Sex Talks With Emma-Louise Boynton - Why women are trained for goodness, while men are trained for power with author and former Goop CCO, Elise Loehnen

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

In this episode, Emma sits down with writer and author, Elise Loehnen, to discuss her best-selling new book, On Our Best Behaviour: The Price Women Pay to be Good. Together they unpack the web of myths and cultural expectations that prop up patriarchy and keep women chasing an ideal of perfection that is neither achievable nor really desirable. "Women," Loehnen explains, "'have been trained for goodness. Men, meanwhile, have been trained for power.' Elise is the former chief content officer of Gwyneth Paltrow’s company Goop, where she oversaw its blog, newsletter, book imprint and podcast as well as its Netflix documentary series, “The Goop Lab.” In 2020, Loehen decided to step down from her position with the company and On Our Best Behaviour is her firstly solely by-lined book. She has ghostwritten 12 other titles. Book tickets to the next live recording of the Sex Talks podcast here. And subscribe to the Sex Talks Substack here.

Before we start, we wanted to let you know that in this episode, sexual abuse is discussed. So please take a break if you need to, and we've added details on the show notes for organisations who can offer support. Hello and welcome to the Sex Talks podcast, with me, your host, Emma Louise Boynton. Sex Talks exist 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 act as 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 the 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. None of them lack confidence. They just know that they can't show it.

They can't express it. It has to be softened with weak language. Right. am so excited for today's episode, in which I speak to the wonderful Elise Lulen, who's the former chief content officer at Gwyneth Paltrow's company, Goop, you may have heard of them, where she oversaw its blog, newsletter, book imprint, and podcast, as well as its Netflix documentary series, The Goop Lab, which I loved. In 2020, Loonen decided to step down from her position with the company, and has since published her first solely byline book, On Our Best Behaviour, The

price women pay to be good. Naturally, the title immediately jumped out at me. And more so the topic. It's a book about the roots and many manifestations of patriarchy, explored by way of the seven deadly sins. We will go more into that in the podcast episode. It's worth noting, by the way, that Elise has ghost written or co-written a dozen other books. She is a booked and busy woman. Now, I love this conversation because I love the way Elise's mind works. She's a critical thinker and in an era in which it can sometimes feel as though social media is homogenizing our culture and making us all think and speak in an algorithmically informed TikTok-fied way. I found Elisa's nuance refreshing. So I hope you enjoy this episode as much

as I did. Please let me know. Slide into my DMs. Drop me a message on Substack. I really really do want to know what you think. Elise, one absolute pleasure to get to speak to you on the Sex Talks podcast day. How are you? I'm well, thanks. Thank you for having me. Delighted to be here. I absolutely loved your book. On our best behavior, the price women pay to be good. It just feels like we're going through such a weird, tumultuous, transitionary period at the moment when it comes to gender relations, when it comes to crisis of masculinity, when it comes to when it comes to feminism, and I think that your book gives such a fascinating, rich history

into how we got to where we are when it comes to patriarchy, and it comes to the traditions and the kind of cultural affectations that have led us here. And I really needed this right now. So thank you for that. Oh, thank you. I mean, that was one of the primary impetus for writing the book was that I would hear and use words like patriarchy. talk about culture and criticize patriarchy. And then I realized, sure, I know sort of the pocket definition of what it is, but it had become this cultural boogeyman and that so meant it's this like, blame the patriarchy or that's patriarchal and that I couldn't actually define it for myself.

Like, who is the patriarchy? Who is behind it? Or is it a system, a way of thinking about and assessing the world that has its hooks in us and has for millennia and drive so many of our actions out our conscious intent or awareness. And that's sort of where I landed. And it's a much more empowering position, I think, to be in to recognize, like, oh, it's not some, like, white man behind a curtain. We are not living in the Wizard of Oz.

This is a system put into place that's still with us and that lives in our bodies and that we pass on to each other and our actions and in our thinking. and that we can start to evolve it or move past it to something more affiliative, more equitable, more reflective of who we are and who we want to be. But it starts with us. We can be hard on the systems. We have to be soft on people. And really the only way that I think we can start to understand it and deal with it is by deal. It's through personal work. I find myself often, to your point there, saying kind of we, this kind of collective way society,

you know, we are so quick to put down women, we do this, we do that, or like, or they, they, I have to catch myself, like, who am I actually talking about? I'm not, who am I talking about? I'm not a conspiracist who think that there is, you know, some, you know, someone behind that, you know, behind a curtain who's kind of pulling these patriarchal strings and fucking things up for women.

But I have caught myself, yeah, not really feeling that certain. as to what I'm drawing upon when I make these quite kind of broad, sweeping, like, and points about the kind of what I see as gender inequality, how gender inequality presents itself society. And I resolved this kind of, this kind of, this we. And I think one thing I first started reading the book, I found it interesting me you pointed out, you introduce kind of why you set about doing this. And you make the point that we often have a kind of tendency to naturalize patriarchy and kind of naturalize a system as if the subordination of women and men being in control and power was just an inevitability, was inevitable fact of history. And now we are in this

kind of more feminist era in which we are pushing back on this biological inevitability. And finally, women are kind of regaining or kind of gained for the first time power in this otherwise unequal equilibrium. But patriarchy, as you point out, wasn't inevitable. It's not a biological fact. Can you just explain that for us briefly? Because I found that fast. Yeah. Yeah. And it's obviously complicated and we're still, we'll never fully know, right? We're talking about these are periods that are a long time ago. But patriarchy as it's emerged has had many different forms in different parts of the world at different times. And I cite a lot of fascinating texts about it. But the reality is as people, and you can see this represented today,

even though we seem to have sort of these primary ways of organizing ourselves, we're far more creative than that. And we have been historically. And so the argument is that before patriarchy, before it really became codified, before Hamarabi's Code and these texts that assert male supremacy, that we were far more affiliative and that we did like together, which makes a lot of sense when you think about our prehistory, or ancestors. They weren't necessarily in the same social structure that we are in today. They were moving around more, foraging. And to that end, we're told so many stories as women and as men about what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman and the natural qualities of each.

And this story that, of course, men are valiant and strong and dominating and controlling and they are out there hunting and women are in caves, dwelling, and breastfeeding. And this is our natural fate. And so the book is really about nature and culture and the way that it's impossible to pull the two apart because so much of who we perceive ourselves to be naturally as women or men or non-binary people is what the culture puts on us, right? And so there's just fascinating evidence that suggests that these stories that we tell about who we are from a gendered perspective are just incomplete and sometimes wrong. And so there's several examples. One, they found this series of graves of warriors and the Andes. And when they reexamine them with

DNA, there were 26 graves. They had presumed that they were all men. They were all warriors, decorated as warriors. Ten of the 26 were women. We now know there were female Vikings. Stanford has been at Cattle Hayek, which is Anatolia, modern-day Turkey. They've been working on that sort of ancient site for a long time. And the research is fascinating because men and women are essentially the same size. Men were not getting superior or higher quality or denser nutrients, which you see in many different parts of the world.

They have the same amount of kitchen smoke in their lungs, suggesting they were spending the same amount of time inside and so on and so forth. And so you even think about the gender differences that we accept that men are invariably bigger and stronger than women. And you have to question, again, is that nature or culture? Have we just bred ourselves to be like that? Or does it suggest some sort of essential physical dominance? So these are just questions that are worth actually looking at and sort of teasing apart because it opens up a lot of thinking about who we really are. And then you look at all the women today who are choosing otherhood or who are essentially saying, I do not have a maternal drive. I do not want

children. And instead of thinking of them as deviant, it's like, oh, well, this is probably always been part of who we are. It's amazing to think about it. You know, a lot of women talk about like the rise of the matriarchy. There have been matrilineal cultures and there still are. but it's not the reverse of patriarchy where you have women dominating and oppressing other people in culture. So that's not also what I think that we want. I think what we want is something that's balanced, truly. Well, I think also what we want is to not have these deterministic assumptions, as you say, these stories that tell us this is who you are and this is how you meant to be that we then kind of have to follow blindly, which throughout history has kind of been

how it's gone. And I think, you know, we always talk about this at sex talks. like question all the baked in assumptions about how and who you should be learn to question them just as you pointed out there ask why and ask why that's a story that you've been told because as you say the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves they are so they shape how we then see the world and hence how we behave in it so as you say it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in a way Carl Jung has this great line where he says thinking is too hard so that's why people judge. And what I really wanted was to examine my own thinking and the shortcutting that you were talking about, the use of they or just like immediately

looking for sort of blaming men or blaming my parents. And then when I actually stopped to tease apart what I was saying, one, I couldn't identify who I was talking about. I know there are horrible patriarchal men in our culture and so on and so forth. But when I went through my own history, it's not like I was like, this man oppressed me, this man oppressed me, my husband, you know, I started to sort of realize that when I was speaking in these really grand sweeping ways, I was being completely dishonest in ways that we're not conscious. But I think that that's sort of how we tend to function.

It's blame your mother. We get into these, into that river, and it's really hard to recognize that you're in it, much less to get out of it and force yourself to think. What is this voice in my head? Who's me? Who am I supposed to be? And where am I getting these messages? And it's not like learning to think critically.

Because I think sometimes it is also easy to slightly fall into the men hating narrative as the kind of easy win for addressing any kind of frustration you feel in the face of patriarchy. There is this kind of sway of online discussions now, essentially suggesting that men are all just fundamentally so deeply flawed and useless and that we need a whole new batch created. And I look at that and I think this is such an unproductive way of moving forward the conversation around to kind of better gender relations. I think dating relationships often shine a magnifying glass on kind of broader, kind of sociocultural trends that we see. to go back to the book briefly, why then did you choose to explore the history of patriarchy and how it presents itself culturally by way of the seven deadly sins? And just for anyone who needs reminding, the seven deadly sins are envy, pride, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, and sloth,

which is just such a satisfying word to say. Yeah, such a satisfying word. I was raised in a secular, politically progressive household. I didn't go to confession. I wasn't told. I wasn't told throughout my life that I was a sinner. But I use that as a construction, in part because it's culture. Religion is culture. So this, again, is the way that we pass these things on to each other consciously without needing to subscribe to any of these systems or saying, I choose that, or I want that, or that's what I heard because it's in us. But one of the main the pieces of the book, really, is that, and I don't explore this at length with men, although the final chapter is about men, but men are conditioned for power, and women are conditioned for goodness. And this idea

for women that reputational harm and assault on your standing as a good mother, a good friend, a good wife, a good coworker that you're not toxic or mean or uncaring, or bitchy or ambitious or any of the other nasty or negatively charged words that we ascribe to women when we wanted to mean them, that's the most harmful thing that you can do to a woman. Truly, you can silence her, cancel her, send her off the stage very swiftly by assaulting her goodness. We are so vulnerable to it, so sensitive to it. Meanwhile, men are teflon when it comes to reputational damage.

But we sure don't like weak men. And the minute that a man loses his power or ability to control a situation, that's the only time that we're sort of done. But you look all throughout culture at the Donald Trumps or the Elon Musk's or Kanye West or any of these people who behave in abhorrent ways. And we still revere them so long as we perceive them as having power, it's a different standard. You cannot imagine. It's impossible as a thought exercise to imagine a female Elon Musk. I think because we love to tear women down so much. I can't imagine being able to get to that height.

Oh, never. But it's just so, it's so abhorrent to us to think of a woman as uncaring or mean or bad, unless we're sort of listening to true crime. Like we will not, we cannot abide by that. And that idea of goodness is so amorphous. What does that even mean? That is the specter in our lives, I think, is women, fear of someone saying, like, you're a bad person. Do you think that goodness is inherently tied to women as a maternal figure?

So we see mothers must be good, so women must be good. Yeah. It's part of that sort of core trait set that we attribute to women. Again, going back to this nature versus culture, this, like, a good woman is maternal, caring, nurturing, selfless. She subjugates her needs to other people's wants. She's tireless in service to the world, but not interested in being of the world. She's not searching for praise or affirmation or attention. She's so happy to stand behind other people.

She's never hungry. She has no appetites. She has no desire. She's a receptacle for other people's desire, though. She's sexy, but she's not sexual. and she's never upset or angry about any of it. That's a good woman, as our culture defines her. When you take those traits and you map them back,

the seven deadly sins become a punch card for what it is to be a good woman, the denial of all those very human instincts, appetites, and desires. I had this like aha moment with those sins, starting with envy and this idea that envy shows us what we want and that so many women who I speak to have no idea what they want. I was that person. I was sort of like, I don't know what I. I'm just here to like serve. I'm just here to do what I'm supposed to do. But I had never actually considered what do I want. It had seemed so tangential or not appropriate or irrelevant. You describe women wanting in the

book as being humiliating, which I feel was such a powerful note to me. What did you mean by that? I don't, for me at least, just to say, I want this thing and to recognize that a million people are there to tell me that I don't deserve it or I'm not worthy or who do you think you are. I think so many of us are trained for these things that we try to get what we want through often manipulating other people because that's how we know how to get along and survive. The promotion needs to be someone else's idea. It can't be a direct ask. We know this. We're not rewarded for it. We're punished for any of our overt wanting. And it's so insidious that it's hard for us to recognize that. And then we have a culture, for example, let's say it's about a promotion or negotiating for more money. What's so insidious about our culture is that you might say, this is crazy. I am doing far more work than my male counterpart or maybe a female counterpart, I know my value in the market. But yet, if you go and assert yourself, if you negotiate on your own behalf, you will let the social

science is clear. Like you will be, it's distasteful in women. We don't like it. And it's not just men who don't like it. It's also women. You will be likely punished or penalized or seen as fill in the blank. It might not even be conscious on the part of these other people. But yet, you're going to be blamed for your lack of pay equity and your lack of title because Emma, you have a confidence gap. It's on you, actually, because women aren't asking for what they deserve. It's really on women. And that's the sort of way that our culture sort of subtly enforces this. Meanwhile, when I ask my friends, none of them lack confidence. They just know that they can't show it. They can't express it. It has to be softened with weak language. You know,

I just was wondering, I'm sure you've already thought of this. Sorry for raising this. It's probably irrelevant. I mean, I have a million manipulations in the way that I speak to get my point across, get my idea through and move things forward. It's that palatibility piece, I think, so when you grow up feeling like you need to be palatable, you need to be accessible, you need to be and we go through all these contortions to make ourselves path to make ourselves not too much. And it's something you go, I think it's actually really a thread that goes throughout the book of like all the ways in which women, we learn to shrink ourselves physically. I don't eat too much. Be thin. We know eating disorder is a rampant. But in other ways too, we just learn to take up less space. But again, as we say all of this, and I appreciate there are so many layers to this and to the kind of cultural conditioning that we are all subject to.

But where for you does that really begin? Where are we as women? Where does that kind of kernel of self-shrinking and of self-doubt and a need for palisibility? Where does that begin? I mean, that's a wonderful question. I think it's just what we pass on. So it's the way that it's modeled for us. And then I think it becomes subconsciously just becomes the behavior pattern.

And then it's again, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because this is how girls are. girls are compliant. Girls are rule following. This is what a good girl is. So as children, right? When we're two, three, like this is not, this is before we're logical. We see how our peers, the people who are like us are behaving. And then we tend to conform and abide. It's not, again, not something that we're like, I'm going to be like Emma. It's just we're present with Emma and we behave as others behave. We're social creatures. So aggression and anger, for example, in the way that it is completely, express in very different ways is one of those things that's fed to us as women and girls of that's just the way that girls are. So it shows up as when we're young, as girls don't

hit and girls don't yell, boys hit, boys yell, they're physically aggressive, verbally aggressive. And to be fair, boys and girls are both aggressive. It's a human trait and experience. And And it's an expression of boundaries and needs and all of these things that are very important. But girls are told that they don't push and they don't yell. And so it comes out in covert ways. So social aggression for girls is mean girls. It's backstabbing, alliance building, gossiping, whisper networks. And then we're told that's just how girls are.

They're these catty, vicious bitches. But it's because we're not allowed. We're not taught to express ourselves an over. overt ways to say, I don't like that. Get away from me. Not that boys are taught good conflict skills either necessarily as kids, but women are not allowed to overtly express their displeasure. And so it has to come out because we're human. And so it comes out in backwards ways that then perpetuate the cycle that we believe about who we are. And you look at the way that we punish angry women, hysterical, bitch, on and on.

invectives. Meanwhile, like for men, this is therapist Harriet Learner's work. It's son of a bitch and bastard. So we still blame the woman. Which is why I've never actually thought how language does so effectively reinforce that there. I'd never really thought it in that way. You just mentioned there that women aren't permitted to show displeasure. And in the same way, we're also not taught to explore our own pleasure, the flip side of that, which you mentioned a little bit early on that point around sex and sexuality and how women are kind of so disconnected from their sensuality and their sexuality as they grow up, but they grow up learning to be celebrated for being sexy, essentially being objectified. I found that a really interesting distinction

that you made in the book, because I guess I'd never really thought about it in that binary, sexy versus sexual and how that feels and what that means as a woman. Can you describe me in a little bit more detail what the kind of difference between those two things and what that really says about the way we moralize female sexuality particularly? So Deborah Tolman, I don't know if you've ever read, it's called The Dilemma of Desire. She's a researcher and she writes about sort of has that famous line about how girls are taught to be desirable but never desire. You know, I'm in my 40s now. This was so insistent. I mean, I know we're trying to change this culturally, but it was like you didn't choose a boy. You needed to be chosen always, this passive receptacle for men's desire. It was never about our own agency or autonomy or the assertion of our own desire, unless it was sort of back channeled. Like, I think he's cute. And I love talking to Peggy Ornstein, who wrote Girls and Sex and Boys in Sex. And she's such a brilliant. thinker. And there was a line in one of her books from a boy that she had interviewed a teen. And he was

saying, oh, I think my girlfriend's sexy, but she's not sexual. And I was like, God, that's a brilliant distinction. Because I think the sexiness, the objectification, the objectification of ourselves is safe and expected, but to be sexual is terrifying in the same way that to be angry is terrifying for the general population. We're terrified, I think, of sexually embodied, sexually powerful women in the same way that we're terrified of outspoken women who will burn it all down. And I think this comes back to, like, goddesses. This is Holly, this is angry earth stuff.

I think it's mythical. We can only be palatable for another. Like, our sexuality is for another. It's displayed and portrayed for others to endure. but it can't be for something that we have. That's what I think the taboo around masturbation, for example. And we never talked about masturbating growing up. But boys, it was just taking for granted that all boys wanked and that was normal.

Whereas for girls, it was kind of, it was really shameful, it was embarrassing. You did not talk about it at all. And I think it's just, like, instills this idea that, yeah, our sexuality is always, it's performative. It is for somebody else. It's not for us. And I mean, shame plays a huge role in that. Again, shame's a topic.

Obviously comes up a lot in, in the book. And you quote Bernie Brown, who talks about shame as the tool of the oppressor, which I found a really powerful line. Because shame is my sex therapist would often say to me, shame is the most powerful social control tool, because shame is what forces us to essentially self-police our actions. We fear being shamed by the collective, so we kind of tow the cultural line. And I think we see this very predominantly when it comes to sex, and particularly female pleasure and female sexuality. this kind of women have historically been, as you just pointed out, kind of shamed for their overt sexualness when it's been apparent. And I just wondered, looking at the kind of history of this,

has there been any equivalent for men? Because it does feel that there's been such an asymmetrical application of particularly sexual shame for women. But I'm just wondering, does it just not apply to men? Are there any examples of it applied to men? I mean, look at erectile dysfunction and the incredible amount of research that's gone into ED. I think men are incredibly wounded by the patriarchy.

It's why I included that chapter on sadness. I think women have learned how to often survive and thrive, whereas men are screwed. I'm deeply worried about them as well. But just to close the loop on the sex thing, too, the conversation I like to have with teenage girls who are so sexy is I hope that you know what you like. Are you able to tell your,

partners, how you want to be touched, what you like. And what I will say invariably is that there is like shock and horror, which to me just underlines that like the sexiness is, is not being an agent of sexuality. It is a performed sexiness. Then get to know your body. I hope you can talk about masturbation. I hope you are forthright with your partners about how you want to be touched because the two need to be paired. I think I agree. I agree. and I think that's so often, I mean, for my own past experience, I did what, I did sex therapy at 28. And until that point, I had no idea what I like sexually. And this kind of bodily disconnect, I felt, had been kind of instituted in the size zero era of the early noughties and had just then evolved and manifested in a kind of multitude of different ways and showed up very viscery when it came to sex. Sex was something that was performative. It was always for somebody else. It was for somebody else's pleasure. And I remember someone actually asking me.

me and I was like 26 and he said you know what do you like what do you want and I was I had no idea how to respond because no one had ever asked me before and I'd never asked myself because I'd also never I guess been taught and I didn't have any kind of references reference points around me to think that that is a question worth asking and a question worth addressing and kind of I think yeah something something worth considering and I think that that bodily disconnect I think is so there's such a kind of common theme I see this amongst so many my friends and women generally, we don't learn how to inhabit our bodies. We erode our relationship to our body if we ever had a relationship with it in the first place. And I found this person,

and I see this amongst my friends, suddenly you get to, maybe you're a late 20s, you get to 30s, and you're suddenly like, whoa, what does building a relationship to my body look like? What does not hating my body look like? What would it feel like to enjoy sex? And that in itself feels like kind of quite a revolutionary moment in a woman's life, I think, because I also appreciate a lot when maybe don't reach that point. And I find I've been staying with my mum, my parents for the last couple weeks, and I found it really interesting with my mum. I've run a platform called sex talks.

Her shame around sex, she can't help but express to me and kind of impress upon me the shame she feels around what I do and how I talk about it. And in kind of covert ways, I don't even think it would be cognizant for her because it would be more like, you know, said in quite a subtle way. like, you know, Emma, you just have to remember that because you run a platform called sex talks, that many will go out, many will go out with them, we'll assume you're promiscuous. And even the word promiscuous, there is, this is so deeply gendered. But it's a constant, like, you know, if you're talking about this, there is going to be an

assumption that, you know, you are, you know, a sex worker. It's, it's interesting seeing it unfold, because I can see it's just this kind of unconscious projection of what she's learned around sex. And then around bodies, which kind of say, you know, women, we're, we're healthiest during the war when we, because we basically ate nothing. And I'm like, Yeah. What? Where does this come from? I think it's in Garda Learner's book about the creation and patriarchy and she writes about this a fair amount. But when you go back to sort of like Hamarabi's Code time, so much of the penal code was about promiscuity for women. Women who were adulterous would be stoned and drowned, whereas men who were adulterous would be fined. We'd have to pay

their wife's father like five bucks or something. And you think about this. Now we're starting to understand epigenetics and how these things carry on. And so you think about our collective ancestors and the way that they were persecuted and penalized. And you go back to sort of the early beginnings of patriarchy. And it was a question of your status was as a wife, a slave, or a concubine was dependent on the number of sexual partners that you had. And decency and to be was something that you could only claim if you had one partner. It was all the way back to this idea of women as chattel, which is still like not that old. It's ingrained in our DNA. Yeah. Throughout the book, you can weave in your own kind of

memoir elements to it. So you can weave in your own experiences and kind of elucidate how these cultural vestiges of patriarchy have cropped up in your own life. Did writing this book and doing this research. Did it impact on how you see and relate to your body, your sexuality? Yes. This book was such a hardcore act of therapy for myself in a way that I didn't realize. I pitched this idea and conceived of the idea and proposed this idea as sort of from the standpoint of being a cultural historian slash therapist. I was going to diagnose the culture and write about how this showed up. And much of the book in some ways is that. But then my editor was like, where are you in this? You are also in this. So you need to bring us through this. It's funny because I had this

immediate, like, I'm not interesting. And as I did concurrent therapy and wrote this book and had to evaluate my own relationship to these sins. And I realized like, oh, I'm kind of the perfect person to do this because I grew up outside of this. And yet it's still in me. So, intensely and that I knew then that probably my experiences weren't going to be that original. But what I had experienced in my life would probably be more of a collective story than I thought. And that's how I found it. That it's a lot of, oh, me too. The chapter on lust and sexuality, I write about my own sexual traumas, which I had never written about before or really even allowed myself to think about, or I just had shoved them so deeply, and they're not remarkable stories. Let me just say that.

That's sort of the whole point of it. This is a collective experience, I think, for a vast majority of women. And yeah, that chapter in particular, I was so hard to write. And I'm certainly not over it, but I recognized it's something I sort of knew, but now I really know that these experiences that happened to me as the first was as a child, sort of in a molestation event by a friend of a family friend that wasn't like that extreme or that prolonged. But that experience

and then an experience in high school were connected and deeply part of a collective female experience of this like, are you responsible even if you're seven years old for drawing the attention

of a 40 year old man? Did you ask for it? Did you want it? Did you enjoy it? Like these are all, I think, the question. that so many of us ask ourselves. And in doing it, I recognize too.

I'm 44 years old and this stuff is still in me. It's completely affected my life and my experience of myself as a sexual person and the denial of myself as a sexual person because I never wanted to lose control. I'm still working on it. That's also, I think, why I have a hypervigilance about younger women where I'm like, don't let, don't let this F you up because it is absolutely not your fault, but society will do anything it can to convince you that it is and that you wanted this or wanted this attention or should have done more or put yourself in this position.

It's such heavy baggage, even when these events seem kind of insignificant. I can't wait until women can put this baggage down. And why do you think it did take you to this point to be able to, articulate and recognize those experiences and the, I don't want to put words about, but the kind of what sounds like the degree of trauma that invariably those sort of instances do end up having to us. Why do you think it took to getting this point to writing a book to be able to actually put into words what had happened to you? I think because the cultural stories around sexual trauma that we hear about are so extreme. And yet those are the ones that

aren't common, right? Like, what happens to girls and women is not typically a law and order SVU episode. And so I think so many of us have these experiences and it's like, oh, that wasn't so bad. That was really nothing. There's no way that that should be influencing me 30, 40 years later. So I think there was that, the minimizing. I'm really good at sort of higher minding. I'm really good at intellectualizing and rationalizing, justifying, thinking things through rather than having an actual physical feeling experience or really being in my body. And some of it was just repressed. I knew sort of the edges of this character in my childhood.

I remembered one incident with him at the lake, which I write about. And I knew he was inappropriate with me and made me uncomfortable. But I didn't probably five or six years ago, I did MDMA therapeutically. And that's when I sort of, one, I had two big revelations. One, I was like, oh, my God, I'm in my body for the first time. Like, I haven't had this experience of actually being in my body, which sounds bizarre, I know. But having had that felt experience, I was like, oh, this is what it is to, like, feel my body. Because the MDMA mutes your amygdala, your fear response, and you can sort of access memories that you had otherwise repressed.

That's when I realized, and I still don't know exactly what happened. that that was a shock to me to hear myself say talking about this. And that's when I realized I was like, oh, this is in me. This is something I've been holding very deeply. That's certainly changing my behavior in ways that are probably obvious, but like we're not obvious to me. I think you raised such an interesting point then. It was something I actually interviewed my sex therapist in the podcast recently.

And we talked about this. And she said that so often clients will come to her in the therapy room and say something's happened to me. but it wasn't big, it wasn't huge and kind of very quick to dismiss something traumatic having happened because they don't feel it was bad enough because of the commonality, unfortunately, of these experiences that so many women have, there is this feeling that we just have, it's like, it's just life, you just have to, like, crack on. And because so many women have had these things, we kind of, it just becomes slightly normalized. And then you hear the apt to be horror stories that are printed in the press and that reimbled. forces the idea that what happened to you isn't as bad as that. And therefore, you're kind of

disconnected from the feelings that might be associated with it. A hundred percent. And I think that's why it was important for me to write myself into the book is because so many, the stories that we get, the stories that are sort of worth memorializing or telling are typically exceptional. They're so, like, they capture our imagination because we can't quite imagine what it would be like to have that experience. And that's, that's understandably where we go. Whereas so many of us are not having exception. We're having very ordinary experiences. And many of us are having the exact same experiences. So that was, that's what's been so amazing about the book and the reception of the book has been the, I feel like we're the same person. Because I think that for most

of us, 90% of us are going to have pretty extreme vend diagrams in terms of our life experiences that make you feel like, oh, I'm not an aberrant weirdo. This is how so many, this is how everyone feels, but we don't necessarily talk about it because it's not exceptional. And so hopefully it's, I really wanted to write a wee story, not a me story. And I think I've done that just in part by saying like, this is how my story fits into this wee story. I really just love how you articulated that in terms of it being.

being the fact our stories don't feel exceptional enough is why we don't talk about them. Because I keep saying, there's still this taboo around sex and that's why we don't talk about it enough. And I think actually the taboo around sex is kind of really declining. I think we are getting better at talking about sex. But what we're not getting better at talking about is the vulnerabilities around sex, the bad experiences. And that can range from being, I don't think I really enjoy it, to this thing happened to me, to this terrible thing happened to me. And I think actually that's what you've just described there. We just don't feel our own are exceptional enough, therefore worthy enough to warrant articulation and discussion and

probing. And as a result, we don't do that work and we don't have those conversations which can end up being not only so illuminating personally, but actually can free us from a narrative that kind of keeps us bound and not actually addressing what can actually be quite kind of long-term issues. Throughout this conversation, we've obviously touched on the myriad ways in which patriarchy raises its ugly head and manifests in today's society and kind of feels very much alive and well. But you did point out earlier, and I think it's a point that's really kind of worth us highlighting that patriarchy does everyone in this service, that men are as let down by patriarchal power institutions as women are. I said at the start of this episode that we

feels like we're in this really transitionary period when it comes to gender relations, that we're having this so-called crisis of masculinity that feels like a very direct reaction to the strength of feminism and the, or the visibility, at least, of feminist discussions and narratives, I think particularly online social media. And obviously, we've seen the rise of Andrew Tate. There was just a report the other day that was, I think, by King's College in London, that found that Gen Z young men are increasingly opting for more kind of traditional viewpoints, especially when it comes to gender relations and their expectations of women. So women are becoming more progressive, young boys are actually becoming less progressive and more kind of traditional in

their viewpoints. And that does feel like this very kind of obvious, I guess like backlash to the progression we've made through feminism in terms of women's rights. And I just would love to know your thoughts on this. I think that our tendency is like this giant human organism is to try to maintain balance. And so I feel like you see these reactions and adverse reactions of a culture that's trying to sort of find its footing, it's becoming, I think, more extreme in part because it's like you need the extremity to balance the extremity.

I certainly feel like we're seeing this in the U.S. in terms of politics. You know, most of us are just trying to sort of find balance in our own lives. And again, to go back to the beginning of the conversation, the reason I really wanted this to be a book for women about our own internalized patriarchy and to recognize what the ways in which we are self-limiting, self-constricting, self-policing,

but that there's so much that is in us and that we then sort of put on other women as well. In the same way that your mom is like, don't be promiscuous. We take these bad feelings and we project them on each other as well. So that's where I wanted to start, in part because I feel like when we sort of start blaming all men, When we take all that bad feeling, we project it on a group of people and make them bad, make them the villain and make ourselves the victim, it's not empowering and it's not helpful. And so in my work, what I want to do is sort of draw attention to the ways that we have internalized it and then uphold it because I feel like that's the easiest place to start. And then sort of holding this line for balance, we need men to let their feminine. You know, I write a bit about sort of the qualities of the divine feminine and divine masculine,

which sounds like a woo-woo concept, but it's not. And I feel like the contemporary trans movement is doing a good job of showing us what this looks like. But this idea of the divine feminine as being qualities of nurturance, care, creativity, et cetera, qualities of the divine masculine being sort of truth, order, structure, direction. These are qualities, these are energies that are in each of us regardless of gender. and most of the women I know, including myself, I mean, I tend to be more in my masculine than in my feminine, but I think women are very good at understanding the way that these polarities exist in us. And I think men have been so shamed away from the feminine, from the caring, the nurturing,

the sensitivity, the emotional awareness. They're so severed from their feelings that they cannot, they don't know how to, we don't have a culture that supports letting the feminine come up in men. And I think that that's killing them and killing us because these wounded boys become wounding men. I think that what we're seeing is our culture trying to polarize to meet the other polarity in a way that feels dysfunctional truly, but is also, I think, how we operate. And I guess also confronting us with the reality to your point of what happens when we don't seek that sort of equilibrium and you just said there that you kind of live mostly in your masculine and that is definitely

something I identify with and I feel like that's also been but a hangover from my version of an interpretation of feminism that I, in order to be a powerful woman in a what felt like a man's world, in order to be a strong woman, I needed to adopt all these more kind of hyper-masculine traits and actually disconnect as much possible from my feelings, from my vulnerability. I need to be hard. I need to be strong. I need to not cry. And I find myself often actually shocking myself with how much I exhibit the very characteristics of this kind of straight white male that we've demonized societyly because of the kind of hyper-masculinity associated with him, how I've ended up actually kind of falling into that model of thinking

because I think that's what I need to be in order to be strong and powerful in a society that really valorises those qualities. We all need that kind of that, that being and that yang in us internally. Otherwise, we end up just kind of perpetuating the very same power structures that this conversation is highlighted. But I think I've been doing a lot of thinking recently about feminism and what the contemporary role and place and model of feminism looks like today, the feminism that I've grown up with and understood, I think very much saw.

or kind of pitted gender equality as women having what men have. And hence, women seeking to emulate these more masculine characteristics. And we see that in terms of how women end up going into business and when women become CEOs typically actually becoming indistinguishable from their male counterparts. And I can understand entirely why that's happened. And I understand why that model of feminism has developed. And I understand why, hence, I'm in my kind of my jackets and my suits

trying to be strong and powerful and not feel anything and not cry. But what do you think the role of feminism is today? And what do you think the model of feminism that we need and want right now looks like? I think it's finding this new model, which I think is inherently within each of us, of being in the world as examples of what it is to sort of straddle both spheres. And so much of the book is about the way, it's like, interrupting the own conversation in our heads so that we can live more holy or fully. And so I think it's that. I think women can certainly show men as well what it looks like to lead differently.

And you talked about sort of, and I write about this a lot. Like I don't want women to behave more like men. I don't want equal power in this particular structure because we can't affect We can't support it. There's so much inequity. We are winding down our planet's resources. We see the writing on the wall, right? There's war all over the place. This isn't about let's have half women ruling and we'll have a different outcome. This is about a different modeling, a different consciousness. And we need to do that in some ways gently. This isn't like burn it down and build something entirely new. This is like the next evolution in our collective. And I think it needs to be led by women who are showing men and other women what it is to live in balance. The work for us,

for women, is to listen to those voices in our head and not silence them, but say, what is this? And when I have that instinct to swat down another woman, can I actually stop? and contemplate and consider what that is in me that makes me want to do that and put her back in her place. So that's the call. My final question then as we wrap up what has been such a fascinating conversation. But for anyone listening who is thinking, God, yes, I want to begin to get a little bit better in my day to day at questioning a lot of these kind of baked in assumptions about who I am and how I'm meant to show up in the world, what it means to this woman, what is one kind of small act of rebellion that we can all begin incorporating into our

day to day life that can help us? At a low key level, fight against that patriarchy. We've talked a bit about sort of like body intelligence or being in our bodies. And for me, that reconnection with being in my body has been so important and such a big part of the journey of sort of both writing and living this book. And for me, it's like a very simple exercise. is to say, like, is this a yes for me or is this a no for me? And to run it through your body, take a minute. I think so many of us reflexively say yes to everything and we will fulfill everyone's needs and wants and put ourselves in service to other people's desires.

But when that, the incoming, instead of the immediate, of course I'll do this, even though I have no idea if I want to do this or if this is good for me in any way to pause, run it through your body, is this a yes for me? Is this a no for me? It works with sex. It works with food. It works with demands on time. And it can really, it can just be a circuit breaker and create enough space for you to actually access yourself. Creating that space and I guess that, that distance between reaction and action, giving us time to think about whether that's actually truly reflective of what we genuinely want. And I think going back to what we said before about it being difficult, particularly for women, to articulate and kind of put into words

what we want and feel that that's an okay thing to do. I think anything that helps you in that very process, identifying the things that you want is such a fulfilling and important one. What a great way to end this episode. At least, thank you so much for your wonderful book. And thank you so much for talking to say. I really, really appreciate it. And I hope everyone listening enjoyed this episode. Thank you, Emma. This was so fun. 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, 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.