Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex - Is it true…? Let’s talk about sex myths

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

In this episode of "Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex with Dr. Sue & Charlie," we break down persistent myths about pregnancy, such as when a woman can and can’t get pregnant, and discuss common misconceptions around things like condoms, anatomy,  and virginity.  Dr. Sue and Charlie explore how pop culture and social norms keep these myths alive, often fueled by clickbait headlines and misinterpreted research. We also discuss why making sex education accessible to people of all ages is important for breaking down these myths. If you have a topic or question you’d like to hear us talk about, please submit your ideas here:  Show suggestions Thanks to Allie O’Brien for our incredible theme music!

Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode of Unzipping Taboos, candid conversations about sex with Dr. Sue and Charlie. Together, we dive into the topics around sex and sexuality that you're curious about, but maybe too shy to talk about. So no judgment here, just real talk. So let's zip down and get candid. I'm here with Dr. Sue. Hey, Dr. Sue.

Hey, Charlie. You want to share with our listeners joining us, perhaps for the first time, a little bit about your background? Yeah, absolutely. So I have a PhD in human sexuality. I work as a sexuality educator and have for many many years now. I primarily work in academia but I also work in doing sex education for people across the lifespan and I am joined today by you our lovely Charlie, an open-minded guide through the intimate and often intriguing world

of sex relationships and everything in between. Do you want to tell us a little bit about you? Sure. Dr. Sue and I have been friends for many years, and we started having these kinds of conversations by virtue of her background and my kind of general curiosity and enjoyment of pushing taboos and talking about things that maybe, you know, I'm not expected to talk about and challenge. So we thought, hey, maybe more people might want to hear this and kind of break down those unzip those taboos. for themselves. So here we are. So I'm excited about today's episode, Dr. Sue. Me too. Yeah. So today, our episode is going to be centered around sex myths. And we got this idea, if I may share. This is an exercise that you do at the beginning of the semester quarter, depending on the institution, with your students within what, like the first one or two weeks?

hour and within the first hour even better within the first hour of the meeting um if you weren't anyone who's going to be in my class yes um they are you know they're anonymous but they're um you you go through this exercise where it is by virtue of you you are a state you provide a space where they can share things that maybe they've heard and have long held that belief and so we thought we would go through some of those and we may hear common themes we may not but let's go through some of them and if there's any more you want to give around this this activity that you engage your students with that you are welcome yeah and before we start i just a huge shout out i know that's old school say shout out but i'm old school a huge shout out to all my

students over the years who contributed to this and so it is nerve-wracking the first time they're meeting not just me but their classmates and now they're having these discussions about these these myths that they've they've either believed themselves or that their friends have believed and they're trying to vocalize them and perhaps using words they've never said out loud and it it's it takes a lot of courage to do that um and i always do get so a lot of times after it I will share pictures of of what they tell me I write down on the board and I'll share pictures on social media always with their consent with the idea that we're going to continue the conversation outside of just our classroom and that's that's what I tell them that the whole reason I share

those myths to social media is that it's my way of helping to educate the people who aren't sitting in that room but I do want to say a huge thank you to my students who who go along for that ride that first day. It's a bit of a whirlwind, I'm sure. I mean, what an incredible, you know, ask to be so vulnerable so quickly. And as you said, put yourself out there in front of your student, your fellow classmates that maybe, you know, maybe you met in passing, but now you have to be vulnerable and show something that maybe you never thought you would have to share. right and and then you're sitting in a room where people are using the words penis and vagina and vulva and like positions and anal and virgin like these are not words we usually throw around in

public and here they are just being and sometimes I laugh so I get even louder when I'm saying them um but they're being said out loud in this in this educational session that may be a little uncomfortable yeah yeah absolutely yeah um and so i also want to echo your appreciation for your students who have participated in this because it is something that helps helps that unzip this taboo to your point earlier that you know this is to continue the conversation because sharing a social media puts it out there you know we talked in our in our very first episode our pilot episode about making this information equitable. And there could be people who never thought about taking a class like yours, that still hold on to these beliefs. And they could be

a few years past their college, you know, career or anything like that. So I want to echo Dr. Sue's appreciation for all of the students that have gone through her class and have, have been vulnerable that's amazing yeah they're pretty cool sometimes yeah most of the time sometimes so you want to you want to pick one oh so i i want to pick the one and and i do i do sometimes do live events um this got a little curtailed by covid obviously i didn't do as many but it was i do this a lot not just with my college students but when i do live events and a lot of the things I was doing were either trivia based in a bar where, you know, people willing to say anything at that point, but I've also done them with social workers. I've done them with senior citizens. I've

done them with healthcare professionals who work with senior citizens. And there's always these commonalities that, that, that go across the lifespan. So the, but the first one I want to talk about, and well, the one I hear the most about is like, what's normal, but we've already done a whole episode on that so you should go listen to that first yes or second um but the one that comes across the most for teens early 20s is usually around pregnancy interesting yeah and it's usually like the you can't get pregnant if and i and i always i always start to feel a little bit like dr seuss like you can't get pregnant on a train you can't get on a plane you can't get pregnant standing up you can't get like but it's always these and they're usually

like location-based like if i have sex in a hot tub so there's there's a myth that comes out of this of the if you get in a hot tub like after someone ejaculates that the sperm will somehow survive the scalding hot water find its way into your vagina and get you pregnant you're not going to get pregnant from that but you will get pregnant if you're having sex in a hot tub that is possible um I've heard I've heard them that's why I'm laughing because they're just so funny sometimes um that if you're standing up or if the woman is on top she can't get pregnant because of gravity well I mean that goes to that that old wives tale about you know if you want a certain gender thrown on your head or something like that um but probably my favorite over the

years of of of how you can and can't i mean i get the one about can you get pregnant that you can get pregnant from a toilet seat which you can't i'm a little worried about saying things as a myth only because i feel like i'm validating it a little bit by saying that out loud um but probably my favorite that i heard was that if you have sex at night she can't get pregnant because the sperm are asleep and that's that's just not sure the sperm are asleep yes who knew sperm rested they're not which is part of the problem

yeah and and we are um you know in the in the vein of candid conversations we are laughing but it is just more it's not laughing at the notion that these are beliefs that people hold It's just, you know, that's not what the laughs are about. It's, it's the sperm we're sleeping. So how, how does that, you know, how does that urban legend come about? Well, and I think that's the thing for me, a little bit of disbelief. Yeah. Part of it for me.

So part of it for me, the laughter is the sheer frustration, because I feel like sometimes if I didn't laugh about these things, I would cry because these are people who are in their late teens early 20s most of my students though not all tell me that they have they are already sexually active so they are sexually active and still don't really understand how they can and can't get pregnant and in some ways that's a little terrifying and so I think I think these myths come from three places um place one is a complete lack of education about it I think we kind of assume people understand where babies come from and how that works but we don't always get into the yeah thanks for that look charlie just gave me a look um but i think i think that we

don't always go into the mechanics of it and get into some of these finer points about sperm and what temperature they thrive at and how long can sperm live and in what conditions so i think part of it is just the sheer lack of education and anyone who's been listening to our podcasts in order know that i keep bringing up that we are going to eventually do an episode on sex education it's coming because I it has to um I think the second place we sometimes get some of these myths are so are popular media so movies tv shows um things like that I think sometimes people hear things and either it's setting just on the show and people don't understand it's a joke or they just didn't they didn't realize it wasn't true and I think the third and this is this is

this one's actually a lot more frustrating for me I think the third place that I hear that people are getting misinformation about when they can and can't get pregnant is because of things that past partners have told them to try to pressure them into having sex that it's okay to have sex while she's on her period so you didn't get I want to be really careful how I phrase this the myth is that she can't get sex when she's on her period I want to get pregnant can't that's the myth, the myth is that she can't get pregnant while she's on her period. The fact is that it can't, she may be able to get pregnant while she's on her period. It's all about the length of her cycle. But if I've heard from students, when we've dived into this or in papers that they write for

me, that they were pressured into having sex by their partners at the time, because they were told, don't worry about it. You can't get pregnant. You're on your period. Don't worry about it you can't get pregnant we'll do it standing up don't worry about it you so a lot of coercion yeah yeah so i think it comes from those places i can't i think it comes from people who have an ulterior motive to try to talk people into being sexually active when their concern is pregnancy when the partner's concern is pregnancy and they're trying to be like no no not a big deal there's no way yeah i don't think media plays as much a big deal i mean i'm trying to think of of, of a good media example or two where I see this, and I actually don't think it's as big of

a player. I think it's more about what we hear and then what will you repeat? And then also just the fact that we never got the education. I'm going to phrase it this way on purpose, but I believe everybody has the right to. Well, and I would, I would push back a little bit on media doesn't have as much of a... I got a face from Dr. Sue now. That media doesn't contribute as much. They may not originate it, but they reinforce it. Sometimes. Right? Sometimes. And especially in popular movies, movies that take off, right? I can think of several titles, but it where where they are to your point earlier making a joke about the myth but it's such a subtle type of humor that it continues to perpetuate the myth to the audience member

yes i i would almost say on other topics on other sex topics because i'm thinking about like timing of orgasm and pleasure and how men and women experiencing it and the rules about communication and, and dating. And I feel like a lot of them, I feel like I'm not saying media is not to blame, but I feel like when it comes to pregnancy, we can let me, I think we can let media off the hook just a little bit. The other ones we'll pull them back in. That is quite generous and unexpected. in. Because I've also seen the good that that media can do. And I know we alluded to this in a previous episode. But there is some education that actually happens. And we have the data on

it to show that sometimes media can do good in getting information out. And yes. And so I feel like but I feel like specifically in the area of pregnancy myths. I get you. Yeah, I feel like maybe maybe it's not as much of I would blame more the lack of education that we, I believe we also rightly deserve but also the things we hear from our partners and from our friends that the you know as many who those of you who have listened my big thing is the social social conditioning the socialization of perpetuating that as a coercion technique to get what you want because and and the jokes you know jokes that comedians can make about oh you know so that's it's kind of the normalization of which is probably going to be a different episode but

a certain type of culture yeah yeah yeah no i'd agree with that and i think that once when you have a group of friends if if one of them is trying to pressure some their partner into having sex if they find out a certain line works and then they repeat it to their buddies yeah so that ripple effect but again if we had education that was age appropriate and medically accurate and culturally appropriate. And on top of that, we did not have censorship when people were trying to look stuff up online, which we've already done an episode on that. But I feel like if we just lived in a culture where people can get information, they would be quicker to question the myth. Because there wouldn't be repercussions. Like if I'm 16, 17 years old, and I don't know if

my parents are checking my search engine you know my search history and I'm typing in can I get pregnant if I'm I'm terrified of what's going to happen if my parents or guardians find out so I may not do that and and that goes back to that that just the general culture we live in that kind of limits the access to the information well and I think that also uh segues into maybe another source of, of the perpetuation of these common myths is generations and their comfort of talking about something taboo. You know, there's all, there can be cutesy language used because the, the person who has been tasked with giving the message to their child, because their child is a teenager and they're going to their first homecoming dance or something like that

with their first love. And there can be that discomfort. And so to ease, I think, the anxiety and the burden, that can help perpetuate some conflation of the information that they're trying to convey but they're so uncomfortable doing it that they just kind of make it a an analogy or something like that and then it the pebble in the pond effect you know the thing is that that starts super young because i'm thinking about it and it starts when we say that babies come from women's stomachs we we don't even use i mean the first time people are asking about pregnancy were lying to them about how it works there was a bunch of books that came out from an author named roby harris where she they were age-appropriate books developmentally age-appropriate

where she made sure that they drew it was a pregnant woman at a movie theater and she's eating popcorn and they made sure to draw popcorn in the stomach separate from baby from pregnancy that was happening in utero yeah and and she got a lot of flack for that book really oh yeah oh wow but it starts super young like we and then how do you if you say something like that like oh babies are in stomachs how do you then go oh hey um so now that you're like in your teen years i have to tell you that like i totally lied to you and made that up and i don't really have the comfort of saying the word vagina as a parent so i'm not gonna bring it up yeah and i think a lot of that goes back to sex education in the schools um but i i do think that there's

a lot of like the parents not knowing how to say it or not thinking it's a certain gender's responsibility so if it's like if if a pregnancy happens and i hear this still to this day that it was the the girl or the woman's fault for not stopping it yeah so if if you're having conversations conversations with your daughter about prevention, but you don't feel the need to say anything to your son or just go there, wrap it up. Like that's not a conversation. And so I think that the gender expectations about pregnancy and then what parents need to and guardians need to do to educate children. Yeah. There's a whole thing we could go into here. Yeah. Any other myths? I mean, I think we've talked about

some of the pregnancy myths. But I think, let's see. We're going to pause for a second. Yeah. Sorry about that pause, folks. We have minor technical difficulty. Charlie, you were saying? Yeah, I was wondering. So I think we kind of did a good job on a couple of the pregnancy myths. Are there any others that from your years of doing this exercise kind of pop out as well there pop out no pun post-pregnancy talk well yes and i'm trying to figure out how we want to go there's so many places we could go we may have to do a second episode of this i'm sure we will yeah one is specifically about condoms and and i think that does play into the pregnancy thing because i think when we talk to you folks

Like we're so focused on pregnancy and we very rarely talk about STIs, but we're so focused on pregnancy that that's where people's brains are. So I get a lot of questions about condoms, sorry, a lot of myths about condoms and whether sex without them can even feel remotely good and whether they work all the time and that they're not effective for, they're not necessary for anal. I mean, not for pregnancy, they're not obviously, because there's a lot of myths that come up around condoms, who can get them where you can get them, whether or not they're legal to have like a lot of myths that come up around condoms. Interesting. Anything else?

There's some stuff about anatomy. I'm trying to think of, I think we talked a little bit before we started this episode there was one that if you have anal sex your um your butt's gonna rip open and all your organs are gonna fall out and that's that's not that's not how that works um there was one about sex being a penis with a going into a belly button which is not yeah that's not sex i mean it could be an interesting sex play for you like i'm not yeah no we don't want to yuck your yum um so there's there's a lot of questions about anatomy and how things work um i've gotten a few over the time about g spots for men g spots for women whether or not they exist whether or not women are capable of orgasm um so yeah there's a few about anatomy and probably the one that comes

up a lot too and i think we're going to do a whole other episode on this i know we talked about a little bit um about virginity so that engaging certain behaviors will or won't affect your virginity and those behaviors have ranged from anal sex to oral sex to using a tampon to using a sex toy um to having um sex dreams like that would somehow violate purity yeah but it's interesting because they don't use the word purity they always use the term virginity which is interesting another term I'm not fond of yes I feel like that's a theme words Dr. Sue is not fond of yeah I feel like a implicit motive behind this is what Dr. Sue is not how Dr. Sue would revamp all of communication yes around sex and sexual health

yeah but really what i mean i mean and i know i know i keep coming back to this is something we want to talk about in the future but i think a lot of this comes back to people aren't getting the information that they would want and and whether or not you agree with me that everyone deserves information which i think it's a human right that we deserve accurate information they they are going to be making decisions about their bodies even if they don't have the accurate information and that's where these these myths can be so powerful because they're guiding choices that can have lifelong ramifications and i think you know kind of going back to how do these myths continue to perpetuate or like what was the source we talked a little bit about some of the sources

but i think it's also a conflation right a conflation of research medical peer-reviewed information and there is a soundbite or a clickbait clickbaity line that a pop culture outlet can use and then it just it can spiral from there and in intentionally or unintentionally reinforce some of the like the gatekeeping of sex based on gender and and all of those things and so it can it just continues to reinforce those things yeah we there was interesting because it came up as a myth one day in class and then i had started doing my hey dr sue so hey dr sue for those of you who aren't familiar people can submit anonymous sex questions through my website and then once a week i answer one question and i post it all over the place um but there was a

question and it happened within a month of the class so this was definitely like where we see the impact of pop culture and recent studies, it was a question about whether or not women will orgasm faster if they're wearing socks. And I, I hadn't heard about it. Um, so we did it in class as a myth and I'm like, okay, ha ha. Like I put it up and I, and I shared these on my social media as well. And then I think three months, three weeks later, sometime in that month, I got the same question to be answered. And I did do a post on this and it winds up, it was based off one study oh okay cool like one study can be powerful and I'm not saying it's not but the study was done with I think 13 or 15 couples like that it was it was in the teens it was in the mid to low teens

that seems relatively small sample size that is a really small sample yeah um and then the problem was somebody somewhere saw it you know great great that they got that published it's an important first step there was a lot of discussion I think that can come out of that and a lot of future studies but the problem is someone found the article and they probably ran with it in a click baby kind of thing or maybe it was mentioned in a tv show somewhere and because people aren't shaking the time and I'm guilty of this too sometimes like I'll read a headline be like that's fascinating and not go in and read the actual have the actual article but that that's how this this idea that came from this very very small study was suddenly I felt like it was

everywhere for about a month or two and it's because we're not yeah we're not reading we're not reading the research itself or we're not able to understand why some of what the research found was limiting either in terms of setup or generalizations or whatever it may be yeah but i think you're right i think people see like a thing they click it they read the headline they don't really understand it then they repeat it or they share it yeah also fascinating it really is and it's it really is and it just it demonstrates well why i have i will have a job forever um but also it just it just reinforces this idea that people are hungry for information and they want to talk about it and i'm sure you'll somehow tie in the word taboo because

you're really good at reminding us of what the title of the show is where i'm just like but i think what these myths do and the way they get repeated is is people desperately trying to fill in the information that they that they want and they don't they don't know what it is you don't know what you don't know sometimes yeah exactly exactly I think that's you know kind of where that conversation comes with your students where you're like where are you getting this and they're like where else are we going to get it yeah and here we are but I was going to make that yeah I was going to make that point as well that these myths are also a result of people just trying to make sense of something that they don't know how to make sense of yet which is why we are

here with unzipping taboos candid conversations with dr sue and charlie so we yeah i did it i did it just as you predicted um we want to thank you all for joining us um on this episode where we kind of talked about this some of common sex myths and maybe where they come from um if you enjoyed the show, please don't forget to subscribe or leave a review and share it with someone who might need to hear this. And we want you to remember that your curiosity is the key to breaking down barriers and embracing a healthier understanding of sex and relationships. So if you've got a question or a topic you want us to dive into, reach out to us via the link in the episode description. Dr. Sue, did you have any closing thoughts? I did. If anyone has some sex

notes they'd like us to talk about even if it doesn't seem like it would be a show on its own please either comment or submit it because we like to know what people are thinking and kind of the things that we're hearing out there and that's really the call for that topic or a question you want us to dive into it it may not be an episode but if it's something that you were just curious about engage with us because it doesn't always have to be an episode we are here to engage with you on these things that you are curious about, but maybe too shy to talk about. So until next time, keep the conversation going, keep unzipping those taboos, and please take care. Thank you.