Single Ladies In Your Area - Single women throughout history with Dr Kate Lister

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

Joining the podcast this week is writer, podcaster and sex historian Dr Kate Lister! She helps answer questions like: When was the best time in history to be a single woman? Was Queen Elizabeth I really a virgin? And if you were a sex loving single woman in the 19th century, was it easier to just tell people you’re actually married to a ghost? Dr Kate Lister's new book, Flick, is out now! To get your copy head to drkatelister.com or tune into her podcast, Betwixt The Sheets, for more scandalous stories.Amy's taking her brand new show Thanks For Having Me on tour around the UK from Feb 2027. Tickets are on sale now, just head to plosive.co.uk.And Harriet is going on tour with her brand new stand-up show Floozy this autumn. For tickets and dates head over harrietkemsley.com.We want to hear your dating stories! Email in at [e-mail] Single Ladies In Your Area on Instagram @singleladiespodProduced, recorded and edited by Aniya Das for Plosive.Assistant Producer is Amy Townsend-Lowcock for Plosive.Photo by Paul Gilbey.Artwork by Welcome Studio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh, hello, it's Harriet, and I've just come on to let you know that I'm on tour. Later in the year, I'm bringing my show Flusie to you. I'm flusying about the UK. Lots of new shows have been added. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, London. New date there. And we've added Winchester, Frum. Got in trouble for pronouncing that wrong.

Frum, Taunton, Leeds, Milton, Keuns, Leeds, Margate, Farnham. And let's not forget, Colchester. You can get tickets at Harrietkembley.com And I'd love to see you there. Hello, I'm Amy Gledhill. And I'm Harriet Kemsley. We're both single and in our 30s. And we've found ourselves back on the dating scene.

And the landscape has changed. Everyone has settled down. But we're back out there. We're desperately trying to figure out what the hell we should be doing. So we're going to speak to experts. Chat about dates we've been on. If we managed to get any. And share your tips and horror stories.

So we all feel less alone. We might even get our exes on. Yeah, we'll see about that. This is Single Ladies in Your Area. Oh, hey, baby. Yeah, baby. Hi. How are you doing?

I'm good. We've got another episode that misses you. I know. I'm gutted I miss this. This is a real good one. Oh, my. I'm sorry. I don't want to rub it in.

I don't want to rub it in, but it's really good. Go on. What is it? We've got the amazing Dr. Kate Lister. I don't know if you. have come across Kate if you follow her on Instagram. But she is one of the most fascinating women I've ever met. She is.

I feel jealous. I'm just saying that now. I think it's good to be honest. I think it's good to be honest. But Amy, she has the best job title you've ever heard. She has a sex historian. Oh, my lord. And she's a doctor. Yeah.

A doctor of sex. The sex historian. Yes. Oh, come on. Yeah. No one should be allowed to be that cool. Leave some for the rest of us. You know, she knows all about, like, sex from the past.

Oh, wow. Yeah, she knows all my dirty secrets. She knew all of it. Plamydia, 2007. Yeah. She knew. She just knew. No, it was 2007.

No, I think it was 2008. That was, well, that was so... You might have contracted it in 2007. There we go, silent carrier. There you go. But she's so... I just thought she was fascinating. I had so many questions for her.

At some point, it does. it does get a bit like, creepy. Like, yeah. Exactly. And then how did the children women have sex? And then how did the Victorian women have sex?

What can I say? I like to learn. Sorry, I love learning so much, Amy. Sorry, I'm a scholar. She was fascinating.

She can't tell the sex future, though, which is, I did ask what she thought about my sex future. Chlamydia 2027? Maybe. We've all got our fingers crossed. stay here. Oh, this sounds amazing. I really enjoyed chatting to her. She's amazing. She has a hit podcast called Betwixt the Sheets and she has published widely in the field of sex history.

God. Cool. Yeah, that's really cool. Crazy cool. She's also written a book. Flick, the story of female pleasure. Wow. Yeah. Wow. The history of female pleasure. I reckon she will be the only person that's ever thought to write a book about that. It begins in 1996. One slut masturbated when her husband was out of town. The end. That's if a man wrote the book. Just a furious book. It's just a furious man.

God, okay, well, it sounds banging. Should you ever listen? Oh, please, can we? I want to learn too. Oh, somebody else is a learner, it turns out. Please welcome Dr Kate Lister. Say it with me. I'm a goddess.

Hello, welcome to the studio. It's not our first doctor, is it? We've got our second doctor. The doctor's in the house. Dr. Kate Lister, thank you so much for joining us. Well, any time, thank you for inviting me. I'm very excited. You're kind of like a sex historian.

Is that your correct title? It's a really cool title. Yeah. It's a weird title. one at parties. It's a, it's a really fun one for parties, I think. I imagine it's, I imagine you end up in more conversations about it, even than I do as a comedian.

Sometimes I tell people, like, you start off and you go, what do you do? You go, I'm a historian. And then they have to what you were historian of. And you have to just take that moment to judge it. And sometimes I go of accountants and walk away. And that's it. Just, that's, I'm not doing this. Yeah, yeah.

But it must be when people get the actual response, they must be so thrilled because they're like, oh, what you're a historian of? and they're like, they're going to say rocks and you're like, sex. And they're like, this is the best party ever. This is so good. You need to get like a name badge. Do you have like a desk that you could put a name badge on saying Dr.

Kate Lister, sex historian? I'm going to now, yeah. You need to do it. You need a t-shirts. Yeah, you should sell much of that. That is so cool. I love it. Thank you for coming.

So just to give some context of who you are as a person. Yep. You are, is it true? You're a single lady. That's very true. Amazing. Yeah. Almost terminally single, I think.

at this point. Like the longer it's going on, the more I'm like... It's become a disease. I just can't imagine, like, how do people, how often do you have to walk boyfriends now?

Like, how much do we eat? Who's going to look after him while I go away for work? Yeah. And this is part of the problem, I think, is the responsibility we feel for them. I just can't do it anymore.

Yeah, exactly why you don't want a boyfriend because they can become like another thing we have to take care of. Yeah, they absolutely are. Yeah. That's my... pattern with dating is that it starts really great.

And then somewhere along the line, I've turned into their mum. And no one wants to fuck Angry Mummy. That's horrible. Well, some people do. Some people do. And that's the problem. They want to fuck Angry Mommy. That's the problem.

But Angry Mommy doesn't want to fuck. No, she doesn't. She definitely doesn't want to... Angry Mommy's tired. Oh, she's so tired. Yes. And she doesn't want to fuck this whiny little, like... She doesn't have my socks.

Yeah, of course. Of course. It all makes sense. we've been there. And that's why I'm single. Yeah. How often does that, how quickly does that begin that cycle? Do you find yourself?

It happens pretty quick. It's like you start off and you're like, right, I'm going to be really boundaries. I'm going to, this is the one. He has to be a grown up. He has to, oh well, I guess I could find out your train time for you. Okay. I could do that one. And then slowly, incrementally, it just, and I guess because it doesn't help that I'm attracted to dickheads as well.

If you're like, you give me. That's your own thing. That's my own thing. I'm working on it. Yeah. In therapy, and that's probably another reason why I'm single is basically I'm not to be trusted. Quite frankly,

I make appalling choices. Maybe that's a self-protection thing. It's like you're protecting yourself because you don't, you know that you're trying to stop them from getting near you. Quite possibly. Until you work through it and then you're like, okay, I'm ready for. At 92 years old in the nursing home, I am now ready.

Yes. I've worked through this now. Well, they say these nursing homes are a hotbed. Do you know that the biggest demographic of with Esk. escalating rates of STIs of the over 60s. I actually did know that. Get it. That's the fact that I think that's the fact that's right out my street.

Absolutely. So there's lots to look forward to, actually. Yeah, there is. Yeah. Perpes. Yeah. Do you find your job researching sex through time? God, you also sound like kind of Doctor Who as well.

It's kind of amazing. Do you find researching sex through time? Also, like, that puts you off men a little bit because you're reading all about how bad men are. It gets weird. There's a few things that go on. So, like, reading about past sexual behaviour is you sort of, it's not the, like, you learn to dislike men in general, although there is a lot of that.

Yes. You just, like, like, it comes with the territory. It kind of does. Like, recently my sister got a kitten, and she wanted to name it after an inspirational historical man who had no nastiness attached to him. And they still haven't been able to name the kitchen. Like, it was literally eight hours of his life sitting there going,

come on, there must be one. somewhere. And then like research and people go, oh no, no. They married their 12-year-old cousin. Oh, that's God. Eventually, either she called the cat Margaret or something. She just gave up. David Attenborough, Brother Kitten. So I'm scared about that one. Yeah, okay. No one look into it. No one look. I don't want to know. It's too late. It's just, yeah, it's best not to look. I think she called it Paz in the end, which was after some, because she's in Mexico and it's after some Mexican freedom fighter. And then she put it on social media and immediately in the comments went, YOL, he was a massive womanizer.

Jesus Christ. Right. Maybe we could call a cat Jesus, and that would probably be, that's, yeah. So you do get that. He wasn't very nice to Mary Magdalene, really, with us. Horrible to his mum at some points as well, quite frankly. So you get a lot of that of just like, wow, we are awful things. But it's more that like it becomes an obstacle to you actually dating.

The second anyone knows that you're researching anything to do with sex, it becomes weird. That's very interesting. It's like, because then sex becomes part of the conversation. immediately. Yeah. And people react to it quite badly. Do you think it's particularly English men? Yeah.

They're reacting to it badly. I think you need not an English man. Not an English man. Yes. Yeah. Because they're like, oh, we don't want to talk about it. It's just the thing that happens. We get very drunk, it happens.

Or they do want to talk about it a lot. Oh, no. And it becomes like, as soon as they know what you do is they suddenly feel that they can disclose really weird. And it's like, well, I give it 100 years and I'd be interested in this. But right now. No. Yeah.

Yeah. You have to, yeah, you have to build up. Exactly. So people get weird about it. So that can become a bit of a barrier because whenever you're on the dating apps or anything, obviously everyone Googles everyone. I don't know. How do you deal with that with like a profile like going on dating apps?

Yeah. It's exactly the same issue. And like, but I think it just, it just weeds them out because any, it just, you just, it just is good because anyone that says in a thing weird at the beginning. You're like, oh, well, that's just, that would have been something they would have said in a few months. And so it just quickly, it just, and like, I get asked so much about how, like, how, oh, men, you know, like, are they worried you're going to talk about them or anything like

this? And I was, like, answer it. And I was just thinking the other day, it's like, I don't want a guy who's boring. I want to go with the sense of humour. Like, I want a guy that is fine with it. It's like, oh, yeah, she wrote this really funny joke about me. That's great. That's actually what I want.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so I want a guy that's fun like that. And so if they're going to be all like, oh, are you going to do it? talk about me and it's like, well then you're not my person. That makes it easier. Yeah. That's a good way of looking at it.

Yeah. So I think you're just taking your time. Okay. You're just, you're armed because it's like you can get into relationships with all sorts, but it's like it's better to take your time. I just don't think that I want one. The longer it's going on, the more I'm just like, actually I'm really good by myself. I'm much more productive.

I'm much happier. I take all of that energy that I just hemorrhage to other people when I'm in a relationship and I give it back to myself. This is the problem as well. It's the energy. It's the energy outlet. And I think this is one of the things I was really interested in in thinking about women throughout history

and just how many women just had to give their energy to men. And I think when you look at that, that must be like an incredibly confronting thing of how many women's lives were taken up by men. Oh, without a doubt. I mean, there's what's happening right now on the scale that it's happening is the first time in at least Western history

when women en masse earn enough money to be able to support themselves, live by themselves, they can opt out in a way that even a couple of generations ago they couldn't do. It wasn't until 1975 when women could get a credit card in their own name in this country. It's insane. It's insane. And there's other laws like that.

Like in France, and I think it was in the 1970s, is that married women couldn't own property without it co-signing. There was a similar law in Ireland. So this stuff is really, really recent, is that you had to get paired up because women could, money, but it was pittance. It was next to nothing at all. And then if you're pregnant,

if you're going to have babies, you definitely need to be with man because the social stigma of being single and pregnant is horrendous. You could be cast out, you could be thrown into a Magdalene home if you were in Ireland or other places that they had these institutions. It was really scary. So the whole system set up that you need a man. And it's been that way for thousands of years. And now we have, for the first time, women going, I'm all right. actually. I'm okay for that. I don't financially need you. I'm not financially dependent. I'm not going to be shamed into marriage because I want to have sex and I'm risking a pregnancy. And what's happening is the birth rates are plummeting. They're absolutely bottoming out in certain countries and everyone's really worried about it. But this is a real new point in

history where this has happened where women have been able to do that. It's amazing. Like we're so lucky. Like there's never been a better time to be a single lady. There has never been a better time to be a single lady. Now, if you're a single lady at various points in history, there are options that you could go for. You could be a nun. It's possibly an option. I've had periods.

I've had my moments for sure. If you were a medieval woman and you didn't fancy getting married, that's an option. But there's a couple of barriers to that is you can't just knock on the door of the nunnery and go, let me in. Yeah. You have to have quite a lot. of money.

What? Yeah, you have to pay you way in, basically, is you have to give them, your family has to give them enough money. How, Christian, yeah. Well, they've got to have some, they can't just let every single woman who doesn't want to get married

turn up their time. If they did that these days, they'd be full, they'd be so full. It'd be hordes of women just going, yeah, it's an early start, but we're all right, we'll give it a crack. So that's one thing that you do. There were examples of women,

and they were of spinsters, which is the derogatory term, but Spinsden just means a woman that can earn her own money. That's the etymology of that. There are examples of women that could earn their own money, but again, they tend to have come from money. So they tend to have inherited money. Yeah.

You see? If you were poor, this is going to be very, very difficult. The thing that you really want to do throughout most of our history, the one that you're aiming for, marry rich, marry young, and marry him old, and pin your hopes on his prostate. That's what... Or some massive cardiac event.

Yeah, just be a really stressful wife. Really stressful. And then he's going to peg out, you're going to inherit everything. And then you get to go, I just loved him too much to consider getting married again. I'm just so sad. Just black really suits me, guys. It just need to keep it up. Are there any examples from history of women that have nailed it?

Like, because you don't think, like, looking back, you'd be like, oh, it must always have been difficult. Are there any stories of, like, women that lived an amazing single life? Yeah, there are. It's not easy, though. I mean, they tend to be quite wealthy. Elizabeth I first, famously. The Virgin I don't think so, Queen, that one.

Wait, what? Oh, my God. Oh, my God, you heard it here first? Well, there's nothing definitive. We don't have her diary saying, you know, I got finger blasted by Robert Dudley or whatever. Hi, there, God, it's me, Elizabeth. But what you do get is you get a lot of gossip going around the court at the time

about how Robert Dudley is leaving her chambers at 4 in the morning and about how they're... Oh, we all know what that means. Come on, everyone. Right. So, I mean, maybe it's all completely innocent. But so... It's never innocent.

No, probably not. But she was a woman who was very much aware of her single status. And this whole, I'm a virgin and I'm married to my country, didn't really come about until much later in her reign. Where it was basically like a bit of a PR spin. That's what historians tend to think. is that because she becomes less of an attractive prospect for other kings and princes to want to marry

because she's now post-menopausal. There's not going to be any babies. So they have this PR spin of like, yes, but she's the virgin queen and she's married to the country. So she played that one quite well. I've kind of done the opposite. I've used my lack of virginity, I guess,

to start this podcast. Yeah, I don't know what my title would be the slutty queen. Then you can't be the queen. Then that's out. Oh, is message back? It's not good. I, because it seems to be a thing of, yeah, being single in the past was, it was kind of villainised.

Like, there was a lot of stigma to it. Like, women were literally burned at the stake. That seems to be the... They weren't burnt at the stake for being single. Okay, great. That's probably quite an important caveat that we should put in there. But being single did make you vulnerable. It made you socially vulnerable.

So if we're talking about things like witchcraft, where most of them in England were hanged, and in Scotland they burnt them, is the women, and it was largely women in England and Scotland, they did tend to be single. Not all of them, but they did tend to be. The ones that were accused of witchcraft. Yeah.

So you could say you're much more likely. You're much more vulnerable. When they're pointing the finger at someone that they think is going to be a witch, if you're rich and you've got a husband and a strong support system, you've got people to stand up and go, no, she is not. No, she's not. But if you're on your own, you're already vulnerable. Plus you have this.

stigma attached to you for being single, being a single woman, which was considered quite a strange thing to do. And it's interesting that the first thing you thought of was being burnt, like witches, the single witch. That figure of her, as it looms in our cultural imagination and in fairy tales, she's always single in that, isn't she? Think of any nasty witch story. There was no husband.

Yeah, you never think of the witch's husband, do you? No coming home after a long day. You've been burning children again. Oh, the oven's full again, Mildred. No, you never get any look into Mr. Witch and what he's been doing. It's always a single woman. Yes. Always.

I've never thought of that before. That's so interesting. Yeah, and she's always, she's usually older. She's usually past fertile period. And she is the complete inversion of this perfect, bountiful mother figure because the mother gives birth to children, the witch eats them. The mother is young, the witch is old. The mother is holy and Christian.

and the witch is magical and satanic. So she's like the exact opposite. Plus she uses all of these domestic symbols but kind of inverts them like the broomstick and the cauldron, all these things that women are supposed to use. But she corrupts them and makes them evil. And it's the fact that she's single is very much a part of that

because she is a destructive threat to the family and what women are supposed to be. Wow. I know. But really she is a woman living by herself in the woods. She is an icon. Yeah, this is. That's amazing. It's amazing. We need to

we need to lift our witches up. We do. It's just like all our childhood's being told how awful these these women are. They own property. They're not bothering anybody. I'm going to, when I'm telling my daughter like bedtime stories, I am going to change the words I can't read yet.

And I'm going to, I'm going to pick up these witches. Because I think it's, I think the thing is like it can feel like now is like such a confusing time. to be a single woman. And I think it's really helpful to kind of see it in context. Like, I don't know if it's necessarily helpful to be like, well, at least you're not going to be hung.

You know what I mean? It's a low. I mean, that's the thing. Like, it's a, it's a, the bar is so low. Like, it's so low. But that's, I mean, a thing, you know, like it can feel really hard or like, oh, it's just different. Like, dating is harder these days or whatever.

But it's like, but how lucky are we that we can make a choice? We are lucky in the fact that they're not trying to. hangers and executors and turn us into monsters. But there is still this stigma around single women. I mean, it was only a couple of weeks ago that some reform candidate guy was talking about how he's going to bring in a tax on people that don't have children. And another reform guy was saying that he's going to bring in,

it was like a minus tax credit and that women need to be reminded of their fertility period. So we do have this real focus on women, particularly single women who don't have children and who are opting out of this setup, being stigmatized again to the point where politicians, sitting MPs, are actually talking about levying taxes. Why they're so obsessed with us?

Well, they always have been. They always have been. I can show you all throughout history. Like, in Germany, in the 15th century, they called single women at Eigenbrodlerin, which means she who earns her own bread. Today in Eganbrotler in means someone who's kind of a lonester and is a bit of an odd bull.

But then it meant a woman who weren't her own bread because she was an independent woman who could, she earned her own money and laws were passed to try and ban them from various German states. Oh my God. Yeah, just for being a woman on your own, earning your own money. That was enough for the law to be passed in Germany.

Yeah, mad, isn't it? It's a bit mad. It's a bit mad. It's all a bit mad to kind of think of, in context, of like, my mother's generation, there was no, when she was born, she couldn't, I mean, you can't get a baby a credit card, but like she couldn't have a,

my grandma couldn't have a credit card. Like these are like, I don't have credit cards, you get what I mean. Like it's been there. Like all this stuff is so, is so recent. And it's still like,

it still keeps piping up a bit in like a backlash against us being able to have our own independence. Yeah, it does. And it's within our lifetime, it's you don't even have to go back to the 70s. I was re-watching friends the other day. And it's like the end,

and sex in the city is another one. It's the emphasis on you cannot be single. It's the worst thing. ever be. It's awful. You've got all these characters being like, I'm so single, it's terrible. I'm going to die of my own. And like, they're obsessed with this. They've got this really strong friendship group in both of those shows, but we'll literally just fuck them all off for anybody who says that they might be in a relationship with them because being single is the worst thing that you could possibly ever, ever be.

And we all grew up with those kind of messages. Like Bridget Jones, a single woman in her 30s. Oh my God, it was so weird. They could make a film out of it. I did always find her like aspirational though because she was like, she was so fun. She was so fun. I know that the messaging was bad, but I still could see beyond it and be like, yeah, but she's doing things.

She's living alive. Look at those boring couples at that dinner party. But she was, she was really important because she made being single fun, even though the messages was a little bit like, but she really doesn't want to be single. Like that's the thing. She desperately doesn't want to be single.

Her entire diary is like, God, I don't want to be single or fat or anything else. And you look back now and you like Bridgett. She was like eight stone and owned her own property in central London. Her job in publishing. Bar market, yeah. And was banging Hugh Grant. Is that one earth that you complained about?

Poor Bridget. Poor Bridget. Is it interesting kind of to look back at dating through history? Like, is there anything that we can learn? It's tricky, isn't it? I mean, they had much stricter codes, social codes, around what was appropriate and what wasn't appropriate. this varies dramatically from place to place, from year to year, from class to class even.

But in some ways, I kind of, I admire the simplicity of it. I wouldn't want to go back, but I admire the simplicity of it. Like, if you watch like a Jane Austen film or if you read the book, like in Sense and Sensibility, there's this character called Marianne who gets dumped horribly because she chased the fuck boy. Sorry, Marian. But there's this bit in it where a sister goes, but you wrote to him, so I assumed you were engaged.

And I kind of like that. Just the simplicity of it. Yeah. He's written you a letter, therefore you must be engaged. There's no situation ships in Regency, Britain. There's no like we won't put a name on it. It's just like, have you spoken to him on your own unaccompanied? Then you must marry him.

That's it. All the rules are out of the window. Yeah. And maybe some A rule might be helpful. Because we're now in this weird, like, limbo. Nothing needs anything and literally no man's land. Yeah. No man's like.

Yeah, that's where we are. Yeah. of the situation ship where like you try and be like cool and hip and funky and go with it in the beginning like yeah man yeah like we don't need to put labels on it and then kind of like a year late you're like actually all right we need to put a fucking label on this like right now yeah it's really because i think a lot of these things just work in their favour and so often they're like oh you know like this is like just keep thinking about like Lidette culture and stuff and how it was like encouraged for women to sleep around like men without but it was like the men that were writing these things there's the men that were like yeah like like sending this message that, oh yeah, you should fuck around as well. You should fuck like a man. Yeah. Really? Yeah.

Do you mean fuck you? Yeah. That's it. And don't be upset about it, you know? Don't be all like attached, you know. You go be free. You know, what an appalling thing to want to do to like text someone whose face you've sat on the night before. That's far too clingy, quite frankly.

I look back at myself in the 20s. It's like, what are you talking about? It's like, yeah. I don't want, you know, that's just too much, man. Yeah. It's so mad how just like even the recent history of like growing up in the 90s and 80s is mad. Like how we treated women there was like you just, I burned in my brain is the circle of shame

and these things that were done to women. And it's just like a voice that's in my head. It's constantly there, isn't it? And it takes the distance of a few decades to be able to look back and really see it because I remember looking at those photos of, was it, Jessica Simpson, when she was like, oh my God, look at fat she's. And I remember being a teenager and look at it

and thinking, oh my God, she's massive. And now, as a woman in my 40s, I look back, she's tiny. She was so small. And I remember distinctly being like, oh, my God, that's just disgusting. I'd never go out looking like that. I'd give my right arm to look like that now. And she looks so happy and beautiful. And it's like you can't, they just had to rip them down these magazines.

Ripped them down, traumatic pieces. I was researching recently for an article about attitudes to women that don't have kids. And I was looking into attitudes from the 90s because I remember it distinctly. It wasn't women that didn't have kids. It was single mums on the doll who were like public enemy number one. And I was reading through some newspaper clippings. It was terrifying. Like there was politicians saying things like, well, they should consider having them adopted.

They were doing polls. saying that should benefits be stopped for mothers, for single mothers that are on the dole, and everyone was going yes, and Panorama was investigating. I think it was the Express called them the brides of the state and an underclass. And it was just, like, it was vitriolic.

Had nothing about the dads that have just disappeared and the women are raising the children. Nothing. Nobody even... My blood is boiling right now. Nobody even for one second went, well, hang up, why... What about these twats that have pissed off?

What about them? It was just, these are awful, awful, awful, awful. women, it was really, like, shocking. I'm not easily shocked, but even, like, reading back over it, I was like, that was vitriolic. And, of course, it wasn't them that caused the flipping financial crass, was it? It wasn't mums on the doll. That's really good point.

Yeah. It's not them that bummed around nor filled the rivers full of shit, was it? They didn't have the chance. Yeah. Well, they might have done. They were too busy, quite frankly. But that's just a continuation of this, we've done this all throughout history, the shaming of women, of basically whatever you're going to do,

you're probably not going to get it right. If you have kids outside of marriage, you have kids with your husband, but you're not looking after them properly, if you don't have any kids, if you do have kids but don't want them or want a career, whatever you're going to do, you're probably going to do it wrong.

So what do you have, like, advice on how we should handle that? Like, do you have a way that you take that? Because I kind of, it makes me kind of want to be like, fuck you, I'm going to live my life in response to it. That's it. That's it because you're not going to get it right for the patriarchy. You're just not. The only way that you'll play that. game is if you become full pick me and you devote yourself to this domesticated model of the

good nurturing wife who's doing everything and is bearing children and who is married and who manages to remain young forever more. And it's an impossible standard that you're never ever going to achieve. They say in America like female homelessness over a certain ages on the rise because women have done the thing that they were told they were meant in the traditional life. But then they haven't paid into a pension. They haven't worked. They don't have, they have blank CVs. And now they're trapped and they've lost their home because their partners moved on to probably someone younger. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And now there's, and then what are you going to do? Now you're in your 40s and you've got no qualifications, you've got very little education, you've got nothing to show for the last 20 years other than that you've been raising babies and nobody, yeah, and these women really do come unstuck. So there's, don't play the game. Just do exactly what it is that you want to do. I think even like with modern dating, the, the information that's out there is, is wrong. I saw something that you said about the 80-20 rule,

which is like something that's been talking about so much recently that 80% of women are going for the same 20% of men on dating apps. That's so interesting. It's just such shit. It's been said as such fact. That's what it is and being used by in sales to be like, there's nothing we can do. If we're not these hot chad, they don't want us.

But that's been the rhetoric. That's been the rhetoric. And as with always these things, people love to say, oh look, the research is proven. Has it fucked? There isn't the research. And as with always with these things, and if you dive down into it, you can find the research that they're talking about. It's actually a pretty shunkey blog article.

I'm not even joking. It was a blog article from 2015 of some guy. And this is what he did, is he created a fake Tinder profile of a super hot guy, matched with 25 women and asked them random questions. And then from that deduced that they were only targeting the top 20% of men. I worked in academia for 15 years. That would have been laughed out of the academy.

That it's not ethical. It's they didn't know what they were doing. We can't see the data. It's just shit. It's just one guy, catfishing. It was an angry man on the internet. Pissed off because he can't get laid. Probably because he's making up profiles

and talking shit about women. But it's obvious that's not true. Go out and look around. I have shagged some really unimpressive specimens. 5K. Yeah, we're doing it for the insult. I'm just saying. How are you guys still around?

We're putting the work in. Don't come at me and themselves. I've tried my best time. We've tried. Yeah. Even you're not grateful. I've done it. I've done my bits to help this particular cause.

But it's obviously bullocks. Go out and look around and it's not true. 80% of women are wandering around only, and 80% of men are single. I know a lot of women with very ugly men. It's just they've married them. They've committed themselves to these men. What do you call that beautiful?

Especially if they married them quite young. I've seen that one a lot. Mentioning no names of my particular social group. They get together really young and then she becomes this like high flyer, amazing woman organised and he becomes a 30-old man who still wants to play on his PlayStation and you're just looking at him like, shit. Another one with a fish.

Was there a period from history where you think dating really were? or any, like, really, like, I was like, there is something romantic about the letters or the handkerchiefs, but I guess the problem is just generally we know that it's, it is always a trap. It is a trap. It's like that plant that, you know, traps animals. A venous fly trap, yes. But then they had to do it. They had to play that game.

There's a really interesting Welsh custom that I learned about that was sort of early modern period that the records go back to called bundling, which was where two single people, I don't know. came up with this was the idea that they could spend the night together without actually getting married as long as they were both wrapped in sacks. I'm sure that nobody left the sack all night long. Like gaffer tape around the neck. That's true. I promise you that's true. It's called bundling. And it was this, that the couple could get to know one another. And it happened in rural Wales. And I can't remember the name of the historian who's working on that. Isn't that quite sweet? Yeah, they're obviously shagging.

But I love the kind of like the dance around it of just like, we'll put them in sacks and then we'll bundle them right up so they can't move. Do you want to go bundling? Do you go bundle him? That is so sweet. That is so sweet. Do you think has there been like many women that have kind of like fought against it or any like, I saw something you're saying about like badly behaved women through history. Like I love a naughty gal. There's a really mad woman that I was investigating for the new book whose name was Ida Craddock.

she was 19th century, she was American, and she believed in free love and free sex and free expression to the point where it was really quite confronting for the time. She would like write, somebody said that they didn't like belly dancing that it was too disgusting. And she wrote into a magazine about how great penises were

in order to try and contradict these things. She was obviously mad. And then she came up with the things. She writes to all these books about how great sex is now we should all be having more sex, definitely have more sex. But the thing is, is Ida wasn't married. So she was in this weird predicament then because it's like, well, Ida, how do you know about sex? For the confines of 19th century America.

So then she's going to have to either say, I did have premarital sex. And then they will shut her down immediately. No more weird magazines for you, Ida. Or she could do what she did, which is she said that she is married to a ghost. And they have regular sex, spirited sex. And he comes and visits her. And, what the hell did she call him? I can't mean.

He's got names like Sol or something like that. And she really wrote this book about how she has sex with this ghost husband and how he visits it. And like really graphic, pornographic descriptions of fucking a ghost. And she was, when you try and get past the madness, I would just love to have sat down with her and go, Ida, tell me, what the, what the, what is happening here? What the fuck is happening?

She's fun. She's a fun time. She's, she is. She had a sad. ending, she came up against this guy called Anthony Comstock, who was this big suppression of vice and censorship from the 19th century. And he hounded her so much, she eventually took her own life.

And she wrote a letter about how she'd done it because of him and how she wanted to be a martyr for sexual freedom. I know. I know. Her name needs to be like... It does. She's due a documentary. She's due a film.

She's due something, this woman, Ida, absolute tour de force and back crap crazy. We love... Our favourites. Yeah. Because that's an interesting thing. I saw what you were saying about Wuthering Heights and books written by women that didn't have sex necessarily. But they had this. Frisson.

Yeah, the lustfulness and the longing. And how did they write such kind of powerful sexual books? Yeah, Emily Bronte. So there's a lot of discussion around that one. Because as far as we know, Emily Bronte, we don't have a lot of biographical information in that her own words really haven't survived. but it seems that she wasn't a people person, which is putting it mildly. She'd just like walking around on the moors

and she liked animals and she really didn't like... She liked her sisters, but that was kind of it. She didn't have any relationships that we know about. So there was a kind of a conversation among academics of like, well, how the hell did she write this absolutely raging, sexually repressed beast of a character in Heathcliff then? And then loads of people jumped in the comments going, well, maybe she could imagine it.

I know she could have imagined it. I know that. But you generally have to have some kind of input from somewhere, right? So she was probably reading the romantic works of Byron and the other romantic poets and kind of taking it from there. But that was considered deeply shocking at the time. That's before Emerald Fennell got hold of it and they had Cathy wanking up the Moors,

which is what we all do in Yorkshire. They would just go up there. There can be a terrible cue. You can't move for people wanking on the Moors. Tell me about it. It's a backlog Everywhere You said we're all

Cue it up Don't be shoving There wasn't anyone That could have worked On the farm Or anyone that she could have had Like her Are you asking if Emily Bronte

Got laid? Yeah, I don't know As far as we know There's very, very little evidence That she even was interested in that She is the epitome of the single lady But another one was afraid Died Young tuberculosis

I know But all the Bronte sisters though examples of women who really did forge a career. And they sort of came from nowhere. I mean, they didn't come from absolute poverty, but they came from the arse end of Yorkshire and were the children of a rector, so not aristocrats by any stretch of imagination.

And they did forge their own career by their writing, which was a really big thing at the time because it's very difficult for women to make their own money. Writing is one way you could do it. And they did. Yeah, that's really interesting that that was one, yeah, one of the only paths that you could do. Not many, not many.

I mean, most sort of middle-class girls would probably be a governess teacher. You could do that. Maybe you could be a companion for a lady. It's all a bit wank, isn't it? Yeah. If you wanted to scandalise everyone, you could be an actress. But you also take a lot of shame and a lot of stigma with that as well because that's your reputation on the line.

And you often, is it that if you're an actress, you have to have kind of a, like, somebody who's a patron. A patron. Normally, not all the time. It's not like a prerequisite, but it's. Well, I demand. Anytime I do any acting, I insist. A wealthy, a wealthy patron. I insist that I have a wealthy patron.

The BBC says, Harry, please, we can't encourage this. But the early comedians, actually, on the stage in the 17th century, Nell Gwynn and Yemald Davis's. They were the first women comedians on stage. And they were very scandalous and they were very shocking. and they were, but people queued up to see them, they couldn't get enough of them. But they occupied this strange area of like,

at once people are obsessed with them, but they also condemn them as being scandalous and immoral. How interesting. How times have changed. Haven't they? Yeah, what an interesting insight. Is it Ham? Oh, hello.

It's just us sneaking into the podcast. Just popping in. Just dropping in. Just dropping. to say, have you thought about joining our Patreon? Yes, there's lots of nice things on our Patreon. Isn't there? You get it ad-free, which is great.

Yeah, lovely, actually. Not any of those adverts. Actually, I love adverts. Yeah, me too. Sorry, we shouldn't be slacking off the adverts. Let's absolutely love adverts. Also, you get to watch the episodes on video. Yeah.

Is that how you describe that? Yeah, that is kind of how you describe it. That's how an elderly person would describe it. We've got full video Epps online now. Yeah. It's a fun time. It's a fun time. And you get little, little tip bits of secrets.

And most importantly, you're supporting the podcast. And you're supporting the podcast. I mean, not most importantly to us. Please let us keep doing this. Please support us. Be our sugar daddies. We're fed up of supporting ourselves. You can find the link to sign up in our single ladies' Instagram bio.

Or go to patreon.com forward slash single ladies in your area. So I have been really trying to listen to my gut. I got a divorce. My ex-husband has requested that I stop talking about it. I've been talking about it for three years. And I do, I just have stopped talking about it. Anyway, it's not about him. But I've been really trying to listen to my gut.

Like, that's how I've been making decisions. But then I saw that you were saying that that is bad and you shouldn't be listening to your gut. Well, yes and no. I wrote the article about that. It was after I'd seen celebrity traitors. Right. Yeah, yeah.

It's like, and everyone in there was like, look, I think I'm going to be really good at this. I'm going to listen to my gut. Your gut knows fuck all most of the time. But the thing is... I'm going to get remarried. That's it. I'm going back to it.

I've made a terrible mistake. No, no, no. The thing is, like, you know that situation incredibly well. Yeah. You know your husband. You know yourself. You know all the players involved in that. So your intuition is actually really finally tuned in that instance.

And you should absolutely listen to it. But it's something like traitors where you're just literally taken from all context and plonked and you've got nothing to go on at all apart from a hunch. All of the research has shown us that a hunch is, you may as well flip a coin. You see, this is internet dating. Yeah, this is. This is internet dating. And that is why you have to not get invested for a while.

Yeah. Because you don't know who anyone is. There's no, they're not connected to your life in any way. But you do eventually, you learn a bit more about that, which is where your intuition comes from. So later on you can trust your gut. At the beginning, you just have to like, it's like you have to be like a detective kind of building a picture of somebody.

Yeah, but you're not though when you first start. So you're like, you run straight into this. Not me. I'm very, I'm being very practical these days. It's my new thing. In the beginning of your dating new singleness, were you reserved and calm and careful? No.

I actually was a bit reserved because of, well, because I've come from it for a marriage and so I know where it goes. Like I've seen, I've seen the future. And so I have, if anything, built up a wall because I don't want to go down that path. And so I feel like I have to be very, but I've been a little bit misled a couple of times. It's like you have to, I just think it's so important for women to not jump in and just be like, you have, you can trust your gut, but you have to know them before you trust your gut. Yes, yes.

I think you've got to gather your information. And something like that when it's like dating, you've also got all your past experience and you know what dating is like. know the red flags to look out for. I tell myself all the time, I have to start listening to my intuition on this stuff. And you just don't. I don't know what that is. The flag goes up and you go, oh, shut up, but it'd be fine. It'll be fine.

Even the doctor of sex is saying that we're so bad. And it's only when, like, you're in the wreckage of it and there's ambulances behind you in flames, you just like should have absolutely should have listened to my gut on that one. The article was about how like just as a sense of intuition to just predict things. it's not actually very reliable at all. Are there many, like, red flags from history? Is there anything we can learn from, like, history of, like, what we should be looking for when we're dating?

Or, like, what are things that we need to look out for? Try and be a young widow is probably the last of history. Yeah, that's really good advice, actually. Thank you. Thank you. No, we probably shouldn't advise people to do that one. Otherwise, this is going to be a true crime podcast. Red flags from history.

I mean, they're walking red flags. flags, aren't they? They're like, it's very, very difficult because as I was saying, now we're in really uncharted territory. The fact that women can go and have sex and can have children and raise them on their own and live on their own and they don't have to be married and the fact that, you know, we're like, yay, lesbian's, hurrah, you crack on and we're embracing all of these different expressions that people can do.

That's completely new and uncharted territory. It's kind of like, you know, how we like, we have to vote because we have to vote for the women that have come before us that have fought for it. We have to fuck for the women that have come before. fuck, right? It's really important. It's important. It's actually really important.

We've got like magazines and internet articles about the clitoris and so like this is all new stuff. I'm not saying for one second that these things haven't existed all throughout history. They completely have. But we now are able to explore them in a way that women even 20 years ago weren't able to do so. So trying to look all throughout history and take that stuff and apply it to now. Like trying to like talk to, I don't know, Anne Boleyn about like, oh God, are you in the talking? phase.

What earth? It's like, you'd have to explain everything about what actually knows she would know because she and Henry were in the talking phase for a good seven years. So she might actually be able to give me some comments. We all know how that ended. Yeah, exactly, right? So hopefully we're not going to end up with our heads in a basket. Yeah, sometimes it feels like it.

I will say sometimes it feels like it. Okay, another question. One of the things I saw you talk about was about, we talk a lot about on this podcast about kissing about why kissing became a thing. Why kissing became a thing. That is... Evolutionary biologists are such a fascinating group of people. They sit around and they try and work out

why we do the stuff that we do. And kissing is a really interesting social custom that there is a lot of argument about why do we do it? Because it's almost a universal experience, kissing in one way or another. There are lots of different types of kissing. Like you kiss your kids, you might do the double cheek showbiz kiss

and then there's snogging, like proper snogging. Why do we do that? One of the theories that I quite like is that on a primal subconscious level, you're actually checking your partner for disease. Oh, that's a really romantic one. Yeah, it's less sexy. But I can kind of see, like, what, think about it

because someone who's a bad kisser or who's got bad breath or like you get close to them and you're like, ugh, eh. Yeah, they're not looking after themselves. So if they've got bad breath, they're not looking after themselves. If they're a bad kisser, they're not thoughtful, they're not connecting with you. I've never been laid right by someone who was a bad kisser.

No. That's never, ever happened. Yeah. That's a red flag right there is if you can't do that properly, there's a very little hope for anything else. After my breakup, I got really, like, repulsed by the idea of kissing. I really started to think about it very, like, scientifically, I think. If you really think about it, it's weird. Yeah, because it was, like, to do it with somebody I didn't know, just felt so, like, jarring.

I'd never had that before. where I was just kind of really put off by it. So when you were saying that, I was really interesting. So I was like, yeah, that is kind of, why do we do it? Why do we do it? It's pair bonding as well. You get a rush of endorphins. It feels quite nice.

You are effectively checking your potential mate's health in a weird way. Yeah, and that's sort of the leading theory as to why we do it. The worst kiss ever, though, is like the one where your teeth catch, have one of those. That's, oh, it's so bad. And you have to try and, like, carry on like nothing's happened. And it's just the worst. Do you from history have advised for people, like I was talking about my breakup, like for people that are recovering from breakups? That's a very, very good question because breakups, again, in history, they look very, very different from now.

Like, handling. They didn't all end up with their heads off. Yeah. But you sort of had to get married and it was incredibly difficult to get a divorce. That's a good thing to think of, though, you know, when you're like in the fetal position crying because at least you can get out. Stephen's dumped you. At least you've still got your head. Yeah.

You know what I mean? That is like a helpful, like positive to think about. Again, the bar is low, but it's more than other women have had throughout history. Yeah. I mean, there have been some epic, epic breakups, like bad breakups. I mentioned Byron, the romantic poet, and there was this woman that he was saying, Lady Caroline Lamb, who was married. She was married to somebody else, and they had this really tempestuous, like, five-month affair.

And then he fucked off and married her cousin. And she just lost it. She went absolutely. She did things like dress up like a boy. and sneak into his house. We've all been there. Who amongst us has not? She, like, wrote to his publisher,

pretending to be him asking for a portrait. She sent some clumps of her pubic hair. She, like, she had the most epic meltdown to the point with her family and her husband. I love this. I had to do an intervention, took her away to Ireland,

to be like, calm the fuck down. We've all just lost our mind at some point. I've never sent pubic hair. No. But you can identify with just like, oh, God, when you're like in the throes of it. Yeah, it's so embarrassing. We do that thing of just like, like, you hang around where you know they're going to be like, oh God, fancy seeing you.

Oh, God, I hate myself. Well, she did that and there was just no holds bad whatsoever. Dressing up as a boy to sneak in. It's so funny. Because what was the, what was going to happen when he saw her? I don't. Well, because he used to have her when they were doing their thing, dressed up as a boy to have sex.

So that was a thing that he liked to do. So she continued... He was a gay man. He was definitely by. He was... I don't know what the word is for Byron. Pan, I think, is probably the word. If it stays too long enough, he'd have a go.

But he used to do that. So she continued to dress up as a page boy and sneak into... And would, like, follow him around to balls and dances and then, like, shout at him. And then she ran up and started cutting her arm and, like, real restraining order type of territory. So don't do that. So no matter what text you've sent, it couldn't be as bad. I don't think it could be, unless you are hacking clumps out of your pubic hair to send to the person that you split up,

you're doing better than Caroline, quite frankly. Take heart. And then my final most important question, and this is based on you're doing a live show. Yes. This is very exciting. It's got the best name of any show I've ever seen. Please tell us what it's called. It's called a dick through time.

It's so good. It's so good. Between the sheets, a dick three time. We'll be looking at the history of the penis. It's amazing. Well, the penis is, it can be amazing. But I think our obsession with it is amazing. And the fact that we still, even now,

when people are drawing things on walls, are doing exactly what the cavemen or what, we crawled out of the sludge and decided we were going to do some art. The first thing we did was a dick. And we're still doing it is we are obsessed with the penis. We're obsessed with the penis. Yeah.

One of the questions that I've actually, always wanted to know, and I'm hoping to find out now, is why the statues from kind of Roman, Greek times, they have tiny, tiny genitalia. They do. Was it, then I was like, oh, I just thought that maybe they were smaller back then. What is the... There are actually reasons for this. There's a whole bunch of different competing theories. One of them is just that it looks neater.

Like, if you've got a statue and if what you're wanting to do is, like, Michael Angel's David, for example. So not ancient Greek, but very much based on the ancient Greeks. It's like, that's not about a wang, that statue. That's about like, you know, the abs and the legs and the sinew muscle. If you put a stonkin big willy in the middle of that, it might be quite distracting. That if we make them little and dinky, then it kind of, it doesn't spoil the aesthetic of what we're working with.

That's one theory. The other theory, and this is the one that sort of most historians seem to agree with, is what you're looking at is the Greeks' pretext. preoccupation with control. And I think that the Greek word for it, I might have this wrong, is Enkrataia. And it's about the tiny penis is basically their visual representation of this is a man who's in charge of his baser urges. This is a man who is not obsessed with sex. And control was really important to the ancient Greeks.

Having control of your emotions of, they invented stoicism, you know, not getting carried away. Women were the emotional ones. Women were the ones who, you know, they would cry and they do silly things. men are very stoic. And we still live with the legacy of this crap today. But they viewed a tiny little dinky penis as being visually representative. This is a man that can control his urges. And it's sort of supported by the fact that when they want to draw things like satyrs and fawns, they tend to have huge, massive penises to symbolise that they are very lustful. So that's the theory is it's not that they had smaller wangs. It's that what you're looking at is this perfect

image of manhood who can control himself. So back then it was like, the micro penis was king. The micropinus was king. Yeah. That is such nice news for all the boys out there that might be a little bit worried. Right? It's not small. I'm just in control of myself.

Yes. And it might come back and you might come back in again. It might, we do get fashions. Yes. We do get penis fashion. I feel like big penises of rain for a long time. I'm not a huge fan of the enormous penis. Yes.

I don't need it to be enormous. It's too much for me. I agree. I agree. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this. Yes. Yes, I agree. No. Don't need that. But yeah, the Greeks, dinky meant that you were intellectual.

Wow. Boys. This one's for you. Thank you so much for coming in. Kate. It was absolutely fascinating. So you have a podcast. Yes. The Twix the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society. Oh my God.

And it's available for more platforms. It is. Yeah. And you have a book. I do. It's called Flick, A History of Feastew. female pleasure and it's looking at women enjoying sex throughout history. Yes. Is there, because I saw one thing that you were saying about women masturbating and how at one point

in history it was seen as a bad thing? Oh, very bad. Yeah. That was men and women. That goes right back to the ancient world. But really the Victorians took this idea and ran with it, that masturbation, especially if you're a man, you'd lose too much of your special magical essence and it would weaken the body.

And they thought, say, with women, that it could cause hysteria and madness and epilepsy and all kinds of things, that's very much a Victorian idea. So if you've ever in the playground, if anyone ever told you that Wanking would damage yourself or you'd go blind, that that's the Victorians. Was there over a period when female pleasure was, yeah. I don't even know. Now is probably the best. We've ever managed it. Now is the best time. This is it.

I think it's always really good to remind ourselves that that's good now. Yep, yeah. And we've still got a long way to go. Exactly, but it could be worse. Could be worse. It could be so much worse. It could be so much worse. But Kate, thank you so much for joining me.

I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. You've been so much fun. And how do you kiss someone? Amy, you just got a lunch. Well, what do you think about that then? If school was as interesting as that, I would have passed a lot more history lessons.

Yeah, why don't they do A-11? and sex history. Every, every, every, every, every A-level student would pass with flying colours because you'd be genuinely like, go on and then what did they do? Yeah. They went up the bum in what year? Do you know what I mean? Of course you'd pay attention. I just think like, why are we learning about the headings

and then not sex as well? Why are we not learning about women's pleasure? Yeah. Why are we to learn about their heads been cut off? Ambling got a head cut off. We know, but did she masturbate? Let's have a bit of balance to this story, shall we? Yeah, I agree. I agree. I agree.

Thank you so much to Dr. Kate Lister. Her book, Flick. Oh, that's such a sexy title, isn't it? Flick and the story. A female pleasure is out. And you can find her on Instagram. I really recommend following her on Instagram. She makes these, like, these short little vids that are like mind blowing.

Oh, my God. At Dr. Kate Lister, and that is Dr. Spelt D.R. Wow. Good to clarify. I'm a learner. What can we say? We're scholars.

Yeah. I feel more intellectual having had a doctor on. Even though I wasn't in there for having listened to it, I feel more intellectual. Yes. And that's the effect I have. Thank you so much. Okay, bye-bye. Hello, single ladies. If you're a single lady and you're interested in meeting other single people who are really furious about the direction of the Labour Party and a contemplating voting green for the first time, then you might meet them in the audience at one of my tour shows. I'm Nish Kumar and my stand-up comedy show is called Angry Humour from a really nice guy. We're going to the UK and Ireland between September and November of 2006 and the tickets are available right now.

I will, if requested, organise a dating service during the show. I would say if you're interested in meeting some very angry people, they will be at the show and they will be mad as hell. Tickets are available at Nish Kumar.coma.uk.uk. None of this is legally binding. You may not meet your life partner at one of Nish Kumar's tour shows.