The Blindboy Podcast - Sex Education from a health Journalist

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

Sophia Smith Galer is a multi-award-winning journalist, author and TikTok creator. She is a Senior News Reporter for VICE World News, a Visiting Fellow at Brown University. We speak about her book, losing it, sex education for the 21st century Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Aquadome, you never-ending Brendans. It's the Blind Boy Podcast. The weather is freezing again. It's proper, appropriate January weather. It was minus three degrees this morning. It was absolutely beautiful. It was up at half seven. I cycled past a horse in an industrial estate with steam rising off his back.

It was an Edward Hopper morning. Absolute clarity. Freezing cold. Slanty morning sun turning red bricks orange. Translucent sky the colour of Holy Mary's jacket with a streak of yellow in it. One of those mornings where you're genuinely glad that you got up really early and experienced this. And minus three degrees it was fucking freezing. And I sat down beside the Terry Wogan statue which is situated by the river in Limerick. And I meditated. I meditated while looking at a bronze Terry Wogan. And I noticed that when the Terry Wogan statue in Limerick is really, really cold, like minus cold, it stops looking like it's bronze and it starts to look chalky. It got so cold and chalky it made me wonder, will it freeze and thaw like the desert?

Will Terry Wogan's bronze features eventually erode away? And then he just looks like one of those wanking plaster statues that they found of people who burnt alive in Pompeii. You're getting two podcasts this week. I've got a bonus episode coming. This Friday, I reckon. It's going to be a monologue essay. This Friday, I reckon. It's going to be a monologue essay.

And for this podcast, I had a wonderful chat, a chat about sex education with an award-winning journalist who specialises in health journalism. And she's been nominated, she's shortlisted as Health Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards. Her name is Sophia Smith-Gaylor.

Incredibly interesting journalist. Who pioneered the use of TikTok for research. And also using TikTok as a platform to deliver journalism. To produce journalistic content. She's also the Senior News reporter for Vice World News. She speaks internationally about her investigations across sexual and reproductive health rights. A very interesting and accomplished person. Sophia has written a book called Losing It, Sex Education for the 21st Century. And the paperback is coming out on the 2nd of February.

So I wanted to chat to her on this podcast. Specifically about sex education. Because most of us got shit sex education. And even now as adults. When anything to do with sex is spoken about in the media. It tends to be accompanied by a giggle or a veil of moral judgment around it. But Sophia speaks about sex from a health perspective. So regarding this podcast, I wouldn't say it's inappropriate. There's nothing inappropriate in this podcast.

But it's a conversation about sex education, so maybe take that into consideration if children are listening. And you might listen to it, and then afterwards decide, maybe my children should listen, but I'll leave that one up to you. Also, maybe you might want to have a think about whether you want to blast this episode out in the office. Maybe you do, it's up to you. I don't think there's anything in here that requires a content warning. Nothing triggering or traumatic is spoken about. It's just a conversation about sex education from a health journalist who specializes in this area and it's very fascinating. So before I begin my chat. With Sophia Smith Gaylor.

I think. I'll do a little ocarina pause. So I don't have to interrupt the chat. I'm in my home studio. So I do have my ocarina with me this week. So I'm going to play the ocarina. And you're going to hear an advert for something. That is algorithmically generated.

This ocarina is particularly offensive to dogs. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for?

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I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. Just some upcoming gigs. I'm going to announce the ones that aren't sold out so where am I Wednesday the 15th of February

I'm in the Cork Opera House Saturday the 4th of March I'm in the Waterfront Belfast Wednesday the 22nd of March I'm in Vicar Street. 24th of March I'm in Vicar Street Dublin. Then on the 1st of April I'm in the TLT Theatre Drogheda. And then the 26th and the 28th of April I'm in Toronto and Vancouver over in Canada and those are my live podcast shows please come along to them if they sound like fun they are fun loads of fun so here is the chat that I had with Sophia Smith Gaylor and her book Losing It Sex Education for the 21st Century is available in shops as

hardback at the moment but paperback on the 2nd of February. So a lot of your stuff is around sexual health and sex education. Why is it that area in particular that you're interested in? Yes, it's a strange journey that my journalism has been on because my first reporter job that I had was on faith and ethics. So it was all about religion and the complexities of contemporary faith, as well as just... How'd you end up in that?

Yeah. How the fuck'd you end up there? Yeah, kind of random, but random and not random, because it was just an interesting job that had opened up for a self-shooting video journalist, which is what I was. But also, I was raised a Catholic. I'm half Italian. So for me, being Italian and being Catholic,

like very similar things. And I can't... Well, I'm Irish. Yeah. Yeah. So I feel like... We have a little bit more shame. Yeah.

The Italians do Catholicism as well. We have a little bit more shame attached to it. Yeah. There's some expression that's something like um yeah we both confess but like almost like Italian Catholics like we do stuff and then just confess about it later and we feel fine um whereas Irish Catholics are a lot better behaved and yeah feel bad about what they've done I've heard something like that before but yeah so i'd grown up with that knowledge i'm not religious but you did you you received catholic education i'm assuming yeah and i'm i i am confirmed i went through my confirmation when i was a teenager i sang at church now over in britain like for me like i had all that like i didn't have a choice like here's the fucked up thing.

Like everybody you speak to in Ireland had a Catholic education and most of us were baptized and confirmed. We didn't have a choice. If I didn't do this, I didn't get a school. Yes. So. Whereas it's more of a choice for you guys over in Britain. Yes. I think if you were to go to a Catholic school here, you do have to do one of those things i believe uh and in ireland it was like uh it's catholic school or otherwise you

have to be a rich protestant or fuck off yeah no changed it recently i did have a choice um i wanted to be confirmed because i everyone else my family had been it was kind of that basic I also yeah and you get to invent a new name exactly and I was like yes who wouldn't want that and also I went to an all-girls school and it meant meant I could meet boys so that was also a really fun element of my confirmation class that I'd go to every Tuesday night which probably wasn't the intention of the priest that ran it but anyway um I did that I sang in church every weekend. I was, my first job was actually as like a wedding singer at the Italian church in London, singing at weddings. So I spent all my teenage years doing weddings and funerals

and a million Catholic masses. I go to uni and I study Spanish and Arabic and I live in Beirut during my year abroad. And what ended up happening is that those different life experiences that I've had mean I may know more about lots of different world religions in a way that other journalists don't. And also you're looking at things from the lens of religion also in the way that other people may not be if they were raised yes yes certainly um i'm immensely critical uh of a lot of the critical because a lot of the stories that i do are people talking about experiences that they have had that are not right or not fair or aren't just a lot of my general journalism has been like that um but and a lot of sexual morality and sexual mores and standards a lot of them have religious roots exactly so for me i remember someone in an interview once said to me how did you go from religion to sex and i said well it's really obvious for me like it's the most unsurprising thing in the world to to um to find the same kinds of things and each of these lots of us

have very moralistic views about not only our own sexual attitudes and lives but that of others we make we make value judgments and opinions about other people based on our own value systems and our value systems are informed by things like whatever our religious background is whatever our cultural background is um but i've gently been lulled further and further into um i'm a generalist reporter at vice world news so i'll report on anything that needs doing in the office that day but i um definitely have a big health focus and um you will often find when you try in a newsroom and i'm speaking really generally here i know this is an issue that lots of people have faced but i've faced it in previous roles when you pitch stories around sex they won't be seen as a health

story or they won't be seen as like a very powerful political current affairs story and it can be really hard trying to convince people so i can remember at the beginning of the pandemic they can be seen as a bit gossipy like it's very hard like when sex is brought up in the media in in whatever form that it is adults tend to lose our adulthood and we can become a little bit silly it can become a little bit winky or gossipy or you know what i mean yeah and if you become a little bit silly it can become a little bit winky or gossipy or you know what i mean yeah and if you're trying to report on it as a health issue it's one of those more rare spaces these days when you report on health where there's taboo

drugs i'd say is similar you know i love the fact that at vice um we have led we have long led coverage on things like drugs and sex from a health-led perspective because drugs too when you have a conversation about drugs in the media it becomes a conversation about morality as opposed to a conversation about health which is what it should be yeah so sex is similar and harm reducing uh so much of my journalism has been to uncover something or share something that's generally underreported which is which is a harm that is going on that needn't be there um and there there are lots of evidence-based solutions to it not being there we just have to make them happen and yeah i really feel especially from from the

book that I did and the fact that I spent so much time looking into okay we loads of us say our sex education was bad loads of us say there are all these harms in society connected to our sex lives who's doing anything about it what can be done And there's loads and it's not being done. So this year, that's been very much a focus for me. I would also say abortion rights was a focus for me anyway. But given the overturning of Roe v. Wade, that has obviously made it even more pertinent because even though worldwide for decades there is a trend of liberalizing abortion laws it's not that they the u.s is going the opposite way but everyone pretty much everyone else is going in a forward in a really good way um but what's happened in

the u.s has galvanized the minority of voices trying to curtail abortion rights. So it's this, this kind of reporting is really urgent. There aren't necessarily lots of people specialized to do it, but we need more and more opportunities to train up and get specialized and get editors who want to commission us. I do think I'm the only journalist in the UK who is both a journalist and I also have an accreditation to deliver relationships and sex education too. And I did that in my own time. That's what I want to know. How did you, what was that qualification? Yeah. So there is no standardised qualification for delivering relationships and sex education in England um and that's so in one respect that's a good thing and a bad thing so if in one respect um if you lower the

sort of barrier of entry it means that anyone from any kind of background socioeconomic cultural background can can access it readily it's quite good that you don't have to do you know that the barrier of entry is not really high but on the other hand it does mean that you can't create this very you can't rely on there being a rigorous system that your teacher has gone through in order to know 100 percent they are rigorously trained and very highly trained and that for me is an issue and I just knew that in in I was aware that I would possibly end up talking about my book in schools and i wanted to do it in an authoritative way in a way where i knew um what the rules are and the way that i knew the best ways to um create like a lesson plan for example i you don't get taught that

at journalism school so um it gave me an opportunity to to learn things like that as well So it gave me an opportunity to learn things like that as well. And like, so like, so I'm Irish, right? So that means as an Irish person, we always think that like British people got a way better sex education than us. Now, I got my sex education in school in the early 2000s. It was delivered to me by a priest. It lasted one day he told us that like if we get a wet dream it meant that we slept with the devil um there was very he then he couldn't talk about penetrative sex but told us not to put our tongue in girls mouths like i didn't receive sex education I had a very strange day with a priest

do you know what I mean that that's what and my situation is not unique and that doesn't set you up to safeguard your own health and well-being as you as you grow up you grow older you enter into sexual maturity and you know you you begin you begin live and end your adult life, which has whatever relationship with sex that you want for it, it also does not ensure that you safeguard the health or wellbeing of any partner you may ever have. And that's not really taken seriously, nearly as seriously as it should be,

yet you will find extensive media mileage of stories um really with people hand-wringing about uh cultures of rape and assault in different industries and schools universities anything well yes are you surprised you've under-prioritized sex education for decades this is these the consequences of that and like so you went to a catholic girls school were you happy with the sex education it wasn't catholic it was church of england it was church of england um all the catholic stuff i did in my spare time um but my my church my my church of england's as girl school that you would think oh yeah maybe slightly more chill um i remember there was a lot of focus on condoms so uh we very much have a style of sex ed here

that a lot of people it should be familiar to a lot of people but it's very risk mitigation so it was very don't get pregnant don't we didn't get any condoms because it was a priest so he wasn't allowed he had to pretend they didn't exist so they did exist for us um but nothing about what healthy relationships or any of that looked like um i did have and this is the anecdote that i lead i think one of the chapters of my book with but i can remember a woman coming in who was a catholic woman an external speaker and she said to us every time she's saying this to a group of women you know young women some of us would have already had sex and some of us wouldn't have uh many of us uh may uh were heterosexual many of us were you know another another orientation

within the lgbtq plus spectrum she says to us every time you have sex with someone you will lose your special glue and when you've lost all of your special glue no husband will love you what special glue yeah uh yeah did they tell Well, they couldn't because it doesn't exist. What is it supposed to be? Whatever it's supposed to be. When you interview people who have been victim of this really, really rubbish abstinence-only education, which studies, numerous studies, including ones funded by the US Congress, have proven to be completely useless. The kind of sex education we should be having is comprehensive sexuality education, not abstinence-only education.

But something that a lot of the people who've had that kind of bad education, they will have been told weird metaphors that involve stickiness. So I was given the special glue thing. Purity culture kind of victims in both the UK and the US and probably elsewhere too. Sometimes in class, two pieces of paper would be stuck together with glue. Does it mean lubrication? No, no, no, no, no, no. Glue? Like what is it?

What is the glue sticking together? Someone should have told me about lube at school i don't think they did um that's not what they were talking about here they they're talking about how um the idea that if you have sex with someone you are permanently changed by it and that that change is a is a negative thing because it's ultimately what what has changed is your value as a person and it is the perception that your value has diminished because you have chosen to have numerous sexual partners as opposed to one man okay so it's your soul yes so i see a lot of weird chat about like soul ties that are coming

from um external speakers in schools which should not be happening all these things that are coming from external speakers in schools, which should not be happening. All these things that are very metaphorical. They have no evidence base. You know, there's no such thing as a soul tie. There is no such thing as special glue. But they'll say these phrases. Your value as a human being, your integrity, all these words, your value, your integrity.

Like when I was seven, I'd been misbehaving in class and the way that the teacher this again was a catholic education the way that i was punished this would have been before i made my first communion okay so i i had never confessed a sin yet now i was fucking seven what sins does a seven-year-old have but i'd'd been misbehaving. So what the teacher did is she got a jam jar and she filled it full of water and she put it at the top of the class and she said, this is your soul. It's clean.

And then she got dirt from a pot and she put it into the water and made it dirty and said, this is your soul now that you've sinned. And the dirty water was used as a metaphor and then she said the only way you can get this clean again is by going into that box with this priest and telling him your secrets and then god will clean your soul so that's that's that's what the special glue reminds me of i've never heard special glue that sounds insane i've also heard stories of um a lollipop being handed out in the classroom and then the lollipop kind of gets dropped on the

floor by numerous people and you pick it back up again and obviously now this is a lollipop with no sort of dust and random bits of crap on it and uh sort of being tainted yes the tainted dirty tainted it'sirty, tainted. What we're talking about is slut shaming. They're slut shaming, but they're doing it in all these strange little metaphors. Yes, and this is overwhelmingly something that young women are taught and educated about

than young men, because the messaging is not equal, because none of this kind of education is remotely gender equal. Like our thing was more restraint. It wasn't if you have sex, your value was like no one ever told me that my value decreases with the amount of sex that I would have. But we would have been told to restrain. Oh, it's so difficult, the urges you get. But to be honest, the restraint wasn't even

don't have sex with someone. It was don't masturbate. Definitely don't do that because that seed inside you is real precious and you got to keep that inside and you can't just go throwing that around your bedroom. That's God, that's children inside there. And again, that's not the science. That's not the evidence base on you know a healthy way of talking

to young people about masturbation so yeah like i heard this shit in the early 2000s you would have heard it in the late 2000s or late to mid 2010s so we're not talking about ancient history here we're not talking about something that happened in the 1960s is this shit still happening yeah what is really embarrassing about sex education curriculums if we take england for example because that's where i grew up i grew up um sort of a bit above london um the the they made it compulsory in a piece of legislation in the late 2010s. And it's taken so long. And also there was a pandemic in the way,

but it's taken them so long to actually bring that new curriculum into schools. Prior to that, the last time it had been updated, a statutory guidance was in 2000. So between the year 2000 and I think 2017, the government hadn't updated the curriculum think about the internet and everything that happened in between those years um our teachers were not remotely prepared or made to feel confident or resourced to be aware of they had no idea i had a runescape boyfriend you know when i was 11 or whatever i would have

been they had or that you mightn't have known that that could have been right they had no idea that uh what what it means if someone asks you asl on msn messenger was one of the first places that i would have started sort of talking talking to boys so that only that So that's only gotten worse. I grew up in that age of instant messenger, where you couldn't really send people pictures because it was also texting pictures to people would be way more expensive SMS. And we all had credit on our phones, we wouldn't do that. If you think how woefully underprepared they were then imagine how underprepared teachers feel now with the the vast social media ecosystem that is out there but also the ease of social media messaging and this goes as um for both the positives of that and the negatives so there's a great misunderstanding

over the sense of community and the good sides of the internet that young people should feel really confident in being able to harness while being digitally literate while maintaining privacy you know all of those things too um but they're also not prepared to support young people when harms are occurring so i can remember um one of the one of the issues in this space is that sometimes uh the lessons are simply coming too late because we're assuming that oh your young person won't be doing this at this age and it's like well actually the minute you hand someone a smartphone most of us knew all the shit like god like when we got sex education i was 14 and I had an idea of what sex was. Now the difference, and I'm really thankful. So I grew up, pornography was illegal in Ireland when I grew up.

Like Playboy, you couldn't even buy it. And I'm kind of glad that I didn't see images of adults having sex until I was about 16. You know what I mean? And I don't know what it's like now for, there's seven and eight year olds who have to see hardcore porn just by being on the internet. And that's kind of a normal experience for very, very young children. Yeah. I was, my first experience was like that. I can remember I was having a sleepover at someone's house and one of the girls in the group essentially sort of wanted to scandalize us and said oh you've got to look at this does a bit

of googling and then shows a clip and I can remember it to this day and I at that point knew very little I knew sex was sex but I didn't know anything about it um I knew I knew it was how babies were made and it's what grown-ups did for fun and here endeth you know I knew sex was sex, but I didn't know anything about it. I knew it was how babies were made and it's what grownups did for fun. And here endeth, you know, I knew nothing else about it. And then suddenly I'm seeing a clip of one Japanese woman pouring like a jar of eels into another Japanese woman's anus. How did that make you feel at that age? I was horrified. I was horrified. I was horrified. I knew enough to think,

I don't think that's what people regularly do in the bedroom, but I really vividly remember thinking that the recipient in the scenario, as it were, looked very heavily sedated. I remember thinking something didn't look right. I can remember oh my goodness is this what some people like um and I guess ideas and worries and anxieties were allowed to proliferate because no one had stepped in first to say to me and then you can't go to your parents and say, I saw this video of a woman getting eels shoved up her ass. You can't like, no, like you're just, you're not talking to a parent. You're not talking to an older brother or sister or a teacher. That's what I hate about that too, is the size of the secret literate enough to think, I don't think people normally do this. And this is horrible. You know, I wasn't there thinking, oh, this looks fun. I'm going to give it a go.

What was harmful to me was the anxieties around sex that would begin to proliferate from little experiences like that where sex felt like something violent. It felt like it was something that would sort of happen to me rather than me being an agent of my sort of own sexual health and well-being. And these ideas weren't challenged. And then that is an example of how I certainly would not have had a lesson saying you may see some things online. This is, if you see something that you don't think you should see and it distresses you, talk to an adult about it.

You know, stuff like that. No one had stepped in. What conversations are happening now? How does a teacher speak to a classroom of eight-year-olds and they know that those eight-year-olds might have seen penetrative sex? It's extremely difficult. And I want everyone who's listening, imagine, you imagine, you know, you are, you either are a parent or you may be a parent one day, or you may have a niece or nephew whatever um we're not necessarily built

to talk about all of these things in a confident way in a way that we're not going to get embarrassed um and teachers especially are so overstretched with all the other things that they have on their plates um this is why i always bring up resourcing because if we take for example england i've already told you about how they made they made it compulsory and then um said oh yeah right we now have to train ourselves to deliver it and we all have to start teaching it i think it was by like september 2020 or something and um the all the charities in england are saying okay we need 60 million pounds to train all the teachers who need training to do this and the government went okay here's six million so already we're talking about a lot less than

what the sort of stakeholders in this space thought yeah teachers across england needed then um i had been communicating with the department of education's press office over another story and they said to me in their comment in reply they were like oh well we have spent three million pounds on blah blah blah about um training teachers to deliver the new curriculum i said no no it was six million and then i got no further reply from the press person i thought that's weird the number was six million where's three from? So I did a freedom of information request. And that's how I discovered that they had spent under 3 million, had cheekily upped it to something like 3.2 million, all because there was a really awful review of English schools that found

this widespread culture of rape and assault assaults. They quickly added some more kind of emergency funding in. They then took the rest of it and they diverted it to other departmental priorities that was the phrasing that they used in their in the freedom of information requests response that i got so teachers do not feel as confident or as empowered as they could to talk about this kind of thing that you want you and i can very easily sort of say yeah it's not the easiest thing in the world to to talk about this yeah we're two adults and what i'm thinking of now as well is the teacher in an underfunded system like how if if a teacher is in a class full of kids and the kids bring things up that teacher can't have open dialogue because where are the bound it's very difficult for adults to talk to

kids about sex especially when they're not your own kids and if a class full of kids are saying i saw this online how does that adult teacher talk to that kid without the adult then wondering am i stepping into abuse territory by even speaking oh no it wouldn't be that teachers have a very powerful safeguarding role and comprehensive sexuality education has been proven in research to prevent abuse so it is the most powerful and protective thing you can do to make sure a child is really well educated about this and obviously it will be delivered in an age-appropriate manner depending on what you know what age the kids reached the i wish everyone could do the kind

of training that i did about relationships and sex ed because you learn that in early years apart from the things that you learn about um when you get taught about sort of puberty and this is how your body's going to change one day and it's going to do this because that's how you sort of become fertile and may have a baby that kind of stuff apart from that so much of the curriculum for uh children who are really quite young in primary school it's all about respecting others it's all about building your self-esteem. It's all about building this communicative culture between sort of this triangle between like the children and the schools and their parents. Then you can introduce healthcare professionals into that, especially when they get old enough to start doing things like going to the the gum

clinic for example um when you build a culture like that where it doesn't feel like you're saying the worst most taboo horrible embarrassing thing in the world to say to mum okay mum this has happened or mr so-and-so this has happened, or really what we deserve. And this isn't only young people at school. This is what you and I deserve. Throughout our lives, at every stage we are at, every life stage, we deserve access to this really well-nourished, almost like a delicious diet and plate of information when it comes to sexual health. So when you're at school,

uh, yeah, it's very, obviously your teachers have a role there. Your parents have a role there and should be talking to you with quite a decent level of regularity about sex. This idea that have you had the talk? It's like what talk we should be talking.

This should be going on, uh, sort of, uh, early early lives the talk is this one thing that it's it's when i hear the talk i don't hear a conversation i hear a bunch of words that a parent feels they have to awkwardly say and then never talk about it yeah get it out of the fucking way because this is so when so when you're young yeah you're in an educational setting where you hopefully have access to parents um teachers who are teaching you good stuff and then the healthcare professionals and then your parents then you're then you're an adult you're no longer

in educational settings oh no you kind of lose lose that all-knowing teacher who may be able to pass you through to a safeguarding route or teach you something that you didn't know about. Oh, can I really get pregnant doing X, Y, Z, stuff like that? That's when Dr. Google suddenly becomes sort of a lot more powerful in our lives. That's when we do not realize how much sex information we get necessarily from when we consume news media or when we watch a documentary or when we read stuff or where we see stuff online and then it's way more up to us to kind of take responsibility for the information we are confronting figuring out what's good information what's miss and disinformation which in the sex space is is massive like any other health space there are people trying to sell you things they shouldn't be um this is a space about interpersonal relations there are people who may want to get something out of you or have power over you in a way they absolutely do not deserve

to that is criminal for them to do like right now sofia right as an adult man i can go to youtube and look for videos of how do i improve my mental health as a male right it's great but someone eventually someone's going to tell me to not wank that's that's like yeah yeah i'm fortunate enough to be to be literate in mental health so like i i know what good advice is and what good advice isn't. And I trained for a while as a psychotherapist. But if I didn't have these tools, if I was maybe 20 and I'm like, OK, I've got depression. So I go to YouTube and it's just some fella with a sword on his wall. And he's telling me some good stuff about self-esteem. And then he goes, and you got to make sure you hold it in.

Don't masturbate because you gotta what is it called no fap yeah no fap yeah there's no fap culture this is adult men telling it to other adult men that you must not masturbate because i don't even know why because i i turned the fucking videos off i think you keep the virility in or something or you keep i don't know what why did they tell men what's no fat it is baseless it is this movement where and you'll find a number of people like you just said um find these communities because a it's nice to be part of an online community when you find one and they seem to say things you agree with you it's nice to find like-minded people and then there'll be something that is shared that is sort of pseudo-scientific, but it's convincing enough. If you already have this kind

of self-confirming confirmation bias, you want to believe it. This is really popular in this space. You'll find a lot of people in those communities believe in porn addiction, which is not yet classified in the ICD. There is a sort of sexuality, sort of sex compulsive behavioral disorder or something like that. That is, which maybe your symptoms are connected to that. But if you haven't seen a medical professional, don't be thinking these things because you haven't consulted anybody.

And research has come out to say that you're far more likely to believe yourself addicted to pornography if you morally disapprove of it so our own biases and moralistic backgrounds really do impact our attitudes to things like this and you may think oh i'm having this problem because i'm watching too much porn um and actually what is going on may be far more nuanced than that could be a physiological issue there you could be really wrongly vilifying porn when it's not what the issue at hand is. It's actually the fact that you lost your job three months ago and no one's ever spoken to you about how your mental health and wellbeing is really rigorously tied to your sexual health and wellbeing. And how if you're having a stressful

day or a down day, to sort of expect yourself to perform sexually in in a way you deem optimum may not happen and that's nothing to worry about here's how we can get through it here's how we can communicate with our partners in a in a nice way about it so that no one no one has to know stress out too much and so there's one one chapter in your book called the virility myth and is that what you're speaking about right here? in the UK, but the proportion of men and women who have experienced a sexual dysfunction that's lasted three months or more in the past year, they're really, really high numbers. It's 40 something percent for men and 50 something percent for women. So really high numbers. And virility is, that's not fertility. Virility is a man's ability to get an erection.

The idea that your masculinity or your sense of self is tied to how you perform sexually. So if you do not perform in the way that you think society wants you to, or the way that you've been socialized to believe is what you should be doing, the effect that that can have on your sense of identity, your self-esteem, your confidence, your happiness. And you take any look online in nofap communities or other communities targeting men's mental health and sexual health, and you can find so much misinformation. Semen retention, which is an idea connected to nofap there's equally um rooted in a lot of pseudoscience there was a study that came out last year that i read the preprint of and it in all the areas of of men's health online it's one of the areas with the least the the smallest amount of

physicians in it sort of physicians posting content and it's like well yeah surprise surprise um this isn't based on science or or medicine so no wonder there aren't really any doctors posting about it and if you're digitally literate you can you know to sort of read that immediately as a ah hmm maybe this isn't the thing because it's shame it's sexual shame and a number of these communities that i was in you could pick up on sort of jargon or vocabulary uh associated with quite dark spaces on the internet for example sort of incel community the far right sphere you can also find lots of people who are subscribed to one i found in my general journey um uh a lot of people were also subscribed to uh video game subreddits which you know i am a keen video game player um

you know no shade video game community but then also loads of um subreddits that are quite associated with suicidal ideation or associated with um forever alone which is an online community of people who believe they're going to be forever alone and uh you look at a lot of the posts and they aren't they aren't always telling each other to don't worry you're going to get through that today think of all the things you've got to look forward to look this is something you can do in your life to feel better instead it will all be like yeah you deserve to die i deserve to die everything's bad um and it's it's such a shame that um studies have also found that uh a lot of men in heterosexual relationships they they feel so bad about some of these really common and normal sexual dysfunctions that people go through throughout their lives that they won't

even talk to their partner about it they won't go go see a GP about it. And obviously, if society is set up to make men feel that embarrassed about that kind of stuff, of course, they are going to end up finding solutions in spaces where the solutions may not be evidence-based. They may not be coming from doctors and they may not be saying the best thing that could actually lead lead you to treatment or lead you to the positive that you're seeking because it's it's an interesting one because they also won't go and speak to other men because when something like that is brought up in a group of men it's immediately something that becomes very funny there's no like if a man isn't going to go to another man and say i'm having difficulty getting an erection like here's one thing i've noticed with men in their 30s

men in their 30s only feel comfortable speaking about something like viagra right around other men never in the context of i'm having difficulty getting an erection only in the context of i might get a bag later i might get a bag of coke and i'm thinking of getting viagra so that context of masculinity is that's the only way they feel safe is to go oh no it's not like it's not that i can't get a boner it's i'm gonna do a lot of coke as well so that's why so you understand don't you it has to be hidden behind that a little bit like if someone in ireland in particular if they don't want to drink alcohol nobody no man in particular says to their friend i'm not drinking tonight instead they make up an excuse oh i'm on antibiotics i can't drink it's the same with

conversations about erections it's i'm getting a bag i'm getting a bag of coke so that's why i have viagra or why i'm even thinking about viagra and we'd never dream of talking about depression or anxiety in the way we are willing to kind of reduce sexual dysfunction to quite a comical level um yeah and i i appreciate there are times when a little bit of an injection of humor can actually help us talk about stuff but in this space as long as it's not punching down like i i what i say is it's like like signing someone's like when i speak about mental health i always try and bring humor into it but what i try and compare it to is when someone breaks their leg and they get a cast we sign that cast that's quite a healthy ritual someone breaks their leg and they get a cast we sign that cast

that's quite a healthy ritual someone has injured themselves and we're humorously signing that cast and I'd like to see people speak about mental health in a way that we're signing that cast you're using humor because having mental health issues is just simply part of the human condition like getting plaque on your teeth or an abscess in your mouth or breaking your toe. So how do we, we're not in a situation to bring humor into conversations about sex when immediately it makes us all giddy and giggly. No, but we are in a position for better representation. better representation. So for example, a hugely motivating factor behind doing the book that I did and debunking sex myths is not only because I identify myself as a victim of sex myths and can chart the sort of sorry state of affairs in my own life. I have lived with a psychosexual disorder.

I have lived with something which you can define as a sexual dysfunction. But the way that I have been socialized and the gender norms I have been socialized and the gender norms I've been socialized around the challenge for me wasn't in talking about it because um uh I don't feel like that there's no cost to who I am as a person in telling in telling someone oh I wasn't able to have sex at all for a really long time um the the challenge for me is far more rooted in a woman talking about her sex life online full stop and the kind of reaction that that may get or the or the kind of um the the negative moralistic sort of stuff that you can get that was the barrier to me which because the work I do I beat it down as a barrier. But the way, the sort of courage that I had to build

in order to be able to speak about vaginismus, which is the condition that I had, a sexual pain disorder, immensely under-researched, for men to sort of come out celebrities and role models to start coming out more and saying, yeah, I've had this. It's not a big deal. I went to the doctor about it. You know, it's eminently treatable, not a big deal i went to the doctor about it um you know it's eminently treatable right there's no reason reason to feel down about it um and lots of us are locked in these sort of little shame cages that we build for ourselves i was i didn't tell anyone what i was going through when i was going through it um and i had to deal with all these gendered health issues in that my own GP I was seeing was not trained in psychosexual disorders and did not know the condition I had. So was not able to give me the treatment that I needed at the time.

Whereas someone coming in with erectile dysfunction that's had a lot more research behind it, you know, I would imagine doctors sort of being far better armed to treat that at that primary care level. But me and lots of other women who've had vaginismus, we all wish that someone could have spoken to us about not only the idea that sex going wrong is you get pregnant. I had a lot of that messaging really as a young person or sex going wrong means you get chlamydia. No one kind of said, oh, what about you can't get aroused? You can't have an orgasm. You can't maintain an erection. None of that was ever addressed. The real function of sex, because we weren't allowed to sort of discuss it in a sort of robust evidence-based mechanical way or look at it as as a skill that's essentially learned we never really talk about sex in that way or how from every experience we learn something our pleasure

like people have sex for pleasure like i didn't sex was a dangerous thing that you have to be careful of. And if you do it wrong, bad things happen. That's about it. No one spoke about sex is a wonderful, fun thing that people do. And you can get good at it. And that, oh yeah, and sometimes something might happen, which doesn't quite go to plan. Here's how to handle it.

Sort of the idea that it's not positive first, and then all about your own sort of agency and autonomy as a person and this is what this is the sex this is what sexual health and well-being can look like for you and then going into okay and these are some of the harms these are some of the things that can happen that ideally we don't want to happen um it's never fronted in that way it's always risk first um i would also say i would have loved so not only would i have loved to have learned more about um sexual dysfunction as a young person but I think a lot of the teaching that I got at my all-girls

school was about women's bodies and I was left hopelessly illiterate about men's bodies and um all of us should know about everyone's bodies I I think that's a basic, because it's not only about, we were an all-girls school, but we were full of, yeah, heterosexual girls and girls who'd end up coming out as gay later on or bisexual or whatever sexual in the LGBTQ plus spectrum. People coming out also with different gender identities to the ones that they had been assigned at birth. We all need to know about our bodies, been assigned at birth um we all need to

know about our bodies the bodies of the partners we may have and also what if a friend comes to you or a child comes to you that does not share your sexuality or gender identity and says this has happened to me do you want to be someone who goes oh yeah i don't know about that i can't talk about it or do you want to say oh yeah i think oh this is where i think you can get more info um don't worry about it actually this happens to a lot of people because i heard xyz and even just saying that can really help someone the a lot of the taboo that we feel is because we feel like we're the only person in the world going through it um i felt like that um so when i had vaginismus i was the only person i knew who had it because

i wasn't talking about it um ever since writing about it in the book and discussing it i am in a scheme for uh young people um sort of young talent in tv and in the course of talking about what i went through um this is something like around four or five out of 30 women have gotten in touch to say oh i i have it too well that's a really high fraction that's a high number. And now each one of us feels less alone. Each one of us feels more chill with what's going on. We've been able to sort of do, share information, learn things we didn't know before, that may make us better advocate for ourselves in medical scenarios, or better, better explain to a partner about what's going on um these are things that can really change people's lives they can make um and they can

help someone who because all of this is going on is disappearing down a mental health spiral that can have devastating consequences that's really eye-opening for me because like erectile dysfunction, while there is still shame around it, it's kind of a household phrase. Like who doesn't know what Viagra is? Who doesn't, like Viagra,

mainly Viagra is a punchline of a joke. Pele, the footballer who died recently, he was the face of Viagra growing up. But I knew what Viagra was before I got sex education. They make it down in Cork. I've heard that fish in Cork. I've got Viagra in their system.

No one ever speaks about what you're speaking about. Yeah, the sort of family of sexual pain disorders that if, yeah. Like never, ever ever if you feel much untalium experience but similarly the thing um viagra can be a red herring too for people who may be listening and may have tried viagra and it hasn't worked um and i know this very well because it's the condition i had was a a pain disorder in which um my pelvic floor would spasm repeatedly and it didn't matter how much i

wanted to have sex every time insertion would be attempted it would feel like someone was stabbing me and i'm not um exaggerating there the only it's it's like it was like a blade um that is how painful it is it cannot be tolerated your everything if you don't mind me asking is was that just uh when having sex with someone or was uh how about masturbation i didn't do that um i didn't know it was something i could do didn't know anything about it had never been talked to about it um super catholic super catholic about that um i had never been able to use a tampon because i'd been painful too uh but certainly anything pleasurable i knew nothing about it i thought the only person who could do that to me as a man didn't occur to me that i could do it to myself

um but it an anxiety a loop we call it psychosexual because it's this mind body sort of connection and it didn't matter that i wanted to have sex the the loop would kick in and this is something that a lot of people who have erectile dysfunction can experience too and because it didn't't work last time, even though you really want to have sex, you have a fear in your head, like, what if I can't get it up again? And then lo and behold, that's what happens. And this, you have to, a lot of people will get therapy to undo that loop. And that's not something connected to blood flow. So if the problem behind your erectile dysfunction this is what numerous experts in my book told me and it's all in that chapter um if your problem isn't connected to your blood flow by agro the role of it is to increase blood flow to the area

if blood flow is not the issue it may not actually work so imagine imagine how you'd feel if you you had no idea something mental or anxiety was the cause behind it. And we now are far more literate thinking about how many people are affected by anxiety. You think, oh, it's fine, I'm going to take this pill. You take the pill and it still doesn't work. Imagine the effect that that can have on someone.

And does that impact what next step will they take? Especially if they have gotten Vagra that's maybe available over the counter to them. They've never actually even had to communicate with a healthcare professional before trying that. So it can be a red herring. It can be something. It's easy to say, oh, there are all these solutions for men and no solutions for women. And actually, all of us could certainly benefit from more research

and awareness on all sides, all sides that affect us, you know, of all gender backgrounds. But in your experience, have you, like, when you you go to doctors did you find that medical professionals were a bit clueless oh yeah the other so i'm very deliberate that i don't talk about my um my my sex life i talk about something that you know happened at the very very beginning which is connected to my vaginismus um but i don't otherwise i don't talk about it i keep it private um but i am very willing talking about my medical experiences because i think it's important um and yeah the first doctor had no idea what it was that i had um told me to a male doctor it was a male doctor

and i was all bolshie and bravado-y going in it was a male gp and i didn't i didn't want to be difficult i didn't want to go actually can i have a woman gp and i didn't i didn't want to be difficult i didn't want to go actually can i have a woman gp instead i didn't i thought i'm going to be a big brave girl and just see whoever can see me as quickly as possible um and in hindsight maybe i shouldn't have done that because um they the the language that they used in a clinical setting was not appropriate i would say i left feeling very um the first question I was asked was have I been a victim of abuse of sexual abuse which did not set me up to feel very positive at all about what was going on with me um and the treatment I'd be given sort of

repeatedly over months on end a gynecologist later said to me yeah you were effectively being told to self-harm every day um and i'll possibly never know you know the the effect that that all had thankfully i admit you know i'm able to have painless sex now and i have for a really long time but i if that hadn't happened i don't know what spiral i could have wound up down i would years later get my first cervical smear um i'm there thinking, oh, it's fine. My vaginismus is going to be in the records. I'm fine now. I feel like I'm cured maybe.

It's going to be fine. And we all get cervical smears, right? We all know it's not the most pleasant experience in the world. No one goes in thinking it's going to be a delight, you know, like when people have to get prostate exams. You do it because there's a really powerful health reason behind it, but no one's going to say, oh yeah, that was thrilling, having a stranger there.

But you do it. I go in, I'm expecting the medical information to be there for them, and it wasn't. And then I slightly spasmed during it, and the nurse practitioner hit me really hard on my leg and said, don't do that. Fucking hell. Yeah. And how does that leave me?

Anyone listening to this, you cannot be swayed from getting your cervical smear. It's really, really important. And that experience will not sway me going back. But my goodness, am I going to advocate for myself? Far better. And you expected them to know already your history i'm i was there like an idiot thinking this surely before this they've got on my page up i still felt too embarrassed to say as i went in oh by the way i used to have aginismus i just sort of thought i was very I was kind of very kind of, um, still quite embarrassed. Isn't quite the word, but even, um, even when I think about it, yeah, I can feel, I can feel the sort of body responses of anxiety coming back to me. Um, because you're sort of

reflecting on a traumatic period in your life. I'd rather not say it if I don't have to. And then I'm thinking, oh, great. It's going to be in my medical records. if I don't have to and then I'm thinking oh great it's going to be my medical records hopefully I don't need to say it instead I probably did um but the thing is irrelevant of what irrelevant of what I had or didn't have uh there's no justification for being um hit in a medical setting um so that that that gives some examples of of the treatment that I have had. But on the other hand, there are so many wonderful doctors out there. Dr. Layla Frodsham is an example of someone that we have in London who does really brilliant work around raising awareness of psychosexual medicine. It's just they need to be amplified and better resourced themselves.

And loads of gps feel woefully under trained when it comes to um psychosexual health so again just like we've been speaking like in this podcast about teachers not feeling like they have the best resources gps also don't feel like they have the best um resourcing resources when it comes to dealing with patients like me another chapter you have in your book is the sexlessness yeah um and i i'm like this is something i'm seeing a lot in the media i'm seeing a lot of headlines which are like men aren't having as much sex as they used to have the sexist chapter is more the the myth that if we don't have or want sex or regular sex there must be something wrong

with us there must be something weird about it um and you are right like you just said all these all this hand-wringing about people having less sex obviously if you can establish a really rigorous causation that might be connected to a harm that may be something to to be worried about um but i think lots of people in my generation like we can all fully understand that if we're if we are feeling less socio-economically secure and powerful than previous generations yeah are living with your fucking parents in your 30s ergo i'm not surprised people are having less sex um the what's crucial here is that um we all know that we're all very educated and literate about that and we're not here thinking again it's like the same refrain i'm the only one in the world everyone else is having sex and i am the only person who's not having sex oh no something

must be very wrong with me and that's when ideas like that get introduced but um the chapter addresses people who've made the decision to be sexless for a period of time maybe their whole life uh maybe um a few months because they've gone through a bad breakup or something traumatic has happened to them and they feel they just need a bit of a break um and they and then they'll be branded as sort of prudes or quite negative words by their friends when that's absolutely not what that person needs in this moment in time is that they're establishing a new relationship with their body and how they wish their body to sort of interact with other bodies. But the other thing is the asexual community and the spectrum of asexuality that we're now getting a lot better at talking about. I, in researching for this book, that's how I learned I am allosexual.

I never thought I was anything other than heterosexual. And then it turns out I'm also allosexual. I experience sexual desire and attraction. Not everybody does. Some people are somewhere on the asexuality spectrum. They do not experience desire or attraction or a wish for romance with others in the way that I do. This means that if I deliver sex education,

you've got to bear in mind there may be people in your classroom, for example, who identifies as asexual. The last thing they need is to be shamed for not having sex. Secondly, when we talk about first time sex, it is a good thing that the average age for sort of sexual initiation is getting later and later because delayed sexual initiation normally means someone's had good sex education and that they are beginning their sex lives when they are ready. That's what we want. We want people to do it when they feel knowledgeable enough to use contraception and they know that it's really important that they consent and that their partner consents and all of that leads to slightly older um ages of first time sex than younger

which is because i remember being 12 13 and the pressure to like finger girls and stuff when you're when you're shifting we call but when you're kissing i didn't want to do that like because i my voice hadn't broken yet i wasn't i hadn't grown pubes yet i was effectively a child but i felt this pressure that i had to do these things with girls and if i didn't do it i was called a frigid that was the word that was used which is awful why do i want to put my finger up there that's where piss comes from i was too young then give it a couple of years and i'm like oh now i get it but like that that's i don't like that and i don't like that now i couldn't say that at the time holy fuck no way yeah and it's really important that we address how so the way that gender norms are

that was one of the pressures applied to you and the virility the fact that you were expected to sort of perform a sexual act um not only perform it but probably like do it well you know do you get more points and status in your group if you say oh yeah i did this and then she did this and blah blah blah what the lad had to do was i call it smell my finger oh my god the lad the lad was expected to then come back from behind the wall or wherever it was with the girl and then make out all the other lads were like let me smell this is this is the performance of virility that's the performance and that meant that was a very masculine thing it meant i'm a man and that gave you value and status and i guarantee you most of the lads were like i don't want to smell

what is that about and also that's not um where where is your pleasure in that conversation um where is where is your partner's pleasure in that conversation? And how much of what we do is because we do it because we feel expected to do it by others outside of the bedroom? We're expected to do it by our partner within the bedroom? Are we being asked to do something or coerced into doing something we really don't want to do, but we don't know how to say no? We don't know how to politely challenge it, if that's how you want to be or robustly kind of defend yourself when needed um that this these are these can be quite difficult conversations to have um and if you've not been sort of set up with here's how oh this has happened and you're struggling to think

of a way to to word it or say it hey this is how you're going to do it. And now at the beginning of my book, I say, some of the things you might learn about in this may make you rethink your own sexual biography. I think I now look at things in my teenage years and early dating experiences, especially my early 20s, things at the time that happened and you kind of thought, hmm, that was weird. And then you move on and you kind of forget about it. And then now I look back because I have way more literacy about these things and the research that I've done. And I think, oh my goodness, that was coercion. That was normalized coercion. So normalized, I didn't even ban eyelid or spot it. But that's what happened to me um and in rethinking and rewriting our own sexual biographies it might be some of it is possibly going to be a bit disturbing we might be um

rethinking negative things as well as positive things but the point is when we are better informed about it all um we are not going to pass that harm on someone else. We are not going to treat a partner in the way where we feel like we may have been very poorly treated. And if we ever find ourselves as a sort of sex education bystander or someone in a sex education role, which we are all in, every group chat with your mates where someone raises something to do with sex, or when a young person in your care may come to you one day asking a question, what kind of person do you want to be in that instance? Do you want to be someone who gives really well-informed power and gender literate information to them? Or

do you want to be someone who passes down the same sex myths we should have all unlearned long ago? I know I want to be someone. I know that I really feel like in my, in my little bloodline or whatever, I'm going to be the last generation that was screwed over. It's not going to happen to the people who come after me. When you make a video about sex,

Sophia, in your mind, when you make this, about sex sophia in your mind when you make this are you thinking this is for an adult or i want someone who could be younger to possibly see this and benefit from it like what are you thinking when you post i for me it's not about age for me it's about is this evidence-based and rigorously researched that's what i'm thinking about thank you very much to sophia smith galer for that wonderful conversation check out her book losing it sex education for the 21st century which is out on paperback on the 2nd of february that's not all from me this week because you're getting a bonus episode

this Friday I reckon which will be a monologue essay hot take in the meantime rub a dog tickle the belly of a cat and say a decade of the rosary for an earthworm go fuck yourselves.

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