Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex - Breaking the Ice: Why is it so hard to talk about sex?

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Welcome to the pilot episode of "Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex with Dr. Sue & Charlie." In this kickoff episode, Dr. Sue and Charlie introduce themselves and dive into one of the biggest questions about sex: Why is it so difficult to talk about? From cultural and societal taboos to personal insecurities and fear of judgment, we explore the many reasons why conversations about sex are often avoided or kept behind closed doors. Dr. Sue shares her professional insights from the field of sex education, while Charlie shares relatable insights & commentary on the topic. Together, they uncover the barriers that keep us silent and discuss why it's important to break the ice and start talking openly about sex. Join us as we lay the groundwork for a series of honest, non-judgmental conversations aimed at breaking down taboos, clearing up misconceptions, and creating a space where everyone can feel comfortable discussing sex. Whether you're curious, nervous, or just eager to learn more, this episode is the perfect start to our journey together. If you have a topic or question you’d like to hear us talk about, please submit your ideas here: Show suggestions

Hey everyone, welcome to our first episode of Unzipping Taboos, Candid Conversations About Sex with Dr. Sue and Charlie. Together we're going to dive deep into the topics around sex and sexuality that you're curious about but maybe too shy to talk about. No judgment here, real talk, so zip down and let's get candid. Hey Dr. Sue. Hey Charlie. How's it going?

It's going well. I'm so excited to be doing the pilot and I think it's important that we say again because this is not our first attempt at the pilot. Why do we have to share that? Because the whole thing's about being candid. And transparent, yes. Yes, so yes, I'm very excited to redo this and get it out to people. How are you doing? I'm doing well. I am also excited about this, about our episode and what we're going to focus on today. So before we get into that, or if we want to share right now, do you want to give a little bit about your background? Yeah. I'll be doing this in each of the episodes just for people who kind of don't find us

with episode one. I'm actually going to do a little bit deeper dive on my background for this first episode because I think it's a little bit important. So I have a bachelor's a master's degree in health education, so I come from a health background, and then I decided to really focus in for my PhD, and I have a PhD in human sexuality education. I have been working in academia for a long time, but in addition to my work in academia, I've also always worked kind of outside of academia. I think it's, I think it's really important that folks are working in the real world not just in that in that ivory tower so I've worked in reproductive health clinics I have written textbooks I have a few years ago I started really wanting to reach more humans

than I could get in my classroom so a few years ago I started doing hey Dr. Sue which is where people submit an anonymous question anonymous sex questions to me and then every Sunday I answer them and it's posted on YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and X and we have a link to that in in the show description so this is just part of kind of the journey for me was to start from a real place of like learning and knowledge for me and then start sharing it out with students and now sharing it out with everyone who's listening and so that's my I guess that wasn't as long as I thought it was going to be. This other person joining me today and on all episodes is Charlie. Charlie is going to be our open-minded guide through the intimate and intriguing world of

sex relationships and basically everything in between. So tell us a little bit about you, Charlie. Well, Dr. Sue and I have been friends for many years and by virtue of our background, it sparked many a candid conversation together just between us and as you were exploring this space and continuing your education space with your students it kind of came up like you know where else are we going to get this information if we're not in a classroom and I think they shared to they shared with you where they saw this information before they got in your class um so there there's that i am someone that really enjoys challenging taboos and social norms and you know bringing to the forefront like why why aren't we talking about this there's really

nothing scary about it it's something that many of us do um sorry there can't i yeah there there can be things scary about it but is that really because it is taboo that we have been conditioned to the taboo nature of this subject and and our interactions with it and all of the different ways we are socially conditioned to think about sex and sexuality and relationships and sexual health so throughout our conversations and the candid nature of them and our friendship we thought hey why not do this together and bring it to to as many people as we can through this medium and I think it really makes it a little bit it helps make it equitable access to the information makes it equitable right because it's not only existing in a classroom now yeah and I think that was a

really big push for me when I started doing the online work was that I realized that the only people who are getting the information from me and not that I'm the only sex educator that's out there but people were only getting the information from me if they happen to be lucky enough to be sitting in my classroom or at a live event because I do do events out in the community if they weren't in those spaces and they weren't getting information from me and again I'm not the only source out there but a lot of this I'm actually going to blame on my students because I would have these conversations semester after semester and they would just come to me with these ideas and like where where are you getting this from

and they were getting it from social media and podcasts and things like that and some of the information was great and some of it not so much and so I would I would critique some of what they were hearing and they're like well why aren't you out there you know if you're if you have so much to say where's your podcast um so here it is to answer all the questions over here we are yeah but they had a great point and and i know that in the q a that i've still been doing i still have students from years ago reaching out to me and saying hey like i have a question now and you know being able to access a source of information and hopefully be entertained a little bit um is it is helpful and i think it's something that we need so we're gonna throw our hats in

the ring of people who are kind of doing this of the podcast world i think another thing too an important thing to point out here is you know we've mentioned your students and your experience with your students and there's an implication there of a certain demographic and that's not really what we're aimed at we are aimed at the spectrum of humans humanity and aging and ages because everybody it's it's rare that there are people who aren't curious about how to talk about this on whatever level they are either interested or engaging with sex and sexual health yeah right it is not just college students it is everybody because this impacts everybody yeah and i'm glad you brought that up um i used to live in the washington dc area and when i was there i was

doing a lot of work with um seniors and health care workers who worked with seniors and and really I did a lot of work across the lifespan and I know you and I have had this conversation about the fact that older folks are very stereotyped about and not being sexually active and how do we challenge that how do we get them information because they may not know where to get that either so yeah this is really open to anyone who can listen to the podcast I don't know since we've been marked as sexually explicit content I don't know if that limits who can access it one of the things I want to do point out that we there is a link in the description if you would like to submit either a question you want us to answer or you want to

submit a show idea because we really want this to be about what you folks want to hear I can talk for hours about topics that may not be of interest to everyone and so we really do want to make this a show for you folks who are listening yeah and to that end it doesn't I don't want our listeners to feel like it has to be some kind of educational let's this is the specific topic if you're watching tv or you're listening to something and there is a nugget that you heard that made you think about it in a way that's like i want to you know unpack this we're open that's that's the stuff that we also want to engage with as well because so much of in my opinion our attitudes towards sexual health and conversations surrounding sex and intimacy are so socially conditioned

through the ways that we consume information and given the technology advances and the additional channels of information that we all have access to that has really broadened the scope of okay where where is the essence of what I need to engage with yeah and I think we we're going to talk a little bit about that about kind of what makes this hard to talk about and why we need to have this podcast I do want to come back to our title just for a hot second so yeah unzapping taboos we've definitely talked about that these are candid conversations and so these episodes are not edited I mean they may be edited a wee bit if something funky happens but they're candid conversations because conversations about sex can be super awkward and you're going to probably

fumble for words and you're going to laugh at what may seem really inappropriate moments and so you're going to hear us misspeak you there's there's going to be things like that that happen But we want to remind you that some of this can be difficult to talk about, especially if you've never done it before. And so we're trying to model how to get through. It could be a very weird thing to have an open conversation about. And I think that is important to highlight because it can be very awkward to talk about if you're not used to it. But this candid conversation format also highlights it can be awkward even if you are used to talking about it. I have literally stood on stage and spoken to hundreds of people at live events and I still trip up.

I've been doing this for literally decades. So, yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. There is no perfection here. So and that's we're humans. We're going to screw it up. And I tell my students that all the time. They they joke with me. They they get to about midpoint in the semester and they realize that my answer to everything is communication. And they joke. They do. It becomes a running joke. um but but I tell them like you're you're gonna you're human you're gonna screw this up you've you're carrying all the baggage into the conversation with you so don't expect it to be perfect and I know that yeah I know some of my students when they're trying to talk to

partners or potential partners and especially if they're doing it by text and I have I have feelings about text I'm actually that's probably a future episode yeah so I'm not against it just for the record yeah um but they'll spend hours like crafting the perfect message you're running it by friends and screenshotting it and what do you think and i think we need to realize that we're never going to do this perfectly and we are going to screw up and i think we want to give you permission to do it because we're going to do it ourselves that way absolutely absolutely so that brings us to the whole premise of this and the unzipping the taboo And we wanted to highlight in this episode, not just us and why we thought this podcast was necessary, but what are some of the contributing factors that make this difficult to talk about or have people shying away from having conversation?

You know, just why is this so taboo, Dr. Sue? Because we don't ever give it that space. we don't for a lot of us we never learned about it in school and I desperately want to do an episode on the state of sex education in the United States in the future so I'm not going to spend a lot of time there but we never learned the language I've worked with adults who have never said the word penis out loud they don't know their own body parts like I spend a lot of time talking to folks about the difference between a vagina and a vulva so there's this fear that they don't know they're talking about because they've never been taught how to talk about so there's just a lack

of language there's a lack of training and then there's all this other stuff that people bring in culture 100 has an impact on that the families we were raised in what we saw as appropriate in media around us and and i know that watching the next generation come up they're seeing things very differently than i did i mean social media didn't exist when i was a child and when there there's something on the TV my parents didn't think was appropriate I was asked to leave the room and now they're getting messages from media they're getting messages from their friends religion can play an impact on this and just our our our own personal cultural background so there's that U.S. culture but then also the culture that we were raised in as individuals all of that all

of that can contribute to that there are some people who are absolutely raised to talk about this openly and honestly and I think I need to say that now I know I've been talking for a little bit here but we're gonna have to talk a little bit and grow stereotypes because there's always going to be that one person that it doesn't apply to and if you were that person who was raised in an open honest place where you can talk about sex and have conversations about it fantastic and we'd love to hear from you but keep in mind that that's not the norm in this country and in this country we're not we're bringing a sense of shame in because we were told to have shame around the subject or we're bringing in the sense of I don't know how to do this because it was always a secret

conversation and something not to be discussed openly and you know talking about the layers gender expectations of who's the gatekeeper of sex and who gets to take sex and you know all of these layers so we have a lot of layers to to unzip through so to speak don't you think dr sue yeah i love the way you tied that back in this this is why we keep charlie around but yeah i mean i would challenge people to think about what when you think about having a sexual conversation or let me change out a conversation about sex with a friend with a roommate with a family member as appropriate with a doctor with a partner like think about where your hesitation might be coming from and then let's think about ways that we can kind of get past that and

normalize a lot of this so that's really one of the goals that we have and again i know we keep saying like if you have an idea submit it through the through the link there is that link in the description if there's something you're like yes like why why do i do this or or why did i learn this throw that in throw that in as a suggestion we're happy to read those and respond absolutely there is no unpack unzipping this again there's no unzipping this without all of you and you know the things that you're that you're going through and that you're trying to unpack for yourself or you may just be at the start of this journey or you may have had an aha moment and you you are just looking for that language to reinforce where you are in your journey right now and we want to

engage with that you know we we're not we're dr sue has that has the background and has that expertise but also this is conversational it's right there in the title and there is no conversation without you all listening so we appreciate you folks tuning into this first episode hope you'll listen to the other ones that are coming out i don't think we've picked a day that we're going to release things but you'll be able to find the episodes as they roll out engage with us with us send us ideas send us questions and hopefully you'll see your your question being highlighted in a future show yeah yeah absolutely so i do i want to echo that i want to thank all of you for joining us on this first episode of unzipping taboos candid conversations about sex with dr

sue and me charlie we hope this sparks some new thoughts and and will open up dialogues worth having you know in your circles and remember your curiosity is really the key to breaking down these barriers and embracing a healthier understanding of sex sex health and relationships so if you enjoyed this pilot don't forget to subscribe leave a review give us your topic ideas share it with someone who you feel might need or want to hear this and um and again if you've got a question or a topic you want us to dive into reach to us reach out to us via the link in the episode description so until next time keep the conversation going and keep unzipping those taboos take care