Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex - Beyond Survival: Continuing the Conversation on Sex and Healing

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

In this follow-up to Healing Out Loud: Sex, Survival, and the Path Back to Your Body, we continue unzipping what healing after sexual trauma really looks like—messy, non-linear, and deeply personal. Together, we unpack the emotional, cultural, and physical layers of recovery—from the weight of societal expectations to the quiet, powerful moments of reclaiming pleasure.We explore the many ways trauma can surface, how it’s often misunderstood, and why healing isn’t about “getting over it”—it’s about coming home to yourself. We reflect on what it means to feel safe in your body again, how pleasure can become a powerful act of reclamation, and why these conversations are essential.If you haven’t listened to Annette’s podcast yet, we encourage you to check out Talk Sex with Annette.If you have a story, thoughts and/or a topic or question for Dr. Sue and Charlie please share your ideas here:  ⁠Show suggestionsIf you want to ask Dr Sue a sex question for the weekly Q&A you can submit it here: Ask a question

Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode of Unzipping Taboos, candid conversations about sex with Dr. Sue and Charlie. We are here to dive into the topics of sex and sexuality that you might be curious about, but don't always feel comfortable talking about. No judgment, just open, honest, candid conversations. So zip down and let's get candid. Today, we're going to follow up on a conversation we had with our very special guest, Annette. But before we get into that, I am here with Dr. Sue. Hey, Dr. Sue. Hey, Charlie.

How are you? I'm doing well. That's good to hear. I know. It's like a surprise. It's not a surprise. It's just good to hear because you can't answer as honestly as you want to. I just want to reiterate that.

And I usually do. Yes, very true. Well, would you like to give our listeners a little bit about your background before we dive in? Yes. And I want to acknowledge that I get feedback and I hear it. And the feedback I have been consistently receiving now from multiple peoples in my life is that I rush through the intro and that I need to own my creds. So I'm going to slow down.

I know last time we did it, it's the last episode we did. If you haven't listened to it, it is the episode that we did with Annette on healing after sexual trauma and reclaiming your pleasure. and i was so excited that she was there that was just like yeah here's my intro um enough about me let's get to a net yeah but i have had consistently from the same person and now other humans um a little chastising so i want to i want to thank you and let you know i heard you chastising or encouragement to lean into your accomplishments i'm just gonna i'm gonna reframe it so my friends who are new yorkers are just way chastising or are they new yorkers and it was encouragement and that was their love language yeah my my my non-new york friends it was more like you should

you should be proud of what you've done i'm like well i am my new york friends were not as polite so um anyway so hi hello now that we've done now that we've taken a dive into new york culture right my my island culture um so i have a phd in human sexuality education and um on the I've been in academia for a long time. Every year feels longer and longer. So on the academic side of the house, I teach undergraduate graduate classes and I've written textbooks on human sexuality. And then on the non-academic side, I have a consulting firm and I have spent years really working with anyone who wants me to talk to them or their constituents about sex. And so I do a lot of lifespan work.

i've worked with everyone as young as mid-teens to 80s i really should have asked that some of how old they were um but it was mostly upper 80s um and i do um answers to people's sex questions so people submit anonymously to my website and we'll include the link in the bio um people submit sex questions some of them are very run-of-the-mill some of them are very intricate and then i answer them all over social media on Sunday and it is my work doing that that led me to be on Annette's um it's it's talk sex with Annette so it was on her podcast it was my work with the community stuff though I'm sure the other stuff is important too um that kind of led us to her and I've done an episode for I've done a couple episodes of her show so if you haven't checked

her out you should do that as well um so yeah I think I think I did the things and I gave it as proper do but what we haven't done yet is we have not talked about you charlie so oh me you so for those of you um for those of you who do know and do not know charlie if this is your first episode welcome um charlie is our curious co-host who is always ready to explore all the things that we talk about here um sex relationships um pleasure everything and all those taboo topics that we which includes all the things i just mentioned but all those taboo topics about sex as well. But I think you should spend, I should encourage you to spend a little time talking about yourself, Charlie. Well, okay. I feel a little unprepared, oddly.

It's weird. Dr. Sue and I have been friends for many years. And one of the things that we discovered immediately, I'm not even going to say almost immediately, but immediately was our comfort talking about things that are topics that are traditionally seen as taboo to bring up to someone that you just met um and start having a barrier for me yeah yeah um and don't ever sit next to me on a train or do or do depends on the adventure you want to have conversationally. Just wanted to throw that qualifier in there. But outside of our friendship, I am someone who grew up just never really wholly buying into the societal expectations and conditioning that surrounded sex and sexuality and pleasure, especially as a woman in this society.

I didn't see any, uh, difference between how I would be allowed to interact with sex and sexuality and, and all of those things compared to hetero males, hetero cis males. Um, and so, so often Dr. C likes to try and tailor her intro to our episodes topic. And, um, I think I might do a little bit of that today. Um, so with that, with that just innate, I don't know, contrarianism, what, whatever you would want to call it, uh, for me that I have always felt, um, the conversation that we're just going to kind of, that we're going to go over today that we had with Annette. Um, it was, it was for me just reinforced all of the things that I have felt and across

the spectrum around sex and sexuality, around sexual assault and rape and my thoughts on that and, you know, experiences. I am a woman in America, so I have maybe an experience or two. And so just being able to talk unashamedly, not feeling shame about talking about the enjoyment of sex or what happened, any kind of experience that I might have had. So all of that brings me to being Dr. Sue's co-host, so she's not talking to herself about these things. I want to get off topic. And it gives us an excuse to have our spirited conversations

as often as we do. More so than just, oh, I should call this person on the cell phone. Hey, we have a recording. Let's talk. Let's talk. Let's just chat. So, uh, for those of you that haven't listened to the episode yet, uh, it is, yeah, I'm, I'm not going to shame you. Dr. Sue might. Um, I know that we all have busy lives, but the episode we're going to be talking about today and kind of giving our thoughts on not kind of, I've got to stop using that, that we're going to give our thoughts on,

is the episode we did with our very special guest, Annette Benedetti, who is the host of the podcast Talk Sex with Annette, as Dr. Sue mentioned. And when we approached her about potentially being a guest for us for our show, she had sent us a list of possible topics that she was happy to record with us as our guest. And the one that we wound up doing is one that jumped out at me. It was finding your journey or going on a journey back to pleasure and your sexuality after experiencing rape or sexual assault. And we highlighted, we requested that specific topic because so much of the conversations, and Dr. Zhu, please feel free to interject, but what I find is that so much of the conversation around sexual assault and rape

is centered on the victim's experience and and we do have an episode kind of talking about how when we talk about sexual insult and rape it it removes the person the perpetrator from the whole thing and so while those conversations and that focus is very important I think it's also important to give space to going through the journey to rediscover yourself and what that journey as messy and tough and it as it can be there is a journey to go from I think Dr. Sue you coined you coined this for me the journey of victim to survivor yeah not and so oh go ahead my phrase I don't own that phrasing but it is one that I use very often yeah and so that's why we chose that that topic to go through with Annette and it was a it was a great conversation

Dr. Segi, you want to share some of your thoughts on it? Yeah. If you haven't checked it out, it's the episode called Healing Out Loud, Sex Survival on the Path Back to Your Body. She's one of our few guests that we have that we are looking to add some more in the future. But it was a lot of us just nodding at each other. It was a lot of us just being on the same page and having this conversation just very openly and very unapologetically about what happens after, because we don't want people's

lives to stop at the rape or at the assault or at the harassment. We want them to find their way to the survivor place where they can function. Not that it didn't happen and they're going to forget it, but that it's not ruling their lives anymore. But if we never talk about that and we don't talk about it openly, how are we going to get people to those places? how we're gonna get yeah how we're gonna get people comfortable being ready to go to find their journey to those places because i because as i as i say so much of the conversation and what we see in media news pop culture otherwise is really centered on on what happened and it's not and what how you know law enforcement may fail at following up on certain things so

much of it is focused on that and those those things do need focus i want to be clear those things do need focus but i don't know of many avenues where the kind of discussion that we had with Annette is as prevalent as as the other pieces of sexual assault and rape discussion are yeah it was I'm trying to find the right words because I don't want to sit here and just be like a you know like a fan of our own episode but if you haven't given it a listen it is a hard one to listen to especially if you've either been through it yourself or have a loved one who's been through it it can be difficult to get through um but if you haven't given a listen definitely give it give it give it the time it is one of our longer episodes it's almost an hour so

just kind of be prepared for that but there were a few things that came out of it that i know like i was frantically scribbling notes as we as we went through them and then we are what to do yes and then probably threw them out because i'm an idiot and i dug them out um dug them out of the recycle bin um but there are a few things that for me i wanted to kind of dive into a little little bit deeper because they're things that come up a lot when I talk to folks, more of an educational setting. So there was one point she made the comment of, and I wish I had the transcript in front of us, but it was, she makes the comment of like people who don't know that they're raped or like they don't know that what happened was rape. And I have this conversation in my class

because we do cover this in my class and I talk about this all the time. Like when I start the class on rape and sexual assault and sexual harassment i always say like don't let me talk you into being a victim and they always give me that look like seriously like they give me that look sometimes after they start to get to know me like what are you gonna do now yeah like what are you talking about journey are you taking us on today dr how are you gonna talk us into doing this and a lot of people don't know definitions and part of the problem is that every state does do it differently. And one of the challenges of the of the institution that I'm at now is that we have a lot of folks from different states. And so in recent semesters, like I've been looking up

like 12 to 15 different state laws to figure out what they are. But every state does define it a little bit differently. And I want to also make sure that we are saying unless Charlie, you went and got some law degree I don't know about. Neither of us are legal scholars. I've consulted of lawyers before when trying to prep for classes sometimes on rape and sexual assault. So I want to preface this with we don't have a single definition, and it does vary from state to state. But there are a lot of pieces to it that people are unaware of. And so if we use a general term of what rape is, first of all, a lot of times it's very prescriptive in the language in that it's he being the perpetrator and she being the victim. And the majority of times that rape and

sexual assault happen that is what that looks like but one of the things that came up in the conversation with annette is that women can force women to do things women can force men to do things i don't think we actually talked that men can force other men to do things um and and for me i don't care if it meets the legal definition like if you feel like you were assaulted or harassed or something was done to you without your consent then i don't really give a shit what the legal definition is and and then it gets into a whole like do you have a da whole prosecute and like blah blah blah blah right so for me i don't always get hung up on that but but a lot of times people don't realize that what may have happened to them in the past especially around their use

of alcohol i usually work with college students well most of my college classes are traditional college-age students so occasionally i'll have an older student in there um and so when we talk about the use of alcohol and being under the influence and how you can't technically give give consent and again that's different from state to state like suddenly their eyes start to get huge and inevitably someone will come up to me either that day after the class or to my office hours and say i i don't i don't know if i was raped and i'm like oh okay like like what happened like you know not to make you relive the trauma but like what's going on and and they'll usually say i i had some alcohol with my boyfriend and i was a little tipsy and now i'm afraid that i met

the definition and i'm like do you feel like what you did was consensual like do you did that feel right at the time for you and oh yeah i'm like then don't don't worry about it but there are some people who especially with cases of sexual harassment at work don't realize they have the you know they don't realize that they're being put in a position where they can't say no because their livelihood is being held over their head and so they don't realize that what happened was assault or rape or or harassment um and so for some people it's it's finding that out or people who were in in situations with people who are the same gender who didn't know that that could be considered rape or sexual assault um yeah so there's there's a lot of times where people are

i don't want to say surprised by the definition because they knew that for a lot of them they knew there was something wrong with the with the with whatever happened um with the incident or what led up to the incident or how they processed it they knew that they weren't okay with it but they were never able to put the language on it and so that's when we use that phrase of like finding out that what happened to you was indeed rape or sexual assault that's a lot of times where that comes from. Yeah. I, uh, that's so important because there is, there's that piece of not knowing the language, but there is also the piece of, I don't want to be seen as a troublemaker or making a big deal out of nothing or banking that how much of this am I, have I encouraged in,

you know, perhaps, uh, cases of harassment or even sexual assault or rape. There's a lot of that language that victims victims own more than they need to um or should in in these cases uh i want to go to this this i um we talked about trauma a bit rightfully so um and one of the things that i can i just put a pause for two seconds I just want to make sure we get two things, and I don't know how I'm going to circle back flawlessly. Go for it. Well, it is candid. It is candid.

The other thing I just want to throw out there sometimes is folks who have intellectual or developmental disabilities might not understand those concept of boundaries, and that especially if it was someone who was trusted by them and their families, that what happened was not okay, especially because we very often, well, we all know how I feel about sex out in this country, but one of the populations that definitely does not get the sex ed that it needs are folks who are intellectually and developmentally disabled so they didn't get the information to even know what was happening was inappropriate um so just want to throw that out there and then just one more thing one more thing well you did say two things i did say i did see there you go yeah um what you were saying about the whole like starting to question yourself and your role in that

before where i worked now i don't want to name institutions i worked at a rather large institution and the first week of classes in the fall semester there were all these signs around like literally like signs stuck in the ground about like ladies like make sure you you know make sure you have a friend who knows where you are like lots of lots of bad things happen the first week and that's true we know especially for freshmen like the the first two weeks of college are oftentimes horrific because they're targeted for sexual assault and harassment and rape not once did i ever see a sign that said don't fucking rape people yeah it was always about like ladies like don't you know make sure you know where you're going make sure people like

people are aware make sure you're aware of your situation at no point was there ever anything holding the people responsible who was actually doing the crime um so that fear of like i'm going to be looked at as what was i wearing and did i do the right thing and you know am i bringing attention to this we we groom people i hate using that word but we do we groom people to kind of feel like if this happened you did something instead of saying hey assholes don't fucking touch people like without consent so yeah i i want to i want to continue on that just a little bit in that it is solely socially conditioned in all of us and many a lot of us have worked to unpack it um but but it is it's that messaging that that implicit messaging on campus do this

so you don't get targeted do this so you don't don't get assaulted it it is never don't be an asshole although i don't fucking violate people i could see why maybe you wouldn't want to put that out for the new mommies and daddies and aunts and uncles and grandparents bringing their kids i mean they have pr teams at those places they could figure out the words i know someone in pr i'm sure she could figure out a nicer way there's chachi bt now you can have it refine the fucking message but but there are so many and just not just that kind of messaging this goes to one of our very early episodes about the pop culture influence and the zeitgeist is that like there are so many programs movies shows what have you except for one that really consistently i think tackles

this um svu i don't watch that i uh i am one who has watched a lot of those episodes um but there is a lot and it was an evolution for them but that's not what this is about it is about there is so much out there scripts are written in a way that reinforces the focus on the victim and what they could have should have done to not eventually become a victim which and go ahead i was gonna i was gonna bring us back i was gonna have a great when you are raised in a culture that teaches you that if this happens to you you did something to deserve it which is never ever true by the way that will increase the trauma response see i got us right back to trauma yes you did but it's like you're dealing with the trauma of the situation

and then you're dealing with the trauma of well i did something like what did i do why am i like why didn't I know better? How come I couldn't do something different? Which gives us multi layers of that trauma. And now we're back to trauma. Flawlessly done, Dr. Sue. So yes, yes, pat yourself on the back. Don't hurt your shoulder. Don't pull anything. So this idea of trauma that and we talked a bit about it um in this in the episode with Annette with the with the focus of getting giving space for the processing of trauma on on this journey of finding the path back to your pleasure your body your sexuality um but trauma really is an individual experience no it's self-defined yeah yeah you you get to decide if something was traumatic for you and I don't

mean that there's a lot of conflating right now younger generations of internet diagnosing yeah well and also like well that was upsetting for me so it was traumatic no no sometimes things in life are upsetting there is a difference between something upsetting you and something being traumatic um so i'm afraid of saying like trauma self-defined and being like something happened to name this trauma it's but but people may go through experiences and be like yeah that sucks that absolutely is miserable but i'm gonna move on and i'm okay with it and i'll process it and you know deal with it and they don't view it as that trauma piece um so so there is there is an individual piece to this because we we bring so many different things to it like our past

experiences our morals our values our religious beliefs are you know what we were taught growing up all of that is going to interpret the events for us and i guess i didn't people can't see you nodding um i realized that as i was i was like oh say something say something charlie it was interesting because i i lose track of timelines um very near around the time that we did the episode with annette i one of the questions i got for hey dr sue was if i'm saving myself for marriage is that is that yeah sexual trauma and a lot of my responses it kind of depends on how you look at it like if you were raised in a culture that you are supposed to wait until marriage and you're like i am so good with this and my my people are good with this and my church

temple mosque are good with this and my future husband and wife is going to be like yay and this is great and it aligns with my morals and values then no there's there's no trauma there there's a lot of inexperience when you finally do get married and have sex um but if you are raised in a culture it's like you will wait until marriage otherwise you are dirty and disgusting and good people don't have urges and you're working your entire single life to try to figure out how to balance what your body is telling you versus what the people around you are telling you then yeah that can have a trauma response. So two people, same situation, are going to view it differently. Absolutely. Absolutely. And again, it is finding that language and that space to understand the

pieces that contribute to the trauma. There's the expectation, there could be the expectation trauma, there's the physical trauma, which I think we might get into a little bit in this episode. um but if i'm if i may dr sue are you comfortable with me sharing kind of a personal story about me surrounding this i'm okay if you're okay and we can always edit this is true so in this so if you hear a big blank so what i just want to i want to be candid with our listeners as as much as i'm comfortable but one of the things that when we were working towards doing this show and developing our podcast one of the things that informed my reticence many of you know we don't release video one of the things that informed my reticence to release video is the trauma of harassment

and being a victim of stalking because there is a there's a point that Annette makes in the episode is that there's a point when you've experienced some kind of violation trauma where you know it's never going to be the same like from that moment that you know you experience something it's never going to be the same it's always going to inform your decisions your safety your comfort and it evolves it doesn't stay the same it evolves but it's always informing something it's always informing what you do and what you decide to do in some way on some level so I just want to wanted to share that trauma like trauma does inform things you do in your life and as I say it evolves and it's not always a fight or flight like shut down but it does inform what you do throughout

your life yes and that's okay that's part of the journey yes and it's and it's uh it can be a healing part of the journey to recognize oh this is why i'm making these decisions in the in this way as you go through that journey and you you start to become more adept at being able to recognize that that's what's informing this decision that can absolutely be part of your journey to rediscovering yourself. And because we are being candid, I am going to tell everyone that I'm about to hit pause so I can check in on Charlie. So I know like no time passed for you there, but I did want to pause and check in because that's important. And outside of being podcast peoples, podcast peoples, podcasters, as they say, we are friends and I wanted to check in

and we're good, right? Tell everybody you're good. We're good. And I really appreciate that you took that moment to, to just check in that way. Thank you. Of course. Yes. Now we got to move on with trauma. We do. Yeah. We've, we've been in this circle for a minute. Okay. Um, cause the other thing I want to say about trauma and it was something that started come out right at the end of an, of the conversation, or at least in my notes, I did, um, the idea that for women specifically, and, and I mean, men go through their own different experiences with sex and we're not trying to say that everything is you know peachy keen for them and peachy keen what freaking decade am i in now um we understand we understand all genders face different different

experiences and different pressures but for some women who feel that pressure to engage in sex when they don't want to um that could also feel traumatic especially if their bodies aren't responding. So there's physical trauma, there's emotional trauma. Annette was kind of talking about this thing where like the vagina shuts. It's something called vaginismus. So it can be caused by physical trauma or emotional trauma. Literally, the vagina will just kind of clamp down and nothing can get in. And if you're going through this, there are ways to work through that. And our hope is to actually get a pelvic floor physical therapist in to talk about some of these things yeah but especially here in the u.s we don't have conversations about that and if you

had a very i don't want to keep using the word trauma if you had a very difficult childbirth physically or emotionally that can make it harder for you to get excited and for your vagina to get wet and if you're having sex when you're not wet then it's going to lead and you're not using lube that's going to lead to pain and now you've got pain on top of the trauma that was already there and that can cause issues if you were enjoying sex and someone shamed you for enjoying sex that can also have problems later on so when we're talking about trauma it's not just about rape and sexual assault and sexual harassment it's also about these experiences where maybe someone laughed at you like and I've heard this from guys before it's like I don't ever want to

get naked with someone with the lights on because i'm afraid like i've had partners laugh at me in the past and i don't want them to do that to me um so it could be that you enjoyed sex not enough or too much it could be that you didn't orgasm or didn't multi multiple orgasm like there's so many things we bring into the bedroom with us and and how we're reacting to them and what we're being told throughout our lifespans about it could all have this kind of traumatic response for our bodies and and we just wanted to kind of acknowledge that so even if you're like you know so much of what she was saying like didn't you know I heard what Annette was saying but I've never been through that but I understood like my body shutting down there's still something there it doesn't have to

be that you were raped or assaulted or harassed um for you to experience a trauma reaction around sex and so we just especially in this culture yeah where we're so weird about it um so we did want to kind of acknowledge that that trauma piece yeah that's that's very very important and i think to if you're okay with this to come through this journey so we've we've spent a lot a lot of time And right now talking about trauma and acknowledging what contributes to your body's response when it when it thinks that it's going to experience a similar situation. And so I want to highlight that that is a very resilient thing that we each possess, is that our brains and our bodies, first and foremost, do everything they can to protect us. And I think that there is something incredibly powerful about that.

And for some of you, for me, it absolutely resonates, is that, holy shit, I harness that kind of power in in my components and that could be a stepping stone if you if you are on your journey or looking looking forward not like excitement forward but like looking down down the road further you're you're in one spot and looking further down the road in your journey that could be a stepping stone like a foundational piece for you to to begin this journey back to yourself and your empowerment and your, I loved it when Annette said this, your birthright to pleasure. Pleasure is your birthright. And just recognizing how powerful and how beautiful our minds and our bodies are in that way, in that first and foremost, we do what we can to protect

ourselves we may not know it cognitively in the moment it is a physiological reaction um and that's what that's what's happening in in what you were describing with i can't say the word yet because i haven't practiced it that vaginismus that is your body saying this look this feels too familiar i'm i i don't think it's right i'm protecting us yeah and since you know we don't really talk about these kinds of things because when we talk about sexual dysfunction dysfunction we're usually talking about penises not working um it's it's one of those things that you don't understand it so like your body's doing this amazing thing and like protecting itself and but you don't understand it and you're like what the fuck is wrong with me now like

i don't know this is a relatively safe situation why why is my body freaking out um and so again And hopefully we'll have a pelvic floor PT come in to talk about how to move past some of this. But it is. It's a really amazing thing. Your body will protect you, but sometimes you don't understand it. And there's layers to it. And it's one of the things that I say to folks all the time. There is a journey after anything traumatic.

Again, partner laughing at you or chastising you for your reaction to rape, sexual assault, harassment. like whatever the trauma is there is a path towards survivorship and and this is a lens i use and that has been kind of introduced to me by others the path sucks it it is not an easy path and so if you're somewhere on that path or you're ready to start that path know that the journey is going to suck know that and you mentioned this a lot in the episode last last time with annette that it is a non-linear journey and i think that's something we we kind of feel like ah i made it past like check mark a i'll be okay now and then you hear a podcast or there is something familiar and suddenly you're right back you know you're right back where you were a year ago um so we

just want to highlight that that journey does exist um we want to highlight that the journey sucks but we also want to highlight that you can get to a place where things are better yeah yeah And I would say the, the whole, the, the whole journey, there will be pieces, maybe significant pieces of the journey that will suck, but the journey is the journey and it's not, I'm going to say that the journey is not going to be easy and it's going to be challenging in ways you likely aren't able to imagine um but and there will be pieces and time spans of time during that journey that will absolutely suck and you'll be like fuck i don't want to yeah i thought it was past this yeah yeah but i get a lot know that that's a normal part of this non-letting

your journey. Sometimes I like to, when I'm talking with friends trying to be supportive in whatever they're going through, I try to help them visualize one of the things that I offer is just imagine that you're kind of on a Lord of the Rings journey where you're going to go through like beautiful pieces of landscape and then you're going to go through really shitty, cold mountainous terrain. And then you're going to go through the beautiful, like some other beautiful piece of landscape that's a little bit easier to navigate. And then you're going to go through a desert with no oasis, no mirage. It's all mirages at that point kind of thing. So just know that, but know that there is something at the end of that journey that is a different kind

of less tumultuous, tumultuous map for you. That was very descriptive. Thank you. I'm feeling quite creative. You are. Can I take us a little out of this? I can tie it in if you'd like. I have a segue or I can just go there. Would you like to hear the segue? Of course. I work really hard on these in my brain um so my poor classes sometimes when I can't make a segue I'm like segue and I just name the thing yeah um one of the other things that came up that I circled during our notes with Annette which you know not everything gets circled was the problem with not using the word rape and and I'm not throwing it out there to trigger folks um and I'm not trying I'm not trying to throw it out there to be like get over the rape like I understand that some people

struggle with the language but part of what we've talked about off camera with the healing journey is that when you don't name the thing and you are ready to start your journey and you are looking for information on either google or reddit because that's where i know most people go or or social media if you are not spelling rape i saw a social media person writing like they had the you know the text took captions and they said grape and i'm like why are there great what oh like it took me a minute so if i'm if i'm if i've been through this experience and i'm like okay i'm ready i'm ready to start my journey like or i'm going through this thing and if you haven't listened i know we keep saying if you haven't listened to the episodes you should but one of the things

annette talks about is that for a lot of people after the rape they start having a lot of sex and we very very rarely talk about that publicly and so if you were just raped and you're like I'm just gonna have a lot of sex and you're like oh shit something's wrong with me you know let me see if this is normal and you try to look it up but you can't figure out the bastardized way that someone spelled rape with like two q's and an l like I don't even know what that word would look like but anyway like or it's muted in the content or it's muted and I get it like I know that my stuff is constantly being censored on things like instagram youtube not so bad youtube usually if i fight it they bring it back up um but but my stuff on instagram does not come to

the forefront because i spell out the word sex because i don't know how many g's you're putting in your version of sex like s-e-g-g-g-s i don't know if you've seen it spelled that way i have so so i think one of the important things about naming it is that when you name it it makes it more accessible for people who are looking up information about it. So I was just raped and I want to have sex. What's wrong with me? I don't have to worry about figuring out how I'm supposed to misspell raped in order to get that information. I'm also, sorry, did you want to jump in? Yeah, I just, I wanted to give a little bit of grace to the content creators that do wind up having to do that because they are wanting to get the context and

the um the conversation out there without getting shadow banned i so i want to i i'm putting the blame solely on on the platforms and the corporations that control the platforms and then what that does to what we talked about earlier is the social conditioning of shame because they're censoring these words not allowing us to name it in an effective way in a search in an seo type of way where people can find helpful content and not just things that you should that can be traumatic in their own right to watch or to see a search result for but but i i will give content creators that are trying to get this information out there a little bit of grace because they they i have seen videos where they say it they name it but when they are using the

transcript uh or the captioning for their transcript they've corrected it so the word doesn't get flagged um but that contributes the fact that they have to do that contributes to this whole thing that feeds into some of these things that we that we wind up having to unpack on our journey because there are forces beyond our control that are influencing that it's funny when you started spelling out SEO I thought you were spelling out SEX and I was going to be like not on our show oh god that's why I was laughing yeah um I I want to also say that I am I don't know if bothered's the right word I don't think it's strong enough I am true I was going to say I'm truly bothered but it's not even the strong enough word

I am furious that we are less okay with the word rape being out in public than we are with rapists doing the act. Because if you look at how rape is prosecuted, not prosecuted, there's not enough. What was that? Pardoned. Yeah, there's not enough proof, so we're not even going to take the case. It'd be too hard to prove, so we're not even going to take the case. we don't want to ruin his future to incredibly lenient things that we are we are harsher on using the word publicly than we are on the people committing the crime and i don't know if i'll ever

figure out the word that makes me angry that that explains just how furious that is for me because until we can name things we can't start dealing with it so that was it well and it again not naming it also contributes to people whether they people who weren't victims minimizing and not and in many ways not realizing that they're minimizing it because it's so innate in culture in our culture yeah can i uh maybe give us a little bit of a rainbow from the conversation you sure it's only going to come from my side of the microphone yeah not from your island culture um the the incredibly powerful statement of pleasure is your birthright

and and getting to that that really resonated to me or resonated with me because in many ways or in many situations I can be searching for where where can I own my my journey where can I where can I root myself in my power and that statement is one of those statements that can I think help people root themselves in finding their power again, is that I deserve pleasure. I deserve to engage with my pleasure again. I deserve mutual pleasure. I deserve someone who understands my pleasure. I deserve to understand my pleasure. I deserve to explore my pleasure. We are pleasure-seeking living beings and so it is she was absolutely right it is actually our birthright it is our

physiological motivation in many ways we are looking for things that give us pleasure and and it's such an important part of the journey yeah and it's not not to take away from you it's not just charlie's right to have all those things it's everybody who's listening it's your right to have all those things yes i believe in everyone's birthright so if you were saying it and being like well that's great for charlie but like i don't deserve that i would ask you to question why you think you don't because i'm sure there's someone going i don't i don't i don't i don't deserve it either because of what you were taught or what's happened to you and so we just want to reiterate charlie deserves it too we all do though yeah um but if there was

a piece of you that heard her saying that and went that sounds great for her but not me i would encourage you to look into what that's about yeah thank you thank you for clarifying that because as i was talking i i was using i a lot but i was it was meaning it in a your uh listener self-reflecting i and not i charlie because i've already rooted in that through lots of work so before we wrap up because i know you're about to do that i think I'll say it one more time if you haven't listened to the episode with Annette please do if you like what you

hear on hers I've done a couple of guest spots on her episode of Talk Sex with Annette one on virginity and one on common questions we get from men about sexual health so definitely give our stuff a listen to definitely show her some love as well

but I just wanted to also thank you Charlie for being you today. So thanks, Dr. Sue. I appreciate you always. All right. Well, good convo there. I do want to thank you all for joining us on this episode of Unzipping Taboos. We hope today's episode maybe sparked some thoughts, some considerations, some grace for yourself, and we'll open up some conversations worth having. Remember that your curiosity is the key to breaking down barriers and embracing a healthier

understanding of sex and relationships and yourself as a sexual being. So if you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, leave a review, share a comment, and subscribe Comment if anything in our conversation today sparked something for you and you have some thoughts and you want to engage with us, please do. We're always here.

And share it with someone who you feel would benefit from hearing this or any other episode. Got a question or a topic you want us to dive into? Reach out to us via the link in the episode description. And with all of that,

we want to give a very special shout out to Ali O'Brien for our incredible theme music. Thank you so much, Ali. I think it'll provide a good smile at the end of this episode for listeners. And until next time, keep the conversation going,

keep unzipping those taboos, and everyone, take care. Thank you for watching!