Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex - Consent Isn’t Optional - Even When It’s Clickable

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

In this episode of Unzipping Taboos, we step into a messy, very public story to ask a much bigger question: what happens when someone’s private sexual expression is exposed without their consent?We���re not here for the headlines—we’re here for the ethics.Using the recent coverage surrounding Bryon Noem as a starting point, we unpack the tension between privacy and public curiosity in a digital world where “private” doesn’t always stay that way. We talk about what consent really means when it comes to sharing intimate content, why outing someone—regardless of who they are—crosses a line, and how quickly media can turn personal expression into spectacle.From there, we zoom out.How do gender expectations shape the way we react to what people do in private—especially when men step outside traditional norms? Why is femininity still used as a punchline? Why are some behaviors pathologized, while others are quietly ignored? And who gets protected… versus exposed?We also take a hard look at media framing—how women are often pulled into narratives about men’s behavior, how headlines shift accountability, and how easily bias hides in plain sight.This is a conversation about privacy, power, consent, and the stories we tell about gender. No shame. No clickbait. Just a candid look at what’s underneath it all—and an invitation to start noticing it in the world around you.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 Unzipping Taboos, Candid Conversations About Sex with Dr. Sue and Charlie. We're here to explore the questions you've always been curious about but don't always feel comfortable asking out loud. No judgment, no shame, just open, honest conversation. So zip down and let's get candid. Today is going to be a bit topical with what's going on in current events regarding Kristi gnomes husband and uh him being outed um by a person who he was interacting with um and and

then the conversation surrounding these types of things um so before we unzip that meant that long zipper so long zipper um not that size matters never no i'm i don't deal in absolutes um Dr. Sue, how's it going? It's going well, Charlie. How are you? It's going good. This is one of our punchier intros we've done in a while. It is.

It is. Because I think we're all so excited to do something that's not, that's topical, but not clickbaity. And I think we'll talk more about that. We'll get, we have a whole thing. Well, we have, we have a whole episode. We have a whole plan for like the first five minutes after that. Yeah, we'll see where it goes.

i love i love i love that brooklyn sensibility it just goes to shit it all just goes to shit on that note would you like to give our listeners a little bit about your background i'm gonna try to give a little bit more okay than i usually do but i'll probably fail just because it's funny because i have conversations about this all the time and people like you need to tell more like what if this is the first time someone's listening and i get that i i just also feel like it's more important to have the conversation but i guess i should explain why i'm part of the conversation like why is my name in the title maybe so i'm dr sue um i have a bachelor's and master's in health education so i absolutely come out from sex from

like a health perspective i do have um i have lots of certifications none of which i really feel the need to give all all those letters after my name um you can look them up uh but i do have a PhD in human sexuality education which is not where I got into the field I got into the field before that actually because people really like people kept wanting to talk about sex but we weren't doing it in a way that was respectful and like giving it space so when it was time to get a PhD I was like okay like maybe I'll do this thing um so the PhD in human sexuality I then went the academia route which is my day job um which i love where i talk about sex yeah and i also do things like publish and publish textbooks and do the academia thing um you always laugh when i do

that um because you try to downplay you because we because because you and you know like i write i write books and i do and i do this other stuff so no big deal but it is a big deal i go yeah um i decided i looked up the date on this by the way it's june something so about five years ago in june i just look up the date um i started doing a lot more because i was starting to feel it's just a thing like i'm really proud of the work i do in academia but i for a long time i don't feel like i was doing enough outside academia so about five years ago i started doing this thing called Hey Dr. Sue where folks could submit their anonymous sex questions. You keep changing color and it's freaking me out. For those of you not watching. Really? I look the

same to me. The color on Charlie's screen is changing and I feel like I'm hallucinating. Anyway, I do this thing where folks can submit an anonymous sex question to my website and then every Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern, I answer it all over social media and on Medium and Substack and YouTube and I'll include the link to that because I do feel like this information is every I mean people have questions about sex and sex comes up everywhere and today's episode talking about Christine Noem's husband by the way I love that we're naming it her husband because so often we center the guy but it's fascinating that it's his behavior and we're not centering it but we're gonna get to all that but because this stuff is pervasive in our life like sex is sex is everywhere

our sex questions are everywhere um i felt like that wasn't enough so we started doing the podcast almost more than a year ago it's been more than yeah yeah um and so if you've got questions for me i know we're going to do this at the end but i also want to do it here because this may bring up questions today about language about what's considered typical or non-typical behavior for those of you listening there are lots of hair and quotes going on um so if you have a question for me you can submit it through my website if you have a question for us you can also submit it there's a separate link if you're not sure who it should go to i read everything so just send it to one of them and you can say i'm not sure if this is like a you or a podcast but we we want to

address the questions that are happening for you which is actually how this episode came up i have been having a lot of conversations with folks i've had a lot of reporters reach out to me on this one and i i find that fascinating yeah i didn't really love the angle they were going for so i didn't respond um but outside of the reporters i've also had a lot of private conversations with folks who have questions and so that's where this episode was born but this podcast is podcast is not just me that might be my longest intro ever um the podcast is not just me um when i decided it was time to like take on the world and address this i realized i needed a co-pilot of sorts or co-host i guess would be the a coat unzip no that doesn't sound right i'll have to figure that out it's a

different type of episode that's a different episode um and that's where charlie came on board and so for those of you who do and don't know charlie though i feel like everyone knows you now um for those of you who do and don't know charlie she is our curious co-host who is always ready to explore the ins and outs of of all of these sexuality topics and how they impact people. Yeah. But you should tell us more about you. I am just that I am a curious person by nature. I also am someone who likes to challenge and who has always challenged what's been expected of me in society as a woman. And, and just I'm trying to understand how we human together that I've been saying that a lot lately, and the things that we do to each other, how we show

up for each other, how we challenge or combat, what is the root of what's driving us, and trying to decondition that in some sense, because at the end of the day, all of us have beating hearts, have lungs, have eyes, um, ears. Um, they all may function a little differently, but we're all made of the same stuff. And so why I, I have never really understood some of the ways that, that society has chosen, which I think is also a keyword chosen to other, um, communities do othering to certain communities, certain genders, certain, just certain microcosms of humanity. And I just, I really like challenging that and having discussions around it and getting to the root of why, why do you believe that? Why is that something that informs you? How did that

inform your principles? Do you have principles? And what are they? Those kinds of things. And do you actually stick to them? right right because those that's the other thing a lot of this stuff ebbs and flows as we grow and as we gain new experiences um and so it's just staying open and curious um throughout your lifetime here so that you can be a good human to the people around you and and beyond so that's me all right christy gnome's husband christy gnome's husband i want to own first that i um am in i am appreciating this enjoying i'm enjoying the scrutiny that christy's having go through. I, however, do not in principle agree with how her husband was outed.

Yep. That was the thing for us is we didn't, if you notice, we don't really do a lot of things that are, I almost said seasonal. Topical is the word you used at the top of the show. We were very cognizant when we were planning out how to do this podcast that we weren't going to clickbait because there's enough of that bullshit and that we wanted this to be substance and we wanted this to have a long shelf life and if we're just talking about the topics of the day we we lose a lot and there are enough people who are doing that whether or not they're qualified there are enough people doing that um but this was different because this played into something we've talked about before which is the idea of people being outed um we've talked and and about

the shame of doing something that's atypical I hate the word there's air quotes for those of you listening or something atypical so for us it was less about the humans involved though I know we're going to talk about that because there's some shit we need to talk about yeah yeah um but if you're if you're listening to this thinking like yeah we're gonna roast this guy and make fun of him like wrong just this is not only the wrong episode this is the wrong podcast um so go go on your merry way and that's just not what we're going to do here because we want to talk about a couple of the issues the first of which is the fact that he was outed without consent and that is a huge problem um it ties back into some of the stuff we've done about the sextortion and

the idea of revenge porn and this idea that we can take what people are doing privately and and the absolute i just lost the word the betrayal of i thought this was a private communication and now it's being spread literally across the world yeah i don't know if you want to chime in on that yeah i i mean that's that's really it because so many people when when things like like his would would you call it a fetish what what would be the right time i don't know that it's a fetish i don't know him well enough to know if it's a fetish or if this is him living out a fantasy or if this is him exploring what it might feel like to be another gender like i don't know and so i i would probably put it under fetish if it's a cross-dressing thing so with this type

of experience that he likes to indulge in i'll say maybe that way okay um and hopefully that's that's all right um so many people a lot of will say i don't care what goes on behind closed doors and we all know that's a crock of shit especially for public figures because because this was going on behind closed doors this was through presumably a platform that um that he paid into to have some level of privacy. Now, again, this could be justified by some as a form of activism i don't know um against christy and the things that she's been that she's done but the the concept here is privacy and and we all if you if you have gone through a digital platform that you've subscribed to that you presume things will be kept within your profile

and those you're interacting with will be kept private then then to have your your video this is that revenge porn thing right it's um it's it ventures into the not okay column for me yeah and i so there's two thoughts for me like one is that when you agree you know it when you go into an agreement with someone that something's going get private and it's not kept private that's a problem yeah we we talked about this we did an episode on revenge porn we talked about it um i know i'm updating a textbook that i'm working on and i think it's the first time i've ever typed the word sextortion in my life um but it falls into sextortion it falls into it falls into revenge porn it falls into that same idea of

there was an inherent sense of privacy and this was violated there's also a small piece of me that thinks like we've also talked about this if you're doing something online you have to expect it's going to come out at some point so so a little bit of like yes in a perfect world nothing you do online would ever be released without your knowledge right would never be shared without your permission your your trust would never be violated you never feel a sense of betrayal but also we don't live in that perfect world and so yeah i do think we kind of have to balance both of those pieces because um while we see platforms i don't want to name some of them but while we see platforms giving over information about women's conversations

about ending pregnancy and everyone's like well they should have known better they were doing it on a digital space well then he arguably he should have known better he was doing it in a digital space right so part of me wants to protect his privacy because he had the right to that privacy like you said it was a subscription service like there should have been an expectation of privacy But also we don't live in that world. And I feel like he's facing consequences that a lot of majority women have to face where their information is being given over to the authorities, where it's being published and their careers are being threatened or their lives are being threatened. Yeah. It's being exploited. Yeah. Right. And yeah. So so there is definitely the part of me that for him feels outraged that his sense of. Privacy was was violated. But again, I don't want to blame the victim, but we don't live in that world where it's perfect and your privacy is always protected. And I say that knowing some of my friends have been doxxed. Like I say that knowing that there is a risk to being online, even though even the rest of the things that we do, I get that. But in the end, I would like to have had his privacy be protected. So it's a lot of mixed emotions on this. there is one emotion let alone like two at the same time for those of you who know me

well and i want to go back to what i was saying because i i derail or uh detracted a little bit um this i don't care what goes beyond go goes on behind closed doors if that were really true then these stories wouldn't be headlines yep yep because he was he and others who have done this who have been outed to their their close their acquaintances their professional lives um celebrities who have gone through something similar if if society really didn't care what goes on behind closed doors then why are you clicking why are you reading why are you engaging with the content reporters only do stories that they think is that they think are going to get opened or read or listen to or whatever it may be right um and

and again i know one of the reasons i i said this at the top the reason i didn't want to work with the reporters was from the way they were asking the questions they wanted to like sensationalize it um because they know that that works and that works because you read it and you open it and you interact with it and you like it and you share it and you all the things that we do with it in this modern world yeah i get that there's like a you want to peek behind the curtain and see what's going on with people i get that like but also if you're like oh why are we running stories about this because people are responding to them yeah and and all all of media except us so far all of media is driven by ad revenue. That's why I was like, not us yet. Hopefully never. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, but so when advertisers buy into networks and outlets, they're expecting a certain amount of exposure and engagement from consumers. And so that is why we get these clickbaity stories. we get these stories that sensationalize private acts but um yeah okay so we definitely talked about the outing issue and we want to make sure that we're being really clear it's funny because yeah go real quick i want to say that also this was not criminal behavior presumably with because we don't know we like i just i say that not knowing the whole story um but what he was engaging in was not criminal report yeah what's been reported so far what he was engaging in was not criminal activity we should probably i just realized we assume everyone

knows what we're talking about yes i did assume that we both did i think we should probably talk about what happened let's yeah let's brian what triggered this yeah let's his name is brian um and we're going to talk about how it's being phrased that the fact that we're referring to as christy gnome's husband instead of brian gnome um we should probably talk about what would happen because i feel like we jumped right into this with the idea that everyone knew what it was we did okay all right so to to recap really or give the high level overview people can't go look at the details but i just realized we were skipping all of the details yeah yeah so the daily mail last week released an article that they had uh photos messages and um audio of brian gnome

interacting recording okay interacting um in an online site that that he paid for um and those were released um and and since then given gnome's uh activity political activity her position her proximity to other political figures this this becomes an interesting story especially given the policies that she's a part of and that she fucking shouts from the mountaintop um so so that's that's what triggered this episode and and i do want to reiterate as well and dr sue feel free to jump in this is not necessarily about that part the political part what we are honing in on is the the lack of consent for the release of this content that presumably was was going to stay private um and then but as we just said earlier like when

when women interact digitally and their stuff gets released the conversation is always well they should have known that this was a possibility so there's a little bit of that here too but overall this is this um this is sextortion potentially um this is being outed without consent um broadly now again personally i don't mind the scrutiny on christine ohm yeah and i'm gonna own that i'm gonna i'm gonna fucking out because i that's that's that's that yeah we we do there's other things there are other parts so the other thing we want to point out was that there was nothing illegal that was happening i don't know if he was in dc when it was happening they're from south carolina i don't know if it was in

dakota south dakota two very different states um sorry south carolina i didn't mean to have you own them um i don't think there are rules about what he was he was an adult the person he was talking to was an adult end of story so we're not going to get into legal pieces of that unless he happened to live in a state where it was illegal to do stuff like this but as much as we're pushing those laws right now it's illegal um we're not going to get into the potentially security issues of this having lived in dc and having a lot of folks who live in places with like security background uh security clearances yeah clearances and having to go through security checks and how this was not flagged is definitely something that my part of my brain was like what yeah that's not

what our show is about there are other shows that do that um we want to talk about well we've already talked about it this idea of outing someone without consent um so apparently he did have the boot the fake boobs um and hot pink pants if i remember correctly so there's there's a few things that we want to talk about um moving forward if that's good okay and one is the fact that we are so we don't know him i i don't i'm not i'm not his therapist i'm not anyone's therapist um i i have i've never and you know i don't know what's going on with him to me what this sounds like is someone who was enjoying dressing like another gender because it made him feel happy or it made him feel sexy or it made him help relax which is what we call cross-dressing

um we used to call it your favorite favorite word to pronounce it used to be referred to as transvesticism i was gonna i was gonna be proud and say it but then i got nervous okay um it's not the easiest word so we've kind of moved away from that language and now we use the term cross-dressing where um we're talking about someone who's dressing in another gender's clothing for sexual satisfaction or for relaxation or because it just it makes them feel good about themselves i don't know if this is a i think i might feel female and identify female and i want to i don't know them all enough to have these conversations um that is something different where people might be exploring what it's like to be another gender online because online is a

place where you can do it without your friends knowing until the daily mail gets a hold of it um for some people it starts as like i don't feel comfortable in my body it doesn't feel congruent with how i feel about myself you know i look down i see my genitals i don't feel congruent um and so i'm going to start exploring dressing in another gender to see if that makes me feel better i don't get the sense that that's what that is um we are trying hard in this country some people not us are trying hard in this country to make that kind of behavior criminal yeah um but to me this sounds a lot more like cross-dressing and so what we want to we want to talk about the idea of the fact that he was outed like that is still an issue regardless of

how you feel about christy gnome regardless of how you feel about republicans and their policies this is a situation where someone was doing something and they were outed without their consent um the other issue here is that we are shaming him for doing something that we don't see is normal and that's part of our anger as well yeah um because so the thing about cross-dressing is it's way easier to diagnose in men because it's really obvious when a man's dressed like a woman the big boobs the hot pants like skirts yeah it's lingerie yeah pearls well i know some guys who anyway sorry folks we had a little technical difficulty there and I still do our editing and I'm still really bad at it so I don't know how smooth that's going to come out but um we were

talking about um the fact that this person was being shamed for oh we were talking about how hard it is to diagnose women with cross-dressing because if I which I do every day I go to work in pants no one's going to look at me and be like oh you're cross-dressing you know if I wear a suit jacket no one's going to look at me and be like oh you're cross-dressing so it is it is much easier for us to say when men do it because it is much more obvious um and and as much as i'd like to say like we're we're we're clearing the path for there to be less gender lines we're not doing it both ways like we've definitely made it easier for you know if a woman's walking around in bhakta shorts no one's going to be like oh cross-dressing

so it is easier to diagnose or to see because i don't diagnose it is easier to identify cross dressing in men um we also come down harder on them because they are straying in this culture and i'm going to let you take this piece this is all about culture and scripts and things like that because they are being less manly that and that's really the driving force right there's there's presumably more shame and the reason this has caught on is because he's being feminine he is playing in a in a feminine circle um with with breasts and you know wanting to feel feel that way and and to my mind you know just being an observer of of all things the things that catch on

and the shame that's exerted is when people are doing something feminine or something that appears homosexual. Those are the times when people get shamed. The loudest and the most sustained

noise. And that's really... so it's those times when when people are engaging in being more feminine or being homosexual or or trans or appearing trans those are the times that these kinds of stories become the loudest for the longest amount of time or if a woman is um is having sex yes or if she's not acting like a traditional woman so if she's being bossy or she's not taking care of other people's feelings if like i think about how we talk about jasmine crockett because she's amazing because she's not

sitting there being like oh let me make you feel better about yourself it's like no you're going to answer these questions we're going to talk about these facts so anytime a woman crosses those traditional gender roles it we also slam her back into place because she's not being she's not accommodating she's not being feminine she's she's not taking care of everybody and that's and that's supposed to be a woman's role please note all the sarcasm yes yes yes yes so that's that's one of the things that i find the most interesting um frustratingly so about these types of stories like i mean even going back to the beginning of um of the popularity of kim kardashian that was triggered by sex tape yeah i forgot about that yeah yeah um and and i'll i'll

say i'll say good for her for building an empire off of that like but but there's always that punch line with her career yeah um and what she's done for her for herself and for her family um so i think that's another piece of this is how long will this follow him how long will this be a punch line in his life well and if you read the press and i don't usually read a lot of press around this but if you read a lot of press excuse me um apparently his neighbors are being very supportive but that's publicly um we don't really know what's going to happen when the you know if he's going to be ostracized in his community um and they're trying to make it as if they're targeting her and so she's gonna i think she's gonna bear the brunt of this more

than he will christy yeah but i just want to talk but that's that that's the part for me where it's like that's where you're a public figure right um i do want to go back to the cross-dressing thing just for one second just to make sure that we're clearing up any stereotypes that exist there's this idea that people who cross-dress are like secretly gay and that's not at all what the data supports now when it comes to data with cross-dressing the thing we need to keep in mind is that we have data on people who decided to come in and talk about this yeah and most people don't be like oh my cross-dressing is a problem i should go talk to someone it's usually because they got caught or because they wanted to get caught like they knew wife was coming home and

they were wearing her bra um and they knew they were going to get caught or they're going because they were threatened if you don't go to therapy we're ending this marriage or i'm outing you or whatever it may be um so most people who go in to get help for this are usually there not because they want to be but because they were told they have to for whatever reason um so i want to i want to acknowledge that the information we have is incredibly limited um but of those people who do go in to do this to do treatment treatment to come to terms with i hate the idea that we're trying to treat it because there's nothing wrong with it um to understand it so maybe they want to understand right well if your partner's forcing you into therapy then they want it fixed yeah um

but they're they're usually white straight men so this this isn't about being gay this isn't about being trans again not that i know of i don't know him i haven't read the transcripts i don't know the thing so i just want to clear up this idea that some people may have that's like oh well he secretly wants to be gay? Probably not. I'd say no. I'm willing to bet that there are probably lots of politicians, male politicians, who are wearing bras and underwear under their three-piece suit. It is way more common than I think we know. We just don't have the data on it. So I do just want to acknowledge that. Yeah. And another piece of this for me is a little bit of what I was alluding to just a moment ago is that the sensationalism around this and around other

other public figures who people may assume are gay or or some some part of some marginalized community they take part like they i don't want to be reductive and say cosplay but they might they might privately be in some circle and so when they're doing certain things that becomes the punchline so it also perpetuates femininity and homosexuality as a punchline and it's not it's definitely not all right so i feel like we got a couple of the bullets sorry we've got thrown out we've had a couple tick issues on this one we appreciate you folks sticking to it um i think we're having some weather induced internet issues so so we're a little scattered thank you though for for keeping with us we're gonna keep plowing through so yeah

i got like three of my bullets done i have two and a half more um so unless you want to go somewhere specific on this next one no go for it i think one of the things that's pissing both of us off well i know it's pissing both i don't have to say i think i've been in the conversations it's the hypocrisy yes of what someone is about in public versus what they do in private you want to you want to be a freak man be a freak but don't legislate against others abilities to be a freak right um you want to come down as like traditional values but you couldn't find a traditional value with like a magnifying glass and a thousand years to do it like don't talk to us about traditional values so for us it's i i know that's one of the things that's bothering us is the hypocrisy

yeah yeah because presumably i mean they've been you know using using this headline as as our kind of kate or our trigger here um presumably he he either has no problem with or supports how she's gone about her political career and her political career is pretty oppressive it's not pretty it's been fucking oppressive and then especially her time as um as whatever she was um yeah um and the things that they've done to families and so there there's a presumption here that that there's there's complicity and i think i think that's the hypocrisy that's why we assume the hypocrisy piece here is because he again presumably doesn't have any problems with the ways she has forged her career and the stances she's taken he may be a full-on supporter of them

Yeah. And the fact that now she's asking for privacy when she's afforded no privacy to citizens of the country. This is not new folks. Some of the people who who wave the flag of conservative values and I'm not attacking conservative. I have some dear friends in my life who who hold those values and hold true to those values and they but they don't try to inflict them on others. It's it's their core belief and that's how they run their lives. The number of times I know, I have known people who work in the abortion world, where they know that there's a very specific, let me just give the specifics without giving names. I have a friend who used to do a lot of work, trying to support folks who are trying to get access, legal access to abortion in the state of Pennsylvania. And it was pretty well known that the leader of that group took his daughter across state lines to have an abortion. And then the very next day was back on those lines, picketing and threatening and trying to intimidate women. um we hear folks who have these conservative values talk about you know being straight and having a wife and we won't even talk about how many times they cheat on said wife um or the number of times large groups of these folks get together in a town and grinding grinder crashes this just this it's it's the double state it's the hypocrisy that i think is eating away at a lot of folks here it's like here's this woman who has done these atrocious things um and has threatened people and they're like i mean we don't know how many people have died while in custody

and while not getting due process and then to say to turn around and be like some privacy please um you know upholding american values while your husband does things that a lot of people would say are not i would argue that yeah it's part of american values as being your true self but But I think it's the hypocrisy. That hypocrisy is not new. And I think we need to acknowledge it. I do think there is a difference between that hypocrisy and learning. And I don't know if you want to say anything more about the hypocrisy before I move on.

I don't think so. I think it's, I think that's, I think we covered it. Yeah. What we see happen sometimes with folks who hold pretty traditional values is that someone in their family comes out um or someone in their family goes goes through an experience or something happens to them or whatever it may be i'm thinking about people whose kids come out gay and suddenly they they change their stance yeah that to me is not hypocrisy that is learning yeah do i wish they'd learned it earlier so maybe they weren't actively involved in passing policies

that threaten people's safety yes am i glad that they are learning like it is very powerful when you meet someone and you're like oh i love you and what you do challenges my values and i'm going to stick to loving you and re-examining my values that is growth that i don't think gets celebrated enough yeah i would like us to not have to live in a world where you have to know someone personally to do that but to me that is not hypocrisy that is what we should do as humans we should learn we should reevaluate and we should become more evolved yes 100 yeah 100 that's that's that is i mean if you're staying the same you're missing out on a lot of things yeah um go ahead no and i can see where some people be like you're you know you're you're

alienating our values it's it's it's growth it's to me there's a difference between I met someone I learned their story I now understand it better I'm going to reevaluate my values versus I'm just going to say these things out loud in public while I do these things in private yeah so that's the that's the part yeah right and then I have 108 270 degrees let's say I want to go 270 okay love the specificity 234 degrees okay unless you have anything left to say about some of that no there is a piece to this that i think is getting lost and i know you and i spoke about this ahead of time um and it is the fact that we are centering the woman which makes total sense because she's the public figure um so i get that we're saying christy gnome's husband his name is

brian with a yo um not byron which i know a lot of people want to see yeah my brain auto corrects seeing the y and the o i'm like no that's not it like i get why we're saying it's christine gnome's husband because it is christine gnome's husband and christine gnome is the political figure and she's been in the news a lot and you know i get that that's why we do it but we have a history in this country of centering women when there's shame and centering men when there's something to be proud of and this happened during the sorry uh celebration yeah centering men when their celebration this was happening during the olympics where female athletes were doing really well and the headlines would read so-and-so's fiance gets gold medal um they tried to do that

way like like a decade or so ago they tried to do that with simone biles i mean i'd like to think now you can't because she's just this amazing athlete who is on a completely different level but towards the beginning of her career they would refer to her as her husband's wife because i think her husband is a former nfl player his current nfl current thank you current nfl player so like if but we we do this all the time this this woman does something and instead of going oh my god this woman's amazing look who she did she won a medal i don't care dude she the olympics like that is a that is amazing in and of itself but then when the headline reads so-and-so's wife girlfriend fiance we are centering the men when there is something to be ashamed of

we are going to center the women christine noem's husband i get it brian noem doesn't carry a lot of weight there's no there's no click baby crap if you were to run his name but this is this is not an isolated incident where we are centering her to shame him well yeah because if we if we were to think of this if he was the public figure and christy gnome had some and she was the spouse of and she had some explicit controversy it would be christy gnome brian gnome's wife right it would it would lead with her name or in some way it it wouldn't center him because because i think the point that you're driving towards is um here in american society especially um in many societies women are meant to bear the brunt of shame yep yep so there there is

that and fuck that so there is that additional piece to this that i think is getting lost in these conversations i think the images are surprising i know snl did something about this recently um i think there's going to be a lot of parodies coming up about it um i think eventually it's going to lose the the camera and lose the focus because something else will happen but i want folks to think about how this was presented and i want to tie it back to those things that we were doing because there were a lot of people who were pissed during olympics and major sporting events where it's like so-and-so's husband i love um hillary knight who um from usa women's hockey because she got engaged to a woman and like i could just see the little brains in the press

offices being like how do we work a man and how do we yeah how do we find this how do we center of the men um but it shouldn't take being in the same sex same sex or same gender relationship for us to realize that we should be centering the person who's responsible or the person who achieved and not deciding how we're going to flip that story based off the genders that are involved and a lot of this is what um what dr sue is just talking about is is the pieces that i i talk about in my intro. These are the ways that we are conditioned to reinforce taboos, to reinforce patriarchal norms, to keep women and marginalized communities in their tidy little box for whatever reason. These are the ways this happens. And it's so subtle and so normalized that these are the

things that we have to pay attention to and have to call out when we notice them and help and help those in our lives who want to do better, or who have an interest or who use problematic language or framing around you. These are the ways that you can begin to chip away at it. And just chip away at the lens that that you've been told to experience life through. Yeah, because if you're not even thinking about the lens, you're not even seeing it, right? You can't see, you can't see um around it so i'm going to give you two more ways that we do this for folks um one is titling the number of times you will read an article where the man has a title even if the woman has the same title oh what's that face i'm just thinking of all the correspondence

we get sometimes all the times they leave doctor out of my name all the time they don't well they don't you don't the number of times folks that we get emails that they want to have someone on our show and charlie does not exist in the email is disgusting um and then the number of times like oh we think you're so great at what you do sue and i'm like is sue in the room with us yeah um i so the number of times we do that though i have seen and we do we often drop titles especially for doctors in in medical practices the number of times dr gets dropped from women's names it's disgusting um but if you're ever reading an article i've seen this done with politicians well it'll refer to representative so and so and then

for the woman it'll just be her name like her title is gone um the other way that we do this a lot is by norming i don't know i'm trying to figure out how to explain this so if there is a woman doing a job we make sure we point out that it's a woman doing the job so a woman engineer woman woman engineer woman firefighter woman unless it's a job we assume is female like the nurse um which explains so then so then it becomes he's a male nurse right because we have to qualify that um so i want i just want so i'm gonna give you homework i haven't given people homework in a while in a minute i know it's been yeah probably because i'm up to my eyeballs in grading right now so you have your own homework this is ungraded homework um what we want you

to do so i'm going to talk for both of us yes please because you don't really exist apparently we love your show sue and like no charlie at all um nope my favorite is when we get emails um when we've been in threads and we've signed dr sue and charlie yeah they still just do dr soon or when they send something going hey guys and i'm like oh yeah hi microaggression how are you yeah um thanks for proving you don't listen to the show um sorry we're getting totally well we're not though because no because this is all related this is all related so what we want you to do here's your unofficial homework if you see a headline which does this that either names women specifically as like the female ceo that's i see that a lot too

female ceo um one you can combat that by doing that to men so being like oh the male ceo so just start putting genders in front of everything yeah um but if you see a headline that does that or a headline that celebrates the man for the woman's victory we want you to tag us or we want you to send it to us yeah um i would love to start compiling some of this and if you want to talk about your experience um we can do this privately and then just kind of share what we learned we are open to have and get i mean we had timothy on the show who's who's one of our one of our favorite listeners who wanted to come on and talk so um if we're hitting home for you if you're like oh my god this has happened to me my entire career let us know if you just see a headline or a meet i

don't want to say a meme or a post or something tag us um you can either tag me with hey dr sue or you can tag the show as unzipping taboos or tag charlie which is uzt charlie uzt charlie UZT Charlie. Find us on social media. Just tag us. Yeah. Or just email it to us. Just you can send it as a show idea. Just send the link. I want you to start. I want you to start tuning into it because it's what Charlie said. Once you have the lens, you don't learn to look around it. We want you to start realizing that you're looking through that lens. Yeah. I want to warn you how pissed off you're about to get. because if you've never done this before I want you to like yeah it is going to be it is going to feel a little overwhelming when you start paying attention to it yeah and I kind of want you to be pissed yeah so I'm not going to apologize yeah yeah yeah yeah yes yes all the things yes so that is your unofficial homework and what the so kind of carrying this the profession thing through um i have a friend who works in the um like in the construction industry

and anytime yeah yeah anytime there's a joke about engineers and their and kind of what people think about when they hear the term engineer that is largely based on male engineers and their and their tendencies so if if a woman who is an engineer is acting like an engineer then that's more okay because the baseline is male-centered and so it's it's all these little things that that are that lens that continue to normalize patriarchal systems and and then that creates this bubble of sensationalism for when people who are presumably masculine hyper masculine or whatever engage in feminine uh presenting activities so charlie yeah what happens when we have a launch of like artemis and we highlight the female astronaut shouldn't we shouldn't we

highlight a female astronaut because she is such a minority i i think if you're gonna do if you're gonna highlight astronauts you highlight them all because that that that does what we're talking about that normalizes a gender neutral storyline for the hard work that everyone had to go through. I think naming how the woman has had to overcome certain biases, certain things, I think having those conversations is important because these tendencies, sexism, misogyny, racism, can continue to exist in the dark. So we need to daylight and we need to do that. But a team of astronauts deserves the whole the spotlight and then and then if there's a platform for the demographic or not even i wouldn't want to do that but but i think they're yeah

the astronaut team equal representation because when you highlight one i mean like we saw this with the the early when no doubt first came out the band no doubt and and gwen was centered and the whole band was there like it was the whole sound it wasn't gwen stefani and no doubt it was no doubt um so so continuing to center one gender um in a team continues to perpetuate what we are talking about deconditioning from but if you want help with your homework go read a story that focuses on the gender breakdown of the astronaut crew because you will see it say the female athlete athlete sorry astronaut with all with the rest of the astronauts why does it not just say with the male astronauts or why doesn't it just say astronauts yeah i mean i do think she deserves

oh yeah she deserves to be highlighted because of how much harder she's had to work yeah and and a lot of these industries are traditionally male-centered but you could very easily in that headline or in that story you could begin to break those walls down by not referring to them as astronauts by referring to them as the male astronauts like let's yeah so you got so you have homework i think it's a good place to leave it was with homework sorry yeah not sorry yeah yeah go do your homework everyone decondition there's a video i forget what movie it was but there are a video where um this guy's given a pair of sunglasses and when he puts it on oh yeah he sees obey consume all of that when he takes it yeah yeah yeah i know exactly

Yeah, that's kind of what we're talking. We're talking about is, and there are certain lenses that I still have that I don't know that I have. But it's the awareness and the willingness to change that lens or to take that lens off completely. So with that, I want to thank everyone for joining us on this episode of Unzipping Taboos. We hope today's episode sparked some new thoughts. We'll open up conversations worth having and spark that curiosity because that is the key to breaking down barriers, embracing a healthier understanding of sex and relationships. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, leave a review, share it with someone who you think might need to hear this. And if you've got a question or a topic you want

us to unzip, please reach out to us via the link in the episode description. We want to give a very special shout out to best friend of the show, Ali O'Brien for our incredible theme music. Thank you so much, Ali. And until next time, keep the conversation going. Keep unzipping those taboos and everyone take care.