The Bossticks - #145: Wednesday Martin - Sex, Female Infidelity, Monogamy, Why People Cheat, Desire, & Removing Sexual Misconceptions

Episode Date: October 23, 2018

On this episode we sit down with Wendy "Wednesday" Martin and talk all things sex. Wednesday is an author and cultural critic who writes and talks about parenting, step parenting, female sexuality, motherhood and pop culture. This episode is heavily focused on the topic of sex, female infidelity, monogamy, the need to feel desired, and why people cheat. We also talk about how the conversation around sex is still taboo and what we can do to change that.  To connect with Wednesday Martin click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) WOO FOR PLAY is the all natural and organic coconut love oil that is changing the way we have sex. With only 4 all natural ingredients WOO is the perfect personal lubricant to spice up your sex life.  All Him & Her Listeners will receive 20% off your entire order plus free shipping when when visiting www.wooforplay.com & using promo code HIMANDHER at checkout.  This episode is brought to you by RITUAL Forget everything you thought you knew about vitamins. Ritual is the brand that's reinventing the experience with 9 essential nutrients women lack the most. If you're ready to invest in your health, do what I did and go to www.ritual.com/skinny  Your future self will thank you for taking Ritual: Consider it your 'Lifelong-Health-401k'. Why put anything but clean ingredients (backed by real science) in your body? This episode is brought to you by THRIVE MARKET. We use Thrive for our online grocery delivery on a weekly basis. They provide the highest quality products and ingredients delivered straight to our door with unbeatable prices.  Be sure to grab our deal by going to to https://thrivemarket.com/skinny to receive 25% off your first order + free shipping and a 30 day trial.

The following podcast is a dear media production. Well, this is fitting because this episode is all about sex. But let's talk about having even better sex. You guys have heard it here before, and probably from a lot of your favorite podcasters, but Woo More Play makes sex even better. Okay? It's coconut oil lube. It has a couple of ingredients.

It's all natural. Little stevia, some vanilla essence, beeswax, and coconut oil. It really is heaven on earth. To try Wu, go to Wu More. moreplay.com and in her promo code him and her at checkout for 20% off your entire order. I'm telling you, pick up at least two bottles. Okay. Your partner's going to want it and so are you.

Again, that's woo moreplay.com. W-O-O-M-O-R-E-P-L-A-Y dot com and inner promo code, him and her for 20% off. And for you long time, listeners, you may have noticed that we change it from Foreplay to MorePlay because we have some additional products coming out, new website, going over some new brand, and we have some new functions on the site as well. If you are loving the product like most people are, we also have a subscribe and save function that will give you a little bit of a discount

and give you regular delivery. So like Lauren said, check it out. Go to woo moreplay.com and enter promo code him and her for 20% off your entire order. Enjoy. Okay, we all know I'm a human guinea pig

so it shouldn't surprise you guys that I'm still taking ritual. And I have to say, after taking it for months, I'm obsessed. I keep it right by my toothbrush. I just pop two in my mouth after I brush my teeth. It's super minty and it has all the standout star vitamins. It has iron,

vitamin E, magnesium, folate, and even omega-3. So you should know that it's also vegan, sugar-free, non-GMO, gluten-free, and allergen-free. 95% of women do not get the vitamins and minerals they need on a daily basis. Ritual created a smarter vitamin with nine essential ingredients women lack most. Go to ritual.com slash skinny to get yours today. Choose clean ingredients backed by science and sign up now. Ritual.com slash skinny. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur.

A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you alone for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the Skinny Confidential, him and her. For women to be honest about what they want sexually, they have to go through a lot more levels of bias and shame, and it's sort of harder for them to peel it apart. So when we say that people need to be honest about what they want,

and I think one thing that can help women get to that point is when they have access to the data and the science, that tells them that what they've been taught about themselves is untrue. Welcome back. Welcome back to the Skinny Competential Him and Her show. If you're new to the show, thank you for joining That clip was from our guests of the show today, Wednesday, Martin. As always, this show pushes the envelope.

On this episode, we discuss sex, monogamy, female infidelity, desire, sex talk, being open, removing misconceptions around sex, and even more. This show is so taboo. I'm obsessed with taboo topics, and I think it's really awesome to use our platform for topics that move the needle like this. I'm very, very much excited for you guys to hear this episode. Moving the needle. And for those of you that are new, I am Michael Bostic. I am a serial entrepreneur and brand builder. Most recently, the CEO of Dear Media.

Across from me is my lovely wife. Lauren, I will let her introduce herself. You're kind of staring at my boobs. Well, what's going on? You're wearing this weird latex thing? It's like a black latex body suit. You talked to Wednesday one time and now you're in these new outfits. Yeah, you never know.

I'm Lauren Everett. I'm the creator of the Skinny Confidential, which is a cheeky resource for beauty, skin, and business. You know why I love this show, and I say this all the time, said it multiple times, because, and listen, tooting my own horn, even though it's like I'm on the show, I don't want to be overconfident, but at the same time, like, I love this show so much

because you think you're getting something, even as the host, you think you're getting something, you think you're going to get into a certain topic, and all of a sudden you take a right turn into a place that you've never been before, that you've never gone, that you've never explored. My favorite thing to do. And you have conversations around topics and with people that you just don't expect to have.

You know, it's like the episode with Susie who I thought we were going to go in and talk about poopery and now she built it in this whole business thing. And then all of a sudden we get into the weeds and talk about all sorts of different things. Here with Wednesday, I knew, you know, when I was researching Wednesday that this conversation was going to be interesting. But again, didn't know it was going to go where it went. And I think, you know, if I was listening to a show, not to tube my own horn, I would want that kind of variety.

I think, you know, as I focused on the podcast space more, it's important to constantly involve your conversation, constantly involve your show. If you're a content creator constantly push the envelope. You don't want to constantly be talking about the same things fitting into a box. That being said, this conversation's out there, Lauren. It's progressive. We're going to shake it up. We're going to press boundaries. I really, really appreciate that about Wednesday for me to hang out and talk with a woman that.

doesn't give a fuck what anyone thinks and is is very very interested in evolving and evolving the conversation really gets me off i like Lauren and I both like compelling non-boring people we're really like that's what we're drawn to I like to hear new new things that doesn't necessarily mean we always agree with everything but I think it's important especially in this time to give people the platform to showcase their beliefs and give their point of view because for so long throughout history people weren't able to do that and now you know with platforms like this they are and I think I think it's important to hear everybody out no matter what beliefs you have. I'm glad she's speaking out too on women.

She talks about women's sexual desires because women do have sexual desires. It's not just men, Michael. Women's infidelity. Yeah, you never know. It's not just us men. We're getting a bad rap. I love to lead with fear. This is great.

Speaking of great things for women, let's talk about ritual. So you guys know I've been trying ritual for the last couple months and loving it. I even did a blog post on it. First of all, it's been on my radar forever because how can you miss it off Instagram? It's so Instagram-y. If you guys haven't seen the package, you got to stock their Instagram. Okay, it's chic A-F. You want it on the feed.

If you're wondering, Ritual is the brand that's reinventing the experience with nine essential nutrients women lack the most. So if you're ready to invest in your health, I highly recommend that you pick up ritual. Okay, guys, it doesn't give you any kind of gross, chalky taste. It actually is infused with peppermint oil, which gives you this really nice minty taste, which we love. I personally am kind of a vitamin snob. I feel like I've tried so many different ones. So for me to be sticking with one day after day is kind of incredible. Like I said, I even keep it next to my toothbrush.

I just feel like vitamins are kind of like deodorant, you know? It's really hard to find a good deodorant. When you find one, I want to blab my mouth around town. but you never want to be like recommending things that you don't absolutely love. So with Ritual, I know that when I tell you guys about it, you're going to love it, you're going to keep it by your toothbrush, and you're going to think the bottle is so, so cute, okay? So I did my research, like a lot of research with Ritual, okay?

And if you want to do your own research, you should definitely go to their site. They break everything down in a very scientific way, but in a basic way so that you can understand. It's not too crazy. So like I said, I've tested tons of vitamins, but this one is the only one that's TSC Master List approved. There's tons of different vitamins in ritual, okay? So you get vitamin K2, D3, B12, omega-3, borin, iron, vitamin E, folate, and magnesium. Personally, I love magnesium because it really keeps things moving, if you know what I mean. And you don't have to have thousands of bottles, okay?

You just have one bottle. I took it when I was traveling. And like I always say, it was pretty damn efficient. Ritual has a happiness guarantee. No questions asked and you can cancel any time. Okay, guys, amazing. If you're ready to invest in your health, do what I did and go to ritual.com slash skinny. Consider it your lifelong health 401K.

Why put anything but clean ingredients backed by real science in your body. Go to ritual.com slash skinny to get yours today. Wendy Wednesday Martin is an American author and cultural critic. She has authored multiple books around parenting, sex, pop culture, step parenting, and more. She just released her new book, Untrue, why nearly everything we believe about women, lust, and infidelity is wrong, and how the new science can set us free. This is a very progressive conversation. We love bringing people on to shake it up and push the boundaries. Wednesday definitely delivers on that account.

With that, let's welcome Wednesday, Martin, to the show. Okay, Wednesday, what is a pussy whisper? A pussy whisper? is a trainer, a female trainer. She can be anywhere in the country, but I learned about the ones in New York City, who works closely with assumedly heterosexual women, who sometimes decide that they're going to have affairs with their trainers. So when I was starting to research this book, I was at a party, and everybody knew I was writing a book about female sexuality, and they were being very helpful. And at this party, a woman came over to me and said, you're writing about the pussy whispers, right?

And I said, yeah, what are they? And she told me. And that really set me on a course because the message there, what was clear was that female sexuality is not what we think it is. You know, when a woman who's married and has children and lives in a conservative neighborhood and one of the most conservative niches of the United States, the Upper East Side, is having an affair with her female trainer. It makes you question everything you thought you knew, not just about female sexuality, but about women.

So the book sort of started from questions like that. I'm never going to figure women out. Wait, hold on. Back up. So when you're saying a woman's having an affair with a female trainer, can you elaborate on that a little bit more? Yes, I first heard about it. There's a big public story in New York City about a woman who was in a traditional marriage,

and she ended up leaving her marriage to a man for her female soul cycle trainer. And they're both very out about it, and it was very inspiring to a lot of women, whether they were straight or bisexual or gay or just defined somewhere along that spectrum. Women in New York really were fascinated by that story. And we started to see that, as you might suspect, this wasn't just one thing. The sex researcher Lisa Diamond coined this term female sexual fluidity. She found that we all have an orientation. That's a very real thing.

But some of us, more often more women than men, have this additional factor, fluidity, so that our orientation doesn't always provide the last word on who we're attracted to. So really what was happening with these women was, they were sort of a living laboratory for the sex research about female sexual fluidity. They were married. Often they appeared very conservative, but their sexuality was something else again. And when they were out in the Hamptons in the summer and their husbands were away, they were enjoying sex with their female trainers. When you say trainers, do you mean like a personal trainer? Sorry, like an exercise coach, a personal trainer. The first big story of that,

it was at Soul Cycle. Now, of course, there are plenty of female trainers who aren't having affairs with their female clients. But what's interesting to me, as a social researcher and through the lens of anthropology, is that in one of the most conservative places in the country, female sexual behavior looks downright freaky compared to male sexual behavior. What's behind that? What's it all about?

And what can it tell us about the backstory of human female sexuality all over the world? So we're going to jump into all of this. I'm sure this episode is going to go all over the place. I'm very excited. We're here with author Wednesday Martin, author of the new book, Untrue, why nearly everything we believe about women, lust and infidelity is wrong and how the new science can set us free. Wednesday, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I thought that I had a brief understanding of women and now once again I am going to be confused. You better watch out. I'm going to leave you for Kim and Ingrid at the same time. It could happen and I have to say I would. not be surprised. Oh, God. Nothing surprises me anymore.

I have to worry about everything. You know what? I can see why women, though, would become lesbian or bi later in life because they just get so fed up with men. Like, men just start to get so annoying that it's like, fuck this shit. Do I have to worry here? You don't have to worry because what you're going to learn is that women are not who you were taught they are.

and that women are more deeply sexual and interesting and sexually adventurous than you knew. Now, to your point, I think you're right that we do see a lot of women later in life in their 50s and 60s, according to Lisa Diamond, the sex researcher, she said to me, we think that as we get older, our sexuality settles, and she says, what I actually have learned studying female sexual fluidity is that female sexuality really changes over time. So I interviewed women who told me stories like my mom was married to my dad for 40 years and then he died and now my mom is with a woman. And Lisa Diamond and other sex researchers tell us we shouldn't be surprised by this that female sexuality changes with life stages. Well, for me, like I'm attracted to energy.

If you have good energy, I mean, I'm all about that. I think energy is so important. Well, you know what? That's exactly to Lisa Diamond's point. Maybe your sexual orientation isn't providing the last word on who you're attracted to. You're saying you're at a club or you're at the library. I don't know where you go. And suddenly you see somebody whose energy, as you describe it, is really appealing to you.

That matters to you maybe more than whether that person is male or female or identifies as neither. Look out, Michael. I guess so. You never know. Plot twist. She's so interesting. I could tell you're going to be a very interesting person. Can you tell us your earliest childhood memory? I want to kind of dive into the person that became interested in the subjects that you're

now interested in. My earliest childhood memory, wow. I think I might have been four and I was having a birthday party in my backyard. That's about as far back as I can go. How do you think you you got to this place? Where did you grow up? I grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is a very conservative place. At one point, I was told that it had more churches per square mile than anywhere else in the country. And my mom, it was repressed a little bit. It was repressed, very Christian, very socially conservative on every measure. But I had a mom who was a feminist. It was, you know, the 70s. And she breastfed my brothers in public. And she subscribed to Ms. Magazine, she had a bumper sticker that said, Uppity Women Unite. She was sort of a classic

second-wave feminism, feminist. And at the same time, I learned that in Grand Rapids, there was a really big, thriving gay scene as I got older. So really, I was raised learning that things are not what they appear, and that if you look under the surface, you're going to find contradictions and surprises. So that might have been what drew me to the project of writing about women's lives and using social science to kind of decode women's social behaviors, including our sexual behaviors. Is there a specific event or maybe an experience that you can remember that sparked your interest in the conversation around sex? Maybe an epiphany? I remember when I was a kid, my friend

got her mom's copy of the happy hooker. So this must have been... The happy hooker. This was a book? This was a really... That sounds juicy. Popular book in the 70s. I'm like downloading it tonight.

There was a lot of great reading about female sexuality in the 70s. So the happy hooker was about a prostitute and my friend and I hid in her closet and we read it. And we were titillated and scandalized. and scandalized. I remember feeling almost ill from it. And then at another point, my mother had a

copy of a book called My Secret Garden by a writer named Nancy Friday. And Nancy Friday sort of blew Americans' minds in 1973 or 1974 by telling them women have sexual fantasies. And she collected hundreds of them in a book called My Secret Garden. Now, it doesn't sound like that big deal now. to assert that women have sexual fantasies. But at the time, people didn't believe that it was true. And the reason they didn't believe it was true is that they didn't believe that women had a sexuality apart from men, that women could have this whole autonomous internal playground.

It was really quite perverse and weird and out there. But she proved that it was true, and there was a lot of backlash. Meanwhile, I just loved reading about these women's sexual fantasies. and I highly suggest that everybody read my secret garden. It will do what Nancy Friday did back in 1973 or 1974. It will really surprise people. I am for sure reading that. You have to. I think you're going to like it.

I wrote a piece about her for The Daily Beast when she died. And a lot of women a lot younger than me got in touch and said I had never known about Nancy Friday. What a badass she was. Yeah. how she changed the way we think of female sexuality. So it was really powerful what she did. And she encountered a lot of resistance. A lot of people were very angry.

You can imagine, especially at that time. Yeah. In a way, the 70s were a great time to be writing about female sexuality, right? You had Sula by Tony Morrison, Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, the Happy Hooker, Nancy Friday. But on the other hand, it was a dangerous time to be writing about. female sexuality. These women did have second wave feminism sort of protecting them from blowback, but these were still new, really threatening ideas. And I think telling the truth about female sexuality is still a pretty controversial thing to do and you encounter, a lot of resistance. Which is ridiculous.

I mean, it's so ridiculous. I know. The guys can talk about jerking off to porn hub, but we're not allowed to talk about using our pink vibrator. There's the double standard is alive and well. And on True, I talk about how I feel like the double standard was baked into the history of this country very early on. Do you think it's necessarily like a double standard or just people are uncomfortable? Before we get into that, let's talk about one of our favorite show sponsors, show partners, thrive market. They really are our one-stop shop for everything when it comes to household supplies, snacks, food, beauty supplies, a little bit of everything. We go there all the time. We go back and forth from L.A. to San Diego, as many of you guys know,

and sometimes it's just difficult to stock the house, right? We just don't have time to get to the grocery store with our busy schedules. And a lot of the time, we just don't want to go to the grocery store. It's a pain in the ass, especially for me. I've said many times my dad used to drag me around to the grocery store and I was a kid, and I think I am traumatized. That's why I love Thrive Market so much. I can go on there.

I can order all of our favorites in one spot, have them delivered straight to the door. Even the annoying stuff like detergents and dish soap and hand soap, they have it all in one place. You can even shop by specific diet, which is great for me because I'm usually the worst figuring this kind of stuff out. If you're paleo, gluten-free, vegetarian, vegan, they have sections for you so you can make it easy. Also, they source the best and healthiest products so that you don't have to go and be sitting around in the grocery store deciding which almond butter is the best one. Lauren sends me out to do that and I look at 50 almond butters and I just get confused and overwhelmed. Thrive Market is your one-stop shop for high-end, high-quality and highly-de-de-relead.

discounted groceries, supplements, beauty products, and household supplies. They guarantee their customers 25 to 50% below retail because they cut out the middleman. And Thrive Market is offering all Skinny Confidential, him and her listeners, 25% off your first order and free shipping with a one-month trial when you go to ThriveMarket.com slash skinny. We would not be talking about this brand so much so frequently on this show if we didn't really believe in them. We vet all of the brands that work with us. And just it's a testament that Thrive has been on this show for so.

long it just shows how much we love them because if we didn't, they wouldn't be here. Again, to take advantage of 25% off your first order and free shipping with a one-month trial, go to thrivemarket.com slash skinny. Again, that's thrive market.com slash skinny. Happy shopping, everyone. You will love Thrive Market if you're not already on there. And also, I forget to mention, Lauren has a special Thrive page that she's set up with all of our favorites on there that you can check out again if you go to our link. So be sure to check that out and all of the great items on Thrive. I think it's both. I think those two things. feed each other. In Plymouth County, sorry, in Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts Bay Colony in the

1600s, women who were married and cheated, a term I don't like, were guilty of adultery, but married men who cheated with unmarried women were guilty of the much lesser crime of fornication. I feel like that's still how it is, though, now. You write about this in your new book, right about female infidelity. The long history of the double standard, you know, how we got where we are right now, and how the double standard continues to affect women. And basically, my book is called untrue because it's about how there's so much bias in the science about female sexuality. And I feel it got us to a really messed up place.

People think men maybe cheat more than women, but in your research, have you found that it's equal, less women, more women, more women? What have you found in your studies? I interviewed 30 experts on female infidelity, so some of them were primatologists, some were anthropologists, sociologists, a lot of istes. And I also spoke to 30 women who had experienced infidelity firsthand. Here's the deal. First of all, women cheat. They cheat at rates basically equal to men into their mid-40s, according to a lot of reliable studies. I was just looking at a study in Great Britain, which showed that 19% of women and 20% of men in a pretty reliable and representative sample admitted that they had cheated.

Now, the other thing that we know is that when it comes to infidelity, people probably feel hesitant to disclose honestly. So it's safe to assume that the numbers are higher. So one reliable measure in the U.S. puts the rate of female infidelity at 30. But another source says that as much as 50% of women have had intercourse with somebody, not their husband, while they're married. I think the truth lies somewhere in between. My view of things is always that I look at things cross-culturally. So there's this great anthropologist named Meredith Small. She became really obsessed with female sexuality.

And she noticed in her survey of 133 countries that there was not a single. one without female infidelity, even in countries where women died from it. And she said infidelity is normative, and so is female infidelity in spite of our belief that women do it less. Ever married women between 18 and 29 cheat more than their male peers. So this whole idea that men cheat more is untrue. I just think that it has to do with shame why we don't hear more about it. I think that if Brian and Susie Homemaker are married and Susie Homemaker

is a PTA mom that does the room mom BS, she is going to get more shame from her community if she cheats as opposed to Brian who's going to get high fives from his friends. So it's just I think that

where no one talks about it on the women's side it does have the foundation is shame. The foundation I agree with you. There is there is an aspect of it being especially shameful to be a woman who refuses monogamy. So what the sociologist Alicia Walker said to me about that that I thought was so interesting, she said, you know, when a guy steps out or refuses monogamy, it basically enhances his masculinity. When a woman does it, there's something unnatural about it because we believe that men have stronger sex drives.

and we believe that men are more naturally promiscuous. So when a woman cheats, she's not just violating the social script that says that monogamy is the best thing and you should really do it. She's also violating a gender script. So women who refuse monogamy are sort of double renegades. They're breaking down our social expectations and they're breaking down our gender expectations too. And I think that's where shame comes to play. So there's a book called Evolutionary Psychology, and it kind of, and I want to get your take on this, breaks down some of these theories.

And it's speaking of monogamy, you know, if you go back, they said in this, and you could disagree with me. I'm not saying I agree with this. I just what I've read in this book. They're saying a lot of this monogamy comes from before when a man was seeking out a mate. You know, the woman, he would impregnate a woman. And there's nine months where other men would not be as pursuitful of that specific woman. and that male's goal then was to go and continue to populate to say it kindly other women. And so they were saying that a lot of that monogamy and a lot of these theories of monogamy come from that.

What do you think about that take? So that's kind of considered old science now. Okay. And that held sway for a long time. In 1948, an English geneticist named Angus Bateman studied a bunch of fruit flies. and he said after he sort of marked them in special ways and watched them reproduce, gave them time to do that, and then he assessed his results. And he said, the males benefited from having more than one mate. Multiple mates, yeah.

But the females didn't benefit from it. Now, that fit in with everybody's really neat notion that, as you said. That theory, yeah. So fast forward to several years when women start entering sex research. primatology, anthropology, and they're looking at actual animal and human behavior on the ground, and here's what they're seeing. Females mate multiply, and females know it. Female langers mate multiply. Female fruit flies mate multiply. Human females mate multiply. And it takes females becoming field scientists to start asking why, to start looking at promiscuity as a breeding

strategy that might serve females. Meanwhile, there's all this resistance and people are saying, that's impossible. They become pregnant or they lay eggs and then they breed. Yeah, so how can this be the case? So what these female scientists discovered was that in fact females benefit, they also increase their reproductive success by mating multiply and that males often increase their reproductive of success by sticking around. So here's what the new science is telling us. When females made it multiply in our evolutionary prehistory, and when many females do it now, they garner a lot of benefits from having multiple mates. First of all, they get a wonderful selection of sperm. And in doing so, they're hedging against the possibility that one guy is infertile. If you're monogamous, if you're a

monogamous mammal or any animal and you're monogamously mated. What if he's infertile? There goes your reproductive success. So that brings my next question. So do you believe in monogamy? I believe that monogamy is a strategy that works sometimes, going back to all the reasons that it benefited females to mate multiply in so many species and probably us in our evolutionary prehistory. What that does is it complicates this really simple narrative that it's, It's great for guys to inseminate a lot of females and run, and it's great for females to just grab one guy and stick with them for life. The data doesn't bear it out.

The observations of animals don't bear it out. Right here in Los Angeles at UCLA, a biologist named Patricia Gowaddy redid the fruit fly study. She tried to replicate Bateman's study, and she found out that the females benefited from mating multiple. just like the males. This really easy distinction that was the basis of a lot of evolutionary psychology for a lot of years is being radically rethought now. So that's interesting. Yeah. So I highly recommend having a look at criticisms of that because that's where the science is now. What do you think the benefits or limitations are with monogamy? Well, I think that for that, I mean, we could look to the primate literature, but it helps to think about human beings.

And I think that what the sex research is showing us is that monogamy is difficult for men and women for basically the same reasons. First of all, the new science is showing us that men and women pretty much cheat or openly refuse sexual exclusivity for the same reasons. We used to think women step out because they want emotional connections, something's bad in the relationship, and that's why they're stepping out. Men are just stepping out for sex. Very bad science. What we've learned is that women, much of the time, and a sociologist named Alicia Walker, discovered this. A lot of the time, women are stepping out because they want excitement and they want orgasms, and they're in a sexless relationship, or they've been in a relationship where they're still having sex, but they're bored of partnered sex.

Meanwhile, plenty of times men are seeking emotional connection. So as one expert I interviewed said to me, her name is Tammy Nelson. She wrote a book called The New Monogamy. She says, men and women are closer than we have thought they are when it comes to infidelity. Okay, what are the limitations? Well, it turns out that monogamy, the new science, is showing us, is actually harder for women than it is for men. The work of several sex researchers is showing that women really crave variety.

It's harder for women to be monogamous. For women than it is for men. You better look out. I'm sick. We're so much more interesting than you've been taught, right? Apparently. Yeah. So there's this researcher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Her name is Martimianna. And she was working with all this group of women who were happily married. They loved their marriages. They loved their husbands. They were their long-term partner. One thing was wrong. Really low levels of desire. So like the love portion of it wasn't the issue.

No, desire, Michael. It's different. Desire's different. So they were saying, she said, what's going on here? Now, a lot of sex researchers would have just said, it's obvious. Women don't like sex as much as men do. So that's what's going on here. And Martimiana wasn't happy with that.

She went to these women and she interviewed them in depth. And here's what she found out. She found out that monogamy and sameness is harder on female desire than it is on male desire. She found out that in the aggregate, If men in long-term partnered relationships are getting regular sex from their partner, they're likely to report pretty high levels of satisfaction, sexual and relationship satisfaction. Women in the aggregate and long-term partnerships who are having regular sex with their long-term partner are dramatically less likely to report high levels of sexual satisfaction.

It took Marta Meanna, thinking about it carefully and refusing to fall into the trap of women just like sex less for us to understand that long-term partnered sexuality is harder on the female libido than it is on the male libido. Women struggle with monogamy in the aggregate, probably more than men do. And that's a complete undoing of everything that we've been taught. Talk to us a little bit about the importance of being desired, whether it's from a man or a woman's standpoint. Yeah, so this is something else that Marta Mayanna works on. She wrote a really funny paper called It's not you, it's me. And this was about an experiment that she had women do.

She said to a group of women and a group of men, would you have sex with yourself? And the men said to her, most of them, I'm sorry. They didn't really know what she was talking about. She said to the women, would you have sex with yourself? And the women said, oh yeah, hell yes. And she said they said it as if they already had had sex with themselves. She said, what is going on there?

And she realized that for women, there was this idea that finding themselves sexy turned them on. And men didn't have the same idea. She said, how do I quantify this? She said to the same group of people, if you're having sex in front of a mirror, say, with your partner, how much of the time are you looking at yourself and how much of the time are you looking at your partner? and the men said pretty much I'm always looking at my partner and the women said I'm looking at myself and Marta Man you do Lauren I look at myself sometimes the near step comes as well I think it's about 50 50 for me is it 50 50 for you maybe I think so wow that's pretty honest do you look at yourself 50 I see what's going on

I just get to make sure the forms get back in place locked in a lot of people like a mirror it makes them um it doesn't like we have mirrors all over our room that's really really good. You have to feel sorry for the people and excited for the people who haven't done it yet, and they still have that threshold to cross. If you are listening and you have not had sex in front of a mirror, immediately go to home goods and buy a mirror. Yes, exactly. A huge ass mirror. And have it installed and enjoy that because what we know is women have this kind of autonomous aspect to their sexuality where they're not like staring into their partner's eye looking for connection all the time. Sometimes they're just turned on by a hot body part. And sometimes

that hot body part is their own, and sometimes they're really into just watching themselves have sex. Here's another really funny thing that she found out. You know how sometimes you say to him, like, how do I look in this dress? And then he says that you look good, and you kind of discount it a little bit? It's because when our long-term partners admire us as women, what Martimiana found is that does a lot less for us than the lustful glance of a total stranger. I was listening to a stand-up comedian. It was a woman. Who was that? She was good. But she was saying, you know, like you're walking a mall and you're with your partner. Like, you still want that glance from the stranger. But men and women want that, right? Men and women want that. But here's an interesting thing

that we found out is that women want it more. Here's something she found out. When you're in a long-term partnership with a man and a woman, for women, all that familiarity and all that sort of institutionalization of your roles that happens when you move in together or you put a ring on it, it dampens their desire, more than it dampens men's desire. Women need that separateness and that excitement. I'm going to start getting some disguises. Yeah. You start popping out of no way. We still need to do sexy stranger. Oh yeah, sexy stranger. Sex with Emily, you need to do that. Sex with Emily came on our podcast and told us that we need to do sexy stranger. Do sexy stranger. I'm still waiting around for the sexy stranger to ask me on a fucking date.

He should ask you. He's coming. Where is he? Maybe you'll go by yourself to a bar. Marta Mianna says, you know what? If you're in a long-term relationship and you're a woman, here's something that you could do. Okay, you could get a mirror. That could work for you.

You could also, when you're meeting your husband or your partner for dinner, just show up by yourself first. Separateness. Women are very turned on by separateness. They're also very turned on by variety. and novelty. The sex researcher named Meredith Chivers studied what porn women's bodies responded to and what porn men's bodies responded to. Men who were heterosexual said to her, well, you know, I'm like, I'm heterosexual. Like, what do you expect? I'm turned on by men having sex with women and women having sex with women. And she found that lo and behold, that was pretty much the case.

Then she said to heterosexual women, let's see what you're turned on by. And they were heterosexual. sexual women. So after all, you would think that they would be turned on by men having sex with men. And women having sex with men. They weren't? Their bodies responded to those things. Their bodies also responded to women having sex with women. I only like to watch porn of women having sex with women. I don't, I have enough penis.

I don't need some random guy's penis on the porn screen. I'm good for penis. Like, I've had the penis. So you like, you like some variety. I'm glad you're getting your fill. She's getting her variety. in novelty. So women's menus, it turned out, were, the heterosexual women's menus were, you know,

from here to Burbank, whereas the men's sexual menus were the width of this laptop screen. Women have a really wide variety of things that we like to think about. Your menu is tiny little menu? I mean, no offense to your menu, but it is narrow. That menu is not a nice kind of menu. I'm getting by. I had this long beard one time, like big beard, it wouldn't recognize me. And she was all into it because I think she thought it was like someone else or something.

Yeah, it was like I was cheating on him. A lot of women feel that way. Listen, if there's a sex that evolved for promiscuity, if there's a sex that struggles with monogamy, if there's a sex that has one organ dedicated to pleasure only, it's not men. So I believe that that was a big turn on for her because the idea of the idea of, of getting something novel and new is uniquely exciting to women. Okay, weren't you taught the opposite? Weren't you taught that men need to have variety of novelty and men get bored?

In the aggregate, women get bored in a long-term partnership more quickly than men do. We need to deal with this data. Otherwise, women are going to feel very weird about themselves. Okay, but I also want to point out the other end of the spectrum, which is men get grouped into this category where they're, dogs and they cheat and blah, blah, blah. I have a friend, don't worry, I won't call you out, babe.

I have a friend that... Wait, is this directed towards me? No, it's not you. No, excuse me, babe, this is not Michael. Babe, I mean, like, my friend, babe. Okay. But the friend's name is not babe. No, I have a friend

who I love, that loves to get escorts. And he told me that he sometimes gets escorts and doesn't sleep with them. He just, what you said earlier, wants that emotional connection and wants to, like, literally cuddle and have that presence there as a woman. So I also think if we're going to talk about how women are misunderstood, I think it's also important to talk about sometimes men don't just always want sex.

That's exactly right. The bad science that has told us that men need to roam and spread their seed and men are more naturally promiscuous and that women are hearthbound and domestic, it's not just harming women. It's harming men, too, and it's giving men and women a fundamental misunderstanding of each other. So absolutely, all these untruths that we've been fed about how men naturally are and how women naturally are harming all of us. I mean, I think the logical horizon of the bad science is that we needed to have the Me Too movement because we started to think that it was just natural and justifiable that men were

sexual predators and we said, what do you expect? And a bunch of women your age said, I expect a lot better. And a bunch of men your age said, I expect a lot better. We don't accept, we don't accept that men are naturally sexual predators. So bad science can take us to very bad places. Yeah, I agree. You know, one of my questions here, which I'm actually going to end up skipping over, is what is something you believe that most people are shocked by? But I think we've gone into so many topics here that we even need that question now. So I want to, you're a mother. I want to talk to you about, um, the belief that children, and listen, I'm not a parent, Lawrence on a parent and maybe this is controversial for me or maybe I'll get trouble. A word it wrong. So apologies if I do. But the belief that

children need monogamous parents to be together in a relationship to be parented correctly. Um, from what, from a lot of things I've seen, you know, I think it's worse when the child is parented by two parents that are together and miserable with each other because you grows up seeing fights and, you know, it's unstable. I actually think in those cases maybe it's better for the parents to co-parent, but separately in separate households. I just kind of wanted to get your take on that. Yeah, it's a really interesting question about, you know, who does monogamy serve?

We know that it's hard for women. We know that it's as hard for women as it is for men and it might be even harder for women. A lot of anthropologists believe that monogamy is pretty new, maybe 10,000. years old and it's a compromise and it's a compromise that children win because they get this thing called bi-parental care right two people caring for them where were we before 10,000 years ago? The new science is telling us that we most likely evolved as cooperative breeders. That means we lived in these kind of loose, rangey bands, and we had multiple sexual partners,

and we raised our children cooperatively. That's what cooperative breeding means. And so what happened 10,000 years ago, when we broke down into a unit, which is called a dyad or a pair, what happened was we made it harder to raise children, and we kind of swerved from the evolutionary script that sort of made child-rearing easier.

And so we find ourselves in this place now. And when people say that monogamy is natural or that it's the best thing, all I can think of the way that I view the world is it's only 10,000 years old, and we're still trying to get used to it, and it's hard for us. I just don't get why there has to be one right thing. I think everyone's different. I think to make a blanket statement that monogamy is right for everyone is close-minded. It is pretty close-minded.

and what's really happening right now is that people are unsatisfied with it and acting on it in new ways. Not just people your age, not just the people in the polyamory movement that I spoke to, not just swingers that I spoke to, not just people who are into consensual non-monogamy. People across the country seem to be very interested in alternatives. There's a sex researcher named Amy Moore's, and she did this study for a 10-year period between, about 2006 and 2015, she looked at people's internet searches for terms related to polyamory, open relationship, consensual non-monogamy. And she found that over that 10-year period, there was a dramatic uptick across the country,

not just L.A. and New York, not just in big cities, but everywhere in America, people were really interested in these terms. So what I like to say is, okay, in 2013, over in New York, not. 90% of Americans told Gallup pollsters that they thought that infidelity was always wrong. At the same time, look at our internet searches. Look at the TV shows that we like, right? Like Big Love, Unicorn Land, all the shows about polyamory. Look at the shows.

Look at the books we're reading. The Ethical Slut is a really popular book. Esther Perel's works on Infigeliality. really popular. Americans might say that they think that monogamy is the best way, but they're very curious about their options and things are changing. What about 50 Shades of Gray? Did you see women went crazy over 50 shades of gray? Women went nuts. And what about how everybody demeaned women for going nuts over 50 shades of gray? And what about how people missed the point? People said, oh, it's S&M light. People said, oh, it's just a Harlequin romance. And they missed the whole point.

which is that women are super freaks sexually. Even women in Florida who are octogenarians, who all went to EL James' book events, they were interested in a story about sexuality that is considered an alternative lifestyle or a little bit weird, although increasingly it's entering the mainstream. Isn't it interesting that nobody, thought to say, wow, it's women who are driving a massive cultural interest in S&M.

It's almost like we couldn't wrap our minds around. It wasn't the men leading it. I think, though, that the thing that I liked about that movie is that he put so much effort into the sex. Like, there was, like, so much effort that was put in. Like, guys get so lazy. Taylor came on our show probably a year ago, our producer and talked about how he, what would you call it to be nice?

a one pump jump. Okay. They get lazy. They just like roll over and like stick it in. And it's like, come on. Put some elbow grease into it. Put some elbow grease into it and some creativity. And think about, you know, we now know that the most basic things that we were taught about female sexual anatomy are untrue,

we were taught that our clitoris is this really tiny little thing. Do you know how big it is? It's all on the inside and it's the size of medium zucchini. Yeah, Michael. Jesus Christ. Okay. It's a medium zucchini. And it's just for pleasure.

Taylor, did you hear that? Did you guys know that ounce per ounce centimeter per centimeter, women have as much erectile tissue as men do? Did you know that women wake up every morning with a boner? And that when women get turned on, they get erections and hard ons. Think about it. Okay, so listen. Women have this vast thing.

called the Female Erectile Network. Women evolved to have multiple orgasms. Women have no refractory period or rest period between their orgasms. They can have them right in a row like this. Don't be jealous, guys. So it is something that could make you jealous. What else it could do is it could inspire you,

this fact, this anatomical fact about women, combined with the fact that we now know that women have these wider menus of what turns them on than men, what heterosexual men, men could be doing now is sort of bowing down before the incredible force of female sexuality that the new science is teaching us is there and that we didn't really know about before. So do I love the idea of men putting effort into it? I do because it's going to benefit everybody. You know, there are

these guys that I write about in untrue. They call themselves cucks. They say that they're in the cuckold lifestyle. They call their wives hot wives, and they enjoy watching their wives have sex with other men. You would hate that. Well, I'm not saying that it's for everyone, but here's the amazing... What's the opposite of that? What's the opposite of that? No, listen, to his, to each his own, I guess. To each his own, right? So these people are admittedly sort of an extreme in terms of sexual behavior and how men and women like to be with each other. They're really radical and that they're sort of disavowing the whole script of masculine possession of a woman. But one thing that they're doing that's so interesting is they're sort of understanding that women are really powerfully sexual

and they're turning that into a spectacle for themselves to watch and enjoy. So that is maybe one end of the spectrum of how men are going to want to start. are really understanding not what they've been told female sexuality is, but what the new data is revealing female sexuality to actually be? To me, I like to try to get to the root of things. And I think this is a lot of complex stuff, so we're definitely not going to be able to do all that here. But I think a lot of the root causes for a lot of these issues,

whether it's monogamy and fidelity, is that the people are not being honest with themselves, and they're feeling shame and they're feeling judged by society. And to me, like I said, to each his own, I know what I'm about. I know what I like. I hope I know what Lauren likes and I hope we communicate that to each other

and like from a place of trust and honesty and understanding. I think where people get in trouble is they're not being honest with their partner and more importantly they're not being honest with themselves and that's where a lot of the problems go because if I was ever in a situation with Lauren and she's like hey, you know, I'm not happy

and I want to go do these things then I as the individual have to respect that. I can't stop that or I can't change it if she's having those feelings. Right. But when it comes in, fidelity, my issue is not that people are going and not being monogamous. It's that they're not being completely honest with themselves and their partner. And this is a new possibility that's

opening up for people again. I mean, it has happened at different points in our history, but a couple of things. The first thing I want to say is that for women to be honest about what they want sexually, they have to go through a lot more levels of bias and shame, and it's sort of harder for them to peel it apart. So when we say that people need to be honest about what they want, it's just not an easy process. And I empathize with that. Yeah, exactly.

So I think it's a great goal, and I think one thing that can help women get to that point is when they have access to the data and the science that tells them that what they've been taught about themselves is untrue. In conversations like this. It's going to be a lot easier for them to really talk about what they want when people aren't saying, yeah, but that's unnatural. Or no, no, that's not the way women are. That's the way men are.

So that's going to be a really important thing for us. And I think that all the new science that's coming out about female sexuality will help us get to the point where, you know, we're not sort of systematically misunderstanding female sexuality and making women feel like if I admit this, it makes me really weird. the more we get out there that women have really wide, freaky sexual menus, the less women will feel weird about communicating it. So I like what you're saying, and I like the way the new data and new science is going to help women say it more honestly. Women's menus are like the cheesecake factory, okay, guys? Like take some notes, okay? This is a broad menu. Lots and lots on the buffet for women.

I'm not putting men down at all. I think that men are going to be able to really enjoy that about. their female partners if they're heterosexual. No, I'm all about, I'm listening. I'm all about it. Open the conversation. I have a difficult time. You're open to conversation about sex with your partner.

I have a, I've always had a difficult time talking to people that can only come from a narrow-minded place and they're not open to different perspectives, right? Like, we talk about the evolutionary psychology thing, right? Like, that's what I've read, but talking to you and opening minds. To me, I have connections with people like that, and I think it's the only way that you can progress as a society and as a culture. Keep listening.

Yeah. At the same time, like, you can have strong values and you can have your beliefs, but you have to be open and respect to other people's. I wanted to say that another new thing that you brought up is this idea you said, can people be honest and tell each other? This idea of consensual non-monogamy is not totally historically new, but people in their 20s and 30s are now taking it to new places. Consensual non-monogamy is now a word. You know, when I was younger, there was. wasn't even a word to describe that experience. Just like in a sadder way, when I was younger, we didn't really have the same definition of sexual assault that we have now. The vocabulary

has changed in terms of how people are understanding themselves sexually, what they want and what they don't want. But consensual non-monogamy is a really interesting, huge cultural shift. As somebody who's interested in social science, I cannot wait to see where it goes. I can't wait to see what happens with the polyamory movement. I can't wait to see how many people actually caught into this idea of dealing with their desire for others by acting on it within the couple and talking to each other about it. And I can't wait to see the creative solutions that people are going to be coming up with. I think that it's going to happen more rapidly than it has in the past because of social media.

I think social media is going to push whatever is happening further ahead quickly. Yeah, I mean, these ideas are not new, which is the other cool thing about writing a book about sexuality. So it was the romantic poets and the transcendentalists who were the first free love hippies. And they lived on communes and they had these very progressive ideas. And it sort of went underground for a while until the 19th. 70s when we had the second wave of consensual non-monogamy in which, you know, there was a free love lifestyle and hippies had this sort of alternative lifestyle and they criticized monogamy. Now comes the third wave of consensual non-monogamy with the polyamory movement and people using

the term consensual non-monogamy in books like the ethical slut and social media, as you said, helping these people connect in new ways. So here we are in the third wave of consensual non-monogamy, and it's going to be amazing to see the way it changes marriages and long-term relationships. And I think that you're right that social media is going to play a role. I interviewed a lot of women who told me that they used social media almost as a workaround strategy for being slut shamed. And one young woman told me it used to be that people could see my tweets to a guy or my Facebook page post. that a guy that I made or that a guy made or my Instagram posts.

And then she said, I got an iPhone and I could communicate by direct message. And there wouldn't be a text blazing across and it wouldn't be a public tweet. And my boyfriend couldn't say to me, who is this guy that you're in touch with? Now, we use social media in all kinds of different ways, but it's going to be really interesting to see how it allows women to express the sexuality that we now know that women have, thanks to the new science and the new data. And I think another interesting thing about social media is the invention of the selfie. The moment that camera could flip around and women could photograph themselves, they were able to put versions of themselves and their sexuality that

they curated and that they liked out there for public consumption. or to send to somebody that they wanted to have sex with. And it really does mark a big change in the way that we think about sex and have sex now. What's that show that you watch or that you used to watch about Rome? Is it called Rome? I think it's called Rome. Rome. In that show, too, if you look at the-

It's a bummer. Okay, but if you look at that era, too, they were all fucking each other. I mean, they're fine. Boys, girls, like, everyone's fucking everyone. You've got to be careful here. Some of those Romans were going a little too far. Are we talking about? Was there a scripted series about sexuality in ancient Rome?

It wasn't just about sexuality, but that was a big part and theme of it. Lauren, did you see the show? No, it was basically about Julius Caesar. I did see the show, Michael. But they showed what the society of Romans looked like. But I said, you've got to be careful with them. It was Game of Thronesy. There was a lot of stuff that if it was taking place in this day and age,

people would be going to jail for a very long time. Ancient Roman sexuality is part of our legacy, and it was wild, as some people have documented. And I remember that there was a soft porn movie called Caligula about the Roman Emperor Caligula. And all is really, you know, shocking to some of us to this day or really interesting sexual practices. So when we dig into history, we see that progress and sexual enlightenment is not an arrow shooting straight forward into space. I mean, we get enlightened and then we become repressed and then we legislate against free sexual expression and then we open it up again. And it changes all the time.

I was really surprised when I was researching this book about how many women had affairs in the 60s, women in certain socioeconomic groups in certain cities and towns in the U.S. and how these women would say to me and to other researchers and to a journalist named Pamela Dracherman, these women said, we can't believe how like uptight you guys in your 30s and 40s are now. Like we were all having affairs. We, you know, we didn't think that monogamy was all that. Now, however you feel about monogamy, it might be a surprise to you to learn that, you know, women who are now in their 70s and 80s didn't value monogamy as much as a lot of people do now. So it's full of surprises when you actually go back and dig into history and our evolutionary prehistory,

female sexuality is not what we have been taught. It was and is. Well, Lauren, I hope you're enlightened, but not too enlightened. I don't want you running out. No, we're really too enlightened together. Yes, okay. Yes, we're all enlightened now. Wednesday, let everyone know where they can find you, where they can find the new book.

We can find my book on Amazon and at your favorite independent bookstore. It's called untrue. What's your Instagram handle? My Instagram handle is at Wednesday Martin, and on Twitter, I'm at Wednesday, Martin, Ph.D. I hope to see everybody there. You'll see me. You're going to get some questions, I'm sure. Oh, some weird ones.

The weird or the better. The weirder, the better. Get freaky, you guys. Ask all your freaky questions to Wednesday. Please do. Thank you so much for coming on. You're so interesting. Thanks for having me on you guys.

It was great. It's nice to talk to you about sex. Guys, a couple of updates. We have an Instagram page. If you're not following along, you have to. It's at TSC podcast. And it has all the guests we've had on and just kind of building a fun community over there. Also, we have a new podcast site that streamlines everything from each episode.

It has resources, the books we talk about, a bunch of links, everything, all streamlines. in one place. It's tscpodcast.com. It's super pretty too, so make sure you check it out. And with that, we will see you next week. This episode was brought to you by Ritual. Ritual is the brand that's reinventing the experience with nine essential nutrients women lack the most. If you're ready to invest in your health, do what I didn't. Go to ritual.com slash skinny. You should know that I've been taking this vitamin every single day for the last three months. Like I said, I keep it by my toothbrush. It's super easy. all the vitamins are in it, and I know I'm getting a lifelong health 401K. Why put anything but clean ingredients backed by real science in your body?

Go to ritual.com slash skinny, and definitely keep me updated with your results. Just DM me on Instagram. Send me some picks. This episode was brought to you by Thrive Market. Thrive Market is your one-stop shop for high-end, high-quality, and highly discounted groceries, supplements, beauty products, and household supplies. Thrive Market guarantees its customers 25 to 50% below, retail on all items because it cuts out the middleman. Thrive Market is offering all

Skinny Confidential, him and her listeners, 25% off your first order in free shipping with a one-month trial when you go to thrivemarket.com slash skinny. Again, that's thrivemarket.com slash skinny. Happy shopping, everybody, and we will be back next week.