Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex - Sex, Power, and Control: When Freedom Becomes a Threat

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

This week on Unzipping Taboos, we unzip the myths around the so-called “sexual revolution.” When one hears “sexual revolution” they tend to picture flower crowns, free love, and a big cultural exhale—but underneath all that was a much deeper fight for bodily autonomy, women’s rights, and freedom from patriarchal control.Our conversation explores how the 1960s and 70s reshaped everything from access to birth control to who could open a credit card—and how, decades later, those same battles are still being fought in new forms. We unzip how power shows up in the way we talk about sex: who’s allowed to speak, who gets blamed, and how “morality” is often used to police women and marginalized groups.We examine how controlling the story means controlling the truth—from how data on maternal health and STIs gets reported (or not reported) to the way headlines frame social change as “moral decline.” The result? A fascinating look at how progress and backlash are intertwined—and why allyship, curiosity, and critical thinking matter now more than ever.If you have a story, thoughts and/or a topic or question for Dr. Sue and Charlie please share your ideas here:  ⁠Show suggestions

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 conversations. So zip down and let's get candid. Before we get started on today's episode, I do want to share with you all that we have now partnered with jackandjilladult.com, one of the top online adult stores. And because you're here with us, you get 20% off with the code UNZIPPING20. So now that we got the business out of the way, today, we're going to be talking about the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s and morality and...

I don't actually think we're going to get into that, but that's what started this conversation. yes that's about that's what i was about to say uh so um but more about you know what where we find ourselves today and what contributes to kind of maybe these shifts as we see it um but with that before we get into all of that and meander down that twisty road conversational road i am here with dr sue as you heard hey dr sue how's it going hey charlie it's going well how are you i'm doing all right thanks would you like to give our listeners a little bit about your background before we get started must i no cool okay so for those of you who don't know charlie i feel like that was a not really you're gonna get yelled at i'm gonna get yelled at um

So let's see. I just feel like today's been a day with I've been doing I've been doing live trainings a lot this week. So I just feel like I've been introducing myself endlessly over and over and over. I do. I have I have done more introductions this week than I have in a very long time when I'm not on the show. So I have a Ph.D. in human sexuality education and part of me is firmly ensconced in the academic world. world so I teach human sexuality classes to undergraduates and I also teach classes on how to teach sex ed for some some graduate students I've written textbooks I've done the speaking thing I do trainings and that's the academic thing but a few years ago I started doing a lot more work kind of in the community and so I started a website and folks can submit anonymous

questions sex questions sex related because sometimes I get stuff about relationships as well uh sex questions then every Sunday at 9 p.m eastern I post one question and answer all over social media um as part of the way to help educate the masses which I think is more important than ever right now to get information out so and then in my spare time of which there is done was that good was that good can i move on now i'll leave it to your critics i do i do um for those of you who are just tuning in going like what the fuck um i get a lot of feedback from people i know offline who are like you're not spending enough time like women downplay their things and and i do the same thing to women when we're in situations and i'm like i gotta actually

yeah so I was with someone who is also a PhD though in a different field and we were doing introductions in the group and she skipped her doctor she was just like hi my name is and I'm like you totally skipped her shit so I guess I'm just as guilty but yeah that's what all this is about but anyway I do I feel like this week I I think this is like my 18th introduction of myself who has surprised you didn't have it more down to more of a pitch well because it was changing based off who I was talking to. I just, yeah. Anyway. Anyway. For those of you who do and don't know Charlie, Charlie is our curious co-host who is always ready to explore the ins and outs of all these topics that we talk about here on the podcast, especially the taboo topics that we as

a society are often really uncomfortable or unwilling to talk about. But I think you need to tell us more. Yeah, enough about you. Yeah, enough about me. Enough about the expert on the podcast. Hi, I'm Charlie. I'm here. I've been friends with Dr. Sue for many, many years. And we have found, we found from almost the onset that we were comfortable. We just got a sense of comfortability. And I mean, often checking in if we were talking about something as we were getting to know each other at the beginning of our friendship. Um, but just had a sense that, no, we can talk about this, you know? And, um, so that is why I have joined Dr. Sue on this podcast, but about me specifically, just kidding. I was like, really? Um, I am someone who, uh, who has

always challenged norms uh societal norms and expectations especially um of women in society i can remember one of my my earliest um dreams was to be the first female major league baseball player um that would have been tough because i would have done it before you but god right and here we are neither one of us having done it but then there's a major a women's major uh professional baseball league coming anyway um but yes i i also have a um just a general interest in the psychology of people and humanity and how how we human together and really looking at messaging and conditioning and how that can be used,

which I think is super relevant for perhaps how our conversation is going to go today. But how messaging and consumption, consumer, the things that we consume day to day, um just kind of subliminally get us to think and behave um a certain way and then there's a through line of general societal um norms that are a social contract with each other so all of those things um so and i'm here to just be like the non-doctor doctorate level person with this stuff to be like it's life man there it is that's the whole thing

we're done thank you yep quickest show ever episode of unzipping cabbages it's life man all right so today's episode dr sue it was triggered by a uh a particular question you received on Hey, Dr. Sue. Yeah. Tell us about that. Yeah. And I apologize to the person who asked it. It got buried. And then I went to do it and realized it was going to be a lot longer than my usual posts. So I, in an effort to share information and in a way that's consumable by people, I make sure that it's relatively short and sweet and to the point, though PR people keep telling me I need to do more. Apparently, we're not just supposed to give people answers. That's a no-no. And I make sure it's below a certain reading level to make sure, again,

it's consumable by most Americans. And so I've really been thinking a lot about how to handle this one because I feel like I would go beyond the stuff I usually do. So I do apologize if you're the person who submitted this question. It is going to be answered and not here. What the question did was it really spiraled us into something else. So I had brought up the question uh and it was did the sexual revolution of the 70s lead to a morality decline in the u.s is sexual sex morally neutral and then you and i were talking about the question um and then that spun off into so many different ways um so yeah i'll let you handle the where we went with that because i'm not really sure my brain tracked it very well well i think i think

the the interesting thing about that question is certainly the way that it's worded because it's taking something that was about rights and um bodily autonomy especially for women at that time and um and kind of leading up and perhaps contributing to the equal rights amendment movement and the feminism movement of the time of the 70s um so the the thing that was interesting to me was certainly how it was worded did this revolution that was about equal rights and bodily autonomy um and sexual freedom equating it with more yeah equating it with morals and and that that part too putting already a value judgment on what it did to morality yeah not saying did it impact this the the person asking the question has already asserted that there was a decline

um so that that was one of the interesting things me unpacking yeah and me unpacking messages if you are the person who did this this is not a commentary on your question like yeah this is very common. Yeah. We, we, we want to, we, this is kind of what we do with it. So I don't want the person being like, I didn't mean to freeze it that way. Like you ask your questions the way you need to, we'll get to them. So, but this is also how, how we, Dr. Sue, I imagine when you get these questions, this is also how you need to approach it to make sure you're getting to the tenor of the intent of the question. Yeah. So there's, there's working through the layers of the words chosen in the question to make sure you're going to provide the, the, the most relevant

information in what, in how you respond. Yes. There's, there's, there's a lot, a lot of that thought that goes into that. Which listener, a person, if the person who asked this question is listening, this is also why it's taken a minute for Dr. Suda to get to it. Yeah. And I was going to go in a completely different direction with that, but okay. So for the, for those of you who don't know what the sexual revolution is maybe we should do that piece first perhaps yeah um so it's funny because as someone who who looks I was alive but have zero memory I'm old but I'm not I'm not old enough to remember the 70s in that way yeah um I was gonna make a joke that you're older than me so you should explain it wow so I was a wee one on the earth at the time but it's

not like I can speak from experience of it and and you know I went to school and I went to a lot of school and eventually I heard about sexual revolution and it was like people having sex everywhere outside the bonds of marriage blah blah blah orgies yes orgies orgies for everyone everywhere key parties and I remember oh we should do that on another one um I remember talking to someone who was much older than me in the 70s and remembers that and they're like I don't know where the sexual revolution was but i didn't have a piece of that and and then i started talking more to people who were kind of alive during that era and i realized how many of them were missing some of what that was about like it wasn't just about free sex love peace whatever the slogans

were happening at the time it was what you were saying charlie it was about it was about giving women rights they didn't have before um and i don't have years in front of me for those of you who know me you know that i make up years anyway so i didn't but but we're talking in my lifetime that women have had the right to have a credit card we're talking about in my lifetime um the ability of women to have a checking account to have a mortgage to do all those things that's a product of this of the 70s and i hate calling it a sexual revolution because i feel like it gets tied into the sex piece and that's how we get into the morality piece um so so there's a lot there and we will i will eventually get to the i feel like i'm gonna say that five times to the

person listening if you're listening the the piece so i don't know if you want to say anything about that before i do the whole is sex morally neutral yeah i would just i would offer the the it was a movement a cultural movement um and just some of the high points were challenging taboos um this is pre-written for us i know challenging taboos um sexual freedom in a way uh that hadn't been discussed before birth control and contraception contraception so the right women having autonomy over their body and their decisions, um, and just shifting social norms. And I think what we find when we have these kinds of, um, revolutions or movements that are the antithesis to the mainstream or not just mainstream, but the power structure.

yeah um because what we're talking what this challenged was a lot of ways that society especially american society had been set up to create a very patriarchal system that kept women in a level of servitude yep i want to go back and talk about what you brought up about the pill um i really wish i'd looked up the date it's late 60s early 70s you can hold me to that but don't hold me to an actual date when the pill first really becomes available and i'm here talking about i'm talking oral contraception though most of the general public calls it the birth control pill that pill gives women the ability to time their pregnancies better and i i don't think that some of the generations that came after that understand the power that gives

women and gave women in the 70s because if you're pregnant there was no maternity leave you know Maybe some places have maternity leave, but essentially that was it. That was the end of your working career. You had your babies, you stayed home. And so making the pill available really gave women the ability to control the timing of their pregnancy. Notice I didn't say not being child free because that really was not something that was happening in the 70s.

And it's being challenged now by society. We'll get to that and you'll clean up my crisis versus I keep screwing up my crisis and my epidemics. But then it's worth pointing out that up until the 80s, and I, again, don't quote me on things. I want to say it was Griswold versus Connecticut. I'm just going to be really general and then name the court case. Griswold versus Connecticut, that really gave women the right to use contraception in a marriage. Because up until then, the idea was that if you were in a marriage, you didn't have the right to do it without your husband.

I don't know how you police that. Knocking on the door, excuse me, we think someone in there is on the pill. Um, but I, I don't, you know, just because something becomes available, late sixties, early seventies, doesn't mean it becomes something that people can access because that access piece becomes really important for me as an educator now in 2025. Yeah. I ran out of steam on that. Sorry.

That's okay. That's okay. I just wanted to go back to that before we moved on. Yeah. so there was somewhere else you wanted to go before i added my little bits well so i did did you do you know where you want to where you wanted to head i think so so the interesting thing here is that where our conversation devolved so devolved devolved so so for those of you who don't know or those of you who are just joining us for the first time

um we like to kind of share how we got here to the story to the you know to the topic to the whatever it is to give you some background and so we brought up this topic and you and i started having these conversations and the next thing you know we're talking about the male loneliness epidemic and the fertility crisis you did it epidemic yeah i guess fertility epidemic doesn't make sense right um that's what they would like right and and so we started talking about those things and how it's about the messaging when we talk about the sexual revolution and people being wild and crazy and all these orgies and sex everywhere we're undercutting the importance of what was happening with legislation and available health care we were you know when

you talk about the sexual revolution most people don't equate that with the now outdated roe v that happened in 1973 um so i i think that we then got into a conversation about like how the fuck did we get here like how are we here in 2025 where everything is becoming a woman's problem i mean we've been blaming women for everything literally since the dawn of humans but you know how did we get here how did this messaging happen and what's the power in it and and i know i i think i was the one who made the comment that when i control the narrative i can control the problem like I get to tell you what the problem is so if you haven't checked out our episode on the male male loneliness epidemic there are air quotes all over that for those of you just listening

it's not about men being lonely because of whatever it is they're trying to blame it on women it's about women saying I respect myself enough to not be in a relationship I don't want to be in I respect enough myself enough to be to say no to someone who is not willing to meet my standards and I can I can thrive on my own in a way I never have before and instead of turning to this thing and being like wow women are empowered they're happier unmarried women live longer than married women married men live longer than unmarried men and instead of looking at this and being like oh like women are taking charge and they're happy and they're making decisions for themselves and you know if they're having children a lot more I would

like to think though I don't have the data to bear this out but maybe there's more planning in the process than there had been in the in the past and instead of looking at all that and saying look at this giant step forward we're going there's a male loneliness epidemic and it's all women's fault and so it's that phrasing it's that how I portray the story and yeah and yeah and yeah and that's life man yeah um end of show yeah it's to me what what is evident is that because we're seeing more of a balance in choice and um and being able to provide for myself as a woman as we see that because like presumably before before the revolution the sexual revolution the scales

were a bit like this right and then the revolution happens and it starts to go like this and when it gets like this when it starts getting closer to equal that's when those who benefit most from that system start screaming traditional values you're ruining you're ruining families marriage is under attack. But that's all messaging. That's not actually happening. Marriage, no one's attacking marriage. People are opting to not get married, but that's not an attack. No. And we have to be cognizant of that kind of, those kinds of words. Because overall, what that messaging is meant to do is to create othering, which I think we talked about in the episode when we talked about this, is that if I can create an other that is triggering my problem and my grievance,

then I have someone to blame and I don't have to take responsibility. I don't have to look at myself to say, if I'm a man, I don't have to say, well, maybe I'm just not an emotionally healthy person that can enter into a relationship. Let me figure that part out why. No, I'm going to go to a subreddit that tells me that the reason why women aren't choosing me or engaging with me is because of X, Y, Z, because they want to climb the social ladder or whatever, whatever bullshit is in those subreddits. But that's the thing. It's as people who have traditionally been kept in servitude, enslavement, because we

see this across the board with um i should i say marginalized or minority um marginalized marginalized because we see we see that we saw that with the civil rights movement movement and that's still as far as hard as black americans have had to fight the very people that built our country have had to fight and continue to have to fight and question if they are going to stay alive in an interaction with a white person that that that it's those dynamics that as the scales start to equal start to equal out a little bit more you see the people who were benefiting the most start to scream the loudest and start using words like attack and and decline they they're the cause of the decline society's being ruined morality's being ruined um all of that stuff yeah

i'm sorry the teacher and me needs to go back for two seconds to anyone who wasn't who's listening and not watching i needed to describe your hands as it was happening oh yes so yeah i was using my hands to yeah to show scales and then as the lower scale started to come up to equal to balance out the weight sorry i had the weight of opportunity and rights and we're seeing that also with like same-sex marriage and trans rights you know talk about marginalized communities fighting for their survival um and and i don't just mean that in a figurative way do i just use english correctly i mean a little like literally fighting for their rights to survive right now um and it's not like they were getting all that much power but they were getting something

or they were just someone that we could blame everything on well and they were getting the same thing because i remember with that the especially during the early 2000s when this really became like there was the um newsom who was mayor of san francisco at the time did uh same same-sex marriages at city hall and that kick-started a whole um that that mainstreamed the movement and and gave gave it national discussion and so before before and during that that whole lead up um in california prop 8 all of that stuff what what was talked about was well i don't mind if they want to be together just don't call it marriage yeah so it's about getting access to the same thing that you felt you had um that you were entitled to and that you see as superior

to something else yes because you believe you should have that privilege as the dominant class and no one else should have access yeah let lesser air quote people who you seem who you deem as lesser should not have access to the markers of affluence and success and family that you do yep same newsome who's governor now yes okay i just wasn't sure i didn't know if it was like a family thing out in california and uh and kamala uh when a a county wouldn't sign a certificate got them on the line and said i'm the attorney general you need to sign it so many thoughts there that's a different episode

so the other thing i want to i don't know how we segued into this when we were talking about it but i know it started pissing me off do you know where i'm going with this uh there there could be so many things is it a multiple choice do you want to phone a friend um it's about the data is that what you're thinking yes yes yeah so we are in a very disturbing trend right now and i i totally get that we're recording this on a certain day and by tomorrow this might be out of date and certainly by the time it airs yeah so we understand that once you commit something to like recorded it's it becomes essentially outdated it becomes an archive yeah um one of the one of the things that we see happening and this isn't new we've done this forever um but in terms of

controlling the narrative in terms of controlling the story we're really starting to limit some of the data that we're getting about populations and i know i talked about this when we did the maternal mortality one of the things that happened when we started seeing the anti-choice legislation passing in texas was that there were a lot more women dying during childbirth and then right after and the state of texas's answer texas's the state of texas i'm sorry i'm tired folks i'm trying to state the state is hard um the state of texas's answer was to simply not release the data and this idea that you can just not release data or what we're seeing now especially and i know we're doing sex um but i also do other stuff in health and including things talking about like

food insecurity and general health promotion um the fact that we are now limiting what we're collecting in terms of food insecurity data the fact that we are threatening this a lot of the staff that works on the nhan study which looks at nutrition and um protective factor not protective factors but nutrition and other behaviors of adults and children in the united states the idea that we're just going to stop collecting the data my fear is that it takes what like one generation to change the story and that's it i don't know where the quote came from i feel like it may have been from a fiction book but anyway but the idea is that if we're going to stop collecting data now we don't have to talk about that but there are no marginalized populations

show me the data there is none and that's that's part of the fear um we saw this happen i remember during during covid there were all these like news outlets that were running this sti rates are going down i'm like you morons they're going down because people aren't leaving their house to get tested and right there's no reporting duh because we're all quarantined well some of us but um it was just it was just like and it became the story like i had students repeating that to me we'd get to stis and be like aren't those going down i'm like oh no like now the clinics now that some of the clinics are back open many of the ones that served marginalized populations and a lot of the ones in inner cities did not reopen or did not reopen at the full hours that

they had been open before um as soon as we started testing again the numbers skyrocketed and it's like whoa what happened i mean people went and got tested there is if you if i can't show you things with data you can deny they're real even if i show you things with data some of you are going to deny that they're real um but we're trying to erase information and when we do that we're erasing in some ways the urgency to help populations that need that help right and that's terrifying for me as a human and as an educator and as a health educator um yeah i don't know if you want to jump in on that there was a lot in that well that's that's how that's what led us to the when when i can control the narrative

i can control the outcomes i can control the messaging i can i i have control if i can control the narrative and in that is sowing doubt in data collection and what they were looking at i mean look at the gene i can't even say it sarcastically look at the person that is our health secretary currently yeah like even that person has access to data and doesn't believe in it air quote believe as if it's a as if it's subjective yeah blatantly just blatantly lying about it at this yeah yeah um but that the scary thing about that and the thing to realize is that when you have, especially the power systems, the people in power erasing these things or campaigning seeds of doubt in the information, the communities that that impacts

first and most egregiously are the marginalized communities. Because many of our support systems and our subsistence systems are budgeted based off that data well right now nothing's being because of right yeah but but you know what i mean like the the structure is set up so that the data informs the budget and the outreach and the personnel and the types of things that are needed for each sector, each component of public health, sexual health, infectious disease, food, all of that. Environmental health. Environmental health. So when you erase that, the very first impact and the biggest nuclear impact are marginalized communities, low income communities, LGBTQ plus, um, are, are, um, minority community, racial minority

communities. Um, it just, we, we have to pay attention to those things. Um, and, and if that doesn't, if that doesn't already trigger an empathetic response, um, I challenge you to find the empathy for the impact that deleting this data erasing this data stopped collecting this data because what it allows people to do as well say oh well they stopped collecting data on it it must not be a problem anymore yep yep i'm actually i'm working with students right now on some food insecurity stuff and some of the things i keep hearing from them is like i didn't know this was an issue i didn't know it was an issue i didn't you know i why didn't i know about this before this and i i challenged them recently to be like now what are you gonna do now the data's gone

where we're not collecting it anymore and i wouldn't be surprised i mean i do know that large data sets are being pulled out from the american public i remember very recently i was trying to find um aids data and and like std data sti data it was gone and i'm like how how do i convince someone of their risk based off where they live and the behaviors that they're engaging in if I can't give them their risk for where they live in the behavior they're engaging in yeah um so it's it really is a terrifying time and and I think we need to kind of come back to that question of how the fuck did we get here and I think is I think it's it's really hard for me to call women marginalized i because i i feel like women don't women outnumber men in this country

in quantity yes so but in power i know social structure and i know i just i find it i i understand that they are i understand that there are in many ways a marginalized community but also i'm like but but but they're okay i'm struggling with the math side of that um but i think we need to recognize what is happening and that and this goes back to that let's tie oh let's see if we can circle back to the original question um maybe um this idea of whether or not sex is is morally neutral really comes down to if we say no who is that controlling if we say that sex there's a moral value to sex who is it that we're controlling because it's not men men do not get impacted when we say that there's a morality around sex we don't we even

like we don't judge men for sleeping with lots of women right we've i know that we've had this argument like the fact that there's no male term for a male slut like drives me nuts to this day we see this in the questions we've done about body count and how differently it's portrayed by gender when we do things like making something like sex morally valued is not the way i would say that if i was speaking good english um have value or not i didn't want to say morally neutral or not um it's it's really going after folks who don't engage in sex the way that we we tend to think is the majority so when we start saying that that sex is morally valued um it gives us an opportunity to go after folks who don't where it's not men and women having sex where it's either

non-binary folks are included or people the same same sex are included um it and it it is very strongly going to fall on women to be somehow responsible for that or somehow easier to blame if they're doing things that don't live up to this code that we have because one of the things i know you like to say and you i think you stole it from shakespeare um what is it uh it's from hamlet and hamlet says this in the graveyard there is nothing good nor bad tis thinking that makes it so yes now do we have laws around sex yes but those are laws created by humans and not necessarily and so there is some like morality to that when we pass laws around sex because we have almost every state has had laws around sex in some way shape or form

um do religions dictate what is morally yes but we still to this day live in a country where there is separation of church and state um i know i have to still say it because technically it's true so so i think to get back to the question about whether or not sex is morally neutral i would argue that it is until society gets involved and then then we're looking at more of what is society reflecting to us and not really about the sex piece but i saw you taking furious notes that's so much fears it's just going back to that piece of um the moral imperative inherently gets assigned to women in our society yeah if a man cheats on his wife it is the woman the the extra woman um that is responsible for seducing him enticing him not not having girl code and standing

up for vows she had no participation in or it's the wife's fault for not being right it's the two women's not his for making a moral judgment right that he was comfortable with surrounding marriage and a commitment that he that he made right so either the wife wasn't doing good enough job to please note all the sarcasm here um we don't we don't believe in us this is an example that the wife isn't doing enough to make him happy and or the other woman should have reminded him of his vows when she may not have even known that he was married but it's never his fault yeah somehow yeah so yeah so i so i will say uh-oh i do not think the sexual revolution is responsible for the moral decline no in the u.s what i what i will say i think is responsible for the moral decline

is that those in power who don't like this change and this equaling out of rights and autonomy and that they're assigning that moral decline because they don't like it. Yep, because they feel threatened. And my choice as an individual, my autonomy as an individual, to me is morally correct.

your autonomy as an individual is morally correct. Assigning blame to me because I don't engage in relationships, that's not moral or immoral. That's just where I find myself because morally I get to do that for myself as a human. So I think it's the people screaming the loudest that are the responsible for the moral decline in the u.s yeah because because also what we find anecdotally is they're the ones that break the very morals they're screaming they're screaming about yeah it was i was wondering if we were going to get here because i was thinking so i i had friends who were working in the field of abortion back in the 1990s and i would hear i'm trying to figure out how to say this about like outing anyone by accident

that um people in in neighboring states who are all like abortion you're going to hell like you glad you would then go take their children their daughters to other states to have abortion and then be right back on those lines the next day or take their mistress across state lines so they weren't doing it in state um and not not that that was a legal issue back then about what states you could and couldn't but it was more about trying to hide the fact of what they were doing um when we hear people yelling about you know what's happening in society and how society is becoming immoral and then we find that those people are being accused of sexual abuse um either of adults or children or both um when we find out about the people who are talking about values and high

values and then they're watching porn on state computers at yeah on public at board of education meetings um so yeah i think i think that's the thing that you're what you were just talking about like the louder they scream the more it makes me wonder what they're hiding you know the idea that when you when we see major political parties who don't really love the gay community getting together and then you know um grinder crashes like yeah um yeah so i think that's a lot of what we're seeing i'm trying to figure out how to loop into this because i have something written down but i don't know how to loop into it so i just i also want to

the the shakespeare nerd in me um what we were just talking about those that are screaming the loudest that is also a hamlet is it me thinks thou dost protest too much yes that i did know yeah so i don't know how to slide us into this piece so can i just pretend there's a segue just make a right turn let's go segue segue by the way my students don't get that reference i'll do that sometimes and they just swear that we're that old yeah they're just lost their mind again um because i want to like yes we were talking about the sexual revolution but then we also talked about like how the fuck did we get here and what does this mean so i kind of want to get

to where you used to put me on the spot and be like so how do we fix it um dr sue yes how do we fix all of this thank you so much how do we how do we fix that's life man yeah i and i think it's hard because i can't i don't think we can name one problem right now there's so much going on on so many fronts, I think it becomes really difficult to say, here's the one answer. So if we're looking at the fact that women's rights are being attacked on so many levels, and then a lot of what we're seeing is backlash against women having power, and women making choices about their bodies and their relationship status. And I mean, just being adults and making all the adult decisions for themselves. The thing I'm going to I want to encourage women to do is keep

doing those things do them louder and do them prouder yeah um and i'm not saying there's anything wrong with deciding that you want to live what we would consider to be a more quote-unquote traditional life there's nothing wrong with that as long as you're not shoving it down anyone else's throat the key is the choice right i want the choice because before 1973 1974 socially we would have had to get married to have a house to have a bank account we because that totally wouldn't have been impossible at all yeah not together but we would have individually had to find marriages with men to to live in a house to get a line of credit to have a checking account to advance in society yeah so so and and then i would also

say if, and I know, I know many of us who I would say are kind of in, in these, in the trenches and in these channels kind of advocating and screaming about, we have to stay strong. I know we're all exhausted. I know that there's a lot, I know that there's overwhelm, but that's also by design to exhaust us to silence us so that's even more of a reason to just keep digging in and do not waver yeah and and if you need a break that's okay i know i quoted this um i know i shared this on social media once and one of my friends like said it back to me months later and it's not mine if i remember where it came from i would have given them credit but the idea is that we don't need all of you all the time to be fighting so take the days and the times that you need and

the pieces of you make sure they're staying intact um but one of the ways that we can fight back especially for women is to live louder and prouder and don't don't hide yourself don't make yourself small celebrate the small wins that's one of the really big things i try to tell a lot of people right now celebrate the small wins smell it celebrate the big wins celebrate the small wins got a promotion celebrate it you don't have to go out and blow all your money in a fancy dinner but celebrate it or you can if you want to or if you can if you want to but but celebrate this what may seem trivial right now those things are acts of resistance by celebrating them if you are not in a marginalized community and i'm cutting women out here i'm focusing more

on racial and ethnic minorities and um someone corrected me when i said that once and i don't remember what the correction was i apologize um or for folks in the lgbtq population if you are not in those groups i need you to be an ally now in a way you have never been before i need you to use your privilege now in a way you have never done before and that it it doesn't mean that you have to go out and march i mean you're welcome to do that if if that's what you want you want to put on a label frog costume and walk around like go for it you can do allyship in so many ways one is making yourself a safe person that they can talk to when they're feeling overwhelmed um you can share information as you know it and that becomes harder in a world that's stripping

us of data but spreading the like if you didn't realize that we weren't collecting data on some of this stuff anymore do a social media post about what the fuck why aren't we getting this data but i need you i need you to be an ally now in a way that you have maybe maybe you have maybe you've been fighting the fight the whole time so good on you if you haven't i need you to kind of step up now because it's it's about all of us um the stronger we are as a group that the harder it is to try to force us back to a world that i think a lot of us don't want to go back to and then i had one more thing but you look like you were going to say something well i just the to that um the piece that you were talking about um and being an ally if you're not in

any of these marginalized populations if you if you internally consider yourself a safe person but you don't know how to convey that to the people that you want to demonstrate your allyship a good first step is understanding your privilege and why your allyship would be so impactful because if you can understand your privilege that already demonstrates that you are working to and and committed to um becoming a safer and safer person because you're also doing the work to understand your how you were able to grow up versus how um some of these marginalized communities the experiences that they've had in our society so to become um a good informed demonstrably safe ally um it and and it is to unpack is to unpack your whatever privilege you may have been afforded

in this society yeah and that can be tough yeah but that's what demonstrates that you're safe you're willing to do the work and you're not asking the marginalized communities to do the work for you and teach you you need to teach yourself yeah and there's plenty of resources for doing that yes um the last one may sound trivial but it's I think it's especially important now with the misinformation the just gross misinformation that's being spread every day if you are on social media check your sources before you post it if you're if you're sharing an article read the whole damn article before you post it but I need you to be aware there's so much misinformation out and so many things that are being put up and then being taken down

when what we know about social media so Charlie you're my friend I post something you believe it I hope I check your sources yeah I know you do and then you send me reports no um someone who doesn't know me who may be following me on Instagram is less likely to believe in me because they don't know me than they would if they were friends with me so when I say friends I don't just mean like friends and following on social media. We are more likely to believe our friends. So I'm going to hold you responsible for spreading the word about some of the stuff that's happening and some of the data that we're losing and what we're doing to marginalized communities in this country. Um, because like your voice can be so powerful. And I think people

forget that because your friends will listen to you, maybe not your family, but your friends will listen to you before they'll listen to an expert. Um, so I just need you to be careful. I need you to use social media well, and I need you to check your sources before you start posting shit. yeah yeah that's what i got did i solve it i think i solved the problem i think you did for those of you wondering what the hell this has to do with sex because i can see where someone's like what the fuck was this episode what did i what did i stumble into and more of this may not seem directly related to it but when we start controlling people's bodies that's sex that's sexual health when we start limiting people's sexual expression

that's sex that's sexual health that's relationships that's relationships when we start wearing people down that's impacting sex and your sexual satisfaction like all of this is tied because we're whole people um so and in case you don't get that we're happy to do another episode yeah just let us know part two you're right yeah well um I do enjoy when we have these talks yeah when when we have these episodes where it is about the state the social state um because I think it is important and I think that there are ways I mean look we I I was able to visit um Amsterdam recently and I I I took the um opportunity to go to the Anne Frank House and and I know that there are still people who think

that this is an extreme statement but we are in the very beginning stages in fact I would say we're not we're not in the beginner level we are in the novice level now we're halfway through this we're halfway through the the poem if you don't know if you don't know what that is look it up That's exactly where it's going. It's like, you know, no, no, it's like, you know me, but the, this all has to do with if it's not affecting you now, that just means it's not affecting you yet. Yep. It doesn't mean it's not going to, and it may, it may come in the form of impacting

people that you absolutely love and care about and want to protect. And you didn't realize that this was going to, this movement, this regime was going to come for them. And they come for one of us. They come for all of us. But the other thing to remember is there's more of us than there are of them. Yep. So let's get loud. Yep.

Live your life big. Live your life bold. And support everybody. And celebrate it. I feel like we summed this up in another episode. Just don't be a dick right now. Don't be a dick and don't put your head in the sand. Yeah.

And I mean, and you talked about this, Dr. Sue, just a moment ago. That doesn't mean showing up loud and show up in the ways like for some of our listeners, we did an episode earlier this year and part of us showing up is continuing to do this. this is this is one of the forms of our resistance yep so find find the ways that you can resist and support an ally because again there's more of us than there are of them and there are people out there being very creative with this if you don't feel like you want to go out and do something publicly what can you do privately what can you do behind the scenes can you volunteer for an organization can you donate some money or some time can you donate resources of other types like

there there's there's a million ways right now to do something but we need you to do something yeah that's your homework forever forever and ever all right well everyone i do want to thank you for joining us on this episode of unzipping taboos we hope today's episode has sparked some new thoughts. We'll open up conversations worth having. And remember that your curiosity is the key to breaking down barriers, embracing a healthier understanding of sex and relationships, and being able to just show up for each other. So 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 dive into, please reach out to us via the link in the episode

description. A huge thanks to jackandjilladult.com for supporting Unzipping Taboos. Don't forget, you can get 20% off your order with code UNZIPPING20. We also want to give a very special shout out to Allie O'Brien for our incredible theme music. Thank you so much, Allie. We love you. And until next time, please keep the conversations going. Keep unzipping those taboos. Keep showing up. And everyone, take care. We'll see you next time.