant backdrop of sexism and harassment in our lives and also the really intrusive kind of sexist, racist, heteronormative beauty standards that we're all subjected to that impact our ability to enjoy our bodies and to enjoy by extension sexual relationships and

pleasure in a world in which men face very little of the same extreme scrutiny and pressure around their bodies as women do. It is unsurprising that men are able to relax more, to enjoy themselves more, to feel more confident in an intimate setting. And in a way, world in which we say that you shouldn't make a fuss about wolf whistles and that street harassment is just compliments, what we are really doing from childhood is setting up a gendered power dynamic in our public spaces, whereby we teach girls from a really young age that when they are in public space, their bodies are public property, and there's nothing they can do about it. And that is a power dynamic between boys and girls, between girls and men, between

women and men, that then perpetuates and kind of gets its tendrils into every other area of our lives, whether it's in the workplace, whether it's within intimate relationships, and you can see it. You can see it in the kinds of language that come up again and again across everyday sex and project entries from the street and one's in the bedroom and one's in the workplace. But there are also elements by which our kind of intimate relationships are shaped by the world's idea of what sex looks like and so much of that is impacted by online pornography which at the moment in its current mainstream easily accessible forms so often shows women being hurt and humiliated and degraded or raped and experiencing sexual violence so if a hundred million people a day

are on porn hub which they are then the idea that our intimate experiences of sex wouldn't be impacted by a world in which millions of people every day are seeing material that teaches them that sex between a man and a woman is something powerful and violent that's done by a man to a woman is kind of ludicrous. So all those different areas of my work and research, which are quite varied, feed into this statistic around the orgasm gap, which we are so often told is nonsense and frivolous and we don't need to talk about. It's so interesting kind of hearing you bring all those strands together. So I think it really gets the heart about you why I think sex is fundamentally such a fascinating topic to explore because so many broader sociopolities

socio-political issues show up very acutely in the context of sex. I feel like sex that kind of a magnifying glass on all the other things that are happening from gender relations to gender power dynamics. And much what you were saying there, Laura, pleasure isn't just something that's a kind of a side note, a footnote, like you're lucky if you have it. When we learn to prioritize and also to deprioritize pleasure in certain people's lives, that says something about whose bodies we value, whose bodies we've learned to appreciate and seen as valuable versus those oftentimes women that we've learned, we've been taught to devalue. And I was reading some really interesting research actually the other day when it comes to kind of the body image

element of things that was saying that body image issues have just as much of an impact on or contribution to sexual dysfunction. So issues around like not being able to orgasm, for example, as performance anxiety, but we just don't often talk about it that much. And I think if you think that 700,000 women in the UK, according to Nights, have eating disorders, which is so much a product of our culture and the kind of the media landscape that you've described, the kind of unrealistic body image ideals that are held up in our society. And so 700,000 women are, you know, experiencing some eating disorder. And that figure, by the way, is going to be so much higher because that's just the people

who are reporting that they have an issue. And if you think about that, I then think how many women are basically having pretty shit sex because they hate the bodies that they live in? Because they've been taught to not like to look down on their body and feel shame, discuss, they're too thin, they're too fat, they're too, they're the wrong colour, all these sorts of things. And that, I think, again, it feels like kind of that tip, that kind of tip of the iceberg of all the other problems that you're discussing there. You mentioned that the impact that pornography is obviously playing on our kind of broader. sex culture. And I wonder if we can delve into that a little bit because I heard you speak 10 years ago at a literary festival. And a story you told that on that stage has never, ever left me. You said that you'd been doing sex education work in a school. And a teacher had told you that

a young boy, he was 14, had been accused of rape. He'd raped a classmate, I believe. And when asked kind of why he didn't stop when she was crying, he said, but I thought that was what was supposed to happen during sex. Don't all women cry during sex. It was because the only thing that he'd learned about sex was through porn and that was, it was violent porn. What do you think, I guess come to you with, what do you think we need to be teaching children in schools when it comes to sex education and particularly around porn literacy to address what feels like these kind of broader problems within our fundamentally quite broken sex culture? Lots of things. And that is just one of so many similar stories and experiences. It's so common to talk to children.

at schools and hear things like rape is a compliment really. It's not rape if she enjoys it. Crying is part of foreplay. It's very common to hear young women who have early sexual experiences, which include being non-consensually choked. One story that always stays with me as a young woman who had that experience the first time she ever had sex with her boyfriend at university. And she kind of panicked and pushed him away and he broke down in tears and said, I'm so sorry, I just thought that was what you'd be expecting. And whenever I tell these stories, people are really shocked. And I think the reason for that is because there is a lack of awareness of the extent of the kind of porn that young people are accessing,

how young they're accessing it, and what a vacuum of other information there is. So there was a really good report on this just recently from the Children's Commissioners Office. It found that 13 is now the average age that young people first see online porn, but that a quarter are 12 or younger when they first see it. and that by the time they reach their late teens, around 87% of young people have seen sexually violent porn. So it's not a few outliers, it's the norm, it's the vast majority. And they just did some really interesting research into this, because whenever you talk about this, people go, but we're not talking about niche stuff.

You know, my child wouldn't be looking up anything like that. What people don't grasp is that we're talking about the most mainstream, readily available, you know, kind of thing that would pop up if you type the word porn or sex into Google and clicked on the top link. And this research from Durham found that of the front page videos serve to first time users of those kinds of websites, one eighth of the videos showed women being raped or abused or otherwise illegal acts. So the sheer normalization and the sheer extent of it, I think is something that people don't necessarily grasp, but also just how silenced we are around alternatives, around the realities, around sex at all.

So people as young kids are seeing this quarter of them before the age of 12, most of them by the age of 13. And instead of saying the way to respond to that is with conversations and talking to them as much as possible, we panic and we go, shut it down, shut it down, don't talk to them, internet controls, turn off the porn, don't let them access it, which is just so incredibly unrealistic. And there's this kind of panic that you can't like talk to children about porn without showing them porn, there's this real sense of fear mongering. But the reality is that at the age of two,

you can teach a child about bodily autonomy. And you're not going to show them porn. You're going to say, do you want to say hello today with a high five or a wave or a hug instead of forcing them to hug? Like, that's how you teach consent to a two-year-old or a three-year-old. And when we teach a kid going to nursery that they don't hit another kid, no one goes, oh my God, you can't talk to them about violence. But if we say to a child going to nursery and people think we're going to talk anything about sexual consent. They go, that's outrageous. You can't do that with a kid of that age. So the first thing is starting young because most schools that are tackling this, which is admirable, they don't want to begin till about 15 when

it's already way too late. And then the next thing is that it's not just about porn. It's about so much more than that. It's about internet literacy. It's about source skepticism. It's about the tools to recognize that what they are seeing online isn't necessarily real life. It's about how those conversations are conducted. There's a big, very well-known boys school that I go to every year and I sit down in a lecture theatre with about 400 boys and me and them and I just talk to them about porn and I do this every year. And every time they come in looking like absolutely terrified and they think this is going to be excruciating and we're about to be told off and we're about to be told that we're awful and we're the problem and we're misogynist

and we're terrible. And I talk to them instead about sexual pleasure and I talk to them about the reason that they're watching porn isn't because they're monsters, it's usually because they're curious or they're nervous and they want to know what might be expected of them in the future. Like, that's why they're watching it. Kids aren't naturally misogynistic inherently. These are external influences. So I talk to them about those anxieties. And if you want to potentially in the future be good at sex, you know, do sex in a way that is pleasurable to a partner, then porn isn't going to help you very much because what's shown in porn is statistically very unlikely to make most women come and talking about it in that way I think is really disarming

for them because it feels like you're on their side and so I think there's so much that needs to change like we need to have these conversations little and often not like one big terrifying awful incredibly painful chat between parents and kids but just constantly you know like hey we just drove past a billboard about a radio show and in the advert the man is in a suit but the woman's in a bikini that's weird you know like and if you're talking about that stuff with them and then a couple of years later some friend WhatsApps them a video that's quite shocking they'll come and talk to you about it because you've created that pathway but if you haven't had those conversations and made it possible to talk about it then they won't and I love that you've

just described that the importance and value of centering pleasure in those conversations And I feel like there's such a fear around talking about thinking about pleasure in the context of sex education. Like we're going to somehow like push children to having sex. We talk about pleasure. And I just think the fact, I mean, my sex education personally was don't get pregnant and don't get an SDI. It's like coach cars like 101, mean girls. Like if you have sex, you will get club in here and you will die. And it was that.

And then it was a video about a woman giving birth. You're not going to have sex after saying that. when you're 12 years old. I feel the approach that we've taken with sex education is so kind of fear-based so often. It's this idea that we can kind of like scare children out of wanting to have sex. But I think when we do that,

when we remove focus from pleasure in conversation around sex, we set the bar really, really low for what people and off women go into sex expecting. My first sexual experiences were really uncomfortable. I didn't know how to articulate what I wanted, what I needed, but I didn't think anything about it because that's what I thought sex was uncomfortable.

I expected that, you know, first time I had sex, I would bleed. It would be very painful. It wasn't going to be a pleasant experience. No, like, we should be setting the bar higher and helping kids build up the kind of language, the kind of toolkit, the language around sex, so they know how to advocate themselves, they know how to ask what they want,

they know how to assert their consent. And I mean, I do always find, it was just yesterday, I think the day before, Tori MP, Andrea Jenkins, said he doesn't want young children to learn about sex, Full stop. She then tweeted, I do not want children

to be taught about sex. We need to protect their innocence in their childhood as if you can kind of wrap these children up in cotton wool and they will never be exposed to sex and then we can live happily ever after. It's just such a kind of deluded approach

and I think then becomes so, and so obviously you can represent it in how we then approach sex education. You just talked there about having this conversation with young boys and then being fearful that you're about to label them more misogynist and actually you're trying to just have quite a productive conversation.

about positive gender relations. But there was this study that came out recently that some of you might have seen, there was, I think it was kind of reported quite widely. It was done by kings. It 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.

It found that one in four men, age 16 to 29, believe it's harder to be a woman than a man, and a fifth of those who have heard of him now look favorably on the social media influencer Andrew Tate. Now, I'd be so curious to know, Laura, especially given that anecdote of these young boys, kind of eagerly, kind of fearful in this conversation with you. What did you make of this research? What did it tell you? Well, this is something I've been talking about for quite a long time that I think people don't realize is the extent of the radicalization that

young men are currently being exposed to online, particularly on social media. And whenever this has always happened throughout history, there's always been misogyny and there's always been backlash every time that there's a kind of feminist movement that gets press, every time that there's perceived social justice progress, there's a backlash. That's nothing new, but what's new about this particular moment and this particular backlash is that it is on steroids in a way that I just don't think people necessarily grasp. So, you know, in the previous decades, we'd be talking about men, perhaps having conversations with individual other men, maybe a few people writing books or newspaper articles about this stuff in, you know, real physical newspapers.

What we have now is conspiracy theories and misinformation and misconceptions. Everything from the gender pay gap is a myth. To me too is a witch hunter, men everywhere are losing their jobs, to women are constantly making false rape allegations. All of these ideas, and of course, feminism is cancer. Feminism is about feminazi, man haters and taking things away from men. all of these ideas are being pumped out in the billions of views by social media algorithms that benefit from polarization. They benefit from targeting young men with extreme and

increasingly extreme content. And we know this. This isn't kind of conjecture. We know that, for example, the YouTube algorithm is geared exclusively to show you content that's increasingly extreme, not the best quality content, not the most relevant content, but content that will keep you watching, which is increasingly extreme content. And if you think about Andrew Tate's content, which supposedly goes against all of TikTok's guidelines, it's been viewed 11.4 billion times on the platform, which if we just take a moment to recognize is bigger than the number of people on the planet. So it's, this isn't on the scale. This is incomparable to any kind of backlash we've ever seen before. It is really kind of brainwashing, grooming,

radicalisation on a mass scale. And we have this huge problem that we don't recognize it as that. We don't talk about the grooming of boys into this particular extremist ideology as radicalization because we don't recognize misogyny as extreme. We don't recognize men who act out misogynistic attacks in real world violence as terrorists. And part of the reason for that is racism, the fact that we find it difficult to think of white men, young white men as terrorists, and the other part is misogyny, that we find it difficult to think of misogyny as extreme because we're so used to it, because women are dying all the time at the hands of men. So we have this situation where young men are being radicalised on a mass scale

with the support, the active support of these incredibly powerful mass radicalisation machines of social media. And society isn't really doing much about it because we don't recognize it for what it is. And I think it is completely no surprise then that you get results of statistics like this. And I've been talking about this for a long time because I am so often in my work told, including by senior MPs, you know, you're very impatient, you're very glass half empty, you're very negative. You girls have never had it so good. You know, women are doing great these days. Things used to be so much worse. You should be grateful and things get better over time, right? So if you'll just, just be patient, just calm down. Things will get better. They always get better.

So things go like that. But for the first time ever, that isn't happening. Because for the first time ever, as I've been saying for a long time, and it's great. Actually, the study confirmed it, young men's attitudes are more extreme, more misogynistic. They are more likely to say that women were to blame for being raped if they were flirting or if they were drinking. They are more likely to say that feminism's gone too far and, you know, good men are the real victims of today's society, then the older generations. And people like to say, these are old-fashioned ideas. They'll die out over time.

they won't. We're going backwards in terms of that real radicalisation. But if we can't call it radicalisation, if we can't talk about it in those terms, if someone like Jake Davidson in Plymouth can carry out the biggest mass shooting that we've seen in the UK for a decade after being deeply immersed in-cell ideology online. And then the same day the police can come out and say there is no suggestion of any kind of extremist motivation or any connection with terrorism or extremism, then we're not looking at what's happening. And if we don't see it, we can't fight it. And for your previous book, Men Who Hate Women, you actually went, kind of deep dived into the so-called manosphere, a term I know you don't love, but these kind of online forums. And I believe

you could have called yourself Alex and kind of delved into the world of these online forums and kind of the in-cell culture that exists there. What was that experience like? What did you, what did you find there? I think partly it was really, I, opening in terms of scale. So people tend to think when we talk about these extreme communities, you're talking about like a handful of very lonely sad men who are, you know, the stereotype is, they're sitting in their underwear in their mom's basement and they never see sunlight. They haven't got any offline, real world influence. They're just sad and they're just kind of, you know, acting out there rage online and they're kind of supporting each other and we should feel sorry

for them. That's the kind of misconception. So the first thing I found was just how many of them there were, that in any given forum there are tens of thousands of men who are actively signed up members, but also millions who are lurking and viewing and consuming the content. And then you have to times that by an entire kind of ecosystem of these different forums and platforms and groups and vlogs and all the rest of it. So we're talking about millions of views, certainly in the hundreds of thousands of men at an absolute minimum. And then we're talking about the proliferation of that content across the ecosystem of social media. So it's so easy to go, well, you know, my child would never be on an in-cell website. You know, my child doesn't hate women.

They'd never go looking for that kind of content, but they don't need to go looking for it because it is filtered kind of downstream if you like through memes and through clickbait and through YouTube viral videos and through kind of cultural touch points. And so the kind of memeification of misogy means that a huge percentage of us come into contact with these ideas and conspiracy theories without ever necessarily going on to a pickup artist's website or a men's rights activist website, good example of this is to think about the time around the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial and to think about your social media during that time. If you came across content that was hypercritical of Amber Heard or content about Johnny Depp being a wronged victim, you came

across content that has its roots within these areas of the manosphere without necessarily ever having gone directly to the source. And I think the thing that fascinated me doing the research was just how vitriolic those spaces were because they are so often painted as kind of support areas for lonely men and if one or two men in there are really extreme you know that shouldn't be the rest of them shouldn't be criticised for it but recent research found that rapists mentioned every 30 seconds in one of these forums they are websites dedicated to hatred

utter hatred and dehumanisation of women their websites entire forums where across millions of posts and comments and articles you don't even see the word woman or women because they use FOID instead, female humanoid. They are literally female humanoid. Yeah, they don't think of women as human beings. They are, you know, there was a thread that was debating whether rape should be legalized and they were advocating that it shouldn't because that would take all the fun out of it.

There is active incitement on these forums to go offline and to kill women, to rape women, to hurt women. And men have. men like Alec Manassian, the Toronto van attacker, who many people have heard of that attack, but don't realize that it was a misogynistic terror attack. Of course, he wasn't charged as a terrorist, but he actively wrote online that he was an insol and he was going to carry out this attack. And then he murdered, all of the people he murdered, 80% of them were women. He was arrested by the police and he told them, I did it because I hate women. And there isn't any

media coverage of that. There isn't any kind of criminal justice repercussions. So it is a, it is a terrorist, a form of terrorism, and it is a extremist movement, and it is radicalization happening to vulnerable young boys. That was the other really sad thing, seeing little boys who were in spaces like a bodybuilding forum, saying things like, oh, this girl in my class, and I really like her, and I don't know, like, what should I do? How should I approach her? And the first comments from an older man saying, rape it, and a link to a pickup forum.

So I think the extremity of it, people don't know about it. the scale of it, people don't know about it, and the fact that it is a form of grooming, people don't realize as well. And it's just setting young boys up to fail. It's just kind of ensnaring them in this kind of misogyny, as you say, kind of grooming space that then sets them up to be kind of men

that they probably didn't want to be in the first place. And it was really interesting reading your research to that because I think I definitely thought, when I think of the so-called Manistville, when I think about in-cell culture, I had always thought of this, this is very, very fringe, very extreme, small pockets of the internet that very few people frequented that as any extreme ideology

obviously has kind of permeates our day-to-day culture in myriad ways but does kind of exist at the side but as you say I know as it grows and as this these these online forms get bigger and bigger and I know since you write in the book you've you've noted that actually the forms that you have have like multiplied five times increase in visit from visits from the UK and so if you think that's continuing to multiply play, the number of people that are getting ensnared in this. I'm very conscious that throughout this conversation, we've highlighted the many problems, the systemic issues that underpin the misogyny and violence against women that is so rife in today's culture. But where do you see,

in the vast amounts of research you've done of your books, where do you see examples of things changing for the better and people looking to make the sort of reforms that are so direly needed? Well, I think there is so much to be hopeful about. I mean, conversations like this wouldn't necessarily have been happening 10 years ago. There are hundreds of new feminist societies, springing up at schools and universities across the country. Girls are so much more politicised, so much more aware of their rights. Things like the Everyone's Invited Initiative was such a clear example of girls standing up and fighting back against things that even 10 years ago, we were conditioned to think we're just part of life, things that we had to accept in silence.

I spoke virtually obviously at the United Nations today about building feminist infrastructure and feminist cities and one of the councillors from Glasgow was there and talking about incredible ways that Glasgow is really mainstreaming a gendered lens into their urban planning which was so incredible and so hopeful. I just ask what does a gendered lens into urban planning look like? So it's almost anything you can think of.

Basically it's the exact opposite of going let's just hand out 200 attack alarms to women It's going, let's think before we build about all the different ways in which infrastructure can feed into violence against women and girls. So, for example, only a fifth of our architects are women, which may have something to do with the fact that 63% of female architects experience sexual harassment in the workplace. So if you think about the kinds of people who are designing cities and building buildings, they're not necessarily thinking about really simple things like, if I build a leisure centre, a 20 minute walk away from the nearest bus. stop, women aren't going to be able to use it after dark, things like that. Or another great example was, I think it was from, where it might have been Madrid, a city where they had, or perhaps it was Valencia, I think it was in Valencia, where they'd introduced a system called in between

stops or something where after dark you can ring the bell on the bus to get off between the stops, so you can get off at your home. Something like that that sounds so simple. Or another good example of this is when we were working with the British Transport Police and they thought it was a great idea that if you were being harassed or assaulted on public transport you could call the British Transport Police on this emergency line and they would come and meet the train or the tube or whatever at the next station or the bus which understandably is a lovely idea but whoever suggested it had clearly never been in that situation in their life before but when we worked closely with them and we fed in women's experiences and the reality of how terrifying that can

be, they changed it to, or they added in a text number so that you can text them and someone can come and be there. So it's things like that within systems and infrastructure that don't require women and girls to adopt coping mechanisms, but instead fit the infrastructure and the architecture of the city around them and their needs instead. And also we have to point out that, and I know this is something that you've written about and talk about a lot, that it's not just women who suffer in at the hands of misogyny and in a patriarchal system, men are very much the victims of all of the issues we've discussed this evening. Can you just, I think, and this is something that I think does get discussed and often I think feminists do say, you know, feminism benefits

everyone, but I feel like recently particularly, feminism has got a bad rep and I feel like it needs a kind of PR campaign to kind of revamp how we think of feminism. So I do think there has, it's kind of been tarred by this brush of being kind of manhating, of being kind of the turf issues have been huge. And I hear that and I understand the criticism, but I think it kind of distracts us from what the fundamental goals of feminism are, which is to do with equality. Can you just explain for us in brief how feminism does genuinely work to benefit everyone, not just the women who are shouting out for things to change? It's really important we acknowledge where the bad name comes from, that it isn't from women or feminism, it's from the Andrew Tates and the George

Peterson's and their massive 11.4 billion PR campaign of all of the social media platforms. We need that campaign. The feminists need 11.4 billion views on YouTube talking about gender equality and then things might change. Yeah, but that's not profitable for social media companies. So I think the first thing is that we acknowledge why it's happening. It is entirely a misinformation campaign. It isn't because feminists have kind of brought it on themselves. I think probably one of the most heartbreaking things about this is that it is so effectively twisted by the mainstream media and by those kind of online bad actors into a battle of the sexes, into a gender war, men against women, when the reality is that it is exactly those

people who are pushing that narrative who are doing the most to hurt with men and boys. So if we look at the leading cause of death for men in this country under the age of 50, it's suicide. Andrew Tate says that depression doesn't exist. Andrew Tate says that you have to be powerful and rich and manly and in control of your woman to be a real man. Those are exactly the kinds of pressures and stereotypes that lead into the fact that men are dramatically less likely than women to feel able to be vulnerable to reach out for support when they're in crisis with their mental health. And it starts so young the boys will be boys narrative that by the time you reach university, fewer than a third of the counselling services provided by UK universities are

accessed by male students. So that stereotype, which is of course a gender stereotype, and no gender stereotype exists in a vacuum. They are always two sides of a coin. The other side of the coin being that if boys are tough and manly and boys don't cry, women are hysterical and hormonal and never stop going on about their feelings. And of course that negatively impacts us when you have a Nobel scientist telling the world, don't put women in a science lab because they'll cry or fall in love with you. And I can see how you might perceive those as two very different issues, discrimination against women in STEM and the male suicide rate. But the reality is, we can trace them back to the same root cause. And the same is true of any one of these issues that these kind of dude bros, these

so-called men's rights activists, will hold up online as their kind of trump card against feminism. They'll talk about custody struggles. They'll talk about men struggling to get custody in court cases as kind of proof that society is stacked against men unfairly. Well, where do you? does that problem come from? It comes from our massive societal assumption about who are natural caregivers, right? We think about women is inherently nurturing. We think about children being better with their mother, right? And yeah, that's damaging as hell to men. That's awful for men who want to spend more time with their kids who are being denied parental leave. But it's also at the root of the fact that 54,000 women a year lose their jobs because of maternity discrimination, because

of exactly the same stereotype. So we're not fighting against. each other here, we are fighting against systems and stereotypes that are set up to hurt all of us. And the mainstreaming of these myths is so effective that this idea, for example, that women lie about rape, this idea that it's combative, that it's men against women, is taken hold to such a degree that 27% of American men, more than a quarter of American men, say that they would not have a one-to-one meeting now on their own with a woman in the workplace. Because of this kind of mythical idea that women might accuse them of something, which obviously devastating to women's careers in terms of mentoring and meetings. But it's also taken hold here this

kind of feverish obsession. And the reality, heartbreakingly, is that a man in the UK is 230 times more likely to be raped himself than falsely accused of rape. So if the Andrew Tates and his ilk who are accusing feminism of being man hating cancer, if they're really the champions of men and boys that they claim to be, then we could expect reasonably to see them making around 200 pieces of content about male survivors of sexual violence for everyone that they make about the threats of feminism and false rape. And if we're not, we have to ask who is exploiting who here

and who has something to gain from that kind of polarisation. The scale of the systemic issues we have touched on, skim the surface of tonight in tonight's discussion, can feel overwhelming and particularly I think for anyone that doesn't whose job isn't in kind of any kind of gender equality space specifically it can feel like it's just so big a problem where do you even begin to tackle the multitude of issues that are before us in which we've touched on to everyone sitting in this room tonight who's listened to you speak and who thinks god I really recognize this is you know this is huge. The level, the scale of misogyny, the scale of violence is something that I do want to do

something to try and tackle. What is one thing everyone here can go away and do a change they can make in their life, something that they can do that genuinely does have a ripple effect and can have a kind of positive effect on some of the things that we've discussed? We can all chip away at it. There isn't a big single policy change that would fix things, unfortunately. It would be great if there were. And there are policy changes we need, but there isn't a magic silver bullet. And actually it is about that societal normalization. When we think about activism, I think people are scared off because they think it means I have to kind of basically have a huge row in front of lots of people, accuse someone of

something, a waiver banner or go on a march. Those are kind of the ideas. Make a poster. Yeah, exactly. The reality is that the way that we talk to our children about safety can revolutionize their lives and the lives of their friends. The way that we talk to our boys about consent instead of talking to our girls about not wearing short skirts.

Or having a quiet word with a mate who, put something inappropriate on the WhatsApp group that you're in. Not necessarily a big blowout in front of everyone, but just a quiet word. Whenever anyone asks me this question about like, what difference does it make? You know, one small thing. It feels kind of completely, I feel powerless. I always just think back to that night on the bus. And I think, okay, what difference would it have made if one person on the bus that night had done one thing? If one person had just said something. And first of all, it would have made a huge difference to me. It would have let me know. that what happened wasn't normal, that it wasn't my fault.

Those were the messages I got, right? Just deal with this. We don't want to hear about it. I got off the bus that night at the next stop and walked the rest of the way home and never told anyone else what had happened because the people around me sent me the message, this is normal, get on with it. But secondly, it would have had an impact on the man sitting next to me. If one person had said one thing, I think about that guy all the time.

And the thing I think about is wondering what happened next. I wonder about the women and girls he came in talking. contact with after me. And I wonder about what he did after getting the message from all the people around us that he could sexually assault someone in public. And even if they said what was happening out loud, nothing would happen to him. So I don't know how many other young women and girls might have had a very different experience in their lives if one person on that bus that night had been brave enough to send that man the message that someone will say something and you can't get away with this. And of course, it sends a message to other people around you.

in terms of that ripple effect. Because if one person on that bus had been brave, then it might be that two or three other people sitting on the bus would have seen them and thought, I can do that too. It would have role-modelled what disrupting it looks like. And then if maybe just two or three of them had gone on on another night on another bus

or in their workplace or wherever it was to be inspired by that into acting themselves, then what feels like one very small action really can have quite a significant ripple effect. I love that. What a positive note to end on. Laura, thank you so much the work that you do. I really do recommend Laura's books that particularly fix the system, not the women.

I just recently read it and loved, I've kind of highlighted half the book. It's your capacity to remember stats, I think we can all recognize, is just phenomenal. I've never met anyone in my entire career of interviewing who can reel off stats the way you can. So it's so deeply impressive. But really thank you for the work that you do. and I think the way that you also articulate the issues at hand, not only highlight where the problems are and how easy it can be to overlook, again, how systemic these things are,

but you also make things feel like they can be solved, like we can begin to address the problems that we see before us. I think that's a really important thing to keep front of mind. You say we can chip away at the broader problems. Huge round of applause for Laura. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening to this live recording of the Sex Talks podcast with me, your host, Emily Boynton.

If you'd like to attend Sex Talks Live, head on over to the Eventbrite link in the show notes, as 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. Thank you. Thank you.

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