Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex - Sex and Censorship: How Silence Fuels the Taboo

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

In this episode of "Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex with Dr. Sue & Charlie," we tackle the complex issue of sex and censorship. Dr. Sue and Charlie explore how censorship in media, education, and public discourse perpetuates the taboo surrounding sex. By limiting what we can see, say, and learn about sex, censorship reinforces shame, stigma, and misinformation. We discuss the impact of censoring sexual content on people's understanding of their own bodies, relationships, and sexual health. Dr. Sue provides insights into how this censorship affects sex education and public awareness, while Charlie questions the societal motivations of keeping conversations about sex behind closed doors. Join us as we uncover the ways censorship keeps the taboo alive and how breaking the silence can lead to healthier, more open conversations about sex. 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 Unzipping Taboo's Candid Conversations About Sex with Dr. Sue and Charlie. Together, we dive into topics surrounding sex and sexuality that you're curious about, but maybe too shy to talk about. No judgment here, just real talk. So zip down and let's get candid. I am here with Dr. Sue. Dr. Sue, do you want to share a little bit about your background with our listeners that may just be joining us? Sure. So my name is Dr. Sue. I have a PhD in homosexuality education. I work primarily as in academia, but I also do a lot of work out in the community. And I do a lot of work trying to get information out about sexual health to everyone on social media. So you can find me if you're looking for me at Hey, Dr. Sue, and we'll have

a link to how to submit your questions for this show in the description yeah and so this is charlie she is our open-minded guide to the intimate and yet intriguing world of sex relationships and everything in between do you want to tell us a little bit more about you uh just real quickly i am someone that inherently has always loved challenging taboos and norms um and so when dr Sue and I began our friendship, we found a kinship there. And especially around this topic, you know, just having the conversations we would on our friendship level. Here we are bringing it to the world. So today, we actually want to talk about something very important and something that I think we are both passionate about as far as what contributes to the taboo, sex and censorship

and how censorship really fuels silence and fuels the taboo around sex. Yes, and how it makes it so difficult for those of us who are trying to get sexual health information out to the world to be able to do it. Yes. Do you want to start with a little bit about the challenges that you run into just with your content? Yeah, so a couple.

Not as big as some of the other folks who are doing the work in the field because right now my, my work trying to educate the masses is secondary to the job that I have in academia. And so I don't spend nearly as much time as other folks whose livelihood is, is really based off being able to be found on social media. And so I haven't had as much struggle with it. But I've had a lot of conversations with it and I have had some really frustrating moments. So every, every Sunday I answer anonymous questions that I get through my website about about sex and i post my answer i have a written answer on medium and then i post the link to it on instagram and facebook and i read my answer for those who like to listen

on youtube and there was a bit of a challenge with a couple of my videos on youtube where they were immediately taken down and i was told that they violated community standards and what was interesting it wasn't even it wasn't even the video it was the description of the video that caused it to come down now in YouTube's defense I did file an appeal the appeal was within like 10 minutes reversed but it was this idea like I'm a sexual health educator I'm literally trained to do this work and me trying to share information was censored and I've also been running into this on Instagram. For those of you who don't keep track of what's happening with Instagram, what was it last December? I think we were looking into when this started. Was it last December?

It was actually a couple of years ago, towards the end of the pandemic year. Okay. And it was December somewhere. Instagram started limiting what you could search for, for hashtags. So you can't try, try it yourself. If you feel comfortable doing it on your device, like try searching sex or sexual health or sex education, all stuff that I use. And so it's really apparent to me why I'm not necessarily getting as many followers, but for me, it's worth it to keep using the language. And so that gets us to the third point. I just want to bring up super quick. When I got censored last time by YouTube, I told everyone about it. I actually did a post on social media and some of my students do follow me on social media and then I came into

class and I was talking about it and the fascinating thing is they they clapped and I was like oh I got censored like this was a moment for me like I I took it as being rebuked in what I was trying to say and they saw it like as a badge of honor and they're like well you have to change the words you use they you need to and this makes me cringe I know people can't see my face but it makes me cringe. Like you need to spell sex with a G and I'm like that, that's the line that I won't cross. I will always spell sex the way it's spelled. Um, and actually when we were talking about the topic, uh, titles for the show, that was my big thing was I wanted to call it S E X because for me, it's so important that we're using the right word. So just a little bit.

so let me step off that soapbox well this is our soapbox so you know sure don't abandon me up here so I think that's a really important thing and I remember that when we were talking about the development of this show that you were very adamant we're not spelling it with as eggs with S in the front of it. Right. And I think a really important point to all of this is taking the language away, the actual language, as you've pointed out in our, you know, our personal conversations, taking that language away, robs people of understanding what they've experienced, being able to process what they've experienced and understanding who they, who they can go to. um because when you when you use all these euphemisms and make it kind of kitschy and

you know it just it can really paralyze people who may be struggling or who are genuinely curious um about what they are thinking and feeling and what's happening inside of them physiologically yeah and i feel like i'm going to say this all show i have two thoughts about this I have multiple thoughts about this. One is the message it sends when we change the word. So when we don't use the word, when we bleep it, when we misspell it, and I've seen this in reels and on TikTok, where someone would use the word sex, or they'll use the word rape, or they'll use the word sexual assault, and they bleep it. Well, that is sending a very strong message that that is not something it's okay to talk about and for someone who has been assaulted or raped if they're

trying to figure out what happened and they're searching for information they're not going to know to search maybe sa which is what we're now using um and and so they may not be able to figure out that that's what they're supposed to be looking at and so if we're trying to help people get information one we're limiting them to that access to that information and i i have really big issues when we limit people's access to information as an educator but also we're sending this message that that word's not okay that it's not the word it's the fact that it happened we should be talking about how to reduce the amount of rape and sexual assault in this country we shouldn't be editing the word itself because when we edit the word it means people aren't going to

do podcasts on it because they're going to get censored it means that we're not going to write about it, because we're going to get blocked by all sorts of filters. And I need to point out, this isn't sorry, did you want to jump in? I was gonna say, just to kind of yes, and that it minimizes the experience. And the other side of what that minimalization communicates is that it's not a big deal if you perpetrate it. Right, right, right. If you if you make the the euphemism you know some combination of the actual letters of rape plus um you know like an at sign or what have you it it communicates that it's not that big of a deal yeah so it's it's it's empowering the perpetrators and it's hurting the victims all all in one word all in all in one

keystroke and and this isn't i want to make sure i'm saying this isn't new this idea of censoring information especially around i'm having two thoughts this is like i said this is just going to be the thing we do today um because i know i really i know i keep saying i'm getting a time out sorry time in we we for those of you who haven't listened to the pilot obviously our our subtitle for the show is candid conversations and we talk about how in the pilot we're going to make mistakes and so we're not going to go back and edit it we have a minor technical issue that happened so it's the joy of being real and having honest conversation yes um all right so we're back from our little technical blip so this this idea of censoring isn't new and so the three three

conversations i want to have i know that i desperately want to do an episode on the state of sex out in the united states and i know we're going to get to it eventually and then we can talk about how we limit teachers in a teaching space but that that'll be i can hold off on that that'll be for another day um but since we've been using technology we have always had filters and sensors and i remember when people were still going to the library to use the computer because that was the easiest way to do it and people couldn't access information on breast cancer because it had the word breast so i do want to make sure that we're saying that this censorship and this limiting people's access to information is in no way new. This has been

happening since the beginning of technology and it's been happening before the technology that we see, which is how most people are accessing information now. Yeah, there's certainly been an evolution in censorship, you know, as someone who is a classic movie enthusiast, just understanding how the motion picture industry um you know informed that so in in old movies that's why married couples are sleeping in separate beds because they couldn't show they made a rule that they couldn't show a married couple sleeping in the same bed um so yeah censorship just evolves with the way we put information out there for entertainment or education or just information And I'll use information as just kind of the catch all.

And I think part of the problem there becomes, you know, social media platforms have really become the modern public forums, but they are run by private corporations. Yes, I see. Very enthusiastic, Dr. Sue. So I'm going to pause there and let her share with us her two or three thoughts. No, because I think it's important that when we're talking about social media, we're not just talking about people being able to pick up a microphone, grab a camera, record and put what they want out there. The message is still being controlled. And for those of us who live in the

United States, we like to think that we have this right to information and lack of censorship. And we know this isn't true other places. Like if you really start thinking about how social media is used to communicate information in other countries and they're shut down and there's sometimes violence that follows that shutdown um i think we like to think that as creators we have full control of what we're saying and we don't we're still under community guidelines we're still under this this something whether it's an agency or a company or just the societal restrictions that are saying this isn't appropriate and that's it's it's limiting and i think we need to realize that sometimes we don't know what we're not hearing a lot of people we had conversations

in my class about the censorship after i got censored um we had some conversations about it and and i knew that instagram had put in those guidelines about words that you couldn't search my students who lived on instagram snapchat and tiktok had no idea that censorship was happening so they didn't even realize that they were being denied access to information and that's that's really powerful and that's a little bit scary and that's uh you know tying back to why we uh why we started this is to chat one of the ways we are challenging taboos is we want to help um shed light i know you don't kind of like those comparisons dr c but just shed light on like how you are accessing and receiving information and understanding the level above it of what is

filtering the information you ultimately see in your device that's at your fingertips that goes through several layers um that are motivated by many different things and you know that those motivations aren't inherently bad or you know my favorite quote from a shakespeare play hamlet is there's nothing good nor bad thinking makes it so so i the judge there's no judgment here on the reason for the levels that these corporations have outlined for themselves and their revenue generating machine. But what we as the general public need to understand is that we rely on these platforms, again, as open public forums. And there seems to be kind of a group psychology that they are open public forums and that if I type in anything, I'm going to find exactly

the sources of information that i need well no there are several layers um that have tailored those results and have omitted maybe some critical information important information that you were actually looking for but you're going to get maybe like you know an art a pop culture article it's and it's interesting because when i ask students because that again i mean i do work in community and we are really targeting lifespan for this podcast but i primarily right now working with college students and I used to teach a class called sex and technology and it was fascinating I had originally designed it to be taught at the graduate level with someone who I do not have necessarily consent to say her name on a podcast so I won't but if

you're listening we used to teach a graduate class on this and then I designed an undergraduate class on this and one of the things I had to do for a paper was they had to imagine a character and that character was seeking information online and they had to pretend to be that character, go find the information. But then they had to analyze what they found. And that stepping back and analyzing the messages was often incredibly powerful. So I had a student who was trying to find information about how to find your birth parents if you were adopted. And I don't remember the search terms that she used. The first things that came up were fake abortion clinics and it was this fascinating yeah and and and then I did have someone who's

actually trying to find information and for those of you who don't remember there was a time where iPhones I believe would not give you search information on local abortion clinics it was there's a few years ago but even searches were being and it wasn't like they were searching weird thing it was like how do I find an abortion clinic it wasn't like they were using a term you might not use and that what they were finding was that the search results were not giving them local things to find and that that moment of my i'm not getting the information i want or need but i didn't even realize that because how often do we critically like you know we'll get a thing and be like i don't want to sign up for this you know this is a suggested site i don't want it but we

we're also not teaching people how to be critical consumers of the information that they're getting and that's that's part of the problem but not as big as the censorship yes yes and and what's so um frustrating slash interesting to me about this is that and how the taboo continues to get feel fueled we are all we all exist because of sex that's why we are all those of us that are here breathing air talking listening we're here because of sex or sexual anatomy because for folks yes has two babies and yes thank you thank you i was struggling with a way to make sure that was an inclusive statement so thank you sexual anatomy if not the actual act of sex sexual anatomy yes um so why does it continue to get censored and with all the advances in technology and information

access the it seems like there are more and more censorship layers surrounding sex and sexual health and yet all at the same time we use sex to sell everything everything everything except sex so we use sex and there's a number of people who've done a whole thing about sex and advertising so i don't want to kind of step on anyone else's stuff but we use sex to sell everything from perfume to liquor to clothing or which is always hysterical because they're not really all that dressed but we're selling clothing we're selling we've seen sexual imagery used to sell food like we use sex all over the place because we know that people want it and they want to talk about it and they find sex interesting but in that same breath we're also going to limit how many how much

information you can get and that's it's a really confusing world for to live in when you're being bombarded with images about sex but you now can't access information about it yeah yeah it's um it's a little it's a little terrifying because and as as we saw the language around sexual assault grow several years ago with some you know critically needed movements social movements that also seems to have contributed to limiting the language and the people that are making those decisions you know this is anecdotal so I'll throw that qualifier out there but you know they could have been in circles where people were impacted by those movements in a negative way and so you know we got a to your point earlier not just analyzing the message but the messenger yeah yeah

and and trying to analyze what those motivations would be yeah and i think it's hard for us to do because we don't always have a face on the person who's doing the censorship right and we don't know if it's being done because of puritanical beliefs about sex or if it's being done strictly for financial reasons and i think that's that's part of the confusion but i i want to talk real quick i just seen an article about it didn't read the whole article so let me own that very odd that i'll talk about something i hadn't read um but the the headline caught my eye and it's um it was about the impact of the barbie movie on google searches that there was a noticeable uptick in searches for gynecology as a result of the movie i know you can't see charlie's face but

it's a face right now yeah but but we know this to be true when when we do episodes on tv about sex stuff there is usually an uptick in google searches about that so there was a famous episode on Friends where they realized that a condom is not 100% effective. There was an uptick in the number of searches about condom effectiveness after that show aired. And so we know that we know people are desperate for this information. And again, I think part of it for me comes back to the, you don't know what you don't know. So if I never heard the word gynecologist and suddenly it's in the Barbie movie, I may just be looking up the word to figure out what it is. But if you think about how we oftentimes talk about pop and pop smears and pop and pop smears and pelvic exams

I don't know if I ever actually use the word gynecologist I think I said going to the doctor going to a health care professional and so if if we don't know what something is now we're being exposed to it now we want to search for it but that search is being shut down so that's or limited again the information is limited it's selected um in ways that we as the general public and general users have no insight into how information that we're trying to access is being limited to us by the time we see it pop up in our search results the other thing um that i that i wrote down just now is often the motivation for some of these things is to solve a critical problem for instance i i imagine that maybe some of the

uh guidelines updated community guidelines on some of these social media platforms or even legislation that was enacted was trying was working to solve a problem of sex trafficking but often these air quote solutions are developed so honed in on one problem that there is no time given to really understanding the ripple effects to write these guidelines and legislations in a in an impactful way I imagine many of this so much of this is developed to throw a solution at the wall and then they'll air quote fix it later but as we all know it's hard once you put it release it from the box it's hard to get it back in and control and refine it um and and what we see is so often they don't guidelines are necessary aren't necessarily walked back to

address what we're talking about having good information available and we don't look at the effects of these policies and these laws so fosta sesta um f-o-s-t-a-s-e-s-t-a those were two that was legislation that was enacted to try to help with sex trafficking and what it really did was it targeted sex workers who were online and what it also did was it targeted the ability of people to give information about sex online what it didn't do was cut down on sex trafficking but it did make it it did put sex workers in the position where they had lost a way of safely doing some of the work that they were doing so we didn't solve the problem we were out to solve and when i say we do not mean i here sorry i meant the lawmakers because i had no part of that

but they didn't solve the problem they wanted to solve they hurt the general public access information and they targeted a population that doesn't have a strong voice on their own anyway but they can turn around and say we saw yeah we did something to fix the problem so I want to be kind and say that they were coming from a good place but it doesn't matter if you're coming from a good place if the outcome of what you did is actually hurting people's access to information and a safe way of working for some of those folks and to go back to one point that we made earlier I think when you limit this the access to the information you limit the language, it's not making people safer. It is putting more people at risk in a multitude of

ways. Lack of information and education can lead to, I mean, it's an uninformed decision that you make and you don't understand maybe the ripple effect of the decision that you made because you couldn't find the information or get access to the information because you've had to go through layers of censorship and there's only so much access that we have because you know this this can go into the equity discussion as well but we won't we won't derail this with equity yeah not today not today we will at some point um i do think it's important because i have i have people ask me all the time about using using words for body parts like really basic concepts you know you struggle with the word sex like that's a fight i'll pick with you another day but

when we're bothered by the names of body parts that makes it hard for people to make decisions communicate with partners and get care so i used to live in the dc area and washington dc area and there were some private religious high schools where students would come out and instead of saying the words penis and vagina they would use the term Pennsylvania and Virginia oh my god yes so those folks I was working in reproductive health care at the time so I was working in clinics those folks didn't know how to ask the question of something is wrong with this body part because they were embarrassed because they didn't feel comfortable calling a clinic or going in to see a healthcare professional and saying there's something wrong with my Virginia, because

that's an awkward conversation. It makes you look less educated. No. And it's already a vulnerable situation. And so they were having problems, whether it was pain during intercourse, whether it was issues with discharge, whether it was just discomfort and they weren't getting medical attention because they didn't even know how to say the word for the body part that was effective and I mean that's it's not just about not using the word it's about the long-term impact on people when we don't use the words yes yes one last thought I know I don't know where we are in time and we made a big deal about not keeping this your specific time but I just I want to throw out this idea really and I think it's important that we're coming back to it because

when I talk about sex and technology, a lot of people be like, Oh, especially parents, technology is so scary. I'm like, it's not, it's not about the technology. It's like you were saying before in the quote, it's about how we use it. We have a lot of problems that have existed outside of technology and that don't involve technology. And I had a student again, back in the Washington DC area who was reading the textbook. Now the newest edition of my textbook has a much racier cover but the cover of that textbook was not in any way shape or form racy it did say in very bright colors human sexuality on the outside and they were at i don't want to name it because i don't think it was a corporate policy i think it was a local

i think it was the store they were at a very well-known coffee house and they were asked to close the book and leave while they were studying for an exam because it was making people uncomfortable so it wasn't even about technology this was a student in a coffee house where a lot of my students go and study reading a textbook textbook yeah getting formation for a college course who was being asked to stop and leave because they were making people uncomfortable And so I do want to point that out. The censorship is real. I will never spell sex with a G. But we also have to keep in mind that the censorship is not just happening in technology and in tech spaces. Yeah, absolutely. Censorship is something that I think that we are, you know, you'll all hear me say it a lot, socially conditioned to enforce among our, you know, our compatriots. I can't, I'm not going to use the word. In our community, yeah, that we that we have people who, for a variety of reasons, I'm not going to, you know, say that it's just corporations or lawmakers, those, those two groups are informed and influenced by the level up from that.

So we just have to continue to understand if we want to break through this taboo personally or help for a little bit of a societal shift, which can be a challenge in where we are in 2024 right now here in the United States. um if we want to continue to to break through break through this taboo around sex we have to understand what's fueling the silence and where it's happening yeah and we have to talk about schools at some point yes yes but that'll be a future episode yes you've heard many future episode ideas from us today so something to look forward to yes do you want to check us out I shall. So thank you, Dr. Sue. I think that was a great conversation about how censorship fuels the silence surrounding the taboo of sex. And I want to thank our listeners for joining us today on Unzipping Taboos, Candid Conversations About Sex with Dr. Sue and me, Charlie. We hope today's episode sparked some new thoughts, some critical thinking, may open up dialogues worth having.

And remember that your curiosity is the key to breaking down these barriers and embracing a healthier understanding of sex and relationships. So if you enjoyed the show, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who you feel might need to hear this. Got a question or a topic you want us to dive into, please reach out to us via the link in the episode description. And until next time, keep the conversation going

and keep on zipping those taboos. Take care, everyone. Thanks, Dr. Su.